UNDERGROUND THEATER
To much fanfare, and some surprise, the northernmost tail of the Second Avenue Subway line opened, as scheduled, on New Years Day. Initial publicity focused on the artworks gracing the new stations at 72nd Street, 86th Street, and 96th Street. These were coordinated by the NYCMTA’s Arts for Transit committee and funded by its Percent for Art Program, that allocates 1% of total construction costs for all major projects to new site-specific artworks. For these stations the MTA chose, wisely, three well-known artists: Sarah Sze, Chuck Close and Vik Muniz. But it gave them blank stretches of 1′x2′ tile to decorate, rather than soliciting works that were deeply integrated with the architecture of the stations, or that might even have inspired the design of the stations.
At the 72nd Street station Sze created scenes of whirling debris in blue and white that are rendered in custom porcelain tiles. The motifs brighten station walls along the escalators and mezzanine. But the tiles remains flat, ornamental rather than imagistic; they never really open into a fictional space. At the 86th Street station Close recreated twelve of his signature pixellated headshot portraits in nine-foot-high mosaic panels along the entrances and mezzanine. The renderings and tilework are skillful, but the celebrity painters he depicts, including himself, evoke the streets of SoHo and Chelsea, not the Upper East Side.
At the 96th Street station Muniz also rendered figures in mosaic tiles. But he’s based these life-size, head-to-toe figures on informal photographs of random contemporary New Yorkers. They represent a broad, comically accurate swathe of the population, including a married gay couple, a mother, a man in a turban, a woman in a sari, a gaggle of high school boys, a cop with a cherry popsicle, an actor in a tiger costume, on old man with a ukelele, and two uptight middle-aged hipsters. These figures create a strong rhythm as one walks the mezzanine, and hold the eye. On opening weekend visitors slowed to examine these characters closely, and stopped to photograph their favorites and to be photographed alongside them. Like the improptu post-election sticky note message wall at Union Square Station, Muniz’ mosaics at 96th Street make powerful street theater.