Hidden New York

Urs Fischer, Carlos Amorales, and Mike Nelson

Much of a city's public spaces remain hidden. One notices them only when the subways flood, a gas main explodes, or the Brooklyn Bridge opens its piers to art installations.

A city grows from a network of public and private spaces. A couple alone together in a crowded restaurant, lights shining from adjacent windows at night, the cell phone that has to die when you enter the subway, a trail home from my childhood neighborhood that only I know how to keep—that kind of fabric makes New York alternately sad and exciting. It makes for fights over real estate, and it parallels another intersection of public and private ends, art.

Installation art has grown depressingly popular, in part because it has grown so depressing in its subjects and in part because it has grown. Artists compete to trash the gallery while putting their egos and private lives on display. It makes for impressive performances, and it makes them stars. But sometimes an artist truly responds to the site—as a part of New York, a part of the art world, and a part of the imagination as well. In different ways in fall 2007, Urs Fischer, Carlos Amorales, Reynold Reynolds, and Mike Nelson offer up dark fantasies, but they do not let one forget the real labor and real history behind them.

At your own risk

Fair is fair. Urs Fischer broke through two walls of the 2006 Whitney Biennial, but he was entitled. He had, after all, had them built first. This time, however, his gallery floor takes a much bigger hit, and it will not so easily come to an end when the show closes. It also makes a good candidate for most dangerous exhibition of 2007.

Not that he has failed to erect a few walls, too. His gallery appears to have shrunk to a narrow space around the front desk. From there one must bend over to pass through another entryway, not unlike the kind to allow pets in and out of the yard—or a child to step through a closet into a private universe. A visit in fact feels very much like playtime, and the interior within the interior has become a connection to the outdoors, right down to West Village soil. It looks, however, more like a construction site. Fischer has drilled right through the floor, leaving a pit littered with its remains, still more of which he may have brought to "Unmonumental" at the New Museum.

A bit of reinforced concrete stands intact around the edge, transformed into a narrow ledge. One can barely circulate it without falling, and the pit runs deeper than one might think. A descent brings the ledge almost to eye level, if you dare—and of course you will. A notice by the desk swears off responsibility for the risks, and while one could put that down to legal necessities or to another kind of theater, I could easily imagine spraining an ankle. I could also imagine settling in for a picnic, give or take the fragments of steel rods protruding here and there.

One can see the debt to both sides of Robert Smithson—earthworks and nonsites that took debris from elsewhere into the gallery. Gordon Matta-Clark made his building cuts long ago, with far less concern for the law, and Chris Burden even knocked through the floor once. One can honestly ask what Fischer adds. For one thing, for better or worse transgression has become repetition and, in the process, a comment on the overwrought art scene and its burgeoning geometries—including architectural installations that trash galleries left and right. This gallery does call itself Gavin Brown's Enterprises, you know, and its URL ends with the extension .biz. One might think of Fischer's stunt at the Whitney in turn as a double-edged tribute to Marcel Breuer and his grand and famous pock-marked ceilings and movable walls.

Fischer's old and new installations have much in common. They invent boundaries, break down the art institution, invite one inside, and leave one standing amid the created ruins. They play with the geometry of the white cube, starting with the large circular holes nested within the Whitney's rectangles. They eliminate the usual doorway and make it less than obvious whether one should enter, right down to the legal warning. They make one part of a ritual. Candles circled overhead at the Whitney, and these days gallery-going is quite enough of a ritual in itself, thank you.

The new piece implies public theater in its very title, you. However, it distinguishes itself by a greater immersion in the real, much like the original earthworks. The project involved taking core samples first, to verify that it was not facing solid bedrock. The medieval chandelier out of a Kubrick film is gone, and in its place one gets a reminder of Manhattan's vertical history and the edge of the island only a couple of blocks away. Come global warming, the Hudson may well end up closer still. Perhaps only rising sea levels could constrain Chelsea.

Life under a cloud

Even a flood might not restrain Carlos Amorales. He calls his installation Black Cloud, but he does not appear to live under one. Only an optimist could affix twenty-five thousand bits of paper to the gallery walls, even with the promise of caffeine and Chelsea prices. The components of his installation pretend to fly above any inundation but his own.

Their sheer number induces a lift, and so does the discovery that they have invaded the gallery rafters and even the office. I took them for butterflies and got caught up in their rising motion, with hardly a cloud in sight. Amorales uses black paper for his swarm, but it seems less an encroaching darkness than a vivid contrast with the usual white walls. The loud music feels at odds with so charming and fragile an installation. A darker soul will recognize the electronic buzz of a horror movie, and it stems from a video in the side gallery—a slow pan across something not unlike the installation, only sparer. The camera eye clearly stands for a threat.

The black shapes represent something less friendly than one might expect as well—not butterflies but moths. Amorales imagines an overpowering invasion at dusk, with an interior dusty and neglected enough to hold it. Still, one has only his word for the species. One has only his word, too, for their number. The show has dark overtones, but he invites one to take his work on trust. A press release calls it "a dark fantasy tinged with optimism," and I enjoyed the paradox that a tinge, too, suggests a shade.

Interpretation does well, then, to hedge its bets. Black moths might allude to the toll of the industrial revolution, when natural selection bred insects able to hide against a soot-darkened landscape, but I doubt it. A few stray moths stick quietly to front desk. They could be smiling at one on the way out.

Reynold Reynolds tours another dark interior, this one closer to the realities of the city. A two-channel video pans and dissolves seamlessly between six cramped apartments and their equally grungy, solitary residents. They barely stir while old appliances decay, dirty dishes gather mildew, a snake slithers on the floor, a tarantula squirms in its cage, and the television flickers. Speakers closer to the viewer than to the image make the life forms that much creepier.

One starts to detect parallels between paired images, but they fade in and out of view just as creepily. A young woman's gaunt profile pairs with an older woman's ruddy face. The first's row of shoes reflects the latter's tired, swollen feet. Out front, sculpture by Wyatt Nash amounts to yet another musician turned artist trashing his apartment in public, but the video looks upon something at once more imaginative, truer to ordinary lives, and less comforting. What art or philosophy calls waiting for death, a New Yorker calls affordable housing.

Door number 3

For all the darkness, a city hides miracles. Did you know that Arshile Gorky once taught in an art school a floor above Grand Central Station? With sculpture in the parks each summer or Doug Aitken's projection on MOMA in winter, who can say for sure where the personal ends and community begins? That is why I held out for a cultural center at Ground Zero, others hold out for the High Line, and everybody packed The Gates. Along Essex Street, the boundaries between public and private erode repeatedly, too—in the challenge of choosing the right door.

Mike Nelson takes over an abandoned food market, and half the thrill comes from discovering it is there. Much of the other half comes from opening its doors one by one, deciding when to follow others, getting lost and forging ahead to exactly where one began, and finally coming out somewhere else entirely—all of twenty yards away.

The sponsor, Creative Time, makes every visitor sign a waiver first. This one has nothing to do with the installation's dangers and everything to do with clearing access with New York City. If anything falls on one's head or if something below gives way, it will not stem from Nelson's quiet refurbishing. The British artist has left some matters undisturbed anyway, down to layer upon layer of dust. He calls the work A Psychic Vacuum, and he does not need to do all that much to suck out one's psyche or to fill the vacuum. After the first room or two, he offers few surprises other than the location of the next door. For the most part, that is enough.

What he does add is ambiguity. Which of those kitchen items and which fragments of carpentry date back to a functioning market? How much of the dust did he bring himself? Nelson actually adds almost every prop, but he depends on that literalism, so that an environment can supply both comfort and displacement, a party atmosphere and an eerie silence, breadth and confinement. In England, he has restaged a hotel and turned a gallery into a coral reef—and here again the environments are in fact almost entirely of his own making. As a coral reef suggests, too, he likes endangered species, and the Lower East Side these days has more than its share.

When Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset turned the basement of a nonprofit into a subway End Station, they punned on real and imagined architecture to mime both real urban infrastructure and real memories of the 1980s. When Christian Holstad turned a midtown deli into a gay meat market, he shoved the darkness and sharp edges right in one's face. Nelson does not push anything too hard, least of all a site's history. I imagined tunneling directly under the busy Essex Street market, but he exploits an additional building across Delancey Street. It hardly matters that the market proper is rapidly gentrifying from its Hispanic vendors of not long ago or that housing projects still loom south of Delancey. Mostly, one thinks instead of the galleries and restaurants coming and going all around.

Men get to pass through a door marked "Women" along the way, and who knows what lies waiting behind door number 3? Only at the very end, though, does Nelson find wonders to equal the maze itself. As a guard asked when I most felt in a dead end, had I seen the sand yet? The last and largest room has piles of it, rising toward the far wall and ceiling. Its cleanness in one's hand feels like a recovery after all the dust, just as the light from the windows reflecting across it signals that one has recovered the street. After that, only the Lower East Side keeps one guessing how things will shake out.

A postscript: Little over two years later, Nelson rams together four beat-up trailers into the world's most compact trailer park. The maze offers plenty of dust and reasonable grounds for curiosity, but few signs of history. Quiver of Arrows also bears considerable resemblance to his makeover of the Essex Street Market's abandoned neighbor, but on the cheap. This time, he appears to like the thought of ashes to ashes, dust to dust, only because he hates housecleaning. Also recently, Justin Lowe and Jonah Freeman have sent visitors crawling through a gallery's hidden depths. Like Nelson before, they turn the Lower East Side's oppressive history into a mind game, a lesson he would do well to remember.

Why attempt a petty reenactment in Chelsea? Um, it worked well the first time, right? Mostly, it serves as a case study in how an upscale gallery can leach art of its meaning, not to mention humanity. It is a case study as well in the pressures on a successful male artist. Build large and build again. Play hard, and do not feel obliged to sweep up after yourself. Along with the buses by Sterling Ruby parked only a block away, they pave paradise and put up a gallery district.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Urs Fischer ran at Gavin Brown's Enterprise through December 22, 2007, Carlos Amorales at Yvon Lambert through November 26, Reynold Reynolds and Wyatt Nash at Roebling Hall through November 1, and Mike Nelson's installation sponsored by Creative Time through October 28. His "Quiver of Arrows" ran at 303 Gallery through April 10, 2010.