The Hudson River Destruction Project

WILLIAMWALDRON/GETTYIMAGES

CITY JOURNAL
Spring 2011

The Hudson River Destruction Project
by James Panero

How the EPA is harming nature and ruining communities

Visit Fort Edward, 200 miles up the Hudson River from New York City, and you’ll find the waste hard to miss. That isn’t because General Electric once used polychlorinated biphenyls, the chemicals known as PCBs, to manufacture electrical equipment at two local plants. Rather, the waste on display in Fort Edward—now boasting a 110-acre “dewatering” facility built on once-fertile farmland and dozens of ugly barges bobbing on the river—is the wastefulness of the Environmental Protection Agency, which is imposing a costly river cleanup that is both unnecessary and environmentally destructive.

By ordering a dredging operation along 40 miles of the Hudson, the EPA has created a disaster of governmental proportions in this quiet upstate community. For six months in 2009, floating clamshell diggers shoveled day and night, pulling sludge from the river bottom around Fort Edward and depositing it onto barges. Six days a week, 24 hours a day, these barges, containing a total of 286,000 cubic yards of sediment mixed with old PCBs, were offloaded into that massive dewatering facility. There the soggy material was treated and squeezed in giant presses. The cakes of compacted sludge were then moved by truck onto 81-car trains, parked on a new spur of the Canadian Pacific Railway extending into the site. Five of these trains were in constant rotation, circulating the 4,400-mile round trip between the facility and the final dump site in Texas.

It was a Herculean attempt at remediation but one that actually increased PCB levels in the Hudson for a time; it also wreaked havoc on locals’ lives and imposed huge costs on General Electric. And all this work was only “Phase I” of the EPA’s plans. The government is now compelling GE to spend billions of dollars on Phase II, an even larger and longer operation. Dredging will recommence this spring.

The mighty Hudson once secured New York City’s commercial dominance, linking it to Canada, the Great Lakes, and the American heartland via the Erie Canal. For centuries, the river also served as the drainpipe for companies in the Empire State—more often than not, with the government’s blessing. From 1947 until 1977, General Electric’s plants at Fort Edward and nearby Hudson Falls discharged up to 1.3 million pounds of PCBs—the overflow waste of production—into the Hudson, and they did so with the full approval of state and federal agencies, which issued GE all the necessary permits.

This complacency wasn’t surprising, because PCBs had long been regarded as miracle compounds. Developed as a by-product of gasoline refinement and licensed by the Monsanto Company in 1929, PCBs were oily substances that conducted heat but were also fire-retardant. They were mixed into everything from road pavement and carbonless copy paper to household caulking and insulation. Because of their fireproof properties, the power industry found PCBs especially useful as safe coolants for electrical generation and distribution. The chemicals therefore replaced organic, more volatile oils as insulators for electrical components—for example, in the cooling liquids found in those metal cylinders that you see atop telephone poles. The rapid, safe expansion of electrical transmission, which brought prosperity and lifesaving energy to all corners of the United States, took place in a bath of PCBs—sometimes, in fact, through components manufactured at the two GE plants on the upper Hudson.

But the chemicals’ renowned stability also rendered them an environmental hazard. PCBs break down slowly in nature. Soluble in oil but not in water, they can “bio-accumulate” in animals and be passed up the food chain, probably posing health risks to people who ingest them in high enough quantities. But the exact nature of those risks has never been identified. A recent New York Times description pushes the perils of PCBs as far as the fact-checkers allow: “In high doses, they have been shown to cause cancer in animals and are listed by federal agencies as a probable human carcinogen.” So the direct human-cancer link of PCBs is unproven, and the description “probable human carcinogen” comes from the federal agencies that, as we will see, have a vested interest in maligning the chemicals.

Congress banned the manufacturing, sale, and distribution of PCBs in 1976. A year earlier, New York State’s commissioner of environmental conservation had sued General Electric, arguing that state law prohibited the company’s discharge of PCBs into the river regardless of the permits that the state had issued. In the landmark settlement adjudicated by Abraham Sofaer, at the time a professor at Columbia University and now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, GE and New York divided responsibility on how they would clean up the remaining PCBs: GE undertook the remediation of its plants, and New York—because it had, after all, approved the original discharges into the Hudson—would deal with the PCB sludge in the river. The settlement specifically stated that GE would not be liable for any future river cleanup.

The company met its mandate well, scrubbing its plants clean and even digging out an ingenious network of tunnels beneath the bedrock of one of its plants to capture every last ounce of PCBs that had seeped into the ground. Meanwhile, the Clean Water Act of 1972 had already begun regulating the discharge of pollutants into American waterways. As the waste pipes were shut off along the Hudson’s banks and sediment began to cover the deposits of PCBs and other chemicals spread out along its bottom, the river began to clean itself, and the recovery of its water became an environmental success story. The federal standard for PCBs in drinking water is capped at 500 parts per trillion; the river now regularly flows with 30 to 50 parts per trillion in the upper Hudson and a tenth of that downriver. The river became cleaner of other pollutants as well. Fort Edward locals remember a time when the Hudson was tinted the color of whatever pigment a nearby paint plant was processing and discharging; today, the water is safe enough to swim in. Some towns along the river even began relying again on the Hudson for their municipal tap.

New York didn’t hold up its end of the 1976 decision as well as GE did. When the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation first tried to clean up the Hudson PCBs in the 1970s and 1980s, it went looking for a convenient dump site for dredged-up pollutants. It eventually settled on a 100-acre dairy farm located near the Champlain Canal, which would allow for easy transportation of the sludge. Sharon Ruggi still lives on the farm, where her husband was born in 1935. One “supper time in October” of 1985, she recalls, state regulators showed up and sat down at the kitchen table. They laid out their papers—agreements to sell—and told the Ruggis to sign. If the Ruggis resisted, the agents warned her, the state would seize the property by eminent domain—but just the farmland. The Ruggis would be left with their house, rendered worthless by its sudden proximity to a toxic dump site.

Despite the threats, Ruggi showed the regulators the door. She then became a full-time activist, joining a farmer-led anti-dredging group called Citizen Environmentalists Against Sludge Encapsulation (Cease). She notified her town about the regulators’ heavy-handed tactics. She wrote to her representatives and testified before Congress about the negative impact of a large-scale PCB cleanup. And she won the day. Without its dump site, New York State had to back off from its cleanup commitment.

But New York had a brilliant idea: passing the buck right back to GE, despite the terms of the settlement, through the new federal law known as Superfund. Officially called the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980, the Superfund legislation empowers the Environmental Protection Agency to pursue whatever chemicals it deems unsafe and to force the “responsible party” to foot the bill for a cleanup, regardless of whether that party was a willful polluter or a good citizen discharging waste with the government’s approval. (Usually, the “responsible party” winds up paying after years of wasteful litigation: one-fourth of Superfund expenses go to “transaction costs,” fees to lawyers and consultants whom even the New York Times once described as “federal officials who spun through Washington’s revolving door to trade their Superfund expertise for private gain.”)

And so in 1984, New York got the EPA to declare the entire 200 miles of Hudson from Fort Edward to New York City a Superfund site. But the EPA also at first decided against dredging the river bottom, deeming it a risky, invasive approach that might stir up more PCBs. In 1989, however, New York appealed the decision, and 13 years later—the wait time alone testifies to federal inefficiency—the EPA finally agreed, calling on GE to conduct extensive dredging.

Its reasons were novel. The concentration of PCBs in the river water had dropped to safe levels, after all. So the EPA, searching for another justification for pursuing massive remediation, settled on PCB accumulation in the river’s fish. PCBs in river water, plants, and sediment could pass in incremental amounts to the fish around them (through ingestion and respiration) and then pass to the people who eat the fish, the EPA reasoned. But here, too, the river was showing stark improvements. In 1975, before the chemicals were banned, the concentration of PCBs in Hudson fish averaged 17.39 parts per million and could go as high as 50.7 parts per million, according to John Cronin, an environmentalist who worries about the dimensions and impact of the dredging project. By 2007, the mean concentration was 0.89 parts per million—well below the two parts per million that the Food and Drug Administration has set for commercially sold fish—and the maximum was 3.56.

Through the calculus of bio-accumulation, however, the EPA has learned to claim that even infinitesimal amounts of PCBs in the environment are major health concerns. A potential exists, says the agency, for PCBs to build up through gradual ingestion, even if that would require a superhuman consumption of a single food source for years on end. This was the argument that finally allowed the EPA to compel the multibillion-dollar cleanup of the Hudson by GE. As Hudson fish were already approaching acceptably safe levels for moderate consumption, the EPA set a new target of 0.05 parts per million in the river’s fish. Such numbers, argued the EPA, would allow for “unrestricted consumption” of Hudson fish by what the agency called “subsistence fishers.” It would be an undeniable achievement to restore the river to its antediluvian glory, with fish safe to pluck and eat at every meal. And the way to achieve that goal, said the EPA, was a massive dredging of the river bottom.

At what cost would such a pristine state be achieved? The dredging in Phase I alone cost General Electric about $500 million. If GE had contested its obligations to dredge, Superfund would have allowed the EPA to conduct the cleanup itself and then collect four times the cost from the company. “If it costs the state $1 billion, we could collect $4 billion, so that’s a pretty heavy stick,” says David King, director of the EPA’s Hudson River field office.

In addition to the $500 million, GE says that it has paid the EPA another $90 million so far to cover the agency’s oversight of the cleanup. In other words, the Superfund program produces windfalls for the government agencies that enforce it at both the federal and state levels. By mandating that GE dredge the Hudson, regulators who oversee the project can submit their own expenses to the company for reimbursement. Indeed, “what propelled the PCB case to the forefront is not just the toxicity of PCBs but also the significant financial resources of General Electric,” Cronin wrote in the New York Times. Superfund only works, needless to say, when there is a viable company to pay for it. (The Hudson site is one of 50 or so Superfund obligations that GE currently faces throughout the country.)

The cost of the EPA’s quest wasn’t just financial. Strolling through Julie Wilson’s daylily garden in Fort Edward last fall, I almost forgot the enormous dewatering facility that the federal government had located next door. This area of farmland, with Vermont’s Green Mountains rising in the distance, can be particularly radiant. Nearby, a steady stream of sailboats with lowered masts floated south from Canada through the last locks of the Champlain Canal into the Hudson. Thanks to regular watering, a mountain of chemical-laden dirt, dredged from the Hudson and still awaiting pickup just over the rise behind Wilson’s flowerpots, was releasing acceptably low levels of dusty contaminants in my direction.

When the facility was in full operation during Phase I, life for Wilson was quite a bit worse. Dredging is a dirty business. Because the river bottom was being disrupted, PCB levels in water, air, and fish all rose dramatically and exceeded federal limits. By every measure, the health of the river and the surrounding community deteriorated, at least temporarily, through the EPA’s intervention. The messiness of the operation was a necessary evil, the agency maintained, the collateral damage of doing good.

Such assurances mean little to Wilson, now 72, as she contemplates the start of Phase II. Even before the processing facility went into high gear, when the neighboring farm was stripped of its topsoil to make way for the construction of the dewatering facility, she had to confront clouds of dust. Her asthmatic daughter still can’t visit on bad days. As he was dying of cancer, Wilson’s husband, James, had to leave the homestead, overcome by the commotion. “There were so many noises, clanging and banging and shouting, motors and unloaders and dump trucks dropping rocks,” Wilson tells me. “You have no idea what it is like. Twenty-four hours a day. It can drive you crazy. The stress level can affect almost every function—cardiac, gastrointestinal, and elimination.” The beeping of the vehicle backup alarms, she says, was the worst.

Wilson’s property value is now down 50 percent. Keeping clients interested in her flower business has also been difficult. “I tried to do garden tours until I could no longer compete with the noise. When you have to raise your voice to shouting, you lose the effect of the tour.” She adds that birds and other wildlife have abandoned her property. “I have such a love of the land here that when I see the site over there, I could just weep.” The sentiment puts her in an unusual position. What do you do when the organization responsible for destroying your environment is none other than the Environmental Protection Agency?

Little stands in the way of Phase II; certainly the EPA itself isn’t likely to cancel the project. Under administrator Lisa Jackson—“the agency’s most progressive chief ever” and “one of the most powerful members of Obama’s Cabinet,” according to an admiring Rolling Stone profile headlined eco-warrior—the EPA has been flexing its regulatory muscle as never before. Because of its own “endangerment finding,” the EPA is attempting to regulate carbon dioxide emissions under the Clean Air Act, a move that could have a profound effect on American industry. The agency has also been raiding New York City public schools in search of PCBs in fluorescent lighting; it recently called for a remediation plan that could, the city initially said, cost up to $1 billion. The EPA is even attempting to impose regulations on the dairy industry by arguing that the Spill Prevention, Control and Countermeasure program, designed in 1970 to prevent oil discharges in waterways, also applies to milk fat spilled on farms.

The agency’s regional administrator in charge of evaluating the Hudson dredging project, Judith Enck, is another eco-warrior. Before taking on her federal post, Enck was head of a New York environmentalist lobby tasked in part with pursuing PCBs. One wonders if an activist—someone who has spun through that “revolving door” described by the New York Times—can be a judicious regulator of a multibillion-dollar project.

The regulators also have a formidable (and tax-exempt) public-relations wing. In 1966, the folksinger Pete Seeger built an antique-style sloop, the Clearwater, to ply the Hudson’s waters and draw attention to its contamination. Since then, Seeger’s environmental group, also called Clearwater, has been joined by Riverkeeper, Scenic Hudson, and the National Resources Defense Council, all of which raise funds by preaching the evils of PCBs.

Nor will GE itself be able to resist the EPA’s plans. Jack Welch, the company’s chairman and CEO from 1981 to 2001, occupied a middle ground, cleaning up the plant sites but arguing that extensive dredging would cause more harm than good. When Jeffrey Immelt, these days a top Obama economic advisor, succeeded Welsh, however, he rebranded the company with the term “ecomagination” to highlight GE’s innovations in green technology. A year later, GE signed on to the EPA’s decision to dredge the Hudson, and in 2005, it filed a consent degree in court to undertake the project. The company did quietly contest the rollout of Phase II, on the grounds that PCB resuspension in the river water during Phase I far exceeded the EPA’s own standards. But just as it pushed down its targets for PCB concentration in fish in order to compel the cleanup, the EPA reset its standards for resuspension, allowing PCB levels in river water to spike above federal safety levels during dredging.

After GE gave me a tour of the dredging operation, I found it difficult to doubt the company’s commitment to the project. Out on the Hudson, our pontoon boat passed by the long row of barges tied up and waiting for the start of Phase II. Downriver, we approached a vessel collecting core samples of sediment to be sent off for an analysis of contamination depth—one of 50,000 data points taken along the waterway. GE divers were rebuilding the pulled-up river bottom, an underwater ecosystem destroyed through the EPA’s mandate, by painstakingly restocking it with 70,000 individual plants, mainly wild celery and American pondweed harvested from local sources.

Once ashore, I looped around to the dewatering facility bordering Julie Wilson’s property. The site was empty and resembled an airless lunar base, with a manicured pile of PCB-laden sediment at the center. The facility’s main task at the time I visited was collecting and processing the rainwater that falls on the site. Not a drop here enters the earth. A sheet of plastic runs beneath the entire facility, collecting the water and feeding it through the same colossal filters used during active dredging to “polish” the water squeezed out of the dredged material.

When Phase II begins, General Electric will again employ 500 workers here and on the river. Once more, Wilson will watch as GE excavates tons of river muck, now buried under 30 years of sediment, and stages it for processing and transportation next to her residential neighborhood. “I view it as creating a new environmental disaster,” Ruggi says, and history suggests that she may be right. In one early dredging attempt, New York State created a PCB dump site at the tip of Rogers Island, just downriver of the plant. That area has now become its own toxic hazard requiring remediation.

“Government looks very good taking corporate USA to task,” Ruggi adds. “It makes great headlines. The sad part is the health of the Hudson loses out. We grow up thinking the government works for us. To come to the realization that it can work against us is shocking.”

Gallery chronicle (May 2011)

In the Use of Others, Daniel G. Hill, Courtesy Norte Maar

THE NEW CRITERION
May 2011

Gallery chronicle
by James Panero

On “In the Use of Others for the Change: A Program of New Ballets by Julia K. Gleich” at the Center for Performance Research, Brooklyn; “Kenneth Noland: Paintings 1958–1968” at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York; and “Structured Color” at D. Wigmore Fine Art, New York.

I know next to nothing about ballet, but that did not stop me from attending the first full-fledged ballet of Bushwick, the alternative arts neighborhood of Brooklyn, in mid-April. I am not ashamed to admit it: New York offers much of which I am ignorant. Fortunately, even if knowledge deepens one’s appreciation of art, good art of any kind does not require an advanced degree to enjoy. I have a rule of thumb I use to evaluate all forms of art I see for the first time. Simply put, if my mind can wander free of my next dental exam or that email I was supposed to send, I consider the art a success.

I did a lot of happy wandering on the night I saw “In the Use of Others for the Change,” the collaborative ballet of Bushwick artists and composers working with the choreographer Julia K. Gleich.[1] One thought was that I was seeing the reincarnation of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Maybe that idea won’t excite everyone as much as it excited me. For a while I have harbored a belief that the groves of Bushwick grow the same special fruit and enjoy the same artistic climate that gave rise to Montparnasse a century ago. The reappearance of the ballet troupe of the Parisian avant-garde would seem to support my theory. And Gleich, as it happens, is only a generation removed from them. One of her teachers was Alexandra Danilova, a star of Diaghilev’s stage.

It is also worth noting that most of Paris in May 1917 did not make it to the opening of “Parade,” one of the most significant artistic collaborations put on by the Ballets Russes, written by Jean Cocteau with sets and costumes by Pablo Picasso, music by Erik Satie, and choreography by Léonide Massine. Likewise, it is safe to say that most of New York did not make it into the fifty-seat auditorium at the Center for Performance Research to see “In the Use of Others” over its three-night run either. Let’s hope this ballet can return for a much longer stay quite soon.

The title of the composition comes from a text by John C. Lilly, a new-ager best known for his development of the deprivation tank, which he used in conjunction with hallucinogenics, and his theories of inter-species communication between humans and dolphins. I often wonder where great art would be without the pseudo-scientists that inspire it. Charlatans either empty one’s wallets or leave one’s underwear atop one’s head. Yet the alchemy of crackpots and cranks, misused in the science of life, often gives life to art. One reason could be that art delivers on what the gurus can only promise: it unmasks and enlivens the senses.

Lilly’s text, from something called “Beliefs Unlimited Exercise,” is as turgid on paper as one might expect. It would be a bad overture if you were looking to kick off inter-species communication with good cocktail conversation and announce: “In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true either is true or becomes true within certain limits, to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are beliefs to be transcended. Hidden from one’s self is a covert set of beliefs that control one’s thinking, one’s actions, and one’s feelings.” And so forth. If I went up to a dolphin and said that, I doubt that dolphin would want to talk, and I wouldn’t blame the dolphin.

But art is art. As a thematic centerpiece to this collaborative ballet, the text worked quite well. The aesthetics of Bushwick may be do-it-yourself, but I doubt much would get done without “the use of others” to support this self-sustaining, blissed-out artistic neighborhood, where artists regularly show one another’s work in their studios and galleries.

The ballet’s impresario, the curator and gallery owner Jason Andrew, is a dancer himself who has enjoyed a long professional collaboration with Gleich, his former teacher. At this performance, the two danced an opening piece, “Ghost (For Martin),” created a decade ago but now a requiem to Gleich’s brother, who died the weekend of its premiere. The other dances of the evening grew out of a retreat last summer called Camp Pocket U(topia) in Rouses Point, New York. Gleich came with her dancers Claire McKeveny and Mary Jane Ward, who developed the second piece of the evening, “Summer in RP,” a work that focused on the classical range of the troupe.

After intermission came “In the Use of Others,” a ballet in three movements. Austin Thomas along with the artists Kevin Regan and Andrew Hurst each supplied designs, and Audra Wolowiec added sound to Thomas’s program. Collaborations work when artists wander together, taken in by each other’s art. Perhaps Bushwick has a particular sensibility that tends to be less armored, less ironic than other scenes, and therefore more willing to give over one’s work to a collaborative end. For “Parade,” Cocteau said that his “dream was to hear the music of Picasso’s guitars.” Here, through the addition of each artist’s work, in the form of projections, readings, and mechanical and recorded sounds, the dancers became the art, with images projected on them and their silhouettes carved out of the projections on the back wall.

The collaborations exposed new depths of each of the artists’ practices: angular dances accentuated the “vectors” of Thomas’s stenciled works; dancers gradually entered the stage as Kevin Regan read, repeated, and echoed Lilly’s text in the mantra-like use of mirroring and repetition; dancers whipped up a frenzy for the cyclone of debris in Hurst’s collages and assemblages. For the culmination, or “decumulation” as it was called, Hurst himself performed a harmonica blues riff as he entered and exited the stage, with a lone dancer snapping alongside him.

Certainly there were shortcomings. Thomas had an idea to feature two of the dancers stenciling their own work at the corners of the stage, but this couldn’t be easily seen by the audience, and the activity was not very interesting to observe anyway. Hurst’s third of the ballet also took up two-thirds of the time. With five middle parts in his second of four parts, it grew long in the tooth. Still, for all of the rigor and labor and unrealized ideas packed into “In the Use of Others,” Hurst’s soulful harmonica finale was a favorite—a perfect unwinding and an open ending. He directed this sendoff at his colleagues on stage as well as to the audience, offering a sweet bridge to the next collaboration.

I found the lengthy catalogue essay to “Kenneth Noland: Paintings 1958–1968,” written by Paul Hayes Tucker, to be particularly illuminating.[2] Tucker occupies the Paul Hayes Tucker Distinguished Professor of Art chair at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and he credits a team of eight researchers in contributing to his twenty-four-page essay. Their singular aim, it seemed, was to liberate Noland from his close association with the critic Clement Greenberg: “Greenberg’s influence—as a brilliant but ultimately limiting formalist—is only one of many reasons why Noland’s art looked the way it did and why it assumed its deserved place at the forefront of America’s contemporary art production.”

I compliment Tucker for striving to uncover every possible alternative influence to Noland’s bull’s-eye confections: the military insignias Noland observed as a glider pilot training for combat in World War II; Sputnik and the space race and the threat of nuclear war; the circular shapes found in the work of Robert Delaunay, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Arthur Dove; the branding of Tide detergent; and the logo of Black Mountain College. Tucker also suggests that Noland’s famous visit to see Helen Frankenthaler’s stain painting “Mountain and Sea,” facilitated through Greenberg, may have been less significant than we believe because he and his fellow artist Morris Louis did not immediately take up the technique themselves.

Perhaps the art market demands the exorcism of Clem, but I still find his singular influence to be an argument in support of Noland’s place in art history. Is it possible to think of Noland without recalling that iconic photograph of Greenberg observing one of the artist’s circles, with Greenberg’s head and torso cocked to the side as if being spun around by the design?

The other problem with removing Greenberg is that this elevates Noland’s other big influence, Wilhelm Reich. An Austrian protegé of Sigmund Freud, Reich believed in the unseen universal forces of “Orgones,” libidinal energies named after the orgasm that could be harnessed through “Orgone Boxes” and used to control the weather. Noland, who like many artists was in Reichian therapy for years, said he became “immersed in it” in 1958 and had Orgone Boxes built at his homes in suburban Washington and later in Vermont. Since Reich eventually was shut down by the government for operating a sex-based fraud, it says something about Greenberg’s current status that one’s association with a quack is better than being connected with modernism’s greatest American critic.

Greenberg was on to something with Noland. At Mitchell-Innes & Nash, the paintings remained inexplicable, delicate, glowing creations, deceptively simple. I found them to be especially intriguing large and up close, bending around the corners of the eye. The diamond-shaped striped painting Orange and Blue (circa 1966) seemed to compress like a spring when I walked around it. In its texture and detail, Earthen Bound (1960) demonstrated Noland’s singular command of the staining technique, cooler and more unreal than what Frankenthaler or Louis would do. Today Noland’s ethereal orbs would probably have little effect on the weather, but I bet they convey a lot more energy than anything Reich ever dreamed up, and Clement Greenberg deserves much of the credit for their creation.

Last month D. Wigmore Fine Art, the smart gallery located on 57th Street, offered up a survey of American Op Art that seemed to tie in to much of what is happening in contemporary Chelsea.[3] I have a feeling that art is getting more optical again, with work that is allowed to stimulate the eye rather than merely tickle the irony receptors. I am still waiting for the artist Lori Ellison to be given a big show of her obsessive little patterned drawings. The Pace Gallery has just featured its second exhibition of the wonderfully precise work of James Siena, now a fastidious family man, but one who came to Op through psychedelica, grotesque doodling, and the 1980s alternative art scene.

The artists at Wigmore meanwhile, those original Op technicians who mainly came through Josef Albers and the color theories of the Bauhaus, might have always been known to initiates, but they feel ready for a general rediscovery. This time around, Julian Stanczak and Richard Anuszkiewicz, the unpronounceable masters of the flickering color line, might take a cue from Tadasuke Kuwayama, which the artist simplified to Tadasky, and come up with better names. Is “Gilbert and George” taken? And Tadasky himself, who is still working at his own remarkable circular patterns, provides a counterpoint to the circles of Noland. Tadaskys are Nolands minus Orgones. Stripped bare of mid-century hocus-pocus, Tadasky’s circles seem more present, more current, than Noland’s epic creations half a century ago.

[1] “In the Use of Others for the Change: A Programof New Ballets by Julia K. Gleich” was on view at the Center for Performance Research, Brooklyn, from April 14 though April 16, 2011.

[2] “Kenneth Noland: Paintings 1958–1968” was on view at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York, from March 17 through April 30, 2011

[3] “Structured Color” was on view at D. Wigmore Fine Art, New York, from February 8 through April 22, 2011.

Gallery chronicle (April 2011)

Peter Reginato, Drunken Angel, courtesy of the artist

THE NEW CRITERION
April 2011

Gallery chronicle
by James Panero

On “Peter Reginato: Polychrome” at Heidi Cho Gallery, “Mel Kendrick: Works from 1995 to Now” at David Nolan Gallery & “Thornton Willis” at Elizabeth Harris Gallery.

Sculpture has a weight problem, and the laws of nature are rarely kind. Gravity never gives up trying to tug matter to the ground. How sculptors confront this force often determines the power of their work. Sometimes sculptors play up the heftiness. The minimalist Richard Serra built his career around work that menaces viewers with teetering sheets of metal. More often, sculptors aim to overcome gravity’s pull. Rather than pressing down, their work reaches up, with an energy that seems greater than the scale and materials might allow. Occasionally, sculptures soar without leaving the ground.

The sculptor Peter Reginato came to his practice by way of the hot rod, that energized American demotic craft. Born in Dallas, Texas in 1945, Reginato grew up outside Oakland, California in the heart of postwar car culture. He moved to New York in the mid-1960s, around the time he started making abstract sculpture. He never forgot the lessons of the Kustom Kar Kommandos, to borrow the title of Kenneth Anger’s 1965 cult film. Speed and invention, with a flash of machismo, became his hallmarks.

Starting out, Reginato dabbled in primary structures—another minimalist crystallizing the avant-garde into a weighty fortress of solitude. Yet he soon broke ranks, developing ever more whimsical, maximal composites of surrealistic planes, flattened metal sheets cut into amoebic shapes, fastened together, and painted in a riot of colors. Today he continues to work in the auto-body style of welded steel, a pyrotechnician with a helmet and a blow-torch building explosions in space, loud and indecorous, often with suggestions of leaves and figures, and titles like “Funk Happens."

In 2009 Reginato exhibited an iteration of his work at the Heidi Cho Gallery in Chelsea that was something of a breakthrough, a clearing out of the body shop and the start of something new. Here, instead of building works out of an assembly of steel planes, he “drew” the outlines of his recurring shapes with metal poles, polished rather than painted to a shine. The result lightened the load of the sculptures to a cloud-like state, with shapes now formed out of the negative space between the metal.

The work did more than shed pounds. It also took on a new energy in the way the eye ran over it. Rather than zero-in on the center of the cut forms, the eye observes the lines around it, following the bends and curves of the rods. The effect reminded me of Gjon Mili’s famous 1949 photographs of Picasso in his studio working with a “light pencil,” where he traces the outline of figures with a flashlight in the space between him and the camera, a process captured through the extended exposure of the film. In both cases, the eye looks over the long line from start to finish.

Since 2009 Reginato has been adding to his open forms, customizing and tricking out the factory models. Now again at Heidi Cho, we can see the conclusion, or rather the latest stopover, of the process.

Back is the color, lending this show its title of “Polychrome.” As in that Picasso picture, Reginato draws and paints in space, here captured in steel rather than photographic emulsion. An artist friend suggested that color makes Reginato’s work unmistakable. I agree. Even more than form, color is his signature. He shares a sensibility for the handling of color with his peers of the 1970s loft generation. Gestural brushwork humanizes the coldness of the steel. It’s not surprising that Ronnie Landfield, the great lyrical abstractionist, has been a friend of Reginato’s since his California days.

In the sculptures now at Heidi Cho, several of them more figure-like than usual, the blended colors appear like the lights reflecting off a figure on a stage, bright and flashy, and sometimes campy and garish.[1] In each sculpture, Reginato starts with an assembly of planes cut in whimsical shapes, much like his older work, but then adds the rods of bent metal. Hip Shaken Mama (2010) comes on like a 1 a.m. set performer out to grab attention at all costs. The piece also serves as a case study in the rhythm that Reginato can attach to form, with each part suggesting a different sort of movement. The zig-zag of a narrow strip of body is a tight jitter. The curve at the waist is more a sashay. The rounded bumps of the left leg is a toe tap. The curving metal poles of the right leg and arm are limbs circling around so quickly we detect the movements more than the forms.

The larger Drunken Angel (2010) steals the show. The work is almost all bent tube, and there’s a mess of it. Rather than merely outlining shape, the rods here trace out movement. The lower half never quite comes together. Too much armature gets used up in a base that seems needlessly clunky. The upper half is a different story. The wings of the figure are spiraling, circulating curves of wire. Just below is another vortex of wire, the air spinning beneath. The figure appears to arch back at the shoulders, chest out. An additional pole curves off the head and back down to the floor, a final flourish that I found distracting up close, if not a little dangerous. Once I backed away it made more sense. I no longer bothered to wonder about each strange, expressive part. After all, it’s unwise to question an angel too much, especially at liftoff, especially one that’s drunk.

Mel Kendrick is a sculptor of process, but his product was the big hit two years ago in Madison Square Park in Manhattan. In the center oval, the park conservancy temporarily installed five enormous new works, all of the same series called “Markers.” The forms were unmistakable Kendrick, shapes he had been working on in wood for several years.

A number of these, in much smaller scale, went on view at David Nolan’s former Soho gallery space in 2007. Each began with a cube of wood, which Kendrick cut and cored. Through this process, he extracted an internal section, a constructivist folly of interlocking cylinders. He left the outer cube intact enough to stay square. Kendrick then placed the core on top of the cube, a weighty figure held up on a hollow base of its former self. The pieces had strict internal logic, but I found them a little smug. They were more process than product, slightly too satisfied in their own art smarts.

For the park, Kendrick enlarged these shapes to over ten feet tall. The cube base became human-sized, like a sliced and diced version of Tony Smith’s six-foot Die. Kendrick also enlivened his surface by creating the work out of alternating layers of black and white poured concrete, like a modernist fantasy of thirteenth-century Siena. With this surface treatment, the works took on a new sense of play. But the real play came after installation. Throughout the run, kids were all over them. They crawled through the carved-up bases and peeked through the holes. They moved through the work the same ways our adult eyes looked it over—usually from a little more distance.

Now at David Nolan’s Chelsea space, a survey of earlier works reveals how Kendrick arrived at his monumental park accomplishment.[2] Much like the excellent arte povera artist Giuseppe Penone, Kendrick has a feel for the logic of wood. In Plug and Shell (2000), he carved up a section of tree trunk, here following the wood grain of the limbs and preserving the vestigial stumps. Rather than stacking the results, he positioned the two parts side by side, the denuded wood on the left and its knobbly bark to the right. He also placed them on alternating bases, one built of stacked cinder-blocks, the other of four metal poles—one solid, the other hollow.

Other pieces have a similar binary relationship, with Kendrick working through different finishes and the question of how precisely to connect the two parts. The two sides of Plug (2000) are both stained black, with the shape of the core now less connected to the wood grain of its shell. In BDF (1995), the two parts are identical forms of assembled sticks, one a rubber cast of the other.

I found the towering Black Trunk (1995), the largest work in the show, to be the most compelling. Here Kendrick took a nearly ten-foot section of large tree, sliced it in smaller pieces, and carved out the center. He then restacked the now hollow tree and carved out a series of dovetail joints. Left open, the joints afforded keyhole glimpses of the interior. They also hinted at a sense of instability, as if someone last minute forgot a very important structural component and a bump could send it toppling over. Yet despite the theater of its display, the dominant feeling was one of arboreal mystery. The sculpture felt like an old-growth giant somewhere deep in the woods. I liked its expressiveness. A large rubbing of the trunk that Kendrick made on paper, displayed on the gallery wall beside it, maintained the binary logic of the show. It also spoke to the more poetic desire to preserve a record of the tree, something to take back out of the forest.

The painter Thornton Willis is a friend. I mention that less in the interest of full disclosure and more just for bragging rights. Willis is the embodiment of true painterly feel—a feel that is actually felt. In his hands the School of Hofmann gets schooled in old-time religion and the healing touch of the primitive South, where Willis was born to an itinerant minister’s family in Pensacola in 1936. An evangelical for American abstraction, Willis is now working at his creative peak, quite an accomplishment for an artist who has been producing significant paintings since the 1960s.

One of the qualities I admire in Willis is his ability to change. When other artists would turn on the auto-pilot, he moves on to a new idiom. A few years ago it was prismatic triangles. Then in 2009 he left that for the lattice. His bright colors and dexterous paint-handling created an undulating sea of shallows and deeps, with parts coming forward and others receding in an energized surface. I contributed the catalogue essay for that exhibition.

Now at Elizabeth Harris Gallery for his third solo show there since 2006, Willis is on to his latest “primal, visionary, even shamanistic” accomplishment, as Lance Esplund writes in the catalogue essay.[3] A painter in the city, Willis translates the skyline into a Tetris-like puzzle, giving us cosmopolitan titles like Gotham Towers (2009) and Streetwise (2010). Yet as in his Homage to Mondrian (2009), Willis is more interested in the boogie-woogie of Broadway than in the literal streetscape.

Given the relative complexity of these recent shapes compared to the simpler squares and screens of the lattice series, the paintings with the most saturated, solid forms were the most successful. The more dissolving brushwork that made his earlier work so compelling couldn’t quite hold these newest shapes together. Juggernaut (2010) was therefore the standout. Not only were the shapes rich in color, but Willis also separated them with heavy black lines. For all the talk of color, Willis knows his black. Rather than lock things down, these heavy lines gave the work its lift, as if forming shadows cast by the colorful shapes, rooftops in the twilight of a summer afternoon. Out of a puzzle of interlocking planes, suddenly there was a mountainscape of the city’s vitality inviting us up and up and up.

[1] “Peter Reginato: Polychrome” opened at Heidi Cho Gallery, New York, on March 17 and remains on view through April 16, 2011.

[2] “Mel Kendrick: Works from 1995 to Now” opened at David Nolan Gallery, New York, on March 17 and remains on view through April 30, 2011.

[3] “Thornton Willis” opened at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York, on March 17 and remains on view through April 23, 2011