I made it up to The Lever House on Park Avenue between 53rd and 54th while it was still warm and sunny out yesterday. Yay! I went to check out Barbara Kruger's Between Being Born and Dying adhesive vinyl messages covering the entire lobby (inside and out) of the building. Kruger used thick, white Helvetica ultra-condensed letters on a black background to write out statements regarding "power, gender roles, social relationships, political issues, consumerism, and individual autonomy and desire" (from the press release).
Emblazoned across the exterior walls and windows, the artist declares for passersby to read: "Know nothing, forget everything, believe anything," "Plenty should be enough," and "In violence we forget who we are" (a quote borrowed from Mary McCarthy).
On the interior walls and windows she states: "If it screams, shove it," "If it vomits, starve it," "If it sees, blind it," "If it laughs, choke it," "If it cries, drown it," "If it sighs, shame it," "If it loves, buy it," and "If it moves, fuck it."
The three columns in the center of the lobby say: "The globe shrinks for those that own it," and "Between being born and dying." On the floor, the artist wrote: "You make history when you do business," and "A rich man's jokes are always funny."
Being a sucker for most 80's nostalgia, the big, bold, declarative text immediately makes me think of British designer Katherine Hamnett's "Choose Life" slogan t-shirts which inspired the "Frankie Say Relax" tees. Kruger, who was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1945 and now splits her time between New York City and Los Angeles where she teaches at UCLA, said about her installation, "I think what I'm trying to do is create moments of recognition. To try to detonate some kind of feeling or understanding of lived experience... I try to deal with the complexities of power and social life, but as far as the visual presentation goes I purposely avoid a high degree of difficulty." Check out the Lever House Art Collection's website here.
I was super psyched to see that The Lever House still has Tom Sachs' Hello Kitty Sculptures outside the building. I saw them at the opening reception way back in May 2008 (Wow! Time flies!) but didn't dare take pictures that night (how gauche!) in front of all the fancy-schmancy pants at the party. So I was finally able to freely take pics of the adorable giants which are down below. Learn more about Sachs at the artist's website Tomsachs.org.
On a separate trip I made uptown last Friday, I checked out Maya Lin's Recycled Landscapes at Salon 94. The gallery is located on the first floor of a swank, residential townhouse on East 94th Street. Lin's works are small sculptures made from recycled items including plastic toys, plastic bottle caps, balls, children's board books, copies of The Yellow Pages, atlases, cardboard boxes, and those plastic bubble containers that hold toys you get out of bubble-gum machines. Lin makes perfect orbs out of the gaudy, plastic pieces, carves multi-layered craters and crevices into the phone books and atlases, and constructs mountain peaks out of the cardboard. See more at salon94.com, read my previous post on Lin here, and see my pics below.
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