2 Cents: Free Only Goes So Far

Olafur Eliasson seems like a nice guy.  And I appreciate the mostly non-commercial nature of his work. (Let's overlook the "art car" he did for BMW).

But, alas, the "New York City Waterfalls" -- which Eliasson miraculously convinced the Public Art Fund to fork over $15 million and persuaded the City of New York, the State of New York, and countless federal agencies to support -- fall flat. The effect they have, at least on me, is pretty much nil.  (Admittedly, I have not taken one of the Circle Line (tm) boats to get a closer look at the falls, nor have I seen them at night).

Here's a photo I took last weekend from the Manhattan shore of the East River:

If you look (very) closely, two of the four waterfalls can be seen.  One is under the Brooklyn Bridge, right up against the piling on the Brooklyn side.  The other is just north of the Manhattan Bridge, and can be seen just beyond the piling on the Manhattan side. 

Eliasson is an artist of the Robert Irwin light & space & art as perceptual exploration school of conceptual art.  BTW - I read Weschler's terrific book about Irwin on a Mexican beach last January:

It's sort of a biography of Irwin, but really a handbook on what it means to be an artist.  A must-read for anyone with artistic pretensions.

But I digress.  Eliasson asserts that the waterfalls, among other things, remind us New Yorkers of something that we've forgotten -- that we're surrounded by water (or, more generally, nature). As for their visible and bare-bones construction of scaffolding and plumbing pipes, that's to remind us of the "stuff" that the city itself is made of; circularity, dude, get it?  Man - nature - man? This is how Roberta Smith put it in her orgiastic review for the Times: "The[] [falls] fake natural history with basic plumbing, making little rips in the urban fabric through which you glimpse hints of lost paradise . . . ."

My problem with the execution of Eliasson's concept is simply that the falls don't do anything for me. Mileage may vary for you.  But as for the concept itself, I ask simply whether we New Yorkers -- we who live on islands called Manhattan, Long, Staten, and Rikers, among others -- need an outsider to tell us that we are surrounded by water? Or to remind us that though we live in a built environment, we are nonetheless surrounded by nature?  

Maybe our endless miles of concrete and steel overwhelmed someone who grew up in Iceland, whose vision of what is properly "nature" is not at all what we experience here.  But we do indeed experience it, and are aware of it.  Life grows everywhere, even on concrete islands, even if it does not seem so to an Icelander.  

I saw this child, for instance, playing on a makeshift beach at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge:

Polluted water and broken bottles (and the odd corpse) be dammed -- he was going to dip his feet in the East River.  I'm pretty sure he didn't need Eliasson's waterfalls to remind him of the presence of water in his town. (BTW - you can see the waterfall just north of the Manhattan Bridge if you look closely.)

Unfortunately, Eliasson's falls are not the only example of weak public art here in the City. There's an equally flat piece currently on display in Midtown:

That's of course Rockefeller Center on the right.  On the left is Chris Burden's newest work, called "What My Dad Gave me." It's a 65-foot high pseudo-skyscraper made from replicated Erector Set (tm) pieces.  

It's a pretty obvious gag, suitable for the tourist plagues of Fifth Avenue.  Get it?  A toy originally inspired by real buildings, now appropriated by Burden to build a (sort of) life-size building?

Sigh.  We're a long way from the VW crucifix of 1974:

Maybe I'm mistaking the object for the art.  But where is the art, then?