Whipped Cream Difficulties

There is a Spanish architect named Santiago Calatrava. Mr. Calatrava is apparently something of a big deal in Spain, and has designed a new PATH station in Lower Manhattan.

One of his big projects was the “City of Arts and Sciences” in a “dried-up riverbed” in Valencia:

…which includes a performance hall, a bridge, a planetarium, an opera house, a science museum, a covered walkway and acres of reflecting pools.

Sounds pretty cool, right?

1. The City of Arts and Sciences was originally budgeted at 300 million euros. So far, it has cost three times that.
2. There are problems with some of the buildings. The opera house has 150 seats with obstructed views (though the NYT doesn’t give a figure for the total number of seats). The science museum was “initially built without fire escapes or elevators for the disabled”.
3. Problems with Mr. Calatrava’s designs aren’t limited to Valencia.
4. “In Bilbao he designed a footbridge with a glass tile surface that allowed it to be lighted from below, keeping its sweeping arches free of lampposts. But in a city that gets a lot of rain and occasional snow, pedestrians keep falling on the slippery surface. City officials say some 50 citizens have injured themselves, sometimes breaking legs or hips, on the bridge since it opened in 1997, and the glass bricks frequently crack and need to be replaced. Two years ago the city resorted to laying a huge black rubber carpet across the bridge.”
5. Mr. Calatrava designed an airport terminal in Bilbao. He designed it without an arrival hall. “Passengers moved through the customs and baggage area directly to the sidewalk where they had to wait in the cold. The airport authorities have since installed a glass wall to shelter them.”
6. Mr. Calatrava and his organization have been ordered to pay $4.5 million to settle a dispute over a conference center in Oviedo. The conference center collapsed.
7. A winery is suing Mr. Calatrava over a leaky roof. (Frank Lloyd Wright, call your office, please.)
8. Mr. Calatrava is being sued over cost overruns and repairs to the Ponte della Costituzione in Venice, a footbridge over the Grand Canal.
9. The skin of the opera house is buckling.
   

   One Valencia architect, Vicente Blasco, has taken Mr. Calatrava to task in a local newspaper for even trying to cover the steel sides of the opera house with a mosaic of broken white tiles. (That touch was Mr. Calatrava’s nod to another noted architect of Spain, Antoni Gaudí, who favored mosaics.) The flourish may have been a nice idea, Mr. Blasco said, but it was absurd. The buckling that is now occurring was predictable. On days with a rapid change in temperature, he wrote, the steel and tile contract and expand at different rates.

Mr. Calatrava was unavailable for an interview by the paper of record. However:

In a brief interview in Architectural Record magazine last year, he noted that clients were satisfied enough to come back for more. Among them are the cities of Dublin and Dallas. In that article, Mr. Calatrava called the uproar over his work in Valencia “a political maneuver by the Communists.”

I’m as anti-communist as the next guy (unless the next guy is Lawrence, who makes me look squishy). But when you are blaming roof leaks on the Communists, I think it is time to sit down and re-evaluate your designs, and how you got to this point in your life.

I have written previously about the performance artist Marina Abramovic.

I was not aware of this, but she had a Kickstarter campaign going. She was trying to raise $600,000 for a “long durational” performance art center.

Well, she did it. She raised $661,452 from 4,765 backers.

And she’s promised every one of them (yes, even the $1 backers) a hug.

Marina will personally thank all those who contribute to the creation of MAI by hugging every backer of this Kickstarter at a live event called THE EMBRACE. This event will be held in two undisclosed locations, one in New York City and one in Europe, with exact dates and times to be announced. MAI Founders who are unable to attend these events will be offered a special reward in lieu of a hug from Marina.

And if you’ve ever wanted to see a performance artist tell a light bulb joke, go here.

The paper of record has a story about a new exhibition at the Park Avenue Armory. (Despite the name, it is an exhibition hall, “with one of the largest open exhibition floors in the world”. But it did start life as a National Guard armory.)

The new exhibit is by Paul McCarthy, described by the NYT as a “revered Los Angeles video artist and sculptor”. The exhibition, “WS”, is described as a retelling of the story of Snow White.

What fun! Take the kids, right?

…the Armory, which has developed a reputation as a family-friendly destination, made the unusual decision, with Mr. McCarthy’s agreement, to restrict visitors to those over 17. And even for adult visitors, the Armory has built a virtual phalanx of warnings: advisories about the show’s graphic content on its Web site, on placards in front of its large oak doors, and inside the building before the entry to the exhibition itself.

Whoa.

Mr. McCarthy’s creation is decidedly not Disney’s version of the fairy tale. Composed of a massive forest-and-house set, accompanied by a seven-hour video of performances shot in and around the set — it is meant to be an apotheosis of the dark and deeply human themes he has been exploring for four decades concerning the body, social repression, consumerism, sex, death, dreams and delirium, and the power of art to deepen our understanding of life.

“an apothosis of the dark and deeply human themes”?

The video narrative and related videos secluded to the side of the main exhibition include plentiful nudity, of both sexes, along with scenes of urination and men masturbating to orgasm, not to mention highly unorthodox use of processed foods. The story also includes gory violence that is no less jarring for using Hollywood techniques like fake blood and sculptural body doubles.

I have no joke here, I just like saying “highly unorthodox use of processed foods”. (Karen Finley, call your office, please.)

As the NYT notes, exhibiting something so…out there…that you don’t want to let minors in to see it is unusual by NYC art world standards: MoMA didn’t ban minors from the Marina Abramović retrospective (though they did put up warning signs), and the Brooklyn Museum recommended (but did not require) parental guidance for “Sensation”.

On the other hand, I did not attend either of those events, and the Wikipedia summaries are unhelpful in determining if processed foods were used in a highly unorthodox manner.