Put the pedal to the metal to save pedestrians' lives

Noshat Nahian didn’t have to die.

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
January 16, 2013

Put the pedal to the metal to save pedestrians' lives
But 'Vision Zero' is a shared responsibility; don't leave it to de Blasio and Bratton alone
by James Panero

Crossing the street shouldn’t cost you your life. But that’s just what happened to two New Yorkers last Friday evening, blocks away and within an hour of each other on the Upper West Side.

Alexander Shear, a 73-year-old father of two, was walking to dinner when a tour bus ran him over as he crossed at 96th St. and Broadway. The bus dragged his body to Amsterdam Ave. before horrified witnesses were able to hail down the driver.

A half-hour later, Dr. Richard Stock, a radiation oncologist, was holding the hand of his 9-year-old son, Cooper, when a taxi making a left turn from 97th St. onto West End Ave. struck both of them in the crosswalk. Cooper’s body was crushed when the cab rolled over him, according to a witness account, and Stock cradled his son as he bled out on the street.

For a city of walkers, New York has long allowed drivers to dominate its streets. The result has been a tragic disregard for public safety. In 2012, according to police data, motorists killed 150 pedestrians in the city and injured more than 11,000. Annual totals declined over the Bloomberg years, but that’s small comfort to the thousands whose lives were affected.

Many of these crashes took the lives of children. A study by Transportation Alternatives and the Drum Major Institute reports that being struck by a car is the most common cause of injury-related death for city children.

Last February, a truck killed 6-year-old Amar Diarrassouba in a crosswalk in East Harlem. Last June, 4-year-old Ariel Russo was walking with her grandmother on W. 97th St. near Amsterdam Ave. when a teenager in an SUV, who was fleeing police, jumped the curb and struck them both, seriously injuring the grandmother and killing Ariel. In December, a truck killed 8-year-old Noshat Nahian in a crosswalk in Queens.

On Wednesday, Mayor de Blasio, Police Commissioner Bill Bratton and other officials promised a new, “comprehensive road map” to eliminate deadly crashes. It’s inspired by a movement called Vision Zero — with the goal of eliminating traffic-related death and serious injury.

The mayor formed a task force, due to report back to him in a month, and Bratton has devoted more resources and manpower to combatting traffic fatalities.

Good. Urgent action, with follow-through, is in order.

The first step is aggressive policing of traffic laws. Even in cases of serious pedestrian injury and death, law enforcement has rarely charged drivers with serious crimes. According to Streetsblog, nearly half of all drivers who take the life of a pedestrian or motorist in New York do not even receive a citation for careless driving.

In Albany, police unions have stood in the way of allowing speed cameras on city streets. After a decadelong battle, the first cameras have only recently been installed around a handful of school zones in a five-year pilot program. De Blasio wants more, and said that those already in place would immediately start issuing tickets.

The second step is redesigning traffic laws to reduce the number of vehicles cruising the city — and to redraw the streets to take into account their full uses by drivers, bikers and pedestrians.

De Blasio plans to push for more residential streets to come down to a 20-mph speed limit, and that can make a difference.

The most dangerous places for pedestrians are not a mystery. In 2008, an extensive study conducted by the Upper West Side Streets Renaissance campaign identified the very corners and very turns where Alexander Shear and Cooper Stock lost their lives, recommending traffic calming measures to slow cars down.

These are vitally important steps. But ultimately, there’s a third — and for this, the onus is shared. Creating safer roads means changing the behavior of those who use them — to ensure that those who speed, or drive carelessly, or even, as bicyclists and pedestrians, veer into traffic, keep one another in mind.

To get to Vision Zero, we must all rethink our relationship to shared space and put safety first, even if it costs us a few extra minutes on the road.

Joan Thorne's Musical Paintings

Joan Thorne, Anada, 2013; oil on canvas, 59 x 50"

James writes:

One of abstract painting’s earliest interests was the depiction of sound. Now at Sideshow through Sunday, Joan Thorne explores this legacy with a finely tuned suite of work.

Like the recent sculptures of Frank Stella, which visualized Scarlatti, Thorne’s abstractions have an ear for form and color. Her paintings are composed of jagged percussions, swirling strings, and radiating winds. She then lays down a melody line in the squiggles and shapes that whirl above these forms. It seems only appropriate that, some three decades ago, one of Thorne's paintings became a print and poster for a musical series at Lincoln Center. 

Joan Thorne, Orchia, 2013; oil on canvas, 55 x 63"

Thorne’s handling of the brush can be like a baton of color. She is a product of the Soho studio scene of the 1970s, and it shows in her layered approach to these canvases. This latest show is also a tribute to Richard Timperio, the owner of Sideshow, for reminding us of both the historical and contemporary achievements of this group of painters who continue to produce important work.

If there is a complaint in this latest series, however, it that some of the arrangements can seem flat. The squiggles and jags can move from formula to formulaic. Several of the paintings here, such as Ananda and Orchia, are symphonic. Other variations, such as Bagan and Naga, are easy listening.

Coming off the successes of this latest show, Thorne should turn up the volume. Her paintings are ready to sing.

Additional images from Structure and Imagery-

“Joan Thorne: Recent Paintings” opened at Sideshow, Brooklyn, on October 12 and remains on view through November 10, 2013.

Taking It Beyond the Street

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
November 5, 2013

Taking It Beyond the Street
by James Panero

When the U.K.-based graffiti artist known as Banksy began a month-long "residency on the streets of New York" at the start of October, I was less than enthusiastic. New York has a long history with graffiti, after all, and the memories are not altogether pleasant. In the 1970s and '80s, as gangs competed to vandalize every square inch of streetscape and subway line with "tags," graffiti became the symbol of a dying metropolis. "A neighborhood that has succumbed to graffiti," the urban critic Heather Mac Donald recently wrote in City Journal, "telegraphs to the world that social and parental control there has broken down."

Similarly, New York's newly scrubbed appearance over the past two decades reflects its urban renaissance. So the prospect of welcoming an out-of-town graffiti artist, even the one behind "Exit Through the Gift Shop," the Oscar-nominated graffiti documentary, irked those who see street art as a form of vandalism. "Nobody's a bigger supporter of the arts than I am," said New York's mayor, Michael Bloomberg, at a press conference when asked about the celebrity visitor. "You running up to somebody's property or public property and defacing it is not my definition of art."

But throughout the past month, Banksy hatred proved to be even more elusive than the artist himself, who despite repeated efforts could neither be tracked down nor caught in the act of creation. With each passing day, as he deployed a new wall stencil or performance piece somewhere in the five boroughs, it became harder not to see his residency as a New York love-bombing run. With his exploits spread through every form of mass and social media, he dominated the news—even during a busy election season—to become a topic of discussion, an object of fascination and a cause célèbre.

Certainly Banksy's residency, which he called "Better Out Than In," will be studied for the brilliance of its marketing strategy, with a guerrilla campaign that was well-attuned to the new economy. As each work became authenticated through his own website and Instagram account, which announced their general locations, his creations turned into an urban scavenger hunt. Crowds attracted even more crowds, cameraphones in hand. Sometimes the assemblies became so dense that all you could see was a cascade of selfies around an otherwise neglected brick wall.

And even as he managed to remain unseen, Banksy revealed himself to be an artist with a particularly effective voice. With the cleverness of Marcel Duchamp, the humor of Henny Youngman and the precision of Walter White, he transcended his medium, elevating the genre of street art while at the same time questioning the scourge of tags.

Banksy's first order of business was to confront the notion that street art must blight other people's property. Unlike those taggers who derive their significance from repetition—being "all city" was the goal of the graffiti artists in the 1983 documentary "Style Wars"—Banksy's work was minimally invasive. Taggers want to be everywhere. Banksy was almost nowhere. While traditional graffiti sets out to be unavoidable, Banksy would have been unlocatable—a couple inches of paint on the base of a wall in Bedford-Stuyvesant—were it not for his online clues.

He also created work that property owners largely embraced. Rather than call the cops, most saw the art as a gift on their doorstep, either protecting it with fences, guards, ropes or plexiglass, or removing it and bringing it inside, as the Hustler Club did for the portrait of a lonely-hearted man painted on its roller gate. Banksy turned the graffiti aesthetic on its head while throwing into relief the commodification of art. He transformed a $50 thrift-store landscape into a $615,000 canvas by inserting a satirical Nazi figure, which he returned as a donation to Housing Works.

In an email interview published in the Village Voice last month, Banksy distanced himself from "vandalism made by part-timers and trust-fund kids." In addition to the mayor, graffiti taggers came to be Banksy's most ardent detractors, angling to deface his work as soon as it went up. "I used to think other graffiti writers hated me because I used stencils," Banksy wrote, "but they just hate me."

Rather than cover the city in paint, Banksy's imaginative choice of locations and use of negative space brought out the wonders of the urban landscape. On the Upper West Side, the silhouette of a boy with a mallet converted a red standpipe and fire bell into a carnival amusement. In Williamsburg, two stenciled figures re-envisioned a bricked-over archway as the moon bridge of a Japanese tea garden. In East New York, a broken signpost became the work of a busy beaver.

Thirty works in 30 days is a tall order for any artist, especially an undercover one without apparent institutional support. The performance pieces that he arranged—a meat truck of squeaking stuffed animals or a Grim Reaper riding a bumper car—generally lacked the restrained simplicity of his stencil work.

Nevertheless, Banksy succeeded in elevating the discussion of street art through his New York run. It was an outcome that was far from accidental for a methodical technician well-versed in art history. As an artist whose website begins with a quote from Cézanne—"all pictures painted inside, in the studio, will never be as good as those done outside"—Banksy sees himself as an extension of a larger modernist tradition. The self-deprecating "audio guide" he created for his website put his work in a museum context even as he mocked its institutional trappings, all the time quoting from John Keats, John Steinbeck and the English poet William Ernest Henley (whom the announcer describes as "the great poet Wikipedia").

"Outside is where art should live, amongst us," Banksy asserted in the final day's audio guide. "Don't we want to live in a world made of art, not just decorated by it?" With free art that proved to be as resonant as a museum blockbuster, he made it hard for me to say no.