top of the tower
If you walk straight back into the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you will get to a room with tapestries on the walls and an enormous choir screen in the middle dividing the east end of the room from the west end. If you then turn left and walk for a good distance, you will eventually pass a pair of relatively nondescript elevators on your right-hand side.Unlike the other elevators in the Met Museum, these elevators will take you up to the roof. If the day is nice, you can buy a drink and lounge about on benches while enjoying a fantastic view of Central Park and midtown Manhattan.
This is what I did yesterday. It was an accident. As a "contributing member" of the museum, I get the privilege of paying a ridiculous sum to dine in the special members' dining room. I was walking past the museum on my way out of the park when I thought, "Gee, I wonder where the members' dining room is." It turns out it's on the fourth floor, just below the roof, also accessible by this special elevator.
I didn't go to the members' dining room. It was not actually my plan to eat alone in a particularly expensive place simply because I've never done it before, after all. I did, however, make my way up to the sparsely populated roof, from which New York looks surprisingly green and inviting. There was an installation by Cai Guo-Qiang up there. Some of it I just didn't "get"; without more in the way of explanation or interpretation, I'm hard-pressed to appreciate crocodiles stuck with knives and scissors. (I admit that it was a briefly clever gag; the sharp objects had all been taken from airport passengers as they went through security, and the title of the works was the official-sounding Move Along, Nothing to See Here. A good momentary evocation of the confiscation, but still not, I think, good art.) More interesting by far, also amusing, and visually striking, was Transparent Monument (pictured, above). This is, essentially, an enormous piece of tempered glass, slightly tinted. The amusing bit is provided by the dead birds placed around the base, as if they'd flown into the window and knocked themselves out.But the interest was provided, for me, much more by the tint and the way the glass divided such an open space, without precisely making it less open. I liked the way the color of the sky was slightly different through the glass, the way it played with color in our world. I liked its openness; it was well-conceived for the available space. And I liked even the title of the work, "monument" being such a loaded word ("monument to what?" we might ask, especially given the prominently displayed Egyptian obelisk not far off in Central Park).
posted by Skay @ 8:28 PM
2 Comments:
Transparent Monuments looks beautiful. I love the work it does, not just in dividing up space but in working framing a space: usually a frame works pretty much just in 2-D (e.g. bordering a painting), but here it frames very different things depending on where you stand (how close, what angle, which side). Sad about the birds, however--maybe it is a monument to them!
It's a good insight, Zraa, about the dimensionality of this frame. I like, also, the fact that the "frame" here is an absence. The piece is framed by negative space; it has no outline or border, but rather simply an edge.
I also find this work beautiful. There is something about the clean lines that attracts me, and something about the views through the glass that keeps my attention. Perhaps these are not enough for beauty; in that case, there is something more, too, which I am hard-pressed to name.
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