New York 2015, part 2

The Whitney

So the immediate raison d'etre for my trip was to make my bourgeois pilgrimage to the newly relocated Whitney Museum of American Art. As part of the revitalization of lower Manhattan, the move of a major cultural institution downtown reflects the return to urbanism that we've been hearing about so much lately. The new Whitney fits right in. The design is obviously informed by the aesthetic of the Apple Store, right down to guides dressed in color-coded T-shirts. Perhaps without the hubris of labeling things Genius bars, but definitely in the same wheelhouse.
Much like its spiritual sister on the West Coast, the new Getty museum overlooking Los Angeles from the West Side, the Whitney provides overlooks on the city it's part of, the people who are performing in the act of attending a museum, and how architecture remains a social signifier of a great city or a great institution. Being modern, I took part in the self-performance by taking a selfie. This was more a form of protection from the relentless march down from the top of the museum to its bottom, passing through the history of American art from 1900 to the present along the way. The name of the exhibit is America is Hard to See and boy is it.
As is well-known, the collection here is nowhere near the quality of the Museum of Modern Art. But it did provide at least one example of teaching me to see: Bill de Kooning's famous painting of Woman with Bicycle.

He's a controversial figure now because of his tendency to reflect the sexist social norms of his day (the link provides a more nuanced view, and also includes the story about my favorite conceptual piece of art, Robert Rauschenberg's Erased De Kooning Drawing), but he was generally considered by his peers to be one of the best painters of the Abstract Expressionists. This painting is less abstract than Rothko, but for the first time in contemplating one of his paintings, I could see what people were talking about. There were feelings about the woman, her hands moving in a cubist swarm but rendered in suggestions of paint wildly applied but perfectly under control, a suggestion of the bicycle moving by her, both future and past, her mouth in motion, with the second image of teeth and red lipstick famously suggesting a necklace, her feet in high heels. But unlike the carefully worked out abstractions of Braque and Picasso, the wild but perfectly controlled application of paint adds an unsettling element. So if for no other reason, I'm glad I went because he's been a nut I've been trying to crack for years.
But what I found really unsettling from the exhibit, which consisted entirely of works from the permanent collection, was how many times in the 20th century that artists were trying to tell us about social injustice. The plight of the striking coal miner, the lynchings of blacks, the war in Vietnam, the AIDS crisis, slumlords in Manhattan, over and over: to what end? Maybe it was a literal and also metaphorical hangover from the joy of Pride the previous day, but the show reminded me that America is Hard to See because our project is never done, our original sins of genocide, slavery, and racism, and our newer sins of capitalist rapacity are never behind us. Just today, I was reading an article about how the US Chamber of Commerce is fighting anti-tobacco forces around the world: the ur-text of American capitalism starts at Jamestown with the discovery of tobacco, our first cash crop that led to all the other victories of capital over the people and their land. As I write, I pass Mystic, CT, the site of the Mystic Massacre where the good Pilgrim fathers did in the Pequots who were standing in their way.
Thanks to the haphazard collection policy of the Whitney, examples of all these were on display all at once, so it was a little overwhelming. But where are the artifacts for the future? Will Facebook threads and tumblr feeds and twitter rants survive 100 years for our future selves to contemplate and understand?
I promise to remember the good things about America in time for the 4th of July.

New York, 2015

New York City sure has changed a lot since the last time I was here in 2007, and it's changed even more since 1995 when I made my first trip as a starving grad student traveling via Amtrak from Austin to Manhattan via Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Washington, DC. Astounding changes since then:
1. Bicycle infrastructure everywhere! Seriously, if you only needed to move around south of 59th Street, you could use Citibike to get everywhere, complete with European-style street furniture. Still a little sketchy riding on some streets, but those bikes are incredibly sturdy and easy to control. It really is amazing. As I rode down 2nd, then 5th Avenue from my midtown hotel (bike station across the street!) to Washington Square park in the drizzle yesterday morning I felt like when I was a kid and my mom let me ride in the overflowing gutters in Lake Jackson, TX during a heavy rain. Joyful!
2. The High Line! It's hard to overestimate what a magical thing this is. Yesterday as I was walking to 28th street from the new Whitney, I floated above the city on this greened walkway in the sky, overlooking the traffic and feeling like a God on a magic carpet, complete with people lying on grass, sitting on benches reading trashy novels, tending their children. You see the roofs and yards and the sides of buildings at your eye level. And, right in the middle, a Blue Bottle coffee cart with a line shorter than any seen since when the first cart opened at the SF Ferry Building. I probably just got lucky there, but I had my Gibraltar as I realized that this replaced the experience of walking in the streets with a sense of grandeur and peace. New York may have lost its grand old Pennsylvania Station, where, to quote Vincent Scully, "One entered the city like a god. One scuttles in now like a rat," but now you can at least stride like a god through Chelsea.
3. Parklets! New York has taken to this San Francisco treat, and as I sit writing in lower Manhattan I see one nearly identical to the one we have on 24th St in sleepy old Noe Valley, down to red cafe tables and steel flower planters.
I was here to celebrate Gay Pride on the 46th anniversary of the Stonewall Inn riots, and hoping / knowing that the Supreme Court would rule as it did. What started as an act of defiance by drag queens, saddened by the loss of Judy Garland and angry at the rejection of their freedoms in the land of the free, blossomed over the years into at least some agreement in the general society that the mere fact of being gay shouldn't mean a life of desperation on its margins. In fact, there is still legal discrimination in many states, and informal discrimination in many others, and our transgender, bi, and poly friends, and gay people of color, still face a more difficult road than the white affluent gay men of our big cities. But at the very least, if you want to tie your life to someone else you love, to make your own way together in life, you have that choice. We may not need the government to grant us dignity (thanks, Justice Thomas, for that piece of philosophy) but at least now it's not forcing us to accept the lack of dignity so many in our society wanted to ensure in perpetuity.
In myth, when I was young, New York was a frightening place: the New York of the French Connection and Mean Streets, of graffitied subway cars and fires in the Bronx and 2000 murders a year. I've only seen post-Giuliani New York, but I think of it in the same way: not perfect, but much improved. There's still an energy to New York not felt anywhere else in the country, and probably not in many places in the world, still. I think I was right to not try to make a life for myself here, although I was dearly tempted 20 years ago, but it still holds a place in my heart as a magical place where merely walking down the street can be a new adventure. I'm getting ready to head uptown to visit the new Whitney, displaced from midtown to downtown, in a bigger building anchoring the High Line. Much as I love San Francisco, its charms will always be smaller. Those who wish to develop in San Francisco would do well to remember this.