Scale

I'm writing while riding the train home from a whirlwind 5 days in Brooklyn/NYC. In spite of the rain, we visited the 2014 Whitney Biennial; Out of Character and The Passions of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux at the MET; and Ai Wei Wei's According to What and Swoon's Submerged Motherlands at the Brooklyn Museum. We also meandered through Chinatown, Little Italy, Lower East Side, East Village, Uptown Manhatten and parts of Brooklyn.

A display in a small market in Chinatown, a colorful selection of everything from Viagra to traditional medicinal herbs. 

In Little Italy at one of the many festivals happening this weekend. A vendor who made magnets in the image of  all imaginable fruits and vegetables... so much choice it's paralyzing... a topic for another post.

What impresses me is the scale of it all – nothing new – a well known fact about New York City. The multitudes of exotic fish, vegetables, fruit, herbs, teas, and other commodities in the street markets is boggling. The confusing multipronged subway map is numbing. The throngs out and about on the streets and in the restaurants can be both invigorating and claustrophobic. The buildings are bigger, the lights are brighter, the buzz is louder. There are so many levels of so many things happening at so many locations and all at the same time that it seems miraculous it works so harmoniously and doesn't collide to a screeching halt.

Smorgasburg in Williamsburg on Saturday. You name it, it could be eaten here. Everything from fresh fish, to fried chicken, to ice cream sandwiches, to ramen burgers, to... you get the idea. So many people that you were often at a standstill to get from tent to tent... but well worth the effort.

Then there is the art. The Whitney Biennial 2014 was diverse, sometimes confusing and often startling. It spotlights some of the many who are practicing art in America (including citizens, emigres and expats) and the numerous issues they are working with. The fourth floor, curated by Michelle Grabner, is concerned with materiality and painting including works of established artists who have been working at their craft for a very long time. The third floor presents a world where societal values are transforming into something that we can't yet identify. Here's a quote from the curator, Stuart Comer, "...I have been compelled by artists whose work is as hybrid as the significant global, environmental, and technological shifts reshaping the United States...". I found some of it unsettling and difficult to resolve and that is probably the point. Due to its size it takes a whole day to see it, and will take many more weeks for me to absorb it.

At the Brooklyn Museum, Swoon's Submerged Motherlands is a site-specific installation that transforms the rotunda gallery into a fantastic landscape centering on a 62-foot tree with a constructed environment at its base, including sculpted boats and rafts, figurative prints and drawings, and cut paper foliage and hundreds of yards of hand dyed fabric strips. At a time when there are still some skeptics, she makes a point about climate change with historical links between catastrophic Hurricane Sandy that struck the Atlantic Coast in 2012, and Doggerland, a landmass that once connected Great Britain and Europe and that was destroyed by a tsunami 8,000 years ago. 

There is also a two-floor exhibit by Ai Wei Wei. To continue on the theme of scale, it is the physical size of his installations, the space they occupy and the massive weight of his concepts that convey the impact of his messages about human rights and collective identities. He talks about how culturally, Chinese citizens identify as a singular whole in a way that allows for their loss of individuality, self worth and ultimately personal human rights. According to Wei Wei, a single pearl is precious, but this same pearl in a large bowl with thousands of others becomes worthless. As an activist in China, Wei Wei is interested in shifting to the importance of the individual, to be respected and valued as a living human being. 

In Straight, Wei Wei used rebar recovered from the rubble of collapsed schoolhouses following the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Each piece of mangled rebar was straightened by hand, requiring at least 200 strokes with a sledgehammer. The large divide in the piece is meant to suggest both a fissure in the ground and a gulf in values

Each piece of rebar represents an individual.. the massive collection signifies the number of deaths and people affected. It serves as a reminder of the repercussions of the earthquake and expresses his concern over society's ability to start afresh 'almost as if nothing had happened'.

Stacked, over 700 individual bicycles that are not simply "stacked" but have been physically attached to create a single cohesive structure.

The nuances of the different perspectives of being a collective are striking. In my collaborative project Hive, groups of individuals work cooperatively to create units that are assembled into larger wholes. The notion is that it is in human nature to want to be part of something bigger and that the connections made while working with others can enhance one's experience in a way that is more than the sum of its parts. When placed next to Chinese culture, to their societal history and to the crimes against humanity by their governing parties, my concepts seem so utopian, so American. 

This is the extent of my view of Kara Walker's A Subtlety at the Domino Sugar Factory in Williamsburg Brooklyn.

Which brings me to Kara Walker's A Subtlety  at the Domino Sugar Factory in Williamsburg – a not so utopian view of American history. I wish I could say that I attended this show. We tried, but when arriving just after noon on Sunday the line already stretched for at least 3 blocks before we gave up trying to find the end of it. With the deadline of needing to catch a train and no sign of the line advancing, we sadly gave up on trying to get in. 

Video of the never-ending line for Kara Walker's Subtlety. If link doesn't work for video above visit blog page here.

What I've read about this show seems like it's worth the hype. A five-story sphinxlike sugar sculpture of an African woman projecting  "... two distinct racist stereotypes of the black female: She has the head of a kerchief-wearing black female, referencing the mythic caretaker of the domestic needs of white families, especially the raising and care of their children, but her body is a veritable caricature of the overly sexualized black woman, with prominent breasts, enormous buttocks, and protruding vulva that is quite visible from the back." 

The Domino Sugar Factory is a building that oozes 100 year old molasses from the walls and floors and is scheduled to be demolished to make space for more high rises and development due to the lack of funding for preservation. It housed an industry that transformed dark raw material into refined white granules and profited from the work of the poorer masses for an elite few. These ugly American themes are typical for Kara Walker, and like the other installations mentioned in this post, she presents in a scale that is inescapable, in your face, and difficult to ignore.

A very good question: Existence or Nonexistence? Skywriting yesterday over the Williamsburg waterfront while on our way to an unrealized viewing of the Walker installation.

These are some large ideas that come from large productions in a city that is larger than life. As a modestly funded artist, an individual and a struggling practitioner, allow me to digress on the observation that much notable contemporary art is big, very labor intensive and requires the help of an expensive team of assistants, facilitators and donors. 

Where would it be without subsidies and support for the arts but in a very dark introverted space? How many more expressions are lost due to lack of funding, no matter the size? How do you go forward without a patron saint for individual artists? And, as an artist, how does one figure out their place?  

I once had a friend tell me to think of it this way... We are each an individual granule in a much larger silo of grain.

All of this makes one feel very small.