Art/Music/Architecture Review: Modern Music at Manhattan's Newest Performance Space

Art/Music Review

Reich Richter Pärt

Art by Gerhard Richter

Music by Arvo Pärt and Steve Reich

The Shed, Hudson Yards, Manhattan

May 26, 2019

NYC’s newest performance venue is The Shed, part of the multi-gazillion dollar real estate Hudson Yards development, built over the Long Island Railroad tracks west of Penn Station. The development includes apartments priced for Russian oligarchs, a luxury mall, an oddly ugly huge sculpture, and this new performance venue, designed for maximum flexibility. It includes fixed art gallery space and cool movable architectural “tarp” that can either decoratively cover the permanent building (as in the first picture below), or roll leftwards on huge wheels to cover the adjacent plaza for various installations and performances. 

For a cool animation of how this works, look at the sixth panel down at this website. 

The development as a whole has been rightly panned by critics as yet another NYC extravagance for the ultrawealthy. I found the mall particularly appalling, with working class tourists spending insane amounts of money on overpriced knickknacks and artisanal microbites to eat in the luxury mall. Next to all of this is an amber, rather ugly, pointless eight story sculpture called The Vessel, consisting of interweaving stairways to climb, but with a top view blocked mostly by the surrounding skyscrapers. You actually need a reservation and pay a fee to walk the stairways. It being New York, the waiting list is currently two weeks!  This could have been interesting if it included Escher-like stairways to nowhere, or optical illusions, but no. It is quite symmetric, and quite dull.

 The initial artistic offerings at the Shed are trying very hard to be diverse and inclusive, with young artists, artists of color, hip hop, performance artists, and classical music all programmed. I attended an interesting collaboration between three famed living artists now in their 80s: the German visual artist Gerhard Richter (b. 1932), the minimalist composer Steve Reich (b. 1936), and the Estonian neo-Renaissance spiritual composer Arvo Pärt (b. 1935). This collaboration was specifically designed for the opening of the Shed. In the first part, audience members enter a large, brightly lit hall lined by wallpaper and several tapestries created by Richter for the event. After a few minutes, a good local youth choir, the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, entered and wandered among the standing audience members singing a typically hypnotically repetitive Part piece Three Shepherd Children of Fatima as we viewed the art. There was good resonance here between art and music. The music featured basic themes and drone notes that were unchanging, while the art was a single elaborate color panel that was duplicated along two axes, creating fourfold symmetry echoing the symmetries in the music.

After this 15 minute segment, we moved to the adjoining large hall. There, a full chamber orchestra (the excellent Ensemble Signal, conducted by Brad Lubman) played a newly commissioned piece by Reich. This was in fact a live film score for a hypnotic 30 minute film by artist Reich which took the tapestries in the first room to a new level. An initial pattern of vertical colored stripes continuously morphed into slowly moving patterns of all sorts, many looking like repeated folk art figures, but all apparently created using a mathematic process. 

The notes described the artist’s creative process as follows:

Using a computer image of the painting, he divided it vertically into two halves and then divided those halves into quarters, making a mirror image of two of the quarters. He then divided the painting into fourths, eighths, 16ths, and so on, up to 4096ths. Each step follows the exact same procedure of divide, mirror, and repeat. The result is an abstract image that becomes a series of increasingly dense patterns, and eventually solid bands of color.

This film, resonant of an acid trip,  was an excellent pairing with the Reich score. The conductor, facing away from the film, had a computer monitor so he could coordinate the Reich chord/pattern changes with the changes in the image.

This was one of the better art-music pairings I have seen, and while neither the art nor the music is in my favorite style (I am a little too logical for psychedelic art and chant-like music), it made me think about how the styles could feed off each other. There was even some resonance between these performances and the monstrous eight story sculpture outside. While the big picture of The Vessel is dull, there are intriguing interlocking geometric metal surfaces that make up its shell, and these divide their reflections into multiple parts, much as the music and art did in the installation. So sometimes one can find beauty midtown, even within an overpriced, gluttonous Manhattan monument to the 1%.