Justen Ladda, an artist who has lived and worked on the Lower East Side since the late 1970s, has spent endless hours for ten years maintaining a remarkable public garden he helped create (with several New York City agencies) on the Allen Street Mall just south of Delancey Street. Every day Ladda picks up bags of trash and cigarette butts from around a magnificent collection of scholar’s rocks he chose and imported from China, each a world unto itself. He plants bulbs, seedlings and rescued bushes; he waters, weeds and trims; he gently admonishes dog owners and converses with whoever wishes to do so; and he notes with meticulous triumph each new blossom and twig. Ladda designed the park deliberately without fences. Nothing shields the delicate plantings and fresh earth from lanes of heavy traffic and whirring bikes on either side, or from predictable desecrations along the pedestrian path – more of a cul-de-sac – that bisects it. Without Ladda’s unpaid, unrecognized efforts, the place would revert to a wasteland. For now, gentrification in these parts coexists with the homeless population it displaces (gentrification complete with ghetto-chic, a cynic might say), so it is often the down and out that frequent the park’s benches. But Ladda’s labor of love includes his own forms of outreach, pragmatism, and forbearance. Together with his gardening it is enough to nurture a zone of calm and contemplation despite civic neglect, smack in an emblematically dense zone of urban stress.

I spoke with Ladda in early May at the park, as leaves and flowers were emerging, and later in his top-floor loft on Stanton Street –– which until recently was without insulation and unheated (Ladda was once featured in a New York Times article about hardy souls who thrive heatless in winter). I asked him about the relationship between the park and his art practice, which includes exquisitely refined sculpture and painting as well as a series of dazzling, tromp-l’œil installations which, viewed at certain angles, create precisely calibrated sculptural hallucinations (notably Art, Fashion & Religion, his 1986 tour-de-force in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art).

As with an installation, Ladda reminds me, “a garden is a curated space. It creates a certain impression; it does something to people.” But different sculptural modes require different kinds of mastery. “In the studio I’m a total control freak. With an artwork you have a vision, but a garden is ongoing. It’s never done. I am always looking for texture and color, just as with painting. I try to achieve a color balance in different seasons. These nasturtiums, I started them as seedlings and determined where to plant them, but then you just let them go where they want. It will make its own image.”

Ladda’s current studio work involves the painstaking application of more than a hundred layers of photosensitive pigment onto prominently grained wood supports, resulting in patterns of mysterious color that can suggest, as Ken Johnson remarked in a review of an 2010 exhibition in Bushwick, “mountains in Chinese landscapes or leaping flames.” Ladda also creates photo-negatives of uncanny personages –– amalgams of human and animal, portraiture and computer morphing –– which he contact prints in layers of silvery sfumato onto wood grain that the artist describes as “serene.” These almost pure horizontal patterns make the images all the more spectral, like old television transmissions from a spirit world. The time element of this studio work is substantial.

That of gardening, however, is on another scale. “Gardening is an old man’s game,” Ladda says wryly. “Time goes by so much faster now –– it feels like it’s Thanksgiving every three months. If you’re young and you plant something you get very impatient. When time goes faster you can literally watch the grass grow.” Being in touch with larger cycles of time explains, in part, Ladda’s obsession with clearing the ground of every scrap. “I like to be in the soil, in the earth. I know I’m going to go there one day.” Visitors to the park, cheek by jowl with rank exhaust fumes, may not think about the improbable luxury of the loamy freshness at their feet, but the sensation is ineffable –– equally life-affirming and a gentle reminder of mortality.

In contrast with the evolving, seasonal plantings, the scholar’s rocks stand as unchanging sentinels fixed in geological time. “I look on them as an early form of abstraction,” says Ladda. Scholar’s rocks resonated with the artist on first encounter in 1995, in an exhibition of the collection assembled by the brilliant contrarian Robert Rosenblum at the China Institute. “My art education in Germany was basically Bauhaus and Mid-20th century abstraction. I think ‘50s sculpture is the same way of seeing as the scholar’s rocks, that’s why I’m so fascinated by them. The Chinese started looking at abstraction around the year 1000, long before artists in the West. They called scholar’s rocks the bones of the earth, and they used them as inspiration for landscape paintings as early as the Southern Song Dynasty.”

Southern Song “academy” painting had reached an apex of poetic realism equal to anything in the European Renaissance –– but centuries earlier –– after which it was largely superseded by “literati” or scholar-amateur painting, in which the brushstroke itself came to be valued above the artful decipherment of natural phenomena. Scholar’s rocks were consulted by both the realists –– i.e., as bones of the earth –– and by the literati, as calligraphic abstractions. Interest in rocks reached a peak in the Ming Dynasty, exemplified in the 1610 scroll, Ten Views of a Lingbi Stone by the eccentric Wu Bin (currently on exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) that maps a famous specimen from multiple angles with a fanatical, jutting plasticity that is neither realistic nor abstract. There is, evidently, a great deal to unpack in those rocks.

The placement of scholar’s rocks at this site, with their ancient premonition of New York School abstraction, can be seen in dialogue with the upcoming opening of the Pat Passlof and Milton Resnick Foundation in the reclaimed synagogue that Resnick painted in for decades on Eldridge Street. Passlof, who had her own synagogue nearby, practiced tai chi daily alongside Chinese residents in local parks into her eighties –– and of course it is the longstanding Chinese community in the area that the scholar’s rocks primarily address. “I think of the rocks as immigrants, because they come from China,” explains Ladda (himself an immigrant, from Germany). “There was a wonderful Chinese antique shop on Allen Street run by Mr. Wong. He had a hundred or so photographs of rocks sent from China from which I chose these. Each stone has its own character –– it has a habit and a posture.” One low, twisting rock resembles a dragon. A mountainous standing rock with scalloped fins and eroded perforations transforms into a flickering flame as you walk past, with the somewhat dreary cityscape providing a perfect foil.

Ladda is under no quixotic illusions about the civic effects of his unpaid artistic labors. “You learn a lot about people when you are here every day: how little people see, how few people really appreciate this park for what it is. I would say maybe 5%, 3%. Most people are on their cellphone. It doesn’t matter to me. But the people who appreciate parks will find delight in it. It’s a gift, yes, but also a gift to myself. Because how else can I have a garden in the city?”

He gleefully recounts how he finds rose bushes in the excess piles of other parks to plant along the bike paths, which were added after the park was built and which radically altered its situation. His eyes light up as he explains that—someday—bike riders will be engulfed in twin tunnels of roses. A tunnel of roses on the Lower East Side? If that miracle comes to pass, it will be due entirely to Ladda’s unceasing custody. “It’s a labor of love,” he explains. “But, you see, a labor of love is not really a labor at all.”

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ERIC SUTPHIN: What’s the story with the banners?

BARBARA MADSEN: The banners are something I’ve been making for a long time. I made quite a few post-9/11 in Jersey City, Newark and in Washington DC. So when Arezoo asked me to do a show, I knew immediately that I wanted to put big images in the windows. But I also knew that I wanted to have an interaction with the city, so the banners had to be translucent. People use this room. I spent a lot of time sitting in here, observing people and how they use the space. If the natural light flooding in was blocked it would ruin the experience, and I did a lot of research looking for a material that is translucent, that can breath, change and let the light in.

They’re mysterious. We see them as large-scale photographic images and they might be mistaken for advertisements. Can you talk about their function as images within the city space?

MADSEN: They begin with something that’s very tiny, which I isolate and blow up. In that process they become iconographic and monumental. The objects I photograph are made from a vivid plastic, so you feel that they are advertisements for some kind of a product. When you look at the forms, there is a familiarity but the scale destabilizes your relationship to what the objects might be.

MOHSENI: They lack the text that is generally associated with ads. The banners also have a theatricality. When you see them at night from outside they are backlit and appear to glow.

And this location on Fifth Avenue is important. Fifth Avenue has a history as a sort of marketplace with big window displays showing off products. But while the objects on the banners appear familiar, I don’t know exactly what I’m looking at. And that is what differentiates these banners from advertisements: an ad’s job is to be clear and sell you something, but Barb’s work tells us to look and to keep looking. Another function of the banners is that they invite us to look at the sculptures in the windows. Can you talk about the sculptures?

MADSEN: The sculptures are site specific and were made to respond directly to the library’s architecture. I wanted you to be able to see through them form both inside of the library and from the street. I didn’t want them to be closed forms; I wanted them to break down the relationship between image and object. I was thinking a lot about Kurt Schwitter’s Merzbau (1923 – 48). Each piece is modular so that when the installation is eventually taken down, each unit can function independently.

You mentioned that some of this imagery is taken from the video game Minecraft. This, coupled with the modularity, like Legos or building blocks, makes me think that play is an important aspect of your work.

MADSEN: I am interested in play and I have too much fun with this stuff! One sculpture has a periscope built into it, poking fun at the surveillance camera mounted directly above it. And inside that sculpture is a light, which flashes and twitches to imply that there’s a video playing inside. There’s no video, but it’s like a game of “Who’s watching whom?” There are a lot of visual puns in this piece. I invited the street artist Neanderthalogical to tag one of the pieces, which you can see from outside. I used photographs that I shot throughout the city so that when you’re looking at the sculpture, you’re also looking at the city, through the city through the sculpture.

MOHSENI: Is this the first time you’ve made freestanding sculptural work?

MADSEN: I’ve been using platforms or plinths as supports for my objects. The assemblages covered in photographic images are a first for me. I’ve been thinking about them conceptually, especially in relation to Schwitters, for quite a long time. With the Library installation, I finally had the right venue to make them happen.

MOHSENI: I see Barb’s work connected to a lineage of artists that includes Frank Stella and Nancy Graves. Both of those artists were investigating the disruption of three-dimensional space while also using intense color. The title of the show, “Plastic Age,” is important here. After World War II, plastic became essential in American industry.

But there’s also humor in the title, you’re playing off the historic “Ages” from the Stone to the Bronze and now into the Plastic Age. In two millennia we’ll be known as that weird civilization that left behind mountains of plastic.

MADSEN: When I was upstairs browsing the Pictures Collection I looked through the “Plastics” folder and I found these Monsanto ads from the 1950s showing the joys and possibilities of plastic. In the ‘50s, nobody thought twice about Monsanto. So there’s a conundrum with the love affair they created with plastic: it’s the container of our dreams but also the destruction of our dreams.

You’ve decided to use the vitrines and glass cabinets, tell me about what’s in those spaces.

MADSEN: The vitrines are dedicated to my collaboration with the Venezuelan poet Ely Rosa Zamora. I make images and she then responds with poetry. This particular book is called “The Unspecific Object” kind of making fun of Donald Judd’s 1965 essay “Specific Objects.” Judd was against illusionary space, so I wanted to take back that illusionary space. I put out an open call on Tumblr to have people submit images of objects and upload them to the site. I then had two jurors: Arezoo and Jared Ash (a Special Collections librarian at the Metropolitan Museum), to whom I gave no set criteria, and together they chose 14 images. I asked the winners to send me the actual objects, which I photographed in black and white within architectural spaces I built. Then I printed the images as photogravures.

You’ve talked about your collaboration with Zamora and your interest in language; are there other literary references that shape the exhibition?

MADSEN: In terms of literature and its relationship to space I think about Flatland (1884), Edwin Abbott’s seminal novel about Albert Square, a two-dimensional figure who exists in a three-dimensional world. Square is persecuted and imprisoned for his belief in a third-dimension. The book talks about possibilities that we don’t understand and our limited aptitudes.

Can you talk about the photographs that are hung in the Pictures Collection?

MADSEN: The photographs conflate types of space — interior and exterior, for example — so what happens is a simultaneous implosion/explosion. I think of it as queering space and taking it as your own, transforming it into a place where “fits” and “misfits” can coexist. They’re psychological spaces that suggest possibility but also admit failure.

It’s funny, going back to the ways in which each of your pieces have this dialogue with each other… I’m standing in the Pictures Collection among aisle after aisle of picture files. So there’s a very direct tie to the function of this part of library and to what your work is doing. The sculptures in the window announce or anticipate what happens within the walls of the Pictures Collection. Did you take photos of the library while you were coming up with the idea for the installation?

MADSEN: I did take photos, but then I spent a lot of time going through the image folders in the Collection. This grid piece shows a selection of images that I think of as portraits, in which I try to make visible something that’s usually invisible.

In your case the idea of a portrait implies a relation to the objects you choose to photograph. You humanize or anthropomorphize the objects. You’ve talked about carrying your collection of objects around for over two decades moving with them, as part of a family unit. So it makes a lot of sense that you would document them as portraits.

MADSEN: It’s also a documentation of excess and hyper-consumption.

But I don’t feel you’re making a value judgment against accumulation or consumption.

MADSEN: Absolutely. I strongly believe that angry diatribe is a failed strategy. You can’t reach people by screaming at them. If you can engage people through looking closely, then you might have a chance at a conversation. But I did want to see just how far I could push the portraits without them becoming too baroque. There’s a Neo-Pop-Baroque aspect to them, they’re so excessive.

We’ll there’s a photogravure of a tiara downstairs!

[laughing]

MADSEN: That’s the queen in all of us.

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NANCY RUBINS: COLLAGES
Paul Kasmin Gallery until August 18
511 W. 27th Street between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-563-4474

HELEN BROUGH: EMULATED FLORA
70 Washington Street, permanently installed
between Front and York, 718-222-5555

E.V. DAY: BRIDE FIGHT
Lever House until August 26
390 Park Avenue between 53 and 54 Streets

New Yorkers who forgo the pleasures of the seashore to remain in the city for the Mostly Mozart festival this summer might feel that Nancy Rubins’s exuberant sculpture, “Big Pleasure Point,” installed by the Public Art Fund at Lincoln Center, is making gentle fun of their decision.

The sculpture is constructed from a mass of old boats, canoes, kyacks and other light vessels, ingeniously suspended overhead on a steel column and held in place by suspension wires.  Mingling with the sounds of the nearby fountain, the second-hand boats, many salvaged from the Pleasure Point Marina in Big Bear Lake, Southern California, and still bearing the rental imprint on their hulls, seem actually to have that faint summery smell of salt and sand.  The cumulative effect kinaesthetically puts you in mind of the beach.

Surreally stranded vessels could have sinister associations.  After viewing Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” with its predictions of a submerged Manhattan, “Big Pleasure Point” could be interpreted as a grim prophecy.  Boats thrown into the air might have had the same out of element sense of the forlorn fishing fleets on the dried-out North Aral Sea in Kazakstan.

But actually, the connotations of Ms. Rubins’s sculpture are all light and airy, chirpy and positive.  The overall structure is birdlike, with the mass of individual boats reading like feathers.  A similar mood pervades her delightful, oversized collages on the same theme as the sculpture, on view at Chelsea’s Paul Kasmin Gallery.  The boats read like spiky petals on an exotic flower.  This sunny disposition epitomizes California, you might think, but actually, it is at odds with the connotations, alike, of bricolage, her chosen sculptural method, and with the style and temper of the Californian avantgarde, of which she is very much part.

Ms. Rubins is married to the veteran performance artist Chris Burden (most famous for having himself shot) and together they taught for over twenty years at the UCLA art department, resigning when a student mimicked Mr. Burden’s firearm antics in class.  Californian artists from Edward Kienholz to Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy have used appropriated, cast off materials to cast a dark view of life.

Ms. Rubins has used industrial and commercial goods throughout her career, but to different aesthetic ends.  She maintains the look, shape, and feel of her chosen objects without inheriting their psychological or political baggage.  The results are as much, therefore, of an iconographic as a physical balancing act.  Connotations of waste, loss, lack of control, disaster even, are there, but held in check.  It is as if the sculpture cries out “Hold that thought,” and supplies other, more felicitous, abstract senstations of flight, pleasure, bouncing around.

“Big Pleasure Point” is a feat of engineering.  In the dense cluster of dozens of vessels, each craft retains its totality.  There isn’t the sadistic crushing you get in the violins of the late Arman, for instance, or the mangled corpses of John Chamberlain’s assemblages of auto parts.  This rentention of wholeness in the midst of displacement, collision, a cacophany of concaves and convexes lends the work a musically satisfying complexity.

Ms. Rubins takes her boats at they come: Neither tarted up nor neutralized, they are a like an unaffectedly natural floral arrangement in their mix of brash, synthetic plastics (red, torquoise), pleasingly distressed painted woods, trade logos (“Malibu Two XL”), and harbor registrations. Her aesthetic is one of robust clarity: there is an exhilerating mass of detail and clustering of effects, but everything remains clean, legible, apparent. It is skilfully engineered, but you can see how everything is done, the soldering of the supporting diagonal column, the wires holding everything together.  With ABT and Mostly Mozart at hand, the sculpture is shot through with a bracing, sprighly discipline.  Lots of fast notes, but a clear structure, a clean legato, a consistent mood.  Bravo.

Every morning I walk my dog through Washington Square Village, the Corbusian 1960s NYU housing complex, noting progress on a program of renovations.  Sunken, vaguely Zen Garden-ish centerpieces in each lobby have been ripped out and replaced by level tiled flooring, a triumph for practicality over period charm.  Whether this original “feature” had been an architect’s indulgence or a handsomely rewarded sculptural commission, it is lost to art history, mourned or not.

Some might argue it never belonged to art history—it was merely décor.  But the fate of intentional artworks are no better assured when they are permanently installed, site specific schemes.  Public art in private places has tricky status: It can seem by sheer quality and charisma to be fated for longevity, but one has only to think of Jorge Pardo’s exquisite 2004 bookstore for Dia.  Soon after completion the museum closed up its Chelsea operation (they plan to relocate to the Meatpacking District.)  It isn’t just vita that’s brevis.

While it recalls Mr. Pardo’s work in its spritely verve, there are no melancholy thoughts in relation to artist Helen Brough’s sculptural installation, “Emulated Flora,” which was completed in May for the new condominium conversion of 70 Washington Street, a sprawling block wide warehouse in DUMBO.   This at once zestful and restful lobby decoration is a hit with children, an important factor according to the building’s owner, David Walentas.  I ran into him in on the day I went to inspect his lobby and he pointed out that every tenant has two children and two dogs.  The children loved the colored shapes immediately, he said, whereas some parents only came around gradually.

Ms. Brough (b.1966) had been a participant of the Triangle Artists’ Workshop’s first residency program, generousy hosted by Mr. Walentas at 70 Washington before renovations began.  This makes “Emulated Flora” a rare, happy link between the artists who helped put the neighborhood on the map and the affluent residents basking in its upward transformation.  If the suspended elements only moved a bit it would be a mobile for the socially mobile.

The work consists of dozens of laser-cut Plexiglas shapes—in a variety of colors and arranged in parallel lines—that are suspended from, or bolted to, a mirrored ceiling.  Some of the shapes are also themselves cut from sheets of mirror.  From the street, and then more intensely within the lobby, one senses row upon row of translucent plastic, curvaceous shape, and chirpy, soft, nursery color.  The layering puts you in mind of rows of scenery in a theatre’s eaves.  The mirroring doubles the perceived depth of the work, giving a soaring sensation of light and color above.

This sounds cathedral like, with the connotations of elevated vaults and stained glass, but actually the feeling is anything but solemn.  On the contrary, a festive vibe—somewhere  between science fair and nightclub—arises from a shape vocabularly which is sensuous and hi-tech at the same time.  The irregular, fluent shapes recall the floral motifs in Matisse’s cutouts, Arp’s biomorphic forms, and molded French Curve geometry sets.

The often punctured piece also look like painters’ palettes.  This together with the sense of overlapping pools of color gives the installation a painterly feel.  A tilted mirror about the reception desk composes cropped, oblique views of the piece in crisp reflection.  But part of the charm of this distinctive yet unobtrusive work is that it expands the space, filling it with a generalized major-key mood, rather than imposing specific meaning or asking to be looked at in sculptural terms.  It works best subliminally and on the move.

Ms. Brough’s vaguely retro look would work perfectly in a steel and glass corporate headquarters.  At Gordon Bunshaft’s Lever House on Park Avenue, however, the new owners have their ideas about art and architecture.  Aby Rosen, of RFR Holding, completed a renovation last year of this classic 1952 building and initiated a series of site specific installations for the lobby and courtyard, which after their alloted run enter the Lever House Collection, which is curated by Richard Marshall.

A 63 foot high Damien Hirst sculpture is somewhat bizarrely placed in the Isamu Noguchi garden (resurrected from an abandoned scheme commissioned by Bunshaft).  In painted bronze, the work depicts a standing figure of a naked young woman (her face and pose recall Degas’s Little Dancer) whose skin is demonstratively cut away from her right thigh to the right half of crown to reveal muscle, skull, and her pregnancy.

A theme of stripped virginity is taken up in the vitrine-like lobby where E.V. Day’s “Bride Fight” (2006) gives new meaning to the phrase “window dressing”.  Also on view, and consonate with Mr. Hirst’s medicalia, are three of her “clam and tongue” sculptures, gruesomely precisionist renderings of human tongues on clam shells, pierced by oysters and mounted on crumpled black velvet in steel and glass display cases.

“Bride Fight”, which could equally have been called “Bridezilla,” is an exhilerating tour de force of camp theatricality evoking Japanese animé and an array of other art historical sources.  Ms. Day has deconstructed two bridal gowns and accessories to depict a ferocious catfight, although it is tulle, silk and lace rather than fur that is flying.  Ingeniously, the couture fragments are held in place in an elaborate choreography by suspended fishing tackle suspended between floor and ceiling by metal hardware.   Inside the Marilyn-style puffed up skirt of one bride are a pair of pink, full bodied panties, while her adversary, whose dress is the more shredded, opts for a skimpier white number with torquoise garters.  Suspended between the pair and stretched lace gloves.

The title inevitably recalls Duchamp’s “Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even” (also known as the “Large Glass”) (1915-23) although here the brides manage without male intervention.  Formally speaking, the work evokes Abstract Expressionism in its “all-over” web of line and shape.  It creates a tight, dynamic gestalt.  But while it is fun to marvel at its ingenius construction and witty craft, the work is actually best enjoyed sweeping by at night in a taxi, when it is dramatically lit.  The experience then becomes cinematic rather than sculptural, as the props bounce into action.

Versions of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, July 13 and August 17, 2006.

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