HyperMasculine Art and Theater without Boundaries

        Each trip to New York stokes the imagination for this is truly a destination of fire. For visual art, we visited the New Museum, a freshly-constructed edifice that resembles surround-sound speakers balancing on each other's shoulders like cheerleaders. Located on the Upper Bowery, its new location was finished in 2007 and its top floor features the best canvas of all, downtown Manhattan viewed from an open-air balcony. Its other six floors feature gallery space, staff offices and the ground-floor cafe and bookstore.

View of the New World Trade Center

          The New Museum's featured artist is Chris Burden, a baby-boomer sculptor and performance artist who takes militancy and hypermasculinity to an uncomfortable level. His show, Extreme Measures, centers of engineering, collision and military planning. One of his pieces is a video of an irresponsible crane letting loose beams from hundreds of feet up. The camera takes the perspective of the falling beams as they come careening into wet cement. His work includes lots of iron sculptures, steel bridges and fun vehicles.

         Although not partial to his point of view, I did find his "A Tale of Two Cities" fascinating for the amount of energy and dedication it took to assemble. ATOTC is like a little boy's dream of military planning brought to the nth degree in a 300 square foot sandbox. Essentially, it's about one bigger city launching an attack on a smaller city with an onslaught of tiny war toys. Burden uses 5,000 pieces in this presentation and hundreds of gallons of sand in this presentation.

     
         Chris Burden (a name, ironically, I cannot help to interpret as "the cross on Christ") may win accolades for edginess but I find that his work lacks humanity. I'm not sure if he is criticizing Pentagon officials  or living out his boyhood dreams but it's this hyper-3D game of Risk that leaves injured and damaged veterans struggling to secure benefits and valuable jobs on their return home. There's no evidence of human suffering in his work. I feel like he's speaking for the thirsty war lords who have no qualms about launching missiles but also no clue about how to heal families and generations broken apart by war. That's the part that leaves me cold with his work.

     

         In many ways I wondered if this was an extension of New York City itself: dark, grey, unforgiving and hopelessly masculine. Don't get me wrong; I would live there in a heartbeat and may need to in order to counteract the femininity of rosy, colorful San Francisco but I don't know if I could handle a place where everyone wears black everyday. All the men too look like models until I realized that they probably ARE models.

        In Conor McPherson's play, The Night Alive, you will find models too, models of folly. Set near modern-day Dublin's Phoenix Park, the play centers on a handyman named Tommy who has a heart of gold but lives a messy, chaotic life. He develops an ill-fated romance with a woman who is in trouble. Simultaneously, Tommy can't shake the company of his moocher best friend, Doc. Like any noteworthy Irish work, The Night Alive has tragedy intermixed with comedy (even at the micro-level, within the same line of dialogue) but the play is really about the trouble we all get into when we don't set good boundaries. With continuing poverty, addiction and violence, the characters let their lowly associations rule their lives because they are scared of living any other way. But it's also a play about spirituality, death and forgiveness and the lengths we'll go to enjoy some fine company and a bit of craic. This is a play I devoured.

         The Night Alive has been extended until February 2nd and stars Ciaran Hinds, one of the characters in a Harry Potter movie. It's playing at Chelsea's Atlantic Theater Company.