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.”