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Flanders, New York
She's standing in the ashes at the end of the world, four winds blowing through her hair
We are finishing things up with a few local destinations, including a first stop to visit The Big Duck in Flanders, on the eastern end of Long Island, New York. This is in fact not any old big duck but in fact the original non decorated shed duck that Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown made famous. And they sold duck related merchandise inside, which makes sense I guess.
We’re staying out in Long Island to visit the Parrish Art Museum out in Water Mill, right near the Hamptons. The Parrish was designed by Herzog & de Meuron (or Hedgehog and the Moron as Will Alsop famously called them). Despite what Will Alsop might think, I’m a big fan of Herzog & de Meuron and really liked the museum.
The Parrish Art Museum a really interesting building. The original design had all of these small, distinct jewel like pavilions but it turned out to be crazy expensive. The architects needed to bring the cost way down, but were able to tackle that problem and still do something really interesting. The ceiling material in the galleries is exposed plywood, the roof is metal, the steel is standard issue and the walls are mostly solid concrete, all relatively inexpensive materials put together in a really interesting way. The gallery space (especially the central corridor) is even more impressive when you take that into consideration.
We’re back in New York and on Governors Island visiting this year’s City of Dreams Pavilion. This is Head in the Clouds by Jason Klimoski and Lesley Chang of studioKCA, it is made of recycled bottles and milk jugs and represents what is thrown out in New York City every hour. Even without knowing that gut punch of a fact, it was still an interesting pavilion and one of my favorites so far.
We’re finishing up with some local art, and that includes the blockbuster Rain Room installation by Random International at the Museum of Modern Art. This is a walk through exhibit with huge, frustratingly slow lines that is designed to let you walk through without getting wet- sensors detect your location so that it only rains around you and not on you.
After waiting on that huge, frustrating slow line, I quickly found that it was incredibly fun to walk through Rain Room (the rain really does not fall on you as you walk through), but the way the lighting was set up, it was more appealing staring into the light than looking back where you were.
If you have ever been on a 7 train in Queens, then chances are that you've already seen 5Pointz- a seemingly normal building near PS1 that is completely covered in graffiti. The building is actually a museum of sorts, where (almost) all of the best street artists come to spray paint up the place. 5 Pointz, known as The 5 Pointz Aerosol Center or The Institute of Higher Burnin' or just 5 Pointz, was named not after the notorious slum that Charles Dickens wanted to visit but the 5 boroughs of New York City (that even includes you Staten island).
Just a few weeks before I went, 5Pointz was in the news when the city planning commission unanimously voted to let the building's owner tear it down and replace it with some condo buildings. With its future in doubt (and by "in doubt" I really mean "totally doomed"), I booked myself on a tour to see 5Pointz while I still could. The people at 5 Pointz are well aware of this, and while they are optimistic that somehow this will end well, they're also realistic enough to paint this mural of their landlord, getting eaten by a shark and another shark, all the while enjoying his expensive coffee.
If you want to see it for yourself, $35 tours are available through sidetour. The tours are led by Meres One, the incredibly disorganized but also incredibly talented and interesting curator at 5Pointz. He takes you around the outside of the building, then up to the roof, tells you blind item stories about vandalizing subway trains, warns you never to eat a certain bagel brand (he's seen pigeons inside their food prep area), chases away people with tripods, attempts to tell jokes, tells you never to eat from a pushcart (he's serious about that) and then actually gives a demonstration of how to use spray paint, which was far more impressive than you can imagine.
With that, it’s time to say goodbye to 5 Pointz (hopefully not forever but it doesn’t look good) and it’s time to wrap up another Weekend Trips Slideshow. See you in 2014…
