Just Plain Heaven
Chloe Hawkins
Tracing a path from 34th Street South to Gansevoort Street along the west side of Manhattan is the Highline, an elevated and abandoned railway, a relic of the Industrial Age now overgrown with weeds and grasses. The wild beauty of the rusty tracks has captured the interest of New Yorkers, inspiring the dream that the Highline could become an innovative open public space where freight traffic would be replaced with foot traffic, lifting city dwellers off the streets and into the sky to experience the city from above. After years of community activism and a widely publicized partnership between the non-profit organization Friends of the Highline, dedicated to the preservation and transformation of the railway, the design team of Field Operations and Diller, Scofidio and Renfro, and the City of New York, the realization of this dream is imminent with construction scheduled to begin in the early part of 2006.
Capping the southern end of the Highline in the Meatpacking District is a vacant warehouse whose crumbling walls and floors scattered with stray feathers hint at the years it has been sitting vacant, since its final days of processing poultry. It awaits probable demolition to make way for the Dia Foundation’s new museum. Taking advantage of this moment when the Highline is at a crossroads–hovering between a past of neglect and future of certain reconstruction–Creative Time, New York’s public art elite, reincarnated the vacant building as host to "The Plain of Heaven," a show of 14 international artists, many of whom contributed new works for this show inspired by the Highline project. Off-limits to the public, accessible only to the imagination, the Highline has embodied the dual forces of preservation and development, an idealism for the future informed by a nostalgia for the past, that the artists explored in a variety of media.
In the cavernous darkness of the first floor, where rows of meat hooks on the low ceiling were pointed reminders of place, a luminous opaque plastic barrel with a spout installed at its base slowly leaked water, drop by drop. Water Thief was Paul Ramirez Jonas’s version of a Roman water clock where water is time and, like Shannon Ebner’s Exit Glacier–which consisted of photographic posters inspired by a rapidly receding glacier stacked in two piles–the life of the sculpture was tied to the timeline of the show. Both pieces diminished throughout the six weekends of visitors, Ebner’s leaving in the hands of the attendees, Jonas’ going literally down the drain. Focusing on the process of disappearance, Ramirez and Ebner filled the space with an awareness of inevitable endings. Due to drip its last drop on the closing moment of the show, the clock seemed to tick: when it’s gone, it’s gone.
The ground floor also flickered with three video works that played with time as a transformative or regenerative influence. Preah, meaning God, was the video resulting from Corey McCorkle’s journey to find a Cambodian cow whose saliva was rumored to be endowed with healing properties. The large, cream-colored animal bestowed licks on his appreciative visitors and also lumbered slowly, grazing in green fields; a sacred cow, but a cow nonetheless. In a room heavy with the history of slaughter, this vision of holiness mocked both our treatments of the sacred and the profane, offering the possibility that such a distinction is determined by what we choose to believe. Watching Burning Photograph, Song Dong’s video, you soon realize that the burning photos are not being destroyed by the fire, but rather, are being formed by the flames. Note that in each image he is pictured in front of monuments that have stood the test of time as national icons: Trafalgar Square in London, the Eiffel Tower in Paris and, finally, in front of the Highline. Touching on our desire for symbols of place and our tendency to mythologize memories, he suggests that destructive forces are also creative forces and that the development of the Highline, which will involve a fair amount of demolition, could transform it into a monumental symbol of New York.
Facing Song Dong’s work on the far end of a long, narrow room is another projection showing a process of recreation–archival footage documenting Day’s End, one of Gordon Matta-Clark’s famed cutting projects from the 70s, here a summer-long process of transforming a large warehouse on Gansevoort pier, by cutting into its walls and floors, removing pieces and parts, giving new life to an abandoned building and a new experience of a neglected space. Shown here, the film functions as an echo of the future from the past.
Ascending from the darkness of the first floor to an upper level flooded with light was a bit of a shock, enhanced by an immediate encounter with Adam Cvijanovich’s massive floor-to-ceiling landscape painting of the Union Pacific Railroad as it crosses the plains of Wyoming. The railroad was perfectly centered in a vast western landscape, disappearing into a deep and distant single point. From any perspective in the room, it was impossible to feel anywhere but on the tracks, a gift considering real-life access to the Highline was still impossible.
In conversation with the theme of inaccessible places, Helen Mirra’s sound piece, Green Break addressed the process of how we come to understand what we cannot see. She filled a darkened space with whistles, moans and echoes that vibrated the room into being, successfully communicating, despite the absence of sight, the presence of an immense and empty space. In the absence of access, our minds must take some creative license with clues from our experience to create an image of the real.
Also beginning in darkness, Leandro Erlich’s Las Puertas, an installation of four doors in the wall of a dim room, presented a view of the metaphorical other side. Seeping through the cracks and keyholes was an intense light, implying that they separated us from a powerfully radiant space. Turning the handle granted passage through, but only rewarded us with the darkness from which we came and a mirror image of the same four doors. Las Puertas questioned our perceptions of reality and implied that all journeys, despite being initiated by a bright promise of possibility, lead back to the beginning.
Transitioning, whether from darkness to light, from one side to the other, from past to future, or ideal to real, was a ubiquitous theme present even in the change in character between the two floors of the warehouse. Sparsely distributed in the oppressive darkness below and the heavenly light above, the pieces filled the space with a sense of its own emptiness. Of all the works, the only piece that was to remain after de-installation was a Sol Le-Witt wall drawing that will symbolically be destroyed when the building is torn down in the process of re-making the Highiline. In contrast with the necessarily practical and optimistic architectural vision put forth by Friends of the Highline, "The Plain of Heaven" asked us to pause and reflect upon the balance between what is lost and what is gained in the process of transformation, to recognize that development is a simultaneously constructive and destructive process in which we are all complicit either by our idealistic or nostalgic ideas. Left to linger was the thought that some ideals are forever unattainable, though they may continue to motivate our passage from one place to the next.
