Artist-Style ‘Nature’ Blooms Downtown Upon a couple of city blocks in Lower Manhattan, one Tribeca-based artist this month will bring a touch of synthetic suburbia. Another will add a bit of rural landscape. A pair of porch swings will sway beneath a shed-like shelter in Collect Pond Park, across the street from the city’s Criminal Court building on Centre Street. The piece, to be installed this month, will offer a perpetually rainy day, courtesy of an attached water pump. “It’s a temporary, portable fountain that seats six,” said Tribeca artist Matthew Geller, who modeled the work on similar pieces he has installed elsewhere. Both works will be on view through December. Geller is the artist who created “Foggy Day,” a 2003 installation in Cortlandt Alley, between White and Walker Streets. For two weeks he piped in machine-made fog that transformed the alley into a noirish urban landscape. Geller said he is attracted to the “romantic and tragic” atmosphere of underused space, and Collect Pond Park certainly fits the description. It is a quiet and small plaza surrounded by blocks that are busy with clerks, attorneys, defendants and other citizens walking in and out of the courthouses and other government buildings. But it is hardly an oasis. Few but pigeons and the presumably unemployed seem to spend much time there. Oppenheim’s work has been described as “zany and eclectic, defying categorization and easy explanation,” and his fanciful installation in Thomas Paine Park is no exception. During a reporter’s visit to the sculptor’s studio last month, before the work was installed, assistants were bringing flowers, trees, and hedges into bloom with power drills, torches and a jigsaw. A bed of flowers—a rack of three-dozen steel tines skewering red rubber balls—rested on the concrete floor. Tall iron trees, with green PVC pipes for foliage, leaned against the wall. He calls the individual pieces “alternative landscape components.” The work is tamer than some of Oppenheim’s earlier pieces, like the fireworks-loaded Launching Structure #2, which accidentally ignited during a Soho gallery opening, or Rolling Explosion, a set of 10-foot-high wheels on rails, installed in a Tribeca traffic triangle, which a thief sent traveling down Sixth Avenue. “With public art you anticipate some public interaction, some vandalism,” he said. But he was surprised by the number of times he had to shoo children out of the artificial garden last month after his work was installed. “Keep off the grass,” they warn.
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