2-1/2 Hours From Penn Square: Xu Bing’s Phoenix of Beauty, Power and Wonder

Some great art dazzles us with its beauty; some astonishes us with the power of its message.  Only intermittently do both qualities come together in a single work, and then the effect is transcendent.

So we should all rejoice that New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine, on Morningside Heights, has extended through February the exhibition of one of the most arrestingly beautiful and meaningful sculptures of our time: Xu Bing’s Phoenix.

Hung from the nave of one of the world’s grandest sacred chambers, the piece is a feast of imagination and a call to consciousness: a pair of flying dragons from Chinese mythology, 100 and 90 feet respectively, assembled entirely from the construction detritus of a major commercial office development in Beijing.

Aloft within the cathedral’s vastness, amid the sequoian columns, vaulted ceilings and stained-glass tableaux of Biblical imagery, silently fly these two fierce and noble creatures composed of tiles, tools, wire, ventilator hoods, machine parts, rebar, fasteners and fittings – all festooned with light-emitting diodes.

Commissioned to create a monumental sculpture as a signature for the massive, Cesar Pelli-designed Beijing World Financial Center, Xu, a MacArthur fellow who divides his time between the United States and his native China, was as deeply affected by the have-and-have-not conditions of China’s emergence, as by the commercial demands of the building project.

His dragon-birds capture both the high-voltage dynamism of the new China, and the terrible costs it extracts on the people and environment of the world’s biggest country.  The artist himself explained: "The phoenix of today's China bears countless scars; it has lived through hardship.  But it has adorned itself with great self-respect."

Xu Bing

When he assembled Phoenix at the building site, the developers wanted him to sanitize and soften the mixed message by giving it a facelift with a coating of crystals to make the birds shimmer like sequined ballerinas.

Xu would have none of it, and, to his great good fortune and America’s, Taiwanese tech tycoon Barry Lam financed the purchase and transport of Phoenix to the contemporary art museum Mass MoCA, in North Adams, Massachusetts.

Original plans had the work returning to its home in the Berkshires at the end of this year, but New Yorkers have been given an extra few months of viewing time.  Anyone with an opportunity to see and experience this 21^st Century masterwork would be remiss not to do so.

Get up and go:  The Cathedral of St. John the Divine is located at Amsterdam Avenue and W. 112^th Street.  Take the #1 subway to 116^th Street-Columbia University.  Hours are 7:30 am to 6 pm, and admission is without charge.  Across Amsterdam Avenue a block to the south are The Hungarian Pastry Shop and V&T’s pizzeria/restaurant, both legendary for the generations of Columbia students who plant themselves there for hours of reading, writing and noshing.  On W. 106^th Street is Culinaria Gastronomia, an extraordinary Italian restaurant.

Ephrata Agonistes

Last August this blog discussed the looming fiscal difficulties facing public libraries generally and Lancaster’s public library specifically. Over the past month, the crisis has arrived, however it hit not in the City, but in Ephrata.

Facing a shortfall projected between $80,000 to $100,000, the Ephrata Library – Lancaster County’s second busiest – was forced to make deep, painful cuts: Sundays and Fridays closed, evening hours curtailed, programs cancelled, and 11 employees – half the staff – laid off.  Gone.

On the face of it, the shortfall was attributed to a bad year of fundraising from private donors, who generate almost two-thirds of the Library’s operating funds.  (Perhaps given a ‘kickstart’ by its crisis, Ephrata Library out-performed other Lancaster County public library programs in the Thanksgiving week ‘Extraordinary Give’ fundraising drive, harvesting more than  $29,000 contributed by 328 donors.)

We’ve become accustomed as a nation to having a certain type of public service increasingly reliant on voluntary contributions rather than government support through the appropriation of general revenues.  This concept took off during the tax-cutting 1980’s, underpinned by the rhetorical premise that so-called “discretionary” services should be able to demonstrate their worth to the public by surviving in the competitive marketplace of charitable giving.

The poster-child that was said to validate the concept was public broadcasting – PBS, National Public Radio, and their member stations – which went from hand-wringing over lost government support to self-sustaining fundraising juggernauts in a few short years.  (At this point in the article, there is an overwhelming temptation to take a short break in order to meet this hour’s goal.  Is there a matching grant somewhere out there?)

But except for a few flagship institutions, public libraries, parks and museums are really not in the same fundraising boat as public TV or radio, given broadcasting technology’s incomparable reach and messaging impact.

For our more localized community institutions, the current over-dependence on private donors just is not going to cut it for the long-term.

Must it be this way?  Apparently not, as evidenced by Dauphin County, where a dedicated countywidelibrary tax funds 65 percent of library operations, providing the county’s libraries with funding stability, if not quite abundance.

Then there is the parlous condition of our fiscally mismanaged Commonwealth.  If a new Administration in Harrisburg can find a way to overcome the forecast of gridlock from a General Assembly controlled by the loyal opposition, perhaps some reasonable participation and overdue funding relief is in sight for our precious community public services.  

As Willy Loman’s wife Linda, warning of the awful price of abandonment, put it to her sons in Death of a Salesman, “Attention…attention finally must be paid.”

You’re Looking Good, Lancaster, But How Well Do You Move?

So the good news is that one of America’s leading urban planners thinks Lancaster is the “best looking city” he’s worked in, and he’s worked in a lot of them.  The bad news –for planner Jeff Speck, that is – is that it’s not so easy to find ways to improve things.

Speck, who is co-author of the urban revival manifesto“Suburban Nation”, shouldn’t be overly apprehensive since he is the recipient of $50,000 from the Lancaster City Alliance to come up with ideas to make downtown Lancaster more ”walkable.”

To that end, an auditorium full of citizens and officials came to Ware Center Monday evening to hear Speck go through a locally customized version of his celebrated TED Talk (800,000-plus views and counting) on “The Walkable City” (not coincidentally, the title of his newest book).

The goal, in his catchphrase, is “to use everyday design in everyday spaces that get people out in the street.”

This is happening around the country, in urban centers large and small that are seeking ways to promote business, entertainment, housing, recreation and reputation – apparently, we all want to live in Portlandia these days – by getting people out of their cars and moving by foot (or by extension, two-wheeled, foot-powered pedals).

Speck cautioned that typical planning practice tends to look out 20 years, but, as a member of the cohort the planners now term “aging boomers,” his tolerance for deferred gratification has waned, so he’s viewing the Lancaster project as one of  recommending strategies that can be realized within two to five years time.

His fundamental, inarguable premise is that the miracle of the private automobile has resulted in a litany of social, economic and environmental ills; hence if people were to drive less it would benefit them and their communities with improved health, prosperity, social welfare and environmental quality.

Speck’s approach to reducing the tyranny of the car is not to abolish its use but to tweak the conditions of its operation:  Narrower traffic corridors and fewer lanes, more four-way stop intersections and fewer stoplights, replacing one-way raceways with two-way flows that prevent driver jockeying and passing, and lots of on-street parking, a bit counter-intuitively, to separate sidewalks and bike lanes from auto flow are the hit tunes in his songbook.

Plans are already afoot (as it were), including the reversion of Mulberry Street to two-way flow, followed thereafter by a look at the same change for Charlotte Street.   Moves such as these are not aimed to reduce congestion as much as contain congestion and turn it to benefit by discouraging those with a choice from getting into the car to make that quick trip to the market or café.

Urban planner Jeff Speck

Speck makes little reference to the economists’ favored mechanism of pricing to incentivize behavior.  Nor does he have much to say beyond a perfunctory nod about the importance of transit. 

The latter omission seems shortsighted inasmuch as our commuter rail service is at the heart of what makes Lancaster attractive and successful far beyond that of Pennsylvania’s other comparably sized cities.  But with the recently spruced up train station almost solely dependent on car travel to deliver and collect passengers, the inadequacies of the bus network would be a worthy line of inquiry for Speck to pursue as his study proceeds.

Finally, he makes an explicit point of addressing safety in terms of accident reduction, not crime reduction.   The data-driven reality is that Lancaster is a safe community in which to live, work, visit and walk.  But because perception shapes reality, planner Speck would do well to be mindful that all the traffic-management strategies in the world will not get people out of their cars if they don’t feel secure in their person walking down the street after dark.

Make yourself heard: Jeff Speck invites comments and suggestions for his Lancaster Walkability Study.  Tweet him at: https://twitter.com/jeffspeckaicp

Back Where They Belong

Lancaster's grand burghers gathered Thursday to formally dedicate the newly renovated and expanded City Hall.  The historic 1888 Duke Street structure -- originally built for use as the main Post Office until its acquisition by the city in 1930 -- has been remodeled, modernized and joined at the hip with a new, complimentary annex behind it on Marion Street.

It is a visual delight that is -- to give a new twist to an old saying -- not bad for government work.

Ribbons were cut, of course

The new City Council chambers

The Council Chambers lobby doubles as an art gallery

The juxtaposition of old and new creates some delightful geometries.
Here, a porthole window in the northeast staircase

And here, the main stairway of the new wing
 rises up to greet what once was the rear
exterior of the original building

The center of the old building has been opened up on the first floor, revealing a
grove of squared columns with ornate capitals

Worth a visit, if only to
pick up a yard-waste bag...

...or to pop into the Mayor's office

Art everywhere.  Here, Bill Hutson's Lancaster Series on the 2d Floor

The grand main entry, back in service

Painting With Light: The Art of Bunch Washington

The first and lasting impression made by the art of Bunch Washington, an obscure but multi-talented African-American visual artist, is its deep luminescence.

Washington (1937-2008), whose work is now on exhibit at Franklin & Marshall’s Phillips Museum, tinkered and experimented for years in his home studios in Brooklyn and Poughkeepsie, NY, until he found the right formula of resin and pigments.  These he would pour and mix, gradually building up, layer by layer, adding color and dropping in objects both random and specific to be in encased in the fluid radiance of the cured solid blocks he would call  “transparent collage.”

The artist Bunch Washington in Brooklyn
photo: Jerry Jack, courtesy Valentine NY

A dozen of these, including two bas relief sculptures that were antecedents along the artist’s path of developing his technique, are on display around the perimeter of the Phillips’s Dana Gallery.  They surround a room filled with the man’s lifetime memorabilia and an odd assortment of unprepossessing, mid-century diner furniture meant to evoke the Lower East Side soul-food restaurant Washington ran that was a haunt of Charles Mingus, Dick Gregory, Kathleen Neal, Sun Ra and other nonpareils of New York’s mid-Sixties African-American cultural flowering during that fertile moment.

Regrettably, though perhaps necessarily, the transparent collages are illuminated artificially from behind rather than by the natural light that Washington created them for.  Like the windows at Chartres, these pieces were made to change and interplay with the movement and constant variations of sunlight.

Eastern Beauty, year unknown
photo: Melissa Hess

The impermanence of experience emanating from within the confinement of these meticulously constructed blocks of kaleidoscopic colors and talismanic objects – jewelry and fabrics, charms, coins, leaves and flowers, an occasional photograph – amply represents Washington’s searching and often turbulent life.

McCleary Bunch Washington was born fatherless into a poor Philadelphia family.  His innate talent and creativity were identified by a public school art teacher early on, earning him formal training at the Fleisher Art Memorial, the Philadelphia Museum School and the Barnes Foundation.  The restaurant was his entry point into the New York scene, where he then turned his rich knowledge and strong writing skills into a breakthrough scholastic volume about Romare Bearden, a giant of African-American art in the last century.

Bearden befriended him and they developed a mentor-protégé relationship that propelled Washington’s own artistic journey.  He never received great recognition and was financially stressed most of his life.  He also suffered periodic bouts of mental illness that sent him hurtling off-track at various times, and in his later years he lapsed into drug addiction and homelessness.

Washington’s daughter (and the curator of the Phillips exhibition) Elizabeth de Souza believes it is possible her father’s psychological disturbances were rooted in the neurotoxicity of the materials he worked with.  Whatever its origins, he remained to the end a man of gentle manner, engaging, humorous and curious.  In his stretches of lucidity, he was given to compose poetry, much of it informed by the precepts of the Baha’i Faith that he embraced early in adulthood.

The struggles of a black American man buffeted hard by life’s storms, creating beauty and meaning while trying to make his way in New York’s remorseless art world, reveal themselves in Bunch Washington’s transparent collages.  But they reveal themselves without rancor or recrimination.  They reveal themselves in the play of the light, the external light captured within the box, and the light then transformed and refracted outward toward the viewer.  In the process, the artist – somewhat miraculously – conjures serenity.

Pearls, 1998
photo: Melissa Hess

Get up and go:

The exhibition “Painting With Light: The Art of Bunch Washington” will remain at the PhillipsMuseum of Art through Oct. 31, 2014.  The museum is located in the south wing of the Steinman College Center and is open to the public, free of charge, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday, 11:30 am – 4:00 pm, Thursday 1:00 pm – 4:30 pm, and on weekends, 12:30 pm – 4:30 pm.

The exhibition features a number of special events, notably a gathering Fri., Oct. 17, 1:30-4:30 pm in the gallery that will combine music and discussion to explore Bunch Washington’s art and its relationship to mental health, culture and social conditions. Participants will include Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Les Payne, long one of the nation’s most prominent African-American journalists and a dear friend of Washington’s.

All images subject to copyright laws and used with permission herein.