Maya Barkai’s crowdsourced art installation has brought pedestrian crossing symbols from around the world to New York’s streets
Only a block north from the construction barriers surrounding the former site of the World Trade Center, which brim with boastful renderings of progress on the nearly-complete September 11th Memorial, another, less conspicuous hole opens up in Lower Manhattan’s lapidary landscape. Compared to the blocks bordering Ground Zero, it’s a stretch of Church Street that’s relatively empty. Maybe that’s part of why the netting surrounding this construction site was passed up as glossy adspace showcasing the real estate to come and instead given over to art — currently, Israeli artist Maya Barkai’s installation “Walking Men,” which juxtaposes images of pedestrian walk signs from around the world.
In North America, it’s easy not to devote much thought to the design of “walking men”. While the pictograms are relatively new to the US — until recently, it was still not uncommon to come across a spelled-out “WALK” sign on the streets of New York — bright-white walk symbols are now not only fairly uniform across dense American cities, they’re also uniformly ignored by jaywalkers, who normally treat the signals as well-meaning but unnecessary suggestions.
Elsewhere, though, walk signals are much more diverse — and sometimes more meaningful. In Germany, pedestrians who cross against the light aren’t really braving traffic as much as the reproachful glances of those dutifully remaining at the opposite corner. From Munich to Münster, old women wait at otherwise empty street crossings for the signal to change — on principle. Ordnung — the organizing principle of German civilization — begins at the intersection.
At three o’clock on Wednesday morning, the air beneath the Central Mid-Levels Escalator became thick with the fumes of spray paint as a young university student left a message on the escalator’s pillars: “Who’s afraid of Ai Wei Wei?”
Over the past week, the student, nicknamed Chin, has blitzed some of Hong Kong’s most high-profile locations with the message and hand-cut stencil portraits of Ai, the Beijing-based artist and activist who was arrested on April 3rd while attempting to board a flight to Hong Kong.
Now Chin is on the run from the Hong Kong police’s Regional Crime Unit, which normally investigates serious crimes like rape and murder. She risks being charged with criminal damage, which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in jail. But she says she remains unbowed.
“It will be worth it if just one person sees what I’ve done and asks themselves, ‘Why should Ai Wei Wei be silenced?’’” she said.
“What I’m doing is not random tagging. I expected there to be an investigation at some point, especially since there is a political message here. If I am arrested, I have trust in the Hong Kong legal system that my case can be heard fairly. In the worst case scenario, I know that I might have to pay a fine and go to jail, and I’m prepared for that.”
It was bound to happen. 26 months after Tsoi Yuen Village received its death sentence, 100 police officers burst into the remaining villagers’ houses and told them to leave.
The villagers were incredulous. “I was negotiating with the government peacefully only a few days ago,” one man, Cheung Sun-yau, told the South China Morning Post. Tuesday morning, after workers cut through his front gate, police pushed him into his house and searched him, before telling him that it was his last chance to leave before a new high-speed railway is built through the village.
Tsoi Yuen’s residents have been protesting their village’s impending demolition for more than two years. Despite an evacuation order last year, 60 villagers have chosen to remain as they continue to negotiate with the government for compensation. Yesterday, apparently, the government decided it had had enough.
By the time February rolls around, Montreal has already been buried in snow for a couple of months and your mental map of the city has changed considerably. Places you’d normally linger — the steps at Place des Arts, the plaza in front of Mont-Royal metro, the giant chess board in Berri Square — have vanished from the landscape, inaccessible under the snow, unpleasant in the sub-zero wind.
Montreal’s seasonal extremes are a challenge to urban planning: how do you create a vibrant place that can function just as well on a frigid January day as on a balmy August night? Some spaces are more adaptable than others. Neighbourhood retail streets will always be lively, since people still need to hit up the supermarket, coffee shop and drug store even when it’s cold. Park lawns make good toboggan slopes and hockey rinks in the winter. But hard-surfaced plazas and squares — those quintessentially urban spaces — have a hard time finding much use between December and April.
For most of the years I lived in Montreal, the only time of the winter when a downtown square came back to life was during February’s Nuit Blanche festival, when performances and light installations take over the snowbound tarmac at Place des Arts. Lately, however, some of the ideas behind that one night of wintertime festivities has been extended throughout the winter. Last year, the recently-built Place des Festivals played host to Champ de pixels, which transformed the square into a giant Lite Brite studded with illuminated “pixels” made from overturned plastic buckets. Each bucket was equipped with motion sensors; when you walked by, the colour of the light shifted from white to red.
Bill Brand’s “Masstransiscipe” installation in New York’s subway
I first noticed subway tunnel wall animations in Boston, where the long gaps between stations on the MBTA Red Line provides a captive audience. The animation, composed of dozens of stills that simulated movement as the train zoomed by, was an ad. The message: visit Vermont and its great outdoors, which certainly must have resonated with more than a few claustrophobes riding the crowded rush hour rails.
Animated ads in subway tunnels are expensive, both to design and install, which helps explain why the Vermont ad’s successor, a campaign for a movie “coming to theatres” last February, was only removed recently — with no ready replacement. But the medium is a popular one, if only because it’s relatively novel and rare. Examples from Budapest, Hong Kong, Kiev, L.A., Tokyo, and Washington, D.C. have been enthusiastically documented for upload to YouTube. And given that cash-strapped transit agencies have allowed almost every other subway surface to be colonized by ad space, including seats and whole exteriors of rolling stock, it was almost a logical next step.
Much of the credit for introducing these flipbook or zoetrope-like ads goes to two independent innovators: New York astrophysics student Joshua Spodek and Winnipeg animator Bradley Caruk. Spodek’s ads debuted in Atlanta in 2001; his company, Sub Media, continues to produce similar ads today. In 2006, Caruk won a Manning Innovation Award for his concept, which his partner, Rob Walker, first thought up while staring at the blank walls of Paris’ Metro. The company they co-founded, SideTrack Technologies, set up its first system in Kuala Lumpur and has since opened others across the United States — and beyond, to London, Rio de Janeiro, and cities in Mexico.
Caruk’s system, which relies on motion-sensitive LEDs, made subway advertising widespread and profitable. The MBTA raked in $1.5 million in SideTrack’s first two years of operation in Boston, and one ad alone brought the L.A. Metro the equivalent of 192,000 new riders in revenue. But he was hardly the first person to experiment with subway animation.
In the omphalos of Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate, Chicago
The contemporary art world can be a fickle place. Less than a decade ago, Damien Hirst somehow managed to earn an overnight fortune by preserving a dead shark in a fish tank. That was before a host of personal troubles — and the ongoing recession’s damper on the market for ostentatious art. These days, Hirst’s star is falling — fast. But at least one international art sensation of the last decade, sober sculptor Anish Kapoor, is still rapidly on the rise.
Born into Bombay’s community of former Baghdad Jews and educated in Israel and Britain, Kapoor has always been a consummate cosmopolitan, but he’ll have a truly unique place on the world stage all to himself in 2012, when his wild design (co-conceived with Cecil Balmond) for a centerpiece to the London Olympics — a 115 meter high tower, complete with a sort of pretzeloid roller coaster frame that looks even more mad than the games’ controversial logo — is likely to be lingered over by the cameras of broadcasters around the globe.
If Kapoor’s Olympic piece is a coup — it’s already touted as a future landmark on par with the Eiffel Tower — it may cement his everlasting fame. But as a practitioner of urban art, the work he’s left behind to date — more intimate, intricate, and people-friendly — may yet prove more valuable. Warmly embraced wherever it’s been exhibited, Kapoor’s outdoor oeuvre has represented a rare popular success for conceptual sculpture — reflecting, and unavoidably engaging with — the surrounding city, even if that isn’t quite what the artist originally intended.
Dispatchwork installation in Quito, Ecuador. Photos by Jan Vormann.
Children and adults alike have long built fantasy cities out of Lego. But Jan Vormann seems like he’s on a mission to patch all the holes, cracks, and fissures in the walls of the world’s existing cities with the colorful toy bricks. As part of his Dispatchwork project, the German artist has already stuffed Lego pieces into holes on four continents, from Tel Aviv to Quito to New York — where he vowed to “support Mayor Bloomberg in his everyday struggle” by assembling a thirty person crew to patch a post office, the wall surrounding Central Park, Times Square’s police station, and, of course, the mosaic walls of the subway. In Berlin, passersby pitched in to help plug bullet holes left from the Second World War.
Vormann’s project has not been without incident. He dryly reports that Serbians were “not too into plastic,” muttering something “connected to the term ‘private property’”. In Quito, he inadvertently found himself patching the city’s “most dangerous” street. But his most difficult installation may have been Zürich, where the artist said it was “hard to find spots” because “the municipality is too wealthy to let the facades show decay”.
It’s not hard to see why Kacey Wong‘s “Paddling Home” is one of the most popular installations at the Hong Kong-Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism. It’s a houseboat that looks just like a typical Hong Kong apartment, after all, and anyone who lives here can relate to it.
Wong has paid particular attention to detail, cladding his boat in chintzy pink tile (popular in the 1990s as a kind of postmodern nostalgia for the ’50s, he says) and giving it what is locally (but inaccurately) known as a “bay window,” a kind of projecting window box that saves developers money on floor space while including the area of the windowsill in an apartment’s square footage. Wong’s installation highlights the absurdity of the property game in Hong Kong, where real estate is business, politics and civic obsession all at once.
The police have taken over the Shenzhen-Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism. They are rehearsing for an official event to happen later in the day and many of the biennale’s outdoor installations at Shenzhen’s massive Civic Square have been temporarily closed off to the public for the occasion.
Ou Ning, the biennale’s curator, is standing in the square watching thousands of police officers and soldiers march in.
“I’ve been taking photos of the police standing in front of the exhibits,” says Ou, dressed in black, standing unassumingly on the side of the square. “It’s quite funny to see.”
Ou lived in Shenzhen for a decade before moving to Guangzhou and eventually Beijing. More than any other Chinese city, he says, people in Shenzhen are eager for political reform. He sees the next step in Shenzhen’s evolution as becoming a political testing ground for the rest of China and he wants this year’s biennale to heighten awareness of Shenzhen’s political role through the use of public space.
In the most remote corner of the Hong Kong-Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale‘s West Kowloon site, three architects, Kingsley Ng, Syren Johnstone and Daniel Patzold, are digging up Hong Kong’s heritage from virgin land. The concept: it’s several centuries into the future and an old street market has been discovered, leading to an archaeological race to save what remains of it.
Artifacts from the Central street market are scattered around the dig, including an old green market booth the team brought in from Gutzlaff Street. It now sits incongruously in an open plain with the giant glass-and-stall wall of the just-built International Commerce Centre rising incongruously behind it.
“When something like this is in the market, you don’t notice because it’s a shitty old thing, but when you move it here, you start seeing all of the details. There’s a lot of stories here,” says Johnstone. “If we found an old market 350 years in the future, we would want to preserve and protect the ruins. Why not today for the markets that still exist?”
Last Sunday, Clara Lee and her nine-year-old daughter Hoi-ching were wandering through the craggy grass and gnarly trees that make up the West Kowloon site of the Hong Kong-Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture.
“It’s big here!” exclaimed Hoi-ching. “I don’t often go to the countryside.”
“Actually,” said her mother, “this is not the countryside. We’re in the city.”
Hoi-ching looked up, perplexed. “But it feels like the country.”
She could be excused for being mistaken. After it was created from landfill fifteen years ago, parts of West Kowloon were developed with malls and highrises, while a narrow strip of waterfront was recently converted into a public park and promenade. But most of it was simply fenced off and left fallow; land reclaimed from the sea was gradually reclaimed by nature. With the totems of Hong Kong finance soaring at either end of the site, it’s an odd experience to wander along a dirt road past wild grass, untamed shrubs and the sound of crickets buzzing in the sun.
It becomes obvious as soon as you enter the métro car: this will be no ordinary ride. The usual advertisements and bright orange colour have been replaced by a dark blue, wood-textured film covering the car’s interior walls. Distorted, semi-transparent photos are pasted on the windows. As the métro doors close, eerie music starts playing, followed by the mournful wail of a fog horn.
Nowhere are the odd sounds and visuals explained, which is exactly what artist Rose-Marie Goulet wanted when she created Point de fuite, an unprecedented art project that has been riding the rails of the métro’s Orange Line since last September. When she first teamed up with the Montreal Transit Corp. to create the installation, in 2006, she insisted that it not be labelled explicitly as an art project.
“It’s by chance that you come across this car,” Goulet explained. “People aren’t expecting it, that’s what’s important.”
At Henri Bourassa station, meanwhile, métro riders have even more unusual art to consider: .98, a new light mural that was inaugurated last April. Located in one of Henri Bourassa’s long corridors, the mural consists of several dozen LED lights programmed to change colours and blink in different patterns.
Art has been part of Montreal’s métro since the system first opened in 1966. In some ways, with its abundance of sculptures, murals and unique architectural details, it is a vast underground gallery through which hundreds of thousands of commuters just happen to pass every day. What makes .98 and Point de fuite stand out is the way they engage métro riders in unorthodox ways.
When lighting designer Axel Morgenthaler was commissioned to create a new work of art in the Henri-Bourassa station, he wanted to make something unusual that would grab the attention of harried commuters.
What do you do with an abandoned building? Turn it into art. Such is the case in Liverpool where the British sculptor Richard Wilson has created Turning the Place Over, an ambitious intervention that removes an eight metre chunk of façade from a building in central Liverpool, rotates it and puts it back into place. An introduction to the piece by the Cass Sculpture Foundation describes it in more detail:
Turning the Place Over consists of an 8 metres diameter ovoid cut from the façade of a building and made to oscillate in three dimensions. The revolving façade rests on a specially designed giant rotator, usually used in the shipping and nuclear industries, and acts as a huge opening and closing ‘window’, offering recurrent glimpses of the interior during its constant cycle during daylight hours.
The ovoid section of facade is then mounted on a central spindle, aligned on a specific angle to the building. When at rest, the ovoid section of facade would fit flush into the rest of the building. The angled spindle is, however, placed on a set of powerful motorised industrial rollers and will rotate. As it rotates, the facade not only becomes completely inverted, but will also oscillate into the building and out into the street, revealing the interior of the building and only being flush with the building at one point during its rotation.
This astonishing feat of engineering will stun audiences on many levels. Disturbing and disorientating from a distance, from close-up passers-by have a thrilling experience as the building rotates above them.
Some observers have noted that Wilson’s intervention draws heavily from the work of Gordon Matta-Clark, an American architect and artist who carved up houses with a chainsaw in the 1970s. His work dwelled on the disintegration of the United States’ public life, including the decay of its cities; one of his more well-known efforts, very similar to Turning the Place Over, involved cutting out a large piece of wall from a New York warehouse and suspending it from a crane.
It’s not entirely clear what Wilson’s installation, which was commissioned by Liverpool in celebration of its designation as 2008′s European Capital of Culture, is trying to say. But it’s still remarkable, if only because it merges the public and private spheres of life into one, revealing the inner workings of a building that is normally shielded from passersby.
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