Category Archives: art

General arts and culture posts

Eiffel’s Train Station in Budapest

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The viewpoint is looking up at the iron- and glass-vaulted ceiling of Budapest’s Nyugati train station, designed by Gustave Eiffel at the turn of the last century. In 1875 (before the eponymous tower commissioned in 1887), Gustave Eiffel was given an important contract for the terminus for the line from Vienna to Budapest. The station in Budapest was innovative because rather than conceal the metal structure behind an elaborate facade, Eiffel’s design for Budapest used the metal structure as the centerpiece of the building, flanked on either side by conventional stone and brick-clad structures housing administrative offices. The modern glass and iron construction materials remains an airy and light for the trains.

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Claudia Wieser: The Mirror

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Words cannot tell how much I enjoyed this show, so I am posting all my pictures of Claudia Wieser’s show at Marianne Boesky gallery that ended recently. The Berlin artist’s work reminded me of the mystic side of this year’s Central Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, which opened with a darkened round space of Carl Jung’s Red Book drawings that journeyed deep into the psychoanalyst’s subconscious. Yet The Mirror contains itself in structured geometric forms, and a seemingly endless chain of art historical references whose multiplicity is reinforced by the patterned mirrors.

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The mirrors, prints, tapestries, and leaning wood elements, taken to the height of wallpaper, enforced through their flatness the artificial construction of the space even as they beguile the viewer. The size contrasts with the small drawings on paper aligned in rows on the wall. The artist cites the influence of Kandinsky and Klee, which is apparent, and takes her title from Tarkovsky’s film, which shares a dreamlike sense of non-linear time.

Per usual lately, I’m posting this after the show has already closed…but otherwise I would definitely recommend checking it out.

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Sheep before Condos: Lalanne Sheep Station in Chelsea

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Aside from the obviously pleasing incongruity of sheep in the middle of Manhattan, what’s going on here? These epoxy stone and bronze moutons are on one hand iconic sculptures by deceased French artist François-Xavier Lalanne. Sheep in Manhattan: charming and a bit surprising, even if they are cartoonish sheep elevated vis-a-vis art. Less surprising is that the Getty Filling station that used to mark this corner of Chelsea has been transformed — partially into a public art space– but more purposefully as the ground floor cornerstone to a “premier collection of luxury residences.” No doubt the art and the adjacent High Line will only add to the attractions of this future luxury development by Michael Shvo.

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Not that there is anything wrong with that. Art in New York (in the world but especially in New York) hardly exists in an art-for-art’s-sake vacuum. I hesitate to imply there should be guilt rather than the pure candor of the press release which spells out this relationship, linking commercialism and social status to art in ways that no doubt everyone is already more than aware of. But how does it make you feel about the sheep, hanging artificially onto a carefully-watered patch of grass in the midst of the vast metropolis?

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