A VISION WHOSE HARSHNESS IS MITIGATED BY DISTANCE

7wtc2holzerI learned about this Jenny Holzer piece, titled,  "Le Courbusier" on Curbed and went to James Wagner’s site for more.

James Wagner lives in New York and writes about art and politics on jameswagner.com. He is the editor, along with Barry Hoggard, of the arts calendar ArtCal. He had this to say about the piece at the new 7 WTC.

I think it will look fine, perhaps even very, very fine. At least
from a distance the Childs building seems to be an improvement over the
old 7 WTC, even if much of its virtue may be tied to its glassy near
invisibility. I worked in the old fortress for years, and even with a
lobby stocked with decent, large-scale late twentieth-century art I
shuddered every time I had to walk to or from the elevators. The
Lichtenstein, the Held, the Nevelson and the Bleckner [all destroyed]
were all basically add-ons inside that pompous and brutally cold
corporate control center lobby.

Today’s article describes some of the process of the collaboration
between the artist, architect David Childs and developer Larry
Silverstein. While it clearly won’t be one of Holzer’s more provocative
projects (the texts which had to be cleared by Silverstein, will
apparently be as close to sweetness and light as Manhattan ever gets),
we may still be able to hope for more later on: "I hope to feed it
again," Ms. Holzer said. "It would be nice to keep it alive."

For the sake of all of us, I wish her success.

*
the complete quote reads:

The George Washington Bridge
over the Hudson is the most beautiful bridge in the world. Made of
cables and steel beams, it gleams in the sky like a reversed arch. It
is blessed. It is the only seat of grace in the disordered city. It is
painted an aluminum color and, between water and sky, you see nothing
but the bent cord supported by two steel towers. When your car moves up
the ramp, the two towers rise so high that it brings you happiness;
their structure is so pure, so resolute, so regular that here, finally, steel architecture
seems to laugh… The second tower is very far away; innumerable vertical
cables, gleaming across the sky, are suspended from the magisterial
curve that swings down and then up. The rose-colored towers of New York
appear, a vision whose harshness is mitigated by distance.

The quote is by Le Courbousier