The Great Indoors I

Summer Installations 2004: Heading Inside

Whatever happened to summer sculpture? This summer, one can easily have missed it.

But summer was there, and so was the challenging art. The great outdoors had simply moved inside—to installations or to the still more private space between one's ears. This review asks how art has turned the urban environment into indoor representation, thanks to Mark di Suvero and Franz West, Rudolf Stingel, and Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. No wonder summer practically disappeared.

Did you miss it?

Did you miss it? I almost did. The parks appeared all but empty, as if nothing should spoil the new lawns along the Hudson, the newfound elegance of Madison Square, with its retro hamburger stand by Danny Meyer of the Union Square Cafe, or the bleak security around City Hall. The usual summer Brooklyn display between the bridges came early and disappeared before I knew it.

The little remaining outdoors seemed to strive too hard for permanence, as if summer just carried on the imposing New York landscape of offices and chilly streets. Even the sky was gray and cool.

After several years of gambling on unknowns and cramped installations, Madison Square turned to the reliability of Mark di Suvero, with some of the work dating back fifteen years. Known for rusted, steel-beams that combine the industrial esthetic of David Smith with the higher ground of modernist pyramids, he has always had a surprisingly deft touch. Here the wide-open constructions begged Alexander Calder to let in the light. As viewed from a distance, three vertical beams twisted and crossed along their gradual ascent, as if each pair gently marked a cartoon X in the sky.

In City Hall Park, a reduced summer show took Roy Lichtenstein at his blandest, as if phasing the summer exhibition out a year at a time. As so often, his sculptures play down the cartoon, the roots in pop culture, and the magnificence of his brush and play up the permanence of his place in history. No wonder he quotes Constantin Brancusi's Endless Column.

Uptown, at Central Park and Lincoln Center, Franz West struggled against invisibility. His rugged, patched, metal surfaces pay their dues to Minimalist talk about materials, especially industrial materials, but they also evoke the comfort of well-worn jeans. They are so user friendly, in fact, that even the kids who played on them or the adults who turned to them as park benches in a sense tuned out the art entirely. That only means that they had failed to engage the senses, intellect, or emotions fully enough.

But New York City actually began its public art installations indoors this summer, on a scale that even the architects of Lincoln Center or of landscape in an artist's book would have relished. Perhaps it always has, as with The New York Earth Room, by Walter de Maria. This review looks in more depth at just two more, by Stingel and by Cardiff and Miller. An accompanying review turns to exhibitions of those months that make urban architecture itself the focus, with Andreas Gursky, Peter Wegner, and "Tall Buildings."

Calling art on the carpet

Rudolf Stingel carpets Grand Central Station with a charming perversity. He sets unnaturally blue flowers over hot pinks and a dreadful paler pink background. The pattern that could almost pass for the taste of suburban commuters.

As you will see for Wegner in part two, Stingel straddles installation art, Minimalism, and Beuys's turn of the color wheel. Art on which one can walk freely may suggest Carl Andre. The interior covering definitely recalls cow wallpaper by Andy Warhol as well. So does its color scheme, not to speak of imagery that points simultaneously to nature and mass production at its most tasteless. In each case, Stingel cleverly ups the ante. Here one cannot help stepping on the work—or plopping down on one's butt—and at this scale color becomes downright nauseating.

A fabric covering may also suggest Christo's way of wrapping large spaces, giving visual unity to diverse human experiences. Vanderbilt Hall sorely needs a unifying purpose anyway. Once a waiting room, it now looms too large for its puzzling lack of purpose. People barrel right through its center as they cross between 42nd Street and the main concourse. A downward visual thrust almost promises to tame its high-ceilinged, classical architecture, so often ignored after the main hall's starlit ceiling.

Stingel is capable of much more, especially when he more directly tackles painting, a space, and the aura of a dealer or work of art. Nonetheless, the perverse move indoors underscores what falls, well, flat. The choice of an interior for a seasonal installation itself serves as a reminder of Stingel's lack of interest in site-specific work. In fact, he has ditched up the same floor pattern before, in another city. Perhaps he needs one of Wegner's footnotes to indicate New York.

Stingel's lively precedents also underscore what goes wrong. Unlike Christo, Warhol, or Andre, he disdains beauty, sarcasm, and human interaction alike. He prefers the old-fashioned pretense of an artist dictating esthetic experience, even if in practice people decidedly fail to take dictation. One does not participate in shaping the room or one's encounter with it, and neither does the hall's function, architecture, or history. Forget mind games about art and reality. Stingel is elevating carpeting to art—painting, as he prefers to call it.

Paradoxically, the artist's insistence on his esthetic purpose helps the work, by putting back on the table—or maybe the floor—the old puzzles over the limits of art. Yet his formidable presence renders the outcome curiously tame. People in search of the installation have walked on it without so much as noticing it, and other travelers must care less still. Somehow, Stingel never thrusts one's face in the work or, more dangerously, into the floor. Stingel stands at the brink of a central concourse that carries passengers and the human eye everywhere. Yet, he never forces art and the charged experience of a train station to collide.

The space between one's ears

Some art dared to remain outdoors, but had I seen it, and was it really there? Janet Cardiff cherished the illusion of having vanished to a space between one's ears, along with summer itself. Her evocation of memory, loss, the park's changing light, and the intimacy it offers even in a crowd seems so fitting for cooler weather, changing seasons, and the return of New Yorkers that I hated to see it go away with the advent of fall. Then again, perhaps the heat of summer made Her Long Black Hair more impressive as sheer illusion. (Note: it returned again among New York's 2005 summer sculpture offerings.)

The 35-minute audio work in fact took one right into some lovely tourist country that, so often, natives try to overlook—by the pond off Central Park South, through the zoo, and past Balto the dog before ending beside the lake. There were no advance reservations, so one put one's name down, started a stroll all one's own, and returned to pick up a headset at Sixth Avenue. That preliminary made me feel less ordered about by a neurotic relative than Cardiff's indoor collaborations with George Bures Miller usually allow.

She also used stereo more than ever before to place one within an illusion. From the first moment, the sounds of a marching band had me turning my head to look for what had passed decades ago—or perhaps never happened at all outside Cardiff's imagination. At other times, one could not be sure what was real, between her having cased out the joint well and her gambling on near certainties. When, descending the stairs in the first minutes, I indeed saw that woman on a cell phone, I was startled, and the description of darker, damper hours over the pond almost altered the sky for me.

Fittingly, I never had one illusion—that the speaker, Cardiff herself, was there. It allowed me to imagine her as the dark-haired woman that she or, perhaps, the man who took the three photos in one's hands will never recover. Cardiff or her narrative voice claims to have based the work on photos she found quite by accident, and the slippery levels of her persona stick with me as well. Her voice, as ever, sounds at once rather too feverish for its own good and on Quaaludes, and that, too, makes sense as belonging to another time. Not just the 1960s, but many a nineteenth-century figure on drugs or alcohol, perhaps the poets and philosophers she quotes, would understand.

All this worked best for me in those very first minutes. Not every guess of hers was right, and as the misses started to dispel the illusion, I started to have to take her story and her leadership role more seriously. It ran the risk of her slipping back into her usual mix of drill sergeant, demon lover, and hopeless romantic.

I found the learned digressions more tiring. I found that I was forcing myself not to run ahead of her demands and, often, failing. I found that I was trying to understand why the woman would be lost to Cardiff, her lover, or to me if she turned around. I found myself wanting to explain to Cardiff that it was Orpheus who risked losing Eurydice if he turned toward her. Still, perhaps the role reversal and gender reversal added to the work's relevance after all. In getting out from imagined film noir and into the light of day, Cardiff—and New York's great outdoors—may at last have discovered artifice.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Mark di Suvero occupied Madison Square through October 31, 2004, Franz West had work at Grand Army Plaza and Lincoln Center through August 31, Rudolf Stingel carpeted Grand Central Station through July 29, and Janet Cardiff had a walk beginning at Sixth Avenue and Central Park South through September 13, sponsored by the Public Art Fund.