Showing posts with label NYC. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NYC. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Will you know me?
There was a man on the subway this morning who made an announcement, asking if anyone wanted to be his friend. Well, not in so many words, but that was the gist: he was handing out business cards, amiably offering to teach something (a language perhaps? I couldn't hear) to anyone who wanted to learn. In conversation, he said he rode the F-train daily, just like many of the people there, and decided he needed to change something about his life, or maybe the way he did things, I wasn't sure. And while he definitely was less than cool, he was nowhere near as weird as could easily have been assumed. Even in New York, that was something unusual.
Monday, March 1, 2010
Being here
When I took a CD out from the library for the first time today, it turned out that Acts I & II of La Bohème had been replaced with Lenny Kravitz’s Greatest Hits. It was probably inadvertent, but I like to think that some rabid Lenny Kravitz fan was nefariously replacing CDs in the back of the library just to shock and appall all the harmless classical music listeners out there. All over Brooklyn, night after night, some unsuspecting music nerd goes to listen to Puccini or Bartok and gets a dose of reasonably catchy if less than spectacular pop-rock. Bewildering conspiracies are the best.
And now, although it’s not much of a segue, the ways in which living in a city differs from not:
1) There’s a lot more stuff. Buildings, activities, people, forms of transportation: these are all available in excess, which is both part of the fun and a little disorienting to someone not used to it.
2) On that topic: public transportation, namely, subways. Both wonderful and utterly frustrating, they encapsulate my encounter with the city as a whole on a daily basis. The fundamental idea of a subway appeals to me for some reason: I go underground in Brooklyn and poof! suddenly I’m in Manhattan, a form of magic accessible to everyone. I feel pride and mastery when I do something right, and feel equally disheartened when I don’t, or when service is changed and the F turns out to only go where I need it to if the number of letters in the name of the stop is a multiple of 4, which, it turns out, is not often.
3) Your home has its own personality. Other places do too, but less aggressively, and learning the rhythm of life here seems more like an act of assimilation than imposition.
4) Grocery-shopping and errand-running are much, much easier.
5) The sheer number of people has two primary effects, which are not necessarily incompatible: isolation and connection. Oddly, I find knowing that there are so many people here to be isolating, while I find seeing them to be kind of comforting. There is no obvious connection between me and the strangers I pass on the sidewalk, but I feel a camaraderie with them lacking when I contemplate the city from my apartment.
6) Relaxing is harder. For me, at least.
All of this adds up to something and at the same time it doesn’t, because for me part of the experience of living here is a variety and breadth that are too wide-ranging and heterogeneous to be summed and placed into neat conclusions. It’s an experience and a process that takes place on multiple levels, and reinforces the notion that location matters a great deal. It’s a place brimming with possibilities and pitfalls, which is just as it should be. It feels like a place to be young in, to make mistakes and successes and discoveries in. I have a hard time imagining growing old here without having started here. But that’s probably because I’m still young.
And now, for your listening pleasure, some Lenny Kravitz and some La Boheme.
And now, although it’s not much of a segue, the ways in which living in a city differs from not:
1) There’s a lot more stuff. Buildings, activities, people, forms of transportation: these are all available in excess, which is both part of the fun and a little disorienting to someone not used to it.
2) On that topic: public transportation, namely, subways. Both wonderful and utterly frustrating, they encapsulate my encounter with the city as a whole on a daily basis. The fundamental idea of a subway appeals to me for some reason: I go underground in Brooklyn and poof! suddenly I’m in Manhattan, a form of magic accessible to everyone. I feel pride and mastery when I do something right, and feel equally disheartened when I don’t, or when service is changed and the F turns out to only go where I need it to if the number of letters in the name of the stop is a multiple of 4, which, it turns out, is not often.
3) Your home has its own personality. Other places do too, but less aggressively, and learning the rhythm of life here seems more like an act of assimilation than imposition.
4) Grocery-shopping and errand-running are much, much easier.
5) The sheer number of people has two primary effects, which are not necessarily incompatible: isolation and connection. Oddly, I find knowing that there are so many people here to be isolating, while I find seeing them to be kind of comforting. There is no obvious connection between me and the strangers I pass on the sidewalk, but I feel a camaraderie with them lacking when I contemplate the city from my apartment.
6) Relaxing is harder. For me, at least.
All of this adds up to something and at the same time it doesn’t, because for me part of the experience of living here is a variety and breadth that are too wide-ranging and heterogeneous to be summed and placed into neat conclusions. It’s an experience and a process that takes place on multiple levels, and reinforces the notion that location matters a great deal. It’s a place brimming with possibilities and pitfalls, which is just as it should be. It feels like a place to be young in, to make mistakes and successes and discoveries in. I have a hard time imagining growing old here without having started here. But that’s probably because I’m still young.
And now, for your listening pleasure, some Lenny Kravitz and some La Boheme.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Tino Seghal at the Guggenheim*
A friend from Philadelphia was visiting for the weekend, and she had said to meet her and another friend at the Guggenheim on Saturday. Going, I didn’t know what the current exhibition was at all; last thing I had heard, there was a big Kandinsky show up. Since I was running somewhat later than I should have been on Saturday, I received a text from my friend, which said something along the lines of “We will watch the people making out until you arrive.” I kind of laughed and didn’t think too much of it (people-watching in public places is a very legitimate urban activity), so imagine my surprise when I arrived in the Guggenheim to find that she was not referring to one of New York’s overly affectionate couples, but to the artwork.
The spiral of the Guggenheim was stripped bare, devoid of art to my eyes. In the center of the ground floor, a couple was rolling around, making out, groping each other, and occasionally striking poses from famous pieces of artwork, all in slow motion. My friends were positioned maybe twenty feet away, as were many other museum patrons, sitting on a free bench, watching the couple about as unawkwardly as it is possible to watch a couple make out in slow motion. This was a sculpture (dance piece?) by the artist Tino Sehgal, to which my reaction was, “Well. Okay,” and trying to watch without appearing too interested.
We headed up the spiral, and as I looked for whatever I was supposed to be looking for, a kid, maybe ten years old, walked up to us, said, “Hello. This is the exhibition. Can I ask you a question? (Yes.) What is progress?” I was totally disoriented and a little freaked out that someone had conscripted a child to work as a part of the exhibition, but followed him up the spiral with my friends somewhat hesitantly, talking about progress all the while. Then the kid led us up to a teenager, summarized our responses for her, and she took us up from there.
That’s the gist of the exhibition: talking and walking, a few big ideas posed to you by progressively older participants. It concluded at the very top of the rotunda, with a senior citizen, who finished by telling us the name of the exhibition and what a pleasure it was to have conversed. Simple, straightforward, direct in its methods and basic in its execution; disconcertingly one-note, but not a bad note to dwell on. I began thoroughly unconvinced, but finished energized, at the height of a spiral, looking down at a couple obliviously making out in slow-motion, feeling the same kind of subtle euphoria and optimism that I do after a good, long run.
It was effective because although it was one-note, that note wasn’t static; it grew and evolved and worked its way into my thoughts. It was staged, and it felt staged, which is part of why I was so disconcerted by both the couple and the child at first; but at a certain point, I came around to the realization that ideas spoken by actors are still ideas, that inauthentic shared experiences are still experiences shared. There was something about the medium of choice being conversation that made it invariably effective; a simulacrum of a conversation is, you guessed it, still a conversation. So that I do not know if what each actor said was utterly scripted or spontaneous, truthful or fabricated, but I do know that I had an interesting conversation with four or five different people (of increasing ages—a key point) no matter what. It wasn’t life-shattering, or even that revelatory, but it was true nonetheless. The best analogy I can think of is that it would be like taking a photo of the color red, and trying to distinguish between the photo and the original color; the distinction is in a way irrelevant: it’s still red. The truth of the perception is still there.
But with contemporary art, the question I almost always feel compelled to ask myself, explicitly or implicitly, is: is there something to mourn here? What is the loss? And with this: when all is said and done, what is left? I suppose there’s something to be said for art that is purely experiential (and this guy is all about the ephemeral, if documentation of the work is made, it becomes “inauthentic”), but something that constitutes a significant part of my art consumption is going back again and again, having the thing itself (or my experience of it) at my fingertips and eyes and ears. Perhaps part of the problem here is that this experience was good, but not great; compared to a great concert, or a great performance, I don’t think this would measure up. A lot of art that gets on my nerves confuses the intention with the result, and though I don’t think Sehgal’s committed that particular error, I don’t think it entirely works either. I often have to let things sit in the back of my head for a while before I can fully understand their impact, or before I can feel and not just know how they'll last. The problem here is that Sehgal’s piece isn’t in the back of my head; it’s still at the Guggenheim.
- the Guggenheim's page on the exhibition
- NY Times review of the exhibition
- interesting longer piece on him from NY Times magazine
*I believe the two works are called The Kiss and This Progress, though I could be wrong.
The spiral of the Guggenheim was stripped bare, devoid of art to my eyes. In the center of the ground floor, a couple was rolling around, making out, groping each other, and occasionally striking poses from famous pieces of artwork, all in slow motion. My friends were positioned maybe twenty feet away, as were many other museum patrons, sitting on a free bench, watching the couple about as unawkwardly as it is possible to watch a couple make out in slow motion. This was a sculpture (dance piece?) by the artist Tino Sehgal, to which my reaction was, “Well. Okay,” and trying to watch without appearing too interested.
We headed up the spiral, and as I looked for whatever I was supposed to be looking for, a kid, maybe ten years old, walked up to us, said, “Hello. This is the exhibition. Can I ask you a question? (Yes.) What is progress?” I was totally disoriented and a little freaked out that someone had conscripted a child to work as a part of the exhibition, but followed him up the spiral with my friends somewhat hesitantly, talking about progress all the while. Then the kid led us up to a teenager, summarized our responses for her, and she took us up from there.
That’s the gist of the exhibition: talking and walking, a few big ideas posed to you by progressively older participants. It concluded at the very top of the rotunda, with a senior citizen, who finished by telling us the name of the exhibition and what a pleasure it was to have conversed. Simple, straightforward, direct in its methods and basic in its execution; disconcertingly one-note, but not a bad note to dwell on. I began thoroughly unconvinced, but finished energized, at the height of a spiral, looking down at a couple obliviously making out in slow-motion, feeling the same kind of subtle euphoria and optimism that I do after a good, long run.
It was effective because although it was one-note, that note wasn’t static; it grew and evolved and worked its way into my thoughts. It was staged, and it felt staged, which is part of why I was so disconcerted by both the couple and the child at first; but at a certain point, I came around to the realization that ideas spoken by actors are still ideas, that inauthentic shared experiences are still experiences shared. There was something about the medium of choice being conversation that made it invariably effective; a simulacrum of a conversation is, you guessed it, still a conversation. So that I do not know if what each actor said was utterly scripted or spontaneous, truthful or fabricated, but I do know that I had an interesting conversation with four or five different people (of increasing ages—a key point) no matter what. It wasn’t life-shattering, or even that revelatory, but it was true nonetheless. The best analogy I can think of is that it would be like taking a photo of the color red, and trying to distinguish between the photo and the original color; the distinction is in a way irrelevant: it’s still red. The truth of the perception is still there.
But with contemporary art, the question I almost always feel compelled to ask myself, explicitly or implicitly, is: is there something to mourn here? What is the loss? And with this: when all is said and done, what is left? I suppose there’s something to be said for art that is purely experiential (and this guy is all about the ephemeral, if documentation of the work is made, it becomes “inauthentic”), but something that constitutes a significant part of my art consumption is going back again and again, having the thing itself (or my experience of it) at my fingertips and eyes and ears. Perhaps part of the problem here is that this experience was good, but not great; compared to a great concert, or a great performance, I don’t think this would measure up. A lot of art that gets on my nerves confuses the intention with the result, and though I don’t think Sehgal’s committed that particular error, I don’t think it entirely works either. I often have to let things sit in the back of my head for a while before I can fully understand their impact, or before I can feel and not just know how they'll last. The problem here is that Sehgal’s piece isn’t in the back of my head; it’s still at the Guggenheim.
- the Guggenheim's page on the exhibition
- NY Times review of the exhibition
- interesting longer piece on him from NY Times magazine
*I believe the two works are called The Kiss and This Progress, though I could be wrong.
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