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Though carefully planned and meticulously executed, the artist’s actions remain subject to chance, a tension that imbues Signer’s work with an inherent vulnerability. Signer’s performative actions and ephemeral sculptural  arrangements, documented using the more permanent medium of film, underscore the mutability of the materials and objects he involves, which reminds us of the fragility of human existence.

Part of High Line Channel 22, a series of videos projected on an adjacent building from 2012 – 2014, Signer presented his celebrated 8mm film Kayak (2000). In the short work, Signer sits in a blue kayak clad in a black leather motorcycle jacket and a white helmet. Rather than commence his journey in the water, a truck tows Signer on a dry road as the bottom of the kayak slowly scrapes away. As Signer is dragged along a Swiss country road, a herd of dairy cows gallop alongside him, captivated by the surreal scene. By decontextualizing the familiar, Signer expands, in a humorously subversive and poetic vein, our view of the world.

Roman Signer, Kayak was on view from October 10 to December 4, 2013 on High Line Channel 22.

High Line Art debuted in 2009 with The River That Flows Both Ways, an installation by Spencer Finch that was presented in partnership with Creative Time. Inspired by the Hudson River, the artist documented a 700-minute journey on the river in a single day. The title is a translation of Muhheakantuck, the Native American name for the Hudson River, referring to the river’s natural flow in two directions. Installed in the Chelsea Market Passage, Finch’s work has become an iconic part of High Line Art and is still on view today.

Some of the highlights from High Line Art’s first five years include New York-based artist Sarah Sze’s beloved Still Life with Landscape (Model for a Habitat), which played with the High Line’s architecture and sight lines, acting as a bird, butterfly, and insect observatory, with perches, feeding spots, and birdbaths throughout. The work was on view from 2011 to 2012.

Our first group exhibition, Lilliput, was on view from 2012 to 2013 and featured miniature sculptures by six international artists. The show reflected on the traditional role of public art by offering a counterbalance to the monumental scale often employed for plaza sculptures and other outdoor installations in public spaces. One of the most popular sculptures was Tomoaki Suzuki’sCarson, a diminutive bronze sculpture based on a friend of the artist.

High Line Art’s largest commission to date was Broken Bridge II by West African artist El Anatsui. A monumental tapestry made of pressed tin and mirrors, the artwork was installed on the side of a building creating a stunning visual of wave-like patterns and folds, reflecting the surrounding landscape of the High Line and the fabric of the city. Measuring at 37 feet high by 157 feet long, the work was on view from 2012 to 2013.

One of the most ambitious and unique commissions was by New York-based artist Carol Bove. Titled Caterpillar, the work consisted of seven abstract sculptures installed within the wild landscape on the High Line at the Rail Yards, the third and northernmost section of the High Line still closed to the public. Bove’s sculptures were only viewable by public tours. Over the course of 2013 to 2014, High Line rangers conducted over 500 public tours to over 15,000 visitors.

This past spring we installed the first public art commission in New York by the legendary artist Ed Ruscha. Hand-painted on the side of a building, Honey, I Twisted Through More Damn Traffic Today is based on a pastel drawing of the same name from 1977. The mural will be on view through May 2015.

Some of our most popular artworks have been our series of High Line Billboards, located on the Edison ParkFast billboard at West 18th Street. Previous billboards have included works by John Baldessari (2011), Allen Ruppersberg (2013), Paola Pivi (2012), Faith Ringgold (2012), and Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari for Toilet Paper (2012), among others.

Along with our commissions and billboards, we have presented both historical and new video works by artists on High Line Channel 14 and High Line Channel 22. Highlights include videos by John Cage (2012), Cinthia Marcelle (2012), Sturtevant (2012), Oscar Munoz (2013), Guido van der Werve (2013), and Gordan Matta-Clark (2011), among others.

One of the most unique and interactive programs is the series High Line Performances. Past works have included performances by Trisha Brown Dance Company (2011), Alyson Knowles (2012), Simone Forti (2012), Jennifer West (2012), Mungo Thomson (2013), and Pablo Bronstein (2013), among others.

For more stories on the first five years of the High Line, visit the Friends of the High Line blog.

475 VOLVER from cinthia marcelle on Vimeo.

The quotidian, simple gestures in Marcelle’s films such as excavation and accumulation suggest playful metaphors about society and the human condition. As the artist explains, “the landscapes in my work, more recently, start to present the idea of ruin, the accumulation of the residues, scraps. They are landscapes of the culture, its frontiers and its barriers – or since they are landscapes, this starts to be a frontier between nature and culture. The accumulation can often be seen as a sign of the time.” For example, in 475 Volver (To Come To) (2009), a bulldozer drives continuously in the shape of an infinity sign in a barren landscape, as if writing out its own fate in the red sand.  The movement of sand also recalls an hourglass, underscoring the passage of time. Whether human or mechanical, the protagonists in her films undertake their fruitless work silently and with an odd sense of determination, reflecting the strange nature of labor and industry in a globalized market.

FONTE 193 from cinthia marcelle on Vimeo.

CRUZADA from cinthia marcelle on Vimeo.

Two of Marcelle’s other films shown on the High Line also took place in barren landscapes. The elevated perspective and remote settings of the films place the viewer at a remove from the other people in Marcelle’s films. Filmed from above, the viewer takes on an omniscient role. Fonte 193 (Fountain 193) (2007) features a fire truck driving in a circle while watering the red soil as if extinguishing a nonexistent fire. In Cruzada (Crusade) (2010), a marching band meets at a remote intersection and plays as a group to an absent audience. These odd occurrences in desolate landscapes recall a mirage, where characters, settings and actions sprout from the imagination of the viewer. 

LEITMOTIV from cinthia marcelle on Vimeo.

Leitmotiv (2011) also assumes a dream-like quality. In the film, water pours over a dirt-covered floor as broom sticks manipulate the water and dirt to create intricate patterns.  The sound of the water precedes its visual manifestation, allowing the viewer to fill the space prior to the entrance of the event.  Lastly, in the 2005 video Confronto (Comparison), eight people conduct a routine with flaming batons in the middle of a crosswalk, seeming to ignore the cacophony of horns when the stoplight turns green. In this work, as well as her other works, Marcelle depicts a playful sense of life where humor, politics, society, and culture exist on the same plane. 

CONFRONTO from cinthia marcelle on Vimeo.

After watching Marcelle’s films, one begins to notice the poetic nature of everyday occurrences. The personal, quotidian and local have global implications. As a part of society, the simplest gesture or happening symptomatically reflects the contemporary moment. With this in mind, the most mundane moments can transform into the most profound.

- Kat Widing

One of the most celebrated figures of the American musical avant-garde, John Cage (1912 – 1992) was instrumental in reshaping postwar Western music. Cage enacted radical innovations in compositions and theory, such as the application of chance and “found” sound as an integral compositional device and the creation of musical structures based on rhythm versus tonality. For example, Cage’s 4’33’’ (1952) famously involved a pianist sitting before a piano with a stopwatch without striking a note.  Rather than intending to simply shock his audience by upending convention, Cage’s silent piece hoped to highlight negative space as a valid part of a composition. The new “music” was produced by the ambient sounds of the audience: someone clearing their throat, the hum of the air conditioner, and the rustling of moving bodies.

A dual work, One11 and 103 is made up of a film, One11, and a musical score, 103.  This work is part of John Cage’s number series that occupied him during the last six years of his life (1987-1992). In this series, each piece is named after the number of performers. For example, One11 is the eleventh work for one performer that he created and 103 is performed by an orchestra of 103 musicians. 

One11is a black-and-white film that shows floating clouds of light drifting across a dark screen.  To generate the abstraction, Cage created computerized permutations to determine the unique placement, angle, and intensity of 168 lights in a Munich television studio. This way, the viewer would never experience the same arrangement of light twice.  John Cage explained, “One11 is a film without subject. There is light but no persons, no things, no ideas about repetition and variation. It is meaningless activity which is nonetheless communicative, like light itself, escaping our attention as communication because it has no content to restrict its transforming and informing power.”

As High Line visitors walked through the 14th Street Passage, they were met with a minimal orchestral composition called 103 which accompanied Cage’s visual lightshow. The piece consists of a series of single wind and brass tones against a backdrop of strings and percussion, creating an urgent rather than soothing atmosphere. Paired together on the High Line, One11 and 103 initiated a series of chance encounters with park visitors that perfectly reflected Cage’s synthesis of chance operations, experimental music, and the visual arts.

- Kat Widing

ABOUT TIMES LAUGHS BACK AT YOU LIKE A SUNKEN SHIP (2012): In Times Laughs Back at You Like a Sunken Ship (2012), Magdy presents a poetic setting, a working biosphere, for the wanderings of a young man. The silent protagonist carries a vision device – a makeshift construction that allows him to see the world through a viewfinder while simultaneously reflecting his surroundings through a mirror surface. The video alternates between scenes of the young man exploring his enclosed surroundings and archival historical images of ancient ruins.

Q&A:

Cecilia Alemani: You often combine documentary footage and fictional narratives in you video works. Can you talk about this?

Basim Magdy: All my work with moving image in the last 4 years was shot on Super 8 film. This creates a misconception - which is not necessarily a bad one - that it's found footage. I don't use film to create this misconception, though. There is a certain depth that an image shot on film has that video can never replicate. Because of this, film becomes an interpretation of reality that doesn't attempt to replicate every aspect of it identically. Film has its own way of recreating what is shot on it that depends on many variables. To me, this makes film the perfect tool as a starting point to build fictional narratives that are rooted in the world we are all familiar with, but at the same time try to dissect it and present it to viewers in unfamiliar ways.

CA: Who is the main character of Time Laughs Back at You Like a Sunken Ship?

BM: He could be anyone. He's a man who surrounds himself with mirrors that reflect the artificially-constructed environment in which he exists - a geodesic greenhouse. He sits, he gets up, he walks around in circles, he gazes at the intricate details of his tailored environment, then he sits down again and the day ends. The film started as an investigation into the passing of time and its influence on the occurrence of tiniest mundane events. While shooting the film, the setting became as important and I started thinking about how we look at our surroundings and how we choose to integrate them to fit within our comfortable understanding of our reality.

CA: How do you move across such a variety of artistic mediums, from drawings to videos, from slide installation to painting?

BM: I studied painting and that's the thing I do the least right now. I guess it's a combination of me getting bored easily but also the fact that I enjoy exploring new mediums and trying to stretch their potential in new directions. Of course, inevitably, there are usually a lot of failures and unsatisfactory results, but as long as it's a fun process where one exciting discovery or technical detail leads to another, I'm happy with those failures when they occur. It's really about a constant search to find the best way to communicate my ideas, and because my ideas and interests keep developing and sometimes even changing drastically, it only makes sense to work with different mediums to reflect those changes.

CA: What role does music play in your videos?

BM: I try to put a lot of effort into the soundtracks of my films, especially in the ones that have no spoken narrative. I try to work with layering samples in a way that what you hear doesn't always respond to what you see literally - something I also do often with combinations of text or spoken narratives and moving or still images - but still feels right and somehow surprisingly familiar. There is no guaranteed formula for that, sometimes it just happens and sometimes I struggle with a soundtrack for days. Music is part of some of those layered soundtracks. I either play and record the instruments myself or use existing small samples and loop, stretch or reverse them. My biggest concern is that people won't get bored while watching my films and any soundtrack can have a critical influence on whether they do or not.

CA: Does climate change affect your work?

BM:I can't think of a direct connection, but I'm always reading about science among other interests and I believe that everything affects everything else indirectly and those influences could take years to surface in a work of art. In a way, I hope that we won't get to a point where climate change starts affecting my work physically. That would be an indication that it is affecting millions of more important things that can ruin many peoples' lives.

Tune in next Tuesday, November 19, for the third installment of #SolarPanel featuring Neil Beloufa!

In April and May of 2012, the High Line screened Sturtevant’s Warhol Empire State (1972), an appropriation of Andy Warhol’s film Empire (1964) on High Line Channel 22. Warhol Empire State was both emblematic of Sturtevant’s career and related to the ethos of Manhattan in its inclusion of one of New York’s most popular architectural icons. The film consists of a single black-and-white shot of the iconic Empire State Building over the course of an evening, from 8:06 PM on July 25to 2:42 AM on July 26, 1964. As an excruciatingly long ode to one of New York’s most iconic buildings, the video acts as a meditation on the passage of time as well as the limits of representation. Some have even deemed the original video “unwatchable” for its deadpan view and length. The video was shown on the High Line at West 22nd Street, where visitors could also see the real Empire State Building in the distance. In juxtaposing the real with its representation, Sturtevant’s reinstallation of the piece on the High Line emphasized the concepts of simulacrum and simulation in contemporary culture. 

A predecessor of the Pictures Generation of the 1970s which included artists such as Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince, Sturtevant’s work highlighted the issues of originality and authenticity in media saturated culture at an extremely early point in art history, paving the way for future appropriation artists. Her work on the High Line reminded us that these issues are just as prevalent as they were in 1972, and continue to concern artists today.

- Kat Widing