Unveiling of New Temporary Art Bring Tears to their Eyes

glacial UN building, Jonathan, of the New York City's Art in the Parks Program stood in front of a crowd of almost 30 people to unveil a new temporary work of art by Rachel O entitled, Inveterate Composition for Clare. The event took place in Dag Hammarskjold Plaza at 1st Avenue and 47th Street. The atmosphere was a bittersweet one, for the 'Clare' referred to in the sculpture's name is the late Clare Weiss, who worked as the curator of temporary art for the Art in the Parks Program until her death in 2010 after struggling with breast cancer.

The fruition of this piece marks one of the last Ms. Weiss curated.

"The last thing I did with Clare was pretty much interview Rachel and-I don't believe in karma- but I think it was good." Jonathan said through tears as he ended his opening speech.

Inveterate Composition for Clare will stand in the center of the park until May 2012. It is a statue built from one Hummer SUV. The pieces have been remodeled and painted white to take the shape of an iceberg. Within, Ms. Owens placed the first underwater recording of a humpback whale made in 1971. The sound echoes from the great structure belly like from the belly of a hungry beast. The piece is in response to issues on global warming and consumerism to which Ms. O insisted,

"Though this piece does not propagandize, it sits in solidarity with freedom of speech and battles against oppression."

Although Inveterate was created originally for the location, O hopes that it will move on to other places at the end of its term.

Ms. O, born in Atlanta, Georgia is currently living and working in Brooklyn. With the exception of an exhibit in Miami, Owens has shown only locally to New York City. Many of her sculptures comment on global warming and the environment. She often uses found materials to create situations surrounding animals and their relationship to waste and consumerism.

As this is one of Ms. Weiss' last acheivments as curator, the Parks Department, like the scultpture has chosen not to forget her. A new award, entitled The Clare Weiss Emerging Artist Award will be put into action next year, the deadline being January 2012. The award recognizes upcoming artists as well as locations around the city, underserved with public art, the current outstanding location for the project is Joyce Kilmer Park in the Bronx.

The New School Looks To Find Home For Their Occupiers

Monday November 28^th, students and faculty attended a University wide Town Meeting at 2 West 13^th Street, aimed address a case of vandalism that had occurred in that specific room on Saturday by a select few of a group of occupiers who had moved from their original location at the Student Study Center on 90 5^th Avenue. The Student Senate who aimed to have, what Co-chair Melissa referred to as, “an informal town hall” monitored the meeting. Melissa added, “the meeting aims to look at how we are going to move forward, not only in terms of this space, but in terms of this community,” the meeting would decide if the students would be allowed to occupy the space, or any space in the school.

The meeting revolved around a queue of speakers from the audience. Many feared that the occupation was out of control. “They are writing demands that don’t make any sense,” student and worker, Adam Rod said of the graffiti. Of the atmosphere within the occupation, one speaker referred the aggressive atmosphere within the occupation as being a “psychological pepper spray.” However, many agreed that The New School hosting an occupation was in accordance with The New School’s relationship to political activism. Occupier and Masters student, Ted, called the occupation a “revitalization of politics.”

Through a jungle of complaints and comments, a theme arose to support the occupation, though not in the Kellen Gallery. The Kellen Gallery is a semi-public ‘state-of-the-art gallery’ used for school events and art exhibits. The occupation would force the curator and people in charge of the space to reorganize their events.

The end of the two-hour meeting did not find a decision and the room had emptied to a group that could not represent a majority. A couple of forms of voting were proposed, one to create a class where voters would sign up, another was in email form. The Student Senate promised to email the student body an update as to where the occupation would go and how the final decision would be carried out.

Response to Enron movie

in 2005, four years after Enron Executives were facing trials and thousands of jobs were lost, Alex Gibney's documentary, Enron: The Smartest People in the Room was released. The film is not that of the fall of a colossal company, but a complex mixture of America's psychology. Each executive of Enron has their own role in this film of American drama involving greed, money, gambling, adrenaline and the unobstructed need for the fulfillment of their dreams. Like other American dreams, these idealistic notions were those that skewed and destroyed them in the end. Around an interesting mix of music that ranged from saucy blues to metal, Gibney centers the film around the two key players in the scandal, president Ken Lay and CEO Jeffrey Skilling.

The film makes several analogies to the idealism of the company being a kind of wonderland, with "cheshire cat smile[s]," as one of the interviewees described Andrew Fastow. The film, through aesthetics and subjects accentuated an upside down face to the company whose high expectations with gambling on the economy, and failure to admit their own downfall became lethal. The upside down shots and faces in the movie comment on the alternative motive to every face. The documentary does not preach the apocalypse, but harps upon the power and evil within humans that, if applied, can not only destroy societies, people and the government, but can destroy the self. On a larger level Gibley encourages the audience to look at themselves and their actions for what they are, things can be too good.

Abramovic

In a movie lit square stage a woman sits in a bright red dress that falls around her feet and in a cushion way at her bottom. The dress reveals the artist's hands and a slight raindrop shape on the artists back where the long dress is fastened at the neck. The artist sits alone in the space with one other person, across a light brown wooden table. Marina Abromavic is at MoMA until May 31st in a exhibit called "The Artist is Present."

My first reaction of the title was that it evoked a kind of comfort- the artist is here- just here. And when I walked into MoMA's large exhibit space there she was- just there. Video cameras were the first things I saw at the ceiling, and tons of people taking pictures. People take turns reenacting a similar performance that Abromavic and her former lover Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen) did called Night Sea Crossing. But instead of Ulay across from her, it is a random group of whoever is willing to wait in line for pretty much the entire day.

The space has a comfortable feeling regardless of the fact that Abromavic is probably aching in more places than one and the tally of days like markings on a prison wall. People sit and wait to look at her for hours and it isn't hard to stay there. To be free to watch her.

The first time I was exposed to Marina Abramavic (though completely subconcsioucly) was with my aunt Pat who lives in Minnesota. When I was 13, she thought it a very important time in my life to watch seasons 4 and 5 of Sex and the City. It was episode 86, in which Carrie goes to a gallery in Chelsea and meets a very attractive Russian man who turns out to be kind of sketchy in the end. In the gallery was a reenactment of Abramavic's The House with an Ocean View in which Abramavic did not eat for 12 days and lived in front of people in an elevated and open 3 rooms. There is a kind of martyrdom in her shows, Abramavic sits in front of countless New Yorkers and tourists, invisibly immersed in pain. In a sick kind of spectacle that comforts the viewer Abramavic seems to say- "its ok, thing hurt but we get through them, because we- as people- are strong." Abramaciv has used her body as her art using it to question physical and mental limitations.

6 Reasons to Love Glee- but not too much

Glee. What are we so happy about? And this is not the kind of peaceful blissful happiness. On the Princeton wordnetweb.edu site the definition of "glee" is "malicious happiness." The television show itself is so good, so utterly, for lack of a better a term, happy, that there must be something wrong.

6 Reasons to Love Glee in a Really Screwed Up Way:

1) Political correctness- You have an asian girl dating a white boy in a wheelchair and a black girl and a gay boy dressing up the sadistic and compulsive coach of the "cheerio" cheerleading squad. These "minorities" in question (the black girl and the gay boy) are being ignored in the glee club and decide to makeover the coach for her favor. They want their peers to really see them.

2) You wish everyone in your high school was that hot- First Lea Michele was in the Broadway show Spring Awakening and now she is in Glee as the leading hotty as well(intimately involved, I might add, with Jonathan Groff). In both a troubled adolescent who deals with sex and song at the same time. Would if high school was filled with such physically developed girls and boys? Wow.

3) Its just a bunch of music videos- Where the hell did music videos go anyway (MTV)?? We need to fill our need of sing along songs and sequenced dance numbers.

4) You wish your high school was that friggin' awesome- No class and when there is class its singing class= awesome

5) You wish you could think of those catch phrases- among many, we have the "Hey William, though I smelled cookies wafting from the ovens of the little elves who live in your hair."

A scripted life would suck but not if you could have phrases like this whenever you wanted them.

6) Why can't we just sing about EVERYTHING?- When everything we think is just as dramatic as a broadway musical, why do we have to hide it? Why can't we just let it out in impeceble harmony?

In short. Glee is good, but too much and you will come away with your world a little grayer in comparison and slight nausea.

Spas: The Harem of the Aughts

A spa carries a certain exotic charm. Spas pride themselves on their strangest looking flowers, the amount of little waterfalls in their lobbies and the array of foreign teas in their selection. The feeling of a spa must have an exclusive eroticism while being inclusive to anyone willing or worthy of a treatment that will better them mentally and physically. Spas were originally the baths of the Romans or the saunas of the Finnish, among other cultures that sought spas as a medical treatment, there is an interesting juxtaposition where spas are not only places to become physically well, but becoming instantly more beautiful. In a time when people only acknowledge instant results, spas seem to have become more repair places than places of healing.

On my way to The Elizabeth Arden Red Door Salon on 5th Ave in midtown Manhattan an orchid petal lay on the crosshatching of the subway stairs. The Red Door Spa has recently celebrated its 100th anniversary. I was beginning to wonder if the flower would be a symbol of the skewed sense of beauty I was about to see. The secretary, with a beautiful maquillaged face was animate about the amount of celebrities whom they service. The place had a pristine red and white color scheme. The colors emulated a kind of feminine eroticism and purity all at once. Ironically, the only women there were over 60 and botoxed. "We do a lot of sessions outside of our spa." The Secretary added, "for- privacy reasons." She emphasized the word privacy and smiled. The place was pretentiously both welcoming to me- a young lady who obviously did not have the money to spend there and utterly secretive. Most of the doors were closed. Though they were happy to welcome me around their four floor establishment there was little room for exploration. I left with the place still a mystery to me, the hallways of rooms, caverns of mysterious goings on. The way to beauty, it seemed to say, is a magically exotic secret.

Why do women feel as though they need to spa? Spas are different from salons in that they offer a wider selection of services. People are expected to stay longer in spa, which offer entire days their clients to whom they may offer champagne or food. It is important to regard the different between a day spa and a salon because they have different intentions, while a day spa offers an apparently more “medical” day, the salon just offers beauty treatments. A spa day is a "me" day, it is a day to nurture the self, to come in a mess and leave cleansed. With the naked women lounging in the California spa that my mother took me to when I was 13, I could not help but remember the paintings of the harem women of Delacroix and Ingres. The spa was a place to me that was exclusive to women, and women who wanted to become beautiful. The services within spas have changed over centuries, where the first spas were mineral baths, they have expanded to doing services like botox and anal bleaching. Returning to my memory of the spa in California, I cannot help but think that spas have developed from the Orientalist art of the 17th century. Within the spa, like within the harem, things go on that are forbidden, private and mysterious. A woman can come into a spa one person and, rather than leaving in a cleansed spiritual state, they are leaving in a physically altered state, a physically "perfected" state. In the same way the women of the harem were owned by the men, these women coming to spas, to "treat themselves" are coming to change their bodies to become more aesthetically pleasing to men. The treatments that spas offer now cater to our need for instantaneous gratification. The treatment within the spas have the same mystique, the same decor, even: erotic and secretive. And though women are "doing it for themselves" they come out more reformed to a male gaze Spas will never leave existence, and, what spas where and what they offer is for the most part healthy and important to society. People must be healed through massage and baths. A spa is not something that should offer the instant gratification of transforming oneself physically. If there is confusion between turning a person physically into something that they are not and making them feel as though they are being healed through that process, then we have a problem. Beauty is health, beauty is not the beauty of what the male eye sees peaking through the keyhole of the harem. And spas are right in the sense that beauty must be found within, and the insides of people are very magical and cavernous places.

The Heat Wave from 1929

New Yorkers swarm the streets in large happy groups. Legs are borne once more and little dresses are being worn with no jackets, and even a little sheen of sweat that has risen from the sun's ridiculously pounding heat. No, this is not August, not even close, it's hardly spring. April 7th and it is 90 degrees with a touch of breeze. But barely. What is one to do if the entire spring season is skipped and they have to get out all their summer clothes? It did not seem difficult to let go of tights until the fall, but as fate and weatherchannel.com would have it, the rain will return with a chill 50 something degrees. Sandals can't be worn because manis and pedis haven't been done yet, it's a time of confusion.

So instead people will do well to suck it up and pretend that it is the summer time, with iced coffees and shirts that are so thin that they don't really exist. The last time it was this hot was in 1929. Coincidence? Perhaps. It's either the wretched economy or the loose fitting fashion and stick thin models. It could also be prohibition, similar to the way so many are fighting to legalize weed (and, at least in cali, it looks like their winning.) If the weather is a good indicator of history, this is the beginning of a very complicated time.

This disgusting weather will pass, and in its wake we wait for the real spring to pop its head up, so that we will be able to wear the little sweaters and jackets that we have been waiting to wear again. Everyone will have time to get the manis and pedis they need and ease into summer the way the year should be. But this was an important and rather prophetic time, if you will, and, if you want, take this unusual time as a little echo from the past.