Doing New York -- day 6

Central Park

It was our last day in New York and we were leaving the city very early the next morning. All of us felt a sadness that we have never really experienced before when on holiday. Usually there's little reluctance to leave, however good a time we've had, as the pull of home starts to exert itself. But I think all four of us loved New York so much, we'd quite like to have stayed there for who knows how long.
     So we had to cram in as much as possible... I don't have many photos for this day, as you couldn't take photos in the galleries. First we went to the Gagosian Gallery on Madison Avenue to see Robert Rauschenberg's private art collection. As Gagosian is a commercial gallery, it's really just a posh shop (we told ourselves as we tiptoed in trying to look respectable), but the opportunity to see Rauschenberg's own collection seemed quite special. It's all being sold, after his death in 2008, to benefit the new foundation set up in his name. The art was great, a lot of it personally dedicated to 'Bob', and gave a sense of a close-knit circle of artists.
     It felt very cool to be in that smart private gallery -- how were the staff to know that we weren't a shabby-looking family of vast wealth looking to blow a few millions on a Jasper Johns...?
     After Gagosian, we went to the Whitney Museum of American Art, which was also terrific. We didn't much rate the special shows dedicated to Sherrie Levine (seems like a massive case of Emperor's New Clothes) and David Smith (apparently one of the greatest sculptors of the 20th century... liked shiny rectangles), but I was wowed by the floor that drew on the Museum's own collection. It was called Real/Surreal and brought together ... realists and surrealists in order to show the common ground between the two. It was true! I've always said to myself that I'm not keen on surrealism as I tend so strongly towards the realists, but, placed side by side like this, you could see that both tendencies depended for their effect on elements of the other end of the spectrum. It came down to 'making strange', I guess, so that a city sidewalk would be given an aura of unreality by its emptiness or the cool, oblique light, and a fantastical scene would be imbued with creepiness by the sense that it could be happening just around the corner in your own world.
     I was very struck by this weird lithograph by Robert Riggs called 'Children's Ward' from c. 1940:

After that we walked down Madison Avenue (sigh, how long before I can write those words again...?) to Barney's department store, which made up in glamour what Macy's had lacked the day before. Instead of Santa's grotto they had 'Gaga's Wonderland'. I'm not a massive fan of Lady G, but there was something enjoyably camp about this whole thing.

Chocolate Alexander McQueen shoes, anyone?

A quick trip round FAO Schwarz next but it was insane. You had to queue both to get in and to get out, which tended to induce mild panic. The sweeties bit was good.

Can you sense the crazed fever setting in now? We had to fit everything in that we hadn't done previously. Impossible! But it was on to Central Park.

Sigh.
Then up to Columbus Circle.

Sigh.
Then, finally, a last tired walk back to the hotel, taking in a supermarket.

And then packing. And sleeping. And leaving.

Doing New York -- day 5

Detail from 'I Still Use Brushes' by Arman, paintbrushes set in acrylic resin, 1969, MOMA

Day 5 and the art was really ramping up now. We headed straight for MOMA, first thing. I can't begin to capture MOMA in a blogpost, but will just touch on a couple of things. I was tickled by the work, above, which was pulsatingly red/orange and both beautiful and funny (I thought). It dates from the late Sixties, when the 'death of painting' had been confidently declared, so although Arman (not come across him before, but he is a good one to Google for images - he loved accumulations of the same object...) was still using brushes, he wasn't painting with them.

City Hall Subway Station, New York, by Hannah Wilke, kneaded erasers and antique postcard, mounted on wood, 1974, MOMA

This small work by Hannah Wilke caught my eye because it used a vintage postcard. The 'kneaded erasers' are possibly standing in for gum. There was a whole room devoted to Wilke, who seems to have straddled many different art disciplines. She died far too young.

Untitled (Placebo) by Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Another artist who died too young is Felix Gonzalez-Torres. I'm only finding out all this information about these artists in retrospect, you understand. Gonzalez-Torres died in 1996 aged 39. When you come across this silver sea of sweets in the context of a serious state gallery like MOMA, it's very thrilling to realise that you won't be penalised if you take some of the sweets. You will be 'stealing' the work, but in a sense that act of stealing constitutes the work, or is a vital part of it. It's such an incredibly simple thing and yet the act of taking the sweets galvanises the relationship between the artist and the viewer, making the latter feel as though they're crossing boundaries (of course they're not, because the 'stealing' is permitted, and the card on the gallery wall said that the sweets were 'endless', so they are just replenished all the time). For the last few decades, a lot of modern art has been trying to undermine the various ways in which 'art' is venerated and taken so seriously and this piece succeeds in this aim better than most. My kids exulted in eating their little bits of 'stolen' art. I brought mine home and they're here on my desk, still 'vibrating' (for me) with my experience of seeing them in situ, bending down, daring to grasp them and stowing them in my pocket.

Talking of eating the art, the weirdest experience we had in the Museum of Modern Art was Rirkrit Tiravanija's Untitled (Free/Still). It consisted of a kind of 'soup kitchen' in the middle of the gallery where delicious Thai vegetable curry was being served to all comers, for free. This was the art.

Here's the blurb about it, from the gallery wall:

I guess this works in much the same way as the sweets. It was very exciting and transgressive to be sitting eating curry in the gallery and I guess that we became part of the exhibit for as long as we were partaking. People were very curious and couldn't quite believe that they were allowed to get the food and eat it there. I'm so glad the curry itself was so tasty. It wouldn't have been the same if it had been horrible.

After MOMA (no need for a lunch stop now!), we walked down to the International Center for Photography, taking in the HBO shop on the way in order to pay homage to our beloved Larry David of Curb Your Enthusiasm (I forgot to include Curb on my list of Top TV for 2011; the latest series has been wonderful). At the Photography Center, there was a big exhibition of photos remembering 9/11 which was very sobering. We had decided not to go to Ground Zero because it seemed a bit ghoulish but these images seemed a fitting way to acknowledge the city's terrible wound.

Getting tired now, but for some reason one of our number (no names) had become fixated on Macy's, so we trogged to Macy's and it turned out to be rather limp and weary (like me). The knackered old escalators were something else. It was good to visit another iconic NYC place but not for very long.

John's Pizzeria

The big mural at John's

I just have to mention the pizza place we went to that evening: John's, slogan 'No Slices'. We just picked it more or less at random but it was fantastic, housed in a big converted church with a huge stained glass dome. If you didn't have a table (of course we didn't), you had to stand in the bar until your number came up on a digital board, which was quite exciting (for a while). The pizza was really good and it turns out that the place is well known and has hosted the end of series parties for The Sopranos (another of my absolute fave shows) so who knows, maybe I sat in the same chair as Tone!

M&M's World -- the wall of M&M's

     This was the night that the lucky males in our party went to see Stephen Merchant's stand-up show but it was too naughty for the girls (well, maybe I could have taken it...), so Dora and I went out on our own and hung out in Times Square, which we liked so much. We went to M&M's World where you can fill a bag from the vast selection of colours you can see some of above. All around us people were loading up with great sackloads of M&M's, but we managed to stop at only a relative few (it was the same syndrome you get in a bead shop when you can hardly bear to stop picking colours).
      Then we went back to the hotel and watched the (grim) final of American X Factor. It was only good for staying awake until the men came back.

Doing New York -- day 4

Are you still with me? Thanks so much for your comments about New York -- I know it's a bit much to draw it out for such a long time, but it would take so long to record the whole trip in one go. I'm late posting again today as I've been finishing off some Thank You card designs to be sent to relatives.

So, on our Tuesday in New York, we began by trying to offset the badness of the previous day with a healthy breakfast. I had oatmeal with berries and a smoothie. Not impressed! Once I had eaten the meagre scattering of berries, the porridge was bland and tasteless. I only like porridge as a carrier for, erm, cream, butter, brown sugar, strawberries, etc, etc. The smoothie was not a smoothie in my book but a slushy! Nasty icy thing. Let's face it, I'm just not a naturally healthy eater. I blame my granny on my dad's side (who I also seem to be starting to resemble physically, which perhaps shouldn't come as any surprise but it is rather unnerving) -- who worked in the baking bit of a baker's shop and was hardly ever not making a cake at any time of night or day.

A nice big picture of the Statue of Liberty to stop the cake rot

Yes, it was more airport-style security in Battery Park in order to board a small boat to go out to Ellis Island. When you are being herded through a shed in your stockinged feet with your coat and belt and belongings in a plastic box you start to wonder if it's really worth it. But a person at work who I respect very much (a History professor) had told me he had wept at Ellis Island to see the touching belongings of the immigrants, and so I very much wanted to go there. All the time that we'd been in New York I had been reading Vol 3 of The Emigrants, Vilhelm Moberg's incredible 4-volume sequence about Swedish emigrants who went to America in 1850. I love these books so much and will be bereft when I reach the end (Vol 4 is on its way from Amazon as I type this). Reading this book also heightened my sense of expectation about visiting the point of entry for 12 million immigrants to the United States.

Ellis Island

We chugged past the Statue of Liberty (you can't help but be moved by it -- Liberty seems lonely out there in the water). Before long we had arrived at Ellis Island, me trying to imagine I was Kristina Nilsson, pregnant, sick, struggling with three small children and a huge Swedish chest, as I arrived in America after a three-month journey on a filthy ship.

Immigrants' trunks in the entrance of Ellis Island museum

The museum was surprisingly serious, absolutely no dumbing down of this subject which is so significant in America's history. There were an awful lot of boards to read and a massive amount of information to ingest. I decided to try to follow a Swedish thread through it all.

A Swedish immigrant family c 1860s

The vaulted reception hall at Ellis Island

The elders of a Swedish immigrant community with their new church

The cabinets of objects brought into America by immigrants were on the third floor. We made our way up there and I prepared to be touched by them -- I wanted to be touched! Sadly, I remained unmoved, probably because you can't really set yourself up for emotion in that way. Lord knows I cry easily enough (Joe and Pip's final hug on Great Expectations earlier this week...) but it wasn't happening this time.

the view of Manhattan from the boat

We sailed back to the city on the next boat and went for lunch at the famous Oyster restaurant underneath Grand Central Station. The station itself is a treat, with its vast hall, mirroring the hall at Ellis Island in a way.

Grand Central Station

The restaurant was fantastic, one of those down-to-earth places that serve great food without making much of a fuss about it. The menu was incredible, with oysters (ugh!), fish and scallops from all over America. We had scallops with fries and creamed spinach. The scallops were huge, about three or four times bigger than the ones you usually get in the UK. And we ordered far too much spinach! When will we learn?

The Oyster restaurant

You may have been wondering where the art was in this New York trip. Somehow, it all got bunched up at the end and now it began, with the wonderful spirally Guggenheim. When we got there, I was suddenly strongly put in mind of my Mum, who visited New York on her own in the Eighties. I remember her telling me how much she loved going to the Guggenheim, but that she'd been dying to borrow one of their wheelchairs, ride in the lift to the top of the spiral and let gravity whizz her all the way down.

This time, all the art had been removed from the gallery walls and the entire space within the spiral was given over to a massive retrospective of the work of Maurizio Cattelan. I just can't pretend that I was really aware of his work before I saw this show, but I certainly am now. The visual impact of the mass of objects strung up on ropes was amazing.

What I finally understood was that this wasn't some one-off installation -- or rather, it was, but each element of the installation was a re-creation of an earlier work by Cattelan, but now treated in this 'disrespectful' way, strung up, competing for attention with the mass of other objects. So it was a retrospective, giving a full overview of the artist's work to date, but it also had its own impact, undermining the seriousness of a gallery space like the Guggenheim, and also, to me, suggesting the artist's own 'head space' crowded with ideas and memories. It was fantastic, anyway.

Rock of Ages

That evening we went to see the musical Rock of Ages, which was fun (it's about 80s rock music, but also very sweet and pantomimey with a timeless, nay, almost Shakespearean, love story). It worried me that most of the people sitting around us in the stalls didn't seem to speak English, and they were a little bit slow to warm up, but by the end of Act 2, led on by a few dedicated rock 'dudes and dudettes' (ladies, those pumping fists became just a little tiresome after an hour and a half...), plenty of them were dancing in the aisles in the finale. A weird thing was that hunky male usherettes (? ushers?) sold drinks right the way through the performance, but it didn't really distract too much.

Come back tomorrow for MOMA and M&M World...

Doing New York -- day 3

Sorry that today's bit about New York is so late. I've been to London, at last, to see the Grayson Perry exhibition at the British Museum.

The British Museum, a great British institution

 I was very taken by the exhibition and could certainly understand why I've read so many enthusiastic reports of it on various blogs I follow. I loved the exuberant mixing of cultures in the objects Grayson had selected, and the artworks he'd been inspired to make were incredible. In recent years I haven't been that taken with the logo-filled tapestries he's been doing, the brand-name Bayeuxs, but somehow the pieces in this show seemed more visceral, with a real connection to the artist. I particularly liked the skull with all the English symbols embedded in it, and the cast iron 'Parents' figures with their massive burdens.

Pilgrimage to the British Museum by Grayson Perry

But I must get back to New York while it's still fresh in my mind...

Lollipops in Dylan's Candy Bar

So, Monday morning found us getting a sugar rush in the giant pop-up store for Dylan's Candy Bar, even before we'd had breakfast. The day was fast turning into a kitschfest as we breakfasted on 'egg, sausage and cheese biscuits' at 'Tim Horton's Cake and Bake', followed by the best doughnut EVER, just oozing jammy gunge.

The lobby of the Empire State Building

We'd set aside the morning to go to the top of the Empire State Building, which was something the kids specially wanted to do. We hadn't bargained on the airport-style security and the endless queues. It took a very long time before we were in the lift and swooshing up to the 86th floor.

One of the million photos we took -- you can see the Chrysler Building in this one

Up there it was very very cold and windy. I was very surprised to see one or two pigeons landing on the parapets -- I would have expected them to stay down nearer the ground. We listened to 'Tony', a native New Yorker, giving us the lowdown on everything we could see, on the audio guide. There was a definite air of defiance and patriotism in the recording, post 9/11 -- the Twin Towers might have gone but the Empire State Building was standing proud. No wonder the security was so stringent.

The view south towards the financial district

Back down to earth again, we walked to Bryant Park where there was a Christmas market. Continuing the day's healthy theme, we had cheese and ham crepes and almond-flavoured hot chocolate, sitting on the comfy seats out in the open. We watched the brisk sales at a pickle stall, Pickle Me Pete. People's faces were lighting up as they spied the pickle man, and they would buy a huge gherkin to eat like a lolly!

 There was ice-skating in Bryant Park as well. It was very relaxed and pretty. The holiday spirit was really building up.

Christmassy fast-food van

 We just wandered up Fifth Avenue again, taking in Radio City and Abercrombie and Fitch where a certain person had been promised a hoody for Christmas.

When we had entered the US two days previously and were having our retinas photographed and our fingerprints taken digitally (at least I think that's what was going on), the US Marshal on the desk, oblivious to the massive queue waiting to come through immigration, had chatted to us for far too long -- we didn't want to displease him so we just smiled and nodded -- but he told us that 'the best show in town' was the Christmas Spectacular at Radio City. There were crowds of people going inside to see it as we passed, but as far as we could tell it was very oldfashioned with the Rockettes dancing girls the chief selling point. So we just kept on walking until I virtually had to be airlifted back to the hotel.