I turned 41 that day in the last year of the last century when I resolved to do the New York marathon one day. Before that I had never run a single kilometer, but the CPC in The Hague, Egmond, Zeven Heuvelen and other half runs were getting easier and easier for me. Still, I anticipated that I would never be able to run the full forty-two kilometers within a healthy four hours and left it at that. The heart kept beating. A travel grant from the Gerbrandy Culture Fund Foundation enabled me to make my dream visit to the metropolis of modern art a reality. Fellow artist Barbara Bartlett I thank for the invitation and the stay in Queens that we have come to call Sunnyside Art Residency.
"Hi, where are you from? I'm from Peru (Cuba, Argentina, wherever)" is invariably the proud and warmly welcome greeting in the new world. "I'm an alien" from Jubbega and I immediately feel at home here.
It's October 2015. For nine days I dance through Delirious New York trying to get a grip on the grid. My legs carry me for miles along a wondrous course with no finish line. Upper, Lower, East and West. High Line, highlights and underground. One museum mile is more exciting than the next.
New York gradually unfolds as a slowly growing sculpture of almost accidental and sometimes very deliberately well detailed compositions. Arrangements and rearrangements of volumes in various sizes and tones. Subdued and exuberant. Anonymous and famous. As rich as it is sparse. The range of visual stimuli is more than immense. Only a minute tranche can obviously be consumed in the limited time available. As I value chance in my work, I therefore allow myself to be overwhelmed by the shows of very large and very small galleries and studios that Chelsea is literally full of.
Starting at the New Museum on the Bowery, Chelsea-based Calvin Seibert, sculptor/art assistant, guides me in high speed through a morning of his favorite displays. We make a sprint through Lower Manhattan: Nolita, Soho, Little Italy and China Town.
Not even casually but as a natural attitude, I explore the visual possibilities of material and place. I record found sculptures, unintentional sculptural artifacts, if you will, stacks of waste and/or construction materials, which together form a beautiful open-air museum. Images of the works are recorded and revealed in the Musée de Sculpture Trouvée (www.flickr.com/groups/musee_de_sculpture_trouvee) an online international collection of unintentional art. I find it striking that the metropolis is almost more tidy than Friesland, while in my time in The Hague the 'gold' was on the streets.
I also add here and there site specific one day sculptures to the street scene. From a roadside batch of coat hangers marked Real Simple, a flank of car tire and a fine rusty piece of steel scrap from a manhole, I create the sculpture of the same name in the Dutch Kills neighborhood on Queens. Between the concrete walls of an outdoor room at MoMA-PS1, I am balancing a cube, referring to the cube sculptures Red Cube by Isamu Noguchi on Broadway, in the Financial district and Alamo by Tony Rosenthal on Astor Place.
Of course I did not cross the ocean empty-handed; I carry a total of sixteen wearable sculptures into my new world and carry them with me every day. And wherever the opportunity arises, they take turns to be unashamedly given a temporal but decidedly regal place in the most prestigious museum presentations. The MoMA, Metropolitan, PS1 and Guggenheim all secretly showcase exclusively The Formerly Unknown Artist Prince.
A small empty pedestal next to a graphite drawing by Picasso at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art offers itself up obtrusively. Otherwise, though, a bench is willing as a guerilla display. To photograph the portable objects I sometimes unashamedly sprawl on the floor or sit on my squat or knees in the more than monumental museum rooms. Thus self-similar to a new work by Maurizio Cattelan. Thus the little prince measures up to the greats. Who doesn't like to stand on the shoulders of the masters?
The multicultural muses of cosmopolitan Manhattan are particularly good to me. They gladly and especially proudly adorn themselves with my bizarre neckwear at my shy request and allow themselves to be radiantly self-consciously portrayed. A cool Finnish in front of Frank Lloyd Wrights Guggenheim Museum. An Oriental beauty in Washington street, Brooklyn with Manhattan
Bridge as a cinematic backdrop. A ballerina on pointe in front of the David H. Koch Theater at nighttime Lincoln Center Plaza. Julia, the young art student from Argentina at the Metropolitan. The radiant Afro-supposters at MoMa and PS1.
Back in the Frisian studio, fresh impressions from my New York Times are immediately processed into NY-thing. Architectural structures are rising up next to the climbing frames of my former gymnasium. One High Rise of wood, iron and cardboard is already out of the scaffolding and manifests itself, still just dry, at the group exhibition NAT in a picturesque church in the West Stellingwerfse De Hoeve.
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Marcel Prins is the first recipient of a travel grant from the Gerbrandy Culture Fund Foundation. Among other things, this new foundation provides grants to visual artists who want to spend some time abroad for their artistic development. gerbrandy-cultuurfonds.nl
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