THE SHOW SO FAR

Garden Ornaments, Loisaida, NYC

Glass diatom, American Museum of Natural History NYC

Well, here I am, having arrived in the Lower East Side with a *sudden streaming cold*, confirming my long held suspicion that airplanes are toxic metal test tubes, rife with festering disease. So I’ve been spending my time schnuffling around the (once) mean streets in a kind of mucosal delirium, punctuated (thankfully) by moments of sheer Manhattan bliss.

I’ve always had a kind of twisted relationship with this dementedly dense, skyscraper encrusted island, ever since the first time I came here on the day John Lennon was shot, now over 23 years ago. On that day, I beheld a very different city, the gritty old, pre theme-parked New York of graffitied subway trains and an ubiquitous sense of transgressiveness. I must say I share a bit of nostalgia for the lost (old) New York of Lou Reed and Taxi Driver but despite systemic gentrification, the city hasn’t yet seemed to have lost its rampant life force. For a window on how some of the edgier New Yorkers feel about the gradual blanding down of its urban bohemia, check out Bruce Benderson’s fascinating (1994) essay Toward a New Degeneracy.

Ghetto palms, Ailanthus altissima

Bonsai, Brooklyn Botanical Gardens

To me, this city’s protean unstopability is epitomized by its Ailanthus trees, which people here call *ghetto palms*, which seem to erupt from nearly every crack in the concrete continuum, bursting through the pavement of litter-strewn parking lots and jamming themselves up against buildings, defiantly waving their absurdly rampant plume-like leaves in a mockery of human order.
The class war has indeed taken its toll here, but I was pleased to see that some of my favorite Lower East Side guerrilla gardens have managed to survive. In fact these survivors seem to be thriving more than ever, as their caretakers tend them with a new fervor.
Of course being the inveterate botano-phile I had to make an obligatory pilgrimage to the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx and to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. These large botanical gardens are veritable Wunderkammern for me, mapping out the vast domains of the botanically possible. At the moment, New York is seething at the cusp of a humid East Coast summer. Every shrub and tree seems to be exploding into flower and leaf at a pace that I find quite unnerving, compared to the more sedate, quietly incremental seasonal transitions of my mossy, drippy West Coast rain forest home.
The New York Botanical Garden has within it an incongruous patch of old deciduous forest along the Bronx River in which grow oaks and tulip trees that have attained great size. We came upon a cross section of a really old tulip tree and of course I had to take a picture to pay homage to Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Chris Marker’s La jetee. Apparently there are a few giant, old growth tulip trees hidden throughout the New York area, broodily biding their time within the city’s overlooked peripheries. The venerable Queens Giant looms over 134 feet high, a stone’s throw from the Long Island Expressway, having miraculously survived close to four centuries of pervasive urbanization.

tulip tree time travel in the Bronx

And what would New York be without art? I went to my friend Marina Zurkow’s opening at The Kitchen this week where she showed *Braingirl* (which is webcast on the Kitchen’s site) and her amazing interactive installation, *Little NO*, which is (to quote Marina):

a non-linear allegory with a circular structure, inspired by the Tibetan Buddhist Wheel of Life. In a psychedelic, animated, animal-filled world, a young girl enacts the Wheel’s emotional states of selfhood, through her physical gestures and surreal circumstance

The installation induced in me a wonderful kind of hypnotic synergy in which my mind oscillated between being caught in an endless Powerpuff Girls episode and some kind of demented Tibetan Thangka. The haunting soundtrack made it even more evocative.

The Guggenheim offered up some rather interesting exhibitions, notably Singular Forms Sometimes Repeated which presents a kind of historical survey of of Minimalism, from 1951 till present. Now I have to admit, I have always struggled with appreciating Minimalism which can seem strangely *aura-less*,

adhering to the High Modernist principle that judges an artwork’s validity by its adherence to fundamental properties of its specific medium.

or to quote Frank Stella:

“What you see is what you see.”

Singular Forms Sometimes Repeated largely reinforced this perception with a few *delightful* exceptions such as Wolfgang Leib’s The Five Mountains not to Climb on, exquisite in its vulnerability, being composed entirely of little mounds of hazel tree pollen. A trio of pieces (“Cross”, “Museum piece” and “Star”) by Walter DeMaria, creator of the famous Lightning Field, presented an oddly poignant critique of perhaps the most powerful (and destructive) icons of Western Civilization. The security around some of these *Singular Forms* at times seemed almost ludicrous and for most of the lay public, completely confusing. For example, Jackie Winsor’s (1972) *Sheetrock Piece*, (literally a pile of sheet rock adorned with staples with some square holes cut into it), was zealously defended by its own security guard who constantly admonished the curious throngs to “stand behind the line.” On the other hand, the viewers of Felix Gonzalez Torres’ (1991)Untitled (Public Opinion) (basically an 800 lb pile of neatly wrapped pieces of black rod licorice candy), were encouraged to take pieces of it home with them. For me, the highlight of the show was the most recent work, Damian Hirst’s (2002) Armageddon, which consisted of a thick layer of dead house flies stuck to a large canvas. The effect was beautifully scintillating as the ambient light scattered from the millions of mute metallic blue exoskeletons.

Conceptually more remarkable was the Guggenheim’s exhibition Seeing Double- Emulation in Theory and Practice which poses the interesting question of “Does a computer-based artwork remain the same piece, if it is exhibited on a more recent platform?” While, frankly, I personally haven’t lost a lot of sleep over this issue, it has become a serious concern, given the rapid pace of technological development. A case in point, is Mary Flanagan’s [phage], which mines data from the user’s hard drive, mixing HTML with e-mail, images, help files etc. and displays them slowly and randomly across a blank screen. Now, if the work is shown on a late model computer, it runs too quickly and isn’t as beautiful as in its original version, but if the work’s *code* has to be changed to slow it down, *is it still the same?* Seeing Double exhibits [phage]’s varying incarnations (Windows 98, Windows XP, Windows emulator on Mac OSX) along with similarly phylogenetic displays of other computer artists’ work, allowing viewers to explore this issue first hand. Once again, much of the work left me feeling a bit *aura-deprived* in its complete absence of materiality or sense of the personality of the maker, but also very much in awe of the cleverness apparent in both concept and execution.

The Whitney Biennial was on the other hand, for the most part *stultifyingly bad* with the exception of brilliant drawings by Amy Cutler, Zac Smith, Ernesto Caivano, as well as some beautiful offerings by old war horses, David Hockney and Robert Longo.

But despite all of the art and cultural foment, at the end of a long and sweltering Manhattan day, I remain most enchanted by the giant elm trees in Tompkins Square Park. Their enormous vaulted, umbrella-shaped canopies shimmer golden green in the evening sun, bring me back to distant memories of long vanished childhood summers. I remember gazing up into the crowns of similar elms , (it seems an eternity ago), as I lay on my back in Toronto’s cool suburban grass and watched orange orioles flitting through the leaves. Sadly, Tompkins Square’s stately elms are relics of an extirpitated race. The elms of my childhood are no more, wiped out by an apocalypse of Dutch Elm disease , which has left the eastern North American landscape studded with their mute skeletons.

Tompkins Square Park Elm Trees