Why Love NY

Madison Square Park is quite possibly one of the best parks in Manhattan. For starters it has the Shake Shack, where I had a delectable burger today for lunch.

Beyond Danny Meyer’s ode to fast food, Madison Square Park has the most amazing public art installations. Last year the park was home to one of my favorites, Roxy Paine’s trio of Conjoined, Defunct and Erratic. Not being a professional art critic, I’ll leave the descriptions to madisonsquarepark.org.

Conjoined is a 40-feet-tall sculpture of two trees whose branches cantilever in space and connect in mid air. Paine creates two different tree species with each branch of one joining to a branch of the other. For the observer, it is unclear where one tree begins and the other ends. Conjoined, with its gleaming steel branches and improbable marriage of two species, embodies man’s complex relationship with the empirical and utopian. As Ralph Waldo Emerson writes, “We want the Exact and the Vast; we want our Dreams, and our Mathematics.”

Defunct is a 42-feet-tall stainless steel sculpture of a dead or dying tree infiltrated with fungus. The trunk and limbs have deteriorated from disease or old age. The beauty of the once daunting, vibrant tree is shadowed by the growing rot and shelf fungus. The death of the tree has given life to the fungus. Defunct, a meditation on loss and life, describes the symbiosis between industry and earth, between production and natural selection.

Paine’s Erratic is his newest transformation of a natural phenomenon. Erratic is a stainless steel boulder measuring 7 feet high by 15 feet wide. The term “erratic” refers to a rock that is found in an area where it bears little or no relationship to the underlying geology. Essentially, it is a boulder that has been carried by a glacier hundreds of miles away from its original geographic location. Erratic’s slick exterior leaves its origin unexplained. It is a boulder displaced from somewhere between a mountain and a steel factory.

So basically they’re some shiny trees and rocks and they made me smile. You got a problem with that?

I was surprised to find these beauties being chopped to pieces today as I waited on line at the Shake Shack. They had a good run, I suppose it’s time to let another artist have their turn at bat.

And who is the next contestant on The Price is Right? That’d be British artist Richard Deacon, bringing his Seven Works to Madison Square Park. If these pictures are any indication, color me unimpressed. Any way we can reassemble the stainless steel trees? No? Crap.

If you can’t make it down to Madison Square Park before Paine’s work is gone for good, you’re in luck. I snapped a bunch of photos of the stainless steel tree carnage so you don’t have to.