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Manhole art is coming to NYC |
Michele Brody's studio faces the head offices of "Tibet House." One day she looked out her window and saw the Dalai Lama. I asked her, "did you say 'Hello Dalai?'" She looked at me like I was from outer space.
I can't say that I spend too much of my day interacting with, much less understanding, modern art. That said, there are certain bits of groovy-artistic-thoughtfulness that I encounter and get upset over when no one else recognizes just how brilliant they are. You know the giant light-beam xylophone in the 34th St. subway station? You remember when somebody (perhaps a band promoter) was spray-painting "Dead Men Don't" all over the place? I'm a big fan of that sort of thing. Whatever that thing is.
The newest artist to tackle interactive urban art is Michele Brody. Her current project is "Re-Covering the Cityscape: Impressions of History Under Foot." Hopefully going into production by the end of the year, Ms. Brody plans to, dig this, make art of manholes. Manholes. How cool is that? I mean, it's a perfect New York thing. Manholes are everywhere, design goes into making them as is (more on this later), so why not use manholes as a form of expression?
I asked Michele when she first started getting into manholes. "When I first moved to New York, I became a pedestrian for the first time. And you always have to be looking down, to avoid ice and dog shit. That's when I really started taking notice of these medallions in the street. They're everywhere."
She quickly became obsessed with manholes, reading up on them about as much as anyone can read up on manholes. In the brief time I spent with her at her Chelsea studio (the very one which had an Arvo Part CD given out as a gift from WNYC playing softly in the background), I got a fascinating crash-course in manholia.
We need manholes so workmen can get to all the wires and pipes and such underground.
Manholes are round, so they can never fall in on themselves.
The interlocking patterns are for traction, as the iron gets slippery when wet. This was discovered during the early days of horse-traffic, as every time it rained back then the city would turn to hooves on ice.
Every city has manholes with its own relief design, created by the local ironworks foundry. Most of the designers have gone uncredited.
We then looked at photos of manholes from all over the country. I found that ones from the Midwest, particularly St. Louis and Indianapolis, had some of the most startling designs. Hopefully Ms. Brody will change some of that and give New York its due.
Her plans are to have specialized manholes, designed by her but created by licensed foundries, placed in significant areas in lower Manhattan. The proposed first ten locations include the Frederick Phillipse House, Jefferson Market, Tombs Prison, Pace Univeristy and the National Academy of Design.
Mock-ups of the individual designs live at one of her many Web sites www.recoveringthecityscape.com.
The first stage is surviving the gauntlet of boarders and zoners and rubber stampers who have to approve of all this. The dough is coming from grants and private sources.
And then once it's out there, that's it? I ask. "I hope to have a marker, but I want it to live naturally in the space. Not too many whistles and bells."
When asked if she's prepared to see her work get corroded by weather and traffic, her eyes light up, "Oh yeah! That's the whole point!"
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Sailing Into Grandma's House
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Brody isn't new to site-specific artwork. This will certainly be her biggest project, but some of her past work has been just as nifty. Some of her works live on at Colorado State, mostly alterations of the public spaces with metal bars that kinda make you dizzy when you look at them. She's also been known to monkey around with living organisms within her installations. Some examples of this include hanging drapes with weeds growing inside the fabric. The plantlife is supported by a hidden irrigation system. (You can check out photos at www.michelebrody.com/installations.) I've also heard tell of a chair totally covered in living, growing grass, but I haven't seen photos of it yet, so I won't believe something that cool exists.
Still living in Williamsburg is a piece called "Sailing Into Grandma's House." It's large work, an array of concrete wrapped in sail cloth, lace and mylar. It's very possible bad kids are hanging out there after dark and drinking Coors.
Brody says her favorite kind of public art is the kind you only notice the fourth time you see it. "Once you realize it's there, and that you've seen it without registering it for so long, that moment of recognition is really exciting to me. It totally alters your relationship with that space, and kinda changes your whole day, if it works properly."
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Brody stands before one of her glowing urban household ornaments
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It's all about manholes these days, though. I don't think I ever used the word so much in one conversation . . . manhole. ("It's a curious word, isn't it?" she says.) While preparing for the public installations, she's still working to make manholes a full-time gig. She's taken tracings of live manholes (and watermains and other cool urban thingiemabobs) and turned them into home ornaments. In the right house or restaurant, they'd look pretty damn cool. There're a whole bunch to look at on yet another website, www.urbanilluminations.com. There're even some for sale.
And dig: The glowing orange one in her studio is the same one that graces the CD cover of the newest Chris Washburne album.
So I'll be watching where I walk, hoping to catch some of Brody's artwork. If the first ten take off, she hopes to expand it, first Uptown, then the Boroughs, then maybe towns everywhere.
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