Tag Archives: art

making “space to create” new urban systems: an open proposal to chashama

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to chashama,

I spent the past year living abroad as a Thomas J. Watson Fellow, which meant, for me, that my primary occupation was to think about urban space and its uses, as I worked on a project entitled: Cities in Transition: Identity, Narrative and the Changing Urban Landscape. I spent the fall of 2011 in Toronto, Canada observing the magnetism of Harbourfront Centre, which draws in thousands every weekend from the possible reaches of the Greater Toronto Area. I spent the winter standing on the streets of Quito, Ecuador’s old city, the first to be designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, considering how the legacy of a space makes itself present as that space extends into the future. I spent the spring exploring Sydney, Australia’s infinite network of suburbs and their distinct sensibilities, and the City of Sydney’s curious and often brilliant unification of art objects and the public sphere.

In the course of my Watson year, I’ve interviewed planners, artists, cycling advocates, designers, social innovators and many others who spend their lives thinking about one or a number of facets of the relationship between how a city is designed and how it’s inhabited. What I’ve tried to do as a Watson Fellow is to listen both to how residents talk about their cities and how individuals involved in a city’s design and operation talk about their work, in order to see what it would look like to build a bridge between how cities are lived in and how planners and designers prepare for their future.

In thinking about that relationship – between urban identity and urban design – I’ve been particularly interested in the role artists play, especially artists who work and show their work in public and publically-accessible spaces. I’ve come to believe that the role of the artist is singular in this process of creating channels for interplay between the lived city and the realm of design, as the strongest art objects engage with their viewers to generate new ways of looking, a skill residents need to learn in order to see their city in new ways. In this way, public and publically-accessible art becomes a crucial feature in creating the kind of structural change necessary to make the work of urban advocates both relevant and useful to residents and to continue the conversations that push the innovation of urban systems forward. To this end, I see the work of chashama as central to the development of the ideas and practices that will be core features of the conversations about New York City’s future.

As I bring the implicit questions of my Watson year home, I’d like to continue to explore the role of artists as crucial public actors, a feature of artists’ work that chashama both heightens and extends. With this in mind, I’d love to work with you to profile a series of artists working with chashama who are furthering the project of how we as New Yorkers look and learn to look at our city and how that looking is embedded in our design of the city’s future. It is my intention that such a profile series will bring into the foreground both all of the ways we see our city and how the evolution of those ways of seeing is itself crucial to how we direct, explore and envision the city’s future.

This is a project that could extend in many directions, but it feels like a good place to start.

Let me know your thoughts.

All the best,

Davy Knittle

davy.knittle@gmail.com

chashama at work: a review of chashama 461 gallery’s bait and switch

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Several weeks ago, Urban Omnibus, a production of the Architectural League, profiled the work of Anita Durst, founder of space-repurposing arts organization chashama, which gives artists “space to create” in donated under-used spaces for performance and exhibition and subsidized artist studios. In speaking about chashama’s work, Durst highlighted its greater mission as being based in the incubation of artists in the name of neighborhood enlivening and sustainability. Durst’s intentions for chashama’s spaces are extended and deepened by the show bait and switch, which opened in chashama 461 gallery on Friday

The premise of bait and switch, curated by Chiara Di Lello, is to provide a space that subverts the now-standardized culture of cursory looking by displaying artworks that redirect the viewer’s attention and encourage an engagement attained only by sustained inquiry. While the beginning of the presentational text on the postcard reads “In today’s culture, the average viewer…” the show is interested in neither “today’s culture” nor the “average viewer,” as it creates a series of relationships that comment not on culture or the normalized qualities of viewership, but on the very basic act of developing a personal and enduring relationship with an art object, and extending from that, with a space, an idea or a practice.

The show puts into action exactly what Durst explains as chashama’s ideal, by creating a space that incubates not only the work of local artists, but also invites the city into the gallery by putting many of the features of the city into necessary conversation with each other by means of the art and where the work sends its viewers back into the city with thoughts of what’s possible for New York.

Work such as Olivia Swisher’s Increasingly Problematic: Nobody Puts Baby in a Corner, does what New York does at its best, by creating a conversation that begins in questioning and encourages the viewer to explore the piece, first in pursuit of that question and then for the joy of connective looking, moving between the painting, created by Swisher dancing with paint-covered feet on a sheet of paper, and the contact sheet that displays the stages of the act of making the piece, to explore both the process by which the work was made and the conversation between the piece’s elements.

The work displayed in bait and switch ranges from a clear and presentational subversion of the expectations of the illusive “average viewer” to the show’s strongest pieces which make space for both a singular and unifying experience of looking, where the strength of the piece relies on the viewer’s commitment to an extended engagement with it. This is especially true of Laura Meyer’s wallpapers, which open to an endless recombination of patterns the longer they’re explored,

and of Queena Ko’s Untitled (Stoop Series), which situates a structural refiguring of the discrete features of an iconic New York space and returns the space of the stoop back to its compositional elements, only after it attains the viewer’s attention by means of its familiar subject matter.

bait and switch does for viewers what chashama has done for its artists: it creates the opportunity for the independent generation of expansive ideas, themselves extended by collective inquiry. chashama has sent the artists into the gallery to make a show whose compositional whole makes each piece work harder, and the show sends viewers back out onto 126th street with new ways of looking for the compositional synergy of the city itself.

bait and switch is on view at chashama 461 gallery (461 w. 126th Street) until July 7th, daily from 12-7 and by appointment, with abbreviated hours on July 4th

“In Which the Past is Always Available”: Cy Twombly’s “Three Studies from the Temeraire”

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I grew up familiar with Cy Twombly’s work from regular trips to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where one room is devoted to his Fifty Days at Iliam, but I didn’t begin to learn how to engage with his work until I spent a school holiday at the museum with my high school girlfriend, who has a lifelong and symbiotic relationship with art and art making. On that day, we sat with Twombly’s series and looked and talked and worked to develop a relationship until we reached what I now regard as the experiential art museum ideal: a sense of ownership in our experience with the paintings, a home ground in Twombly’s work.

Because I didn’t begin to develop an academic interest in art history until my final two years of college, I have a particular attachment to the artists whose work I learned to love before I amassed the academic tools that helped me figure out what the work was doing – relationships I developed on the grounds of observation and instinct. This year, encountering the work of those artists (an unusual mixture of Thomas Eakins, Robert Rauschenberg, Mark Rothko and the photographer Andreas Gursky, among others) in different museums around the world feels reliably like a homecoming, and so when I came across the Twombly series “Three Studies from the Temeraire,” in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the room itself felt immediately familiar.

Cy Twombly, Three Studies from the Temeraire, 1998-99. Art Gallery of NSW.

The wall text that accompanies the series highlights Twombly’s engagement with the idea of a uniformly accessible past, of “the trajectory from the present to the past and vice versa” that provides a “continuity of human, cultural and aesthetic experience in which the past is always available.” There’s a particular strength in the fact that the paintings call Australia their permanent home, and that they sit on land both historically accessible by sea only and containing over 40,000 years of human history.

As an American in Australia, I’m consistently struck by the discontinuity of old and new. By the standards of American colonization and the subsequent gain of independence from its colonial protectors, Australia’s 20th century separation from Great Britain is mystifyingly recent. Growing up in Philadelphia, which was founded in the 1680s, Sydney feels like a young city, despite its late 18th century foundation. Australians often talk about themselves as citizens of a young country, and yet in the Sydney Basin there are rock carvings that are purported to have 40,000 years of history, which is nearly impossible to reconcile with the discourse that sees Sydney as a “new” place.

To the make the argument that Twombly’s work communicates the idea of an accessible past is also to suggest that, by means of Twombly’s model, the relationship to the past is fluid, that there is continuity between what is and what was – something that I wonder about often when considering Sydney’s history during my tenure as a temporary Sydneysider.

Twombly’s series communicates this by means of an endless current of viewership, in which it is possible to find a connective path between the panels in both directions, the progression of the boats across the canvases from left to right suggesting that the rightmost boat will continue onward, and the partial boat extending from the leftmost side of the left panel suggesting that the progression could just as easily continue in the other direction.

One of the ways I read the series was to consider it as a study in the progression of one boat, where the direction of movement is unclear. In this reading, the boat is morphed by the process of travel, having greater or shallower depth to its body, carrying a heavier load as indicated by the saturated color partially covering its body in each of the panels, effectively allowing the boat to shed and reconstitute itself in travel.

In reading the panels from left to right, because the first two panels contain boats that extend to the horizontal edges of the picture plane, in the rightmost panel, the boat commands the full horizontal space of the canvas, where it is situated in its journey even as it sheds its pigment to its environment below, where it’s paused in a magnetized balance between the pull of the ships and the pull of the rightmost extension of the canvas, thus creating a limitless present with a marked route back into the available past.

Thinking about Twombly’s interest in creating process-based linkages to antiquity, (where the ships are both a mode of transit and a figure with a long, progressive history; the ships are both the means by which antiquity is reached and the symbol of antiquity itself) it brings to mind Harold Bloom’s characterization of Walt Whitman’s four major tropes in Leaves of Grass: death, night, the mother and the sea, all of which are both destinations of and vehicles for seemingly endless transit, all of which can be used to move from the limitlessly antique to the present and back, where the movement can be omnidirectional. Where to investigate the innate human qualities of the present is to draw an innately human path back through their history by means of these tropes.

In my reading of Twombly’s series, to draw this path to antiquity is to understand that those ships will eventually have their own homecoming, arriving at a final present, and yet as soon as they do, that present will serve as another link, back through their past and onto the future present of another series of ships, which creates a template for the development of a connective engagement with the past that Sydney itself could do well to use.

As I consider the final weeks of my Watson year, which is full of things that soon will be superseded by another present, but which I’m not ready to let go of, to find these lines, these ships that link my continual present to a dynamic and evolving relational past means that there is hope for the ongoing relevance of these experiences. As Twombly might argue, there’s hope, too, for their availability to a future present, to catalogue them, as they happen, as integral features of a linked and forward-thinking history.