Please Don’t Squeeze the Cemin

Hardened Gothamites are used to seeing strange things on the streets of New York City.  Often, the very strangest things come in the form of sponsored “art” projects designed to provide concrete canyon dwellers with a respite and bring their benighted souls closer to that transcendent thing we call “art.”

Or something.  Needless to say, most of these community art projects are dismal failures.  Community trusts are too frightened of anything that could be perceived as highbrow, or culturally exclusionary or even remotely interesting – how, under those restrictions, would it be possible to succeed?  Better stick with the tasteless pabulum that is all-to-available in galleries today.

And no better example of that pabulum can be found than up and down Broadway with seven sculptures by Saint Clair Cemin (born 1951) organized by the Broadway Mall Association in collaboration with the Paul Kasmin Gallery.  Ideally the world’s largest paperweights, these sculptures underscore the high camp joke that the Fine Arts have become in the United States.  Or, as “art historian and critic” Donald Kuspit writes, Cemin’s endgame modernism – a synthesis of old modern manners, breathing surreal new life into them – artfully condenses the absurdity in singularly perverse works.  Yes, I’ve read that twice and it still makes no sense.  Equally delicious is his official bio, which reads: Saint Clair Cemin … looks to string together the rational, the unknown, the unconscious, and the dream with a synthesis of old modern manners, breathing new life into them. Saint Clair Cemin creates surreal portraits of absurd characters as well as sculptural snapshots of his own past, blurring the line between figuration and abstraction in this collection.

Or something.  The piece above is called The Four, and is described as a Corten steel sculpture that longs to be at once both geometric and organic.  I stood before the sculpture just this weekend, and I didn't immediately notice it longing to be anything.  I, on the other hand, quickly started longing for some of the sculptural treasures in the nearby Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Readers with a sense of humor and high tolerance for camp can see all seven of Cemin’s sculptures in parks and pedestrian malls along Broadway between 57th and 157th Streets.

Peter Woytuk’s Large Animal Sculptures Invade New York

There are times when your correspondent can only shake his head in disappointed wonderment.  It seems, at times, as if New York actively demonstrates that it can only support public art that is ugly, irrelevant or meretricious.  After the appalling Frederick Douglass statue in Harlem and the gaudy Andy Warhol in lower Manhattan, how much lower can the City Fathers sink?

There answer is: lots lower.  Currently the city is under siege, an attack calculated by the Broadway Mall Association, the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation and the Morrison Gallery of Kent, Connecticut (note that Morrison is safely several states away).  The weapon, a series of “whimsical and captivating sculptures” dumped on city streets from Columbus Circle to 168^th Street. 

The sculptures are the work of Peter Woytuk (born 1958), who obviously took his early experiences with Play-Dough too closely to heart.  What can one say of Woytuk, other than yet another “artist” has flimflammed civic-minded boobs?  Here is a snippet of Woytuk’s bio, courtesy of his representative, the Morrison Gallery:

In recent years, Peter has been experimenting with life-size and monumental sculpture. His group of bulls, in particular, were first selected because he was attracted to the "sprawl of mass" displayed by seated and reclining bulls on the farms surrounding his former studio in New England. In his interpretation, Peter has somewhat altered their shapes. As he explains, "they're basically large volumes of simplified bovine forms. Their backbone contours, the overlapping silhouette lines of bull groupings, mirror the shapes of the hills surrounding my studio. I kind of like to think of them as the cow as landscape." Ultimately for Peter, the end result is not only the objects themselves but also the way other people respond to and interact with them. He is pleasantly surprised that the bulls have "become sort of a playground for children. They're inviting and great to climb on," he explains.

Peter's decision to create large-scale sculpture has brought about an interesting dilemma –where to have such enormous work cast. For his larger sculptures, Peter has been using foundries in Thailand and China. According to Peter, these facilities, which are used to "working on twenty-foot Buddhas," have "the ability to pour very large-scale sculpture. They're almost unique in their capacity to melt and pour a great amount of metal." The resulting product is finely crafted under the scrupulous direction of the artist.

Ah … finely crafted under the scrupulous direction of the artist.  In short, high-end junk for a people who no longer believe in real art.  One is delighted, however, that children are smart enough to know a large-scale toy when they see it, and act accordingly.

The above bird (bird?) can be found at the train station at Broadway and 72^nd.  It is representative of the show, which is to say that none of the other pieces are better or worse.  Another worm at the core of the Big Apple…