Temporary fences in Prospect Park in winter and February by James Schuyler

 

February

by James Schuyler

A chimney, breathing a little smoke.
The sun, I can't see
making a bit of pink
I can't quite see in the blue.
The pink of five tulips
at five p.m. on the day before March first.
The green of the tulip stems and leaves
like something I can't remember,
finding a jack-in-the-pulpit
a long time ago and far away.
Why it was December then
and the sun was on the sea
by the temples we'd gone to see.
One green wave moved in the violet sea
like the UN Building on big evenings,
green and wet
while the sky turns violet.
A few almond trees
had a few flowers, like a few snowflakes
out of the blue looking pink in the light.
A gray hush
in which the boxy trucks roll up Second Avenue
into the sky. They're just
going over the hill.
The green leaves of the tulips on my desk
like grass light on flesh,
and a green-copper steeple
and streaks of cloud beginning to glow.
I can't get over
how it all works in together
like a woman who just came to her window
and stands there filling it
jogging her baby in her arms.
She's so far off. Is it the light
that makes the baby pink?
I can see the little fists
and the rocking-horse motion of her breasts.
It's getting grayer and gold and chilly.
Two dog-size lions face each other
at the corners of a roof.
It's the yellow dust inside the tulips.
It's the shape of a tulip.
It's the water in the drinking glass the tulips are in.
It's a day like any other.

A little Non-dancer Dance Practice

My dance costumes are coming along, here's an unfinished "Fainting Couch" modeled by me, non-dancer extraordinaire.

The Styrene Fantastic will premiere at Rachel Uffner Gallery on Sunday April 26th, as part of the Movement Research Festival

Good Fences

I just wanted to give a shout out to the Parks Department for the loving care they give to mending their fences.


Look at how many kinds of fence there are in one 3-foot stretch. Wrought iron, chain link and those wooden slats that arrive in big rolls on the back of Parks Department trucks. I can't decide if this is one complex fix or several attempts to correct the problem.


This one is hard to spot, but it's the most exquisite fence-mending. Two thin, hand-twisted wires spanning the gap horizontally.

Barbies Dance the Styrene Fantastic

A performance (starring the styrofoam) danced en maquette. Actual performance and performers coming soon -- stay tuned for details!

"Fainting Couch"

"Fainting Couch" in action

"Bench" and "Fainting Couch"

"Chaise"

And be sure to stick around for the after party!

Rescue Mission in Park Slope!

On Saturday while walking across the park to the bank I suddenly saw this on Garfield Place:


All this clean white styrofoam in the trash! I know the city picks up Christmas trees, but it doesn’t recycle styrofoam. I am actually quite self-conscious about trash picking, but this was too much to let go. Also, way too much to carry in my hands.


So after depositing my checks, I had to do a quick calculation: would buying plastic garbage bags just to carry styrofoam home offset the good done by rescuing it?

But of course, I’m not really saving the planet, I’m saving styrofoam! So I bought recycled plastic bags, but art was always going to win this battle anyway. I would have bought bottled water if that was going to help me get this sweet styrene into my studio!

On the way back to the site, I was so excited my heart was pounding. I was sure someone else would beat me to it, and that my styrofoam would be gone.

Not only was it still there, it seemed to have spawned.


Walking across the park was also a nice little performance piece**. Everyone stared at me, one woman stopped me to ask what it was -- it’s funny that carrying styrofoam turns out to be more provocative than crawling around a subway grate in knee pads.


**Interaction is my preferred word for this kind of piece, actually.

The things you see in Chelsea

Over the course of two relatively recent visits, some highlights:
Reflecting pools under subway gratings.
Tiny mushrooms growing out of a tree on 22nd Street. (Lovely to see, but probably bad news for the tree.)
Some lovely Robert Morris felt pieces at Sonnabend, and some lovely ladies looking at a Joan Mitchell painting.












I've never felt much for Joan Mitchell -- all those later American abstraction heroes kind of blend together for me the same way classic rock radio filler does. I would never seek them out the same way I would never intentionally listen to Steve Miller Band. But this visit to Cheim and Reid I rather liked these paintings. Maybe it was the two ladies sharing the gallery with me. Maybe it was because I've been thinking about paintings of plants. Maybe it was just the way suddenly you hear Tiny Dancer on a car radio and find yourself singing along so happy to hear it again. And you know every word.

Or maybe Joan Mitchell is just like Aerosmith, who I do truly adore.

My own private landfill

As many of you know, I've been collecting styrofoam from my friends and neighbors for a few months now. I could rhapsodize about the material forever, but right now I want to focus more on the accumulation. It's taking up quite a bit of real estate in my studio. It's pretty amazing that a few posts to a few yahoo lists can generate this much styrofoam.



I've always had a very local and personal response to the problem of consumer waste. Our apartment gets perilously close to being a collier mansion, not because I'm such a hoarder -- I don't really want the stuff, or picture a future for it -- but because I can't bear to add it to a landfill, or worse, send it off floating on a barge forever.

Now I read that (as usual) I've simply been a little ahead of the trend. This week's NY Times reports that as the demand for materials to recycle falls, cities and people are being forced to store their own paper, bags, bottles &c.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/08/business/08recycle.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Foreword

The pedestrian sidewalk on the Manhattan Bridge, seen from the Q

It seems it's not conventional to introduce, but to dive right in seems too abrupt. I'll try to avoid over-explication, so this doesn't end up reading like the pilot of a long-running series. But if I wasn't chatty, I wouldn't be starting a blog.

So. This is an open sketchbook. It's about sidewalks, and things on the sidewalk. About cities -- especially New York City -- and public space and personal space and how it's not easy being green. It's not an eco-art blog, but rather an art blog with urban and eco leanings.

Or at least that's what I think it is. What it really is, dear reader, we will have to wait and see.