Chris Jordan’s images of excess
Photographer Chris Jordan makes staggering representations of human waste, consumerism and cultural practices, focusing on the immense environmental impact of collective consumption. Jordan illustrates daunting statistics–4 million plastic cups used each day on airline flights alone, 166,000 overnight packages shipped by air in the U.S. every hour–that transform abstract data into palpable visual language. From a distance, his large-scale images resemble pointillism, but zoomed in, they are composed of individual cups, bottles or prison uniforms. This is pretty powerful stuff–it can be hard to get a grip on the scale of these numbers in abstraction, as we’ve learned talking about the 150 million tons of waste buried at Fresh Kills. Visualization helps.
Jordan has published a book of his photos, Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait and recently completed Midway: Message from the Gyre, a series of stills taken of albatross carcasses in the North Pacific, where colorful bits of plastic have been mistaken for food by the birds.
Agnes Denes retrospective
The artist, standing within "Wheatfield--A Confrontation," at the Battery Park Landfill, 1982.
Philosophy in the Land II, an exhibition featuring photography, drawings and prints by artist Agnes Denes spanning the last 50 years, is on view at the Leslie Tonkonow Gallery in Manhattan until January 16th. Denes is a pioneer of the environmental art movment whose ecological and philosophical interests surfaced in her 1968 piece Rice/Tree/Burial, which has been described as “the first site-specific piece anywhere with ecological concerns.” Also included in the exhibition are photos of her iconic Wheatfield–A Confrontation, a field of wheat planted and harvested by the artist in 1982 on the site of the Battery Park Landfill, now Battery Park City in lower Manhattan. Commissioned by Public Art Fund, Denes created Wheatfield over a period of four months and described the piece as “a work that addresses human values and misplaced priorities.” The exhibition also includes many of the artist’s drawings and prints exploring visual ideas across a range of disciplines, including mathematics, philosophy and science.
Pop-up parks
LentSpace is a 37,000 square foot temporary park and cultural space at Canal and Sullivan Streets in lower Manhattan. The site opened to the public on September 18th–Park(ing) Day–and is on loan to the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council for three years from Trinity Real Estate, which hopes to build on it when the City’s real estate market improves. The video above depicts the site’s construction.
This particular economic moment seems ripe with opportunities to build parks like these–”pop-up parks”–where construction projects have stalled indefinitely or where there happens to be temporarily vacant land:
- The hugely popular Brooklyn Bridge Park-adjacent pop-up park that appeared in summer 2008 offered the only view of all four of Olafur Eliasson’s Waterfalls in addition to hosting a picnic spot, sand play area and an outdoor cafe and bar.
- In London, the site of a mothballed 48-story building project was the subject of a public design competition, the winner of which proposed Leadenhall City Farm, a temporary, low-budget park featuring a garden, market and soup kitchen.
- A three month-long art park in London called Wonderwood, which transformed an abandoned building into a public play space, won honors in the Leeds Architecture Awards new Temporary Works category.
- There were 51 participating parks in this year’s NYC Park(ing) Day:
(via The New York Times, Treehugger, and The Infrastructurist)
Autumn beauty
Photographer Nathan Kensinger has posted a set of terrific photos and his impressions of the Freshkills Park site, collected during our photographers’ tour last month. We’ve been doing these tours every few months; if you’re a professional photographer interested in participating in future photo tours, feel free to be in touch.
Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Freshkill”
UbuWeb, the large online archive of avant-garde art, has posted a streaming video of Gordon Matta-Clark’s 1972 “Freshkill,” filmed at the Fresh Kills Landfill. The short film depicts the destruction of the artist’s truck by a bulldozer. The video is also available for download as an MP4.
Maya Lin’s landscapes, big and small
Artist Maya Lin is exhibiting both architectural sculptures and environmental installations this fall in and around New York City. Among the sculptures on view at Salon 94 are number of “asteroids” constructed from children’s toys, bottle caps and other recycled materials, as well as topographical formations carved from atlases and phone books. The small scale works are a departure from her larger reflections on landscape, which are also currently on view at Pace Wildenstien and the Storm King Art Center.
100 Acres of art
The Indianapolis Museum of Art is in progress developing the largest museum park in the US: 100 acres: The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art and Nature Park. Formerly a construction site and gravel pit, the 100-acre parkland has evolved naturally into woodland and wetland areas and includes a 35-acre lake. While there are a number of other museum parks in the country, 100 Acres will be the only such venue that commissions ongoing, temporary site-specific art installations. There are eight projects slated to open in the park by June 2010, including work by Kendall Buster, Rotterdam collective Atelier Van Lieshout, Andrea Zittel and others. The installation work is intended to facilitate an integrated experience of art and nature.
(Via The Dirt)
“Songs About Packaging” recap
Randy Ludacer’s performance at the Freshkills Park site last Saturday was terrific. An eager audience poured out of our Parks bus at North Mound to hear Randy serenede them (and the millions of tons of discarded packaging buried underfoot) with the new album of songs he’d recorded for the event, including “The Prettiest Package” and “This Landfill is Your Landfill.” Thanks to Randy, and to the folks at COAHSI for funding his project. This was a really fun event, and we’re hoping it’s the forerunner of many more musical performances at the site. (We have a set of guidelines for anyone interested in putting together a proposal for an event or performance.)
The crowd for this performance was full of photographers, videographers and bloggers. We’ve just uploaded a set of photos from the event to our flickr page. Artist Tattfoo Tan has posted a short video clip. Marijke from Landfill Diaries has posted her impressions. If you’ve got a photo set to share, please let us know, and we’ll link to it here.
UPDATED: Andrew Gardner has posted a nice flickr photo set of the event.
Spencer Finch artist talk tonight
Spencer Finch’s The River That Flows Both Ways–the first public art commission on the High Line–is an installation of 700 panes of colored glass on the Chelsea Market building, between 15th and 16th Streets on the elevated park at 10th Avenue. The distinct colors of the glass panes are drawn from 700 photographs taken of the Hudson river. On a journey up the river, the artist snapped a photo every minute for 700 minutes within a single day. The result is a testament to the experience of viewing the flowing river as one travels through time and space, whether by rail or by foot. The artist will speak about his work tonight, Wednesday the 30th, at 6:30 pm in the 14th St. Passage. FREE. RSVP recommended.
(Via High Line Blog)
Our Lady of Detritus
Choreographer/performer Jill Sigman and composer/vocalist Kristin Norderval have collaborated to produce Our Lady of Detritus, a performance piece focused on “trash and transcendence” that has been making its way through various outdoor New York City sites for the past month.
The performance travels on a cart made of an orange cargo tricycle decorated with fluorescent junk foods and powered by a combination of solar panels, pedal power and rechargeable batteries. Using improvisational dance structures and an interactive sound system, Sigman and Norderval entice passersby into participating in the event and considering questions such as “What’s the last thing you threw away and how long did you have it?” and “Are there things you’ve discarded that you regret?”
The performance will make its way to Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx this Saturday & Sunday, September 26 & 27, from 2-4PM. Attendance is free, and audience members are free to come and go as they like.
