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A view of Roxy Paine's "Maelstrom"
Any artist who undertakes a show on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum is inherently taking on a big challenge. Unlike the white walls of a gallery, which funnel attention to the work, the roof of the Met is a visual wonderland that is a destination in itself. The verdant topography of Central Park, seen immediately below, pillows into the vertical rise of Manhattan's skyscrapers that circle the park. Even for seasoned New Yorkers, this visual experience is awesome and engaging. Putting art next to this view is like opening a farm stand in the Garden of Eden.
In past years, Jeff Koons and Andy Goldsworthy have installed work on the roof to varied results. Mr. Koons, whose work usually falls dead in a gallery, succeeded in part because he showed high-chrome sculptures that gleamed in the sun. No matter how much you wanted to look at the view, the sculptures caught your eye like someone with a mirror reflecting light at you. You couldn't help but return to the work. And what's not to love about shiny bunnies?
This year, the Met has brought Brooklyn artist Roxy Paine in to fill the rooftop with "Maelstrom," an installation of interconnected steel branches that sprawl across the roof. The entire sculpture weighs seven tons, but Paine’s surface is similar to Koons’s -- the stainless steel tendrils gleam in the sun and seem almost weightless. The surface is where the similarities end, however. The show has received a lot of excited attention in New York, which might say a lot about our fair city's need for organic inspiration. James Cohan Gallery has a video of portrait of Paine on its site.
Click here to see a slideshow from inside "Maelstrom"
Walking the entire roof requires stepping over some branches and ducking under others as "Maelstrom" unfolds over the entire deck. Paine has cited the growth of trees and the structure of neurons as inspiration for the sculpture, as well as the Tunguska meteor strike in Siberia in 1908.
Watching people twist and crouch around the limbs reminded me of old PBS icon Slim Goodbody traveling through massive models of the human body. And it may be that the work's wonder comes from navigating a large interconnected structure. When I was there, kids were carefully stepping over branches but taking delight as one small tap of the foot resulted in 15 feet of wobbling steel.
The entire piece stretches over the roof like a fallen tree, inhabiting its space as a visitor or interloper. It's like a beached whale or a large tree of corral in a pen, surging overhead and filling the nooks of the roof deck in a way that is both organic and unnatural. Parts of the sculpture attach to water pipes; some branches are flush with the ground, as if they're fusing with the roof. The suggestion is something beyond.
Looking back over the view beyond the Met, which is lush and green in the spring and summer, one sees a similar pattern in the squared-off design of Frederick Olmstead's Central Park. It seems to be a free-flowing natural unfolding of organic growth until you hit the walls of Fifth Avenue, 59th Street, and Central Park West.
Of course, the park is both natural and unnatural. It was planned and is a continuous dialog between the designs of men and the malleability of natural forms. This conversation happens in Roxy Paine's work, too, and I look forward to returning in the fall, when the park's trees bare their leaves and talk even more frankly to the naked branches of "Maelstrom." Although Central Park's trees are more delicate than the sculpture and change dramatically over the seasons, Paine's work on the rooftop is a moment of human design's triumph that is guaranteed to end in the fall.
"Roxy Paine on the Roof: Maelstrom" through Nov. 29, 2009 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Video: Installation of Roxy Paine's "Maelstrom"
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