August 2011

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When Art Comes to Life

written by Stuart Mitchner

photography by Andrew Wilkinson and Benoit Cortet

Toward the end of Clifford W. Zink’s big lavishly illustrated volume The Roebling Legacy (see The Book Scene) there are images of Art All Night, the unique annual event that for one night every year illuminates one of the largest physical manifestations of that legacy, the sprawling 50,000-square-foot former Roebling Machine Shop and the adjacent Roebling Millyard. The photo of the vast interior of the building (built in 1890, expanded in 1901, added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1997) shows people strolling down either side of a wide avenue lined with art ranging from the free-form imagery of children to the work of inspired novices and professionals.

The image of the firelit millyard at night more closely resembles a fiesta south of the border than a Mercer County urban park in Trenton. Fiesta is the word for it, if you can imagine a 24-hour festival of art, music, films, and food where as many as 10,000 guests show up, just under a thousand of them with an artwork of their own to display. The gloriously democratic nature of the event would surely delight John Augustus Roebling, who came to America in 1831 as a young man inspired by his friend and teacher G.W.F. Hegel’s belief that “nothing great in the World has been accomplished without passion,” that “the essence of spirit is freedom,” and that America “with its firm freedom” is “the land of the future.”

Judging from the almost universally radiant faces of the 621 participants in Art All Night photographed by Andrew Wilkinson and Benoit Cortet, passion, spirit, and freedom are alive and well and burning bright in the land of the future that is 2011. What these photographers have conceived, created, accomplished, and simply allowed to happen here is remarkable on many levels, not least in the way that the people facing the camera, in terms of age, race, gender, size and shape, at once embody and celebrate the wondrously various nature of the event. This is art without airs, an unaffected creative force reflecting the enjoyment and excitement of an aesthetic resistant to borders or limits, which of course is in the very nature of a festival that refuses to confine itself to strict limits but that for 24 hours can flow freely.

When you consider how difficult it is to get people to look natural when they know they’re being photographed, what Wilkinson and Cortet have come up with here seems downright uncanny. No one, surely, had to tell these people to smile; the smiles alone would be enough to cheer you up should you be feeling low or lonely or down on life. Clearly one of the keys to the success of this artfully artless venture, which the artists are calling the Anthropological Wordsmith Picture Show, is the one-word sign each person has made and is holding. It’s almost inevitable that in the moment the picture is being taken they feel they are the word, which strikes some of them as silly or weird or fun or simply funny. Especially important is the way each person chooses to hold his or her word-self. Some people hold the paper shyly, some boldly, some sweetly, stylishly, even elegantly, forefingers slightly raised, pinkies extended. When the expressiveness of the hands complements or counterpoints in some quirky, human, mysterious way the expression of the face, then art and life come together so fluently, there’s nothing more to say but that they are one.

Other Area Exhibits:

Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, 33 Livingston Avenue, New Brunswick. Artists are invited to apply for Print and Paper Fellowships for a two-month residency at the Center. Artists will work with a master printer or papermaker to produce a print or handmade paper project. Participants will receive a $500 honorarium and 1/2 the edition. All projects will be completed within the residency period. This residency is open to artists on any medium. For full submission information contact brodsky_center@email.rutgers.edu. Firestone Library on the Princeton University campus. George Segal: Sculptor as Photographer will run through December 30 in the Milberg Gallery. A free public lecture “George Segal: Sculptor, Painter, Photographer,” with art historian Phyllis Tuchman, will also be held at 3PM Sunday, November 6, in McCormick Hall, Room 101. The Princeton University Art Museum on the Princeton campus. The Life and Death of Buildings, an indirect meditation on the upcoming 10th anniversary of September 11 doubles as a survey of photographs from the 1840s to the present. The exhibit will continue through November 6. The Bunnell Decades, which celebrates the work of Peter C. Bunnell, Princeton’s first professor of the history of photography, will be on view through October 23. Cartographies of Time has been extended through September 18, as has When Men and Mountains Meet: China as Land and People. Museum hours: Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday: 10AM to 5PM; Thursday, 10AM to 10PM; and Sunday, 1 to 5PM. For further information, call 609.258.3788. The University Medical Centerat Princeton (UMCP), 253 Witherspoon Street. Water, Water, Everywhere - Pastel Painting of Water Scenes, an art show and sale featuring works by Grace Previty Johnston will run through September 13. Presented by Community Connection of Princeton HealthCare, the art sale will benefit the Art for Healing program at UMCP. For more information, call 609.497.4192. The West Windsor Arts Council at the West Windsor Arts Center, 952 Alexander Road, Princeton Junction. The Arts Council will be presenting Global Rhythms, its 2011 Inaugural Members Exhibition reflecting and celebrating the multicultural world. The exhibit will run from September 3 to October 14. For more information call 609-716-1931 or visit www.westwindsorartscenter.org.

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