THE ARTS IN NEW YORK CITY Fall 2017 | Baruch College | Macaulay Honors

Ai Weiwei’s citywide exhibit, Good Fences Make Good Neighbors is presented at a crucial time in history, a year ago we elected an extremely xenophobic president who is threatening to close our borders and deport immigrants, even ones that were brought to America as children. Weiwei’s installation serves to publicize the anti-immigrant rhetoric that is becoming dangerously commonplace to believe in and to criticize it.  This anti-immigrant feeling might not seem to be the largest problem in New York City, where we have tons of different immigrant populations who we know are critical to our culture, but in the America as a whole and the rest of the world, anti-immigrant sentiment is quite dangerous and serves a threat to the lives of immigrants and refugees who are fleeing their home countries for a variety of reasons.

The first installation I visited was the Circle Fence in the Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. The last time I had been here was with my dad and stepmom when I was a kid and I remember that we had found someone’s lost phone and were trying to call someone who could tell them, but the phone belonged to a Spanish speaking person so we had a hard time figuring out how to call someone. This was before the days of smart phones when one could use Google Translate to translate something on the fly. Luckily my Dad understands Spanish so we figured it out and got the phone back to him. I feel like this story is a good analogy to how it’s not necessarily bad to live in a multilingual community. It makes us more knowledgeable, my dad only understood Spanish because he had been working in a garage with many Spanish speakers. This installation was pretty cool because it highlighted a previous installation from the World’s Fair in 1964 which was to serve as a symbol of international unity at the height of the Cold War, it’s important to remember past sentiments of internationality and why they were important then and now.

The next installation I visited was in Central Park. This installation was a Gilded Cage that uses functions of architecture to demonstrate both elements of opulence and confinement. This makes quite a statement towards the people who work or live near Central Park, people who probably are very rich and powerful and might not be so pro-immigrant. It forces the viewer to actually stand inside of a cage, and try to imagine what it is like to be on the other side of the power dynamic. I think it’s a really good technique to bring out people who like go see public art and take pictures of it for their Instagram, and then force them to think about their place in society.

The last installation I visited with Veronica. It was the cage that Weiwei placed strategically inside the arch in Washington Square. It was a strategic placement because the arch was made to commemorate George Washington leading the nation to democracy. Democracy is supposedly one of the main tenets of our country but lately it hasn’t been feeling too valued. Things like the electoral college prevent us from directly voting who we want to be president and we can see how that really manifested in the election of Donald Trump, who did not win the popular vote. This is a really cool installation because it forces you to stand in the space of an encaged person and be confronted with your own image.   

If I had to create a public art project that engaged the NYC community around the theme I chose for my curatorial project, which was the conflict surrounding the Israeli occupation of Palestine, I would make some kind of performance art piece that would force people to see things through the eyes of others. I’m thinking that I could have Jews and Muslims in New York City go into a room where there is a thin wall dividing them from each other. Then I could have questions that they could answer to see the humanity in each other and understand that they aren’t so different. I got this idea from an article I read on the New York Times a couple of years ago called The 36 Questions That Lead to Love which was inspired by an essay by Mandy Len Catron called To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This.  It breaks down how people fall in love with each other with science, and brings up intimate questions that would normally take a long time to figure out. I think it would be really cool to try this out on a large scale, in a public space and have strangers ask these kinds of questions to each other. I think that it could be set up in a park somewhere and then could be recorded to be publicized or shown in a museum. Showing it in a museum or having the video available online would help engage the community so that a larger conversation could begin on the subject.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 19th, 2017 at 3:03 pm and is filed under Blog #11. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.