The New York Times - USA (2020-08-06)

THURSDAY, AUGUST 6, 2020C1

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NEWS CRITICISM

6 MUSIC

The Salzburg Festival scales

down. BY A. J. GOLDMANN

3 EXHIBITIONS

Racial issues end Lincoln

Library show. BY SARAH BAHR

6 BOOK REVIEW

How American

immigration laws

are weaponized.

BY JENNIFER SZALAI

WITH MORE RESIDENTSthan Dallas, more
than Atlanta and San Francisco combined,
the Bronx is a vast, vibrant megalopolis,
which also happens to be New York City’s
greenest borough. It’s home to the largest
urban zoological garden in America, a park
system nearly 10 times the size of Manhat-
tan’s Central Park — and the city’s last re-
maining patch of old growth forest.
A few months ago, for a series of (edited
and condensed) walks around town, Eric W.
Sanderson and I toured Lower Manhattan,
pretending it was circa 1609, the year Henry
Hudson sailed through the Narrows into
New York Harbor. Mr. Sanderson is a senior
conservation ecologist for the Wildlife Con-
servation Society, based at the Bronx Zoo.
He is also a longtime resident of the bor-
ough’s City Island. “My beloved Min-
newits,” he calls it, using the Lenape name.
For this installment, we explore a swath
of the Bronx before it was consolidated and
became part of New York City in 1898. The
walk, conducted virtually, by phone, starts
near Yankee Stadium, once the site of a salt
marsh, near a ridge the Lenape knew as
Keskeskich, today called Woodycrest Ave-
nue. Our walk ends at the Bronx Zoo.
In all, we (virtually) traverse about four

miles. Full disclosure: Halfway through the

walk, Mr. Sanderson suggested we cheat,

slightly. He recommended hopping on the

BX21 bus on the floor of an ancient creek

bed carved thousands of years ago by a

glacier out of the borough’s marble bedrock.

On Google Maps it’s called Third Avenue.

MICHAEL KIMMELMANEric, I assume geolog-

ically speaking this walk is different from

the one we took through Lower Manhattan.

ERIC SANDERSONYou know what geologists

say.

KIMMELMANNo, I don’t.

SANDERSON The Bronx is gneiss, Manhat-

tan is schist.

KIMMELMANI’m sorry to hear that.

SANDERSONThe Bronx is the only part of

New York City that’s actually attached to

the rest of North America. Manhattan and

Staten Island are islands, Brooklyn and

Queens are part of Long Island — meaning

the city is basically an archipelago in an es-

tuary exceptfor the Bronx, where you can

walk to Connecticut and farther north. The

borough’s geology has had a tremendous in-

fluence on its ecology and development.

MICHAEL KIMMELMAN CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK

ZACK DeZON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Before Yankees Strode the Bronx

Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, top, was once the site of a salt marsh, perhaps like the one imagined above.

ERIC MEHL/THINK HYPOTHETICAL, INC.; JESSE MOY; ERIC SANDERSON/WILDLIFE CONSERVATION SOCIETY

Long ago, the borough was ‘an ecological wonderland.’ Bits of that past still speak to those who know where to look.

CONTINUED ON PAGE C4

LONDON — The artist Heather Phillipson’s

latest work is a 31-foot statue of a dollop of

whipped cream, with a fly on it.

This one hasn’t been easy. In March, the

work was meant to be installed on an empty

plinth in Trafalgar Square, the latest in a se-

ries of commissions that brings contempo-

rary art to the central London plaza. But on

the day the installation was scheduled to be-

gin, Britain went into lockdown.

Soon after, she was having conversations

with the London city officials about whether

the work could be installed during the pan-

demic at all. The work’s title, “The End,”

didn’t have the best connotations at a mo-

ment when thousands were dying.

“It started to feel like there’d never be a

good time, or a right time, for it to go up,”

Phillipson said in a recent interview at her

East London studio.

On Thursday, “The End” was finally un-

veiled. Phillipson said the work had been

conceived in 2016, not long after Britain

voted to leave the European Union, and she

had wanted the creamy sculpture, which

looks as if it could ooze off its platform, to

look precarious, because that’s how the

world felt back then. Recently, she added,

things have gotten worse.

But people could read the statue however

they wanted, Phillipson said: She would

even be happy if they just saw it as a bit of

fun.

“Personally, I’m drawn to stuff that baf-
fles me,” she said. “If I don’t get it, that’s
when I’m hooked.”
Enjoying being confused is central to the
charm of Phillipson’s works, whose bright,
over-the-top exteriors often belie their
dark, urgent messages about environmen-
tal destruction or humanity’s treatment of
animals. She is a vegan (since “before it was
fashionable”) and her interviews are lit-
tered with talk of impending planetary
doom.
“The End” is a more ambiguous piece,
but a huge planned installation at Tate Brit-
ain is perhaps more typical: Phillipson will
turn the museum’s central gallery into “a
suite of deranged landscapes, addressing
the earth as a thinking eruption, on the
Heather Phillipson and her statue “The End” in Trafalgar Square in London.

TOM JAMIESON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Darkness Looms Under Sugar Coating

Viewers may smile, but these

sculptures bear urgent ideas.

By ALEX MARSHALL

CONTINUED ON PAGE C2