AERNOUT MIK, MOMA, JULY 2009

Aernout Mik's gripping installations at the MOMA pull apart the fascia of social anxiety. Figures run frantically within violent scenarios as well as from installation to installation. Relationships between crowded bodies, contorted, spasmodic movements, and intensified activity are investigated. Mik is brilliant at pulling disparate real life events into a performative space of interaction through editing. The viewer is made complicit with the action unfolding:we are part of the violence, part of the detritus of a catastrophe, part of a war in which we are privileged viewers in a human scale projection. Mik uses performance and cinema, media and physicality to tear away at actions and events that are chaotic. His instinctive ability to capture what is raw in societal dysfunction threads through his large performance installations. The scale of Mik's work is gigantic- monumental. There is nothing timid about his investigation of random human actions impacting human life without accountability. Mik's world is brutal: here people are animal like, scavengering modern life without narrative continuity. To that extent, Mik's "events" do not have a continuous narrative flow, but rather, are staged as ruptures of perception. Fragments of a life caught digitally and edited into meaning. 

POP UP ART GALLERIES on 14th STREET

Could 14th Street be a new Meatpacking District, where art, commerce, trash and the transient merge? The current show of works by Alexandra Pacula and JMR at the Dapper Dan Imperial Gallery, 139 West 14th. Street, Manhattan, suggest a new energy of possibility on an otherwise nondescript stretch of 14th St. between 7th and 8th Avenues. Street artist and visionary curator Alex Emmart has brought two vibrant talents to this innocuous stretch: the bold graffiti artist JMR, and the heady, intense ferocity of Alexandra Pacula. Pacula's furious brush work is rivetting. A glass of Scotch holds one's gait. Streetscenes of Manhattan are caught in their relentless passion. The colors are unapologetic, sweeping the viewer into the maelstrom of drama. Pacula's graphite on paper are magnetic images of delirious traffic. The strokes draw the eye along the lines of speed. The passerby is left thinking: we need more of this. Emmart's tenacity has brought two gems to 14th Street, and we can do with more of such surprises along forgotten storefronts and forelorn drapery stores.

CONEY ISLAND REDEVELOPMENT FUTURE

The New York City Council under Mayor Michael Bloomberg approved plans for the redevelopment of Coney Island this week. Many New Yorkers are dismayed at the progress of the aggressive Thor Equities plan for highrises that will force out existing businesses. This decision accelerates a broad set of concerns around the Coney Island neighborhood. One primary concern is the question of how much shadow the new highrises planned to tower over the area will cast on the historically bright and open amusement park where visitors could always see the sky. The image of a Coney Island amusement park dwarfed by towering glass boxes of rich occupants and privatised services is hard to envision. And, if the projected big development has its way, the area designated for what has historically been the place of entertainment and public delight will be shrunk to a fraction of its original area.

"MARITIME SKY of MANHATTAN"

New York City is in a dramatic relationship with its waterfront. A fundamental shift is a drift.  The lower East Side gardens were a catalyst to thinking of Ebenezer Howard's garden city within urban hardscape.  Liz Chrystie, Adam Purple, Chico Mendez, and the visionary community gardeners of the East Village opened up a new way of inhabiting urban detritus. The extraordinary lower East Side gardens are truly remarkable testaments to how people can harness the most intimidating of urban landscapes to produce sustainable relationships to air, water and the earth. Make beauty where the city forgets people.  Open the sky through greenery where people have forgotten how to live.  When Corbusier visited Manhattan in 1930's, he was impressed by the "maritime sky of manhattan" yet this maritime sky was not a romance that Robert Moses shared with Corbu as an intimate relationship between neighborhoods and water. The energy crisis is forcing a remapping about how people perceive their cities.  Instead of following Gideon's call to "kill the streets" the people of New York City are actively building on what Jane Jacobs and the movements that followed her inspiration came to identify as the walking city. The post-9/11 New York City is a mobile new york- people want to run, jump, catapult, fly through the air on a trapeze, snooze, kayak, swim around manhattan or across the East River to Brooklyn, bike across the five boroughs or just sit and drum by the water on the Upper West Side. It is a new changing conversation between urban citizens and their public spaces.  

NYC WATERFRONT FUTURES

Governors Island, July 18, 2009 is a very thrilling place.  A critical shift in ways of thinking about cities in general and New York City in particular, is adrift.  The island is filled with pragmatic proposals by the New York City Waterfront Alliance on how to shift thinking about energy and resources in New York City to a different register that focuses on the city's natural resources: water, river estuaries, currents, Hudson River ecology.  The proposals include expanding water commuting in the future planning of New York City, emphasize the waterfront in children's education and growth, bring waterfront thinking to inland communities who have access to water but do not think of it as an option, stop sludging the rivers, dynamize community investment in contaminated sites for reclamation projects.  New York City finally has the single biggest vision since the heavy hand of Robert Moses and his car defined modernity. Finally, New York City is reclaiming its waterfront as a critical aspect of its everyday future- not just a place for trade, work, industrial labor and illicit social exchanges.  The waterfront is slowly transforming New York City into its uncharted identity as an archipelago of islands in conversation across distinctive local ecologies of waterfronts.

WASHINGTON SQUARE FOUNTAIN

Washington Square Park is a cleaner, brighter, more easily surveilled park.  I miss the old fountain with its reassuring air that iconic monuments never move.  The fountain's new old abode (its current alignment with the Stanford White Washington Square arch citing an earlier era of its location)  is cleverly designed to seduce and prevent public performances.  Powerful sprays of water delight everyone and prevent anyone from lingering to rabble rouse or hypnotise a passerby.  As one of my students said to me: the park has a strange "open" feel to it.  Reminds me of what Paul Virilio says in his book on Speed and Politics about the scale of Haussman's boulevards in the heart of Paris designed to prevent another revolution.  The park's pedestrian pathways signal crowd control and armed vehicular manoeverability.  As a prominent destination for major protests, parades, demonstrations and vigils in the city of New York, the park's geography has always been a growth towards greater crowd control over the decades. Despite its history of military parades and its current heavily security determined design of large vehicular entry with its sweeping egresses and pathways, Washington Square Park remains charming if less mysterious.  It is a destination shorn of magic.  Perhaps time will reclaim the park's aura to weave new mystique onto its flattened landscape. 

ARIANNE MNOUCHKINE: SMALL LIVES, EPIC SCALE

Viewing Mnouchkine's Les Ephemeres after her big themes of greek tragedy, the shakepearean history plays and the journeys of Odysseus, is a surprise.  It requires relearning what to look for in Mnouchkine.  The epic scale of a performance in seven hours is packed with the details of modern dispersal.  War, history and forgetting are some of the mechanisms through which the narrative fragmentation takes place in Les Ephermers.  One is in the world of a young woman and her dead mother, whose poignant story is the Ariadne thread to multiple lives and periods.  Mnouchkine's Les Ephemeres investigates loss and melancholia as virtuosic vignettes in epic time.  The little details of a look or a piece of cake becomes a hook into the past.  History is ephemeral but memory lives to haunt.  Unlike the Mnouchkine of big gestures drawn from Yakshagana, Flamenco, Kabuki, Kathakali and Sufi movement that one was immersed in Les Atrides, this feast of detail is an introspectic Mnouchkine, looking melancholia in its depths and searching for its meanings.  Death is at the door of this piece, and fear is not far behind.  Rotating discs carrying half a dozen actors at a time float into the dream worlds of the daily.  In Ephemeres, one is in the field of the cinematic Mnouchkine: seamless gliding mise en scenes, theatricality of a slice of life, fade ins and fade outs of reality and memory.  Jean Jacques Lemaitres' haunting music calibrates the pacing and development of the piece, grounding the openings scenes in his distinctive bass cello invocations.  One is left desiring the punch that always distinguishes Mnouchkine's storytelling from other great directors of our time.

ERIC W. SANDERSON: THE MANNAHATTA PROJECT

July 9, 2009

At the Museum of the City of New York is an extraordinary constellation of maps and ideas.  In one exhibition titlted: MANNAHATTA/MANHATTAN is located 4 key maps of New York City's emergence: the British Headquarters' Map, the Viele Map, the Commisioner's Map and finally, Randal's extraordinary drawings of lot by lot in his series of maps of New York City, known as the Randall's Map.  A reproduction of the Costello Map of New Amsterdam is also on show at the exhibit.  What makes this collection of cartographic renderings significant is their symbiotic importance in the understanding of New York City's landscape, materiality and topography.  The projected future in each one of these maps is vastly different.   Cumulatively, these different interpretations of information produce layered conceptions of what New York is and can become.  

ARIANNE MNOUCHKINE: EPHEMERAL GESTURES

July 11, 2009

Park Avenue Armory,

New York City.

The audience walks into a cavernous space of parallel steeply racked seats.  In the center is a large but compact open arena spacious to carry to large rotating wheels of actors.  On either side of this empty space is a raised platform.  On one side of the raised platform sits the Sound and Light Operator.  On the other sits Jean -Jacques Lemaitre, Arianne Mnouchkine's composer of many years, surrounded by an entourage of wooden instruments of unusual shapes and heights.

Arianne Mnouchkine's Les Ephemeres is an expedition into the deepest recesses of the human psyche.  Watching Les Ephemeres the week following Pina Bausch's death cannot but influence the viewing a seven hour performance on loss, aging, death, memory, childhood, melancholia and birth.  Les Ephemeres is about little gestures and thick memories: a slice of pie, chocolate cake, a goldfish, are conduits to former lives, forgotten pasts.

Les Ephemeres is a gigantic memory box of stories, vignettes, snapshots, fading photographs.  We are drawn to the peripheries of daily lives, and sucked into the vortex of incomplete stories.  The threads of all these myriad tales interlock into a web like network of narratives, of histories, and ultimately of interdependent fates.  We are all connected and need each other.  This is the simple message borne out of war and dispersal, fear and alienation.  What connects humanity is the myriad spheres of social interaction- miniscules of gestures that bear the baggage of contact.

PINA BAUSCH: The City in a Village

Pina Bausch's passing away marks the passage of an era.  Bausch brought to a synthesis the formal divides between theater and dance, beween village and the world.  Bausch's grounding in the village of Wuppertal, Germany for her movement work became an artistic practice unique and critical to the world of performance and movement.  Bausch's model of producing dance theater is a powerful model of alternative living.  Her example is extreme but inspiring: move to an unknown site and start your own theater company that centralizes the life of performance and artistic practice at its core.   Bausch's dance practice based on communal living in a small village echoes earlier aesthetic practices of the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College and prior to that, the more esoteric investigations of Francois Delsarte and Emile Dalcroze, who respectively investigated the associations between movement, emotions, dance and theatricality.  In Bausch's work, the distillation of movement as a kinetic medium whose compositional formality incorporates the daily gestures of life, comes to a head.  The dancer in Bausch's work became a conduit of the contemporary gesture, a walk, a casual squat, a slide of the feet that cites both Buster Keaton and the Judson Church movement.

In Pina Bausch's dance pieces, theatricality acquired a clarification- movement heightened dramatic action, action became the event, and choreography replaced Stanislavskian fidelity to produce fresh new images on slices of life.  The detailed gesture in Pina Bausch's dance work becomes an investigation into the science of movement-  it brings Delsarte's interest in the "science of movement" into conversation with the quotidien life of the expendable present.  

The passing of the great movement theorist and practitioner is the passing of an era of investigation of big gestures through little things, where the world is unpacked within the confines of a utopian village.

SPECTACLE, NOISE POLLUTION and SECURITY

It is July 4th and the fireworks on the Hudson River are spectacularly exploding.  Earlier today, the bike path on the Hudson River Park Greenway was closed and the entire bikepath downtown filled with police activity cordoning off the area in anticipation of the MACY's fireworks.  New Yorkers love a good firework display.  The sound of fireworks in New York City however have a very different impact on many residents.  Since September 11, 2001, the sound of fireworks has conflated with the sound of war in a tactile way.  Despite the rationale of festivity and celebration, a sense of ominous foreboding creeps into the home at the sound and ricochetting of explosions.  This ongoing issue of sound anxiety triggered by fireworks for downtown Manhattan residents really surfaced when Rupert Murdoch's wedding bash on the New York waterfront right after September 11, 2001 concluded with a riotous firework display on the river that shook buildings, triggered off alarms and woke up sleeping babies.  For many of us, the implications of the United States's strategy of "shock and awe" and perpetual state of orange alert in New York City left no room for humor at the hideous display of uncivic insensitivity by Murdoch's crew.  Since then, fireworks invoke security anxieties- downtown New York is viscerally affected by the sound of fireworks.  Buildings shake.  The walls quake.  The sensation evokes the impact of buildings falling down.  It disrupts our quality of life outside special events like July 4 and Gay Pride celebrations, which are annual city rituals. Private firework displays of greed and wealth should not be permitted to disrupt the shared public air spaces of dense cities like New York City after September 11.

GOVERNORS ISLAND

The archaeological details raised by Diana di Zerega Wall and Anne-Marie Cantwell about the historic timeline of human habitation on Governor's Island is noteworthy.  It is a point of interest that seems to be somewhat hidden in the literature on the founding of Mannahatta.  The detail that Governor's Island was the first settlement of the first small group of Dutch settlers to arrive in New Amsterdam is little noted.  The first Dutch settlers built their settlements on Governor's Island over the settlements of Woodland Indian habitants of the island.  According to de Zerega Wall and Cantwell, archaeological debris from Governor's Island indicate that indigenous habitation existed on the island for 4000 years.  This alters the import of the tiny piece of land south of Manhattan as a point of interest.  Governor's Island is a dense conglomeration of New York history, anthropological, archaeological, historical, military, maritime, penitentiary, and now, leisure.  It must have been a powerful place for peoples more in tune with nature: an island facing the ocean at the confluence of two rivers covered with oysters and blessed with extraordinary access to natural food supplies.