Ideal Cities

Civic Action and Long Island City

Foreclosed, Suburbia, and the American Dream

As New York City was coming out of its darkest years, art did not exactly lead the way. Who would have asked it to try? Now two institutions have joined forces to do just that. The Noguchi Museum, in collaboration with Socrates Sculpture Park, offers "Civic Action: A Vision for Long Island City."

"Change the dream and you change the city." The line could describe their hopes exactly. Instead, it helps introduce five other plans for suburban America, each with a commitment to cities and to dreaming. The Museum of Modern Art calls the show "Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream." Yet the curators are not looking for new architecture to house an older ideal. Rather, they want to change thinking, the kind that brought the tangle of postwar suburban sprawl and, in their minds, the doomed housing bubble.

They see the bursting of that bubble and, with it, the American dream for so many as an opportunity. While their inspiration, called the Buell hypothesis, is surprisingly hard to pin down, that one line may be its finest expression. All these shows see past trends and past ideals as a failure—or do they? In the real city, they know, urban ideals have stimulated some serious gentrification. They have one anxious for the future, but also contrasting it with their visions all along. In Long Island City, take a step back to the mid-1980s, before so much happened.

Civic inaction

P.S. 1 had opened in 1976 without changing the Long Island City landscape. East Village galleries were to pack up and leave from almost the moment they caught fire. Soho was flourishing, but artists were lamenting the loss of affordable lofts. If they had imagined Soho as a luxury shopping mall, much less artists as hipsters chasing themselves out of Williamsburg, they might have cried. Lincoln Center had literally turned its back on a community, and no one wanted another bare plaza. Modernism's ideal city had come to stand for failure or repression, and no one had the cash to build one.

In 1985 and 1986, two artists came up with their own Long Island City visions. Isamu Noguchi and Mark di Suvero might have been worlds apart, rather than a block away. The Noguchi Garden Museum opened to the public across the street from his studio in Queens. A few months later, di Suvero founded Socrates Sculpture Park. It, too, had both work and display space, and his own towering sculpture still anchors it to the waterfront. They offered two models for change—and two good reasons not to worry about it.

Noguchi had purchased a photogravure plant ten years before to display his work, and he brought to museum architecture the same quietude and perfection as in his sculpture. di Suvero, nearly thirty years younger, saw things in terms of community and as a work in progress. An heir at once of Alexander Calder, David Smith, Minimalism, and earth art, he knew what it means to leave rough edges in place—and what it means to encourage human traffic to add more. Industrial material or studio activity was something not to hide, but to display. And these visions co-exist today. As one walks more than half a mile to the foot of Broadway, one feels the isolation but also the community.

Gentrification is not the first work to spring to mind. In hardly a block from the subway, one leaves Astoria's coffee shops and bakeries (not to mention my dentist) behind. After a renovated school and a shopping plaza for mostly fast food, one sees emptiness, auto body shops, and scattered apartment buildings. Yet people make the trek all the time. The park has a Saturday green market, outdoor movies, and of course sculpture. When I came for "Civic Action," Ben Goodward's fifty-foot arch of scaffolding enclosed black oil drums, like a rock concert stage as colorful dump site.

One can credit art, but change was slow in coming after all. It took twenty more years for the Noguchi Foundation to register with New York as a museum. It still has few visitors, although all the more peace for that. Just a few summers ago, too, the scruffy sculpture park had little action. The undistinguished apartments look as if they went up barely yesterday, and mostly they have. Surely the biggest trigger, other than New York housing needs, was not art but the Costco right next store.

Lessons are easy enough to find. Visions matter, but not necessarily to others. Change comes on its own, and things work out in the end, but free markets do not serve everyone well. As it happens, "Civic Action" has all sorts of lessons, too—none of them clear either. As curator, Amy Stewart-Smith invites four artists and collectives to reshape the future, and they come up with fascinating visions. They also break with Noguchi, di Suvero, and the area's current evolution. They imagine Long Island City as a work of art all their own.

Astroturf and information

No one expects anything new from Rirkrit Tiravanija, and he delivers. The artist who cannot stop serving curry in upscale galleries imagines a "community kitchen." At least this time "menus will vary." He responds to community needs by letting spores and plants arrive of their own accord that "perhaps . . . will be edible." If Astroturf has come to mean a phony pretense of grass-roots support in politics, he also proposes paving Broadway with "drivable grass." This is relational esthetics with no relation to its surroundings.

Natalie Jeremijnko, who appeared in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, has more respect for her neighbors. Salamanders, for example, will receive "luxury housing." People, unfortunately, must submit to a sterner regimen—one part environmentalism and ten parts fantasy. Women will wear "hot-rodded" high heels, families will grow their own food by hanging "urban farming systems" in AgBags out their double windows, and "feral robots" will relieve everyone of the need ever to get together. People will spread seed with hula hoops, and biometric wings will replace diesel trucks with dreams of human flight out of a century-old movie. As so often, going back to Noguchi's collaboration with Buckminster Fuller, futurism dates mighty quickly.

George Trakas, too, repeats himself, but more in line with old-fashioned landscape architecture. He proposes shoreline walkway, uniting Broadway with the bridge to Roosevelt Island and Newtown Creek beyond. It will have the decency to serve "the people who live here now," while recalling the estates, Ravenswood, that served the wealthy almost two hundred years ago. It fits well with the biggest (if not only) real development near MoMA PS1, by the old Coca-Cola sign overlooking the East River. It also translates into an amusing museum display, including a piano sporting Haydn's Water Music but with its innards leaning against a display table as a relic or instrument to itself—like the piano that Harpo Marx destroys in A Night at the Opera. Still, the project leaves existing neighborhoods all but untouched.

Mary Miss has survived more visions and movements than almost anyone. A pioneer of earth art, she moved from what Robert Smithson called nonsite to such welcoming urban designs as the pier off Manhattan's Battery Park—and she has seen way too many other plans go unrealized. Now she focuses less on reconstruction than on information, to enable "creative re-purposing" by others to come. Her museum display replicates the ghostly Con Ed stacks that tower over the waterfront as something more like barber poles. In turn, she would make actual poles in the area into meters monitoring waste, water, and energy use. One can only hope that her "speech bubbles" and truck containers as "incubator studios" will encourage conversation rather than prepare it for disposal.

The ideas range from self-parody to beauty—and from architecture to sheer thought. They fit into the physical and mental space between a sculpture garden and a community park. They should inspire not just rezoning, but more museum displays like this. They also do too much to impose on the area and too little to transform or protect it. Maybe it comes with asking artists to play visionaries. Maybe it comes, too, with the show's point of origin.

It takes a little imagination even to call this Long Island City, so far from the Queensboro Bridge and even further from the former Italian neighborhood to the south. It takes too little imagination not to probe actual developments in Long Island City or a more vivid fantasy New York. Housing is at last beginning to flourish, but restaurants and galleries near MoMA PS1 and SculptureCenter have a way of vanishing, with Richard Rogers's plans for the former Silvercup bakery still unfinished. And it takes callousness never once to mention the most concentrated development southwest of Astoria—the Queensbridge low-income housing. In the real world, projects mean anything but grant proposals and artist visions. Then again, Smith-Stewart will understand, for she has been in transit from her days as a curator at what was then P.S. 1 and her former Lower East Side gallery, too.

The suburb as city

Note: this part is to come soon.

jhaber@haberarts.com

"Civic Action: A Vision for Long Island City" ran at the Noguchi Museum through April 22, 2012, with components on display in Socrates Sculpture Park starting in May. "Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream" ran at The Museum of Modern Art through July 30.