Behind the Wall

John Haber
in New York City

Dream the Combine: Young Architects

Urs Fischer, Heidi Lanino Bilezikian, and Yayoi Kusama

New York lost, to my mind, its finest alternative art space not just to the Museum of Modern Art, but also to bad architecture. Could the museum's commitment to new architecture be its saving grace?

Art in New York has few greater pleasures than in summer, when the city empties out and sculpture takes to the parks. For 2018, though, some of its pleasures are neither outside nor in. They are also not fully public or private. Dream the Combine fills the courtyard to MoMA PS1, as part of its Young Architect Program, recovering the space behind its entrance wall for art. Urs Fischer and Heidi Lanino Bilezikian place their sculpture behind glass, visible from the street. And Yayoi Kusama invites one to Rockaway Beach, only to duck inside for still greater access to the light.

Naturally the architects engage the viewer by mass, the storefront windows through vision. They can hardly help it from their placement alone. This has not been a good year for rhinos. It has also been a mixed year for public art, but Fischer delivers on both. Bilezikian, in turn, makes vision a function of mass by evoking women and dance. Only Kusama, though, makes the choice between installation and vision irrelevant.

A place or two to rest

Changes to P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Centerdid not take place all at once. The Modern swallowed it in 1999 but did not rename it for years to come. And then came the wall. A concrete barrier facing Jackson Avenue removes the illusion of simply entering an old brick schoolhouse in Long Island City, like a student of long ago or a dedicated follower of art. The thick white wall looks back to Brutalism so common in architecture before 1975—and before P.S. 1's founding in 1976. It marks MoMA PS1 as just another corporate headquarters, but then so does the huge museum logo that it bears.

It also, though, creates an opportunity, if only a lost one. Past the wall, a gift shop, the cash register, and a guard, one still has a long way to go before heading inside. One reenters the light, for a sculpture garden, only without sculpture or a garden. The pebbled courtyard has a lifeless chill, just as with the Maya Lin design for SculptureCenter down the street. It also gives itself over almost never to art, but rather to a bubble tent with still more corporate logos, a bar, and alcoves to one side behind still more concrete barriers—perpetually empty but for construction equipment for further displays of museum power.

It is, in short, just a storage and performance space—which is, I suppose, not altogether bad. Face it: those days of lonely alternatives in art are gone. Exit Art is gone, and the New Museum is now yet another big-box institution on the Bowery. In turn, the space can boast of entertainment and crowds. Just do not show up on a summer Saturday hoping to see exhibitions without tickets in hand for electronic music and djs, or you will be turned away.

I know I have, angrily, but I came back the very next day for something more. With Hide & Seek, the courtyard has changed for once from the space between a neighborhood and a museum to the space between architecture and art. The installation bursts the bubble at last, although the bar remains, mostly unused. Its huge outlines fill the main yard and two of three alcoves. It has a variety of uses that respond to the courtyard's function as well. It invites one to seek out spaces that the museum so often makes off-limits. Just do not expect a place to hide.

It does, though, offer a place or two to rest. One alcove holds a steel bench set against the far wall. The other has a black rope hammock, like oversized lawn furniture for a lazy summer day. The main yard, off to the side, has a triangular summer stage suitable to weekend performance. One might have a bit harder time accounting for center stage of the installation itself—a long steel "runway" a healthy step up from the white pebbles. An overhead platform and trellis offer shade, while bridging the installation's components.

They become in the process an industrial space after all, in tribute less to the museum or "architecture now" than to Minimalism, while tempering the promise of R'n'R. The Minneapolis architects, Jennifer Newsom and Tom Carruthers of Dream the Combine (in collaboration with Clayton Binkley of ARUP), sure sound dreamy—to the point of withholding their names rather the firm's. "Starchitects" they are not, but then this is not just architecture. Huge mirrors at the end of each component, backed by formidable steel rods, confront visitors as much as reflecting them. One suspended just above the hammock sways in response to the slightest of movements, while threatening to turn things upside-down. If the hammock's breadth approaches that of the runway, better run fast before MoMA's bow to sculpture and architecture is already gone.

Roaring back

An African subspecies took one more step toward dying off, but not before inspiring the cheesiest and most pathetic effort ever on its behalf—a sculpture in Astor Place by Gillie and Marc. Soon enough, though, rhinos were roaring back. At least one was, with an assist from Urs Fischer, in the corner storefront on Fifth Avenue. It was bigger and feistier than ever, in fact, thanks to the accumulation of debris on its back, from a toilet and vacuum to an entire copy machine. If the rest of the large site looks comically empty, apart from a man tending the desk, who would dare stand in its way? Here preservation is indistinguishable from mass destruction.

Fischer has played the gentrifier before, with money to spare. If pop-up shows more often serve beleaguered galleries and collectives, not him and Gagosian. He has knocked right through a floor in the name of art or a refusal of art. Like Walton Ford, he has also identified, massively, with wild animals. His 2015 summer sculpture in the plaza of the Seagram Building on Park Avenue could pass for an elephant or its droppings. Now he gets to be the bull in a china shop.

Fischer takes metaphors literally, like everything else, because it attracts attention, and he knows it. He gets to state the obvious while playing against the familiar. Here the creature looks exotic in Manhattan, but it could have pillaged nearby office buildings for its heavy load. Its silvery finish suggests both polished sculpture and industrial recycling. With its overpowering reflections, it also takes up space visually, even from a distance. This is art meant not to last, but to charge on through.

Motion is key, too, behind another shop window, but without the macho posturing. Heidi Lanino Bilezikian adapts the female form to the Flatiron Prow Art Space. She mimes an art form often associated with women as well. Her tall Folded Females float lightly and move comfortably together, as if caught up in a single dance. She paints on the same surface as Fischer's, reflective metal, as well as paper. Yet she might have constructed them all on the spot.

They look more like cut and folded paper anyway, no small part of their lightness. Like their near abstract lines, derived from classical sculpture, it connects them to Cubism and the process of their own making and unfolding. Their planes and black outlines might have emerged from Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, by Pablo Picasso, but without his backing away from a woman's sexuality—while their sharp metal edges might threaten even him. Where Fischer depends on the literal, they refuse it. By day, painted metal competes with bare surfaces and plain white, for a greater brightness. At night under artificial light, color takes over more completely.

Storefronts are always treacherous spaces for art, even apart from abandonment and even at the New Museum, which sets a window aside for new media. Displays risk the kitsch of department stores in December, and more than a few at the Flatiron Building recently have fallen prey to it, painfully. They may work best when they are closer to fabric than glitter like an installation for Serena Gidwani Buschi, more volumetric like Xin Song, and closer to the fabric of the city like Christina Lihan. Garret Kane simulated motion here before with a flock of birds or school of fish, although his later jolly green giant could not. Bilezikian has touches of all these but with closer ties to Modernism. If you want a charge, there is always midtown.

Sharing the spotlight

Yayoi Kusama first served up the glittery confection of Narcissus Garden at the 1966 Venice Biennale. Now she has to settle for an abandoned train garage past Kennedy Airport, but the move pays off. Its derelict remains could well be the star of the show. It would not, though, without her deft handling. Her fifteen hundred silvery spheres cannot take anything away from the old loft and graffiti-covered walls. Yet they cover the floor, take one into the space, guide one's movements, and soak up light from the attic windows.

Of course, Kusama has herself become a star in the intervening fifty years. She has had a Whitney retrospective and ever so many performances. Lines for her latest installation in Chelsea stretched around the block. Here the original plastic spheres have given way to polished metal. Back when, she tossed them in the air and offered them for sale for a couple of bucks apiece. Now there is no touching, and she is nowhere in sight.

She still commands the spotlight. She draws a line here, too, just to enter the building—amid a former military base at the western end of the Rockaways, near the baseball fields and chapel. (Where would a work of hers be without a line?) One can get pretty close by bus from either of two subways or a ferry, but I chose to walk along Rockaway Beach on a sweltering summer day. By the time I reached the sands of Jacob Riis Park, after forty minutes, I was close to giving up, but with another mile or more ahead. It felt like crawling through the desert, as in an old cartoon in need of a punch line, only to encounter a half-hour wait at the oasis.

It hardly helped that I knew nothing of my destination beyond an unnamed place in Fort Tilden, much as in a future year for Nancy Baker Cahill. As organizer, MoMA PS1 offers few clues. The Rockaway Artists Alliance manages the display in an adjacent building, including text and photos of Kusama's history, as the 2018 edition of "Rockaway!" If you see signs for it, though, beware: they may be pointing the wrong way. The Alliance does, though, set out water and umbrellas for shelter from the sun while on line.

It seems ever so different from last year, when I had a shed to myself that Katharina Grosse had spray painted by the shore—not unlike the bright red of a fire boat from Tauba Auerbach in summer sculpture this year. Because Kusama works indoors, and the event needs handlers, it is open only weekends and holidays, extending the line. Still, it has a poignant subtext in the site's vulnerability to climate change and decay. Grosse's shed was slated for destruction because of damage from Hurricane Sandy. Here the structure began its decline earlier but still stands. For once, too, it appears to stand thanks to art.

Kusama knows narcissism as well as any artist, even Paul McCarthy or the late Mike Kelley, and the work has obvious parallels in the mirrored spaces of her Infinity Rooms or the high-tech light show of Drift. Back in 1966, a sign proclaimed "Your Narcissism for Sale," but now she can claim a monopoly. One cannot so much as straddle a sphere rather than stick to the paths that she has left around and between them. The paths pay off, though, in one's shifting focus on the surrounding space. Some spheres rest behind a fence, because who is she to alter the site in any way? Reflected sunlight on silver marks other paths for the eye only, but the distinction between the material and the visual dissolves before one's eyes.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Dream the Combine ran at MoMA PS1 through September 3, 2018, Urs Fischer at 511 Fifth Avenue at 43rd Street through June 23, Heidi Lanino Bilezikian at the Flatiron Prow Art Space organized by Cheryl McGinnis through September 4, and Yayoi Kusama at Fort Tilden curated by MoMA PS1 through September 3. Relateds review look at 2018 summer sculpture outdoors and annuals on Governors Island and Socrates Sculpture Park.