Terry Smith, Then and Now
In conversation, Terry calls the project Broken Capital. We hedged a bit with the official title, eventually settling on Capital Revisited, in reference to Capital, the vast (and semi-legal) drawing of an Ionic column Terry cut into a wall at the British Museum in 1995.
Capital Revisited, Terry’s series of temporary wall and window drawings of a Corinthian capital, appeared at five sites around the Bowery in May of 2013: Ideal Glass; the back wall of LaMaMa Theater; the basement of LaMaMa (a temporary studio space for Terry); First Street Green Park; and L’Apicio restaurant. Capital Revisited was The Drawing Center’s contribution to IDEAS CITY, the festival founded by the New Museum to investigate the future of cities. For Terry, cities are concentrations of resources that are unfairly dispersed, yet full of hidden or unrealized potential. Hence, broken capital: the drawing appeared in pieces, huge and abstracted – impossible to ignore, but resistant to interpretation.
Capitals appear all over New York. Imprinting them onto the city’s grand old buildings at first seems like a laudatory gesture, but the confusion between surface and structure slowly manifests as a gentle provocation. Terry’s drawn columns are representations of power; stripped of their architectural purpose, they hover between use and decoration.
The exhibition Document, at The Drawing Center, is another kind of displacement: it presents the essentially ephemeral experience that is public art, in a gallery space. Each site for Capital Revisited was found with the indispensable help of the directors of Fourth Arts Block, and the generosity of the managers of each of the sites. As a result, for nearly a month, Terry worked in the basement of the historic LaMaMa Theater, the former screening room of the venerable Millennium Film Archive, making hundreds of drawings. Likewise, the work was installed with invaluable support from Jason Voegele of Republic Worldwide, while the time-lapse film of Terry working, viewable on our website, was a spontaneous contribution by local filmmaker Chuck Smith. Terry’s work draws attention to these invisible and underground aspects of artistic practice, while rendering the resulting work indefinite, elusive - always open to another visit.
Nova Benway
Technically we used a process of wheat paste. This was a mixture of flour and water to create a sticky paste that would last only for a short duration.
Wheat paste is a simple DIY adhesive popular among street artists, guerilla marketers, and craft enthusiasts. You can make a simple wheat paste by whisking flour and cool water together and then adding it to boiling water.
Site visit Feb 2013
It was a cold February, snow and wind. Nova, Blake and Aimee took me on a walk around possible sites for the street intervention
Nova Benway, Blake Ruehrwein and Aimee Goode
