I’ve touched on the importance of public art in a previous post, and the summer onslaught continues with the New York City Parks’ Dance Out! initiative, a series of site specific dance performances around the city (site specific dance around America will soon be finding it’s way to SundayArts in Great Performance’s Dance in America: Wolf Trap). This one combines two cool things: Free art that reaches people in their (common) backyard and site-specific performance. The parks’ series, copresented with the Joyce Theater, focuses on three dances, which will travel to the boroughs—and not just to flagships like Central Park or Prospect Park, but to less obvious spaces like St. Mary’s Park in the Bronx or Staten Island’s South Beach boardwalk. Of the three, Michael Schumacher’s Dans le jardin (in the garden) seems to make the most use of its environment, so the work should change slightly depending on where it’s performed.
And like every summer, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Sitelines series offers free site-specific dance and dance-theater in the financial district. I’m particularly looking forward to Hostile Takeover by Richard Move’s MoveOpolis in August (Move made his name with someone else’s when he recreated Martha Graham dances in full Martha drag realness). The program is described thus: “Feminine beauty is placed upon a pedestal (literally) in the midst of the male-dominated world of high finance, with stunningly costumed, Butoh-inspired female dancers occupying six different locations.” Yowsa! I’m sure I’ll get back to it next month. read more
There’s a lot of talk about public art these days. The term now seems to commonly refer to free projects that take over part of a city—and sometimes a large part, if you remember the CowParade that started in Chicago in 1999, invaded New York’s sidewalks in 2000, and has since traveled to cities as diverse as Las Vegas, Manchester, Stockholm, Istanbul and, er, West Hartford. Many other projects aim for higher artistic worth (sorry to drag such elitist concepts in this discussion): For several years, the Creative Time organization set up wildly diverse music and art shows in the Brooklyn Bridge’s Anchorage, until post-9/11 security measures closed off the space; New Yorkers also remember Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s The Gates (2005) in Central Park.
In New York, the Public Art Fund is responsible for this summer’s headline-grabbing installation, Olafur Eliasson’s Waterfalls, in which four gigantic man-made waterfalls will dot the East River; meanwhile, the aforementioned Creative Time is bringing a project helmed by David Byrne, Playing the Building, in which visitors will be able to “play” the Battery Maritime Building via a jerry rigged organ.
But the bottom line for most such endeavors is just that: the displays may be free, but public art now means big revenues for the participating cities (sorry to drag such crass concepts in this discussion). Canny mayors are finally catching up to the fact that healthy cultural scenes are often linked to healthy economic returns. (The fact that this blog is hosted by a publicly funded entity is not coincidental either; after all, you could argue that aspects of PBS are a form of public art.) read more
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