Circle of Animals / Zodiac Heads, 12 bronze sculptures by Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei, are on display at the Pulitzer Fountain in Manhattan's Grand Army Plaza through July 15. The pieces are a reinterpretation of "the traditional Chinese zodiac that once adorned the famed fountain-clock of the Yuanming Yuan, an imperial retreat in Beijing," according to the exhibit's website. Ai was released from an undisclosed holding area on June 22 after being detained by the Chinese government for almost three months.
It's true. You CAN make your own art to hang it on your wall as part of a new decorating scheme and have everything in the world be right for just a few great moments.
(Artist: Elizabeth Devereaux, St. Thomas More Parrish & Newman Center)
Once again I'm reminded that unlike just about anywhere else in the world, including Tampa where I've been since May for work, if you need something, you can most likely find it in New York City (or Brooklyn, if you're willing to travel). Case in point, I've had a bug up my ass to do some crafty shit with collaged items between glass slides soldered together and worn as a necklace. Or something sort of like that. I don't know why these things occur to me but it becomes something akin to taking the train to crazy town until I actually try it (and more typically fail at it).
(Photo by REUTERS/Tim Wimbourn, appears in Sydney's Daily Telegraph)
I'm back from two weeks cruising around New Zealand and Australia, a trip that encompassed every emotion from fantastical to just weird, which, on a vacation is just fine with me.
The absolute highlight of the trip, beyond the amazing new group of friends we met, was being able to participate in Spencer Tunick's art installation "Mardi Gras: The Base" on March 1st at the base of the Sydney Opera House, as seen in the picture above.
More about our participation and how I can absolutely prove I was there among the 5,200.
(Still Hunt, Central Park NYC, Feb 5th, 2010 - photo by me)
I run past this statue of a big, crouching cat, set back in a thicket on an outcropping of rock, every morning and have wondered for years what it was about. No plaque or explanation around it. Finally got off my lazy ass and took a picture of it this morning then looked it up and got the low down.
It's one of those little hidden gems of the city that would be easily missed but which makes for a little smile when you find it. It looks ferocious coming from north to south but up close, it becomes a sad cat who probably just missed the bird.
(Still Hunt, Face Detail - Central Park NYC, Feb 5th, 2010 - photo by me)
Culturally forward queers! Living Art! Bears, cubs, and voyeurs! And a rousing according rendition of “The Masochism Tango”. It was this and more at “Imitation of Crisp: A Happening in the Profession of Being” last night at the Envoy Enterprises artist space on New York’s Lower East Side.
Posted by Beau The snowpocalypse this past weekend wan't much of anything but the cold dregs and coming months of winter have me turning to the list of things I would like to do (or should want to do) in New York City before the end of my days. Having drinks at the King Cole Bar in the St. Regis Hotel in Midtown East was an easy choice. It was not so much about having expensive cocktails in a dark-paneled, up-scale location where supposedly the Bloody Mary was introduced to the US, but rather the famous Maxfield Parrish mural backing the entire length of the bar.
With my schedule full of decidedly non-NYC things to do over the next few weeks, I seized the opportunity to go see the Tim Burton exhibition now featured at the Museum of Modern Art in Midtown, NYC. The special showing is sponsored by the SyFy channel and is a collection of Tim Burton's art including drawings, sketches, paintings, sculptures, and other related items from his movies and animated shorts he's directed and produced over the course of several decades.
When you’ve spent even a short amount of time riding the NYC subway, you quickly become immured against all the vendors, buskers, preachers and panhandlers you encounter there. It’s not long before you’ve seen every acrobatic dance, every noise-making trinket, every bootlegged DVD, before you’ve heard every a capella gospel number, every mariachi band, every joke (‘smile, it won’t mess up your hair’) and exhortation (‘God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve’). It’s easy to become cynical about the panhandlers in particular.
I love New York and I never hesitate to say so. Even when The City is maddening, disappointing, difficult, selfish or unreasonably demanding, it remains easy to declare how much I love it. I love it despite its crazy contradictions, perhaps even because of them. Examples? A list of things I profess to dislike is nearly identical to a list of what makes New York New York. I find shopping for almost anything distasteful. I loathe crass commercialism and relentless consumerism, loud talkers in cramped spaces, waiting in unmoving lines, rude people, traffic jams, obscene wealth, political corruption, haphazard development, and lowest common denominator pop culture.
See what I mean? You would think I’d have ended up in a cabin in Montana, not a tiny studio apartment in one of the wealthiest zip codes in the city. But then, I love the cyclical layer upon layer of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it development and destruction, the architecture and art, the triple parked social schedules, and the fractal-like splintering of groups into sub-groups into ever smaller sub-groups, with every participant constantly on the move, uptown, downtown, across town, underground, performing for the judges, expecting to “win their category” in the absolutely unmatched continuous diversity parade that is every day in New York.
Two thoughts:
It is often stated that you can’t appreciate beauty without knowing what ugly is.
Elevating annoyance to the superlative transforms it into fascination.
In New York, the stimulation is constant. Beauty and filth, color and chaos, serenity and sensationalism, insight and impact, dark corners and bright lights. Attention must be paid, demands the urban landscape, in Helvetica Extra Boldand underlined.
I love the electricity buzzing through the sidewalks, the buildings shedding their skin, falling down, and sprouting up like weeds, sometimes even exploding, all quite literally.
You could easily spend a lifetime - maybe two, attempting to categorize, quantify, critique, or just contain what New York presents, and to many it would be more than enough.
But then there are the details - the cracks and crevasses, the blotches and blobs, pipes, conduits, rust and remnants that decorate the city. An architectural patina of man-made and organic entropy catching the eye of the contrary (those looking down when everyone else is pointing up), or the explorer on the fringe, hoping to find, in that totally forgotten back alley, architectural ruin or industrial wasteland, a decaying mechanical device of unrecognizable purpose or a concrete Ozymandias, silently guarding the secrets of one or many generations of laborers and immigrants, those who began the palimpsest we call New York.
Then, since this is New York, I look up and see a crowd surrounding me, digital cameras ready, looking for exactly the same thing.
Guess I found my sub-group (or they found me).
Here, for your enjoyment, is an iMovie/Garage Band video I made from some of those pictures. (This is my first attempt at original music.) There are some architectural details large enough to be recognizable, but mostly an obvious obsession with rusty metal, storm drains and other industrial design remnants. See anything you recognize?
Circle of Animals / Zodiac Heads, 12 bronze sculptures by Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei, are on display at the Pulitzer Fountain in Manhattan's Grand Army Plaza through July 15. The pieces are a reinterpretation of "the traditional Chinese zodiac that once adorned the famed fountain-clock of the Yuanming Yuan, an imperial retreat in Beijing," according to the exhibit's website. Ai was released from an undisclosed holding area on June 22 after being detained by the Chinese government for almost three months.
