Unmonumental at the New Museum: Just Like Your Favorite Messy Friend's Place (A Review)

Looking at the New Museum of Contemporary Art's inaugural Unmonumental exhibition is like visiting the crash pad of a favorite friend, the one that's creative and stays up all night and leaves dirty dishes piled up in the sink and doesn't have any real furniture and what's in their place came from the stuff people threw out on the sidewalk. They've taken their broken mattress and stuck a fluorescent light tube through it and artfully stacked their laundry in a huge tower of bungee cords. They've scotch-taped xeroxed pictures of their friends on the wall, and they sleep elsewhere.

Sarah Lucas, now 45 (impossible! when did THAT happen?), seems almost too famous for Unmonumental, because I immediately connected her bed object with her name and established career. Isa Genzken, born in 1948 and the oldest artist, represents the core handmade aesthetic of the exhibit with Elefant, her assemblage made of cloth, vacuum tubes, plastic, and paper. The rest seems the work of youthful anonymous sprites amok and bored in the fairy kingdom and with no discernible sense of place. I have no problem with this. The modern world is filled with too much waste and cast-off beauty, and assemblage, as well as collage, encourages innovation and repurposed associations.

Unmonumental serves to show off the New Museum because the visitor needs to move in and around the spaces, looking up at the lights and down to the cracked concrete floor and past the sculptures to glance at the Bowery rooftops. Two-dimensional artwork would kill the intent, and I indeed wonder how they're going to pull off any future exhibit that could include works on paper or canvas. They've been so bold in stating that sculptural assemblage is the art of our time, so how will they frame, so to speak, work that is not of this genre? What of the contemporary painter who seeks more to life than just gallery sales?

For the time being, the New Museum's '70s love for democratically Pop, un-Genius Art, rough-edged punk-inspired hand-me-downs, and dare I say it, feminist-informed and modestly-tempered collage aesthetics is alright by me. They've made a new home on the Bowery, and they've decided to crash there, as oppose to invade. Good for them.

See related post: Mixing and Matching at the New Museum on the Bowery: A Review

(NEW 12/20/07: My response to Stanley Fish's blog post.)

Mixing and Matching at the New Museum on the Bowery: A Review

During the rush of pack arts journalism that greeted the opening of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in the Bowery (235 Bowery) last weekend, I read all the reviews but decided to stay home until the initial frenzy died down. I wanted to get some distance, if only a week, between the opening marathon and my memory of the reviews. I wanted to experience the newness (as, indeed, all is branded there as "New") with judgments unburdened from the critical mass and to see, really, if I would enjoy myself.

The new building, designed by the Japanese architecture firm SANAA, feels both modern, with a touch of early modernism without the polemics, and postmodern, with plenty of playfulness without the irony. The museum offers several pleasures. The almost medieval staircase linking the galleries is so narrow that it's hard not to be intimate with people walking in the opposite direction, and I intend to use these steps in the future as my public stairmaster. The bathrooms are lined in colorful floral tile patterns. The elevators are the color of absinthe.

The New Museum is not large, a fact I found contributed to my comfort level as a veteran museum-goer. The layout and ambience of the first floor reminded me of Renzo Piano's contemporary addition to The Morgan Library & Museum, with the admissions area to the left of the front doors and the café space at the rear. The mix-and-match chairs of the New Museum's café contribute to the space's informality but also link the museum to the chair stores in the surrounding Bowery neighborhood. The New Food of the café offers large red velvet cupcakes at a reasonable price. Trendy, yes, but sheer comfort also.

Jerry Saltz, in his smart review for New York ("Little House on the Bowery," Dec. 3, 2007), argues that the museum's modest scale poses a problem for the museum's ambitions. I agree that the curators may find in these boxy white and well-lit spaces some challenges for future presentations, especially after the totally appropriate inaugural Unmonumental exhibition (more about that in an upcoming post). But maybe not. Maybe its time for art itself to shrink back to a more human scale after being so frighteningly large for so long. The limited space of an influential museum could help steer contemporary art in new directions. If I ran the museum, I would put in charge of a future exhibition whoever made the decision about the café chairs.

See related post: Unmonumental at the New Museum: Just Like Your Favorite Messy Friend's Place (A Review)

Tickets Already Snapped Up For The New Museum Opening Marathon

Am I going to the opening of the New Museum of Contemporary Art on the Bowery this weekend? I wanted the answer to be "Hell, Yes!,"* but I've learned that all the time-allotted tickets for the Target-sponsored 30-hour opening marathon have officially been given out. According to the New Museum's website, it's possible that some tickets will be returned or unused, so you're free to show up and get lucky.

*Ugo Rondinone's sculptural rainbow, Hell, Yes! is currently installed on the front of the New Museum of Contemporary Art.

Image above: The New Museum of Contemporary Art as seen from behind an industrial mixer at a restaurant supply store across the street. WOTBA.

The Bowery 2007 Walk: Chinatown

You may remember that scene in the infamous final episode of The Sopranos when one of the guys walks out of a Little Italy restaurant and then the camera pulls back with a wide shot of the street to show Chinese businesses closing in on the old neighborhood. If you didn't see it, never mind.

When I walk south along the tenuous and uncertain blocks of the northern Bowery these days, I get a feeling that everything is up in the air, unsettled. No one building, either built or under construction, makes a definitive statement. It IS like the current state of the New York Yankees, one that has finished the season but will try to be different next year. That was the point I was trying to make in a post the other day. Anxiety and uncertainty, along with too many choices, leads to a depressing state of affairs.

When I reach the transition of the northern Bowery to the owned and operated Chinese blocks to the south, I immediately feel better. First of all, we have colors - reds, greens, pinks, merlots, and what have you, vivid background awning colors advertising with clear and large signs, in English and Chinese, the lighting shops, hotels, bakeries, social associations, and more. No more subtlety, no more understated lack of assurance. The individual businesses are filled in, for the most part, providing a sense of unity.

Note: The Bowery 2007 Walk, now complete, will appear in a few days, along with a map, on the sidebar of this website. A pedestrian interpretation of Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) will follow in due course.

See the complete walk here.

The Bowery 2007 Walk: Upscaling the Flophouse

The Bowery's northern blocks, from Cooper Square south toward the Kenmare-Delancey intersection, embrace the majority of the area's new construction. The most controversial new building, the Cooper Square Hotel, looms out of scale on 3rd Avenue, just yards before the Bowery technically begins.

I've passed through the area many times, and I often see people standing across the street from the hotel looking like they want to tear it down with their bare hands. I talked to one guy the other day who wanted some affirmation that the building was "ugly." I've seen design professionals waving their arms and shaking their heads. The hotel will market itself as "downtown luxury." There's no stopping it now.

Farther to the south, The Bowery Hotel at 335 Bowery, in business for several months now, strikes me and many others as a successful design. Handsome on the interior as well as exterior, the hotel builds upon and improves a pre-existing structure, expanding windows and opening terraces. The interior design blends old school ambience and modern comfort into something that can be appropriately described, for once, as casual elegance. Don't get too excited, however, unless you have over $500 to spend per night.

Another promising addition to the Bowery hotel "scene" will be the "green" hotel planned for 250 Bowery. Based on the renderings at their website, Flank Architects look like they understand the concept of scale. The perforated Corten steel exterior skin may play off the New Museum's aluminum mesh. Perhaps now all the Bowery buildings should wear metallic veils.

Other than visiting the New Museum of Contemporary Art, guests of these hotels will not likely hang out on the overly-wide Bowery and bargain shop for industrial Hobart mixers. They'll be out and about in the adjoining NoLita, a neighborhood that can only be described as precious, and on nearby streets of the Lower East Side. You can believe, though, that the pressure is on for many of the older existing Bowery businesses to leave.

The area does have some nice and affordable places to stay. Check out the Off SoHo Suites Hotel on Rivington, or the SoHotel, just off the Bowery on Broome.

See the complete walk here.

Images: at top, the unfinished Cooper Square Hotel; below, The Bowery Hotel

A Halloween in Progress

I've spent much of the last year getting to know a guy named Alex. The other day, however, he broke it off with me, giving me the same old sorry excuse that he needed to see other people.

I've heard that line before. I thought we had an agreement that he would stick around a little longer. After all, he was being paid well enough to do what he does best here, and he made a lot more than the regular Joe in the Bronx. I should have seen it coming. Furthermore, his manager packed up his bags, too, and is heading for L.A. Their friend, Don, looks like he's getting out of Dodge with them. I worry others will follow as well.

I loved Alex. I spent many week nights and weekends with him, and the colonel liked him enough to take me to see him on my birthday. Alex's parent company named a new guy to take Joe's place, and his name is Joe, too, and strangely he looks a little bit like Alex. The new Joe seems OK, but he's not my real daddy, and it will be a while before I get comfortable with him.

Awakening in a state of melancholy, I naturally headed for The Bowery to walk off the whole thing. Everyone now knows to go to The Bowery to cry in public.

So beginning at Cooper Square I walked south along the Bowery today, looking for meaning in an Alex-less New York.

Tonight, I plan to join the throngs along 6th Avenue to contact the nocturnal spirit world for guidance, and of course, will alert you of any special messages from the beyond.

Images: October 31, 2007. WOTBA

The New BAD (Bowery art district) Springs Up Along Bummer Street

WOTBA (Walking Off the Big Apple) wishes you a Happy Halloween, and I would like to send a special All Hallow's Eve greeting to all the gallerists of the new BAD (Bowery art district).

As all-in-the-know are aware, the Bowery has recently awakened from its famed languid derelictions to embrace the life-affirming values of art. On the side streets of NoLita and the Lower East Side, galleries big and small jockey for positions around the New Museum's big ghost mothership on the Bowery. Essex, Eldridge, Rivington, Spring, Greene, Chrystie - yes, all these streets come together to form the BAD.

Artists and writers have lived along the Bowery for a long time, and I'll cite just one example here. 222 Bowery, a loft coop between Spring and Prince, is home to all sorts of fascinating living people, but among its deceased denizens we can count the likes of Fernand Leger, Mark Rothko, and William Burroughs.

Everyone, including WOTBA, is sad about last year's closing of The Bowery's famed punk palace, CBGB's. But life is looking up along Bummer St, the heart of the melancholy district, with BAD.

WOTBA has an idea. If the Bowery is the new Chelsea, then it needs its own High Line. Let's rebuild the old Third Avenue El along the street, convert it immediately to a rails-to-trails project and then plant some native grasses along the new BAD high line. Here's our marketing slogan: "Down on the Bowery, we know how to get high."

Image: See the famed film of the Third Avenue El from the 1950s (before the line was demolished) HERE. Internet Archive.

See the complete walk here.

The Bowery 2007 Walk: Crying in Public

More on my advocacy of The Bowery as the designated Melancholy District:

Ah me I busted out
Don't even ask me how
I went to get some help
I walked by a Guernsey cow
Who directed me down
To the Bowery slums
Where people carried signs around
Saying, "Ban the bums"
I jumped right into line
Sayin', "I hope that I'm not late"
When I realized I hadn't eaten
For five days straight

-from Bob Dylan's 115th Dream, Bringing It All Back Home, 1965

Johnny Ryall is the bum on my stoop
I gave him fifty cents to buy some soup
He knows the time with the fresh Gucci watch
He's even more over than the mayor Ed Koch
Washing windows on the Bowery at a quarter to four
'Cause he ain't gonna' work on Maggie's farm no more

-from Beastie Boys' Johnny Ryall, Paul's Boutique, 1989

With a metropolis so large as New York City, it's not unusual to witness strangers crying in public. While I was working on the Upper East Side last year, I cried a few times myself as I was walking down the street. On one of these occasions I passed a woman who had just left her place of employment, and she was crying, too.

Most often public grieving manifests itself in the form of a twenty-something crying and pleading on a cell phone to someone I cannot see. I also overhear people on the verge of tears apologizing on the phone to their immediate supervisor. Then, after hanging up, the flood gates open.

See, wouldn't it be great if all the sad people just headed to The Bowery on these bad days? The temporarily saddened could wallow in the misery of others. Retail stores that market to these needs would flourish - chocolate stores, shoe boutiques, saki bars, and Pinkberry. But we shouldn't depend on consumer habits to handle our melancholy needs. Maybe if people knew that they could freely walk up and down the Bowery and cry in public, then that would be enough.

See the complete walk here.

Images: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, scheduled to open December 2007, a restaurant supply store, the Bowery Mission, and in the foreground a pressure cooker on the sidewalk. All of New York is a pressure cooker.

The Bowery 2007 Walk: Bummer Street Then and Now

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When the Third Avenue El operated along the Bowery from the 1870s to the early 1950s, the tracks plunged the street into shadowy gloom, making it easy for bad things to happen in the dark. The Bowery became for many the home of last resort, a collective magnet for degradation and shame.

From The WPA Guide to New York (1939):

"Thousands of the nation's unemployed drift to this section and may be seen sleeping in all-night restaurants, in doorways, and on loading platforms, furtively begging, or waiting with hopeless faces for some bread line or free lodging house to open."

From the Michelin Green Guide, 7th edition, c. 1984:

"It is best known for its 'bums' – homeless alcoholics, drug addicts, the chronically disturbed and the unemployed. A walk along it is not dangerous but depressing, and may make you feel uneasy. Derelicts lie on the sidewalks or in doorways and wait for handouts. The Bowery is also a great center for buying electrical goods especially lighting apparatus, and all types of restaurant equipment."

When I read the quote above, I had an image of someone stepping over derelicts to go into a store to buy a margarita machine.

Walking Off the Big Apple is not nostalgic for derelicts or streets filled with the unemployed, so I do not mourn the passing of a sad era. But I am uneasy with assumptions that the Bowery is languishing or even that a degree of languishment should be a bad thing. I'd like to see the community boards plan for a street devoted to collective melancholy, a place where all of us could go and find some solace after a really really bad day.

Image at top: The Bowery near Grand St., New York. Created/Published [ca. 1900]. "708-5" on negative. Detroit Publishing Co. no. 012678. Gift; State Historical Society of Colorado; 1949. Library of Congress.

Image below: The Intersection of Bleecker and The Bowery. October 29, 2007. WOTBA

See the complete walk here.

The Bowery 2007 Walk: General Themes

Readers of Walking Off the Big Apple know that I just don't walk to shop, eat, and exercise. I walk to make a big deal of something, to see walks as metaphors for other issues. With Garbo Walks, I explore the issues of privacy, celebrity culture, and postwar New York. My British Invasion Walk comments on the continuing influence of English culture on American society. In short, pedestrian activity leads down some unfamiliar streets, even for me.

I'm all about the Bowery right now. The street serves as a slippery signifier of constant urban change, and with imperfect points of departure for its new iteration. The buildings along the way constitute a mélange of layered histories. Many businesses are closing, new hotels and residences are rising, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, probably the most formidable player, will set a tone in its special way.

I am excited about the New Museum arriving on the Bowery, watching its boxy whiteness unfold in its metallic mesh clothing. Aside from the museum, however, the development of the Bowery makes me nervous. The avenue is wide, the history is deep, and the traffic is noisy. I have a lot of questions, mainly about the new Bowery, and I will post them over the next couple of days.

So, the Bowery: A street that stretches from the indigenous people to the Dutch and through 18th century fashion, from the worlds of Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie to the immigrant communities of the Lower East Side and the story of Hong Kong and contemporary China, and the insistent questions of the art world, real estate and the precarious questions of "revitalization," and all mediated in an imperfect way by a fifth-generation Texas woman of Scotch-Irish-Austrian heritage and with a background in American Studies, well, this should be interesting.

So far I've seen a lot of industrial Hobart mixers. I could make cupcakes for all y'all.

See the complete walk here.

Images: Photos of The Bowery, October 29, 2007. WOTBA.

The Bowery 2007: The Art World Likes to Fix Things Up

From "On the Bowery, a New Home for New Art" by Carol Vogel, The New York Times, March 28, 2007

The board spent a year scouring the city for its new home. “It wasn’t till we saw the empty parking lot on the Lower East Side that we knew we’d found the spot,” Ms. Phillips said. “The board saw the potential before I did. They saw right away how consistent it was with the museum’s mission. They loved the fact that the neighborhood was rough and the street was languishing, and that it was a major avenue with easy subway access.”

Once more: "They loved the fact that the neighborhood was rough and the street was languishing, and that it was a major avenue with easy subway access.”

See the complete walk here.

The Bowery 2007: Preliminaries, continued

"Progressive business men will not become interested in ancient and dilapidated buildings."

From the article "Developments On the Bowery Forecast New and Varied Business Expansion," The New York Times, November 18, 1917

See the complete walk here.

The Bowery 2007: Preliminaries

From Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (1900):

No more weakly looking object ever strolled out into the spring sunshine than the once hale, lusty manager. All his corpulency had fled.

His face was thin and pale, his hands white, his body flabby. Clothes and all, he weighed but one hundred and thirty- five pounds. Some old garments had been given him--a cheap brown coat and misfit pair of trousers. Also some change and advice. He was told to apply to the charities.

Again he resorted to the Bowery lodging-house, brooding over where to look. From this it was but a step to beggary.

"What can a man do?" he said. "I can't starve."

See the complete walk here.

Image: Louis Sontag, The Bowery at Night, 1895