DAE student Adrian Madlener tells about his internship with Christian Wassmann, an achitect and designer based in New York. This story is a sequel to his earlier written blog. Adrian is a student of the department Man & Leisure.
Adrien Madlener:
The Weekly Fix
They’re playing Cage and Cunningham is dancing, Ginsburg is rapping, “vast expanses of Jersey,” The Hudson horizon is nothing more then a westward promise outside the prison of hedged city grids. The black and white footage of New York’s ‘hustle and bustle’ passes in equally timed segments across the screen. Gershwin’s Rhapsody intensifies as the pan moves towards alpine vistas of midtown, Woody’s indecisively mortal voice narrates the New Yorker’s post psychoanalytic mania. Don’t you dare pass 96th street or for that matter, go under 14th street. Drinks at lunch and happy hour, the afternoon fog of a four a clock hangover has been reduced to a four-dollar double shot espresso.
With the passing weeks revealing the bloom of springtime, I have already come half way through my internship but talking about nostalgia is a little premature. It’s too easy to fall into the cliché, ‘time always moves faster and faster.’ What is perhaps more interesting is everything around a 10 to 7, Monday through Friday work schedule. Too much work and no play makes anyone dull.
As I might spend hours figuring out how to arrange 40 white CB2 desks for a digital Interface firm based here in New York, I tend to think about some my plans for the weekend ahead. For the past few months I have attempted to immerse myself in what is supposed to be a dense, rich, and varied offering of cultural stimulus. Varied certainly, dense not always. Art openings in Chelsea on Thursdays are met by performance art happenings on Fridays. Saturdays are either reserved for dance pieces, museum lectures, or the occasional big theater production. This past weekend it was an assemblage of scenography, dramaturgy, and dance, presented as “On the Beach” in honor of the 35th anniversary of Phillip Glass and Robert Wilson’s seminal work, “Einstein On the Beach.” This refreshingly new but referentially correct program was presented at the equally prestigious Baryshnikov Center. New York Times review.
But every-now-and-then, New Yorker’s curb their hectic agendas and rejoin the continent they are actually connected to by ‘bridges, tunnels and ferries’ to celebrate the endless slew of holidays that fill the ‘off season.’ Secretly junkies, for most true Americans, big events, parties, and happenings resemble these traditional celebrations. Such momentous occasions also include subsequent Sunday nights in front of the T.V. Since January, it’s been anything from the Super Bowl, the Oscars, March Madness, or the Season Premier of Mad Men. Sometimes holidays such as Easter are good excuses to rejuvenate battered spirits and leave Gotham behind for a few days. Two hours in any direction and the changing seasons are finally visible along secluded country roads.
This is of course a city drenched in art history but what remains of its hay day? The truth is that an open perspective will reveal different things on the constantly redefined, perhaps jaded, paths that crisscross this city’s neighborhoods. Bushwick more then Williamsburg these days but soon It’ll be Bedford in Brooklyn, a place where people’s attitudes are ‘laid back’ and less bluntly ambitious then their towering neighbor. Recently, I visited an installation entitled “Here we Are” by Copper Union architecture student Jakob Oredsson. This collaborative work focused on the meaningful decomposition of a space, Windows were taken out and used as blank canvases while a recording devise amplified the busy street below. (Image Above) Artists, their studios and galleries, within this main city agglomeration, can be found allover downtown and Chelsea but the area that is now the most interesting is LoHo. The new hip name for the Lower East Side where these creative individuals inevitable instigate gentrification.
Things change fast in a town plauged by its addiction to making money while trying to hold onto ‘a mix of everything’ culture. Art is finally heading back uptown outside the sometimes-austere context of Museum Mile, The Met, Guggenheim, Frick Collection, Neue Gallery, and Copper Hewitt. Time Square’s multi story high screens are now slowly sharing space with video art. It’s about ‘time’. (more)
The art world, circles I have only just begun to infiltrate are small in this city, 30 seconds is all the time you have to identify and subconsciously prove yourself in conversation. But work remains the most important thing as I learn the reality of being a creative professional in this city. You need 110% all the time as you try to find balance and close ties with places and people, balance also with what thousands of others are doing outside studio or office walls.