8.7.24 — Totems, Coils, and Trees
To pick up from last time on New York summer sculpture, Huma Bhabha may seem a strange choice for Brooklyn Bridge Park, overlooking the New York harbor and a gateway to the New World. This artist looks out on nothing but the pitiless depths of the human heart.
She has an uneasy relationship with a park’s natural growth as well. The Pakistani American called a solo show “Unnatural Histories” and appeared among others in “After Nature,” and the work itself has an unnatural darkness. She carves four plinths from cork before casting them in bronze—and their heads from skulls. She sets them in a secluded lawn, facing one another or looking within.
Unless, that is, they are staring down the viewer, through next May 9. For all her pretension, she is not turning away. The carvings bring fullness to their bodies and the spirit life at their base. Their title, Before the End, quotes a medieval writer’s apocalyptic visions, but eternity has already arrived. Bhabha brought her strange beings to the Met roof in 2018, and the whole point could be the interplay of weekend pleasures and spiritual aspirations. Were the four mythic women not so far apart, one could almost call them a community.
Jorge Otero-Pailos has modern sculpture tied up in knots. His welded steel on Park Avenue’s median strip looks back to David Smith in its industrial materials and sharp edges, like farm equipment no longer able to produce anything but art. Still, his spikes and coils have a clear sense of direction, at facing ends of a block and a mile north—perhaps an artifact of its original site in Oslo. The Spanish artist invites viewers to start crossing the street only to stop dead in the middle, through October 31. Most artists would bring more than three works, to fill more of the avenue, but Otero-Pailos sticks to such classy neighbors as the Seagram Building and Park Avenue Armory. Call it classicism run wild.
Further up the avenue, is that a totem, the old staple of public sculpture? A block further, is that one huge roll of toilet paper? But no, both are used tires. Betsabeé Romero embellishes the first with traditional Mexican garments, the second with gold and silver leaf. A third sculpture, a tire alone, bears images that I can only guess are ancient warriors or gods. They may respect their ancestry, but, they are begging to hit the road.
Only someone with a lot of nerve could welcome summer two years running with a bright pink tree bare of leaves—or only an artist. Pamela Rosenkranz is both, and she names her construction on the spur of the High Line Old Tree at that. If it seems as confrontational as the 2022 pretend drone airplane by Sam Durant, it is a lot more colorful, through fall. Besides, now it has company, in an entire Secondary Forest four blocks away, through next March. Giulia Cenci populates it poignantly, with figures in melted down scrap metal, the trees their skin and bones. They do not look sad, though, and one could almost call it a park.
Also on the High Line, Kapwani Kiwanga adds a single fern, in shifting colors behind dichroic glass. The tall glass and steel case has a beauty of its own, though October 31. After so much artistry, it seems downright peevish for a ballerina to take her curtain call, roses in hand through November 30, for Karon Davis. The act continues with an entire rock band from Cosima von Bonin, through August 31, of six smiling fish. Lily van der Stokker adds to the cutes with a billboard reading THANK YOU DARLiNG through November. If you, like the artist, find this a feminist statement, you are only taking the bait—and I pick up the tour next time in Socrates Sculpture Park and beyond.
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