Prospect: A Year in the Park

Water colors

The problem with the DUMBO Arts Festival is that the artworks...or installations, or performances, or whatever...get so outrageously upstaged by Brooklyn Bridge Park, our guest park of the day. The "art," like this golden waterlily, tends toward the quirky and trivial, while some of New York's most iconic views rise up in the background and remind you that great design, and real life, kick butt without pretense.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Spouse is a much better audience for this sort of thing. He gamely peered over a canvas in the roofless Tobacco Warehouse...

 

...examined the backpack "galleries" of these inventive young strolling artistes...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

...and wandered into "Silhouettes of Us," which, according to the inevitable Artist's Statement, "explores what personal space means in an urban environment." (The clotheslines "act as a transcendental ever-changing canvas that plays with light, scale and perception," it also said, and it went on from there but I didn't.)

 

 

After a brief downpour, kids and parents re-populated the "Art Village" to make a "Skyline String Installation" and paint a mural.

 

 

 

   

 

 But in this park, the skyline is the mural, and vice versa.

Tomorrow: Some shots from DUMBO's one masterpiece "installation," Jane's Carousel.

Only God can make a tree...

...but professional artists keep trying.

 

I suspected some artyfact-related shenanigans were afoot on Tuesday when I saw this curious object being reverently photographed by two people in wetsuits as it was edged toward the lake opposite Prospect Park's Boathouse.

 

 

 

Then nearby, I came across this ungainly specimen, apparently some sort of cast.

 

Oh, dear. It looked like a fresh attack of Public Art. In parks, there are generally two types: the kind that sticks out like a sore thumb of artifice, and the kind that aims for homage to nature. Okay, three types, if one includes the Self-Consciously Fake Homage to Nature (like the shiny-silver "erratic boulders" that hunkered down near the Litchfield villa a few years ago).This looks like type 3.

 

 

 

 

 

Most of these efforts leave me cold, because they are overwhelmed by the profound, authentic beauty all around them. What might look majestic and intriguing in a loft or studio space tends to whimper and shrink alongside the magnificence of the simplest maple tree, much less a rock star like the park's tortuous Camperdown Elm (left).

 

(One big exception: the "Natural History" installation at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden by Patrick Dougherty, perhaps because of an inherent humility in its conception. It seems content to deepen the mystery of the natural world around it, rather than ostentatiously comment on it.)

 

 

 

 

 

My suspicions were correct: Art, incoming. According to the park's website: "Sculptor Robert Lobe is installing three sculptures that will be on view in and around the Lullwater by the Boathouse from May through November 2011. The artist stretched, gathered and tooled sheets of aluminum around trees and rocks to sculpt the skin of the forest." Lobe, a Detroit native, is currently an artist-in-residence at the LUX Art Institute in Encinitas, Calif., and he does wonderful drawings of trees and has taken gorgeous pictures of the Boathouse in winter. He also apparently welds in the snow, which is more guts than I've got. Maybe I will come to like his aluminum tree skins; I will try to keep an open mind. Meanwhile, I'm with Joyce Kilmer.

SPEAKING OF OPEN MINDS...

...I'm hoping to meet some at this year's Brooklyn Blogfest, tonight, May 12, 2011, at 7:30 p.m. at the Bell House (149 Seventh St. between 2nd and 3rd Avenues, in the groovy outback that some call Gowanus and I call Park Slump). I will be "facilitating" a breakout session, along with a fellow blogger, on journalistic ethics in blogging.  (Like, is it ethical to say snarky things about art before it's fully installed?) If nobody shows up, the topic will seem like a real punchline, so I hope we get at least a few souls to hash things out. It's a great program and always a good party, should be worth the $15 price of admission!

The flowering of Salem Fields

The metaphors of Spring are not subtle...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

...especially when life springs from rock that holds in the dead. This is Salem Fields Cemetery in Cypress Hills, a fascinating neighborhood perched on the Graveyard Greenbelt that knits together Brooklyn and Queens, and it is our Guest Park of the Day.

 I picnicked there yesterday on my lunch hour from a teaching gig, just as the Victorians used to do at Green-Wood Cemetery before they had nearby Prospect Park. This gate was locked, but the main arch at Jamaica and Euclid Avenues stood open on a cool and glorious noon.

 

 

This magnolia's vigor seemed shocking against a landscape of blue sky and tombstones. The cemetery is a German-Jewish one, mostly; I didn't happen upon them, but buried here are William Fox (the "Twentieth Century" film magnate), Harry Guggenheim (founder of Newsday), and impressario Lee Shubert (he of the Broadway "alley").

 

 

 

 

A broken column is a classic bit of funerary iconography for life cut short, but nature made its own version after our recent rough weather with this broken tree. How much more eloquent it is than any statuary!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

These charming cherubs probably signify a child's tomb. The countless children in old cemeteries always make me wonder how parents' hearts held up in those days before routine vaccinations and antibiotics, when you could bury one little one after another.

 

 

 

 

This more mature angel sighed nearby. The cool breeze seemed to blow away melancholy, just leaving wistfulness. My eye was drawn to the stone by my mother's unusual name, Mathilde, here a grieving mother for a five-year-old girl.

 

The inscription read:

WIR LIEBTEN DICH IM LEBEN

WIR LIEBEN DICH IM TOD

GOTT GAB DICH

GOTT NAHM DICH

GOTT LINDERE UNSERE NOTH

 

 

 

 

Translated by Google, that means:

We loved you in life

We love you in death

God gave you

God took you

God alleviate our distress

 

As I sat eating my turkey sandwich amid the deceased, and pondering the short life of little Evelyn Sophie, Father Mark Lane was blessing an even tinier casket at our family's Catholic parish church in downtown Brooklyn—that of little Louis Dewayne Mosely, who was recently beaten to death in foster care and would that afternoon be interred in the cemetery across the street from Salem Fields. “We don’t have any rewind button on life," said my pastor. "No matter how much justice demands it, it doesn’t happen.” 

This same pastor once described a mystery as "a truth so deep that we can never reach the bottom, no matter how often we go back to the well." With each passing year, I find myself more grateful for the well of springtime.

Right: Window, mausoleum interior, Salem Fields Cemetery

The Great Chestnut Hope

Once upon a time, billions of chestnut trees shaded America's parks, main streets, and yards. Under their spreading branches, village smithies stood. But then came the Chestnut Blight, a fungus that wiped out most of them. "All Chestnut Trees Here are Doomed," read a New York Times headline in 1911.Today, American chestnuts in their original Northeastern range are close to extinct except for (usually doomed) sprouts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For those of us who sneer at modern plant hybridizing, and treasure "heirloom" varieties, it can be tough to admit that science can sometimes trump nature, but this plateful of hairy sprouting chestnuts would seem to say so. They are a new strain of blight-resistant American Chestnuts, according to a happier post in today's Times, and they'll be planted eventually in Prospect Park and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. The new variety was cross-bred with resistant Chinese varieties and then bred back with American varieties, so the resulting tree will, it's hoped, closely resemble the iconic chestnut of yore in everything except its mortality rate. 

Chestnuts were such a mainstay of Northeastern U.S. forests that their wipeout has been termed an ecological disaster. They've got their own American Chestnut Foundation, where you can learn everything there is to know about the battle for Chestnut Resurrection (and buy swag including chestnut-leaf hats). I confess that, for me, it all just brings to mind James Thurber's tale of his granduncle Zenas:

Zenas had died in 1866. A sensitive, rather poetical boy of twenty-one when the Civil War broke out, Zenas had gone to South America - "just,” as he wrote back, “until it blows over.” Returning after the war had blown over, he caught the same disease that was killing off the chestnut trees in those years, and passed away. It was the only case in history where a tree doctor had to be called in to spray a person, and our family had felt it very keenly; nobody else in the United States caught the blight. Some of us have looked upon Zenas’ fate as a kind of poetic justice.

--The Car We Had to Push/My Life and Hard Times

 

Images: Top: American Chestnut Foundation. Middle: Chester Higgins, New York Times. Bottom: James Thurber. Copyrighted! (But: My thanks to blogger adazylog for posting the cartoon.)

Brooklyn, Blooming

Saturday was "Making Brooklyn Bloom" day at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. The program focused on the way gardens bring communities together. Out on the grounds, no words were needed for that message.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This sweep of crocus under the Caucasian Wing-Nut was getting a bit stomped, but it was easy to understand the temptation, especially for little ones.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Patrick Dougherty's magnificent twig installation "Natural History" loomed invitingly across a field of snowdrops.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nothing in the world promises new life from the dead of winter like snowdrops...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

unless it's witch hazel.

On this day that began with terrifying news footage from Japan, I found myself preoccupied with the smallness of the planet, the unearned gift of this peaceful landscape, and the fragility of our lives. The day's theme of "Gardening Together" seemed to take on a deeper and unintended meaning, and the pristine Japanese Garden, barely waking from its winter slumber, had a special poignancy.

Among the branches

"Feral children and wayward adults." Those words were among the inspirations for environmental artist Patrick Dougherty's new installation at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, he said tonight in a twilight talk on the grounds. Seldom have I enthused over "environmental art," but this one is fascinating and beautiful, and brought out the feral child in all present.

(The artist says that the piece has been named "Natural History," prompted by a four-year-old who told his mother that "it looked like natural history.")

 

Dougherty works with sticks and twigs, bent and woven into fantastical sculptures and structures. The BBG project, made of unwanted willow branches cleared from Staten Island, is a sort of mystical hamlet of fragrant hives or nests, set down near a sheltering oak grove. Visitors are irresistibly drawn to step in and out of the structures.

The artist himself was an engagingly modest guy, respectful of the natural beauty of the sites where his work took shape. The fabrication depended on an enthusiastic ad-hoc community of volunteers, Dougherty related. The team learned quickly how to execute his sketched plans; "everybody knows about sticks," he said, whether as weapon, tool, magic wand or building block, and the helpers readily channeled their inner hunter-gatherers.

The sculpture will stay up for at least a year, during which it will begin to deteriorate naturally. Imagine how it will look covered with snow. Daughter and I agreed that we would kill to camp out in one of these: a camp for feral children, within the safety of the garden. (Gothamist has more photos.)

Waiting for Seurat

On a brilliant Sunday afternoon in mid-May, Prospect Park calls to the spirit of Georges to set up his easel on the balcony of the Boathouse.

But pointillism is for the patient. With the feeble zoom of my point-and-shoot, in the course of 5 minutes, I capture a leaping princess...

...two gentlemen clad in African finery...

...and a frisky wedding party out with their photographer.

 

On the nearby lakeshore, bucolic Brooklyn attitude is exemplified by a fisherchick and an oblivious swan.

It's hard out here for a snowman

Most so-called "video art" is jumbled, unengaging rubbish by hip narcissists. And some mere "YouTube" videos rise unexpectedly to genuine art. Take 9 minutes of your day to relish this exquisite time-lapse portrait of humanity in Prospect Park. It is tender and breathtaking, and if this isn't the art of moving pictures, nothing is. Although it is set charmingly to one of my favorite classical guitar pieces (or perhaps mandolin), I recommend seeing it the first time through with the sound off. Kudos to creator Li Perez-Rey, who tells us how she did it in a comment below.

Which moment is your favorite? (Mine: Angry Guy Alone in Deep Night.)

The Snowman from Li Perez-Rey on Vimeo.

First contact

Today, please welcome another fine guest photographer to have documented the Snowicane in Prospect Park: William Woerner, whose gorgeous images (like this one of the Meadowport Arch) seem suffused by ambient alien landing lights. In these shots of the wintry park, solitude reigns but We Are Not Alone.

 

Near the arch, the iconic Camperdown Elm was cloaked in snow.

 

I would have shot the elm if I'd braved the snow that night, but I never would have seen this one. 

On his website (along with more great images), Woerner makes this fascinating allegation:

"The crack dealers take over this section of woods at night. At all times of the year, even in snowstorms, there were a couple of crackheads scurrying in and out of the path."

Whose woods these are...I did not know!

Snow draggin'

A lousy cold has left me just enough energy to shovel out the driveway, but not enough to check out Prospect Park after the latest Snowpocalypse. Fortunately, my friend Ralph sent me some pictures on "his side" (the Slope) of the park. They are very artistic on that side, judging by this perky little dragon.

 

This is either a Snowball of Mass Destruction, or the base for a Snowzilla.  Love that cloudscape.

 

The Marquis de Lafayette has an ermine cape!

Photos: Ralph Bonheim