Summer is no longer the only eventful season for outdoor sculpture. As sculpture -- so often costly to make and show -- seems more and more of an outcast in galleries during this economic crunch, it may be finding more of a home in New York City's parks and streets. Sculpture, and public art in general, now almost seems part of the fabric of New York rather than just a guest waiting, or sometimes demanding, to be invited in for a few months each year.
Not all the sculpture on view is worthy of attention; it never is. And some of the news from the outdoor-sculpture front is not good. Vandalism is so widespread that sculptors installing work outdoors have to consider it more than a remote possibility. But this is winter -- not summer, when sculpture is almost in the air -- and the thoughtful commitment to public art, throughout this city, is indicative of a healthy situation.
This winter offers three main events. One is taking place at the Hunts Point Food Distribution Center in the Bronx, which last year inaugurated a sculpture program unlike any other in the history of New York City. Another is at Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, Queens, which is now the most influential and important outdoor sculpture site in New York. For sculptors and their supporters, these out-of-the-way parks are fields of dreams.
The third main event is taking place on bus shelters and billboards throughout the five boroughs. The promoter is the Public Art Fund, which commissioned works from Gran Fury, the Guerrilla Girls and Barbara Kruger. Their posters are nasty, alarming and absurd enough (those of Ms. Kruger feature photographs of hard-hat or yuppie men pleading for help after learning they are pregnant) to make some people think a bit differently about abortion, AIDS and censorship. Done well, this kind of art counters and questions the subliminal messages spread in subways and bus stops and other places where advertisements tend to be passively absorbed.
The Food Center Sculpture Park at Hunts Point is not yet a sculpture park but rather is an assortment of works installed in one of the largest food-market complexes in the world. The park's second annual exhibition is hardly even an exhibition, since there is no theme and little coherence to the selection and installation.
Continue reading the main storyThe roughly 20 works, most of them outdoors, include a number of John Ahearn's and Rigoberto Torres's portrait busts (from the mid-1980's) cast from ordinary people in the South Bronx, and Jonathan Silver's classically inspired "Small Venus" from 1979, an earthy yet fragmented nude that underlines the precariousness that can be felt throughout this site. The exhibition also includes a procession of abstract sculptures in wood and steel marching aimlessly across the pebbly front yard of the headquarters of National Foods.
More important than the limited success of this show is the very existence of sculpture in this raw, stripped-down neighborhood and the potential of this program to define many of the possibilities of sculpture in the 90's. It is startling to encounter sculptures behind barbed wire, or in a field alongside a Sanitation Department transfer station where garbage is loaded onto barges, or near Food Center Drive, a main thoroughfare on which an abandoned car that seems less stripped than raped can sit for weeks before authorities remove it.
If the future of the Hunts Point Sculpture Park is still up in the air, the next few years of the Socrates Sculpture Park look reasonably secure. The park has signed a temporary occupancy permit with the city through October 1992, and its officials hope to sign two more one-year permits afterward. The current exhibition, "No Man's Land," appears, like this park's previous exhibitions, to be something of a free-for-all, but it is in fact quite clear about the directions the park intends to follow.
There is nothing quite like this park. In its largely untamed site by the East River, visitors know right away this is not first of all their world. The park seems to belong to the sculptures, which over the years develop lives of their own. Only a sculptor -- Mark di Suvero, whose towering black steel beams preside over the park -- could have conceived a place in which sculpture can be so free.
Now for the bad news. The same climate of vulnerability and hostility that is creating more of a need for public art is also making it harder for it to survive. In the last year, one sculpture in the first annual Hunts Points exhibition was stolen; two sculptures in the current show at Socrates Sculpture Park were destroyed; an outdoor sculpture in TriBeCa was banged up, and a recent installation in a SoHo park had chained-in parts removed.
In light of this vandalism, public art in New York must be selected and installed with the kind of care that inspires respect. Some trivial works, like Keith Haring's sprightly red figures in Dante Park, in front of Lincoln Center, are probably harmless. Some, like Linda Cunningham's "Structural Transformations: An Environmental Memorial," a two-part installation that is totally out of place on the pavement of TriBeCa, are unfortunate. This installation combines natural and industrial materials like fossilized rock and steel and includes references to the fragility and survival of nature, but there is nothing redeeming about its materials or content. Such a work cannot make it easier for other outdoor sculptures to be protected and shown. Food Center Sculpture Park at Hunts Point Hunts Point Food Distribution Center The Bronx Through 1991
Although this exhibition includes several successful works, the Food Center Sculpture Park is still clearly searching for a firm foundation. The financing was very limited, only $15,000. One of the two site-specific projects, a sculpture by Martha Burgess, has yet to be installed. One other work, a mural by Richard Haas, is not yet in place. Some works accompanying the exhibition -- T-shirts and signs by Barbara Kruger and signs by Anton von Dalen -- are still being produced.
The sculptures with the most personality, by far, were made by Ming Fay for a small space by a staircase inside the wholesale produce market that looks a bit like a vast army barracks. In "Orange Queen," "Black Plum" and "Big Bosc," giant pieces of fruit seem to have been squeezed into packing crates so that each looks like an orangutan in a cage. In each work, the fruit seems imprisoned, eager to escape its commercial fate and gain the kind of freedom Mr. Fay confers on his fruit in his current SoHo installation at Exit Art (through March 23). The Chinese characters written on the crates suggest the exotic nature of the familiar freight. Stenciled letters on the crates spell out "handle with care" and "made in USA" and acknowledge the sponsors of the exhibition.
Other sculptures with some zip include Hank de Ricco's "Rounder" and "High Noon," both of which relate to activities in the market. Each of these wood sculptures looks like an armature: for a giant basket or refuse container ("Rounder"), or for a giant, crystalline toy or storage bin that can be stretched this way or that ("High Noon").
The exhibition provides an instructive example of how a site can affect art. In last year's show, the two wood sculptures by Peter Dudek were ineffective alongside company headquarters buildings. Now in an open field by the marine transfer station, the sculptures' taut grids and Mondrianlike colors bring to their bleak site a concentrated dose of energy and light.
The selection process for the exhibition was similar to last year's. The participating organizations either commissioned works or chose works from proposals made by a committee representing several commercial and arts organizations. The administrator of the show was Lyn Freeman, formerly of the Public Art Fund. Prominent figures in the sculpture park continue to be Sigmund R. Balka, the general counsel for Krasdale Foods; Coy LaSister, the director of markets for the City Department of Ports and Trade, and Betti-Sue Hertz of the Bronx Council on the Arts. For information on the show, call (212) 931-9500. No Man's Land Socrates Sculpture Park Broadway and Vernon Boulevard Long Island City, Queens Through March
"No Man's Land" provides a good idea of what the Socrates Sculpture Park is trying to do and where it is going. The exhibition gives gallery sculptors like Robin Hill a chance to show outdoors. It brings to New York sculptors like Vicki Scuri and Keith Oliver, who laid long shreds of tires in black paths that slither from the waterfront into the heart of the park. It encourages experimental work, with light (Ed Andrews) and water (Ray Kelly). Two large blue columns by the Mexican sculptor Sebastian demonstrate the park's interest in artists from outside the United States.
Several of the works are big. Mr. Andrews's 50-foot-tall column is made up of around 10 layers -- each resembling a stainless-steel grass skirt -- with a small wind sensor on top. The speed with which the sensor spins determines the amount of light produced by the neon camouflaged within the metal.
Jesse Moore is a talented young sculptor who is beginning to feel her oats. Her "Calling to Evangeline" brings to mind the big wood wheel by Martin Puryear and the wooden spokes in sculptures by Elizabeth Egbert. Her two wheels are enormous, and they support a long horn that can be looked through, as if it were a telescope, or spoken into, as if it were a megaphone trying to persuade the rest of the park and even Manhattan itself, across the river, to listen.
All the shows in this park are distinguished by a feeling for materials. Pat Dougherty is one of a number of contemporary sculptors looking to weave together industry and nature. His work includes a metal frame the size of a small house, which seems to have been settled by giant birds. Clusters of saplings are wound around two parts of the house. A third cluster sits on a lawn in the middle of the house like a child's castle or like the nest of a gigantic avian creature that will shortly return. Mel Edwards Doris Freedman Plaza 60th Street and Fifth Avenue Through May
"Tomorrow's Wind" is evidence of the large-scale, public-art side of Mel Edwards, who is best known for his small "Lynch Fragments" (a sculpture representing the third, polychrome side of his work is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris). In June, "Tomorrow's Wind" is to be installed in the site for which it was made, Thomas Jefferson Park in East Harlem.
This 13 1/2-foot-tall, welded stainless-steel sculpture features a disk that tilts backward, reflecting light to the point where the heavy metal can seem like a silver sun. A second form, almost guarding the disk, is upright and blade-shaped. The third form looks like a piece of a house with a door cut out of it. With their hints of building blocks, tools, homes and stars, the forms are loaded with symbolic meaning.
The work is fully three-dimensional and loses its sculptural conviction only from the back, when it stops responding to its environment and turns inward. One problem people may have with the work is that its debt to the tradition of stainless-steel sculpture is so obvious. In his public art, Mr. Edwards is clearly less interested in originality than he is in making an intense and full human statement. Gran Fury, Guerrilla Girls, Barbara Kruger Bus shelters and billboards New York City
On the 100 color posters by Gran Fury on bus shelters throughout the city, the English text (half the posters are in Spanish) includes the words: "Women don't get AIDS, they just die from it." In smaller letters, the posters call attention to the problem faced by women who test positive for the AIDS virus but whose infections don't fit the Centers for Disease Control's definition of AIDS, which Gran Fury says prevents these women from getting health care. In a kind of blue mist behind the letters are images of bathing beauties in a Miss America pageant. The reality of the words overpowers dreamy images of idealized women who seem little more than mouths and legs.
The posters by Barbara Kruger appear on 100 bus shelters around the city. One of her three images presents a young black man, another a middle-aged construction worker, another a yuppie father with his child. All have the word "help" plastered in red letters across their chests. On their bellies we read about their confusion now that they have found out they are pregnant and cannot follow the personal and professional lives they planned. The tone of these posters is deadpan. The effect is comic and pointed.
The Guerrilla Girls' poster, on 10 billboards throughout the city except Staten Island, is an attempt to link government control of women and censorship of art. "First they want to take away a woman's right to choose," read the red and black letters on a yellow ground. "Now they're censoring art." To the right of the words is an image of the "Mona Lisa" with a green fig leaf over her mouth. The poster has the Guerrilla Girls' graphic gift and ability to make a general point. It also has their weakness for blanket, us-versus-them statements that inflame passions and make it harder to think about actual, concrete situations.
(The Guerrilla Girls' posters remain up through March; the others remain up through April.)
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