At Moynihan Train Hall, Joshua Frankel’s piece functions, whether he wants it to or not, as another ad for us to ignore.
Zendaya, the stunning actress, hovers in front of the great Victory of Samothrace at the Louvre, her black cape spreading out to echo the classical statue’s white wings. “BEAUTY IS A LIVING ART,” reads the tagline, in this sleek ad for Lancôme cosmetics playing across the 160-foot width of the video screens in Amtrak’s Moynihan Train Hall.
Those screens, four of them, then display some stills, rather less sleek, of the N.F.L. quarterback Jalen Hurts in his green Eagles jersey, with copy that proclaims “HULU HAS LIVE SPORTS.”
And finally they’re filled with a hand-drawn animation, in scrawly white on black, of a crowd of figures crossing and recrossing some empty urban space.
You guess at the text that might follow: “Citibank: By New Yorkers, For New Yorkers.”
Or maybe: “Zoloft: For When You Feel Lost in the Crowd.”
And then you spot the actual copy, briefly splashed across the leftmost screen: “JOSHUA FRANKEL: WITHIN THE CROWD THERE IS A QUALITY.” With no corporate name in view and a text that’s more than a little opaque, the right savvy viewer might recognize this as art.
Frankel’s 42-second animation, alternating with just over 14 minutes of ads, is in fact the latest offering in the Moynihan Train Hall Public Art Program, which presents permanent works by major figures such as Kehinde Wiley and Stan Douglas as well as temporary pieces like Frankel’s video art, which will be on the hall’s screens through Nov. 14 as part of the Art at Amtrak series. Frankel will be followed on the Moynihan screens by a roster of leading artists that includes Shahzia Sikander, a Pakistani American inspired by Persian and Indian miniatures, and William Kentridge, the South African famous for his socially conscious animations.
Those screens themselves prove how central video is to our culture: It has become ever-present on our phones and TVs, in our stadiums and bars — and even in our train halls. That ubiquity has also made video the medium of choice for some of the best art of the past few decades. Landmark video pieces like Christian Marclay’s “The Clock” or Arthur Jafa’s “Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death” take our normal screen experiences and push them to new and surprising places.
The challenge for Frankel’s video is to do that in the train hall, and it can’t. His animation, so sensitive and unassuming, looks like just the kind of handcrafted imagery a bank or a drugmaker would deploy to humanize its public image — to set it off, for instance, from the gloss of luxury cosmetics. Frankel’s piece matches our expectations for screen-play rather than transcending them, which means we’re not likely to notice it at all. And indeed, over the course of something like 45 minutes of observation in Moynihan on a busy Friday evening, I was unable to spot a single traveler giving Frankel’s work more than the most passing glance.
But that’s not Frankel’s fault.
I couldn’t spot anyone in the hall taking in any of the other imagery that played across its four giant screens either, whether in an ad for a car, a delivery service, a blockbuster movie or for Amtrak itself. Now that smartphones allow us to program our screens with content we’ve actually chosen, we’ve gotten better than ever at ignoring content chosen by companies and ad execs, on screens we can’t control. Instead of having to compete for our attention, you might say that Frankel has to compete for our inattention — a much harder task.
Like lots of critics, curators and artists, I’ve always thought it made a lot of sense to insert video art, or art of almost any kind, into our everyday lives and communal spaces. It’s been at least 70 years, in fact, since the art world started talking about collapsing the gap between art and life, and I’ve been one of its more recent talkers. But Frankel’s piece has got me rethinking that.
I have a feeling his video would have had a lot more impact and meant a lot more to me — would have gotten a far longer look, from anyone who saw it — had it been shown in a space custom-made for us to think artistic thoughts. I’d go so far as to say that such context is pretty much what makes art, art: Hang Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” in a public washroom, and it’s just a urinal; put the Mona Lisa on a poster, and it’s probably working as décor or a souvenir, not as the subject for truly artistic contemplation. You might say that any picture or object is only really art when it’s busy functioning as that, usually because there’s some clue to tell us that’s what it is. And up on the screens at Moynihan, Frankel’s piece functions, whether he wants it to or not, as another ad for us to ignore. The next videos in the Art at Amtrak series will face the same challenge. We’ll have to see if even the famous animations of William Kentridge will manage to meet it. It seems likely that they, too, will meet eyes so skilled at looking away from ads that there’s no getting them to look at art that fills the same space.
Art has to stand out as signal from the noise of all the non-art out there. In a public setting like Moynihan Hall, only something unavoidably radical would have a chance of doing that. Frankel’s subtlety just leaves his piece drowned out. But would corporate titans stand to see their ads screened alongside art that’s wild enough to outshine them? A video that aims to be our era’s Victory of Samothrace might cast shade on a Lancôme lipstick.
