Closing the Great Outdoors

John Haber
in New York City

Summer Sculpture 2020 and the Socrates Annual

Jeffrey Gibson and Monuments Now

They can close the galleries—until too late in the summer for many to open. They can close the museums. But can they shutter the great outdoors?

As it turns out, they may not have to try. Between depleted audiences, depleted staff, and depleted funds on top of fears of a pandemic, arts groups have done a fine job of shutting down themselves. For New Yorkers still in a steamy city, art has long had its own great outdoors, in summer sculpture. I look forward each year to sunlit walks to track it all down. It may not keep up with the breadth of contemporary art, but it makes a terrific reminder of the breadth of a vibrant city. In the face of the virus, though, art is cutting back.

Things looked promising enough, at first. Even after the start of the lockdown, the Socrates Sculpture Park 2019 winter annual stayed on for ten days, as planned. Come the end of July, though, just one work in "Monuments Now," set to open there in May, had arrived, by Jeffrey Gibson. It could stand for the many delays and disappointments to come. No one expected to catch Héctor Zamora on the Met roof until museums reopen, short of a helicopter landing. Yet a largely empty city seemed to have swallowed ever so much more.

Feeling the heat

Actually, New York can shutter the outdoors. It closed playgrounds for a while, and it briefly threatened to close Central Park as well. (What a great way to drive people indoors, the better to spread disease.) Even the High Line was out of the picture for months, thanks to narrow tracks that put visitors in close proximity. (There are drawbacks after all to its much touristed architecture, quite apart from predictability and pedestrian gridlock.) But the greater toll came in spaces that remained open—and it puts a public face on the plight of art after Covid-19 everywhere.

The Park Avenue medium strip? Nothing. Madison Square Park teemed with couples taking in the summer sun, and the High Line reopened, but both for once without new art. (Simone Leigh continues to look down on Tenth Avenue and the likes of you from the "spur" of the High Line at West 30th Street, and Abigail DeVille will bring Liberty's torch to Madison Square in late October.) For the second year, Frieze art fair promised to spill over into Rockefeller Center, as Frieze Sculpture. But then there was no fair and, until September, no spill.

Other art lingered on, much as exhibitions lasted indoors and online without visitors, in an eerie state between open and closed. Jean-Marie Appriou has his larger than life horses at an entrance to Central Park, competing with the statue outside the Plaza Hotel. Its mockery took on unearned resonance as the American Museum of Natural History agreed to take Theodore Roosevelt off his high horse there. Appriou slices apart or forces his animals together, while leaving the marks of his own fashioning in their rough surface. I trust they elevate the world's agonies or his own. (Sam Moyer has since replaced him.)

Wangechi Mutu still had a niche or two (or, well, four) on the Met's façade, life size but strangely diminished. Not quite outdoors, Jean Shin creates a chandelier of blue plastic bottles for the grand stairs of Brookfield Place. It builds on her towers of prescription drug containers in 2005. Still, its own glories undercut its critique of the drug industry, consumerism, and pollution. It seems much of a piece with the upscale shopping mall between the World Trade Center and the marina. With her pyramid of plastic drinking cups, Sarah Sze pulled off a greater transformation long ago.

The ferry to Governors Island started up late—and even then on the way to mere holdovers from past years. Could City Hall Park do better? It has held out before until August, and it has stood above the urge to discover new faces. (Its community, after all, is the financial district of Lower Manhattan.) Last year, it brought an artist aged over one hundred, Carmen Herrera, with a Whitney retrospective behind her. And this year, the Public Art Fund slotted a towering figure in African American art and contemporary sculpture, Melvin Edwards.

It even billed its choices as a retrospective. Not that a small park is the obvious place for one, and not that Edwards has lacked for attention, in shows of black abstraction, black power, and black LA. Still, who could more deserve one? And then the Web page for the exhibition vanished, and the show was gone—postponed, it finally turns out, until next April. The artist who tempered his abstraction with history, in what might pass for shackles, had been shackled. While the decision was his, in light of Occupy City Hall, the seat of local government in an empty park could sum up a long, hot, empty summer.

Business as usual

You may miss art after Covid-19, or you may simply miss a degree of normalcy in Covid New York. Maybe for you, too, they go together, and never mind that art at its best disturbs the norm. It informs the norm as well. Yet for months the only available information was old news—like a gigantic clothes hanger on Governors Island, its handle bent to touch ground. Mark Handforth paints it white, adding to its blissful elegance, even as ordinary wire hangers and their spiky protrusions end up in the trash. One can sit on it or walk through it, like a playground set or a ceremonial arch, but hopes for a feminist commentary on back-alley abortions may, I fear, be asking too much.

Still, you could have art and normalcy together at the very start of the lockdown, in the Socrates Annual or, still, under the shadow of the pandemic, a Socrates Annual to come. A busy fifteen works competed for attention with kids playing whiffle ball and adults taking the air. I took it in as much for the walk to Queens as for the sculpture. Galleries, of course, were closed as nonessential business to anyone but their owners—now fearful for their future. New Yorkers, though, are encouraged to take exercise, and the six-foot rule goes without saying on the Astoria waterfront, a healthy distance from the subway. The park seems light years away from the urban bustle, even at barely half a mile from the mayor's residence in Gracie Mansion, just across the East River.

Now if only it did not feel like business as usual. Not that the park rounds up the usual suspects. Commendably, the show runs to unknowns and ethnic diversity, most often from the Americas. Still, unlike such recent summer standouts as Nari Ward and Virginia Overton, they can be awfully hard to remember. Great sculpture responds to a site and transforms it. Here art just plops down like an invasive species.

Two artists reference just that. Rachelle Dang puts out seed boxes, while Lucia Thormé paints plaster and plywood with foliage from a stink tree. If it looks ill-defined and inorganic, much else does as well. The blob from Hadrien Gérenton and Loup Sarion takes the form of s blue nose, with a pink lizard emerging from a nostril. Marius Ritiu reimagines an obelisk (or, perhaps, what Constantin Brancusi called Endless Column) as a meteorite. It may not have made much of an impact, but it does seem to have crushed a shopping cart from Costco right down the street.

As with Ritiu, much alludes to the park's scenic and industrial neighbors. Thormé discovered her forms in the nearby Noguchi Garden Museum, while the Workers Art Coalition constructs its double spiral from electrical conduits—much like a metal tube skeleton by Jes Fan. Chris Domenick recreates a kitchen counter, although it, too, might as well have fallen from outer space. Much has political overtones as well, like the resemblance of Thormé's foliage to camouflage for a liberation army still to come. A green turtle of wampum and chicken wire from Tecumseh Ceaser (aka Native Tec) pays homage to the borough's indigenous people, while rough-hewn wood in acid red from Jesus Benavente spreads its wings to honor Latinx losses, and an urn from Hadi Fallahpisheh acquires a cowboy hat. Martina Onyemaechi Crouch-Anyarogbu hangs out flags from the guilty parties of colonialism.

Nothing cuts deep, no more than the flags have much to say, pro or con, about colonialism. The show works best at its simplest, boldest, and least freighted with deep intent. A wood star low to the ground by Alva Mooses covers black volcanic ash, as a dance platform for survivors of a natural disaster. Paul Kopkau, in turn, allows his black sculptures to rise up in the shape of cell phones old and new. Gabriela Salazar marks a path through bare trees with red velvet rope. Kids at play ignored its invitation to act as VIPs, but then I felt like one until I returned home to my lockdown.

Monumentally late

By mid-August, if only then, new art began to arrive. Davina Semo nestled into Brooklyn Bridge Park with Reverberation. The orange bells look more like castoff heating ducts or nose cones from a guided missile aimed at nothing, but they do resound. Paul Ramírez Jonas and Xaviera Simmons joined Jeffrey Gibson in Socrates Sculpture Park for "Monuments Now." They were to have the park to themselves all summer, as the advanced contingent for ten more due in October, but so much for that. (A jury selects the larger set from neighborhood submissions, and I promise to return for them.)

Does that make the summer invitational the avant-garde? Literally so, I suppose, but then public sculpture always has to balance the creative act and community. With Eternal Flame, BBQ grills set in a vaguely classical monument surrounded by picnic benches in party colors, Jonas bows to the ancient symbol of the Olympics and family cookouts in the park. Simmons squeezes enough text into a dark gateway, a steel billboard with an ominous profusion of legs, and a niche resembling an open book, like the Old Testament for Anselm Kiefer, to tell of race in America. Can they retain their populism and authority? Not entirely, but they are competing with the truly monumental in Jeffrey Gibson.

A rising star as recently as Greater New York 2015," the survey of emerging artists at MoMA PS1, Gibson has appeared often enough since, right down to the 2019 Whitney Biennial. He has the appeal of bright colors, modest materials, and nods like Esteban Cabeza de Baca, Beau Dick, and Gabrielle l'Hirondelle Hill to their Native American heritage. So it is again with (deep breath) Because Once You Enter My House It Becomes Our House. The ziggurat bears psychedelic patterns and such text as "Respect Indigenous Lands." It is all very earnest and all in fun. It also echoes the one true monument in the park's summer history—a "living pyramid" by Agnes Denes that sprouted grass, as an extension of the park and the earth.

"Monuments Now" could hardly have planned for a pandemic—no more than Simmons could have planned for the rising public tide in support of Black Lives Matter. Still, it is bound to reflect lives cut short. Pyramids are tombs, and Eternal Flame looks vaguely funerary, too. And then there is the context of art cut short. One may never stumble on Semo's chimes in the larger expanse of Brooklyn's newest and most luxuriant park, as if they never really opened. (Hint: stick to the river's edge on pier 1, nearest the bridge, and ring them bells.)

Ironies abound. Birds by Nicolas Holiber alit on Broadway back in May, just as New Yorkers who could afford it were escaping to the wilds. Their patched metal had the makeshift charm of a child's cardboard construction, just as schools and art classes closed. Art also returned to the Rockaways, with Nancy Baker Cahill, but as "augmented reality." One can see it only on a cell phone, unlike past sculpture, and only on site, unlike the "virtual exhibitions" in so many galleries and museums. Cahill challenges both (and I report on her separately). Her Liberty Bell chimes for freedom from lockdown, too, whether she means it or no.

One more late arrival speaks of freedom from a long summer. If one spot in art can offer relief from the heat, it is the Met's roof, between breezes off Central Park and, in past years, drinks from the bar. Fresh air alone must suffice for Lattice Detour by Héctor Zamora. It is still slated to open before Labor Day, but just barely. I shall continue this survey of 2020 summer sculpture then. I also head to Madison Square in the fall for Abigail DeVille—and to City Hall Park come next spring for Melvin Edwards.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Jean-Marie Appriou at Doris C. Freedman Plaza and Jean Shin at Brookfield Place ran through August 30, 2020, the 2019 Socrates Annual in Socrates Sculpture Park through March 29, Nicolas Holiber on the Broadway mall through August 30, and Héctor Zamora at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through December 7. Davina Semo ran in Brooklyn Bridge Park through April 21, 2021, "Monuments Now" in Socrates Sculpture Park through March 31. I pick up the story shortly with such latecomers as Frieze Sculpture and the expansion of "Monuments Now" to the community. I continue to follow summer sculpture as in past years going back to summer 2003 and continuing with summer 2021, summer 2022, and summer 2023.