Tag: environmental art

Parker's Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) reflected in the glass of Temple of Dendur gallery while museum Director Thomas Campbell speaks at the press opening

Art Review | Cornelia Parker’s Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) | Metropolitan Museum Roof | Summer 2016

On April 24, 2016

… they never promised us a “real” garden …

Cornelia Parker, Transitional Object (PsychoBarn), site specific installation on roof of Metropolitan Museum, summer 2016

When is a house not a house? When it’s a Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) by Cornelia Parker, site specific installation for summer 2016, Roof Garden of the Metropolitan Museum

When I first saw photos of Cornelia Parker’s Transitional Object in a newspaper, I thought oh no, why do they have to stick an eyesore on the museum’s lovely roof garden. When I went to see it actually I found that it’s an intriguing eyesore, not what I’d like best to see on the roof but it does get you thinking.

Cornelia Parker's Transitional Object (PsychoBarn), view of the back showing scaffolding and water tanks used for ballast.

Cornelia Parker’s Transitional Object (PsychoBarn), showing scaffolding and water tanks used for ballast.

As you step from the elevator outside to the roof, you see in the far corner something like a house — but no, that can’t really be a house. First off, it’s not being glimpsed along the road on a drive in the country – it’s on the roof of an art museum (alert there), surrounded by the Central Park and the skyscrapers of Manhattan. And, if you had any thoughts this was some quaint touch for the summer roof garden, you fast find out from moving around it that the façade is a cover for a web of scaffolding, pipes and water tanks. The water tanks are practical as well as expressive: they are ballast to keep the structure in place in high winds. Adding to Transitional Object’s disquieting effect, the shiny mansard roof looks inconsistent with the heavily weathered siding which, we learn, came from an old red barn in up-state New York.

Artist Cornelia Parker sitting on the steps and chatting with a visitor.

Many associations and philosophical ideas are embedded in Transitional Object, as the artist, in person and in abundant accompanying written materials is quick to tell you. As a house facade with an insubstantial and old fashioned look, it recalls a movie set and it was in fact designed after the house in Alfred Hitchcock’s film Psycho, which like many movie sets is a façade with struts holding it up and no real back to it. Hitchcock designed the house in Psycho after one in a well known work of art, Edward Hopper’s painting, House by the Railroad in the Museum of Modern Art, NYC. “Psycho House” looms so large in the popular imagination that a version of it is a tourist attraction at Universal Studios but, for the sake of visitors, Universal built it not just a façade but a complete structure (click here for a terrific series of photos about “the house”). So we have a kind of conversation across culture, in which four of the “same” house, all differently constructed, all have something to say. There’s the Hopper painting, the movie set in Psycho, the intact Psycho House at Universal Studios, and now Transitional Object — to which we can add a fifth, the archetypal old house, haunted or otherwise, of the rural and small town American landscape, that rests in many of our memories and imaginations.

And then there are reflections …

Parker’s Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) reflected in the glass of Temple of Dendur gallery while museum Director Thomas Campbell speaks at the press opening

Which is the “real” house? In tossing into our thoughts the house with a history, Transitional Object shakes us up to think about what is really “real.” That philosophical questions underlies Transitional Object, moving it beyond amusing associations to a work with depth of meaning.

The artist is also interested in the view of the psychoanalyst, D. W. Winnicott, and it’s from his theories that she drew her title. For Winnicott, a “transitional object” refers to objects children seize upon, such security blankets and teddy bears, to provide comfort and enabling their developing independence from their mothers.

British artist Cornelia Parker, the artist, sits on the steps of Transitional Object (Psychobarn)

Artist Cornelia Parker taking the sun on the steps of Transitional Object (PsychoBarn)

As Parker commented, Norman Bates in Hitchcock’s Psycho failed to make that transition and so, taking on the persona of his own dead mother, he became a murderer of women. In this connection, the artist feels that Transitional Object, as houses in general, take on a symbolism referring to the womb. Visually, the array of pipes and water tanks in the back do suggest an external view of the inner parts of the human body, the things that we don’t ordinarily see, that we shouldn’t see, but are always with us. As a rich work of conceptual art, Transitional Object is loaded with ideas, more than I’ve said, perhaps even more than the artist has thought, some you may discover yourself.

And speaking of the living-dead — the stately decrepit structure with its guts exposed brings to mind Salvador Dali’s surrealist painting, Burning Giraffe. Have a look also at Dali’s Spectre of Sex Appeal. But Dali’s work is small, Burning Giraffe is 13.8 in x 10.6 in, and hangs on a wall, and through that alone is less in your face. Although not literally a public space, the roof garden of the Metropolitan Museum of Art functions much like a public space.

My preference for this outdoor summertime space is for a work of art that matches and enriches the loveliness of the setting, one that offers some of those emotions and sensations associated with “real” gardens (I know, I know, What is Real anyhow?). My all-time favorite — so far — is Tomas Saraceno’s Cloud City, on the roof summer of 2012. I like the installations that, like Cloud City, engage visitors physically while, with Transitional Object, we mainly look. To me, it kind of spoils the view … but, thinking about something rich and challenging is a worthy activity. This is a good place to go with a date – lots to talk about! And refreshments are available on the roof too.

Cornelia Parker’s site specific installation Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) will be on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum through October 31, 2016. For more information about the work, and about visiting the museum, click here.

Review | The Painted Rocks At Revolver Creek | Written and Directed by Athol Fugard | Signature Theatre

By Yvonne Korshak

On May 5, 2015

In Off-Broadway Theater

The World Premiere of a Superb Play

Nukain is an uneducated black farm laborer working in South Africa during the period of apartheid who has nothing of his own but a vision: he paints brilliant designs on bare rocks, creating beauty out of bare bones nothing. This stunning play presses forward with the intensity of a Greek tragedy.

Nukain lives in a pondok (Fugard uses words from the local languages effectively), a small shack made available to him by the Afrikaner landowner couple he works for, and he cares for a destitute, bright eleven-year old black boy, Bokkie, who helps the old man, dragging the wagon with the paints and brushes through the dusty red earth. Nukain has painted his “flowers” on over 105 rocks — Bokkie’s counted them – but on this Sunday in 1982, Nukain faces “the big one,” a huge rough boulder, center stage, and we sense this is his final, great challenge.

Overcoming a reluctance to take this last one on, Nukain paints on the big rock his own story, his self- portrait: a man who has walked dark roads in search of work, overcome personal losses and those thrust upon him by the dehumanizing system of apartheid — to create himself. I feel blessed to have seen this painting come into creation — reassured by the strong black hand print in the center, and moved by the rainbow at the top. Nukain is a life-affirming man.

Elmarie, the sweet. young Afrikaner wife, kindly brings some food up to them (left overs, but they look tasty), but her brutal edge springs open like a switch blade at a sign of challenge from either of the two blacks — and she senses a challenge in Nukain’s painting of his story as a man on the big rock. “Hose it off,” she tells Bokkie. By this point in the play, the very thought of destroying the painting is beyond bearing – for Bokkie and the audience.

The second act, taking us years ahead to 2003 and the post-apartheid period, brings an encounter on that same dry piece of earth between Bokkie, now a grown man with a real name, Jonathan, and Elmarie. Post-apartheid, Jonathan’s arc has swung upward and Elmarie’s is in sharp descent. He wears a suit and tie and leather shoes (slung over his shoulders – a touch of Nukain’s wisdom), he’s educated and a high school principal, with ideas of someday writing his story. Elmarie and her (now ill) husband, are living in a state of siege as blacks, seeking to appropriate land, have been murdering white landowners including Elmarie’s neighbors.

Nukain had died all those years ago and three days after completing his work on the big rock. The light reference to Christ’s three days in the tomb suggest, I think, a spiritual living on for the uneducated, profound creator artist that is fulfilled as the play unfolds. As for the painted rocks, out in the open, Nukain’s rock paintings, including the self-portrait of his story, have faded. Jonathan has returned, he says, to restore Nukain’s paintings from the effects of weather and time, but that’s only part of the story.

To the extreme, self-interest and history separate Jonathan and Elmarie , but an underpinning of common humanity keeps them talking. Nukain does, in a sense, live on.

Leon Addison Brown brings a towering dignity at war with a survivor’s servility to the role of Nukain. Thirteen-year old Caleb McLaughlin, playing young Bokkie, is totally focused on studying, helping and learning from Nukain and each instant of the action, inner and outer, is reflected in his face and body.

Bianca Amato is so charming as the young Elmarie, though sure she’s boss, that it’s remarkable to see her shift to the older Elmarie, protecting herself with a gun on the ready, ravaged by events, struggling to maintain her ideology of Afrikaner entitlement, while responding to Jonathan, a man of the new South Africa. Sahr Ngaujah plays the role of the adult Bokkie, proud of his nation though troubled by excesses, seizing his manly place in the world.

Fugard based his play on a true story of an African farm laborer, Nukain Mabuza, who painted a garden of rocks in the region of South Africa in which the play takes place during the late 1960’s and 1970’s; the play’s narrative and characters are invented. First taken up by Fugard years ago, The Painted Rocks At Revolver Creek was completed through a commission of the Signature Theatre, which has produced other works by this prolific and powerful playwright, including The Train Driver and Blood Knot. As my companion at The Painted Rocks remarked, it’s high time Fugard was considered for a Nobel Prize.

For a fascinating background article, with photographs of Fukain and his painted garden, see The New York Times Sunday, May 3, 2015. The one book about Nukain, The Painted Stone Garden of Nukain Mabguza by F. C. Clarke, seems not to be currently available.

The largest issues of historic change and social justice, and the tragedies and ambiguities that accompany them, are made immediate through three “small” lives played out on a patch of rocky earth. That scrubby piece of earth itself is a like character in the play, rendered with real earth and rock in Christopher H. Barreca’s hard-hitting scene design. Sitting in the front row, I sneezed from the dust, and was glad even that way to be a part of Nukain’s world.

This is a play that matters greatly. Thank you, Signature Theatre, for helping to bring this superb play into creation.

The Painted Rocks At Revolver Creek plays at Signature Theatre on West 42nd Street in Manhattan through June 7, 2015.