September 13, 2011 ·

Landscape architecture brings majesty, rebirth to 9/11 memorial site

“We’re sometimes dismissed as the guys who put the trees in,” says David Walker about his firm’s seminal role in the design of the 9/11 memorial site. The 50-year-old Walker, who co-led the project for Peter Walker & Partners, his father’s renowned landscape architecture firm, is in equal measure self-effacing and self-assured, both traits that served him well throughout the seven-year odyssey that lead to this week’s opening of the site. Moreover, he is also part of what, by all appearances, is an extraordinary design accomplishment.

Walker’s design, a stately and ever-evolving grove of majestic oak trees, is coupled with architect Michael Arad’s deeply symbolic but severe memorial pools. This design pairing and the inherent tension between life and death, historic memorial, and future renewal at the heart of it will likely be seen as the foundation of the success of this challenging and exceedingly high-profile site.

A rendering of Peter Walker & Partners’ design for the 9/11 memorial site. Rendering by Squared Design Lab, Courtesy of PWP Landscape Architecture.

The Walker concept was a simple one: “We said that you need a forest to represent renewal,” David Walker says. “The basic notion is that of a forest in downtown Manhattan to communicate rebirth.” The “forest” evolved into the now largely complete installation of 400 swamp white oak trees and over 40,000 tons of new soil on the 7-acre memorial site and surrounding streets. In effect, the Walkers brought ground back to ground zero.

The layout of the trees themselves is at once cultivated and naturalistic, formal and organic. Viewed east-to-west, the oaks are arrayed along a tightly defined grid punctuated by granite slabs to create a boulevard feel. Viewed north-to-south, however, the planting is randomly placed, as in a natural forest. The oaks, cultivated in a New Jersey nursery for the past four years, are now 25-feet tall and pruned to enhance their 15-foot high canopies. Over time, the trees are expected to reach 65 to 75 feet, with their soaring canopies growing together to create “a cathedral-like appearance” when viewed east-west and a fulsome forest from the north and south. Approached from either direction, the site channels visitors through an urban forest to the solemn reflecting pools at its center. “The species of tree we chose creates a vaulted ceiling structure, evoking a religious architectural feel,” Walker explains. The effect also evokes the archways or tridents of the first three stories of the fallen World Trade towers themselves. As the trees mature, the archways will rise once more.

Walker has little to say of the well-publicized head-butting and conflicts of personalities that surrounded the project. “It was an ego-driven process by everyone involved,” he admits, although one detects little of his own. “But it was all driven by a desire to create a lasting statement, and the net result is a design that will endure.”

And in one last study in contrasts, David Walker makes clear that part of the core concept of the memorial is that it actually becomes less of a memorial over time. “There was a lot of discussion about the fact that this will always remain a memorial, but as 9/11 fades beyond living memory, it will serve increasingly as an urban park more so than a memorial,” Walker predicts. “It may feel less like a grave site over time and more like a living, growing park. This is how we thought about it from the very beginning.”

Originally posted on May 17, 2011 in CityArts

While viewing the gigantic exhibition of photographs by Chris Marker at the Peter Blum Gallery, I was struck by one question: How much of a role should context play in understanding and appreciating an artist’s work? To explain, Marker is a legendary figure in cinema history, having made the movie La Jetée, from which countless filmmakers have derived inspiration. He’s kind of an insider guy, an underground artist whose unique vision has endured through decades of changes in the art world. Yet if I did not know any of this, how would I feel about the 200 or so photographs currently on exhibit at both branches of the Peter Blum Gallery?

Passengers is an exhaustive show of digital photos of people on the Paris Metro, taken from 2008-2010. Capturing his subjects by what appears to be a spy camera, Marker then plays with the images, using Photoshop to tweak color and tone. He plays with textural aspects of the images, many of which look grainy, as if the film had been “pushed’ in an older film developing process. The majority of the images are of women—old, young, lost in thought and sleeping. The overall effect is of a world of disconnected people and environments. Marker’s subjects stare off into the distance. Very few of his subjects are looking at the camera, subverting the very notion of portraiture.

Chris Marker “Passengers” 

A student of Marker’s history recognizes the exhibition as another step in his visual evolution. However, without this context, the show might read as a little tedious. There are some knockout individual images, but the sheer volume of pictures of essentially the same subject becomes somewhat numbing. The collective effect is that of a collection of film stills, a group of studies of its subjects, rather than a cohesive narrative about them. As if looking through the windows of a passing subway car, we register briefly the small dramas within and then quickly move on to the next window. Knowing Marker’s eccentric cinematic vision, perhaps this is exactly what he has in mind.

Through June 2, Peter Blum Chelsea, 526 W. 29th St., 212-244-6055 and Peter Blum Soho, 99 Wooster St., 212-343-0441.

orig. published May 2, 2011 The New York Press

by Melissa Stern

Coney IsalndAs New York City rushes headlong into becoming a sleek, homogenous city of modern high-rises, there is a small group of artists, historians and archivists determined to hold on to the glories of a bygone time, at least in one Brooklyn neighborhood. Indeed, two intrepid artists and Coney Island enthusiasts, Joanna Ebenstein and Aaron Beebe, have planned The Coney Island Spectacularium, a year-long program devoted to the glory days of the seaside community beginning this week.

At the end of the 19th Century, Coney Island was the center of a particularly American world of entertainment. Everything from freak shows to amusement-park rides to scientific experiments and theatrical performance passed through, amusing, horrifying and edifying the paying public. The Coney Island Specularium seeks to recapture that energy and wonder and redeliver it to modern audiences. It will be art in all forms, from visual to performance to the purely experiential. In the words of co-curator Ebenstein, “The form of the exhibition—an immersive installation, one that blurs the boundaries between exhibition and recreation, museum and cabinet of curiosities—ties into my interest in multiples, in questioning distinctions between trash and treasure.”  Collaborator Aaron Beebe chimes in effusively, “I can’t believe most people don’t know the insanity that went on down here.”

Opening April 8 with “The Congress of Curious Peoples,” a 10-day series of lectures and performance with parties, scholarly symposia and a few more parties thrown in, “the insanity” will be studied, re-created and, most of all, celebrated. A highlight of the week promises to be the appearance of the last two great impresarios of the sideshow, Bobby Reynolds and Ward Hall, both now in their eighties. These gents, who have been performing since the 1940s, will once again play the big stage together. For aficionados of the sideshow, this is not to be missed.

To provide the Specularium with day-to-day entertainment value, there will be a 360-degree panoramic installation depicting the destruction of Coney Island’s largest amusement park, a living “ethnic” museum, roving magicians and fortunetellers. And, in keeping with the kitschy and nostalgic power of the neighborhood, there will be a dime museum. “The dime museum is a particularly American creation,” says Eberstein, “blending what we would now divide neatly into the categories of museum, theater, education and spectacle, while also hearkening back excitingly to pre- museum private cabinets of curiosity.” Featuring taxidermy, geologic specimens, curiosities of the modern and ancient worlds, palm reading and phrenology, the dime museum promises to be a most excellent part of the celebration. And in the true spirit of Coney Island, throughout the year there will be plenty of parties.

Though not every piece of the year’s programming is in place yet, Beebe and Ebenstein have some tricks up their respective sleeves and speak tantalizingly of a Grand Guiginol to take place Dec. 10 and 11. This bizarre theatrical form, which predated and presaged the slasher film genre, is advertised as “a night of Victorian Horror.” Costume dress will be optional, but suggested strongly for the audience. Bring your own blood.

This outrageously ambitious year of programming is a most apt tribute to Coney Island, the most outrageous of places. Step right up!

orig. published March 8, 2011 CityArts

By Melissa Stern
“Where a thing is, is more important than what it is.” This undated quote by the artist Frederick Sommer sums up neatly his lifelong aesthetic. A man of restless artistic energies and profound curiosity, Sommer roamed the artistic landscape working in photography, drawing and collage throughout the middle and latter half of the century, until his death in 1999. He brought to each medium his conviction that visual elements in the world could be de-contextualized and rearranged in ways that were viscerally satisfying, as well as intellectually challenging.
This huge show of Sommer’s work encompasses both Ricco/Maresca and Bruce Silverstein galleries, each a noteworthy venue in its own right. The show focuses mainly on Sommer’s extraordinary work in collage. A smattering of photos and a fascinating dollop of vernacular scientific objects neatly bookend this thoughtfully curated selection.

“Untitled, 1944,” by Frederick Sommer.

A surrealist of the old school, Sommer worked with what looks like 19th- and 20th-century medical and scientific books, painstakingly cutting and rearranging “parts” into the most elegant of compositions. Chance and the natural order of objects were his guiding forces. This was a man with an impeccable and innate design sense. His collages are rigidly formal in presentation; each is precisely positioned on a black or neutral background, like a scientific or medical presentation. But their subject matter manifests a kind of refined creepiness that leaves the viewer unsettled and oddly guilty, a little like watching a scientific peep show. Recombined body parts—both human and animal—bits of mechanical and biologic illustration and architectural detail are combined seamlessly into elegant, surrealistic, collaged Frankenstein monsters. This work is easy to shrug off if one passes through too quickly. But given a little time alone in an empty gallery, it will deeply move you.
There are numerous works that stand out, some for their simplicity and others for their complexity. “Untitled (Mappa Mundi)” is nearly 40 inches around, a swirling hallucinatory mass of animal, vegetable and mineral. It is like looking into someone’s mind and seeing the collective bits and pieces of image that live there.
Personally, I prefer the visually (but by no means psychologically) simpler pieces. They’re almost all titled “Untitled,” so it’s challenging to single one out and describe it. Suffice it say that Sommer is able, with a few small, perfectly placed combinations of image, to create two-dimensional “life forms,” each elegant and provocative in its own delicate way. Frederick Sommer was a master of the ambiguous object, and this is an exhibition that allows the viewer to become immersed in his universe.
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Through April 2, Ricco/Maresca Gallery, 529 W. 20th St., 212-627-4819, and Bruce Silverstein/20 Gallery, 529 W. 20th St., 212-627-3930.

“Untitled, 1944,” by Frederick Sommer.