Park Avenue Armory — Attraction in New York

Beautiful place, Search

SUBSCRIBE

LOG IN

Art & Design

ART REVIEW

Watch Out: You’re in Ai Weiwei’s Surveillance Zone

Surveillance images from overhead cameras are projected on the floor as part of “Hansel & Gretel,” an installation at the Park Avenue Armory created by Ai Weiwei and the architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron.

AGATON STROM FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

By ROBERTA SMITH

JUNE 8, 2017

With “Hansel & Gretel,” the Park Avenue Armory once again aims ambitiously, and at great expense, for participatory public art but settles instead for public entertainment. In this latest attempt, the subject is surveillance. Your every move is eerily recorded from above by a grid of cameras, which register your ghostly image beneath your feet, while a few tethered drones buzz overhead.

Yet surveillance, so much a part of everyday life, is mostly reduced from threat to mildly educational fun here. The work encourages further variations on the snow-angel selfie, as visitors spread out on the floor and then rise, like Lazarus, leaving behind blurry images of themselves, which they rush to photograph. (It is, in fact, a selfie of a selfie.) At times the scene feels like a large, overactive picnic in a park.

A collaboration several years in the making, this immersive, super-high-tech installation in two parts reunites Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist-activist-dissident, with Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, the Swiss architects overseeing an inspired restoration of the armory’s historical building. The three worked together on the astounding-looking National Stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, a work of starchitecture whose basketlike structure is known as the Bird’s Nest.

Overhead surveillance cameras capture the images of people on the ground and projectors display their images on the floor beside them in “Hansel & Gretel.”

AGATON STROM FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

The armory project’s curators are Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries, a noncollecting exhibition space in London (for whom the artist and architects designed a collaborative pavilion in 2012), andTom Eccles, executive director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.

The work is one of those shows that has “How much did this cost?” written all over it. (The armory would not say.) It teems with fashionable relevance, dovetailing with newish knowledge that the National Security Agency spent yearscollecting emails and texts that Americans exchanged with people overseas, and at a time when the executive wing of the federal government is displaying disturbing...

Make sure you're there early for a production or else you won't be let in and will be left with worthless tickets that they call 'compensation', it is a cold hearted organization..

Here's my story;

We're 3 students studying at Pratt Institute who bought tickets for the production De Materie in March. The tickets were 47 dollars (they have no student discount and right now 47 dollars is a lot for me). Although we left on time after class, coming over all the way from Brooklyn we were late, thanks to the subway traffic. The girl who checked our names on the list said that that they could not let us in. We asked for a refund, she said that all sales were final and they did not do any refunds. She took our emails saying that we would be contacted about a compensation, perhaps tickets for another production during that week. We did not get any emails or phone calls about any compensation, until I decided to call the Armory. They told me that I would receive an email in a few days. The email I received said that they would give us 6 complementary tickets for an exhibition. I took a look at the exhibition which didn't seem very interesting and the tickets were 15 dollars! So I called them back saying that I didn't think that it was a fair compensation; first of all it's not a production and second of all there is a huge price gap. She said in a disinterested manner that they didn't have to compensate and that this exhibition was our only choice, take it or leave it. So here I am left with tickets to an exhibition which is obviously not nearly half as interesting as what I bought tickets for in the first place, thats 47 dollars out...

What a wonderful place, full of history and one of the oldest structures in New york city perhaps in the United States. I loved TIFFANY'S designs and Some of his finest pieces of Art are located in this Armory. This is a National Historic landmark and alternative arts space .in the actuality looks more like a museum with pictures , furniture and decorations from it's brilliant past ., this old building used to store provisions for the military, a library, dining room and staff offices for ten regimental companies.In the 1900 Architects and interior designers of the American Aesthetic Movement were commissioned to furnish the rooms and company quarters. The library is known as the Silver Room or "Trophy Room" and was designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany who worked with architect Stanford White as a consultant on the project. The masterpiece of the armory building is the Veterans Room, also known as the Tiffany Room, with hand carved wood panelling and coffered ceiling in the Viking Revival style. Other significant craftsmen with work in...