Not Like Ike

Model of the Eisenhower Memorial looking at Independence Ave. GEHRY PARTNERS, LLP

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
November 13, 2014

Not Like Ike
by James Panero

Plans for the Eisenhower Memorial have turned into another Washington boondoggle.

Imagine if the great Lincoln Memorial had been designed today. No longer would we feature our 16th president enthroned in a Doric temple. No more would we contend with an off-putting set of stairs as we strain to look up at cold, noninteractive marble.

Instead, Lincoln could be brought down to our size. In an immersive multimedia environment, tapping the latest technologies to recall log-cabin life, here we might help Lincoln as a child contend with his humble beginnings. The native vegetation of Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois could be planted on site, part of a LEED-certified green drainage plan. Through the Lincoln E-Memorial app, visitors could test their strength against the famous rail splitter through a game that posts scores directly to Twitter (hashtag: #RailedIt). Just be sure to duck when visiting the “Ford’s Theatre Experience.”

Thankfully, there is little risk of seeing the Lincoln Memorial recast this way. For Marian Anderson, Martin Luther King Jr. and many others, it has served as one of the most famous backdrops of the past century despite its antiquated marble technology. Yet since 1999, Washington’s master planners have been at work on another presidential memorial on the National Mall—for Dwight D. Eisenhower—that will pursue the opposite of the tried and true: a plan that was touted in its 2008 prospectus as a “21st Century memorialization,” using “new avenues” and “the widest possible range of innovative concepts and ideas,” with a “very significant electronic component,” leading to a “new vision for memorialization.”

National memorials have a history of long gestation and partisan controversy. Even the Lincoln Memorial, designed by Henry Bacon with sculpture by Daniel Chester French, completed in 1922, saw its share of criticism. Yet in this classical city, in hindsight, Washington’s traditional monuments have stood the test of time. So why must new mean “new”?

The congressionally authorized Eisenhower Commission certainly believes it got “new” in Frank Gehry, its chosen architect. With a proposal that subverts many of the classically based traditions of memorial design, the core of Gehry’s plan is the periphery: a 447-foot-long metal screen, suspended between 80-foot-tall columns, interwoven with images of trees. “The setting for Eisenhower Square,” reads the Commission website, “will be framed by transparent stainless steel tapestries, which depict the plains of Kansas, representing Eisenhower’s humble beginnings.” This device would serve as the backdrop for the sculptural program playing out in front of it.

In the initial proposal, since amended to include a greater cast of characters, this program centered on a statue of Eisenhower as a barefoot boy. The memorial would also be designed around an app that “will enable visitors to view historical footage, speeches, and events within the context of the physical memorial through augmented reality.”

Should we be surprised that the plan has become more bogged down than the Battle of the Bulge? The design has received widespread criticism—from Justin Shubow of the National Civic Art Society to Sam Roche of the group Right by Ike, not to mention members of Eisenhower’s own family—that has resonated with lawmakers and the general public. The site would also imperil the historic L’Enfant Plan by overlaying Maryland Avenue, between the Air and Space Museum and the Department of Education. In the New Yorker last year, Jeffrey Frank said the design “has managed to achieve something rare in Washington: in true bipartisan spirit, almost everyone hates it.”

This past summer, congressional members of the Committee on Natural Resources issued a 60-page report damning the project as a “five-star folly.” It is easy to see why. Congress has already appropriated $65 million for a project that would cost $100 million or more. Yet without a stone—or screen—in place, $41 million of this funding has already been spent or obligated, including almost $16.4 million for the designer and $13.3 million for administrative support. A $1.4 million fundraising effort slated to generate $35 million in private support has taken in less than $500,000. Meanwhile, the Commission maintains nine full-time employees and six full-and part-time contractors.

Beset by criticism, Congress has rightly halted future funding, some commissioners have resigned and calls have been mounting to scrap the Gehry plan altogether. Bruce Cole, the former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities who was appointed to the Commission a year ago, remains a skeptic. “A great memorial is an exclamation point, not a question mark,” he recently testified.

Yet led by its chairman, Rocco Siciliano, the Commission has dug in. Recent approvals by the National Capital Planning Commission and the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts have been hailed by Gehry defenders as the green light, even if the project has only enough gas to idle at the curb. Of course the bureaucrats behind the wheel still get their salaries. That’s right: Commission staffers will continue to draw down millions of tax dollars regardless of whether anything gets built.

Yet a greater force than self-interest has propelled the memorial to this point: the sometimes blinding mythology of the “new,” where widespread criticism can be mistaken for vindication, and pushback ennobles a self-anointed vanguard. Mr. Siciliano and others may believe they are following the example of the Vietnam Memorial, an unconventional design that overcame initial controversy to win the public over. But criticism alone does not authenticate avant-garde success. An unconventional design may just be bad, and design à la mode risks falling from fashion.

Eisenhower deserves a great national memorial, and it would be wrong to see this battle reduced to a mandate for one style over another. But the critics are right to demand something genuinely revolutionary—a design that is not simply “new,” but new, and that successfully communicates the essence of the man it claims to honor.

After all, here is the Supreme Allied Commander who oversaw the most complex amphibious assault in history. He liberated Europe, went on to become the president of Columbia University and the commander of NATO. As the American president who ended the Korean War, he ushered in a period of peacetime prosperity, connected the country through the Interstate Highway System, created NASA and the agency that would invent the Internet, while pushing civil-rights legislation and sending federal troops to desegregate the schools. When he died in 1969, he was buried, by his request, in his green World War II jacket in an $80 government-issue casket. Does this say “8-story-high, $100 million metal screen” to you?

A visit to Dead Horse Bay

James writes:

New York is constantly renewing, tearing down, paving over, rebuilding, but you can experience the crunch of history under your feet at Dead Horse Bay, Brooklyn. At different times, this place once known as Barren Island, isolated in Jamaica Bay, served the city in a variety of marginal capacities.

In the nineteenth-century, Dutch flour mills gave way to plants for rendering the city's horse population, from which the cove on its south-west flank gets its name.

In the late 1920s, Barren Island and surrounding estuaries were blanketed with fill to create Floyd Bennett Field, New York City's first airport. In 1937, Robert Moses extended Flatbush Avenue across the remaining resident community of Barren Island to connect Brooklyn to the new Jacob Riis Park on the Rockaways via the Marine Parkway Bridge.  

At some point, Moses arranged to have city garbage deposited as fill to the west of Flatbush Avenue over what remained of Dead Horse Bay (in the area to the lower right of this photograph). 

Howard Warren, as a teacher at Trinity School, was among the first to study the area in depth and believes the dumping occurred during an intense but brief period in 1953, which helps explain the consistency of style in many of the glass items that now wash up on shore. Warren also has the only permit to take artifacts from the beach and disparages those who take sizable spoils from what is now federally protected parkland.

A visit to Dead Horse Bay brings this history to the surface. The area is best accessed at low tide. 

There is a Q35 bus stop next to the trail head, as well as car parking in the southern entrance to Floyd Bennett Field, which like all of Jamaica Bay is now part of the Gateway National Recreation Area, maintaned by the National Parks Service. (Heading south, turn left at the last light before the Marine Parkway Bridge and find parking just past the gate). The head of the well-maintained trail is across Flatbush Avenue and not quite apparent at the crosswalk, but meets the road just a few yards south of the light. The hike in is a beautiful quarter mile or so. When the trail comes to a three way intersection, take the  path to the right for Dead Horse Bay. When reaching the water, turn left. A few yards on is "Bottle Beach."

Gallery Chronicle (October)

From "State of the Art" on view at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art: Isabella Kirkland, Emergent, 2011. Oil and alkyd on polyester over panel. 60 x 48 in.

THE NEW CRITERION
October 2014

Gallery Chronicle
by James Panero

On “State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now” at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; “Ellen Letcher: Gaslight” at Hansel and Gretel Picture Garden Pocket Utopia; “Amy Feldman: High Sign” at Blackston; “Katherine Taylor: New Sculptures” at Skoto Gallery; and “Robert Otto Epstein: Sleeveless” at 99¢ Plus Gallery.

Everyone knows there is more to contemporary American art than the Whitney Biennial. The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, which opened in 2011 in Bentonville, Arkansas, wanted to find out for itself just how much more. Since 2013, the museum president Don Bacigalupi and the curator Chad Alligood logged 100,000 miles visiting nearly a thousand artists’ studios across the country. Their discoveries have now been brought together in “State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now,” the museum’s first of what I hope will be a recurring series of contemporary surveys, and the reason why my art season began with a flight to Fayetteville and a short taxi-ride to Bentonville.1

As opposed to the slick knowingness of big-city surveys (largely populated by coastal artists and the curators’ friends and former students), the Crystal Bridges assembly is a diverse, heterogeneous, and creaky affair. In some cases, especially in the first exhibition room, the squeakiness is audible, as the mechanics below Lalu, a sculpture by the Knoxville-based John Douglas Powers, competes against the more sublime vision, above, of automatic reeds waving against a projected sky.

The entrance to "State of the Art": Andy DuCett, Mom Booth, 2013-14. Interactive installation. Photo: Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

Rather than seek out the hollow and detached, the Crystal Bridges curators went for the uplifting and engaged—at times too uplifting and engaged—as no rhinestone was left unturned in an exhibition that embraces sentimentality and even tackiness (of the unironic kind). The best work here is the meticulous, the realistic, and the strong-willed—art that tends to get overlooked as overwrought and under-intellectualized. I was especially struck by the totemic juju sculptures of Vanessa L. German, the verdant nature scenes of Isabella Kirkland, and the Renaissance revivalism of Jamie Adams. The Brooklyn-based Meg Hitchcock, whose intricate collages of religious texts I featured in this space last season, represents the aspirations of Crystal Bridges at its best.

From "State of the Art": Vanessa L. German, White Naptha Soap or, Contemporary Lessons in Shapeshifting, 2013. Mixed media assemblage. 55 x 15 x 26 in. Courtesy and Photo: Pavel Zoubok Gallery, New York

It is impossible not to walk away from this survey without additional suggestions for the mix: I would like to have seen more of those painters who identify as classical realists, routinely balkanized from the contemporary discussion, as well as the military and civilian illustrators who document the recovery of wounded soldiers and sailors through the Joe Bonham Project. Nevertheless, with “State of the Art” Crystal Bridges has fulfilled a mission to serve as a bridge for the art of the United States, connecting the wide range of the two-million-odd artists working in what I might call America’s outer-outer borough scene.

Installation from Ellen Letcher: Hansel and Gretel Picture Garden Pocket Utopia

The artist Austin Thomas, whose Pocket Utopia was one of the first galleries in Bushwick before its relocation to the Lower East Side, has now made the unexpected jump to Chelsea, pairing with the gallery Hansel and Gretel Picture Garden. She has brought her stable of Bushwick artists with her, promising to deliver some genuinely advanced work to the edges of those blue-chip hedgerows. Her first Chelsea-based exhibition features Ellen Letcher, an artist of the Bushwick old guard, who until recently ran her own pioneering (and imaginatively titled) outer-borough gallery, Famous Accountants.

For years, Letcher’s day job in magazine production gave her easy access to her raw materials—fashion photographs—which she cut up and juxtaposed, pasting, layering, and moving them around on paper using paint as a binder. In her hands the images lost their slick gloss and revealed more sinister underpinnings. Her collages were, in part, inquiries into the image-making of her daylight profession, while also serving as commentaries on larger themes.

Now at Hansel and Gretel Picture Garden Pocket Utopia, Letcher explodes the tidy frames of her works on paper and occupies the space like one large collage.2 The exhibition riffs on the provisional and the transitional, with plastic wrap partially covering at least a couple of sculptures and a handful of paintings spilling out onto the floor. A drop cloth, once used in preparing her collages, forms the basis for one work. A chair covered with paint, and the paint splatterings scraped off the studio floor, form another. In one respect, the installation looks like the artist’s studio, where she has run out in a hurry. In another respect, the presentation brings the violence of her collage-work to the surface. Instead of merely clipping off the head of an image, Letcher decapitates the head of a statue suffocating in plastic, a head that now appears as an independent work for sale. Elsewhere, scratchy messages, such as “We Decided Not To Fight,” have been gathered together and pinned and taped to the wall, part personal sayings, part song lyrics.

The dark tone of this show can be seen as an allusion to world events, albeit a clairvoyant one, since the work came together before the atrocities of late summer. The exhibition opened on the same day, August 20, that ISIS released its snuff film of the journalist James Foley. If artists are the early warning systems of history, Letcher has deployed an advanced installation with ominous long-range sensitivities.

Installation from Amy Feldman: High Sign

Amy Feldman’s paintings are hard to miss. They convey a haunting stillness through a unique economy of means. Her work, in fact, may be the most hauntingly economical paintings around right now. Feldman uses just two tones, gray and white, in her final compositions. The grays do differ slightly painting to painting, ranging from gunmetal to battleship—or, in other words, not much at all. Yet despite these limitations, or more likely because of them, the work almost always captivates.

With several large paintings now encircling the small gallery at Blackston, floor to ceiling, her latest work conveys an added power without giving up its compositional secrets.3 Feldman paints fast, one session per piece, enlarging from sketches into dynamically simple shapes, drips and all. There’s a high-wire quality in the way she makes this happen. The paintings succeed in how she balances the gray and white between figure and ground. While the grays lay on top of the white as a figure, the white also pushes into them, forcing them to ground. The line between the two tones can have an optical quality as this teetering dynamic is played out. The overall effect resembles the flickering, color-deadening sense of space illuminated by an old fluorescent light.

At Blackston, Feldman brings her paintings up to a line of cartoonish legibility, with close-set, similarly styled works interacting like square panels in a comic strip, but with only the most cryptic storyline. Killer Instinct (2014) looks like the face of an angry monkey. Spirit Merit (2014) could be a ghost. Gut Smut (2014) is a puff of smoke. In the side room, the monkey faces return in two animated sets of four smaller paintings. Yet any coherent reading quickly disappears to the margins, just as the gray of Open Omen (2014) migrates to the edges, leaving only a white void.

Katherine Taylor, Bark Feet (2014)

I first met the artist Katherine Taylor almost exactly twenty years ago, hiking the Appalachian Trail between Franconia Notch and Mount Moosilauke, New Hampshire. A year apart from me as an undergraduate at Dartmouth College, she was the sophomore leader on my freshman orientation trip. So perhaps I should claim to be among the first to pay this sculptor a studio visit. Taylor has never stopped working with the woods of New England and Upstate New York in forging a vision between nature and the imaginary world. Now on view at Skoto, her latest show reveals what she has learned in translating her impressions of New Hampshire bark into zoomorphic sculptures of remarkable craft.4

For Bark Feet (2014), what at first seem like outré elephant-foot stools are in fact cast sculptures that are the result of an elaborate process, one that begins with her hiking tubes of silicone caulk into the deep woods to make molds of tree bark. Working in a foundry in the Basque region of Spain, Taylor then multiplies, turns, and folds these impressions into an uncanny semblance of animal skin—even finding ways to mimic the cracked appearance of toenails—which is finally here rendered in aluminum. In other examples, the bark becomes the rind of a sliced fruit or the meat of a nut. Her best work lets these textures speak for themselves, without over-manipulation. In all, Taylor demonstrates the unity of the natural world, with a continuous surface connecting with our own sense of wonder.

Installation form Robert Otto Epstein: Sleeveless

Robert Otto Epstein updates the obsessive craft that defined the Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1970s with the Casualist tendency of the current outer-borough aesthetic. Inventiveness and humor mix with Epstein’s own obsessive abilities, with Bauhaus-quality work inspired by Cosby sweaters and baseball cards. For “Sleeveless” at the Bushwick-based 99¢ Plus Gallery, Epstein showed monochromatic drawings of graphite on hand-gridded paper that referenced patterns from the garment industry: Sleeve for Sweater (2012), Knitting Pattern for Cozy Sweater (2012), and Sleeveless Cardigan (2012).5 In the place of Epstein’s fun sense of color, the work had a quiet melancholy, as though paying homage to the nameless artisans who once made such garments, and to the people, now gone, who once wore them. While this exhibition had a short run, through mid-December Epstein returns for a group exhibition called “Thread Lines” at The Drawing Center that will explore similar themes while “unraveling the distinction between textile and art.”

A final note about an inaugural event called “Exchange Rates: The Bushwick Expo” to take place between October 23 and 26, aligning with Bushwick’s semi-annual “Beatnite” gallery Friday. As I remarked in this space last June, lifestyle culture will increasingly attempt to tap the artistic energy of this outer-borough neighborhood. “Bushwick Takes the Spotlight” read a New York Times headline last month about a new condo development, in an article that began by mentioning “the appearance of a scantily clad, twerking Miley Cyrus at a recent party.”

There is much to be had in twerking with this neighborhood’s artistic reputation even as—or perhaps because—such acts will inevitably will lead to its degradation. Yet “Exchange Rates” looks to be one attempt to expand the cultural conversation from within. Paul D’Agostino of Centotto and Stephanie Theodore of Theodore:Art, two Bushwick stalwarts, have paired with London-based Sluice_ (the underscore isn’t a typo) to place thirty international galleries within twenty Bushwick venues. The four-day collaboration should carry the neighborhood’s DIY approach to an event of broad scope. Whether the mainstream press chooses to note only Miley Cyrus is an open question, although the run promises much to look at and even more to see.

1 “State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now” opened at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, on September 13, 2014 and remains on view through January 19, 2015.

2 “Ellen Letcher: Gaslight” opened at Hansel and Gretel Picture Garden Pocket Utopia, New York, on August 20 and remains on view through October 11, 2014.

3 “Amy Feldman: High Sign” opened at Blackston, New York, on September 12 and remains on view through October 26, 2014.

4 “Katherine Taylor: New Sculptures” opened at Skoto Gallery, New York, on September 11 and remains on view through October 18, 2014.

5 “Robert Otto Epstein: Sleeveless” was on view at 99¢ Plus Gallery, Brooklyn, from September 5 through September 14, 2014.