Photo Credit: Roving Rube. Viewpoint: 53rd St. between 5th and 6th Ave., looking north; 3/19/02 12:02 PM.
Notes (Roving Rube): Today's feature was going to about cherry pickers around town, but the Rube ended up getting interested in the facade the guy in this cherry picker is working on, that of the new American Folk Art Museum.
Briefly golden in the midday sunlight, it darkens to bronzey-silver or gray in the afternoon, as shown in . The new additions to the neighboring Museum of Modern Art will eventually wrap around the Folk Art museum like a clam around a pearl -- only this facade will be left exposed.
The material, which "begs to be touched" (), is "tombasil", chosen by the husband and wife design team of Tod Williams and Billie Tsien:
Tod: Ive heard people say, Oh, Williams and Tsien, theyre experimenting with materials. They seem to think we go to the closet, set out a bunch of materials, and see what happens. We do almost the opposite. We try to hold the materials at bay for as long as possible. We keep asking ourselves what is the right material...
Billie: Someone in our office might say, Lets try fiberglass. Tod and I will reply, Okay, then youd better figure out how to make it fire-retardant. Once they make it fire-retardant, then it doesnt look like fiberglass anymore. So people in our office will send things to fabricators, asking if they would make samples. Things go back and forth, back and forth ...
Tod: Our first idea was to try to cast a concrete facade directly on the street, to use the imprint of 53rd Street as the facade. That would have been extremely interesting, but rather disruptive to traffic. We didnt get a very positive response from the folk art board to the idea of making the facade of cast concrete ... We thought of aluminum because aluminum can have some sparkle and shine and it is ordinary enough to be affordable. But once we melted an ingot [of aluminum] and then cast it, it ... became rather dull and didnt look like aluminum. So we said, Lets look at something thats not aluminum and not copper, but maybe a mix of the two. Through a series of investigations, we learned about Tombasil, which is a form of white bronze.
Billie: We had to work out a lot of technical difficulties because when Pete poured the Tombasil on the concrete floor, the air in the concrete and the moisture caused tiny explosions. We destroyed the floor, but we had some interesting panels."
[Source: an interview by Clifford A. Pearson on archrecord.com; an interesting review of the treatment of the inside of the museum can be found on archidose.org.]
In Alternate View, the entrance shows the Folk Art Museum's first exhibits, running into June. One of them is on the work of Henry Darger, a bizarre centerpiece of the collection:
"It is a humbling experience now to have to admit that not until I looked under all the debris in his room did I become aware of the incredible world that Henry had created from within himself. It was only in the last days of Henry Darger's life that I came close to knowing who this shuffling old man really was ... [Nathan Lerner, Darger's landlord]
Amid a thick accumulation of debris - including hundreds of Pepto Bismol bottles, nearly a thousand balls of string, old newspapers, magazines and comic books, religious kitsch and much more ... Lerner found a creative life's work: and enormous literary and pictorial production. The key element was a picaresque tale in twelve massive volumes composed of some 19,000 pages of legal-sized paper filled with single- spaced typing entitled The story of the Vivian Girls, in what is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. ... the details of battles are recorded in precise quartermaster style in supplemental volumes. In one, for example, he carefully drew and colored the hundreds of flags of the warring nations. Another lists literally thousands of names of officers in the contending armies and their fates (among these, some are described as "killed" while others are "mortally wounded.")
By far the most important supplement to the book, however, exists in the several hundred watercolor paintings Darger left in his room, many of them illustrations for The Realms of the Unreal. ... from the measurements of standard drawing pads to mural-sized works - three or four feet high and as much as eight to ten feet long - made of joined sheets. ... The logistics of how Darger was able to work on these large pictures in the cramped quarters he occupied are remarkable. The only conclusion possible is that he worked in the manner of scroll painters - one segment at a time. But if this is the case, memory had to be relied upon to govern the overall coherences these exceedingly complex compositions."
[Source: University of Iowa Museum site, author Stephen Prokopoff.]
What the Rube remembers from the last time he saw this exhibition was that Darger drew vast armies of children, mostly little girls, which he traced from ads and comic books, a classically obsessed outsider artist. It's awesome and creepy.
Prokopoff: "It is not possible to fathom the causes or intricacies of Darger's fantasies, but it should be said that his public behavior appears to have been without blemish. A saintly man who frequently attended mass, Darger saw himself as the ardent protector of children."