Mark di Suvero on Governors Island, and Things I Didn't Know About Richard Bellamy and Robert Morris

Mark di Suvero, Figolu, 2005-2011, in "Mark di Suvero on Governors Island," presented by Storm King Art Center, through September 25, 2011.

"He's a bit of a maverick, and he's not that much interested in gallery shows," dealer Richard Bellamy told Lee Rosenbaum of Marco Polo "Mark" di Suvero, trying to explain, in 1993, why the widely lauded artist was less visible in the art world than he had once been. There was also, of course, the issue that few spaces — even outdoor spaces — could accommodate di Suvero's largest sculptures at the time. And once your local metropolitan sculpture garden acquires a monumental di Suvero — the one I grew up with, the Walker, owned a huge, awesome one with a wooden swing — it's perhaps hard for its curators to justify buying another.


Detail of Figolu, 2005-2011


Will, 1994

With the recent proliferation of large-scale galleries and gardens, di Suveros have found plenty of new homes. The latest place to take on that role is Governors Island, the 172-acre former military base just off the coast of Manhattan that has been converted into a park over the past few years, where the Storm King Art Center has installed eleven of the artist's works in a show that runs through September 25. It is in an insanely gorgeous exhibition, and a perfect reason to wander around the island on bicycle. So far, the reviews have been resoundingly positive. Writes the New Yorker, "Di Suvero's steel abstractions are so playful that this plein-air installation suggests a game of jacks strewn across the park by a giant hand."

Rather than add to that unanimous, deserved praise, then, let's talk about Bellamy for a bit, whom I somehow didn't realize had played an instrumental role in di Suvero's career, extensively documenting the artist's work in photographs, organizing many of his shows around the world, and even moving his second gallery, the amazingly named Oil and Steel Gallery, into di Suvero's Queens studio, in Hallet's Cove, in 1985. (A year later, di Suvero helped found the nearby Socrates Sculpture Park.)


Mahatma, 1978-1979


Rust Angel, 1995

Bellamy's involvement with di Suvero fascinates me since I've always thought of him solely as the radical proprietor of the Robert Scull-backed Green Gallery, which he ran from 1960 to 1965, showing Pop, Minimal, and Conceptual work by artists by Dan Flavin, George Segal, and Robert Morris, who writes in "Thinking Back About Him," a glorious tribute to Bellamy published in his book of collected writings, Have I Reasons: "A crooked taxi baron glitzed out real vulgar uptown and kept a stable of artists downtown. Dick [Richard Bellamy] floated somewhere between. Hovered mid-town maybe. Mediating. Plugged into other circuits. Listening for edges other never heard." ("A voice like a rich malted milk," Morris adds.) In my cursory conception of Bellamy, di Suvero and his resolutely extroverted sculptures didn't quite make sense.

Morris continues with a story from Bellamy: "'Philip Johnson was in,' he said, smiling that before-the-repaired-teeth smile. 'He saw your work and wanted to get a broom and kill it.'" This would be a great story by itself, but it's made even better by the fact that Johnson actually ended up buying works by Morris — first Litanies (1963), and then Statement of Aesthetic Withdrawl (aka Document) (1963), made by Morris to protest Johnson taking too long to pay for the first work — which speaks either to Bellamy's skills as a dealer, Johnson's willingness to buy art he hated, the overwhelming charisma of Morris's work, or some combination of those factors. Johnson donated both to MoMA in 1970.


She, 1977-78. To view a vintage photograph of the work in di Suvero's studio, scroll to the bottom this MoMA feature on Bellamy, "The Dealer as Co-Conspirator."

It turns out that Bellamy first showed di Suvero at the Green Gallery all the way back in 1960, three years before Morris's first show there (his first in New York). The two men went on to become very different artists — di Suvero an ebullient crowd-pleaser, Morris a continually confounding shape-shifter, a trickster par excellence — and today Morris is something less than a proponent of di Suvero's work. Describing the state of contemporary sculpture in Have I Reasons, Morris writes: "Aggressively large-scale, grand spatial occupation, the buzz of spectacle. A long list could be drawn up. From Pollock and Newman on down to Stella, di Suvero, Heizer, Turrell, Kelly, Serra." Those descriptors sometimes fit di Suvero's work, but they don't here. Placed in one of New York's most daring experiments in pubic space, they look as comfortable, nuanced, and subtle as the masses of people marveling at — and playing on — them.

"Sol LeWitt: Structures, 1965-2006" in City Hall Park

Sol LeWitt, Splotch 15, 2005. Acrylic on fiberglass, 12 ft. x 8 ft. 4 in. x 6 ft. 8 in., in "Sol LeWitt: Structures: 1965–2006," through December 3, 2011, in City Hall Park, New York, organized by the Public Art Fund, curated by Nicholas Baume.


Incomplete Open Cubes, 1974. Painted aluminum, various dimensions, roughly 3 ft. 6 in. x 3 ft. 6 in. x 3 ft. 6 in.

This winter, let's hope that snow starts sticking to the ground in New York City before December 2. The Public Art Fund's epic "Sol LeWitt: Structures, 1965–2006" exhibition is set to close in City Hall Park on that date, and it is a show that one suspects is going to look gorgeous against a thick blanket of crisp white snow. The Fund's director and chief curator, Nicholas Baume, a longtime LeWitt scholar, has filled the hamlet's greens, pathways, and surrounding sidewalks with a trove of the artist's work. There's a large, austere 1969 modular cube, a pair of towering concrete-block works (one making its public U.S. debut, having appeared in the 1987 edition Skulptur Projekte Münster), and even a late, effervescent Splotch piece that resembles a Lynda Benglis latex pour pulled twelve feet into the air, which anchors the southern tip of the park.


Incomplete Open Cubes, 1974. Painted aluminum, various dimensions, roughly 3 ft. 6 in. x 3 ft. 6 in. x 3 ft. 6 in.

That first date in the show's title, 1965, also happens to be the year that LeWitt's longtime gallerist, Paula Cooper, met him for the first time, via artist Walter De Maria. She was working as director of the Park Place Gallery then, and three years later she opened her own gallery in SoHo — or Hell's Hundred Acres, as it was called at the time. For her inaugural show, a benefit for the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam that was organized by Robert Huot, Lucy Lippard, and Ron Wolin, LeWitt publicly displayed one of his wall drawings for the first time. The work didn't sell.

Cooper shared all of this at a talk organized by the Fund early last month (now available online) at the New School. She also told this story, about that first exhibition: "At the end of the show, I asked him, 'Well, what do I do?' And he said, 'Oh, just paint it out.' And I said, 'I can't do that!' ... But anyway, I did." (The wall drawing sold years later she mentions.)


Complex Form 6, 1987. Painted aluminum, 8 ft. x 12 ft. 8 in. x 4 ft.


Tower (Columbus), 1990. Concrete block, 26 ft. 4 in. x 10 ft. 8 in. x 10 ft. 8 in.

Tower (Columbus), 1990. Concrete block, 26 ft. 4 in. x 10 ft. 8 in. x 10 ft. 8 in. In back: Frank Gehry's new 8 Spruce Street building.

If you have even the slightest interest in LeWitt's work, you should watch the video, which includes some wonderful stories and moving reminiscences from Baume, Cooper, painter Pat Steir, and the artist's longtime assistant, Jeremy Ziemann. Here are some highlights:

• Says Steir, in a story that I would like to hear in its entirety, "I met Sol because I was being stalked. Not by Sol, but somebody was stalking me. And one evening a man knocked on my door — and I never saw him before in my life — and he said, 'Don't worry, I chased away your stalker.' And that was Sol. He rescued me." She adds at another point, "If you were ever his friend, you were always his friend. And if you were never his friend, you were never his friend."

• Asked about the difficulty of realizing some of LeWitt's ideas, Ziemann says, "Sometimes he would ... draw something that couldn't be done in reality. We'd say, 'Sol, but this block is floating.' And he's like, 'Oh, well, put three underneath it and it should be okay!'"

• Cooper, relaying what happened when LeWitt discovered that his cancer was terminal: "The doctor gave him very bad news, and was quite direct with him, and told him that he really had not that much longer to live, and he said, 'But that's impossible, I have a show in June!" (The show, "A cube with scribble bands in four directions," was presented posthumously.)

• Baume explains LeWitt's practice, and, I think, nails his driving motivation. "I think there's always a desire on Sol's part to create something that he couldn't imagine," he says. "He needed to set in motion a series of ideas or coordinates, so that the result would be surprising to him, and would take him and his work ... to a new place."

• And let's close with this, from Cooper: "People who worked with him were devoted to him."

Complex Form 6, 1987. Painted aluminum, 8 ft. x 12 ft. 8 in. x 4 ft.


Incomplete Open Cubes, 1974. Painted aluminum, various dimensions, roughly 3 ft. 6 in. x 3 ft. 6 in. x 3 ft. 6 in.


Three-Part Variations on Three Different Kinds of Cubes 3 3 2, 1967/74. Painted steel, 4 ft. 6 in. x 22 ft. 6 in. x 1 ft. 6 in.


Pyramid (Münster), 1987. Concrete block, 13 ft. 4 in. x 13 ft. 8 in. x 13 ft. 8 in.

TK
Stars, 1989–90. Painted aluminum, various sizes, roughly 4 ft. x 4 ft. x 4 ft.


Splotch 15, 2005. Acrylic on fiberglass, 12 ft. x 8 ft. 4 in. x 6 ft. 8 in.

Liz Magic Laser's "Flight" in Times Square

Performance stills of Flight (2010–) on May 7, 2011, 8 pm performance, the eighth of the week's nine performances. Video: 16 Miles of String


Performance stills of Flight.It was previously performed at MoMA P.S.1. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

It was difficult to tell when it happened, but a few minutes after 8 pm on Saturday a performance of Liz Magic Laser's Flight (2010–) began on the iconic, red TKTS stairs in Times Square. Tour groups were climbing the steps, couples were posing for photographs, families were lounging, and people were waving off into the distance. After a few moments, you realized that those wavers — six of them — were really waving, flailing their arms from side to side, standing on the tips of their toes and letting loose. And then they stopped waving and started sprinting down the crowded steps, dodging the seated tourists. Viewers who had been handed a single-page "table of scenes" for Laser's piece by a Times Square public safety officer could consult it to learn that we were watching a scene from Battleship Potemkin (1925), the famous Odessa Steps sequence, in which czarist soldiers gun down civilians. The actors were running for their lives.


One very angry performer heads toward the stairs.

Twenty-two more classic film scenes, most involving epic chases, were staged over the following 30 minutes, including snippets of The Wizard of Oz (1939), Cinderella (1950), and Vertigo (1958). "I'm so sorry I dropped you. I had to save the Declaration," one man told a woman, as they enacted part of National Treasure (2004). "I would have done exactly the same to you," she replied, earning laughter from the audience. This took place low on the stairs, not far from where I was standing at the bottom, but other scenes took place far above the street, almost out of sight. A man strangled a woman at the top of the stairs. Another crept slowly up the far side, quietly stalking a woman at the top who was frantically dialing for help on her cell phone. One moment an actor would be screaming or falling in front of you; the next, he or she would be off in the distance. Terror and excitement came and went, growing rapidly and then receding just as quickly.


A fight on the top deck of the bleachers. Viewers watch as a woman is strangled.

For Laser fans, there were familiar figures among the cast, namely Liz Micek, Michael Wiener, and Max Woertendyke, who all appeared in the artist's chase (2010) video, which was shown at Derek Eller Gallery last year. That work had a theatrical foundation as well, being a contemporary version of Bertolt Brecht's 1926 play Man Equals Man that shot inside the ATM vestibules of various New York banks. It ran for almost two and a half hours, and many complained that it was too long, though that seems more Brecht's fault that Laser's. Regardless, Flight felt perfectly paced. Some people left the stairs during the show, no doubt moving on to other affairs (How were they supposed to know that a performance piece would break out during their evening in Times Square?), but others stuck it out, and most of them looked thrilled.


A tragedy unfolds.

When people did leave, Laser's trusty stage manager Boman Modine directed those waiting below up onto the stairs one or two at a time, leading them into the action as if he was orchestrating a delicate military operation. "You two, head halfway up to the far right," he whispered. Then, "I need one. One right there," pointing to a spot that would almost immediately after be the site of the next showdown. The public safety officers also looked excited, and one grinned wildly as he just barely dodged an actor dashing past him.


Looking south from the bottom of the steps as the action unfolds.

Laser had ripped a tiny hole in reality and then grafted on tiny slices of popular culture in its place. (The Shining (1980), The Fugitive (1993), and Titanic (1997)!) Delightfully, there was no clear censorship in this most public of places. A performer smoked a cigarette and others tossed off an occasional expletive, leading one mother to hastily cover her daughter's ears. Earmuffs! In other words, it looked in many ways like an ordinary day on the streets of New York, albeit one in which a young woman's screams for the police go unanswered and a man is stabbed in the neck in the middle of one of the city's most densely trafficked areas.

After about half an hour, every actor that I could see was sprawled out dead on the stairs. No one was moving. I consulted my table of scenes. "Is this really how Final Destination 4 ends?" I wondered. Finally a middle–aged man reached out and tapped one of the female performers on her shoulders. "Thank you!" she shouted happily, suddenly coming to life and leaping to her feet. "Are you a doctor?" Other members of the audience followed the man's lead, and within moments the whole cast was jaunting down the steps as the crowd applauded.

Down and Then Out: 18 Murals on the Gates of the Bowery

Lawrence Weiner's painting at 134 Bowery, New York, for "After Hours: Murals on the Bowery," organized by the Art Production Fund. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

In December 2009, the New York City Council voted to require business owners to replace garage-style security gates with ones that allow views into the stores behind them by July 2026. "Roll-down gates are essentially large metal canvases," the New York Times' James Barron wrote in a report on artists who criticized the ban on the metal walls (which can no longer be installed after July 1 of this year). Barron noted that some painters have made their names on those gates, like octogenarian Franco Gaskin (also known as Franco the Great or the Harlem Picasso), who has painted scores of them around the world and more than a dozen along 125th Street in Manhattan. In other cases, a street-level mural may be one of the highlights of an artist's career. The city is filled with them.

All of which is to say that the Art Production Fund's latest project, which involved commissioning contemporary artists to design murals for 18 security gates along the Bowery, between Houston and Grand Streets, has an elegiac element alongside its more celebratory aspects. The works, which officially debuted on the evening of May 7 (they're only visible when the stores are closed: at night and on Sunday, in most cases), are on view for only two months, after which they'll be painted over, embodying the upcoming legislated disappearance of the gates across the city. A medium is slowly being ushered offstage.


Mary Heilmann's work at 220 Bowery, just feet from Prince Street

At a time when street art by its most famous practitioners is sometimes sliced off of buildings and sold, I'm a little surprised that no one has proposed auctioning off the soon-to-be-defunct gates to raise money for the APF or the nearby New Museum, especially since some of the works are really wonderful. Three of the most interesting are the abstract works by Mary Heilmann and Jacqueline Humphries and a characteristically manic, brushy text piece by Judith Bernstein, which could all be mistaken for the graffiti that appears on almost every other gate in the neighborhood. They appear to have been quickly and roughly painted, like many of the tags on the surrounding gates, and their work slips easily into the visual landscape of that stretch of blocks. Of course, the murals were in fact meticulously executed by teams of artists working from blueprints. They possess what art historian Rosalind Krauss, discussing Impressionist painting, calls the "codified sign or seme of spontaneity." They look easy, but they're hard-won: painting with the speed of a graffiti artist is difficult work.


A tricolor triptych! Jacqueline Humphries at 153 Bowery, inches from Broome Street.


Two people walking by the Judith Bernstein mural at 272 Bowery


The Kool-Aid man emerges: artists at work on Richard Prince's mural at 265 Bowery.

In other cases, the translation from contemporary painting to street mural is more awkward, as in Richard Prince's enormous Kool-Aid Man or Lawrence Weiner's gorgeous blue text piece. They're both stunning, particularly the Weiner, but they feel slightly out of place along the Bowery. This refusal of site specificity and the unique context and history of the street is a missed opportunity: these murals could be anywhere.


Ne travaillez jamais: Rirkrit Tiravanija's diptych at 180 Bowery

That can't be said of Rirkrit Tiravanija's piece, with its awkwardly shaped letters and occasional patches of sloppy painting, recalling the hand-painted "no parking" signs that adorn the storefront gates of many businesses around the city. It reads, "STOP WORK / NEVER WORK," a slogan plucked from the graffiti of Paris's 1968 revolts ("ne travaillez jamais") and sometimes attributed to Situationist International founder Guy Debord. That phrase also happens to be the text I had printed on the Tiravanija T-shirt that I picked up recently at the artist's "FEAR EATS THE SOUL" show at Gavin Brown's enterprise. Painted on the Bowery, on gates just a few blocks away from the Bowery Mission homeless shelter, it becomes far less easy to consume.


The Bowery Mission at 227 Bowery


Adam McEwen at 212 Bowery


The Danish duo Elmgreen & Dragset's piece at 213 Bowery, right next to Rivington Street


214 Bowery: Deborah Kass and Pulp, Ink have painted the gate of The Chair Factory.

SoHo v. Berlin, Wave Hill, Public Art in Times Square, etc. [Collected]

Installation views of Meghan Gordon, Frederick Samuel Dellenbaugh would have liked to explore the Palisades, 2011, at Wave Hill in the Bronx, through May 8, 2011 Photos: 16 Miles [more]

• Michael Kimmelman compares 1970s SoHo and contemporary Berlin. "Lately, in the former East Berlin, a private club for upwardly mobile art types, of the sort that used to be anathema to Berliners, has opened," he writes. "It’s called ... Soho House. The club could be anywhere in the world, anywhere the new rich live. That’s its point. [NYT]
  
  
• As long as it lasts... is a temporary tattoo parlor in Berlin that offers works by Lawrence Weiner, Cao Fei, Christian Jankowski, Dr. Lakra (thank goodness), and others. [Arratia, Beer via ROLU]
  
  
• Van Hanos chats in his Harlem studio with Alex Hubbard and Ryan Kitson. [The Highlights]
  
  
• Never miss a film screening in New York ever again. [Alt Screen via @AviZenilman]
  
  
• Classic Throwback: "For a six-year run beginning in 1987, Christian Leigh was one of the most visible — and ambitious — independent curators in the international art world. Then he vanished." — Alexi Worth, 2003 [Artforum]
  

The exhibition is inspired, in part, by the belief of some that a lengthy set of murals in Wave Hill's Ecology Building may have been painted by Frederick Samuel Dellenbaugh. Others say it was Howard McCormick. Another inspiration: an underground tunnel on the Wave Hill estate.

• May 4 and 5: "Is Basic Instinct 2, routinely derided as a cine-atrocity, a Lacanian reworking of Ballard, Baudrillard and Bataille in service of the creation of a 'phantasmatic, cybergothic London'?" Mark Fisher at NYU. [K-Punk]
  
  
• May 6 and 7: Liz Magic Laser and company perform on the TKTS stairs in Times Square. [LML]
  
  
• May 7: Van Hanos at West Street Gallery. [WSG]
  
  
• Through May 7: Jules Marquis, the nom de plume of Colin Snapp and Daniel Turner, has a video playing on American Eagle Outfitters' video screen in Times Square every 15 minutes, at 5:40, 17:10, 37:05, and 52:05 after the hour. [Nuit Blanche]
  
  
• May 13: Artist Joshua Abelow, the man behind Art Blog Art Blog, has temporarily acquired an exhibition space in Chelsea, and will be hosting fortnight-long shows there. Up first is "Gold Records," a group show of artists assembled by curator Jon Lutz that appeared on his late blog, The Old Gold. Expect Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Stacy Fisher, Jaime Gecker, and others. [ABAB]
  

Gordon has lined the walls with hand-painted wallpaper, styled on circa 1865 designs.


Just outside the Sunroom Project Space housing Gordon's work there is an exhibition of work by a trio of hallucinogenic masters: Terry Winters, Philip Taaffe, and Fred Tomaselli. A few blocks away, a train station with art by Dennis Oppenheim.

Dennis Oppenheim at a Train Station in the Bronx

Dennis Oppenheim, Rising and Setting Neighborhood, 2006. Painted steel, perforated steel, 22 ft. x 2 ft. x 80 ft. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

"Some warm June night this summer I will wander down to TriBeCa and wait for Dennis to run past me in the night — the outlaw bad-boy artist no one can catch."

– Alice Aycock, Artforum, May 2011

While perusing Dennis Oppenheim's web site in the days after his death in January, I was surprised to learn that he had completed a work of public art at the Metro North train station in the Riverdale section of the Bronx less than five years ago. Somehow, despite riding past that station numerous times, I had completely missed it. Spurred by the tribute penned by his second wife, Alice Aycock in this month's Artforum, I visited the work, Rising and Setting Neighborhood, 2006, over the weekend. It is an odd and beautiful piece, though not as odd and beautiful as some of Oppenheim's other public art pieces. (One can only get away with so much in genteel Riverdale, I assume.)



"The piece evokes the houses of the neighborhood in the light of daybreak and dusk," Oppenheim wrote of the piece. "It greets commuters as they begin their journey leaving in the morning as the sun rises, returning in the evening with the setting sun." I buy all of that, but, as is almost always the case with the Oppenheim's public work, there is another, more sinister, darker element. The houses have an anthropomorphic feel: note the two square eyes and the large square mouth. They may be greeting commuters, as Oppenheim said, but they are not the friendliest ambassadors. They are not smiling. Rather, their mouths are wide open, as if they're screaming or shouting. "Don't leave!" At the same time, they're painted with a family friendly range of colors, and they could be just seven separate, irregular pentagons.



I only met Oppenheim once, for a few minutes, last year at the opening for "The Original Copy" exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, which featured his 1970 work Parallel Stress. Never one to approach an artist I don't know, but having just finished reading Lucy Lippard's Oppenheim–filled Six Years, I decided to say hello after spotting him just outside the sculpture garden. After offering some sort of awkward congratulations, I showed him the book, which he started flipping through, ostensibly excited (though it occurs to me now that he may have just been generously indulging the curiosity of a fan). He stopped on a page with a photograph of Robert Kinmont doing one of his 8 Natural Handstands (1969) — a possible influence on Parallel Stress, in the way that it combines bodily performance and photographic documentation — and said something to the effect of, 'This was a great piece, but he stopped making art shortly after this and just disappeared. These photographs and a few works were all that was left.' Which is where we now find ourselves in regards to Oppenheim.



Thankfully, he has left us with a fascinatingly idiosyncratic body of work, much of it public art that we'll be able to stumble onto for some time to come. Here is a quick roundup of other writers' responses to his passing.

In the Guardian, Michael McNay positions Oppenheim in relation to his peers and followers:

"It might have been expected that the grand calmness of Oppenheim's earth art would lead to sculpture somewhat akin to Rachel Whiteread's understated monumentality, but instead he seems to have followed the example of Claes Oldenburg's monumental pop sculptures of everyday objects and the tainted route of Jeff Koons's urban vulgarity."

Jerry Saltz shares what he found compelling about the artist's work:

But the wild, labyrinthical ways Oppenheim put things together, the way he allowed thought to unspool ever-outward in involuted configurations, was inspiring nonetheless. His ideas of artistic experimentation, theoretically driven art, the merging of sculpture and science, his absolute unwillingness to create a visual style, his aesthetic and material dislocation — all of it wowed me.

Roberta Smith connects his early, ephemeral work to his later, more grandiose efforts (and has a few anecdotes, which are delightful to read):

"Belonging to a generation of artists who saw portable painting and sculpture as obsolete, Mr. Oppenheim started out in the realm of the esoteric, the immaterial and the chronically unsalable. But he was always a showman, not averse to the circuslike, or to courting danger."

Judd Tully remembers almost being killed by an Oppenheim piece:

"I managed to escape with a pack of coughing scribes through an emergency exit just before a retinue of fire equipment and fire fighters arrived to save the day. Oppenheim somehow avoided arrest for what seemed to be an exceptionally dangerous happening-slash-performance. As he said later, 'It wasn't supposed to be so much like Vietnam.'"

Finally, one more line from Aycock:

"Dennis was a trickster, a shape-shifter, a flimflam man, a snake-oil salesman for art, and a rascal. He was highly intelligent, charismatic, and witty."

"Andy Touched Me," a Panel at the New School

Rob Pruitt, at left in the New School's Tishman Auditorium on April 20, 2011, showing a photograph of himself unveiling his Andy Monument in Union Square on March 30, 2011. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

It has been only three weeks since Rob Pruitt stood on the northwest corner of Union Square and pulled a white sheet off of his chrome sculpture of Andy Warhol, The Andy Monument, but it already feels safe to say that the work is a hit, at least judging by the gleeful reactions I have seen from passersby. "It should have been there all along," as writer and artist Rhonda Lieberman put it rather aptly Wednesday night during a panel discussion at the New School. "There's a certain inevitability to it. It's like being in Athens and thinking about Socrates."

"Andy Touched Me" was the rich title of the evening's Public Art Fund–organized affair, which included the panel and an introductory slide show by Pruitt about the making of the sculpture. Depicting 1970s, Interview-era Warhol, it is based largely on the Cincinnati car-dealer-turned-art-collector Andy Stillpass, making the work's title a double tribute. Stillpass is slim like Warhol, an ideal body double, but Pruitt said he also selected the collector because he wanted to "infuse the monument with a personal love of my own." Stillpass is known for adventurously integrating his art into his life — commissioning, for instance, a personal uniform from Andra Zittel and installing a bloody Karen Kilimnik installation that was inspired by the Manson murders in his kitchen. "It made me fall in love with him," Pruitt said of Stillpass's commitment to contemporary art.

Despite his prized status, Stillpass did not escape some abuse. "I kept telling him to hold in his gut," Pruitt said, showing a photograph of his rail-thin model wearing a blond wig and being scanned by computer–modeling cameras. "He didn't laugh," he added, noting his own "beer gut" and insisting it was a joke. "I think I really hurt his feelings." To construct Warhol's face, Pruitt used archival images of the artist, and the initial mold featured deep cheekbones and wrinkles, which Pruitt removed from the final sculpture, wiping away flaws just as his subject had done in his own commissioned portraits. The work is identifiable as Warhol, though only barely, and according to Pruitt, one woman walked by and said, "Oh my God, why is there a monument to Rachel Maddow?" He added cheerfully, "I do love Rachel Maddow."

Pruitt showed an early sketch of the work that he hired a student to make. "It was very lazy of me," he said.

Most responses seem to have been markedly more positive. According to Pruitt, Public Art Fund president Susan Freedman told him, "It's the perfect bookend to the Statute of Liberty — a monument for the disenfranchised." At that moment, he said that he thought, "My God. I am a genius." Jokes aside, Pruitt seemed genuinely pleased with the final product. Near the end of his talk, he paused for a moment, looked up at an image of the monument, and said lovingly, "Isn't it great?" And then it was on to the panel discussion, to hear how critic and poet Wayne Koestenbaum, Public Art Fund director and chief curator Nicholas Baume, Lieberman, and Pruitt himself had been touched by Warhol.

Baume batted first, speaking of his youth in Australia in the 1980s, when Warhol's work was known through "reputation and reproduction." He noted, "That reputation was really quite low," and lauded the work of Richard Meyer and others who helped change that, taking up Warhol's legacy to ensure that it was "rescued from an art history uncomfortable with sexuality," that central element of the artist's work that was ignored for so long. Baume also offered a rousing tribute to Pruitt's monument, describing it as "glistening," "hollow," and "with the nose job that Andy always wanted." And chrome, he pointed out, is "the cheapest of all the metals."

Koestenbaum was up next, sporting orange pants and bright glasses of a similar shade. He oozed enthusiasm as he offered a six-item list of cultural categories that Warhol's career had altered — garbage, sex, publicity, community, collecting, and work — and then launched into a rousing panegyric to Warhol. "Warhol cheers me up about family, its absence and its antidotes," he declared. "Opt out of the nuclear family or convert it into the Factory. Live with your mother as long as you please, and forget public verdicts on your backward ménage." Warhol embraced a "ludic schizophrenia," he said, "a madness that might be good for you." As he ended his talk, the crowd applauded.

As works by Warhol cycled through on the scree, Rob Pruitt, Wayne Koestenbaum, Rhonda Lieberman, and Nicholas Baume (listed left to right) spoke of being touched by the artist.

"I'm the one Andy would be least likely to touch," Lieberman, the next speaker, deadpanned. "I'm just saying." She spoke of spending her "childhood reading about Pop," hunting in library books for gossip on Warhol and his set. Like her fellow panelists, she had been moved at a young age by Warhol, the strange aura that had been produced in downtown Manhattan and then disseminated around the globe — to Australia, to neighborhood libraries, and to the heart of careers. A soup-can poster found its way into Pruitt's childhood home, the artist revealed as he spoke on the panel.

Like Lieberman, Pruitt was taken with Warhol at a young age and read extensively about him. "I thought, that can be my future life," he said. "I can move to New York, I can go clubbing, and go to great parties." He came to New York for college in the early 1980s and found a $200-a-month room in the Chelsea hotel. Looking for a job, he strolling into the Factory and was let up the elevator and into a meeting with Warhol, who asked him about his job experience. It consisted solely of working at an ice cream store in Washington, D.C., he told the artist. "There's a kid here who says he can get us as much Häagen-Dazs as we can eat!" Warhol shouted to a neighboring office. (This is not, Pruitt emphasized, what he had told him.) He was offered an internship, but not knowing what that was and unhappy about the fact that it offered no salary, he turned it down. "I should have taken that job," Pruitt said. "Or maybe not." Lieberman nodded. "Andy liked to get paid," she said.

Instead, Pruitt ended up working in the glove department at Macy's, selling gloves to Prince and LeRoy Neiman. Interestingly, the Warhol in Pruitt's Andy Monument carries a Bloomingdale's shopping bag in his hand, a sterling example of how we all construct our own version of Warhol, picking from the dozens of roles he played — commercial artist, painter, filmmaker, publisher, partier, entrepreneur, and voyeur, to name a few — and adding our own interests. Pruitt takes the body of a friend, adds an idealized face, a Polaroid camera, and a shopping bag, and covers it in chrome, a mirror finish that reflects the city surrounding it.

The sculpture is scheduled to remain on view through October 2, though some, like Jerry Saltz, have called for the work to remain indefinitely. It took some ten years for Pruitt to see the monument to completion. When he first pitched it to the Public Art Fund, it was declined. "I have a lot of ideas — not all of them good," Pruitt said at one point. "But when one is, I don't let go of it." Nevertheless, he refrained from calling for it to remain forever, but shared an idea offered by artist Rachel Harrison, who suggested placing a sculpture of a gun-toting Valerie Solanas across from Warhol. Koestenbaum mused about having Bryant Park's Gertrude Stein statue meet Union Square's Warhol. "I prefer to take it one day at a time," Pruitt said.

What would Warhol want? He was, on the one hand, a publicity hound, the man who remarked flippantly, “Don’t pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches.” That Warhol would probably love the possibility of endless attention. But, as always, there’s another Warhol, another quotation, that offers a contradiction. “I always thought I'd like my own tombstone to be blank,” he told an interviewer. “No epitaph, and no name. Well, actually, I'd like it to say 'figment.'" For now, the sculpture occupies a space somewhere in between those positions: a solid, shining monument that may soon exist in its current location only in the form of memories, which endure far longer than even the finest chrome.

Rob Pruitt's Andy Monument, 2011, on the northwest corner of Union Square in Manhattan, a modest stone's throw from the Decker Building at 33 Union Square West, where Warhol had his Factory from 1968 to 1973.

Robert Irwin and the Intersection of 42nd Street and 5th Avenue in Manhattan

42nd Street and 5th Avenue, New York, New York, April 17, 2011. Photo: 16 Miles

I am never one to turn down the breezy and beautiful train ride up to Dia:Beacon — unless, of course, a plush bus ride is available, as there was this weekend, thanks to Dia, which organized shuttle service to the performances of Robert Whitman's new piece, Passport, along the Hudson River, not far from the museum, on Saturday and Sunday. (The Saturday performance was canceled because of lightning.) The meeting point for the bus in Manhattan was the intersection of 42nd Street and 5th Avenue, which sounded oddly familiar to me, though it took a while for me to figure out exactly why that was.

That intersection, 42nd Street and 5th Avenue, is the exact spot where Robert Irwin produced Black Plane, which involved painting the entire intersection with blacktop sealer as part of his 1977 solo show at the Whitney. A very young Ian Frazier reports from the scene of the creation of the work, on the evening of May 2, 1977, in the June 6 issue of the New Yorker:

"He [Irwin] could not take part in the painting himself, having returned to his house in Los Angeles, but the other night, at about eleven o'clock, Richard Marshall, the curator of the Irwin show, three other members of the Whitney staff, and two friends of the artist arrived at Forty-second and Fifth to paint the intersection. They had with them a permit from the Department of Highways, four five-gallon cans of Peerlux Acrylic Latex Blacktop Sealer, and six rollers with long handles. … They began to apply the sealer in long roller strokes, being careful not to get any on the white crosswalk lines. A photographer for the Whitney recorded the event with a Nikon camera with a Vivitar Auto/Thyristor flash. He had the crew pose dipping their rollers in one of the five-gallon cans."

Robert Irwin, Black Plane, installation at 42nd Street and 5th Avenue, New York, May 2, 1977, reproduced in Art in America, July/August 1977. Photo: Warren Silverman

Unfortunately, I don't have that photograph, but I do have this beauty, pictured above, taken by Warren Silverman and printed in that year's summer issue of Art in America, which is conveniently accessible at the New York Public Library's Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, located mere feet from the intersection. You can see at least some of Irwin's freshly sealed blacktop in the image, but it looks to me — though is impossible to be certain — like this was taken before the entire square was done. Frazier says that workers could only paint one quarter of the road at a time, allowing traffic to continue in at least one lane of each street, and the foreground here looks a great deal shinier than any other part of the intersection.

I imagined Black Plane as a classic example of Irwin's interest in the intimate details of minute perception: one black laid down on top of another, two different shades that are barely distinguishable, as in an Ad Reinhardt painting. But in a 2001 interview conducted at John Wesley's Greenwich Village apartment, Irwin tells then Chinati Foundation director Marianne Stockebrand, "I stepped outside the cherished frame of the museum and painted the graying plane of the intersection." It is black on gray, and definitively so, as this aerial photo provided to Chinati by the Whitney confirms, pictured below. It is a strange black square floating within Manhattan's grid. I never quite realized just how gray some stretches of New York's streets are. (The aerial shot is presented as a mirror image in the newsletter; I have reversed it so that it appears as it does in other official reproductions.)


Robert Irwin, Black Plane, May 2, 1977, reproduced in the Chinati Foundation newsletter, volume 6, December 2001, page 23. Photo: Whitney Museum of American Art

Few people actually saw the piece from the sky, of course. Breaking the institutional frame was the point of the work, as Irwin says above, and his biographer, Lawrence Weschler, concurs. "There are hundreds of shadow squares just as remarkable all up and down the block," Weschler imagines Irwin saying, in his brilliant biography of the artist, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees (1982). "The point is to attend to them."

To return to the account in the New Yorker: Frazier registers one other strange parallel between that night in 1977 and the one this past Sunday, nearly 34 years later: a nearly full moon. Here's Frazier again:

"It was a balmy night with an almost full moon, and moonlight was reflected in the wet sealer. After the crew had painted a quarter of the intersection, they had to wait for it to dry before they could move the barricades, so they went to Pete Smith's Hall of Fame Bar, on Forty-second Street, for a while.

"What with painting the intersection a quarter at a time and waiting for the sealer to dry, 'Black Plane' was not finished until about three in the morning. At about one-thirty, a police car pulled up. A blond policewoman whose name tag said 'Petersen' got out. She walked over and looked at the barricades and the group with the rollers. 'What are you doing?' she said."

A more recent aerial view of 42nd Street and 5th Avenue, New York. The black square in the intersection was, for a time, lined with a diagonal white grid. Photo: Google Maps

The Art in Battery Park City

Louise Bourgeois, Eyes, 1995. Granite, each 37 x 37 x 37 in. Photos: 16 Miles

"Battery Park City, the colossal landfill development on lower Manhattan's western flank, will make a great ruin someday," Peter Schjeldahl wrote, in the short-lived New York-based weekly 7 Days, back in 1988, when the complex was still under construction. He was probably right: the massive, anonymous apartment buildings are going to look pretty wild when they are run down and deserted.


R.M. Fischer, Rector Gate, 1988. Stainless steel, bronze, granite, lighting 50 ft. x 28 ft.

When I visited yesterday, to take a look at the public-art installations that had been included in the project (which Schjeldahl juicily describes as "lavish"), the sprawling public spaces — nearly empty during the writer's visit more than two decades ago — were filled with people. They were mostly tourists, from what I could discern from passing conversations, and they strolled leisurely, apparently undeterred by the brutal ugliness of the concrete expanses.

Most of the late-1980s works are giant-sized. There is roofless temple structure by Ned Smyth, pictured below, adorned with colored glass, gravel, and blue stones, and filled with a table lined with chessboards. Supremely weird and wonderfully out of place, it reads as a direct repudiation of the corporate architecture in which it is enclosed. R.M. Fischer's 50-foot-tall Rector Gate, pictured above, is almost equally bizarre, a hybrid of a weather station and an amusement park. The upside-down cone looks ready to kill people walking underneath: quite a different vibe from the sculptures he showed last year at K.S. Art, which looked like they just wanted to cuddle.


Partial installation view of Ned Smyth, The Upper Room, 1987. Concrete with blue stone aggregate, colored glass, brass, gravel, bluestone 34 ft. x 67 ft. x 14 ft. 4 in.


Partial installation view of Ned Smyth, The Upper Room, 1987


Partial installation view of Ned Smyth, The Upper Room, 1987


Jim Dine, Ape & Cat (at the Dance), 1993. Bronze and wood, 5 ft. 7 in. x 4 ft. 6 1/2 in. x 5 ft.


Partial installation view of Tony Cragg, Resonating Bodies, 1996. Bronze, complete sculpture: 15 ft. x 5 ft. 8 in., 5 ft. x 6 ft. x 15 ft.

The Battery Park City Authority has continued adding work in recent years, tossing in pieces by Martin Puryear, Sol LeWitt, Tony Cragg, Louise Bourgeois, and a number of others. While the towering late-1980s works were attracting little notice (a Richard Artschwager sculpture just off the esplanade looked especially forgotten), the super-minimal Bourgeois, at least, was serving as a set for a number of photo shoots. (Its title is Eyes, which does not rank in the top three or four things that came to mind when looking at it.)

As ambitious as the works are, they are not the reason to make the trip over to Hudson. Schjeldahl again, speaking the truth: "[Y]ou can't beat the view."


View of Upper New York Bay from the Battery Park City esplanade