Friday Photo(s) #53

You may be familiar with Anish Kapoor's 2006 sculpture Cloud Gate, situated in Millennium Park, Chicago. Due to its shape, the huge reflective piece quickly became referred to as The Bean. In February, mere weeks before I touched down in New York, Kapoor's 15 years in-the-making Big Apple version of The Bean was finally unveiled, located just a few hundred yards from my cousin's apartment. Where Cloud Gate stands unencumbered on prominent display, its Tribeca counterpart gives the impression of having been forcibly squished beneath a canopy in the entrance of a large residential building, spilling out across the sidewalk. I was keen to take a good look at the sculpture, but the area was very busy during my initial visit so I only managed to snatch a quick side angle shot from Leonard Street. On the Sunday morning, while on an an extended wander in search of coffee, I found Church Street practically deserted, allowing me to capture The Bean head-on. The imposing structure is 58ft long, 19ft high and cost an estimated $8-10 million dollars to create. 

Spoon - Me and the Bean  

Friday Photo(s) #52

While there was a conspicuous lack of interesting gigs during my visit to New York in March, I did have a few cultural bits and bobs set in stone long before I boarded my flight. One of those was a trip over to the Meatpacking District to catch 'Edward Hopper's New York' at The Whitney a couple of days before the show closed. Given that it was so late in the retrospective's five month run, together with the necessity to pre-book not just a ticket, but also a specific timeslot, I more or less assumed that the gallery space would be easy and comfortable to negotiate. How wrong I was. It was absolutely rammed, ridiculously oversold. I'm guessing that The Whitney had decided to ring every last drop out of the popular exhibit before it packed up and shipped out. The Hopper art on display was almost exclusively modest in size, which meant needing to get as close as possible to each piece while continuously jostling with the crowds for a couple of hours. It was like being in an ongoing series of scrums, moving slowly through the gallery. The work itself was of course fantastic. I was particularly interested by the many magazine illustrations on view, an area of his life I knew little about. Then there were the sketchbooks. The creative process in any artform is a thing of mystery and fascination to me and it was riveting to see as he edged, over successive pages, ever closer towards a finished masterpiece we know so well.

Paul Weller - Hopper (White Label Remix)