IT’S 10 A.M. AND Anne Pasternak, president of the 33-year-old public art organization Creative Time, is listing the tasks she’s already completed for the day.
“I sat on my yoga mats, went to the bank, sent my daughter a care package, wrote a grant”—she paused briefly before cheerily continuing—“sent three thank you letters and did all my emails for the day.”
So far, I’d only made it to the High Line to meet Pasternak. Creative Time is responsible for The River That Flows Both Ways, an installation on the newly land scaped train tracks by Brooklyn-based glass artist Spencer Finch.While not as sexy as David Byrne’s popular Playing the Building installed last year in the Battery Maritime Building, it does enliven an otherwise difficult to program space. Selected from five short listed proposals, Finch’s work references both the natural movement of the Hudson River and the railroad once on the High Line. The window itself is an abstract document of a 700-minute boat trip across the water; the color of each pane of glass represents a sequential pixel point from a chrono logically arranged grid of photographs taken on the minute.The work represents one of two commissions Creative Time will oversee for the High Line.The second, to be installed in another tunnel space, will be announced later this fall.
As we walk along the tracks, Pasternak tells me that her colleagues encouraged her to create a sculpture park here. “But I just think it’s kind of tired,” she admits, expressing a disinterest in the exhibition format. “The [park] design itself is so beautiful, I don’t know that you need to plop sculptures down here.” During the planning phases of the park, Friends of the High Line approached Creative Time with a parcel of real estate resembling a tunnel—something that couldn’t be refurbished with architecture or design. “It was my favorite space because it was so weird,” Pasternak beams. “The artists are either going to hate it or love it, and we’re going to find the artists who love it.”
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By 12:30, we’re on Governor’s Island. Pasternak hops on the back of a rented bike and takes off across a path. I can barely keep up, partially because she’s the public art Energizer Bunny, but also because she managed to get the better bike. So, I lag behind as we head toward the works that comprise This World & Nearer Ones, a series of large installations that are part of Creative Time’s first quadrennial.
The High Line and Governor’s Island both opened in June, and all summer Pasternak has been touting both. That’s what she does. Since joining Creative Time in 1994, Pasternak has spearheaded the group’s mission of commissioning ambitious projects by high profile artists. Doug Aitken’s Sleepwalkers undoubtedly provides the most recent example of this, a giant 2007 video installation resembling an Apple ad projected on MoMA’s facade.
Creative Time’s efforts at Governor’s Island out perform the Aitken project, though the quadrennial isn’t without its problems. Assembled by staff curator Mark Beasley, the project is so tightly bound conceptually, virtually every project Pasternak introduces of the 19 selected have a rationale relating to the history of the island behind it. As a curatorial and artistic practice, it’s a little tedious. Lawrence Weiner’s red text stenciled on the pier, “AT THE SAME MOMENT,” reminds visitors of the transition between those leaving and coming to the island, while Mark Wallinger’s signs hanging over passage points in the ferry—one reads “Goats,” the other “Sheep”—similarly encourage viewers to contemplate duality.
“There’s a subtext of the morose in the exhibition,” she tells me as we cycle. “I think they [the artists] are asking meaningful questions about what we chose to preserve…” When Governor’s Island closes for the season on Oct. 11, Pasternak and her dedicated crew will move on to the next big undertaking.
So far that includes a collaboration with Glenn Kaino to create a “magic show” as part of the Performa 09 biennial.
Still, for the time being, Pasternak rides around the island like a woman on social speed. Between the bike rack and the first fork in the road, we’ve run into no less than six people she knows. Everyone seems to like her. I’m no exception, though I find her enthusiasm about public art a little exhausting. “Creative Time is one of those organizations where we like to discover new space and then we like to leave it!” she tells me breathlessly, pedaling her bike across what’s been her most ambitious project yet. “We get a little bored.”
