NEW YORK — The other day I saw a giant bird perching on a
sliver of crescent moon. It was clutching a comically short ladder, and the
whole scene — an installation by conceptual artist and designer of immersive
environments
Alex Da Corte — was on the roof of the
Metropolitan Museum, tucked
into a corner of one of New York City’s most spectacular patios.
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The piece instantly brought me back to my favorite Italo
Calvino short story, “The Distance of the Moon,” about the good old days when
Earth and its moon were almost close enough to kiss. Rowing out to the point of
closest approach, the narrator and his friends would erect a ladder and leap
across to the lunar surface, where they frolicked and gathered cheese.
For his 2021 Roof Garden Commission, which opens Friday, Da
Corte taps into a similar vein of straight-faced irony. The bird in “As Long as
the Sun Lasts” — its title is borrowed from another Calvino story — is a
full-size, custom-made, blue but otherwise unmistakable Big Bird, the beloved
Sesame Street denizen. Gazing wistfully over the oligarch aeries south of
Central Park, it looks torn, unsure whether to climb back down to earth or fly
away forever.
Fabricated from stainless steel and covered with 7,000
hand-placed aluminum feathers, the Bird swings gently from one end of a long
pole off the floor. Attached to the pole’s other end are five brightly colored
metal discs, a nod to Alexander Calder’s floating mobiles, or at least to their
mass-market nursery knockoffs. The installation’s base, three interlocking
stainless-steel blocks with rounded corners, like modular plastic, are also
painted Calder Red.
The Met Roof Commission isn’t easy to pull off. The artist
competes not only with the breathtaking vista of Central Park, framed by a
forest of Manhattan luxury towers, but also with the aura of the treasure house
downstairs. Whatever the artist chooses to mount will promptly be Instagrammed
to death in an endless summer bacchanal of selfies. So a winsome surefire
crowd-pleaser like this, which turns gentle circles without ever getting
anywhere, may simply be Da Corte’s satirical, if not especially biting,
response to the assignment: Why try to get somewhere? Why not just give people
what they want?
But that wouldn’t account for its undercurrent of
melancholy, the pathos of an innocent creature in the grips of a big decision.
Da Corte has spent his artistic career being other people — dressing up as
rapper Eminem, even adapting Calder’s signature on this sculpture’s base — and
constructing elaborate installations that give you the sense of having wandered
into some other world, brightly colored but eerily unrooted.
Born in New Jersey, he spent his early childhood in
Venezuela, where he watched a Brazilian version of “Sesame Street” called “Vila
Sésamo.” That show’s Big Bird equivalent, Garibaldo, is blue. But the
characters don’t much resemble each other — if you can overlook their both
being anthropomorphic birds — and this Bird’s blue isn’t even the same as
Garibaldo’s. What this Bird’s tint really evokes, whether or not you’ve ever
seen Garibaldo, is a confused memory, or “jamais vu” — déjà vu’s opposite, the
feeling that something familiar is suddenly strange.
Everything about the piece — from the character itself to
the graphic shapes and colors of the Calder-like mobile and the preschool
play-set base — signifies whimsy. But recognizing whimsy, as a viewer, isn’t
the same as feeling whimsical. In fact, it can sometimes feel like the opposite,
a regret-saturated reminder that our days of whimsy are behind us. We have
bills to pay, products to sell, wars to wage, statements to make, reviews to
write. It isn’t our fault we can no longer reach the moon. Our ladders are
simply too short.
The truth is that “As Long as the Sun Lasts” appealed to me
in a visceral way I felt obliged to be suspicious of. Seeing a well-known
children’s character in a space still dedicated to old-fashioned ideas of high
culture made me feel as if someone was getting away with something. But when
the breeze started up and Big Bird began to swing, it was surprisingly
thrilling. I wanted a ride, myself. I even reached up to touch Big Bird’s foot.
It was a few centimeters out of reach.
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