Frieze Sculpture 2019

On 16 May 2019, I posted a report entitled “Two Art Fairs & Joan Miró at MoMA,” covering Art New York 2019 and Frieze New York 2019 (both 2-5 May), along with the Museum of Modern Art’s Joan Miró: Birth of the World (24 February-15 June).  After the report proper, I added a short afterword in which I said that in conjunction with its 2019 art fair, the Frieze organization would present Frieze Sculpture in Rockefeller Center from 25 April to 28 June, a free, mostly outdoor exhibition of sculptures by 14 artists in 16 locations around Rockefeller Plaza.  (Some artists’ works were shown in more than one spot and several locations included more than one piece.  There are actually 23 sculptures on exhibit.)  When my companion at the Frieze art exhibit on Randalls Island, Diana, saw the announcement of the sculpture show, she expressed interest in checking it out.  In the end, she wasn’t able to get to the Rock Center display, so I went alone on Wednesday afternoon about 1 p.m., 26 June, two days before the show closed.

2019’s Frieze Sculpture was intended to be the first of an annual event.  Conceived by Loring Randolph, artistic director of Frieze New York, it was inspired partly by Frieze Sculpture in Regent’s Park, an offshoot of Frieze London.  Randolph hired Brett Littman, the new director (since April 2018) of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum in Long Island City, Queens, to curate the exhibit.  Littman, in turn, collected sculptures by artists from diverse backgrounds to display around Rockefeller Plaza: Kiki Smith, Walter De Maria, Sarah Sze, Hank Willis Thomas, Nick Cave, Aaron Curry, Jose Dávila, Rochelle Goldberg, Goshka Macuga, Joan Miró, Jaume Plensa, Paulo Nazareth, Pedro Reyes, and Ibrahim Mahama.  

Frieze Sculpture wasn’t the first time that Rock Center has been the venue for art displayed on a large scale.  Jeff Koons (American, 1955), Thomas Houseago (British, b. 1972), and art partners Michael Elmgreen (Danish, b. 1961) and Ingar Dragset (Norwegian, b. 1969) have been among the recent artists who’ve had displays in Rockefeller Center.  The Frieze show, however, was apparently the first exhibit with multiple works occupying most of the area.  The curator explained his plan thus:

One thing that I was very concerned about was doing something that was different from what other institutions have done there, which is generally just one monumental sculpture, either on 5th Avenue or in front of 30 Rock Plaza.  The thing that I really wanted to do [was to] curate an alternative sculpture park that was more human scale.  I really wanted to force the viewer to be a flaneur and to walk the whole campus, so not everything is consolidated in one place.

By definition, Frieze Sculpture was also the first to have works of art displayed in several spots in the Center at the same time.  Flâneur is a French word that means ‘loafer,’ ‘idler,’ ‘dawdler,’ or ‘loiterer,’ and usually carries an indolent connotation, but, of course, Littman wanted us to stroll leisurely, but not obliviously or self-absorbedly, around the plaza and take in the art, always mindful, I think, of the site and its echoes, sometimes its dissonance, with the art we were seeing.  The New York Times’ Martha Schwendener seemed to think Littman and the Frieze sculptors succeeded when she declared: “Despite the distractions, the sculptures do exactly what public art is supposed to do and activate the space.”

In sum, the Frieze Sculpture was interesting, but I wouldn’t want to own any of the piece on display . . . well, maybe a couple—but not enough to come by after closing to pick them up!  (For those who don’t know, when I used to go to art shows with my mother, we’d judge if it was a good exhibit or not by whether we’d come back on a “Midnight Shopping Trip” to pick up a painting or sculpture or two.)

Porte II by Joan Miró (Spanish, 1893-1983) from 1974 was the only “old” piece in the show.  A large cast-bronze Cubist and proto-Surrealist piece, the sculpture is shaped like an opened step ladder with a rusty, large-linked chain hanging down the center.  (Miró “made it . . . decades before ‘Game of Thrones,’ where it could fit right in,” quipped Barbara Hoffman and Tamara Beckwith in the New York Post.)  I didn’t find it nearly as appealing or whimsical as his paintings.  (Other posts pertaining to Joan Miró are “Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape,” 5 October 2012, and “Van Gogh & Miró at MoMA (2008),” 12 October 2016.)  The next oldest sculpture was a kind of installation called Truth / Beauty which Walter De Maria (American, 1935-2013) started in 1993, but which wasn’t finished until 2016, three years after he died.  The rest were all 2017 and 2018—very contemporary.  Many were more curious than engaging. 

On the other hand, the walk around Rock Center was pleasant enough—though it was quite warm in the bright sun.  There's precious little shade around the plaza—though a few of the pieces were in building lobbies.  But for 16 sculptures, it was fine.  (Finding all of the pieces wasn’t easy—a bit like an Easter egg hunt; I found the map of the art locations a little misleading sometimes, but I got home at about 2:30, in time for a late lunch.} 

I should also express a complaint that neither Frieze nor the Rockefeller Center provided anything on the exhibit except in a loose-leaf binder at the visitors’ desk in 30 Rock which was only available to look at.  Even on line, there was very little—except a PDF of the layout map—on the artists or their works on display.  To be sure, there were large signs standing near each art work (or, in many instances, a group of works), but these provided only the artists’ names, the works’ titles and dates, and the galleries that handle the artists.  Artists’ life dates and nationality, and the composition of the sculptures weren’t indicated, nor was any explanation of the pieces’ intents or meanings. 

Museums have cut back severely on exhibit materials—I don’t know if galleries have also reduced their printed materials as well; it’s been a while since I went to a commercial gallery.  The art fairs, like Frieze New York and Art New York, seem to go all out to provide background material like artist bios and descriptions of the works, but those are special exhibits.

Rockefeller Center, of course, is a year-round repository for a great deal of art, largely from the 1930s, the era in which the complex was built.  Almost everyone knows Lee Lawrie’s (German-born American, 1877-1963) iconic bronze statue of Atlas (1937) on 5th Avenue in front of the International Building (also known as 630 5th Avenue or 45 Rockefeller Plaza), across from St. Patrick’s Cathedral.  There’s also the immediately-recognizable Prometheus (1934), the gilded, cast-bronze sculpture by Paul Manship (American, 1885-1966) at the west end of the Skating Rink (which, during the summer season, is converted into an outdoor restaurant called the Summer Garden & Bar).

Like most of the permanent art works in Rockefeller Center, these two well-known sculptures are classic examples of Art Deco-style art.  Also on display around the Center are murals and bas-reliefs that decorate all the buildings of Rock Center.  Isamu Noguchi’s (Japanese-born American, 1904-1988) stainless steel bas-relief entitled News (1940) in 50 Rockefeller Plaza (formerly the Associated Press Building) on the pedestrian promenade west of 5th Avenue, between 50th and 51st Streets.  (News was the piece of art at Rockefeller Center that inspired Randolph to organize Frieze Sculpture.)

The hub of Rock Center, 30 Rock (formerly called the RCA Building, later the GE Building, and now renamed the Comcast Building), is replete with works of art.  Behind the visitors’ desk, across from the entrance on Rockefeller Plaza (the pedestrian walkway that runs from 48th Street to 51st Street between 5th and 6th Avenues), is a mural from Josep Maria Sert (Spanish, 1874-1945) called American Progress (1937), an allegorical depiction of men constructing modern America.  It was commissioned by the Rockefellers to replace Diego Rivera’s (Mexican, 1886-1957) mural Man at the Crossroads (1934), which Nelson Rockefeller (1908-79; later Governor of New York State and Vice President of the United States) ordered destroyed because it included an image of Vladimir Lenin.  (Rivera was famously a committed communist.  The Rockefellers were famously capitalist industrialists, politicians, and bankers—and rock-ribbed Republicans.)

Flanking Sert’s mural, in front of the desk, were two pieces from Frieze Sculpture, Jaguar and Seer (both 2018) by Pedro Reyes (b. 1972).  Ironically (or perhaps deliberately), Reyes is, like Rivera, Mexican and his two sculptures clearly evoke Mayan or Aztec motifs; Rivera was devoted to the native images of Mexican life and culture, celebrating both its Indian and Mestizo origins.  Both artists share a commitment to social and political concerns.  The sculptures are carved of dark gray volcanic stone and stand on four-foot-tall rough-hewn stone pedestals. 

Jaguar depicts a mouth-shaped hole within which is a human-like eye.  (Certainly ironic and unintentional is the positioning of Jaguar with its all-seeing eye in the building that houses the headquarters and studios of the National Broadcasting Company.  The eye is recognizable as the perpetual symbol of the Columbia Broadcasting System!)  Seer is stylistically similar but shows an eye-shaped hole out of which protrudes a mammalian tongue. 

Reyes’s Jaguar and Seer, are surely exemplars of the friction between the art work and its display setting.  In a building devoted to communication and journalism, seeing and speaking are apt images.  According to curator Littman, as a pair, Reyes’s sculptures represent “sentinels, in a way. providing a witness to an important moment of censorship of art in this country.”  It was no accident, then, that the Reyes pieces were placed at the location of the destroyed—it wasn’t merely removed; it was smashed—Rivera mural, a violent example of political censorship by a powerful “conservative” family. 

When Frieze director Randolph first saw Noguchi’s News, she explained, it affected her profoundly:

It felt really important in this moment because it was a commission for the Associated Press.  We’re in a kind of difficult moment in the world, politically and socially.  And given what is going on with the war of the press from our administration, it felt like it had real relevance now.

Nonetheless, Littman, who had a free hand to select and site the art in the show, didn’t make deliberate, or at least conscious, politically oriented choices.  “I don’t think that was necessarily part of the calculation,” he said, “—maybe subconsciously, of course, one thinks about that.”  Randolph affirmed, “There are works in the group that make a statement.”

“We are in unstable times politically,” Frieze New York’s artistic director pointed out, “and if there is something to be gained through artistic understanding, artistic output and knowledge, collaboration—all of these things—then that is definitely something that I would want to have and make central to what our presence is in the middle of Manhattan.”

A work that has political implications, aside from the two Reyes sculptures, is perhaps the most unusual piece in Frieze Sculpture.  Most of the art was made of the usual contemporary sculpture materials: metal, stone, wood, resin—some was cast, some carved, some bent and twisted.  Ibrahim Mahama (b. 1987), a Ghanaian artist, created 50 tattered jute flags to replace the 192 national banners of the members of the United Nations that surround the Summer Garden. 

Unlike the flags they replaced for Frieze Sculpture, Mahama’s piece don’t wave or flutter in the wind (the jute, from bags that had been used to carry coffee, concrete, and other goods, and other components are too heavy); they just hang down the poles, limp and immobile.  The artist observed, “These containers gather a lot of memory over time as they encounter various forms of labor.  These labor forms are mostly unaccounted for once the commodities reach their destination due to the system of global trade.”  He added, “I believe that it is important to allow true independence for labor to be fully appreciated in these current times.  The issue of exploited labor is a global one, and I wanted to address that through the form of this installation.”

In an interview, the Ghanaian artist explained: “The flags themselves are not necessarily what I think of as being the sculpture; however, the entire space and forms that they create are.  The poles help complete the idea of the sculpture.” 

“For Mahama,” explained Littman, “these pieces are about global capitalism; the idea of the spice trade, the slave trade; the idea of recycled materials, of third-world economies and how things can be reused.”  For himself, as curator of the public exhibit, he asserted: “What I’m doing is taking down the whole world—the whole UN—and replacing it with a very pointed artwork, which will definitely change the feeling of Rockefeller Center.”

Probably the works with the most obvious political commentary—made perhaps more meaningful at this moment than the artist might have predicted when he conceived them, are Paulo Nazareth’s (Brazilian, b. 1977) four pieces called DRY CUT [from BLACKS IN THE POOL] (all 2019).  The larger-than-life size aluminum cut-outs, two in front of 30 Rock (Tommie and Ruby) and two inside 45 Rockefeller Plaza (Martin and Rosa), depict significant figures of the Civil Rights movement: Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Tommie Smith (one of the Olympic medalists in Mexico City in 1968 who raised the black-gloved, clenched-fist Black Power salute from atop the medal podium to protest racism and injustice against African-Americans), and Ruby Bridges (the first African-American child to desegregate the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans in 1960). 

All these figures stood up and spoke out against injustice, which was a theme of Frieze Sculpture, even if Littman hadn’t intended to send such a message.  Quite a few of the art works in the show expressed this idea, some much more obliquely and metaphorically, like Nick Cave’s (American, 1959) 2018 untitled bronze piece which is a an old horn-shaped gramophone speaker with an arm emerging from it, ending in a fist. 

For most visitors, the entry to Rockefeller Center is on 5th Avenue, then west through the Channel Gardens to the Skating Rink/Summer Garden to the Plaza.  Standing about 25 feet high, right at the entrance, was Behind the Walls (2019) by Jaume Plensa (Spanish, b. 1955).  The monumental white polyester-resin and marble-dust sculpture depicts the elongated head of a woman with her hands in front of her face, covering her eyes as if she were playing peek-a-boo or saying, “I can’t look!  I can’t look!”  On his website, Plensa asserts:

Sometimes, our hands are the biggest walls.  They can cover our eyes, and we can blind ourselves to so much of what’s happening around us. . . .  To me, it’s an obsession to create a beautiful object with a message inside.

The artist says, “It is a very direct piece.  Many times we are blinding ourselves with our hands to be in a more comfortable position.”  Personally, Plensa hopes the sculpture will serve as a “mirror” so “you can look inside and think about your opinions, your attitudes, what you are doing in your own life.”  Says Littman, in contrast: “It’s kind of the way that I feel every morning.  You put your hands over your eyes and you go, ‘I can’t believe we’re going to have to deal with another day like this.’”  A palpable example of art taking on different meaning for different people at different times.

A few steps along the gardens’ flowery path, a Frieze Sculpture visitor would have encountered Rest Upon (2009) by Kiki Smith (West German-born American, b. 1954), a life-sized bronze sculpture of a female figure, very evocative of Alice of Through the Looking Glass portraying Mary of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” (or, as Liddy Berman of Architectural Digest felt, “the work feels like a fairy-tale tableau, something a lucky woodcutter would stumble upon in an enchanted glade”), dozing with a lamb lying on top of her recumbent form. 

In the context of the art in conversation with its exhibition environment, Rest Upon is immensely complex.  Smith’s statue is, of course, a recreation of nature: a human being and a lamb, but created of an artificial substance, and not cast in a totally realistic representation of an actual woman or lamb, as Smith’s art work is slightly impressionistic.  The sculpture’s placed within an artificially created imitation of a natural environment, a carefully designed and landscaped garden with hewn-stone walkways and flower and greenery plots.  The young woman is lying not on a grassy lawn or meadow, but on hard stones. 

There are other people all around, walking through the Channel Gardens, shopping in the stores that line the garden walk, or simply going to or from Rockefeller Center and 5th Avenue.  Few, aside from me, were even looking at Smith’s sculpture.  The total image is a very mixed one—a collaboration, though an inadvertent one, among Smith (who created Rest Upon), Littman (who placed it “based on very specific conscious decisions”), the architects of Rockefeller Center (who designed the overall environment), and the grounds keepers and gardeners of the Center (who selected and maintain the flowers and plants in the immediate venue).  Passers-by have a hand in this as well. 

Littman had selected the sites for each display carefully, with deliberate consideration of “the Rockefeller Center campus and its history.”  He “wanted the layout to compel the viewer to explore beyond just the outdoor spaces, which is where public sculpture has traditionally been sited.”  Of the nearly two dozen pieces in Frieze Sculpture, the works of four artists were placed in the lobbies of four of Rockefeller Center’s Art Deco buildings. 

In 10 Rockefeller Plaza, formerly the headquarters of Eastern Air Lines, once (1926-91) one of the “Big Four” domestic airlines in the United States, Littman set out two installations by Goshka Macuga (Polish, b. 1967), International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, Configuration 25, First Man: Yuri Gagarin, centered on a portrait head of the Soviet cosmonaut, the first man in space in 1961; and International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, Configuration 26, Before the Beginning: Stephen Hawking, the world-renowned astrophysicist (both pieces from 2016).

The heads are cast in bronze but painted: Gagarin’s in his space helmet is eggshell white and Hawking is candy-apple green.  The heads have several feet of one-inch pipe radiating from them—or leading into them.  Littman explains, “For me, these works act as a conceptual homage to all kinds of travel, so it seemed perfect to use the location of [Dean] Cromwell’s [American, 1892-1960] mural [The Story of Transportation (1946), displayed behind the Macugas in 10 Rockefeller Plaza] to highlight this aspect of the work.”

Across the promenade, at 1 Rockefeller Plaza, was Truth / Beauty, an installation of three black granite pallets (from a series of 14) in a line on which sat two pairs of polished polygonal stainless-steel bars.  The assemblage was started by Walter De Maria (American, 1935-2013) in 1993 and finished in 2016 by his estate according to the artist’s wishes.  Each granite base has “TRUTH” and “BEAUTY” engraved on opposite sides—“TRUTH” on one edge and “BEAUTY” on the other—and the rods increase by two sides with each successive couple. 

(The full series starts with five-sided bars and ends in 17-sided rods.  I didn’t count the sides on the three pairs in Frieze Sculpture.  De Maria had apparently completed the rods, but the bases and the assembly were left to the estate after the artist’s death.  He had also not yet engraved the labels on the edges of the bases, but his studio director worked with Gagosian Gallery, which handles De Maria’s work, to locate an expert engraver for the project.)

The bases were oriented north-south in 1 Rockefeller Plaza, and the labels were on the north and south sides of the square pallets.  On the northernmost and southernmost pallets, the rods were laid out in a chevron configuration, all four pairs facing south; on the center base, the bars were in an X formation (or two single chevrons, pointed toward each other).  Permutations of polished steel bars is a motif of De Maria’s work.  According to Amy Verner of the design and architecture magazine Wallpaper:

[Truth / Beauty] is not the first time that De Maria imbued a work with language; but with these two words, he is inviting viewers to confront a powerful duality that has inspired and challenged philosophers and artists since the dawn of Plato. . . .  Indeed, one can’t help but think of Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn: “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

There was considerable coverage of Frieze Sculpture, but it was either descriptive—much of it drawn from the exhibit publicity and press releases, so it was an echo chamber—or interviews of Frieze New York, Frieze Sculpture, or Rockefeller Center officials.  (Two or three articles, such as one in the New York Post, quoted many visitors to the exhibit as well as a few of the organizers and some of the artists.)  While these articles and posts were often informative and interesting—I drew on some of them myself—they weren’t reviews.  So where I planned to quote press criticism of the sculpture show, I can’t. 

I could glean that most of the journalists authoring this coverage were excited to see this innovative use of an important and historic Midtown site and the artists whose work Littman selected to display, particularly the ones making U.S. débuts or rare appearances here.  The newness of the art and the way it was mounted were obviously impressive to the members of the Fourth Estate who covered the event, but I can’t tell you if any of them actually liked the inaugural Frieze Sculpture—or if they felt a little like I did: interested in the phenomenon, but not so much drawn into the art experience.  I’m going to have to leave you with only my assessment without knowing how I fit into the patchwork quilt of opinions.