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In this week’s SKYLINE: We’re proud to share an essay by JULIAN HARAKE on Day’s End, the new installation in Manhattan’s Hudson River Park by American artist DAVID HAMMONS. The article appears in our current issue alongside a full-spread print of an ALVIN BALTROP photograph of the original Day’s End, which was installed (or, rather, cut) by GORDON MATTA-CLARK in 1975.
STEPH TODERO reports from the rooftop at The Met, where BIG BIRD has nested for the summer with help from American artist ALEX DA CORTE. Read on for a brief roundup of this week’s architecture news, as well as listings for a selection of events you certainly don’t want to miss.
Happy reading.
—Phillip Denny
From No. 21 — On Day’s End
JULIAN HARAKE
The last time an artwork was installed at Pier 52 off Gansevoort Street, in 1975, the city claimed vandalism, sued its artist, and finally demolished the work two years later. Now, an ethereal, skeletal monument paying tribute to that artwork and its creator, Day’s End by Gordon Matta-Clark, has been erected in its place and welcomed by this city with open arms—press package and all—the result of a quick pencil sketch by the artist David Hammons, years of subsequent structural refinement, and careful shepherding by the Whitney Museum of American Art.
But Hammons’s new creation—a 325-foot-long, bead-blasted, stainless steel wireframe outlining the now-demolished pier that held Matta-Clark’s masterpiece—memorializes more than that single work of art. Literally delineating what was once a gathering place for New York’s underground gay community, briefly illuminated by Matta-Clark’s crescent-shaped cuts in the pier’s walls, it recalls New York’s codified antipathy toward homosexuality, the pier’s demolition foreshadowing the subsequent cruelties of the AIDS epidemic. By extension, it marks this city’s shameful history of demolishing its own architectural and artistic treasures, now too numerous to count: Tilted Arc by Richard Serra (destroyed 1989), The American Folk Art Museum by Todd Williams and Billie Tsien (demolished 2015), and, most infamously, the original Penn Station by McKim, Mead & White (razed 1963). Today, the work is also evidence of how much the city, and the Meatpacking district in particular, has changed: from a derelict outpost for hippies and artists into one of New York’s chicest neighborhoods. Confronted with this new, gargantuan work of art, located near the Whitney across the West Side Highway, one cannot help but yearn for earlier times and grieve for Matta Clark’s original work of art, felled by city hands.
Likewise, the work marks a change for Hammons, an artist who has perennially eschewed conventions of art’s display and dissemination. The bulk of his art seems to have been made less for galleries and more for the streets, alleyways, and barbershops that frequently supply his materials. Perhaps better known for selling snowballs outside Cooper Union in 1983 and hammering bottle caps to trees elsewhere, Hammons elevates the detritus of life—rocks, human hair, old basketballs, discarded liquor bottles, and garbage bags—to the status of art. By contrast, the polite, marine-grade stainless steel of Day’s End seems out of character for Hammons, given the work’s technical precision and institutional proximity.
At the same time, Day’s End is foremost a public artwork, requiring visitors to turn away from the enclosed galleries of the Whitney toward the Hudson River. Given its prominent public setting, I suspect that Hammons may come to be more widely known for it than any of his previous work. Measuring 52 feet tall and engineered to be as slender as possible, the work is both hard and easy to miss. Fading in and out of focus at various times of day—glistening in the afternoon sun, appearing in silhouette at dusk, and merging with the darkness of the night, there are times when the work recedes far to the background of attention, even while standing directly in front of it. This is perhaps a function of its building-like scale. It acts less like sculpture and more like a substrate to the other stuff of life: the diffuse blood-orange light of the setting sun, joggers running along the Hudson River, seagulls looking for a place to rest, and the aggravatingly slow and loud party boats drifting by. That is what Gordon Matta-Clark managed to do with the previously abandoned pier, and likewise what Hammons accomplishes with but a mere cartoon of architecture. It does make the sunset more beautiful, certainly no small feat. The birds seem to like it too, though, like most New Yorkers walking by, they’re a bit confused and still getting used to it.
It is no easy task to engineer a pencil-thin structure the length of a football field out on the Hudson River with no visible seams or connections. I know this because I played a very minor role in making Day’s End, witnessing firsthand the care paid to it by the engineers and architects at Guy Nordenson and Associates. Details matter in such a straightforward work, and Day’s End owes some of its brilliance to the sophistication of its engineering. Structure aside, the project’s completion signals a new stage of redevelopment for the area. James Corner Field Operations, landscape architect of the nearby High Line as well as Domino Park in Williamsburg, has been asked to reimagine the adjacent Gansevoort Peninsula as a public beach and park. Like those who sought refuge at Pier 52 in the 1970s, visitors will be able to sunbathe under Day’s End and take advantage of the peninsula’s sunny, south-facing edge.
The Whitney claims that Day’s End is a veritable “gift to New York City” and those who call it home. That might be true, but the same could be said for the Vessel, the Shed, Little Island, Domino Park, and all the other recent gifts that dot New York’s valuable waterfront. As in those cases, rhetoric concerning public good and adaptive reuse is no doubt masking other, more selfish motivations. I suspect the museum has eyed Gansevoort Peninsula for some time and sought ways to beautify it since they moved in across the street in 2015. With the arrival of Day’s End, the Whitney seems set to get its way.
This is the reality of development in New York, where one must take the good with the bad and try to keep moving forward. Just as Moynihan Train Hall emerged from the calamity of Penn Station’s demolition, Day’s End rises above the pier that supported its namesake and inspiration and spans tumultuous political waters. It is hard not to sympathize with Hammons’s long-running suspicion of art institutions, or the rhetoric and money surrounding art. Just as he has always risen above those peripheral forces, Day’s End stands as a monument to what was, what can be, and those responsible for making such transformations possible. A different kind of monument.
DISPATCHES
A Familiar, Feathered Friend
Perched high up on the Met’s Cantor Roof Garden, set against the vast backdrop of a New York summer sky, I approach an enormous blue bird sitting on a yellow crescent moon. This is artist ALEX DA CORTE’s As Long as the Sun Lasts, the 2021 Roof Garden Commission for The Met. Moving closer to meet the bird’s gaze, I realize this is, in fact, our dear old friend BIG BIRD. This kind, singular creature from childhood instills a familiar comfort. Here, Big Bird roosts atop a red steel base which allows the piece to rotate gently in the breeze. Big Bird stands 8-feet, 6-inches tall and has 7,000 individually placed aluminum feathers—mostly blue—which create a magical softness against the roof garden’s hardscape. Drawing inspiration from Sesame Street creator Jim Henson, the sculptor Alexander Calder, writer Italo Calvino, and singer-songwriter Donna Summer, Da Corte’s floating bird conjures feelings of nostalgia, innocence, and curiosity. Big Bird’s pretty blue plumage and melancholy expression invoke a feeling of sadness, too, but a red ladder in its left hand suggests upward mobility. Perhaps Big Bird is rebounding from a year of uncertainty, wondering where to go next. The work’s inception coincided with the onslaught of the pandemic. “If I were to think of this year as four seasons of hell,” Da Corte said in an interview with Met curator SHANAY JHAVERI, “then I imagine there must be four seasons of love approaching.”
— STEPH TODERO
As Long as the Sun Lasts will remain on view at the Met through October 31.
IN THE NEWS
… an East Village restaurant’s sidewalk dining setup briefly rises to two stories; Department of Transportation quickly intervenes …
… on the trail of William Friedman, architect of the collapsed Champlain Towers South in Surfside, Florida …
… a fourth person jumps from the Thomas Heatherwick–designed Vessel at Hudson Yards; critic Justin Davidson and others issue calls for its demolition …
If you are thinking about suicide, help is available: The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is available 24 hours, 7 days a week, in English and Spanish. Call 800-273-8255. You are not alone.
DATELINE
The week ahead
Monday, 8/2
The Taste of Text Like the Taste of Honey with Yuri Gordon
2:30 PM | Cooper Union
Crip Technoscience: Disability Culture as Design with Aimi Hamraie, Kelly Fritsch, John Cooper
5:00 PM | SCI-Arc
Wednesday, 8/4
6:30 PM | American Institute of Architects New York
Thursday, 8/5
Spaces & Places 2021 Film Screening: Soul City with Danielle Purifoy, Floyd McKissick Jr., Kofi Boone
1:30 PM | Spaces & Places
Friday, 8/6
Spaces & Places 2021 Film Screening: Freedom Hill with Cierra Hinton, Kofi Boone, Resita Cox, Savonola Horne, Marquetta Dickens
12:00 PM | Spaces & Places
4:00 PM | Pratt Institute, Architectural Association
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