Art Underground

You have to love a city that celebrates art in a tangible public way - even more so when it has a sense of humor about it. Philadelphia,with its lavish scattering of public sculpture and murals, is a great example of a city that celebrates art, but New York has it beat in the sense of humor department. When I was there yesterday, muscling my way through the underground labyrinth that is the NYC Subway system, some pretty nice art snuck up on me and brought color and fun into a grim march towards a destination. I guess that's the idea, isn't it?

My personal 'Look at That!' moment was in the 42nd Street station as I transferred between the #1 downtown local and the R train to Queens, but art - good, original, sometimes big name art - is ubiquitous in the Subway. I've seen interesting work in various stations, but yesterday the ceramic murals of Tony Buonagurio really caught my eye. Go to the NYC Subway website to find links to the art and artist for every station - if you scroll through you'll find that the art is clearly for ALL subway riders and residents (in New York, virtually the same thing.) Everybody gets to benefit from this lively program - you can find examples all up and down the system, even way out in Brooklyn and Queens, in residential neighborhoods where tourists never have reason to go. Tony Buonagurio's murals are small montages of images relating to the 'business' of the area - Broadway, dancing, nightlife - and brightly glazed in crayon colors (each panel 'framed' under thick protective plexiglass) to catch the impatient eye of a commuter.The 42nd Street station also has an overhead mural by Roy Lichtenstein - the bright dots and jazzy lines are a good match for the smaller pieces. Of course the art is part of a lively scene - picture it with the sound track of a good subway combo blasting away between the uptown and downtown stairways, the huddle of NY cops standing around tapping their feet and listening - I mean, of course, keeping order - and the woman from the crowd who jumped in for an impromptu dance. It would be nice to think it was all part of a tribute to Bob Noorda, the designer of the graphics for the NY Subway system - he died this week, but back in the 6o's he gave the system its distinctive modernist aesthetic. I hope he'd be pleased to see the ongoing underground developments in art.

The trek to Chelsea

Chelsea is not Soho. As the present Mecca of the contemporary art world in New York, Chelsea rewards the dedicated art pursuit, but it's a curious destination. There's none of the instant cachet of fine old architecture and easy subway access that helped turned Soho, for an all-too-brief shining moment, into a perfect storm of art and hipness - followed rapidly by the present situation of pricey lofts in a sea of high-end glamor stores. Not much left of art and artists. Chelsea, on the other hand, may just last, precisely because it's hard to get to and not much to look at. The area has certainly improved by the influx of galleries and attendant arts-related activities, not to mention the very cool "High Line" that cuts across overhead, but at first glance it still looks like a fringe area where you go to find a gas station and get your car washed. Trucks, I've found, are the defining sight in Chelsea. The galleries are there, though, in the blocks between 10th and 11th Avenues, and 19th and 29th Streets - a long windy walk from the subway on a cold day. Yesterday I hunted among the offerings and found some real treasure. Pace Gallery has a double presence in Chelsea - Pace Prints on 26th Street and PaceWildenstein on 22nd; both galleries are currently (through Jan 30) featuring the work of Zhang Huan, a current big name whose work is powerful and compelling. Pace Prints shows a series of monoprint woodcuts made from doors in his village in China that tell edgy stories of man, nature, and history. The head of Mao floats in a plank-printed river, overlooked by earlier, wiser-seeming Chinese leaders, above a shrouded coffin shape imprinted with the hammer and sickle - in another a wide-eyed Chinese deer makes a mountain for human footsteps to trample. The cuts are bold and the prints are somewhat crude, giving a sense of quick heavy brushstrokes against a palette of grays - the effect is strikingly close to traditional Chinese ink painting. At Pace Wildenstein the scale expands dramatically with an enormous sculpture of a deteriorating Buddha, grey and dusty, with detached hands - plastered all over with joss sticks and traditional trinkets that signify a contemporary search for material rather than spiritual wealth. See more about the Pace Prints show at: http://www.paceprints.com/artistportfolio/artistportfolio.php?aID=223

A different kind of Calendar

You probably got at least one calendar over the holidays, no doubt with beautiful pictures and a handy way to keep track of dates and events. (I received two, one made by my husband with his own wonderful photographs.) This is not a new idea; the European Middle Ages was a high point for pretty, well-organized calendars - known then as Books of Hours. Religion, of course, was the prompt - Christianity dominated art and culture at the time - but once you take that for granted and keep going, you find the most fascinating details about time, place, and people. Life then was lived by the seasons; people timed their activities by a natural clock of growth and survival accented by festivals celebrating milestones of the year. You can find the labors of the months all over the place once you start looking - carved into cathedrals, formed into stained glass windows, and - in Books of Hours, painstakingly painted with tiny brushes and jewel-like colors on vellum pages. The most famous Book of Hours is the exquisite "Les Tres Belles Heures du Duc du Berry" from the early 15th century, painted by the Limbourg Brothers. A Book of Hours is not meant to be a calendar in the modern sense of the word; the purpose is to track the hours of prayer so that a lay person can follow a private schedule of devotion, but the Duc de Berry's version gives a vivid calendar of the months as well as a delightfully detailed look at contemporary events, styles, and lives at the upper and lower levels of society. The page at the upper left is January, when the wealthy and privileged distributed gifts to the working class and the poor. The Duc (unbelievably wealthy, incredibly important politically and socially, with multiple palaces, many of which are shown in these pages) sits at a banquet with his entourage, enjoying the bounty of his life. On the right is February, when the Duc's workers huddle down to wait out the winter until labors of the land pick up again. The enlargement reveals one of the most amusing details - the men hike up their tunics to warm their .... while the woman looks modestly away. The other month shown here is May; planting is well underway. Note the careful, well-tended look to the landscape (with one of the Duc's palaces in the background) - it trumpets the tidy health and well-being of the Duc's estates, but also signifies God's order in the world of men. The top of each page is a kind of almanac with the movement of the heavens and, in some cases, the signs of the zodiac. Delightful - but not cheap. Only the wealthy could commission such extraordinary works - no bargain "2 for $10" calendars in the Middle Ages!