Visitors are going mad for Manhattan’s new Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) that opened September 27. I joined the throng of 8,000 that first weekend and went not only mad, but also nostalgic, about the museum’s building by the renowned architect Edward Durrell Stone, as well as the wildly imaginative exhibitions.
I had covered art openings at the so-called “lollipop” building at 2 Columbus Circle way back when it was the Huntington Hartford Museum which opened in 1964. I was a child journalist at the time, of course.
The white-divinity-colored building, closed for the past ten years, finally has been reborn after a bitter preservation battle. The zany structure had been empty more than it had been occupied after Huntington Hartford closed his modern art gallery in 1969.
The building had been scoffed at from the beginning. A “die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollipops” mocked New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable.
This September, New York Magazine art critic Jerry Saltz did some scoffing of his own, “It’s like they’ve done sexual-reassignment surgery on it and outfitted it in urbane jewelry.”
The building’s redesign was by Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works Architecture in collaboration with Gary Edward Handel & Associates. Architect Cloepfil said, “…the building was a curiosity…Its transformation converts a silent and inert building to one of life and light.”
The reopening of the redesigned building could be a metaphor for the museum’s exhibition “Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary” except that Stone’s lollipop was anything but ordinary. More than 50 artists from 18 countries transform ordinary, discarded, or worthless objects into fascinating, innovative, often thought-provoking artworks in “Second Lives”.
And the museum’s acronym, MAD, also ties into many of the works. Or some might say OCD for obsessive-compulsive, with apologies to the artists and to Freud.
The artwork “TEXTile” is composed of 22,528 recycled computer keycaps and 192 custom keycaps. “Spoons” has a mere 9,238 plastic spoons tied with 3,091 rubber bands plus a video of the building process. “After the Mona Lisa 7” and “After the Mona Lisa 2” each has more than 5,000 spools of thread. And almost $25,000 of discarded Scratch & Win losing lottery tickets make up “Chance City”.
Several pieces were created from thousands of military objects like 3,000 military dog tags constructing “Metal Jacket”. “Brave #2” is a necklace of a hundred handgun triggers.
Clearly, the works in “Second Lives” are provocative commentaries on crucial issues of war, violence, the environment, value, politics, and identity.
I stopped short at the red, white, and blue neon sign saying "Mandela and Anne Frank" atop zig-zag columns of international telephone directories. To see whether I'd gotten the connection correctly, I read the wall text explaining "Mandela had read Anne Frank's diary while imprisoned in South Africa's Robben Island, and recognized in her story a parable of the plight of his nation and peoples." The telephone book tower "symbolizes names of six million Jews murdered in concentration camps and 12 million Africans forced into slavery."
Like "Mandela and Anne Frank Forever: The Endless Column" by Joe Lewis III, many of the works have layers upon layers of meaning. The items range from deadly serious, often mixing in some whimsicality.
One of the most spectacular of all the intriguing works is “Fading Cloth”, more than 210 square feet of aluminum liquor bottle caps “sewn” together with copper wire. The shimmering gold, red, and black metal tapestry resembles a funeral cloth of the Adinkra peoples of Ghana where the artist, El Anatsui grew up. A similar El Anatsui work “Beyond Earth and Heaven” is in the Metropolitan Museum’s new exhibition “The Essential Art of African Textiles: Design Without End” that opened on September 30.
The Museum of Arts and Design also presents 150 of its most significant works in another exhibit “Permanently MAD: Revealing the Collection”, featuring works from the 1950s to the present by Cindy Sherman, George Segal, Louise Bourgeois, among other groundbreaking artists and designers.
One visitor next to me commented, "This brings a whole new meaning to art."
Another exclaimed, "Oh my God, I could look at these objects over and over and over again."
And what a metaphor for the multimillionaire Huntington Hartford who originated his own museum and building at 2 Columbus Circle, only to close both after five years. Hartford had inherited an estimated $90 million, but eventually declared bankruptcy.
He had longed to be “an arbiter of culture and a master builder – ambitions that eluded him time after time,” The New York Times wrote in Hartford’s obit when he died at age 97 this past May. Hartford once wrote, “I have tried to use my millions creatively, but the golden bird, coming to life, has sometimes wriggled out of my hand and flown away.”
Fortunately, the white building that many people had called a white elephant and an albatross, now has a second life as a museum -- and a symbol of art, design, preservation, and perseverance.
For more info: www.madmuseum.org
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