The draining of the reservoir has revealed its potential as a new kind of urban park.

By Sara Catania

Surrounded by freeways and bombarded with billboards, we green-seeking Angelenos take pride in our nature-ish things. East L.A. has Evergreen Cemetery; West L.A. has Venice Beach; Silver Lake has its reservoir. Or had, anyway.

After a rare photochemical reaction created carcinogens in the “lake,” the Department of Water and Power pulled the plug, draining its entire 600,000-gallon supply. By the standards of municipal thirst, that’s not very much. It wouldn’t even satisfy a single day’s need. But in terms of land, the space required to hold that water is massive. The reservoir and its environs occupy the equivalent of 96 football fields.

The drainage is temporary. By June, the DWP aims to refill the concrete basin, which at the moment resembles an abandoned quarry. But its drinking-water days are numbered. After more than 100 years, the DWP is phasing out the Silver Lake Reservoir — and the adjacent, smaller Ivanhoe Reservoir — to comply with stringent water-safety laws banning the use of uncovered supplies. By 2015, the lake in Silver Lake will exist primarily as eye candy for passersby and the 1,000 or so residents with a view.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

Residents should continue to have something lovely to look at, but why should all that prime urban space be buried under ornamental water? Unlike other imperiled urban waterways, such as the L.A. River and the Ballona Wetlands, the reservoir is a fabrication, a hole dug in a prairie to accommodate our water needs — needs that will soon be met elsewhere.

The end of the reservoir provides us with a rare and potentially brilliant opportunity to rethink the concept of an urban park for the 21st century. Nearly every sizable open space in Los Angeles was designed long ago, for a town of citrus groves and open plains that looks nothing like the city we live in today.

This reservoir-turned-park could offer a model of urban sustainability, continuing to provide sanctuary for urban-adapted wildlife while addressing the neighborhood’s pressing human needs. New Yorkers pay astronomical sums for apartments facing the green of Central Park; a new Silver Lake Park could offer a similarly sylvan respite. What if the “lake” — complete with some islands and wetlands — were reduced to the size of five football fields, with a chunk of adjacent land fenced off as a sanctuary for birds and other animals? The remaining acreage could intersperse meandering walking paths with groves of Western sycamores, coast live oaks and other native plants.

The park could support a community garden, a neighborhood composting center and cisterns to capture rainwater to keep the grounds green — a park-sized sustainability project that might inspire visitors to try a thing or two at home.

The will is there. One neighborhood advocacy group has made major strides in landscaping the perimeter of the reservoir, creating tree-lined walking and biking paths. It is on the verge of gaining park status for a six-acre fenced-off area known as the “Meadow.” It took thousands of volunteer hours and years of meetings, studies and contentious negotiations to win those improvements, which were outlined in a reservoir master plan. But now that the DWP is taking its water elsewhere, much more could be done.

A true rethinking can’t stop with paths and gardens. As the human population of Los Angeles continues to increase, we need to get creative about melding green space and human space. Imagine low-slung, affordable bungalows skirting the grounds. To forestall an increase in the neighborhood’s already horrendous traffic, residents would be barred from owning cars as a condition of occupancy and given access to a few collective cars, available for rent by the hour. A long-overdue DASH shuttle route could provide transport to nearby shopping and subway stations.
This may sound far-fetched; OK, it is far-fetched. But isn’t fencing off a massive open space in the middle of the city in desperate need of parkland and housing even more cockamamie?

(Central Park NYC)
The people-park idea is not entirely original. One model of such urban faux-nature was created for the city of Copenhagen by architect Bjarke Ingels. His is a swath of garden-topped housing enclosing a succession of soccer fields. The effect is urban hobbit. In Los Angeles, the nonprofit group TreePeople– a pioneer in recognizing the need to integrate humans and urban nature — has spearheaded several projects involving the greening of existing homes and schools and is sitting on blueprints for new, sustainable development.
There are, no doubt, urban planners and community activists with other, better ideas about how to use the reservoir space. Let’s hear them. The draining of the lake has laid bare a trove of public land that belongs to us all.

Sara Catania lives in Silver Lake, teaches journalism at USC and blogs at seehowweare.blogstream.com.

thanks to steve at http://thecentralshaft.blogspot.com/

A New Dodger Vision

Team Owner Announces Plans for $500 Million Stadium Renovation

by Anna Scott
LA Downtown News Published May 12

Los Angeles Dodgers owner Frank McCourt stood at center field of Dodger Stadium last week to announce a $500 million planned renovation of the 46-year-old ballpark.
Los Angeles Dodgers owner Frank McCourt last Thursday announced a half-billion dollar upgrade of the 1962 stadium. He pointed out details to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and City Council President Eric Garcetti. Photo by Gary McCarthy.

On Thursday, April 24, McCourt was joined by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, City Council President Eric Garcetti, First District Councilman Ed Reyes and others to discuss the upcoming makeover. The effort is expected to get underway next year and wrap up by opening day 2012, in time for the stadium’s 50th anniversary.

The announcement was significant not just for the size of the project and the scale of the investment, but for the message it sends about the team’s future in the historic stadium. Ever since McCourt, a Boston real estate developer, acquired the team four years ago, there had been speculation that he might one day seek to move the team and create housing on the site.

Instead, McCourt discussed an expansive vision to improve the fan experience. Plans include an upgraded entrance, greenery, restaurants, retail and sustainable features.

McCourt said he expects the renovation to make the stadium a year-round, family-friendly dining and shopping spot. Part of the goal, he said, is to encourage people to come early and stay late on game days, which in turn could help ease traffic congestion.

“We will preserve Dodger Stadium’s essential charm,” said McCourt, while transforming the complex into “a lifestyle destination.”
*

Downtown leaders praised the plan.

Reyes, whose district includes Dodger Stadium, stressed the stadium’s potential to complement efforts to green the Los Angeles River and other community initiatives, and to create new jobs.

“Everything that you’re doing is going to be about this holistic approach, and creating change in our city,” Reyes told McCourt and his wife, Dodgers President Jamie McCourt.

Central City Association President Carol Schatz added, “Dodger Stadium, from our point of view, is the northern edge of Downtown. It will be a great resource for the Downtown community.”

Green Necklace

Key elements of the renovation, which is being designed by a team led by architecture and planning firms Johnson Fain and HKS, start at the park’s main entrance, which will be enhanced with trees and other landscaping.

Inside stadium gates, a landscaped grand plaza beyond center field will connect to a promenade called Dodger Way. It will feature restaurants, shops and a Dodger museum.

A so-called “green necklace,” a landscaped outdoor walkway on what is currently several acres of surface-level parking lots, will encircle the perimeter of the stadium and connect to Dodger Way. Two new garages will replace the 2,000 spaces in the lots.

The walkway will also connect to a large, outdoor plaza showcasing views of the Downtown skyline, the Santa Monica Bay, the Santa Monica and San Gabriel mountains and the Dodger Stadium playing field.

The project will aim for certification through the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) program, and feature sustainable elements such as recycled materials, water-saving measures and possibly solar power, said architect Scott Johnson of Johnson Fain, which is headquartered near the stadium in Chinatown.

“But the hugest thing” the design team is doing in relation to the environment, he added, “is keeping the stadium intact.”

Off-Season Construction

Dodger Stadium opened in 1962, four years after Walter O’Malley moved the team to Los Angeles from Brooklyn. The 56,000-seat stadium was the key to O’Malley’s vision, and established Major League Baseball on the West Coast.

O’Malley’s son Peter eventually took over the team, and in the mid-1990s began exploring plans to build a football stadium in the Dodger Stadium parking lot in the effort to help return the NFL to Los Angeles. However, after initially receiving city support, momentum swung to the Coliseum as the next site for NFL football. O’Malley said the experience was part of what led him to sell the team to Fox. The company in turn unloaded the stadium and the team to McCourt.

The project team filed its city applications last week, said Johnson, and expects to obtain all the necessary approvals to begin work in the fall of 2009. Construction will unfold mostly during the off-seasons, said McCourt, and will not interfere with Dodger games.

McCourt said that the renovation is privately funded but declined to give further details about the project’s budget or financing. He did, however, say that the improvements will not be reflected in ticket prices, which currently range from about $10 to $150.

“This has nothing to do with ticket prices at all. We look at it as providing more value for the ticket holder,” said McCourt. “This is an opportunity to grow the business here.” The project also will not increase the stadium’s seating capacity, he said.

The new plans come on the heels of smaller upgrades that began when McCourt took over the Dodgers in 2004, including a recently completed $75 million overhaul of the Field Level concourse, new seats throughout the stadium and a new playing surface, new dugouts and more. Additional improvements are expected to be complete before the 2010 season.

Last season, Dodger Stadium hosted nearly 4 million fans, and officials have said they hope to hit that number in the coming years.

Contact Anna Scott at anna@downtownnews.com.

Text by JOHN SCHWARTZ
NY Times Published: May 11, 2008

TO JUDGE from the news out of NASA these days, you might think we are witnessing the last gasps of the space age. The agency has announced that it will phase out its aging fleet of space shuttles by the year 2010, and the next iteration of the space program, known as Constellation, isn’t likely to be sending people into orbit before 2015. Back in 2004, President Bush exhorted NASA to return humans to the moon (and then continue on to Mars), but precious little has been heard from the White House on the matter since. The American enthusiasm for space travel that accompanied the first footprints on the lunar surface seems less ardent with each year that separates us from that one small step.

Yet human space flight hardly tells the whole story about launching pads and orbits. In addition to NASA’s current robotic missions — including the Hubble Space Telescope, the Mars landers and the Cassini spacecraft — there is also a large market for sending satellites into space. Between 1998 and 2007, 421 satellites were sent skyward. Government programs, commercial launchings and consumer products tied to satellites make up a $251-billion-a-year industry, according to the Space Foundation, a group that tracks the global space economy. The technologies in orbit serve the needs of television and radio; Internet and telephone service; imaging systems for military and intelligence operations (as well as commercial services like Google Earth); and the global positioning systems that help guide planes, boats and automobiles from Point A to Point B. Last year, according to the consulting firm Futron, about 70 orbital satellites were launched into space: roughly 25 by the United States and 30 by Russia. Of the 41 commercial launchings in 2006, about half belonged to the United States. Periodically, the U.S. military continues to test unarmed missiles that are designed to carry warheads.

The photographer Simon Norfolk has documented a series of military and commercial launchings, as well as the respective launching sites. He observes that rockets are “built on earth and live in the heavens” and in both stages exist largely out of sight (and out of mind). But for 90 seconds, when it is “launched in fire between two worlds,” he says, a rocket becomes a quintessentially observable object, a leaping, shrieking arc of beauty and unnerving fascination — “an explosion,” as he describes it, “that goes in one direction, rather than all directions.” An exhibition of Norfolk’s photos, which have appeared often in these pages in recent years, will take place at the New York Photo Festival, May 14-18.

image above by Christian Jankowski

Santa Monica Museum of Art
May 24 - August 9, 2008

The Puppet Show

International in scope, the exhibition brings together works by 28 contemporary artists who explore the imagery of puppets in sculpture, film, video, time-based media, animation, and 2D work. Participating artists include: Guy Ben-Ner, Nayland Blake, Louise Bourgeois, Maurizio Cattelan, Anne Chu, Nathalie Djurberg, Terence Gower, Dan Graham, Pierre Huyghe, Christian Jankowski, Mike Kelley, William Kentridge, Cindy Loehr, Annette Messager, Paul McCarthy, Matt Mullican, Bruce Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim, Philippe Parreno and Rirkrit Tiravanija, Thomas Sch�tte, Doug Skinner and Michael Smith, Laurie Simmons, Kiki Smith, Kara Walker, Andy Warhol, and Charlie White.

The Puppet Show takes as its historic point of departure a great work of European avant-garde art history: Alfred Jarry�s 1896 play Ubu Roi, which was originally conceived as a puppet show. The despotic King, who strode on stage roaring the French scatological word �merdre,� is the perfect source for all puppet allegories of grotesque government and acts of puppet transgression. More recently, puppets have taken hold of popular consciousness. They show up on stage, on television, in film, and even online, where assuming a fake identity to garner public opinion is called �sock-puppeting.� Seen in correspondence with these pop culture images, the works in The Puppet Show advance the question: why do puppets matter now?

The Puppet Show installation includes works by participating artists as well as a collection of historic puppets, who are housed in Puppet Storage�the exhibition�s simultaneous entry and �backstage� or unconsciousness. Some works in the show involve puppets as figures (marionettes, shadow puppets, ventriloquist dummies). In others, artists perform as puppeteers. Others still evoke such topics associated with puppetry (manipulation, miniaturization, and control).

Perhaps it is the puppet�s power as an allegorical object that makes it so relevant and liberating. In a time when communication seems increasingly mediated and individual agency diminished, puppets abstract the dramas, mysteries, anxieties, and personas we might all project onto a shared stage. As Los Angeles is home to an extraordinary community of artists at the forefront of experimental and avant-garde puppetry, it is an ideal venue for this investigation into puppetry�s cultural, political, and psychological terrains.

Programs for The Puppet Show are funded, in part, by the City of Santa Monica�s Community Arts Grant Program.

The Puppet Show is organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. It is co-curated by Ingrid Schaffner, ICA Senior curator, and Carin Kuoni, Director, The Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School. ICA thanks the following funders: Barbara B. & Theodore R. Aronson; Etant donnes: The French-American Fund for Contemporary Art; Susquehanna Foundation; The Bandier Family Foundation; Goldberg Foundation; Sotheby�s; Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation; The Chodorow Exhibition Initiative Fund; and the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, a program of the Philadelphia Center for Arts and Heritage, funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts, and administered by University of the Arts.

smmoa

Density Of Time
Fri 02. May 2008 - Sat 14. Jun 2008

Johann König, Berlin is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of french artist Tatiana Trouvé , coinciding with the Gallery Weekend opening. Trouvé will be showing, besides various new drawings and bronze sculptures, a space encompassing installation. With this work, she was awarded the Prix Marcel Duchamp, the most important recognition for emerging french artists.

The exhibition „ Density of Time“ adopts the construction principles from the honoured work and transfers as well as expands them within the entire exhibition space. Two walls enclose an in-between world, in which objects seem to obey unusual physical characteristics and laws. A pool table and a chair are suspended as they fall; perspectives open up and elongate into infinity as if the time and space coordinates had been shifted. Time marks the attempt at a fourth dimension, produced by the two-dimensionality of the drawings and the three-dimensionality of the objects installed. Interventions on the gallery walls dilate the space as the building’s foundation penetrates one wall while burnt out air vents blur the limits between inside and outside, alluding to the hidden presence of a peculiar world.

Trouvé also plays with these intensities in her sculptures, in which the transformation of matter and form attempt to freeze time. Instead of gas, copper pipes come out of pressure tanks, a cord’s swinging movement is immortalized in bronze. In the series of drawings „Remanence“, forms disappear into the black paper background as if swallowed by a black hole. Once again, the passing of time in space has been disrupted. The place disappears, leaving only its shadow.

Tatiana Trouvé’s site-specific constructions out of mundane objects, plexiglass, metal, wood, drawings and sculptures remind us of the cold halls of bureaucracy, the fitness studios, hairdresser salons, cloak rooms or torture chambers. These spaces consist of architectural modules, which the artist calls ‘polders’. In the Netherlands, a polder denominates an area near the sea protected by dikes from flooding. Permanently threatened by flood, the protective function of the dike proves quite deceptive. Trouvé’s polder makes reference to the psychoanalytic connotation of this phenomenon: „ Each polder wins ground within a space, a piece of tangible territory, which obliges it to show itself as an imaginary figure, a mental space, an atmosphere or formation of memory“. ( Jens Emil Sennewald)

Tatiana Trouvé (*1968) lives and works in Paris. An important solo show of the artist will open on the 24th of June, 2008, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The works of the french artist, until now not sufficiently acknowledged in Germany, were to be seen in the 52nd Biennial in Venice (Arsenale) as well as in the show „Airs de Paris“ curated by Daniel Birnbaum and Christine Marcel in the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Tatiana Trouvé’s work was also shown at solo exhibitions in The Villa Arson in Nice, the museum Mac/Val in Vitry-sur-Seine and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris last year. Until now, five monographs on her work have been published.

johann koenig

By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN
NY Times Published: May 8, 2008
MUIR BEACH, Calif.

AS a proudly Birkenstocked Zen gardener, Wendy Johnson can mindfully muster up affection for many of the earth’s species, with the possible exception of persimmon-devouring gophers.

But poison hemlock holds a special place in her heart.

Without the presence of this pernicious carrot look-alike, a potent vertigo-inducing poison that when ingested can cause death, she reasons, her garden would be all cloying lilac- and lily-scented perfection — boring, in short. The innocent-looking malevolent weed, which she allows to flourish for its capacity to draw rich minerals from the soil for compost, “gives the garden its punch,” she said, “snapping me back to my senses.”

Like her beloved hemlock, Ms. Johnson has deep taproots in California. Her own garden, bordered by a mountain creek with a view of the Pacific Ocean, lies down the road from the Green Gulch Farm Zen Center, where she helped pioneer the concept of organic gardening in the United States. Now the farm’s unofficial gardener emeritus, she lived at Green Gulch for 25 years, marrying, raising her two children and growing produce for Greens Restaurant, which was founded by the Center in 1979.

Long before Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver wrote best-selling books about eating foods grown locally, Ms. Johnson, with a long-necked English watering can perpetually in hand, was cultivating an awareness of how lettuce grown au naturel can also feed the soul.

“You should taste this place,” she said, offering a visitor dried lemon verbena tea from the garden, her wide eyes bringing to mind a surprised lemur.

It is a cliché to say that gardening is meditative. But few have meditated as long and as earnestly as Ms. Johnson, who arrived at “the Gulch” with a sweaty Kelty backpack in 1975 after trekking much of the way from Tassajara, a rugged Zen outpost in the Ventana Wilderness. In her new book, “Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate: At Work in the Wild and Cultivated World” — part memoir, part Sunset Magazine sitting on the floor mindfully eating a raisin in the zendo — she ponders such questions as whether it’s O.K. for life-embracing Buddhists to crush snails (ask forgiveness first) or to trap gophers (breathe deep, then fence instead).

For Ms. Johnson, who occasionally waters the Buddha statue in her greenhouse to, as she says, “bring him to life a little bit,” gardening is about far more than Gravenstein apple trees or David Austin heirloom roses. It is to literally know “the heart and mind of your place,” and in so doing, to know your own heart and mind as well. “I am often most alert and settled in the garden when I am working hard, hip deep in a succulent snarl of spring weeds,” she writes. “My mind and body drop away then, far below wild radish and bull thistle, and I live in the rhythmic pulse of the long green throat of my work.”

Her looks betray her place: an unapologetic 60, Ms. Johnson has earthmother-y white hair, liver spots, knee socks and gnarly rose-scratched hands that horrify her two fashionable younger sisters in New York and Los Angeles. (“We’d look like you if we didn’t take care of ourselves!” they tell her — lovingly, she insists.)

Her primer on meditation and gardening is similarly steeped in northern California, a place where, since the 1960s, cultivation of the land and the self have been intertwined. Less widely known than Chez Panisse or the zen center’s own restaurant, Greens, the farm has influence that has nevertheless extended far beyond its terroir, a fertile dragon-shaped swath of what was once compressed ocean bottom at the foot of Mount Tamalpais.

From it germinated a movement toward “conscious eating and conscious growing, linked with the ethic of taking care of the land,” said Randolph Delehanty, a San Francisco historian. The organic Buddhists, led by Ms. Johnson; her husband, Peter Rudnick; and two influential teachers, Alan Chadwick and Harry Roberts, were “among the first people to take the idea of stewardship of the land and make a lifestyle out of it,” said Fred Bové, the former education director for the San Francisco Botanical Garden Society.

As a gardener, Ms. Johnson combines the conventional and the not-so. She grows roses and apple trees but also advocates compost and manure teas to boost the immune systems of plants (add 2-3 cups well decomposed compost or live manure per gallon of water; steep for 3 days). A columnist for Tricycle, the Buddhist magazine, she occasionally lapses into the woo-woo in the book, defining “inter-being” as “looking mindfully at broccoli and beet plants” and knowing that you are all one.

In her own garden, which she describes as “wild and bestial,” a hot tub deemed ugly on the deck is concealed by tangles of jasmine, narcissus and other plants, including several opium poppies. “The bees love them,” she observed of the poppies. “They’re medicating themselves right and left.”

The hot tub overlooks a pond filled with rainwater where otters occasionally do the backstroke and frogs make chirping sounds at night (she holds the phone over the pond to comfort her daughter, Alisa, a freshman at Bard, when she is homesick). Ms. Johnson meditates daily here, sitting on the cushion she stores beneath the living room sofa, where the cat sleeps (“stray cats target Buddhist households,” she said).

Written in longhand over 13 years, the book, her first, published by Bantam, hints at but does not fully reveal Ms. Johnson’s own circuitous path. She and Mr. Rudnick have lived “off campus” since 1998, when she inherited enough money to “move out into the world,” she said. Though she lives “one rung out” from the farm, as she puts it, she continues to teach gardening and meditation and serves as a mentor to young apprentices. She shares her home with her husband and their friend Mayumi Oda, a Zen silk screen artist, who also spends time in Hawaii.

The decor of her home is a heady mix of votive-lit Buddhist altars and moon calendars combined with schoolmarmish English teacups and other heirlooms from her grandmother’s house on Mirror Lake in Lake Placid. She grew up in Westport, Conn., the daughter of an independently wealthy, politically involved theater producer and a “wild gambler” mother who spent much of her time in Manhattan teaching bridge at the Regency Club and gambling at the Cavendish Club. (On Fridays she would say, “See you Monday”).

She and her sisters, Deborah, a New York fashion designer, and Sally, an actress in Los Angeles, were raised with a French governess they called Nanny (yes, “Eloise” was her favorite book).

Her parents divorced when Ms. Johnson was 13, and she divided her time between Westport and Manhattan, where her father “kept clothes so we could go to the theater,” including a turquoise and gray houndstooth suit with patent leather shoes. Both parents have died, but she remains close to her stepmother, Sandy Johnson, the author of “The Book of Tibetan Elders.”

A photograph of her in a satin dress on her 10th birthday at Sardi’s hangs on the wall. “I remember my father telling me, ‘I have the best present for you,’ ” she said. “I thought it was a horse. Instead, it was tickets to the New York Yankees.”

Her father told her it was “really not conscionable” to go to college — she should be out protesting. But Ms. Johnson eventually wound up at Pomona. Like many young seekers, she responded to the tumult of the Vietnam era by fleeing, spending her junior year in Israel, where, in 1972, she met her first “root teacher,” Soen Nakagawa Roshi. A year later, she arrived at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center near Big Sur, where people walked around in black robes chanting in Japanese. “I felt I was making the most relevant decision,” she said, “because the world didn’t make sense to me.”

A fellow pilgrim was Annie Somerville, now the executive chef of Greens, with whom Ms. Johnson frequently collaborates on the “eating-garden relationship,” including the cookbook “Fields of Greens” (Ms. Johnson is also an adviser to the Chez Panisse Foundation’s Edible Schoolyard project at the Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Berkeley). At Tassajara, Ms. Somerville recalled, Ms. Johnson insisted on planting comfrey, “a deeply mucilaginous plant with furry leaves that helps coagulate blood and tastes absolutely revolting.”

Ms. Johnson said: “There was a lot of sitting, chanting and meditating. The garden kept me sane.”

She felt profoundly disoriented upon leaving Tassajara, with its dry porous soil, for foggy Green Gulch, where she and Mr. Rudnick would get married and eventually plant their children’s placentas beneath a now-flourishing crabapple tree. Her homesickness was lessened only when she stumbled upon a huge wild red rose growing on a crest of the headlands, perhaps left by a long-gone rancher, a “north star” plant that emotionally anchored her by reminding her that she was on well-loved land.

She takes stock of such touchstones, finding Zen perspectives even in compost. On a cold and windy New Year’s Eve last year, she and Mr. Rudnick headed out to the compost heap with five shopping bags full of outtakes from her book, “much of it purple prose,” she said.

She placed the discarded manuscripts on the pile, covering them with old weeds, hot manure and newly pulled poison hemlock to help them decompose. She put another batch of prose and weeds into a 55-gallon drum. Then, with lovingkindness toward herself, she lit it all.

“It was hugely satisfying,” she said.

ny times

By STEVEN ERLANGER
NY Times Published: May 7, 2008

PARIS — France is making a fuss this week over Richard Serra, the 68-year-old American bantamweight who fashions elegant, gargantuan art out of steel.

On Wednesday Mr. Serra opens the annual solo show called Monumenta in the echoing Grand Palais; the city of Paris has restored one of his earlier works to its proper place in the garden of the Tuileries; and he has been made a commander of the Order of Arts and Letters of the French Academy — a two-rank leap from his previous knighthood, the starter kind usually given to singers like Kylie Minogue, who recently received hers.

France has always welcomed Mr. Serra, even before he became iconic, in the days when some of his work in America was dismantled for scrap. President Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife, Carla, are expected to attend the opening of “Monumenta,” prompting Mr. Serra to ask, “What U.S. president would do that?”

But the sheer scale of Mr. Serra’s work has always created difficulties, to which Paris has found two creative solutions — for now, at least.

Monumenta started last year under the French Culture Ministry as a way of filling the enormous Grand Palais, built for the 1900 Universal Exhibition, after a long and expensive restoration.

A cruciform crystal palace of filigreed iron and glass, the Grand Palais rises 197 feet at the nave and covers 775,000 square feet, and filling it is a monumental task. The German sculptor Anselm Kiefer did it last year with seven stand-alone houses, or galleries, each about 50 feet high, and concrete towers.

Mr. Serra began struggling with the problem two years ago. “First, you have to figure out scale,” he said. “I was overwhelmed by the space and wasn’t exactly sure what to do. But I realized you have to deal with the entirety of the space — to think otherwise was to kid myself.”

He couldn’t just deal with the floor plan, he said. “I had to go vertical here.”

His answer is a sculpture called “Promenade,” five enormous slabs of Cor-Ten steel set along the central axis of the floor. The steel slabs are each 56 feet high, 13 feet wide and 5 ½ inches thick, and each weighs some 73 tons. Yet they are precisely placed and angled, leaning 20 inches in or away from their axis, creating shifting lines of sight. As the sun moves over the course of the day, casting different latticed shadows from the building, the plates appear at times to bend toward or away from the viewer. At night, with the ceiling dark, the sculpture becomes “more somber, more of a sanctuary,” Mr. Serra said.

Formalism seems to require words, and Mr. Serra complies. “You have to set up a formal structure; it makes sculpture interesting,” he said, wandering among the slabs in the otherwise empty hall. “If we hang new material on old forms, it’s boring.”

His generation, he said, “wanted to open the entire field — to see something in time and place,” and take sculpture off its pedestal, which “makes it seem like furniture or commodities,” he said.

“People don’t perceive the art but the surplus value of art — art as photographs, as J-PEGs. People talk of art and ask: ‘How much does it cost? What’s its pedigree?’ But people don’t go to see the work in place.”

He wants people to experience the art in a particular time and setting: “It’s about apprehension, how you apprehend the space and the piece,” he said. “It’s part of the experience of walking around the space in which the art appears — you implicate yourself in the space, and the experience is in you, not in the frame or on the wall.”

It’s a democratic thought in an elitist field. But it can be troubling too, as his experience with “Clara-Clara” demonstrates.

Mr. Serra met his wife, Clara Weyergraf-Serra, in 1977. In 1983 he created “Clara-Clara,” a sculpture commissioned for the pit, or forum, of the Pompidou Center as part of a Serra retrospective show. Two large, inclined steel C’s, each roughly 12 feet high by 108 feet long and weighing 105 tons, curve away from each other at the ends and nearly meet in the middle, but allow a viewer to walk through.

But the weight was considered too much for the site, and Dominique Bozo, then the Pompidou Center’s director, suggested placing the sculpture at one end of the Tuileries garden, so it would frame the Louvre Museum at one end and the large obelisk from the Temple of Luxor in the Place de la Concorde at the other.

As Michael Brenson wrote in The New York Times in 1985, “The sculpture seems both to open like magical doors and to squeeze inward like a trap, both to expose itself like a flower hungry for the sun and to curl up like a sunflower at dusk.”

The city of Paris bought the sculpture and later found a place for it in the park of Choisy, in the 13th arrondissement. But the piece was badly scratched, covered with graffiti and used by the homeless for a shelter, and in 1993 the city took it down and put it in storage. Since then Mr. Serra and his wife have rejected various other suggestions for a permanent installation.

Now, under the auspices of the Louvre, “Clara-Clara” is back in the Tuileries, at least until November. But much to Mr. Serra’s chagrin, those who visit it, on dusty ground, have decided in a kind of collective fancy to put their footprints on the steel.

The soles of sneakers and athletic shoes may have their own formal design, but the prints look tacky on the orangey patina of the steel. As much as one may admire the dexterity of those who have put their footprints high up on the sculpture, Mr. Serra is not pleased at the way these particular viewers have chosen to “implicate” themselves and “apprehend the space and the piece.”

He hopes the city will at least put up a sign. “It bothers me a lot the way they put their feet on it,” he said. “But I haven’t gone up to anyone to pull them away.”

His wife is more philosophical. “Well,” Ms. Weyergraf-Serra said, “I prefer that people not step on me!”

The Monumenta show runs through June 15 and will include a variety of evenings with critics, philosophers and filmmakers like Chantal Akerman. On June 7 Mr. Serra’s old friend Philip Glass will perform at a solo piano concert in the Grand Palais.

The two men met here in 1965, when Mr. Serra came to Paris on a Yale traveling fellowship. “We used to go to La Coupole and watch Giacometti come in, plaster dust in his hair, like two groupies,” Mr. Serra said. Later Mr. Serra and Mr. Glass returned to New York and worked together as truck drivers and furniture delivery men as they began to fashion their extraordinary careers in the fickle world of art.

Mr. Serra, who lives in TriBeCa, was there on Sept. 11, 2001, and in its aftermath. He was horrified by his own voyeurism, he said, as he and others watched people in the burning towers throw themselves to their deaths, hand in hand.

“People were silent, other people jumped, and people on the ground moaned in unison, like a Greek chorus,” he said.

It had a great impact on him, he said, talking of the random quickness of life, a new desire to be considerate. “You need to keep your wits about you, and you have to acknowledge everyone around you,” he said. “Before, maybe I didn’t. But we’re all here and here together. It made me a stronger person. But also I think a little more open and generous one.”

Mr. Serra, who owns “Promenade,” invested close to $1 million for its development and construction. But he says he has no idea what will happen to it after Monumenta — or what Paris will decide to do with “Clara-Clara.”

“You have to let it go,” he said. “You have to move on. Otherwise it’s a dog with a bone. Like this piece, ‘Promenade.’ There’s no guarantee of perpetuity. Who can know?”

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