Huddled in the Rain

John Haber
in New York City

Summer Sculpture 2018

Huma Bhabha, Diana Al-Hadid, and Virginia Overton

On a chill April morning, a woman huddled for protection from the rain. She was a formidable presence nonetheless—and a chilling introduction to 2018 summer sculpture. Its diversity will have even natives getting reacquainted with New York.

Huma Bhabha on the Met roof offers the perfect place to begin, at least in drier weather. Midtown boulevards and the High Line may hold the expected, but Diana Al-Hadid has her watery women, too, in Madison Square. Who would dare treat the city's sacred green space as a parking lot? Just one year ago, Virginia Overton brought her "Sculpture Gardens" to the Whitney. Now she brings a truck or two to the garden with "Built"—a rare solo show in Socrates Sculpture Park. A separate review follows public sculpture into private spaces, from the Flatiron Building to the Rockaways.

Weather permitting

The Met roof does not normally welcome visitors in a downpour, but that huddled woman might have welcomed company for warmth. Her black cloak covered all but her enormous hands and knotted tail, as she pressed her head to the ground. At eighteen feet, she needed every inch of it. Then again, the wet cloak took on the slickness of a tarp, and the Met might just not have got around to removing it. Come to think of it, how was I so sure that the huddled mass represents a woman? Only the most inexcusable sexism expects women to lie prostrate, and only in sexist banter does a woman have a tail.

Everything by Huma Bhabha invites a narrative or two, just as the covering suggests that, one day, everything will be revealed. The prostrate woman, named Benaam, lies before a single standing figure, as We Come in Peace. They might belong to an alien race or a primitive people, but then so might you. For those whose Urdu is rusty, Benaam means "no name." And for those who take untitled sculpture for granted, Urdu is one of the official languages of Pakistan, which Bhabha once called home—before her studies at the Rhode Island School of Design and her move to suburban New York. She knows what it is like to come in from the threat of war.

Her title quotes The Day the Earth Stood Still, from 1951, eleven years before her birth. In the film, space aliens may claim to come in peace, but they have power over life and death. They, like the film, are also rather cheesy, and Bhabha worked in cork and Styrofoam casings along with wet clay. Cast in bronze, they take on the bulk and abjection of Magdalena Abakanowicz and Kiki Smith. The standing figure may have blood stains on her feet, the marks of a whip on her back, and a hand print in yellow on one knee. To judge by the yellow traces on its left hand, the print may be her own.

A similar totem dominated Bhabha's 2013 show at MoMA PS1. She appeared, too, in the 2010 Whitney Biennial and the New Museum's 2008 "After Nature," and she shares the latter's neo-primitivism. So does Julia Phillips at MoMA PS1. Phillips lays her black ceramic body parts beside a corkscrew and forceps, on steel armatures like further instruments of torture. Still, Bhabha tries to keep her narratives multiple. The standing totem has five faces.

She is also reasonably traditional. She recalls early modern "primitivism," too, its pretensions intact. The Cubism of Henri Laurens meets the coarse but vulnerable humanity of Alberto Giacometti. In this setting, sculpture is itself traditional. Most summers have run to full-blown installations, from the near empty rooftop of Pierre Huyghe to the packed constructions of Dan Graham, Tomás Saraceno, and Adrián Villar Rojas. This year (weather permitting), one might actually have room for a drink.

Even for those with a drink in hand, the bronze women make weighty but disconcerting company. Here anything can mean everything or nothing, from politics to the quote-unquote human condition. Bhabha leaves the choice to you while mastering her sites and materials. She aligns her figures north-south, as if to stare down the bar at the north end while confronting one another. Yet the prostrate figure points not at the totem, but just past her side to the length of Central Park. And the park is full of strangers who come in peace, even in a driving rain.

Go with the flow

Anselm Kiefer uses Rockefeller Center for his favorite theme of a book, the Book, its pedestal the serpent that Moses subjected. Also in midtown, Tony Cragg erects suitably craggy pillars along Park Avenue, twisting and spreading toward the top, while Yinka Shonibare lends his fiberglass column at the entrance to Central Park a still greater spin and a lot more color. He even calls it Wind Sculpture, but don't hold your breath. Kathy Ruttenberg draws her public creatures along Broadway from her private creepy fairy tale, from a dancer morphing in or out of a tree near Lincoln Center to a woman standing on her head while bearing the world on her feet at Columbia University. She builds the paradox into their title, In Dreams Awake, but you might wish that she acknowledged your dreams, too.

Sheila Hicks lingered for a while from last summer by Hudson Yards, with her fabric tubes. What was once exuberance had fallen into decrepitude and accident, like serpents that have literally bit the dust. Perhaps she intended it that way, to acknowledge the limits of a public space or her practice as an artist. She has a near colorless replacement that—one that Maria Thereza Alves conceives as a garden. Her plants, ones that would have reached early New York in the ballast of its colonizers, belong to "Agora," a group show the length of the High Line that sounds like a meeting point but speaks instead of displacement. It works best when it struggles with its site.

Phyllida Barlow does, although not in the show, with lumber, concrete, and metal chunks, like a fallen totem of industry or the sad remains of a gateway to the former freight line. So, too, do Naufus Ramirez-Figueroa, Timur Si-Qin, and Duane Linklater with a decrepit bunk bed hidden in the leaves, rust-colored branches rising above, and "tepees" of from three to five poles in the shape of tripods towering over all. They reflect a multinational cast and the plight of refugees who never made it to the city. Others settle for a more literal minded politics—like neon signs demanding reparations and solidarity with the eleven million undocumented immigrations by Pope.L and Andrea Bowers, a wildly fragmented anatomical model by Mariechen Danz, or a pun on the Hollywood sign and a notorious prison by Sable Elyse Smith. Marinella Senatore uses lights, too, for what looks like yet another tourist festival in Little Italy, as Give Your Daughters Difficult Names. For all its virtues, "Agora" could do with a true gathering place and more difficult art.

A dome covers the fountain in Madison Square Park, broken by pockets of sunlight and a steady stream of water. Diana Al-Hadid crafts her Citadel from a loose wire frame and patches of white. Is that a woman's bust outlined in wire at the top? If so, she is both towering and flowing, like the water. That opposition runs through the Syrian-born artist's entire installation, as Delirious Matter. The clotted white recalls early modern sculpture by Medardo Rossi, an acknowledged influence, but you may see only the women, rags, flowers, and water.

Three more sculptures depict reclining women, roughly life size, although they could pass for floral arrangements or flowing water. Al-Hadid may mean either in calling them Synonym. She speaks of the influence of Hans Memling in the Northern Renaissance and Islamic art—but one might see instead a reflection of the surrounding park. She goes on to construct a formal garden in the central green, with hedge rows on two facing sides and white walls connecting them. They, too, descend in torrents. Unless the flow continues long enough, one facing wall will fill the gap in the other.

Tauba Auerbach hides her traces with Flow Separation, a fireboat that moves on an uncertain schedule from pier to pier, ending just west of Chelsea. I fear it was the motion and not the cheery red and white paint job camouflage that kept me from it for days (and I never did get to depart on its overbooked cruise), but the "dazzle camouflage" is still dazzling. To stem the flow, B. Wurtz plants his Kitchen Trees in City Hall Park. The Studio Museum in Harlem branches out once more into Marcus Garvey Park, but this time it means the part about branches. They bow to urban history as much as arboreal splendor, although their resemblance to gas lamps or overwrought chandeliers made of housewares seems less site specific than kitsch. Maren Hassinger fashions them into Monuments, like a nest, a platform, and other simple geometries—Minimalist, site responsive, and suggestive.

Parking in the park

Erwin Wurm drives his own taxi-yellow truck into a park, in the shape of a slightly anthropomorphic hot dog. Sure enough, his Hot Dog Bus dispenses free franks on a pier by the Brooklyn Bridge (while supplies last). Wurm may be more all-American than Rirkrit Tiravanija ladling curry, but as art he lacks a certain spice. He could, no doubt, dispense more upscale sausage. I might even get to like having art for lunch. Still, I was glad to look elsewhere for parking, to Virginia Overton.

Overton relishes art that is always site specific and always distinctly out of place, even compared to the Socrates Annual of artists in residence here and again in many a Socrates Annual to come. A Dodge pick-up truck with vanity plates and a silvery finish stands just past the park's entrance. Styles have hardly changed since the 1990 Ford pick-up in a far corner near the water. Look again at Virginia Overton, and she accentuates its brute presence by painting it a deep blue close to black, right down to its lights, windows, and rear-view mirror. This used truck is not going anywhere fast, and it hoists a steel tank bearing an alarming rip. Better not get too close.

She seems determined to stand out, except when she does not. A tall wood beam looks garish enough but blends in quite well with support for one of the park's two canopies. She has added the sign Socrates to the other, just so you know. A thick stack of pipes looks like more of an intrusion, but they offer perfectly lovely views of the East River. Another wood beam hangs from the park's enormous steel gantry, and the beam makes a terrific swing. It seats nine, and a high-school class made good use of it.

Overton offers a handy lecture on what Leo Marx, writing about modern life, called the machine in the garden—but just try to tell one from the other. The ambiguity, she knows, is built right into the site and its history. Mark di Suvero founded it and graced it with his work, and one of her smaller pieces could pass for his. Yet it also serves as a public park, with summer movies, and a garden, and another piece contains an acrylic disk to focus summer light. Canopies cover working studios and an area for park upkeep. The summer's events include lessons in body casting and urban farming.

It is, in other words, both a working space and a community space. Its art belongs both to studio art and summer sculpture, and the other permanent display apart from di Suvero's belongs to Tim Rollins (who died in December) and K.O.S., or Kids of Survival. Whether with industry, art, or a space to play, Overton is carrying coals to Newcastle. She even brings a lotus pond to the garden, with a fountain at its center. It just happens to lie in the back of the silver pick-up. Things come and go, but the machine in the garden survives.

Overton uses the park's entrance billboard for an old liquor bottle. Its glassy surface bears a warning that "federal law forbids sale or re-use of this bottle," from bootlegging days, but the park is itself a testimony to recycling. She, like di Suvero, merely recalls its industrial origins. They remember even as the lotus eaters in Green myth were doomed to forget. Still more rusted braces take the shape of an outsize gem or top. Even as summer comes to an end, there is still time to build, to shine, or to play.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Huma Bhabha ran at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through October 28, 2018, Julia Phillips at MoMA PS1 through September 3, Anselm Kiefer at Rockefeller Center through July 22, Tony Cragg on Park Avenue through October 31, Yinka Shonibare at Doris C. Freedman Plaza through October 14, Diana Al-Hadid in Madison Square Park through September 3, B. Wurtz in City Hall Park through December 7, Virginia Overton in Socrates Sculpture Park through September 3, and Erwin Wurm in Brooklyn Bridge Park through August 26. Kathy Ruttenberg ran on Broadway through February 28, 2019, "Agora" on the High Line through March 3, Tauba Auerbach at piers in Brooklyn Bridge Park and the west side of Manhattan through May 12, and Maren Hassinger in Marcus Garvey Park curated by Studio Museum in Harlem through June 10. I continue to follow summer sculpture as in 2019 summer sculpture and past years going back to summer 2003 and continuing through summer 2020 and its extension into fall, summer 2021, summer 2022, summer 2023, and summer 2024.