Essentially the entire exhibit takes place in a narrow hall (which fortunately has swivelling wall sections, so when the weather's fine like today, the air comes through like you're still outside). On one wall is a distribution of grey settlement floor plans spread out on the axes of time and elevation. It's pretty good, it's interesting, and it'll take you less than five minutes to take it in. But it's the other wall that's amazing, and amazing in its simplicity. It's simply 10 aerial photos of settlements. They are big and in color and glossy and well mounted. Then under them are two small cards. One identifies elements of the photos with numbers. And the other explains what each number stands for -- a synagogue, a cellphone tower, a yeshiva, etc. It's all quite deadpan and laconic.
But buried in each of these notecards are always two or three details that will surprise you. And they are spread out expertly, so even when you're sure that this next one can only hold repetition, you'll find it expands on an element that has gone unelaborated on until then, and which you were sure you knew, and which contains a whole new dimension. The drama contained and paced in these notecards, and give substance through these photos, is simple and obvious and sui generis. It's like the drama in the footnotes in _Pale Fire_, except extremely minimalist and unobtrusive. Unlike 99% of all architectural writing, which repeats itself so often, often in the same sentence, even the same noun phrase, that you rebel even when its true. Here the repetitions are like the repetitions of Groundhog Day -- they're paced perfectly and they always have a point. All you have to do is follow the photo, line up the numbers, and match the descriptions to the images. And a light will go off in your head. It's extremement cool. 25 minutes and you'll feel like you've had a real New York cultural experience just like you keep telling yourself you should have more of. And there's a cheesecake store on the corner -- you're in an outpost of little Italy.
The staff at the gallery say the catalog is going to be republished, but if their old catalog is an accurate reflection of the show that never was, that show, while bigger, had nothing in it as good as this show, because nothing so distilled. Their self-descriptions tend to be wordy. And while having all the same interesting information and more, they never give you this feeling that suddenly for a moment it all makes sense. Normally you don't get a god's eye view, and when you do, since you're not god, it doesn't make any sense. But here you see it all at once and understand what you see.
I think the final product might well be the result of inspired improvisation. The staff person said that the two of them wrote the captions to the photos on a computer the night they hung the show. And they give a credit to a guy, Dov something, for helping them interpret the photos, whose name appears nowhere else. Since these same photos appear in the catalog without these wonderful captions, I think it might have been a connection they made at the last moment. Perhaps they serendipitously ran into a friend with intelligence skills. At any rate, it makes it. And if they don't incorporate it into their catalog or their website, it will have been an ephemeral piece of genius.
Here's the rundown on how to get there:
The show runs through April 20th. It's at
The Storefront for Art & Architecture 97 Kenmare Street (between Cleveland and Mulberry, on the corner of Cleveland, north side of the street) 212.431.5795 info at storefrontnews.org Trains: R to Prince, 6 to Spring, F, V & S to B-way/Lafeyette Open every day until 6 pm (although the Sunday I visited, they let it hang open later).
As I understand it, after it closes New York, it's going to be mounted somewhere in Berlin.
Michael