NEW YORK – Rarely does the wall text for an exhibit inspire true surprise, but when a show’s sculptures are as visually straightforward, and yet conceptually perplexing as those in “Image Objects,” the new show from the Public Art Fund at City Hall Park, one finds out that sometimes a rock is so much more.
The rocks in question, part of Rockfall by Alice Channer, are both an image and an object. The sculptures mimic the look of jagged rocks, but their creation involved taking pictures of concrete blocks, digitally altering said pictures, turning the pictures into three-dimensional molds with the help of some 3-D printers, and then casting the molds in concrete, aluminum and Cor-Ten steel. Until I read the text, I didn’t think the rocks were art at all, just a natural feature of the park. Art, like forest creatures, knows how to camouflage.
Like Channer, Jon Rafman started with an image of an object to create his New Age Demanded. The two, white curvaceous sculptures look like abstract busts, and were created by taking a photograph of a Greco-Roman bust, and rendering the images in white Carrera marble. Instead of the chisels and other tools the actual Greeks and Romans might have used, Rafman’s sculptures were created with the help of computerized machines.
Should this feel a little disconcerting, direct your gaze to the right lawn, which features Lothar Hempel’s Frozen, a photo of a woman skateboarding. The photo is perched high enough that it looks like she’s skating through the trees. Below is the multicolored pinwheel cursor, a familiar to Apple users as they wait for programs to load. I still can’t figure what the cursor’s purpose is, but it’s impossible to look at the trees, the skateboard, the woman, and her expression of utter freedom, without considering how you too can one day be that unencumbered.
Take some of that happiness with you while proceeding to the fountain and the southern end of the park, where on the left stands Timur Si-Qin’s Monument to Exaptation. The installation includes three large black panels, each featuring a symbol reminiscent of a moon or a yin-yang above which is the word “PEACE.”
More than anything they look like information booths for neighboring attractions. I half-expected a staff member to jump out from one with discount tickets to One World Trade Center’s observation deck. Exaptation, a word I’d never heard before, refers to a biological feature that acquires a function that was not acquired through natural selection. For example, feathers may have originally been intended for warmth before they aided in flight. The wall text explains that sculpture too is an exaptation, hinting at how art forms, once intended for radical purposes, can just as easily be co-opted for commerce.
I couldn’t quite make the connection, but perhaps this past Sunday’s heat clouded my judgment. Come see for yourself, as Image Objects is on view at City Hall Park through Nov. 20.
