Foggy Day 2003 (partial installation view), water, plants, trees, rubber. [Enlarge in New Window]

Matthew Geller: Foggy Day

Have you ever come upon a dark city street and felt irresistibly attracted to its air of mystery or lured by the feeling that something thrilling might happen there? With the installation Foggy Day, Matthew Geller will take just such a shadowy, urban setting and supply the surprise -- large trees, inviting benches, and an oversized bird feeder. Underfoot will be a springy surface: a giant puddle of multicolored translucent rubber. And at different times throughout the day, a wall of fog will rise, lowering the temperature by as much as 20 degrees. The result is a nebulous, enchanting space that functions as a threshold between the unattractive and the appealing, the scary and the seductive. "It's like a cross-dissolve in film," says Geller, "where two related but distinct images overlap--each only being half there."

He already has most of the installation's technical details hammered out, having installed a similar piece--fog machine, rubber, and all--on a public street in Rotterdam in 1999. Aside from being much larger in scale, Foggy Day will take important cues from its new site, Cortlandt Alley, a dim, narrow passage in downtown Manhattan. "Cortlandt Alley has a theatrical mystery to it," Geller says. "If you stand in the alley and look up, you'll see fire escapes, half-open steel shutters, and steam coming out of windows from the factories above. All I'm doing is taking what's already there and exaggerating it."

After his original site in New York's Financial District fell through during the permissions process, the artist dutifully entered into another lengthy application process for Cortlandt Alley situated a block south of Canal Street. "I'd really like to do it in other locations," Geller says. "It's about taking a disregarded or ignored site, wherever it happens to be, and shifting the balance."

The lines between the given and the imagined, nonfiction and fiction, are ones that Geller has been exploring for the better part of his career. Having started out as a sculptor at the end of the 1970s, the New York-based artist took a decade-long detour into videomaking in the 1980s, making short and feature-length narratives with one foot in the experimental, one foot in the suburban living room. "My notion," Geller explains, "was that these experimental pieces would be understood by unitiated viewers because the videotapes relied on knowledge that the viewers already have about TV narrative structure." But in the early '90s, Geller began to find that the creeping rhythm of videomaking (producing one videotape every 18 or 24 months) no longer suited him. In recent years he's applied his flair for storytelling and the cinematic to constructing miniature basements and bizarrely scaled, empty buildings. "Basements, empty buildings, and alleyways share something in common: lots of bad or secret things seem to happen in all three places," Geller insists. "If you were to walk by Cortlandt Alley, you could immediately imagine a crime scene in the movies or real life. It's one of those almost forgotten, often lonely places, where almost anything can happen."

For Geller, the possibility of integrating the everyday, the mundane, into the work is part of what's so exciting about public art. "People aren't coming to it with the same prejudices or expectations they might bring to art in a museum," he contends. "I'm sure some who come to this installation won't know it's art, and won't care it's art. I don't think interacting with it will feel awkward or forced." Passersby can choose to view Foggy Day from one-and-a-half blocks away, or they can walk right into it. The story that unfolds there is up to them.

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THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Visual > Sculpture | The Built Environment | Environment | History | New York | 2000