Out & About
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Spandex, East German DVDs, an old desk, and a thimble are some of the materials found in a new show at SculptureCenter, housed in a former trolley repair shop in Long Island City redesigned by Maya Lin.
Only one sculpture was being touched, stepped on, and hugged at the show’s opening on Sunday: a weeping cherry tree, cut down and reassembled with steel bolts and joints inside SculptureCenter, where its branches reach the top of the 50-foot-high clerestory.
“This is my first tree,” sculptor Anya Gallaccio said. Past works have included a carpet of roses and a tree cast of bronze, and even some real tree stumps – but never a real tree in its entirety.
“This is an ephemeral monument,” Ms. Gallaccio said of the work, titled “one art,” after Elizabeth Bishop’s poem about the art of losing things.
The artist, whose home is in the East End of London, spent three weeks looking at trees in the region – in city parks, in East Hampton, in office parks – before settling on this weeping cherry, whose roots had been accidentally cut by a contractor (one of the her requirements was that the tree would had to be destined for the ax already). Ms. Gallaccio has no idea what will happen to the tree after the show. She did not think the tree would hold up to being reassembled elsewhere.
“I love the form of it. The central part is strong and forces your eye up. As an object in its own right, I thought it was such an extraordinary thing,” Ms. Gallaccio said.
The process of figuring out where to cut it and how to put it back together showed her “the ingeniousness of a tree’s engineering.” As a sculptural form, the tree is “a combination of gravity and grace,” Ms. Gallaccio said.
As for the other works, on view through April 3: The thimble can be found in a room devoted to Michael Ross’s work. The spandex, installed in an arched room in the basement, is courtesy of McKendree Key.Next door, Monika Zarzeczna took her desk from home and created an imagined office whose walls are filled with sketches. And the East German DVDs – along with a soundtrack of East German punk rock – are in the installation by Bozidar Brazda.
Working with experimental sculptors requires patience.
“We often don’t know how something is going to turn out,” SculptureCenter’s executive director, Mary Ceruti, told me.
Since moving to the trolley factory in 2002, the organization has increased expenditures on marketing, visitor services, and public programs, quadrupling its budget in the past five years. Visitation in 2004 was 10,000-12,000, and Ms. Ceruti projects growth to 30,000. “Our central idea is to be a home for artists,” Ms. Ceruti said. “But we’ve also dedicated ourselves to building a bigger audience for their work.”
Sculptor Joel Shapiro recently joined the board. “He has a studio here. It’s great for us to have someone who knows the dynamics of this neighborhood,” Ms. Ceruti said.
Spotted at the opening: artist and longtime SculptureCenter board member Fred Wilson, who has a show at PaceWildenstein in March; Citigroup’s curator, Suzanne Lemakis; the director of the Noguchi Museum, Jenny Dixon; the deputy director of the Brooklyn Museum, Charles Desmarais, the executive director of Creative Time, Anne Pasternak; the executive director of the Kitchen, Debra Singer, and sculptor Kate Raudenbush, who most recently created a “Stadium of the Self” at the 2005 Burning Man festival.
