So the art students had an exhibit.
I hadn’t been out to Brooklyn yet, so it was as good a time as any to get a taste of the city outside the City. Getting there was easy enough – it’s one of those awesome train rides that takes you out of the ground so you can actually see the City. (If I made a City I would put all he mass transit about ten stories in the air with the birds, not in the ground with the rats.)
The Flux Factory – It’s on 29th Street and 40th Ave!, one of the art students told us. You got it, we said. And after getting lost once walking in the wrong direction – a beautiful direction despite being wrong – we did find it.
Along the beautiful wrong direction, Victoria snapped some photos of a still congested but lower-rise kind of life filled with some of the odder sights I’ve seen yet in the city. Below is a sampling of the sites we saw on our misguided walk East.
This car had a stuffed panda and an action figure of Jesus in it:
Once we got to the Flux Factory, I finally got to see what those artists have been up to all semester – I saw Jackie’s videos, Sava’s collages, Greg’s paintings of fat women’s abdomens, Sarah’s comic books, Chase’s “earth art,” Nellie’s “hand art,” and Kay’s tumor-like bouncy ball things that sat like soccer balls on a carpet of Astroturf (the perfect space for lounging, as seen below:)
As an architecture student, I can’t help but share my thoughts about the space:
The non-descript entrance and the low ceilings of the entry corridor heighten a spectator’s sense of entering something hidden and special. The conveyor belt in one corner reminds us of the building’s past and invites speculation about what used to happen here – the conveyor belt goes out the window? we can put people on this thing? – Daniel get on there! – what is flux? :
Nellie’s hand art really intrigued me. This series of photographs were taken as she penned scenes of the city on her own hand and arm:
The palimpsest that begins to be produced seems to me to be a kind of personal text describing the City’s endless cycle of construction and erasure. Inscribing these things on the body invites a whole series of readings: are they to be read as tattoos? important information that must be kept close – a searing memory, an important note or telephone number? Or is writing the architecture of the City on the body a more sinister critique of how the City’s inflexible networks are imprinted onto the bodies and into the lives of the citizens that live in it, whether they like it or not? And who are we to believe is the author? Nellie or the City?
These art students really get you thinking.
…
The end of the semester is on its way. We are busy with preparations for final reviews and final papers, but let’s not forget: we are in the City. Want to go to a Broadway box office for student rush tickets tomorrow morning? Let’s do it.