Mike Nelson’s Pyschic Vacuum (September 8—October 28, at 117 Delancey St.)
Some of us who’ve been fighting the art wars for a long time have grown pessimistic about the future of public art, especially in cities. To artists, the onslaught of new construction in old districts equals the death of affordable living. It erodes our foothold in the world. If contemporary public art doesn’t address that sense of fragility, it acts like a flower in a gun muzzle. It may look nice, but it doesn’t mitigate the threat.
For over thirty years, the spirits of old downtown have been systematically hounded out of their lairs and chased across the river to Brooklyn and Queens. But those of us lucky enough to have taken a walk through Mike Nelson’s installation in the old Essex Street Market, titled “A Psychic Vacuum” have had the rare opportunity to step into the pitiless carnival that was once the Lower East Side.
For an expanded meaning of Nelson’s gesture, we might look at who sponsored it. The nonprofit art organization Creative Time championed the sculptor Red Grooms and his “Ruckus Manhattan” project over thirty years ago. “Ruckus” was a transformative artwork too, though a very different one. Grooms made exaggerated versions of Manhattan landmarks—the Staten Island ferry, the Lexington Avenue local—out of cheap, gravity-defying papier-maché, and they were big enough for the public to climb around and through. The hysterical drama of everyday life in New York became funny, and so did the surly mob that acts it out, and the hulking buildings where they made their living. Grooms was the first—perhaps the only—artist to dissect the relatively new phenomenon of the World Trade towers. If you went up inside the model, you could see floor after floor of miniature executives, barbers, and shoeshiners, all busy at their trades. “We are all the same,” the exhibition seemed to say, “and we work ridiculously hard.”
Ruckus Manhattan succeeded by humanizing New York, by making the scary parts funny—an accomplishment that was at once sophisticated and deeply humane. Mike Nelson has done something very different but equally bold in trying to get that old New York back. He’s not caricaturing the neighborhood, he’s trying to re-uglify it. That’s a humane act, too: we lost Manhattan’s strange carelessness, its gloom and dislocation—the things that disappear along with poverty, that nobody misses unless they’re gone.
After this introduction, it may be hard to conceive of a walk through “Psychic Vacuum” as a treat. But if you like being disoriented, it’s great fun, and is a work of technical virtuosity besides. After you sign the release at the entrance (there are lots of phobia-inducing scenes inside), you enter a dim room that looks like the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant after a nuclear war. Its sense of sadness and abandonment nearly drives you on into the hallway until you realize there’s something off-pitch about it. And there is, of course—the old appliances and debris, even the dust, have been carefully arranged by the artist. “What is he trying to make me feel?” is an appropriate response. And with that, the psychic vacuum is switched on.
A viewer (like me) who deliberately ignored the show’s advance press has to figure it out on his or her own, and the revelation is creepy: “You mean all this weird junk that looks like it’s been here forever is new?” It’s new in the sense that it was gathered, graded, rejiggered, and installed here to create a specific effect. And while wondering further what that effect is supposed to be, you suddenly realize you’ve walked through the same room three times in two different directions, and you’re totally lost. It’s a Blair Witch moment: delicious, or awful, or both.
The manipulation of the inside of the market is so subtle as to be almost undetectable. Walls have been moved and painted, but they still look old. Something (what?) has been done to the floor. The small Buddhist statues underfoot seem added as an afterthought. There are animal antlers in closet-like rooms that could be reception areas for some ghost hotel. A barber chair reclines in a workshop that seems like an illegal dentist’s office. Some of the environments in the smaller spaces are like recitations of Ed Keinholz’s famous works, “Beanery: and “The Wait.” (The latter, which used to be in MoMa, featured a live parakeet.) But unlike Keinholz’s works, the Nelson phenomena makes the building itself into an art material. The ceiling paint is peeling off “Psychic Vacuum” in eerily consistent flakes as big as banana leaves. The question of how Nelson did this is confused with if he did it, and when you finally blunder into a long alcove with a dusty bar along one wall you may wish for a ghost bartender to pour you a cracked tumbler of cheap whiskey so you can stop and figure it out.
At the end of the maze, you find yourself standing in a giant room full of sand. That’s it—an anticlimactic finish, and possibly an ill-conceived one, but still a gentle push to get you back outside into the real world.
Whatever that is.
I like the form of the completed circle, and it seems the creative current of New York has coursed through Red Grooms’s populist fingertips through Mike Nelson’s mystical ones. I hope the energy cycles back into Grooms’s territory. We’ll need something to make sense of the void once Nelson’s exhibition is taken down and a condo has gone up in its place.
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The Age of Rembrandt (Metropolitan Museum of Art; ongoing)
I wonder if, after taking on de Kooning (below) I ought to have the temerity to write about Rembrandt, but what’s a heaven for? The exhibition of still lives and portraits in this Met Museum blockbuster are irresistible for me, a Dutch-o-phile. Willem de Kooning is, obviously, Dutch, too—but in contrast to his freedom from the iconography of everyday stuff, this show is nothing but icons. The “thinginess” of traditional Dutch paintings is their distinguishing factor, but still derived from the Netherlands’ humanitarian outlook. The Dutch are nothing if not pragmatic, and these paintings treat all the factors of a composition with equal fascination and care. Lemons, cattle, textures of gold and glass, it’s all here as if no loss of vitality were possible over these hundreds of years.
Dutch paintings of animals are among the best in art because they look past the anthropomorphizing impulse and treat the animals as the disgruntled bit players they usually are. Horses are coarse and lumpy; cattle have that distracted look that goes along with having three stomachs and nothing to put in them but grass. (Albert Cuyp’s enormous painting of a bull, hanging in the Mauritshuis in den Haag, shows a the animal accompanied by the one thing rarely seen in pastoral paintings, but which cattle are seldom without: a cow pie.) People occupy the same space physically and esthetically in Dutch art. It’s not uncommon for a character in a seventeenth-century Dutch painting to be laughing, talking to a friend, or taking a shit. One of Rembrandt's most charming drawings is of a woman peeing into a pot. (It's not here, unfortunately. Maybe it's in the Toilet Museum.)
Most people would look through a show like this expecting Rembrandt to steal it, but he has serious competition, especially from Abraham de Vries, a (mostly) seventeenth century painter from den Haag. It’s a portrait of a man with a slightly undershot jaw, lashless eyes, serious but merry cheeks. He’s caught in a gesture of turning slightly to the left. This is one of those rare portraits that looks back at you. The eyes are luminous, expectant. It’s strange indeed to see it in context with the rest of the show and realize that in a Rembrandt portrait, the eyes are black thumbprints that absorb light rather than reflect it.
There's one really bizarre component of this show. It's there at the very beginning: the first thing you see is an encomium to the Museum's patrons who originally bought all these expensive paintings. Being forced to deal with this information has a very nineteenth-century overtone: salute the benefactors, and then we can get on with the pleasure. It's like eating dinner at Tammany Hall.
Perhaps we should be grateful. But aren't we, always? All painters doff their caps to Rembrandt. The museum patrons, generous as they have been, don't belong in the same room where the supplications are done.
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