They Told Me Not to Take that Job: Tumult, Betrayal, Heroics, and the Transformation of Lincoln Center (12 page)

The art of being a first-class festival presenter resides in posing and satisfactorily answering a series of questions, season after season. What combination of programs will attract an audience? Can they be packaged, priced, scheduled, and promoted in an attractive way? Are they planned far enough in advance to increase the probability that donations can be raised to defray costs for particular productions? Will the ideal venue be identified and available to mount the production? Is the content of this work, the way it is being mounted and performed, and by whom, worthy of Lincoln Center’s imprimatur? Do the planned presentations complement and supplement the year-round artistic diet offered to Lincoln Center’s far-flung audience? Have we adequately included performing art emanating from Russia, Eastern Europe, and the continents of Asia, Africa, and South America?

If there is an audience for these artists and their work, how fervently do we believe in both? If successful, can a given production burnish established careers or boost those of newcomers, moving them along the spectrum from “promising” to “proven”? Is it likely that once performed at Lincoln Center, the piece of work will have “legs”? How probable is it that audiences around the country and the world will have a chance to encounter it?

Finally, have we adequately prepared to greet and support our visiting artists in every conceivable way, from housing them, to feeding them, to transporting them, and to offering assistance of many other kinds?

The track record of Redden and his staff in responding to these formidable questions buoyantly and creatively has been superb.
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Redden has held himself to a world-class standard of curatorial distinction for over three decades. His artistic taste and judgment are remarkable.

That Lincoln Center has been the beneficiary of Nigel’s talent and of Jane Moss’s expertise is really a tribute to my predecessor, once removed, Nat Leventhal. He selected them. He chose very well.

B
UILT INTO THE
DNA of Lincoln Center is visual art. The Alexander Calder and its stately presence at the entryway in Hearst Plaza to The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. The Henry Moore Sculpture in the Paul Milstein Pool and Terrace. The Jasper Johns “Numbers” in the lobby of the David H. Koch Theater. David Smith’s
one-ton steel sculpture, entitled
Zig IV
, safely ensconced in Avery Fisher Hall. Louise Nevelson’s
Nightsphere-Light
at The Juilliard School.

These are among the permanent pieces, many site specific, given as generous gifts to Lincoln Center in its early years.

Adding to this legacy is the Vera List Art Project, established by a gift from Albert and Vera List in 1962. Its goal is to have contemporary limited edition artworks commissioned and sold to the public to support Lincoln Center and its programs. The artists attracted to this project included, in its formative years, Roy Lichtenstein, Larry Rivers, Andy Warhol, and Helen Frankenthaler. In the last decade and a half, works have been commissioned from such artists as Jim Dine, William Kentridge, Karen Kilimnik, Guillermo Kutcha, Glenn Ligon, Richard Serra, and Terry Winters.

Looking forward, the question seemed to me not whether there was a place for visual art on our campus, but rather what form it would assume. What impact would the transformation of Lincoln Center’s public spaces and performance facilities have on our thinking?

Lincoln Center is no longer interested in acquiring works of art as gifts. It is not a museum. It does not employ the expert staff needed to look after the physical condition of more than the couple of dozen pieces already in its possession. Instead, as the conclusion of the redevelopment project approached in 2010, we began to consider how best to deploy temporary exhibitions in our newly built indoor and outdoor spaces so that tens of thousands of visitors and ticketholders might view them. Could we commission new work, or mount existing work, in ways that would complement what was appearing on our stages, or in ways that would attract a new and different following? Could we call attention to artists of enormous talent who deserve the kind of exposure an association with Lincoln Center generates?

Our initial thought was to use visual art to animate Lincoln Center’s huge public spaces, like Josie Robertson Plaza. We established a partnership with the Public Art Fund, a nonprofit organization dedicated to commissioning and presenting the work of important artists in outdoor spaces where they can be viewed free of charge. The partnership began with two major installations.

The first was the work of Franz West, the Viennese artist. In the summer of 2004, he installed seven huge aluminum sculptures in a rainbow
of bright colors that sat across Josie Robertson Plaza, stretching from Avery Fisher Hall to the New York State Theater. They assumed compelling, whimsical shapes. Completely approachable, the bright yellow, blue, pink, and green figures all called out “Touch me,” “Sit on me,” “Lean on me,” “Run around and through me.” It was the human interaction with his art that West wished for most. To the delight of kids and families, his dreams were completely realized with this installation.

Also in cooperation with the Public Art Fund, the Malibu, California–based artist Nancy Rubins assembled her sculpture
Big Pleasure Point
on Josie Robertson Plaza. For two months in the summer of 2006, the sixty colorful vessels she accumulated and assembled included kayaks, canoes, rowboats, surfboards, sailboats, paddleboats, and windsurfing boats. They commanded attention. Forty feet tall, fifty-five feet wide, and weighing over six thousand pounds, the assemblage brought new shapes and new life to the space it occupied. All patrons and passersby, nautically minded or otherwise, paused to look and marvel.

These site-specific works made sense. Josie Robertson Plaza is a monumental, monochromatic space. Any installation prepared for it demands a keen sense of light and proportion. Figuring out the geography of the placement of objects and the color combination that would work best was a major part of any artistic assignment. Learning from these earliest, well-received trials, Lincoln Center next turned to Los Angeles–based artist Aaron Curry.

Taking the Revson Fountain as his central perspective, he created fifteen monumental aluminum sculptures shaped like anthropomorphic figures. Their bright colors and playful forms were impossible to ignore. As people walked by these human-like shapes, it was as if they were accompanying them to the theater, or they were waiting for the curtain to come down so the viewers could converse with them about how they had enjoyed the show. Kids and their families were drawn to them, and as with West’s sculptures, thousands of photos were taken. These likeable and attractive figures captured the imagination. Families even gave them names and checked in on them, day after day. Fanciful conversations ensued. Aaron Curry received precisely the kind of public and media attention to which we aspired.

Other experiments on campus have enjoyed a closer affinity to the performing arts. In July 2007 forty-three dancers, among them Bill T.
Jones, Wendy Whelan, William Forsythe, and Judith Jamison, were projected on three huge screens suspended from the roof of the New York State Theater. What amazed and engrossed everyone was how slow moving the figures were and how sharp their renderings. The ripple of a muscle, the strand of a hair, the arc of a body in flight. To show dancers moving at less than one one-hundredth of their original speed was an amazing technical accomplishment, brought off by the gifted photographer David Michalek. To witness the progression of a gesture, the movement of a shoulder, the majesty of a jump, the delicacy of a turn, the subtlety of a foot landing was astonishing. The dancers moved side by side on the three screens. The overall effect was to be suffused in movement, form, and color. Tens of thousands of strolling pedestrians paused to look at the video presentation during the ten-week run of
Slow Dancing
, between the hours of 9:00 p.m. and 1:00 a.m. Others, like Mikhail Baryshnikov, brought their own beach chairs and bottles of wine and took their time to enjoy it all.

Slow Dancing
traveled to several dozen cities around the world, and ultimately millions of people saw this remarkable piece. It was our privilege to have Josie Robertson Plaza be the site of its world premiere.

What David Michalek is to dance, Janet Cardiff is to music and Christian Marclay is to film, at least insofar as Lincoln Center’s public art program is concerned. Cardiff’s
Forty-Part Motet
is a sound installation artwork that was incorporated into the 2010 White Light Festival. The music is from a sixteenth-century motet by Thomas Tallis in which eight groups of five singers meet and diverge in sound. Cardiff recorded each singer separately, each projected by one or more speakers. As listeners step back from any single speaker, the ensemble coalesces. As they approach a single speaker, one of the parts emerges. The work is spellbinding and mesmerizing. Those who assembled in a rehearsal room and recording studio at Jazz at Lincoln Center to hear Cardiff’s piece are unlikely to have forgotten their visit, as Justin Davidson explained in an article in the
New York Magazine
on November 1, 2010:

Here . . . for eight hours each day, in a windowless sanctum, Cardiff offers a fourteen-minute bath of warm Renaissance counterpoint—a sauna for the mind. Physical and virtual space fuse. Normally, your
ears will tell you where you are in the world, but not here. Close your eyes and the room gets vaster, turning into a cathedral without walls, where exquisite music reverberates in the open air.

The Lincoln Center art installation that drew the most critical attention was Christian Marclay’s
The Clock
, a twenty-four-hour collage of pieces of film that refer to time as depicted in objects of all kinds. Their appearance coincides with the very hour and minute when one is watching. For this enthralling masterpiece that wove together parts of over three thousand films, Lincoln Center built a theater in the David Rubenstein Atrium to Marclay’s demanding specifications. He determined the weight, color, texture, and length of the drapes that surround the audience; the exact benches on which viewers would sit, and the space between them as they were positioned; and the quality of the speakers and their precise placement. Marclay insisted that each member of the audience should be able to remain in the theater for as long as he or she wished, free of charge. Hardly an empty seat could be found for any hour of any day during the three-week run in the summer of 2012.

The visual and sound editing are works of genius. They depict the role that time plays in film and how it is experienced differently around America and around the world, by the young and by the elderly, at work and at play, in the twenty-first century and earlier, by pedestrians and those in various modes of transport. It all adds up to a magnificent study.
The Clock
is a beautiful and evocative meditation on the meaning of time.

The reviews of Marclay’s work were almost rapturous—apparently inspired by the quality of his work. Meghan O’Rourke, in the
New Yorker
on July 19, 2012, suggested that
The Clock
is nothing less than a definitive ode to film as an art form:

“The Clock” with its obsessive compiling, its miniature riffs, its capacious comic and dramatic turns, speaks to the completest lurking in all of present-day us. If montage is usually as cheaply sweet as Asti Spumante, “The Clock” is champagne: it’s what the form was invented for, it turns out. Drink it in deeply and the days might just go on forever.

The curatorial parent of this new way to integrate visual art into Lincoln Center is trustee Peter Kraus, CEO of AllianceBernstein. He assembled some extraordinary curators and museum directors as informal advisors to suggest artists for commissioned work and to debate the pros and cons of how their visions and voices might be utilized in one or another of Lincoln Center’s public spaces. The whole process is monitored by the trustees and volunteers on Lincoln Center’s public art committee, chaired by Peter. Its meetings are fun; its exchange of views lively. Its results are embellishing the performing arts in a dramatic manner.

Public art has a bright future at Lincoln Center. Carefully thinking through the place of public art on the campus, the staff and trustees formulated a distinctive role, one that plays to the strengths of Lincoln Center’s mission, generous outdoor space, and very large audience.

A
T THE NUCLEUS
of Lincoln Center’s reason for being is the art mounted on its many indoor and outdoor stages. I cannot recall an important undertaking that either Nigel Redden or Jane Moss wished to see performed that was turned down because Tamar Podell, vice president for development, and I were unable to raise adequate funds. I am proud that their programs grew and flourished on my watch.

I was known as an easy touch for the programs generated by Moss and Redden. But saying yes required freeing up resources by keeping management expenses under tight control and keeping productivity high. Saying yes demanded relentless, round-the-clock fund-raising. Saying yes meant pursuing that new and altered economic model for Lincoln Center, finding alternative or enhanced sources of recurring net income. Saying yes meant lots of self-imposed pressure, on me and on the rest of the staff. Saying yes was a pleasure. Delivering on the “yes” was more than a full-time job.

But running Lincoln Center was only part of what I had been asked to do. Rejuvenating it conceptually, reconceiving it urbanistically, and rebuilding it physically were also in my job description. Achieving these objectives in the midst of continuing controversy would be a major endeavor.

CHAPTER 4