James Nares

Manhattan is an odd tabula rasa. In the press release for his latest exhibition, James Nares is quoted as saying that Lower Manhattan “nurtured the talent of a generation inspired by its vast emptiness.” While his statement of course misconstrues the centuries of building and demolition that preceded this artist’s arrival to the metropolitan site, such a willful denial of precedent is not uncommon in an emerging generation of makers. That said, the citation has a certain resonance with the works on view, which include drawings, photographs, diagrams, and objects that depict a Lower Manhattan nearly absent of inhabitants and vehicles—most notably, the 1976 film Pendulum, in which the artist hung a wire with a lead concrete sphere at its end from a footbridge on Staple Street. The length of the suspension allows the ball to swing almost the entire span of the alley. Though there is a scientistic pretense here (mass, energy, movement), the groan of the wire, combined with a multiplicity of almost expressionist shots that include some dramatic angles featuring the artist’s body and shadow, result in something totally anathema to physics class.

With this exhibition, the pendulum is swung into our present, and it necessarily picks up new connotations along the way. September 11, which would become an ideological “blank slate” that denied the consideration of precedents and justified a general clampdown on public space, came to mind. When looking back, however, it is important to stay wary of idealizations of 1970s New York; the city teetered on bankruptcy and large sections of the population lived in poverty. Nevertheless, given the current ubiquity of security guards, surveillance cameras, and cops in Lower Manhattan, this document of scaling a city structure, suspending a ball, and letting it swing freely may generate, as it did for me, a kind of magical thinking in New York now.