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Object Lessons

Object Lesson #11

by Stephen Kobasa | May 19, 2009 10:56 am | Comments (0)

SNET.JPGVestibule
The Eli Apartments
227 Church Street

Or it would be, if one could gain entrance. But the doorways of Oz are often locked, and there is not always a working bell. My opportunity for access had some resemblance to the Cowardly Lion slipping inside the witch’s castle before the gate clanged shut, though without the costume and spear. I mention this only because objects of splendor such as this lobby are not always restored when the building which contains them is given over to other uses, as has happened in this case.

But the developers of the former SNET building, originally constructed in 1937 to a design by architects R.W. Foote and Douglas Orr, have been considerate and thorough in their preservation of what were once the spaces most open to the traffic of the city around them. All the burnished details recall the glory of local public utilities, before deregulation and mergers displaced them to banal corporate malls in the suburbs. But salvation has come at a price. Now a container for luxury apartments, the building has become a private confine, as if one of those outlying gated communities had been transported downtown to keep fear at bay.

One can always peer through the glass doors, which are at least still transparent. Or perhaps present oneself, lavishly dressed, as an interested buyer, and demand to see every surviving art deco flourish close up.

Continue reading ‘Object Lesson #11’

Ojbect Lesson #3

by Stephen Kobasa | Mar 31, 2009 11:55 am | Comments (2)

Falco.JPG

Richard Falco, untitled (self-titled), found wood, 2006 and ongoing
Museum of False Art
510 Derby Avenue
West Haven

Nature and art struggle with a co-dependency that is both inevitable and unnerving. New Haven artist Richard Falco has discovered a way of resolving that tension in this assemblage of woodland debris that dances somewhere between accident and intent. While it suggests the work of the British sculptor Andy Goldsworthy, it has none of that artist’s studied contrivance or illusory perfection. There are puzzles in the twigs for which Falco finds one solution, and then another. Time and weather collaborate, rather than damage. What you see in the photograph is not what exists at this moment, and that, too, may well have been altered by the time you seek it out, if you do. The work is always complete. And never.