Site Specific Magazine

site specific

site specific

November 2017 cornelia parker

by Ramzi Husein

boogie down bronx

by Zachary Delcamp

29 rooms recap

by Nicole Malasarti

decor with gore

by Sarah DiPirro

all the feels

by Toni Ehret

storm king art

by Nicole Malasarti

dia: beacon

by Sarah DiPirro

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contents

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contributor's page

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editor's letter

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column page

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cornelia parker

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weaponry with personality, giving turpedos a facelift before departure

by Ramzi Husein

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boogie down bronx

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29 rooms recap

A playground for adults that's totally Instagram worthy

by Sarah Cascone

storm king art

A playground for adults that's totally Instagram worthy

by Ken Johnson

The Bronx culture is heard with eco-friendly music booth

by Winnie Hu

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all the feels

The Bronx culture is heard with eco-friendly music booth

by Jared Keller

an artist interview

by Ramzi Husein

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decor with gore

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dia: beacon

weaponry with personality, giving turpedos a facelift before departure

by Mark Stevens

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Zachary Delcamp Contributing Writer

His work has appeared in The Atlantic and many other magazines and journals for fiction and nonfiction. Among his awards, he received a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference work-study scholarship for fiction and a scholarship to the Summer Literary Seminars. He has been a visiting editor to the Disquiet International Literary Program and is a frequent member of various nominating committees for top literary awards. Meakin is also a contributor to four nonfiction books and two fiction anthologies.

Victoria Kiefer Copy Editor

While copy editor at Site Specific Magazine, Victoria is the online literature editor for BOMB Magazine. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, The Guardian, Words Without Borders, and others. She’s interested in compelling argumentation and honest takes on how the personal is political. She edits in service of helping writers discover and deliver the best incarnations of their work.

Grace Gobush Contributing Photographer

A Montreal-born editor and writer focused on women’s issues and religion. Previously, she was Guernica’s managing and special issues editor, and before that a reporter based out of TIME magazine’s Hong Kong bureau. She has pursued stories in over fifteen countries, and her work has appeared in TIME, the Daily Beast, the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, the Oxford American, Slate, and on PRI’s “The World,” among others.

Justine Gabbar Art Director

His writing has appeared in The Deal, The Washington Examiner and The Satirist, among others. He is the Program Director at WriteOn NYC, which provides writing teachers to underserved school children. Phin sits on the Board of Governors for The Schools of Public Engagement at The New School, where he earned an MFA in Creative Writing.

He also has an MBA from Columbia Business School.

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contributors site specific DECEMBER 2017

EDITOR Ramzi Husein ART DIRECTOR Nicole Malazarti ASSOCIATE EDITOR Mint Julip ASSIS. DIRECTOR Sarah DiPirro DESIGN INTERN Gloria Ha-ha

CONTRIBUTORS Ramzi Husein, Grace Dobush, Justine Gabbar, Olivind Hovland, Scott Kirkwood

SUBSCRIPTION ORDERS, INQUIRIES AND ADDRESS CHANGES P.O. Box 421751; Montclair, NJ 07043-1234 (800)333-1115; (386)246-3365

F+W MEDIA INC. CHAIRMAN & CEO Ramzi Husein CFO & COO Nicole Mazarabe PRESIDENT Mint Julip CHIEF DIGITAL OFFICER Sarah DiPirro SENIOR VP Gloria Ha-ha VP/AVERTISING Ramzi Husein VP/COMMUNICATIONS Nicole Mazarabe

DESIGN COMMUNITY CHAIRMAN & CEO Ramzi Husein CFO & COO Nicole Mazarabe PRESIDENT Mint Julip CHIEF DIGITAL OFFICER Sarah DiPirro SENIOR VP Gloria Ha-ha VP/AVERTISING Ramzi Husein VP/COMMUNICATIONS Nicole Mazarabe

Site Specific (ISSN 0032-1234) is published 6 times per year in February, April, June, August, October, and December by F+W Media, 10151 Carver Road, Suite 200, Blue Ash, OH 45242.

Volume 67, Issue 5.

Periodicals Postage paid at Concinnati, Oh, and additional mailing offices.

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editor's letter

by Ramzi Husein

Artists featured in this edition: Henti consequ aessim fuga.

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I have a passion for installation art and that passion has fueled my pursuit to create a magazine that highlights local installation art in specific sites to gain exposure for artists and to enable to public to become more cultured in the arts.

Judging the annual Artistic Excellence competition, which is now in its seventh year, is a herculean task. The editorial team here at Southwest Art invests countless hours reviewing nearly 2,000 individual entries, viewing many of them multiple times over and making many difficult decisions as the field is gradually narrowed down. But I wouldn’t trade it for anything, because it’s a unique chance to experience paintings and other artworks that I might not otherwise see, and to discover many new artists.

This year’s 13 top winners are a geographically diverse bunch. Some of them hail from right here in the West, while others live around the globe. Among the westerners, two are in Colorado, three in California, and one in Washington. One honoree comes from Ohio and another from New Jersey. And that leaves five winners from other countries: two from Canada and one each from China, France, and the United Kingdom.

Another parallel can be found in the winning works by Michael Fitzpatrick and Bruce Lawes. In Fitzpatrick’s painting of three seated ballerinas, the girls themselves are portrayed in detailed realism, while nearly everything around them is loose, created with squeegees, palette knives, rulers, and other tools. “The abstract makes the real look more real,” Fitzpatrick says. A similar approach is at work in Lawes’ depiction of a realistic African elephant with an impressionistic background. “What happens is, your eye goes to the sharper image, and then it starts to wander around the softer areas,” Lawes explains.

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art exposure is essential to the cultivation of a singular opinion

art in the city Places to go: Chelsea Gallery 2 MoMA special exhibition Brooklyn Park Chapter NY Sargent's Daughters FLAG Art Foundation Guggenheim Museum The MET breur

To grasp the unpredictability of the art market, one need only look to this week of fall auctions.

Despite a tumultuous presidential election and the constant drumbeat of predictions about a softening art market, the sales at Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips set highs for a range of artists, including Wassily Kandinsky, Willem de Kooning, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, John Currin and Carmen Herrera, not to mention Monet, whose grainstack sold for $81.4 million.

And the drama of the salesroom — largely drained over the years by a growing number of phone bidders — occasionally delivered, from the deadly silence as the Sotheby’s auctioneer Helena Newman struggled to sell Munch’s 1902 painting “Girls on the Bridge” to the expectant hush as the Christie’s auctioneer juggled five competing bids over 14 minutes for Monet’s 1891 canvas “Meule.”

At the same time, several lots had only one bidder, which made for less buoyancy over all. (The Sotheby’s contemporary sale Thursday night had yet to take place at press time.) And many say the shrunken supply of trophies at Christie’s and Sotheby’s represents an expected reining in of a runaway art market and is likely to last for a while. “It wasn’t bad; it wasn’t good,” said the financier and longtime collector David Ganek. “It’s like going to a zoning meeting, it’s just not that exciting.”

“The market has been outperforming, so there’s got to be a reversion,” he added. “Doesn’t mean there aren’t great things.”

Indeed, art experts agree that there were some great things for sale this week, namely de Kooning’s “Untitled XXV” (1977) which sold for $66.3 million with fees to an unidentified bidder, and Moholy-Nagy’s “EM 1 (Telephone Picture)” (1923), which sold for $6.1 million to the Museum of Modern Art.

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cornelia parker

by Ramzi Husein

Integrating an informative agenda along with functionality, this bench fully integrates into the daily lives of the general public.

Cius et quis anducitatur, tempe volecae eatur simus et quias volorehent.Rum volute etus. Perum et earuptatia apid eos repudi remporest qui corrore es aut officae.

Like many things in British politics, the job of the official U.K. election artist is a bit make-itup-as-you-go. Dreamed up by the maverick former sports minister Tony Banks, in the early two-thousands, the post was one of the feel-good innovations of Tony Blair’s first term in office. “It just occurred to me that we have war artists, so why not have an election artist?”

Banks said at the time.

Each election cycle, an artist joins politicians, pundits, and news photographers on the campaign trail and produces his or her own interpretation of events. The only requirement is that the artists betray no political bias and that, upon completion, the works they create go on display in the Houses of Parliament. The painter Jonathan Yeo, the first artist appointed, in 2001, produced respectful oil portraits of Blair and his rival party leaders.

Most recently, in 2015, the illustrator Adam Dant made a fantastical pen-and-ink drawing, “The Government Stable,” which crowded many of the events that he’d witnessed in the course of the campaign onto a single “Where’s Waldo?”-ish canvas, six feet wide.

This year’s appointee, Cornelia Parker, is the first conceptual artist to take up the role, and the first woman. She is also, by some margin, more famous than previous incumbents. Since hitting the campaign trail, in early May, she has become a news item in her own right, often glimpsed with her own TV crew in tow. “It’s all very meta,” she told me.

Parker, who is known for creating quizzical and sometimes surreal installations, explained that she’d been considering the role since the 2015 election. At the time, her

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Integrating an informative agenda along with functionality, this bench fully integrates into the daily lives of the general public.

other commitments—which included working on a life-size imitation of the house from Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” which was displayed on the roof of the Met Museum in 2016—got in the way. But this year, when the election was called, just after Easter, the parliamentary committee on the arts got back in touch. This time, Parker said yes.

She is now charged with following a snap election that no one expected until six weeks ago, and which has delivered its share of surprises. Her decision to take on the challenge, she told me, was driven in part by the fact that she’d become so fretful about the state of politics in the U.K. and beyond. “I was just thinking, Shit, this is a nightmare— you know, we’re entering this very dark phase and feeling very depressed. Then I got this, and I thought, Well, at least I can do something.”

Parker and I first met a little more than two weeks before polling day, at her London gallery. Playing behind us was a four-channel video installation titled “American Gothic 2017,” featuring footage that she’d collected in New York last Halloween. One screen showed a crowd of Trumpistas gathered outside Trump Tower, their faces locked in expressions of anger and indignation. A second screen showed a young man dressed as Trump ranting in a pizza parlor. The deadline for finalizing her election proposal was looming, but Parker, who wears schoolgirl-like outfits and a close-cut bob, cheerfully admitted that she had next to no idea what she would create. “You see, that’s the way I work,” she told me. “People get very nervous about that, including me, but everybody doesn’t really know what I’m doing until the last minute.”

Parker’s best-known art works have commented only obliquely on contemporary politics. For her breakthrough piece, “Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View,” from 1991, she blew up a garden shed, then rehung hundreds of its fragments to depict an explosion frozen at the instant of detonation. It was a bravura demonstration of her ability to twist and tame reality, both playful and chillingly violent at once. The mainland U.K. was, at the time, in the midst of an I.R.A. bombing campaign, and the artist later admitted that she’d considered approaching Republicans to see if she could borrow an explosives expert. In the end, she was persuaded to work with the British Army instead.

In other works, Parker has purloined objects, squashed them, melted them down and recast them, scratched them, and fired bullets at them. In 1997 and 2005, she created a sombre diptych, “Mass” and “Anti-Mass,” consisting of two clouds of charred fragments; one was drawn from the remains of a white Baptist church in Texas that was destroyed by lightning, the other from an African-American church in Kentucky that was burned down by arsonists. In 2015, for the eight hundredth anniversary of the Magna Carta, Parker created a thirteen-metre-long tapestry that replicated the Wikipedia entry for the document, sections of which were embroidered by Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange, and by inmates in British prisons.

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“Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View� installation from 1991 at The Tate Modern in NYC.

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boogie down bronx

by Winnie Hu

89 Eldridge Street New York, NY, 10002 July 2016 July 2017

the Bronx culture is heard with ecofriendly musical community booth Integrating an informative agenda along with functionality, this bench fully integrates into the daily lives of the general public.

Jazz and mambo flowed along a stretch of the Bronx in the 1940s and for years after. Lined with nightclubs, theaters and catering halls, Southern Boulevard was a musician’s playground.

This summer, music is back on the street. An open-air sound booth beneath the elevated Freeman Street station on the Nos. 2 and 5 lines is playing songs around the clock by musicians with a Bronx connection, including Bobby Sanabria, Rebel

Diaz, Willie Rodriguez, Will Calhoun, Ilu Aye and Circa ’95. The installation, called the Boogie Down Booth, will run until September and is intended as much as a tribute to the borough’s rich musical history as a respite for commuters and residents in a noisy streetscape.

“It definitely brings people around,” said Talik Reed, 24, an airport security guard, who stopped to listen to salsa against a backdrop of rumbling trains one

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Integrating an informative agenda along with functionality, this bench fully integrates into the daily lives of the general public.

evening last week. “They may have to turn it up a little, but I think it’s perfect.”

The booth is part of an initiative by the city’s Department of Transportation; the Design Trust for Public Space, a nonprofit organization that helped restore the High Line; and community groups, including the Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corporation, or Whedco, in the Bronx. The initiative, “Under the Elevated: Reclaiming Space, Connecting Communities,” focuses on underused public areas below more than 700 miles of highways, bridges and train tracks. It is being financed with about $200,000 in government money, foundation grants and donations.

“We’re finding ways to reimagine the uses for these spaces,” said Susan Chin, executive director of the Design Trust. “People think of them as being very loud and not pleasant to be in, so how do you improve this kind of space?”

The Design Trust selected five people with expertise in landscape architecture, graphic design and urban policy to work with community groups to create prototypes of installations. The first one, which ran from April to July, was a kiosk under the Manhattan Bridge in Chinatown that invited residents to post events and comments to a community calendar and blackboard. Other sites that are being considered include areas below the Van Wyck Expressway in Queens and the Gowanus Expressway in Brooklyn,

The Boogie Down Bronx serves a location for live music, poetry readings, and even educational classes on the culture of the Bronx. To the right, a live band brings passers into the music.

and the Manhattan and Queens landings of the Queensboro Bridge.

Continue reading the main story Neil Gagliardi, director of urban design for the Transportation Department, said there had been other efforts to address these underused spaces, but this initiative was the first comprehensive, citywide approach. He said he saw it as a way to potentially add to the city’s growing inventory of street amenities — including bus shelters, newsstands and bike racks — with a goal of “making hospitable streetscapes for a diverse population.”

“We want to expand our efforts, and really learn from these installations what’s possible, what works, and what doesn’t, and develop a tool kit that we can use elsewhere,” he added.

The turquoise-blue sound booth in the Bronx, which cost about $18,000, sits below the elevated station on a wide commercial strip dotted with bodegas, takeout restaurants and a laundromat.

It provides bench seating, underneath speakers and LED lights powered by solar panels. The booth is decorated with the names of Bronx artists: Thelonious Monk, DJ Kool Herc and the Chantels.

The booth continuously cycles through a playlist of 18 songs selected from the archives of the Bronx Music Heritage Center, a performance and community space that is part of Whedco. The songs are by artists who have performed at the center within the past 18 months, or

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who are on the center’s advisory board, said Elena Martínez, the co-artistic director of the center along with Mr. Sanabria.

“It’s something different,” Tyre George, 30, a post office clerk, said as he took a seat on the bench to wait for the Bx19 bus.

“I’m glad to see new and fun stuff around.”

The turquoise-blue sound booth in the Bronx, which cost about $18,000, sits below the elevated station on a wide commercial strip dotted with bodegas, takeout restaurants and a laundromat. It provides bench seating around a rusted pole, underneath speakers and LED lights powered by solar panels. The booth is decorated with the names of Bronx artists: Thelonious Monk, DJ Kool Herc and the Chantels.

The booth continuously cycles through a playlist of 18 songs selected from the archives of the Bronx Music Heritage Center, a performance and community space that is part of Whedco. The songs are by artists who have performed at the center within the past 18 months, or who are on the center’s advisory board, said Elena Martínez, the co-artistic director of the center.

“It’s something different,” Tyre George, 30, a post office clerk, said as he took a seat on the bench to wait for the Bx19 bus.

“I’m glad to see new and fun stuff around.”

Fred Negron, 49, an auto mechanic on disability, said the booth transformed what had been an ugly, dark corner in his neighborhood into a place where he could come and hang out.

“It’s like 200 percent better,” he said. “I’m sitting here today and enjoying the music. If I come in two months and it’s gone, that will make me cry.”

Though the booth under the Freeman station will close at the end of the summer, there are already plans to replicate it in at least two other locations. Kerry McLean, director of community development for Whedco, said her group had secured about $100,000 in grants to create booths and related programs on Southern Boulevard and at an affordable housing complex, under construction in nearby Melrose, that will house the Bronx Music Heritage Center and include dedicated apartments for Bronx musicians and artists.

The Bronx Music strcture provides a place of learning while adding to the culture the Bronx has become so unique for.

Mr. Sanabria, who was checking out the booth on Thursday, waved over two young men who were walking by. Together, they listened to salsa on the sidewalk. “There’s going to be rap and pop and everything,” Mr. Sanabria told the men. “Instead of just sitting here and hearing the sirens, you’ll be able to hear great music from people born and raised in the Bronx.”

Afterward, Mr. Sanabria noted that he often had to explain the Bronx’s musical contributions to those who did not know about them, including young people, immigrants and those from outside the borough.

Now, he said, he is simply going to tell them, “Go to the Freeman Street subway stop, walk down the stairs and you’ll hear what came out of the Bronx.”

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29 rooms recap

by Sarah Cascone

Sept. 9 - 11 12-8pm

29 rooms, a playground for adults that’s totally Instagram worthy Picture taken at 29 rooms in NYC. Photo Credit: Lauren Wisnewski

Perhaps nothing embodies the growing phenomena of art-as-social-media-photoopp as “29Rooms,” online women’s magazine Refinery29’s fashion-forward take on an art fair/fun house. Now in its third year, the interactive project takes place—as the title suggests—in 29 different “rooms.”

Some feature audio components or require audience participation, such as reading or painting. In others, visitors are invited to jump into a massive ball pit

or share their dreams with singer Katrina Cunningham so she can transform them into a song.

Taking over an empty Williamsburg warehouse for the weekend, the popup event promises to fill your Instagram feed with colorful art subtly blended with corporate branding. But in addition to entertaining, Refinery29 also aims to engage with political, social, and environmental causes. “We wanted to present more

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thought-provoking issues this year,” said Albie Alexander Hueston, the company’s creative director of experiential, during a preview of the exhibition. (Hueston organized the event with Refinery29 co-founder and creative director Piera Gelardi.)

Dana Wisnewski To that end, this iteration of trying out the VR “29Rooms” features a neon light display headsets at 29 from Planned Parenthood. The nonprofit rooms experience.

Photo Credit: organization hopes it will “help to educate Lauren Wisnewski people about the services we provide and inspire them to act to protect their access to sexual reproductive healthcare and rights,” Caren Spruch, Planned Parenthood’s director of arts and entertainment, told artnet News.

“Refinery29 makes content for women every day, and our alignment with Planned Parenthood is very important to us,” explained Hueston.

On a similar note, the Women’s March also has a room, featuring many of the protest signs and artworks carried around the world during the January 21 protests, including Shepard Fairey‘s posters. “We wanted to turn activism into art,” said Hueston, noting that guests will have the chance to mail postcards expressing their opinions to their gov’t representatives.

Environmental concerns come to the fore in the work of Jee Young Lee, who collected 9,800 bottles, 1,500 wine corks, and other assorted trash from the streets of New York to create her seascape installation, with a boat that guests are invited to sit in. “We waste so many things,” the artist said, noting pollution inspired her.

Transparent creator Jill Soloway has teamed up with artist Xavier Schipani to explore the topic of gender identity. The stalls in a recreation of a school bathroom—decorated by Schipani with illustrations about gender—become listening pods to hear recordings from various people recalling the first time they became aware of their gender identity.

For those frustrated by the current administration’s approach to these issues, we suggest taking a swing at the punching bags in “The Future Is Female” room, decorated with feminist slogans by illustrator Jen Mussari. With each contact, percussive sounds from electronic musician Madame Ghandi ring out, creating a punch-driven cacophony.

With contributions from Dunkin’ Donuts and the Casper mattress company displayed alongside such thoughtful contributions, striking a balance between artistry and corporate branding is no easy task. Thankfully, most of the rooms have no connection

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“Refinery29 makes content for women every day, and our alignment with Planned Parenthood is very important to us.”

to commercial interests, allowing the art and interactivity to shine.

In addition to featuring contributions from celebrities like Jake Gyllenhaal and Emma Roberts—a cathartic shredding of your secrets inspired by Gyllenhaal’s upcoming film Stronger, and a celebration of female authors from Roberts and book community Bellatrist founder Karah Priess—Refinery29 has enlisted plenty of artists to take part.

Near the entrance, there’s sure to be long lines to take a photo with the optically jarring work of Alexa Meade, who paints entire sets, including the people in them, to create the illusion of an 2-D painting. “People are being able to physically immersed in the work,” Meade said, taking a break from outfitting visitors in her hand-painted jackets and sunglasses so they could pose in the brightly colored space.

Jonathan Rosen, one of the hits of this year’s SPRING/BREAK Art Show, has again created a selfie-ready mirror artwork, with each photograph capturing one of a constant stream of adjectives.

Here, the words are taken from a poem by Ashlee Haze about “how we see our body and acceptance of our body,” according to the artist.

Benjamin Shine, known for his stunning fashion displays crafted from expertly manipulated tulle, has created a stunning double portrait of twin sisters and singers Chloe x Halle, proteges of Beyoncé, in a thin wire mesh. Suspended from the ceiling and rotating, the ethereal work is paired with headphones playing a song recorded by the duo for the occasion in celebration of sisterhood. “It kind of looks like smoke, but you can’t really see what it is until you’re fully in front of it,” noted Hueston.

You can make the art yourself with the Art of Elysium, which enlists artists to work with the sick, the homeless, veterans, and other communities in need. Their room is giant stack of Japanese lanterns, on which visitors are invited to paint messages of hope.

“It’s a therapeutic moment to experience the creative process,” vice president of development Allison Beck said.

Although the back area still takes the “rooms” concept fairly literally, there’s a different feel at the exhibition entrance. “When we walked into the space, the first thing that we thought was ‘sculpture garden,'” said Hueston. Freestanding works like a giant red womb enclosure featuring spoken poetry from Cleo Wade, fashion designer Jason Wu’s mobile-inspired collaboration with Cadillac, and Maisie Cousin’s “Erotica in Bloom,” a giant floral chandelier, make for a dramatic entryway.

After two years of out-of-control lines, Refinery29 has wisely opted to sell $19 tickets to the formerly free event, meaning there’s

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Photo Credit: Lauren Wisnewski

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no longer any need to camp out on the streets of Brooklyn for hours in order to get that perfect Instagram moment—tickets have sold out, naturally. (A portion of the profits will go to the exhibition’s non-profit partners, Refinery29 promises.)

In many ways, “29Rooms” feels like art for social media’s sake, and it certainly stands apart from the museums and galleries of the world. But there’s no denying that it’s fun.

“It’s like a melting pot for creativity,” said Hueston. “We want to create something joyful.”

With multiple floors in the warehouse structure, even the hallways separating all of the unique rooms is made to provide the viewers with a visually rich and photogenic experience.

Photo Credit: Lauren Wisnewski

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decor with gore

by Ramzi Husein

89 Eldridge Street New York, NY, 10002 Hours: Wed-Sun 11am-6pm

weaponry with a personality: giving torpedos a facelift before departure With multiple floors in the warehouse structure, even the hallways separating all of the unique rooms is made to provide the viewers with a visually rich and photogenic experience.

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The torpedoes have become more than just a weapon of mass destruction. They have taken on a personality that makes their purpose everthemore heartwrenching.

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all the feels

by Jared Keller

Sept. 9 - 11 12-8pm

it’s emotionally compromising, yet visually exciting to say the least Cius et quis anducitatur, tempe volecae eatur simus et quias volorehent.

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As I step into the Museum of Feelings, all I feel is dread. The pop-up museum, which bills itself as “the first museum that reacts to emotions—and turns them into art,” is an odd addition to the chromeand-glass paneled buildings of Lower Manhattan’s Battery Park City. Covered in a faint white canopy that sways against the wind and rain one evening in December, the museum resembles a giant plastic mausoleum, bathed in neon light like a

set piece from a James Turrell installation (or the video for Drake’s mega-popular “Hotline Bling.”) The exterior color supposedly uses social media data to “reflect New York’s ever-changing mood in vivid color;” the current light pink exterior indicates “calm” on the Museum of Feelings’ arbitrary mood scale. Which, considering that earlier this day, Twitter and Facebook were dominated by the news that two terrorists gunned down 1.

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After waiting in a sprawling line for more than an hour, I enter the cube with a gaggle of college students in hipster chic. “Open up to an emotional journey,” the opening inscription reads. “Twist your inner mood to own.” I do, and I immediately feel annoyed.

The Museum of Feelings doesn’t really have “exhibits” in the conventional sense; rather, visitors move from one themed alcove to another, five in total, each with its own distinctive aroma. The “Optimistic Room,” bathed in vivid pink and purple light, is little more than a lightshow, with patrons using small reflective panels to bounce light around the room. An attendant tells me the odor I smell is “Radiant Berries.” The “Joyful Room” is a dense jungle of green LED lights suspended in vine-like plastic tubes; the “Invigorated Room” encircles visitors in halos of bright light projected on the floor that respond to their movements. The “Exhilarated Room” is a funhouse of crystalline mirrors, like Superman’s Fortress of Solitude, dotted with flowerlike patterns and accompanied by the putrid odor of what’s described to me as “Blooming Peony and Cherry.” The “Calm Room” is like stepping into a cloud, saturating us with a fine mist of “Vanilla and Lavender.”

The big “reveal” at the end of our tour is that the museum is sponsored by Glade, hence all the olfactory elements to our sensory journey. Working off the idea that smell is the strongest sense tied to emotion, the SC Johnson company paired with marketing group Radical Media to engineer the five scents tied to our emotional state, so that each room “evoke each emotion in the abstract through visuals, touch, sound, and smell,” as Fast Company explained. At the end, visitors are offered a chance to buy candles and distillations of these scents.

I felt had. But should I? After all, corporate sponsorship of museums is as old as the American museum system itself. The Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded by a handful of businessmen and financiers, and plutocrats like the Koch brothers have donated millions to support the arts and humanities across the country. The SC Johnson company itself pledged $5 million to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History for the renovation of the groundbreaking innovation wing that opened this year.

During my time as an editor at Bloomberg, I had free access to most of the city’s museums thanks to the patronage of the company’s mayoral namesake. With

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Sponsored by Glade, your olfactory senses will be off the charts with this scent-tailored museum.

corporate-sponsored art on the rise, is it possible that this marketing stunt could actually have the makings of a legitimate museum, with the scholarship and educational value that comes with that?

Certainly, but not in this case. “This is more like a massage parlor than a museum.” says David Ward, a senior historian at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., Museum of Feelings.

Ward points out that the presence of corporate money doesn’t necessarily invalidate a museum’s function as a collection of artifacts of historical or cultural importance. Consider the Corning Museum of Glass in New York, owned and operated as an extension of ceramics and glass manufacturer Corning Incorporated.

“Despite the fact that it’s closely associated with the company, the museum was established to examine the history, science and technology of glassworking, and it’s become a respected institution even though it’s explicitly attached.

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The problem with the Museum of Feelings, rather, is that it lacks any sort of educational or pedagogical logic that defines every other museum in the country. Ward points to the Peale Museum, the first museum in the Western hemisphere established by Charles Peale in Baltimore in 1814.

“There was an explicit pedagogy at play in the Peale museum, and that has filtered down into almost every museum in America,” explains Ward. “This was an institution designed not just for us to learn about nature and man, but to make good citizens.” The Museum of Feelings is more akin to P.T. Barnum’s 19th-century amusements, which took the experience of observation and turned it into entertainment rather than education.

This is certainly my experience at the Museum of Feelings. The rooms are certainly interesting and evocative — “where we used to visit museums to see, say, a locomotive and woolly mammoth, now we go to see ourselves,” says Ward of the concept — but I don’t come away with any new knowledge or insights into the nature of human emotion. When I question the attendants in each special room about the composition of the exhibit, they can only incessantly repeat the names of the Glade-branded scents, like “Radiant Berries.”

Evan Schechtman, the CTO of Radical Media and chief design mind behind the Museum of Feelings, did not respond to request for comment, but in an interview with Fast Company, he indicated that he’ll be measuring the success of his creation on social media. “Schechtman knows it is impossible to convey a four-sense experience through tweets and Instagram posts,” writes Fast Company’s David Lumb. “But if it’s a knockout, he says, it will be reported as such.”

But even Barnum’s regime of the fantastic, beginning with the opening of his American Museum in New York City in 1841, invoked the educational and skeptical next to his bizarre and exotic collections. “Barnum appealed to the public seeking both reality and pleasure,” wrote Jane Glaser and Artemis Zenetou of the entertainer’s impact on American museology in Museums: A Place to Work. “He invited one and all to observe and learn how these exotic and strange things actually worked. He openly invited skepticism, challenge, and debate, and was a genuine pioneer in his understanding of the educational and entertainment power of museums.” Barnum popularized natural history by inviting the public on an enthralling journey; the cheerful attendants at the Museum of Feelings seemed lost in their own space, lacking any working knowledge of the “exhibitions” themselves.

I turned to Amanda White, a neuroscience Ph.D at the University of Michigan and frequent writer on the relationship between smell and emotion, to understand the science underpinning the Museum of Feelings. She explained that while there’s certainly a special relationship between emotion and smell, more so than other senses, but it’s not nearly as clean-cut a relationship as the installation makes it seem.

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“The regions of the brain [that] process olfaction, emotion, and memory are tightly connected, but it’s not a one-to-one relationship,” she says. “Memory is really the function that bridges the two. Somebody may have an extremely negative emotion tied to a scent because of the memories it evokes. Instead of connecting a feeling to a scent or color, it makes sense to focus on smells that most people will respond positively to, like the smell of baking cookies that brings back memories of childhood.”

By these metrics, is the Museum of Feelings a farce? Without some level of pedagogical logic and civic intent, is it simply an entertaining art installation, regardless of who foots the bill for its construction? In the eyes of historians like Ward, the Museum of Feelings represents a “clever attempt to conflate itself with something respectable.”

To Ward, it’s indicative of a larger trend in American culture: a tendency to crowdsource art and culture, to turn things to the masses, in lieu of the careful (if elitist) curation of scholars and academics that imparts museums with the knowledge and sensibility that makes them worthy stewards of the title.“Instead of rationality and pedagogy, we’re getting something closer to a carnival,” says Ward. “There’s no demonstrably larger social significance running through a place like the [Museum of Feelings] … so why are they pretending it’s something it isn’t?”

P.T. Barnum showed the world that entertainment and education can coexist, the Corning Museum succeeded at evolving a promotional vehicle into a reputable museum, and philanthropy has proven to be a valuable engine of museum scholarship and exhibitions. But in my view, a museum deserving of that name needs to offer a little bit more than a whiff of scented air freshener.

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storm king art

by Ken Johnson

Sept. 9 - 11 12-8pm

where art meets nature -- colossal sculptures rule the landscape Cius et quis anducitatur, tempe volecae eatur simus et quias volorehent.

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MOUNTAINVILLE, N.Y. — Storm King Art Center, the bucolic 500-acre sculpture preserve near West Point, makes me think of Steven Spielberg’s “Jurassic Park.” With giant dinosaurs of Modernist abstraction

by Alexander Calder, Alexander Liberman and Mark di Suvero looming over the gently rolling landscape, it takes visitors back to a nearly forgotten era — the 1960s — when sheer bigness and industrial materials and processes were compelling

signs of sophisticated sculptural ambition.

The center has updated its collection over the years, adding a gargantuan bronze spider by Louise Bourgeois, a wavy field by Maya Lin and a stone wall winding through woods by Andy Goldsworthy.

Still, the aesthetic center of gravity remains pretty conservative, and many of the most provocative sculptors of the post-World War II period — John Chamberlain, Jeff Koons and Franz West to mention three —

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Nature meets art in this landscape of wonder. This relationship emphasizes the natural beauty of the world that we live in.

are absent. If the recent addition of “Three Legged Buddha” by Zhang Huan — an immense and immensely ugly gift from Pace Gallery and Mr. Huan — is any indicator, the center could become a graveyard for sculptures no one else wants.

Temporary exhibitions at the center have not been notably with-it either. This year’s, “Light and Landscape,” ventures haphazardly into Postmodern territory with mixed results. Organized by Nora Lawrence, the center’s recently appointed associate curator, it samples a variety of familiar conceptual approaches relating to natural light by 14 artists.

There is one indisputably beautiful piece, a washtub-size cylinder of solid, icy blue glass by Roni Horn. Placed in the center’s Norman chateau-style museum building in a room with floor-to-ceiling windows, it glows. While frosted around its circumference, it is so smooth on top that it looks as if filled with water. On the walls a series of close-up photographic

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portraits by Ms. Horn of an Icelandic woman up to her neck in different thermal pools in her homeland gives the otherwise enigmatic glass object a curiously literal yet still poetic meaning. The sculpture’s title — “Untitled (‘... it was a mask, but the real face was identical to the false one’)” — adds another lyrical layer.

A different sun-filled room is occupied by a pair of works by Alyson Shotz made of thin bands of a semi-reflective material called dichroic acrylic. The sculptures resemble bigger-than-life classical human torsos dematerialized into lattices of prismatic light.

There are a number of duds indoors too. A sign by Matthew Buckingham tells how long it took light from the sun coming through the windows to reach it. A video by Diana Thater pictures the sun tinted blue, so you can see swirling patterns on its surface. A bulky construction like a telescope by Olafur Eliasson offers a banal kaleidoscopic view out a window. Any of these would be more meaningful in a children’s science museum.

Outdoor pieces similarly tend to elementary science. Attentive visitors may notice that the bulbs inside antique lamps over the museum’s two entrances are flickering — not because they need to be replaced but, according to the exhibition brochure, because they are registering, in real time, transmissions from a lightning-detecting antenna in Britain. This putatively global-consciousness-expanding piece is by Katie Paterson. More immediately a concave disc of polished stainless steel by Anish Kapoor attached to the building’s stone exterior wall demonstrates perceptually confounding mirroring effects.

Farther afield a clunky construction more than 11 feet tall by Spencer Finch titled “Lunar” looks as if designed for a Moon landing. Elevated on a tripod base, a big ball made of hexagonal, beige-colored plastic facets is illuminated from within by lights powered by solar panel wings. The brochure explains that the orb’s light exactly replicates the color of the July 2011 full moon over Chicago. On the sunny day of my visit I had to take that on faith, but I imagine it looks good at night.

“Solarium” by William Lamson is a walk-in greenhouse the size of a tool shed with a couple of potted plants on a bench inside. The building’s glass panels have sugar baked in, giving them variegated caramel hues. The brochure explains that this alludes to the creation of sugars in plants by means of photosynthesis, but it does not say anything about the most interesting phenomenon: the hundreds of bees buzzing around the panes. The glass is odorless, as far as I could tell, so I guess they evidently are attracted

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With giant dinosaurs of Modernist abstraction by Alexander Calder, Alexander Liberman and Mark di Suvero looming over the gently rolling landscape, it takes visitors back to a nearly forgotten era — the 1960s — when sheer bigness and industrial materials and processes were compelling signs of sophisticated sculptural ambition.

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by the honeylike colors, which must be terribly frustrating for them.

Happier bees, on the other hand, are to be observed in an installation of real hives within a picket fence enclosure

by Peter Coffin. The brochure says that a beekeeper will be there on Saturdays at noon to educate visitors about what bees do. Since I was there two Sundays ago, I cannot comment on that experience, nor could I receive the gift of a jar of local honey promised to attendees.

My favorite piece was another by Mr. Coffin: “Untitled (Sunshine).” Four loud speakers on a tall pole on a grassy hill broadcast cheerful keyboard melodies.

Again I had to refer to the indispensable brochure wherein I learned that Mr. Coffin invited the jazz musician Bob James to compose and perform “a musical interpretation of sunshine.” I enjoyed the music, but what I liked more was that it was emitted by equipment that looks as if it had been appropriated from an Army base. Nothing else in the exhibition was so delightfully unexpected.

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dia: beacon

by Mark Stevens

Sept. 9 - 11 12-8pm

minimal art: a curated installation of the work of the best artists Cius et quis anducitatur, tempe volecae eatur simus et quias volorehent.Elis alita dolupta core ipsam, ut volo vene eatem fuga.

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Church, palace, house, museum: That’s where we usually situate art. In the sixties, however, many artists grew impatient with these traditional settings and began to dream of less-confining environments.

Some lived in the cast-iron district of Soho, in lofts originally constructed for industrial use. These no-nonsense spaces were open, sweeping, and sometimes epic in scale, with large, declarative windows. Artists of the time developed an ap-

proach, at once brusquely proletarian and intellectual, that flourished in this bracing atmosphere; the lofts echoed their use of grids, series, and industrial materials.

The working-class spirit symbolized their disdain for both conventional museum practice, with its pedigreed genealogies and “this begat that� attitude, and the romantic cult of the genius.

Dia:Beacon, which opened last week in a former Nabisco printing plant built

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in 1929, represents the radiant culmination of this loft sensibility.

Located on the eastern bank of the Hudson in the river town of Beacon, about an hour and a half by train or car from New York, the 300,000-square-foot facility presents the work of 24 artists favored by Dia. The artist Robert Irwin, himself a significant figure of the Dia generation, oversaw the renovation in consultation with the architecture firm OpenOffice and the Dia staff—notably the director, Michael Govan, and the curator, Lynne Cooke. A tripartite building and train shed are joined together into what is now called the Riggio galleries (named after the family of the founder of Barnes and Noble, who contributed much of the funding). Whatever one’s views of the art, Dia:Beacon is a marvelous place of luxuriant light, open space, and serene galleries. As Irwin knows so well, rooms often look best when occupied by daylight.

Instead of creating a new piece of architecture, Irwin—who often works with “given” spaces—adapted the plant to the requirements of the art on display. Dia:Beacon therefore reflects the principles for exhibiting art developed by major figures in the sixties—particularly Donald Judd—and subsequently propounded by Dia’s founders, Heiner Friedrich and Philippa de Menil. In her essay on the facility, Lynne Cooke begins with Donald Judd’s complaint about the Art 101 shtick that typically dominates museums: “It’s freshman English for ever and never no more no literature.” In the Dia space, there’s no museum chronology or implicit hierarchy. Instead, Dia has tried to provide what Judd once called “a permanent installation of a good proportion of the work of the best artists.” Each artist has a dedicated space in which his or her work can be viewed in depth and, presumably, in perpetuity. The artists themselves were invited when possible to create galleries.

Irwin’s modifications subtly enhance the viewpoint of the period. He has designed gardens in keeping with minimal art— and also with the simple, rectilinear logic of early-twentieth-century industrial architecture. Outside, there’s a kind of grassy grid; hedgelike trees form straight lines. In the building itself, Irwin has inserted four clear glass panels into the structure’s many large, multi-paned frosted windows. This creates a precise blurring of outside and inside, one that would be appreciated by the many Dia artists who have worked with perceptual conundrums and by those—such as Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer—who have preferred to work with the landscape itself.

Irwin’s entrance to the facility is shadowy and modest, which magnifies the epic light-burst of space that greets the viewer.

Walter de Maria’s The Equal Area Series (1976–77)—a work of paired stainless-steel circles and squares that plays with the viewer’s perception of perspective—lies flat on the ground of the great opening plain (and plane). In a large neighboring space is Andy Warhol’s Shadows (1978–79), a massive single work of 72 canvases that evokes the perceptual flicker of light and dark.

Paintings work best in the front of the facility, where there is a

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steady north light. Robert Ryman’s white-on-white images glow in this illuminating area, as do Agnes Martin’s sublimely gentle grid paintings. Sculpture that shows well in strong daylight occupies the perimeters, notably Dan Flavin’s “monument” for V. Tatlin series (1964–81), which also works with white-on-white.

Deeper into the building, where the light can be more raking, the organizers exhibit other sculpture or, sometimes, art that requires a lower illumination. Near the heart of Dia:Beacon, appropriately, are several works by Donald Judd. Close by is a commissioned piece by Gerhard Richter, who has created a series of monumental gray glasses that call to mind both painting and

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"A permanent installation of a good proportion of the work of the best artists."

-Dia

sculpture; they can equally symbolize “the window” and “the mirror” of art. The Richter work reflects upon reflecting—embodying the questioning self-consciousness typical of the art of the sixties and seventies.

Although the main floor of Dia:Beacon contains austere work that appears quite reserved, there is also an attic, a basement, and the former railroad shed to one side. On these edges and outskirts, the organizers have placed more unruly temperaments.

Louise Bourgeois becomes the madwoman in Dia’s attic. Left mostly raw, her space brilliantly serves dark dreams, including a lurid piece called Destruction of the Father (1974). The wild child

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Bruce Nauman inhabits the basement, and in the railroad shed is the Vulcan of contemporary art, Richard Serra. Three of his massive Torqued Ellipses (1996–97) are on view, along with a torqued spiral called 2000 (2000).

Perhaps Dia:Beacon will refresh our thinking about minimal art. It embodies some interesting paradoxes. In Soho, the loft sensibility, despite its origins, quickly became chic. Like so many previous movements, minimal art, too, became elegant; it, too, became a power style. Dia:Beacon, inevitably, is surpassingly elegant. It’s also literally positioned at a confluence of two great romantic themes in American culture, that of the railroad and that of the untrammeled landscape. The Hudson River painters liked the Beacon area, and trains are constantly hurtling by. A coincidence, of course, but a telling one. In minimal art, too, there is somewhere a rarely acknowledged American romance, which remains to be explored.

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