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Review | books

Speculations on NYC

CITY SPECULATIONS
Edited by Patricia C. Phillips
Princeton Architectural Press
ISBN 1-56898-077-9
Paperback: 101 pages

Located within the Queens Museum of Art, The Panorama of the City of New York occupies close to one-third of the museum’s exhibition space. Projects like City Speculations are part of an ongoing presentation which the museum hosts, to bring the Panorama model and a definitive sense of New York City urban dynamism to its museum-goers.

This publication documents the diversity of City Speculations exhibits that were presented under the curatorial wing of Patricia C. Phillips, Associate Professor and Chair of the Art Department at the State University of New York, New Paltz. The main conceptual handle of this project was to reveal ‘the complexities and turmoil that animate urban life and comprise the character of New York’. Moving decidedly away from the caricaturized Panorama portrayal of the city, this series of exhibits included works by Diller + Scofidio, Keller Easterling, Andrea Kahn and RAAUM, which subvert normative modes of city-reading. The tag of an ‘art exhibit’ allowed these architects, theorists and designers to interpret their personal experiences and observations of NYC and translate these ideas into provoking abstract models and images.

Diller + Scofidio took their exhibit, Soft Sell, street-walking on Forty-second Street in the entrance of the former Rialto Theater, now an abandoned pornographic theatre. Forty-second Street, a site of ‘reversible values’ with ‘unsightly’ tourist on-goings, is a meeting ground between decadence and delight (think Geylang-meets-Orchard-Towers, perhaps our best local counterpart). A video screen on which flashed a pair of sensuous plump, red lips and tantalizing script – “Hey you, wanna buy a full service secretary?” or “Hey you, wanna buy the fountain of youth?” or “Hey you, wanna buy a left kidney?” – became the means by which the seedy and secret layers of the site were unearthed, and displayed to all and sundry.

With explorations like, The Hidden City, Second New York, Scoring the Park and Fresh Kills, one is drawn into an otherworldly and panoramic representation of a New York City, which perhaps is more of a truth than the brilliant verisimilitude of an objectified Museum panorama.

[images: Debbie]

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Debbie is a student of architecture, a lover of poetry, and a hopeful song-writer who longs for solo-travels and tends to dip her fingers in too many honey-pots.