Imagine you’re a New York City building official, and the mayor’s office has decided to let an artist build a living room six stories up in the air and wrap it around a historic statue of Christopher Columbus in the middle of one of Manhattan’s busiest intersections.
Oh, and the plan is to have 100,000 people climb up stairs to view it.
High Above Columbus Circle, a Living Room, TV Included
by Robin Pogrebin
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/13/arts/design/in-columbus-circle-tatzu-nishi-to-build-living-room.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Imagine you’re a New York City building official, and the mayor’s office has decided to let an artist build a living room six stories up in the air and wrap it around a historic statue of Christopher Columbus in the middle of one of Manhattan’s busiest intersections.
Oh, and the plan is to have 100,000 people climb up stairs to view it.
You might have a few safety concerns and envision a few traffic headaches. And you’d note, of course, that somebody will have to worry about insurance and handicap accessibility.
But the mayor is, as you know, a big champion of the arts and, by reputation, no great fan of the automobile.
So your reaction to the project may well be a lot like that of Thomas Fariello, the first deputy buildings commissioner who is overseeing a plan to convert Columbus Circle into a piece of Conceptual art this fall.
“I like it,” he said recently. “I think it’s fun.”
The fun is just beginning, with the scaffolding rising for the piece, by the Japanese artist Tatzu Nishi, who plans to furnish the living room with couches, lamps and a coffee table for visitors, who will be able to commune face to face in homey comfort with the 13-foot tall explorer as he pokes up into the space from atop his lofty pedestal.
“It’s such a wonderful and innovative way of bringing people closer to Columbus,” said John Calvelli, secretary of the National Italian American Foundation, who is trying to promote and raise money for the project, “Discovering Columbus.” “Some of the people in the community are wondering, ‘What is this actually going to be?’ It’s going to be an opportunity to have a moment with Columbus and have an intimate experience.”
Various public officials also have had to warm to the project, which was developed by the Public Art Fund, a nonprofit organization that presents art around the city.
Before it opens on Sept. 20, the exhibition will need multiple approvals from the Buildings Department, including permits to erect a temporary structure, for equipment, for construction and exhibition fencing and one for an elevator, which is required under the law to provide access for the disabled.
The Department of Transportation ascertained that traffic would not be disrupted, and the Fire Department signed off on safety factors and made sure that the living room would have “adequate means of egress”: in this case, stairs.
The Parks Department — together with the Central Park Conservancy — is making sure that no damage is done to the statue itself, which was unveiled in 1892 to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas.
“With city bureaucrats, our initial response to anything is skepticism, because part of our job is to make sure things don’t happen that are dangerous to the public,” said Adrian Benepe, the parks commissioner. “Like doctors: first do no harm.”
In this case, officials said the project would actually help the white marble statue by Gaetano Russo, which is showing some wear and tear. When the exhibition closes on Nov. 18, workers will use the living room as an enclosed perch for restoration work.
Money is being raised for the project. How much is unclear: the Public Art Fund does not reveal its budgets. The city’s Cultural Affairs Department is pitching in more than $1 million for the restoration; some cleaning of the Sardinian granite base and column on which the statue sits is already under way.
Mr. Nishi has done this sort of thing before, and so has the Bloomberg administration.
The artist surrounded a statue of Queen Victoria in Liverpool, England, with a temporary functioning hotel; created a one-room apartment over the roof of a 14th-century cathedral — enclosing a bronze, angel-shaped weather vane — in Basel, Switzerland; and built a temporary hotel suite around the Merlion fountain in Singapore.
The administration has not allowed logistical challenges to stand in the way of art, whether for “The Gates,” a serpentine series of saffron panels that laced through Central Park in 2005, or the artificial waterfalls — 90 to 120 feet high — that faced the New York waterfront in 2008, or the 60 pianos placed on the city’s streets for public playing in 2010.
“Public art has always been at the heart of New York City’s unique culture,” said Julie Wood, a spokeswoman for the mayor.
The city insures itself for public art installations and all capital projects, and it will require the sponsors and the contractors to carry insurance that indemnifies the city for various forms of liability. Tishman Construction is building the scaffold.
“This is pretty standard stuff,” Mr. Fariello said. That said, he is still trying to guard against congestion or catastrophe. (The living room’s windows, for example, do not open.)
“We worry about everything — that’s what we do,” he said. “They’re assuring us they’re going to have 50 people in the living room portion at a time, and they’re not going to have 50 people downstairs lining up.”
To avoid long lines, the project will issue timed tickets so that people essentially show up by appointment. Tickets are free and will be available at publicartfund.org/discoveringcolumbus and at an information desk in the Time Warner Center. The installation will be open daily from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.
It is not clear whether there will be a time limit on visiting with Columbus. The living room will have a television, though not Wi-Fi.
If there is a line to enter the exhibition, it will form within the circle on a section of the sidewalk.
The statue will already be encased on Columbus Day, Oct. 8, when New York stages a parade, and typically a debate renews over Columbus’s legacy. Noble explorer or greedy colonizer?
Nothing in Mr. Nishi’s work is expected to address that issue. His focus is on visual surprise.
“He recontextualizes those different elements and creates almost a kind of surreal experience of something that is perhaps very familiar but that becomes unfamiliar, or is discovered in a new way through his work of art,” said Nicholas Baume, the director and chief curator of the Public Art Fund. “I loved the idea of him revealing something that’s hiding in plain sight.”
Frank Vernuccio, though, said he did not think many of New York’s Italian-Americans would find the living room revelatory.
Mr. Vernuccio, a board member of the Enrico Fermi Cultural Committee — a Bronx nonprofit organization dedicated to Italian-American heritage — said it was another example of the Bloomberg administration’s silly revisionism when it comes to public spaces.
“The plans seem to hide the Columbus statue for no reason whatsoever,” he said. “A problem well illustrated by the placing of suburban lawn furniture on the iconic crossroads of the world near Times Square.”