Building Bridges

John Haber
in New York City

Siah Armajani, Wangechi Mutu, and Public Art

In 1970, when public art meant little more than monuments, Siah Armajani built a bridge. It sounds ever so utilitarian, but this one nestled into a park in Minneapolis, and it could only make crossing the lawn harder. It also rose up over not a river, but an evergreen tree. What good is that?

Yet he really was building bridges, only starting with that between the public sphere and art—and one can still see the value of public art as Wangechi Mutu comes to the façade of the Met. Thanks to artists like these, New York now has a Public Art Fund, which has sponsored a recreation in Brooklyn Bridge Park. It is the literal high point of a retrospective at Met Breuer. Armajani was looking for a bridge, too, between his homeland in Iran and a new life in the United States. He is still building bridges, at age eighty, and still both at home and in exile. So, he suggests, are many more, and it is a haunting place for art.

Beyond monuments

Armajani had begun building bridges even before 1970. He made his First Bridge two years earlier, although only a tabletop model. The Walker Art Center, which also sponsored his Bridge over Tree in the park, helped him take that outdoors, too, in 1972. He had begun thinking about the possibility of a truly public art earlier still. In a manifesto, he called it "a search for a cultural history." One can pick up a copy at his retrospective.

He was not alone in his search. Other artists, too, as with Sheida Soleimani and in a recent survey of "Iran Modern," were looking beyond monuments, like Robert Smithson or Agnes Denes in "earthworks," to something more responsive to the viewer and the site. Unlike most land art, though, one did not have to deal with mounds of dirt and remote locations, and one could walk right in. The bridge's ramp slopes ever so gently from either side, before a sudden rise up steep steps and over a tree. For its February opening, not long after Donald J. Trump's declaration of war against immigrants much like him, snow was in the forecast and a foreboding was in the air. Still, little kids were already climbing right over.

Armajani sought something "useful and common," as the manifesto continues, but to them it was just plain fun. (I enjoyed it, too.) He also sought "to make artists citizens again." That, though, is an ambitious goal. Alternatively, it might be trivial, unless you were an American from Iran. And his bridge might well seem out of reach or redundant, too. It lies between the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges, and the artist, hearty but leaning on a cane, was not rushing for the stairs.

A bridge never comes easy, he insists, not even to climb a tree. His work also bridges art and architecture, but they still have "different histories, different methodologies, and two different languages." First Bridge looks warm and cozy, but it curves off and tapers to barely a window. Can the present offer a vista onto the future or a bar to passage? The entire show keeps asking. It also asks, as the manifesto's title has it, about art "in the context of American democracy."

The curators, Park Clare Davies with the Walker's Victoria Sung and Jadine Collingwood (and Nicholas Baume of the Public Art Fund), open with a life-size Garden Gate, in a cheery red, yellow, and blue. Yet a gate is both an entrance and a barrier, and this art is filled with fences. The gate also has a lectern, which might afford a place to read and to rest, a welcome gathering place, or the call to prayer that Armajani was happy enough to leave behind. Even the dark side of a bridge presented itself right there in Minneapolis in 1972, when John Berryman, the poet, leapt to his death. The artist responded by modeling an entire city block in black, with Berryman's tomb in the middle of the street. And then he went back to building for himself and others.

He created, in fact, a "Dictionary for Building" in the mid-1970s, with one hundred fifty works in just two years. It is as if he could not stop himself, and the Met Breuer has most of them, on pedestals or tables throughout. Both sides of that garden gate open onto a productive chaos. It shows Armajani tinkering modestly, with no taste for monuments, in little more than cardboard, balsa wood, and a touch of paint. It shows him having fun and funny as well, and Berryman must have appealed to him for mixing desperation with an exuberant humor in poetry. Even now, the kids in Brooklyn Bridge Park are enjoying themselves.

Not at home

Born in 1939 in Teheran, Armajani began with ink on gesso and a taste for Islamic art. Already, though, he is also dismantling tradition, as its illuminated manuscripts become clotted and illegible. He is also looking to the West, for the chance procedures and repeated gestures of Minimalism. And he held to both points of reference on moving to New York in 1960. He adapts calligraphy to create abstract gradations between black and white, much as Carl Andre adapted arbitrary letters on a manual typewriter. The show's title, "Follow This Line," refers at once to drawing, calligraphy, rote operations, and small acts of rebellion. Children in Iran, he recalls, would drag a pencil along a wall, to leave their mark.

First, though, he has to adapt to his new country—much as his new country has since claimed his early Prayer for a show about "September 11." He preserves letters home to his family, in felt-tip pen on cloth, and sews them together as a mural. Its twenty-four feet include a dromedary, but also a Coca-Cola logo. He assembles every illustration from a standard dictionary into a single compendium of English while effacing text from another. He waxes over the Warren Commission report on the Kennedy assassination, and he traces over page after page of newsprint reporting on the moon landing. If life under the Shah of Iran was oppressive, neither is America an unalloyed pleasure.

Armajani still works by hand, much as he will in cardboard, but his deference to formula only increases. The man who turned his back on the Shah and the Ayatollah alike still plays by the rules. That drew him, naturally enough, to mathematics, to imagine a tower just high enough to cast its shadow across the length of North Dakota and another reaching to outer space. It also took him to Minnesota, where he still resides, for some of the first ever computer art. An animation, in conjunction with the Hybrid Computer Laboratory there, allowed him To Perceive 10,000 Different Squares in 6 Minutes and 55 Seconds. The exhibition borrows a clunky computer typeface for its wall labels.

He is also making the transition to public spaces and back to private ones. With his "Dictionary for Building," Armajani is remaking private homes and taking them apart in the public space of a museum. At the same time, he is just a creative artist riffing. What else could go under or above stairs or a door? How many ways are there to reach the basement or to ascend three floors, and what might one find when one gets there? One has entered, he says, what Gyõrgy Lukács, the Marxist philosopher, calls "transcendental homelessness."

Sigmund Freud, he recalls, used the German unheimlich, or not at home, for the uncanny—that sense of being haunted and nothing being quite right. A loading dock or a closet could be scaffolding for a hanging, a Murphy bed a gallows. Windows could be thrown open and apart by a storm. If the result is uninhabitable, such is life in exile. The political undercurrents become more explicit in 1988, with a full-scale "reading room" for Sacco and Vanzetti, the Italian-American anarchists scapegoated and executed for murder in 1927. Its chambers could pass for prison cells.

Still, Armajani does not easily surrender his exuberance or a healthy sense of the absurd. He could still be the young artist listening to songs on the radio along with sermons. His constructions have the liberating angles of early Soviet art, and the reading room is open to you. An artist collective picked out its leftist reading list, but the museum also stocks it with the day's papers, including tabloids. Even a Room for Deportees from 2017 looks downright homey, with a purse and fedora set down as if its occupants had only just come in. They may have a long way to go to become citizens, but they will cross that bridge when they come to it.

See no evil

For more than a hundred years, sculptural niches to either side of the Met's grand entrance have stood empty. Now Wangechi Mutu does not just fill them but command them—with commissions in the offing for the Great Hall inside, starting with Kent Monkman. Mutu's four women sit as if enthroned, their flowing robes adding to their dignity and weight. Each bears a gold disk like a halo, its shine reflected back at you. Slits above and below their eyes, as for David Alekhuogie, bring out their ties to African art in wood, but also their stern refusal to smile. They are just the first in a projected series, but it is hard to imagine their taking orders to go.

Maybe you knew that the niches existed, but have you ever really seen them? Like me, you probably take them for granted as part of the Neoclassical architecture stretching for blocks along Fifth Avenue. For a New Yorker, the Met must seem to have been there forever, give or take its incursions over the years into Central Park—although Richard Morris Hunt completed the façade in 1902. Who would have known that he intended to have them filled, any more than that he intended the slabs above them to be carved. Karl Bitter, who proposed figures for four of the arts, even got as far as plaster models. He meant them as caryatids, or standing women as supporting columns. And then they ran out of money.

Sound familiar? The museum has record attendance and ambitions, but it will be giving up the Met Breuer before its lease is up, leaving space for the Frick Madison, and it has raised admission steeply for visitors from out of state. It also fired its last director, but surely the blame for its financial woes lies with trustees who cannot get enough of contemporary artists like, say, Mutu. As it is, she has to compete with food trucks, sidewalk stalls for egregious art, fountains redone to glorify right-wing donors, and outsize banners for exhibitions. On opening day, one banner just happened to show a kneeling man—Leonardo's Saint Jerome. At least they give people something to see while waiting on line outside or lazing on the steps.

For the Met, the sculpture is a dream deferred, but for Mutu there is no such thing as a dream denied. She came to New York from Kenya at age twenty on the way to Yale, and she acknowledges caryatids as an age-old tradition from the Acropolis to Africa. She does not hesitate to describe hers as "poised" and "stately" or as representatives of "women and power." Although their place overhead makes it hard to judge their scale, they are distinctly larger than life. As caryatids go, they have also escaped their marble columns to become The Seated. Collectively, her title adds, The New Ones, will free Us—starting, no doubt, with freedom of capitalization and punctuation.

Like Frédéric Bruly Bouabré in the Ivory Coast, Mutu has a talent for drawing on the past while unleashing her fantasies in the present, with a woman rather like her in the starring role. In her 2014 midcareer retrospective in Brooklyn and among the women in "Born in Flames," those fantasies allow her to move among media from painting to installations, video, and now bronze. They also show her as an African American, unable to turn her back on the burdens of history—and do check out my past reviews in the links here for more. Has she lost her willingness to go beyond role models to responsibilities? The bronze figures have much the same self-assurance as the bust of a girl on the High Line by Simone Leigh. And Leigh, too, can ordinarily look back to Africa and see dead ends.

Still, Mutu intends, she writes, "to bear witness." Her figures may look commanding, but two might be kneeling under their long robes. The coils of fabric run horizontally in all but one, projecting vigor but also entrapment. Their saintly halos have slipped as well—to one woman's forehead and the back of another's head like a bun, but in others to cover their eyes and lips. Are they blinded and silenced? The niches stood stand empty again for nine months before Mutu's successor the next fall. You will just have to see whether art can see evil and speak evil then.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Siah Armajani ran at The Met Breuer through June 2, 2019, and in Brooklyn Bridge Park through September 29, Wangechi Mutu at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through November 1, 2020. Related articles look at outdoor sculpture and Mutu in retrospective.