I met an amazing photographer yesterday on the renovated High Line in New York City. He is a pinhole photographer, he takes small metal tins and pokes holes in them and takes beautiful and evocative photographers. He drooled over my big and beautiful Canon, but he says he has 50 pinhole cameras, they cost 50 cents apiece.
I bought a photograph he tool of a Ferris Wheel at Coney Island, he told it to me for $20, he spends several days a week in a freezing wind tunnel out of the sun in a High Line tunnel. We talked a bit, he inspired me very much. I’ll share the photograph tomorrow, tonight I’ve got to get some sleep.
In the 1970’s and 80’s, American saw the building of many new museums and many new prisons. The old ones are still there, too, and they are full.
The artist Andrea Fraser has created a powerful and disturbing exhibit at the new Whitney Museum on it’s vast 5th floor. She challenged visitors to bring together two American experiences, a museum and a notorious prison. The exhibit space is empty, it is an acoustic space, filled with sounds recorded in a cell block of Sing Sing prison, just north of New York City on the Hudson River.
It is disorienting at first, until you understand you are hearing the shouts and clanging and conflict of a prison – one kind of experience for many Americans – and walking freely in this beautiful space, open to the big city around it. The views are beautiful, the sounds are chilling. She connects the two in ways that made me squirm.
Her idea was to try and bridge the great divide between the people in prisons and the people in museums.
This comes against the backdrop of the harsh and even hateful rhetoric directed at poor people and at prisoners and people arrested for crimes.
Both prisons and museums are powerful and expansive institutions in American life. Both are booming in their own way. I never thought to connect the two until I saw and heard this exhibit. And that, of course, is what artists and writers are supposed to do: make people think.
I have learned that many people like to pretend that they want to think, but in practice, most people don’t want to think too hard about things. The exhibit is a triumph in that way.
It is really, in a sense, art about compassion. We lock up all kinds of people like animals and forget about them, and almost all of them are poor people from various minorities, especially young African-American men. A country that can build and sustain so many lavish museums can perhaps do better in re-thinking the lives of the millions of people in prisons. You could hear their voices in the exhibit.
They were all the more powerful for not being seen, appropriate since we don’t want to know anything about them once we put the away. We do throw away the keys.
In this vast exhibition space, flanked by stunning views of Manhattan, the Hudson River and New Jersey, you are in two worlds at once, you can’t help but think of a country so torn in it’s impulses, so angry and disconnected from it’s compassionate soul.
Maria and I got up at 5 a.m. Saturday to drive to Albany and take a beautiful Amtrak ride along the Hudson River into Manhattan. We spent much of the day walking. We walked the length of the High Line and back, this is perhaps my favorite project of urban imagination. The High Line is a re-imagined and restored former elevated freight train track that ran along the lower West Side of Manhattan.
The High Line rail line opened in the 1930’s and closed in the 1980’s, it ran right through the center of commercial and residential blacks and was restored by committed neighbors and residents and the city government. The High Line runs from 34th street to St. John’s terminal at Spring Street. It is am amazing experience to walk through it, it weaves right alongside apartment and office windows – there is an astounding amount of construction in that neighborhood, and there are stunning views of the city East and West while walking.
You don’t feel as if you are traveling over or under the city, it is all around you.
Many of the tracks have been preserved and now serve as planters for trees and various art projects, the High Line was jammed with tourists from all over the world today. It ends at the new Whitney Museum, where we went, and we had lunch with my daughter Emma at a cool Mexican restaurant.
It is great to see Em, our lives have taken us in different directions and places, I am quite proud of her and we had a great time catching up. I think my job as a father is to see her off on her own life, not tangled up in mine. If she can live a successful, independent and loving life, then that is a job well done. And she is.
She is so much at home in New York, she would be lost up in my beautiful and mostly forgotten county. The weather was sunny and cool, I got some big and painful blisters for my trouble, I ended up hobbling some, it was well worth it.
After lunch, Maria and I stopped into a half-dozen galleries and then made our way back to the train. Is was just what we needed, a change of scenery, an infusion of museums, art, and a dose of urbanity. A great day.
