New York is a truly electric city. There’s a real feeling of flux in every neighborhood, excitement along every neon vista and surprise in the most unlikely places. It lights up at night, freezes in the winter, sweats underground and buzzes in the summer. It’s a city you love; visiting it countless times – the peaks and gullies, side streets and diners – through pop culture and art, high and low.
And this is now – in the decade of globalization, mass communication and over-consumption. Thanks to harsh mayoral ’street clearances’, New York is cleaner than ever, it’s property market booming thanks to the commercial midas touch of gentrification and it’s art market ripe and fit to burst. – so different to thirty, twenty, even ten years ago! How are we to get into this writhing mass, reaching ever higher, further, faster? How are we to get a sense of a moment in this flux, to hear the thoughts of its inhabitants, to reassess and review? Who better to turn to than the artists, writers, filmmakers and musicians – woven into the fabric of the city, yet producing work to speak across time, signposts towards a better understanding of these experiences …
Artists grapple intimately with the heart of the zeitgeist, yet at the same time are required to exist on the periphery. This is a near impossible demand, hard to reconcile in any environment, and especially so in New York – a behemoth of a city; disjointed, fidgeting, fighting, chattering and howling day and night, for it never sleeps. A collective of artists that have worked in New York over the last thirty years is Creative Time. They’ve produced a series of entries explaining their struggles to read and relate their experiences throughout their history in the city, accessible day and night via a cell phone at a number of locations across the city.
It’s a wonderful idea; a guide to an incarnation of New York that no longer exists. The ghosts of passionate pasts, living in neighborhoods a world away then from those we know today (when the MeatPacking District was simply the meatpacking district), revealing memories lost in empty spaces; boarded up, painted over, raised or re-used. Harnessing the technologies which simultaneously separate and bridge the gap between people in contemporary society, Creative Time intend to create a sense of place within these barren spaces through the tradition of storytelling and the relatable intimacy of the human voice.
The recorded entries catalogue a vast variety of sites and the events hosted within them, through the words of the artists and reactionaries who produced or experienced them directly at the time. Many facets of the city experience are covered, and some do justice to their subject. In one instance Anne Pasternak effectively demonstrates the use of discussing art in its absence by asking listeners to close their eyes and concentrate on the sounds of footsteps around them when describing the once ‘vegas-esque carpet’ lining Grand Central’s ticket hall. In doing so the listener is able to recreate something of the wonder of experiencing the (absent) art work. In another, John Waters walks us through a 70s sex club, recounting his experiences, as well as describing the social state of the surrounding neighborhood. The accuracy of these descriptions are assured by the presence of Waters (whose controversial filmmaking always manages to steer well clear of the mainstream); if he says the neighborhood was dangerous it was most definitely best avoided (especially as he’s recently been quoted as saying that, ‘alas’ (!), New York no longer has any dangerous parts of town).
Unfortunately, the overall experience of listening to the entries is a mixed one. The scripts deal with periods of upheaval, passion and strife in the city’s history. Evocative descriptions are given of the minutiae of atmospheric conditions created by an installation, and an artist effectively recreates the experience of looking at a building through his eyes. However, what should set an audio guide apart from a simple written description on a wall is often lacking – from the ’self-help’ soundtrack intro to the uncharismatic, monotony of the principle narrator and the poor editing of phrases. The narrator speaks of ‘crisis, culture and heat’ but you’d never know it from his inflection, and DJ Spooky talks of the crowd ‘moving in the rhythm of the movement’, though this is far from mirrored in his delivery. The project is unbalanced; some of the artists’ views would clearly be better aired by more engaging speakers and often the script writers should have exchanged their microphones for voice actors. New York is a myth for many, yet it suits this myth. Talk of the city is best presented in a manner akin to the introductions to the impassioned works of Spike Lee, one of the principle proponents of the New York myth – a local addressing us with the charisma of the vernacular. Creative Time get close with the Waters sound-bites, but often fall short of the mark.
Ultimately, the idea behind the project is so good that it gains more favor than is warranted by its patchy execution.
