Open Air Art No. 2 –Spinning the Cube
On New Year’s Eve, Dianne and I were among the small crowd of people in Astor Place, walking around in that disjointed maze of traffic islands and converging intersections near 8th and Lafayette Streets. To our right was the 15-foot high cube sculpture, which stands pivoted on one of its corners like a bizarro globe of a flatlander world. Two men stopped to give the cube a push. It looked like work, but they got it moving. There was a lot of noise in the air, so I couldn’t tell if the cube itself also made noise, like a creaky gate with rusty hinges.
Open air sculptures in public places have to be built for abuse. The cube at Astor Place actually invites handling. Dianne and I stopped to watch the cube spin as the two men leaned into it and pushed. It was an impressionistic moment in the shadows of the night. A few minutes later we would duck into a small bar, Tribe, where the DJ would queue up Guy Lombardo’s rendition of Auld Lang Sine at the end of a boisterous countdown.
Last week, we found ourselves back in Astor Place again. I looked at the cube with a new curiosity, noticing a flyer taped near one of its corners and its blackness against the icy snow packed around it. I find that my mind turns to open air art wherever I find it these days, probably as a consequence of the Gates event drawing nearer.
From where we stood, I also saw the hundred-year old cupola of the Astor Place subway station, one of the original in the IRT system that helped usher into the 20th century a new era of speed. To my back was the Cooper Union building. The cube seemed to be sandwiched like a flea market layout of knickknacks from different centuries. I enjoyed its overlooked presence and the chaos of traffic and urban elements surrounding it.
In the lobby of the Cooper’s Union, a 19th century hand tinted photograph is on display that shows Cooper’s Union looming over the other buildings in the neighborhood, unlike today, where the scale has been reversed. It also shows a neat, treed street, not cluttered and busy. Undoubtedly, the day is coming when the immense potential to create a coordinated public space in Astor Place will be mulled over by some urban designers, and, once again, this chaotic corner might become a neat, treed public space. But however they choose to design it, the cube will be a part of their plan.
This past Sunday, as it turned out, the Times ran a short piece on the cube. After thirty-some years of spinning on its axis at the whims of passersby, the cube was recently found to be stuck in place. Who knows, maybe it was that final push on New Year’s Eve that finally did it.
The Times recalled the cube’s early history. It was installed in 1968 as part of a citywide event called “Sculpture and the Environment.” Back then, Cooper Union’s students protested its removal when the event was over, and somehow it has survived in place until today.
In 1968, it wasn’t unusual for students to raise their collective voice in protest. Typically, they widely disdained concepts representing their parents’ side of “the gap” and embraced the things from their side of “the gap.” The gap was the so-called generation gap, a term that faded from use quickly, but not before it got imbedded as the name for a store that would grow into a mega-clothing store chain.
I can understand how Rosenthal’s cube could fit the students’ ideas of art on their side of the gap. The piece strikes me as having a pop art sensibility, that Warholian feeling that imbues common day objects with artful pretense. Its kinetic aspect subverts notions identified with pedestal-sculpture, such as, the idea that art is not to be touched.
Sixties students related well to expanding ideas that left behind what they perceived were rigid conventions. If, on the other hand, the cube were to be perceived, for example, as an object from the post-war school of abstract expressionism, the 60’s protesters would have been left cold. That sort of intellectualism was from the other side of the gap. The cube would have become scrap metal once the citywide installation was through.
Instead, the cube was left in place, apparently the first open air modern-art sculpture accepted by the City. On Sunday, the Times reported that it couldn’t find anyone in charge of it. The Parks Department once told the cube’s artist Tony Rosenthal that they would henceforth take care of it, but this seems to be one of those unwritten agreements that faded away with time. (The Times didn’t mention it, but Rosenthal is now over 90 and apparently still a working artist, God bless him.) The Transportation Department, “does not repair kinetic works of art,” according to a spokesperson, speaking as if this was a matter of wise policy. The Village Alliance, a business improvement district, cleans off graffiti from time to time but that’s all they’re willing to do.
In the meantime, the cube stays stuck in a moment it can’t get out of.
Open air sculptures in public places have to be built for abuse. The cube at Astor Place actually invites handling. Dianne and I stopped to watch the cube spin as the two men leaned into it and pushed. It was an impressionistic moment in the shadows of the night. A few minutes later we would duck into a small bar, Tribe, where the DJ would queue up Guy Lombardo’s rendition of Auld Lang Sine at the end of a boisterous countdown.
Last week, we found ourselves back in Astor Place again. I looked at the cube with a new curiosity, noticing a flyer taped near one of its corners and its blackness against the icy snow packed around it. I find that my mind turns to open air art wherever I find it these days, probably as a consequence of the Gates event drawing nearer.
From where we stood, I also saw the hundred-year old cupola of the Astor Place subway station, one of the original in the IRT system that helped usher into the 20th century a new era of speed. To my back was the Cooper Union building. The cube seemed to be sandwiched like a flea market layout of knickknacks from different centuries. I enjoyed its overlooked presence and the chaos of traffic and urban elements surrounding it.
In the lobby of the Cooper’s Union, a 19th century hand tinted photograph is on display that shows Cooper’s Union looming over the other buildings in the neighborhood, unlike today, where the scale has been reversed. It also shows a neat, treed street, not cluttered and busy. Undoubtedly, the day is coming when the immense potential to create a coordinated public space in Astor Place will be mulled over by some urban designers, and, once again, this chaotic corner might become a neat, treed public space. But however they choose to design it, the cube will be a part of their plan.
This past Sunday, as it turned out, the Times ran a short piece on the cube. After thirty-some years of spinning on its axis at the whims of passersby, the cube was recently found to be stuck in place. Who knows, maybe it was that final push on New Year’s Eve that finally did it.
The Times recalled the cube’s early history. It was installed in 1968 as part of a citywide event called “Sculpture and the Environment.” Back then, Cooper Union’s students protested its removal when the event was over, and somehow it has survived in place until today.
In 1968, it wasn’t unusual for students to raise their collective voice in protest. Typically, they widely disdained concepts representing their parents’ side of “the gap” and embraced the things from their side of “the gap.” The gap was the so-called generation gap, a term that faded from use quickly, but not before it got imbedded as the name for a store that would grow into a mega-clothing store chain.
I can understand how Rosenthal’s cube could fit the students’ ideas of art on their side of the gap. The piece strikes me as having a pop art sensibility, that Warholian feeling that imbues common day objects with artful pretense. Its kinetic aspect subverts notions identified with pedestal-sculpture, such as, the idea that art is not to be touched.
Sixties students related well to expanding ideas that left behind what they perceived were rigid conventions. If, on the other hand, the cube were to be perceived, for example, as an object from the post-war school of abstract expressionism, the 60’s protesters would have been left cold. That sort of intellectualism was from the other side of the gap. The cube would have become scrap metal once the citywide installation was through.
Instead, the cube was left in place, apparently the first open air modern-art sculpture accepted by the City. On Sunday, the Times reported that it couldn’t find anyone in charge of it. The Parks Department once told the cube’s artist Tony Rosenthal that they would henceforth take care of it, but this seems to be one of those unwritten agreements that faded away with time. (The Times didn’t mention it, but Rosenthal is now over 90 and apparently still a working artist, God bless him.) The Transportation Department, “does not repair kinetic works of art,” according to a spokesperson, speaking as if this was a matter of wise policy. The Village Alliance, a business improvement district, cleans off graffiti from time to time but that’s all they’re willing to do.
In the meantime, the cube stays stuck in a moment it can’t get out of.
posted by Paul Cogley at 5:16 PM
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