VIA 57th West, a majestic new addition to the New York skyline by Bjarke Ingels Group is one of the most anticipated new buildings of 2016. Stephen Glassman Studio has created a monumental public artwork for the development.Glassman speaks to BLOUIN Artinfo while standing in a sixth floor apartment and overlooking the final touches on the artwork which, at 60 feet across and 60 feet tall, scales eight stories of the adjacent building, marking the entrance into VIA 57th West.Glassman is directing the workers as they are putting braces into one of the plates: “It’s almost like watching a piano being tuned. The workers go up and down the strings, tightening the bolts, to get the tubes to line up into one long line. There is a moment, when all the connections are just right, when the pipes lose their identity and become just… a painting.”The sculpture is a layered jigsaw puzzle of sorts, with 35 interlocking panels and nearly 400 pipe clusters. Visually, it looks like river frozen in motion. A monumental endeavor, it is equal parts building and painting. The name of the work is a loose translation of the Native American name to the adjacent Hudson River: “Flows Two Ways.” It is also an apt metaphor for the concept behind the development, by The Durst Organization, of an entire urban block envisioned as a new gateway into Manhattan: the river and the city are two forces, separate yet connected. (Glassman has time to answer a few questions.)What does the concept mean?This area used to be the industrial back door out of Manhattan. The building, and the sculpture, have transformed it into the new front door into Manhattan, the new entrance to 57th Street. Bjarke’s building is geared mostly for the west view – facing the river, like a giant James Turrell installation. It’s a triangular crater, geared towards the west. This is when I started getting excited about my participation: even though the west vision was artfully shaped, the relationship to water sensitively defined, the view east was a random cacophony of vertical edifice and city grid. We all suddenly realized that we can use the artwork to shape the view and the experience of the building looking east.Does the work reconfigure the circulation of Manhattan?Not only that. The Durst Organization, who own the entire block, are very active and progressive environmentalists. All the buildings are beyond platinum-certified, and they’ve opened up a lot of space on the block, to have three buildings in dialog with each other. A lot of light seeps into the block, just like the light hits almost every apartment in BIG’s building. The way to enter the building is through a private street that connects to the two main boulevards. The sculpture is the entryway to that street.So your work plays a role in how the block interacts with the local environment?Yes. It’s a permanent piece: it will be there for a hundred years or more. It’s very important that something be at once an iconic landmark, and also part of the daily landscape.You have a very socially minded practice of public art – with installations in urban sites in Los Angeles devastated by the Rodney King Riots, Malibu fires, the Northridge Quake – as well as playing an active role in urban advocacy. How would you define your practice?I just consider myself an artist. But the intent of my work is to generate the random, intuitive, emotional, human gesture, on the civic scale. To humanize our built environment. I think that’s what graffiti artists are all about, too – getting their mark into the world.Where does that interest come from?My introduction to art, even as a young child, was through public sculpture. Seeing work on the street. Even in museums, it was the giant canvasses of Clyfford Still and Jackson Pollock. Scale was always part of my experience in art. I first studied scenography. So, at the very basis of my training was a sense of scale and production, and a philosophy of working together with people.I honestly believe that creativity for no reason is, that human beings are the only species on the planet who can do that. When I work on these projects, with union iron workers in New York City – supposedly the roughest, toughest, meanest bunch of guys – when you tap into who they are creatively, at a human level, the work just pours out. It is amazing to see. For me, it is more about agreement and connection, than rarefied connoisseurship.How do you see the role of public art, which sits between art and architecture?There’s a lot of crossover between art and architecture. But I believe that, at their very foundation, they are distinct. What drives architecture, fundamentally, is shelter and place – if you think of it in terms of a campfire. Whereas the basis of art, I think, is in mystery, the complete unknown. Even the most beautiful building, such as Bjarke’s VIA 57th West, which is a skyline sculpture, is only a building on the human, pedestrian scale. There is a certain number of units, people live there. Whereas a sculpture is really not architecture, it is really all just mystery, the experience of seeing. I like to think of them as the crack and the mirror.In painting, in the world of two dimensions, you have figure-ground. When you expand that into sculpture, it becomes context-content. Oftentimes the context can be a gallery, museum. But when it’s in public space, context becomes an active dialog, an active construct, in the life of a city. That relationship is essential inquiry of mine.In some ways, it comes from one of my introductions to art: the Japanese kite. In some ways it is pure architecture, but what it does is, it brings your eye to the sky. You have a beautiful form, you launch it, and it connects you to the sky. Context-content. Even from cave painting, art is always a collective community experience, a kind of agreement.You are not attracted to working in a gallery?The private gallery world was a little unsatisfying. For me, art doesn’t stop at a private gesture, working in that precious vacuum.In the 80s I was very involved in performance and robotics and stuff, but I was never much of a Postmodernist. Come the 90s, I really lost interest in the art world. The galleries were fighting for a place in a gallery, which were full of artists screaming that art was dead, painting was dead, galleries were dead. It was a very strange, nihilistic vanity. What was interesting was what was going on in architecture, especially in LA. Coop Himme(l)blau, Gehry, Eric Owen Moss, they were literally taking chainsaws to the bungalows in my neighborhood, and turning architecture into a creative act. I spent my time in the 90s learning from conceptual architecture. That has led me to who I am now.How is it different, working in LA and working in New York?I really believe that NYC is just the greatest city in the world. It’s very exciting to be part of the new skyline, to be working on this scale in NYC. I think my work the tallest public work in New York, apart from the Statue of Liberty. It is deeply humbling to be in the company of so many masterpieces, for the next century.“Flows Two Ways” and VIA 57th West are due to complete in August 2016, in New York City.
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