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“Windy” spins on New York’s High Line. (Courtesy Meriem Bennani, High Line Art, and Audemars Piguet)
“Windy” spins on New York’s High Line. (Courtesy Meriem Bennani, High Line Art, and Audemars Piguet)

On Manhattan’s High Line, Experimentation Leads to a Whirling, Whizzing, Whooshing Sculpture

Mara Fisher

July 6, 2022
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Rising from a patch of spiny ornamental grass on New York’s High Line park, a 9-foot-tall tornado spins in place, whirling with the fierce, relentless energy of a speeding locomotive—or, to use an apt Looney Toons analogy, the Tasmanian Devil. The arresting apparition? “Windy”, a new (and first-ever) sculpture by the Moroccan-born, New York–based artist Meriem Bennani, installed near West 23rd Street through May 2023. Best-known for her ambitious, often absurd videos, Bennani deftly mixes references from reality TV, cartoons, documentaries, and social media to tell stories about human behavior online and off. (Her viral video series, “2 Lizards” (2020), made with filmmaker Orian Barki and launched on Instagram at the start of the pandemic, depicted the bewildering experience of isolation with uncanny precision.)

“Windy,” Bennani’s first public artwork and stand-alone sculpture without a video component, allowed her to experiment with a new set of conceptual, material, and technical challenges. She programmed a set of 10 electric bike motors to power different sections of the kinetic form, made from some 200 discs of lightweight UV- and waterproof foam, allowing each area to revolve at different speeds and sequences. Both timeless and timely, “Windy” references, through its gyrations, the busy activity on Manhattan’s crowded sidewalks (including the High Line, which saw an estimated 8 million visitors in 2019) and the visual simulation felt upon returning to life after quarantine. The sculpture commands both a sense of wonder and anxiety as it spins. The idea was not necessarily one “of representing a tornado,” Bennani says, “but of making a tornado.”

“I hope they don’t try to touch it,” she says with a laugh, of onlookers and passersby, before confirming that there are indeed motion sensors installed to stop it.

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Meriem Bennani building “Windy.” (Courtesy Audemars Piguet)
Meriem Bennani building “Windy.” (Courtesy Audemars Piguet)
Foam disks for “Windy.” (Courtesy Audemars Piguet)
Foam disks for “Windy.” (Courtesy Audemars Piguet)
(From left) High Line director and chief curator Cecilia Alemani, Audemars Piguet Contemporary curator Audrey Teichmann, and High Line associate curator Melanie Kress. (Courtesy Audemars Piguet)
(From left) High Line director and chief curator Cecilia Alemani, Audemars Piguet Contemporary curator Audrey Teichmann, and High Line associate curator Melanie Kress. (Courtesy Audemars Piguet)
Meriem Bennani building “Windy.” (Courtesy Audemars Piguet)
Meriem Bennani building “Windy.” (Courtesy Audemars Piguet)
Foam disks for “Windy.” (Courtesy Audemars Piguet)
Foam disks for “Windy.” (Courtesy Audemars Piguet)
(From left) High Line director and chief curator Cecilia Alemani, Audemars Piguet Contemporary curator Audrey Teichmann, and High Line associate curator Melanie Kress. (Courtesy Audemars Piguet)
(From left) High Line director and chief curator Cecilia Alemani, Audemars Piguet Contemporary curator Audrey Teichmann, and High Line associate curator Melanie Kress. (Courtesy Audemars Piguet)
Meriem Bennani building “Windy.” (Courtesy Audemars Piguet)
Meriem Bennani building “Windy.” (Courtesy Audemars Piguet)
Foam disks for “Windy.” (Courtesy Audemars Piguet)
Foam disks for “Windy.” (Courtesy Audemars Piguet)
(From left) High Line director and chief curator Cecilia Alemani, Audemars Piguet Contemporary curator Audrey Teichmann, and High Line associate curator Melanie Kress. (Courtesy Audemars Piguet)
(From left) High Line director and chief curator Cecilia Alemani, Audemars Piguet Contemporary curator Audrey Teichmann, and High Line associate curator Melanie Kress. (Courtesy Audemars Piguet)

The project is the latest effort by Audemars Piguet Contemporary, an art initiative of the master Swiss watchmaker Audemars Piguet, which co-curated and co-commissioned “Windy” with High Line Art. “We wanted to support a moment in Meriem’s career as she explores the notion of sculpture,” says Audrey Teichmann, one of the organization’s in-house curators, noting that she and her team worked closely with Bennani throughout the project’s development. “The idea was to accompany a process.” Founded in 2012, Audemars Piguet Contemporary gives artists the time, funding, and help to manufacture and exhibit a work that represents a departure from their practice, resulting in forward-thinking commissions that participants may not have realized otherwise.

To date, Audemars Piguet Contemporary has worked with 20 artists and mounted 57 exhibitions of its commissioned pieces around the globe. These include “The Art of Listening: Under Water,” an immersive site-specific audio composition by sound artist Jana Winderen shown during Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019 (an iteration of the project was presented at Columbia University’s Lenfest Center for the Arts earlier this year); “Isle of Instability,” a record of multimedia artist Cao Fei’s daily activities during Beijing’s Covid-19 lockdowns that premiered at Shanghai’s West Bund Art & Design fair in 2020; and “Wild Constellations” a sonic artwork embedded in a wall of live moss created by artist Alexandre Joly and presented at the Art Basel fairs in Basel, Miami Beach, and Hong Kong in 2015. Joly recorded the natural and industrial sounds for his installation—including rustling tree leaves, cracking ice, and the ticking of a watch—in Switzerland’s Vallée de Joux and inside Audemars Piguet’s manufacture facility in the nearby village of Le Brassus, where the watchmaker was founded in 1875.

Like its parent company’s timepieces, Audemars Piguet Contemporary’s approach to its work stems from a commitment to demonstrating how works of art are about more than what meets the eye, and can act as vessels for ideas, craftsmanship, and imagination. “Contemporary art goes beyond first impressions,” Teichmann says, “and artists offer a critical perspective. We share a commitment with them to think radically and to explore the avant-garde.” Helping realize a twirling twister on the High Line certainly fits the bill. Embodying the organization’s creativity-let-loose ethos, Bennani’s sculpture also certainly makes for a fitting metaphor.

# Art# Sculpture# New York

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The “shite” (primary performer) in “Makura Jido” (“Chrysanthemum Boy”). (Photo: Yutaka Ishida. Courtesy Japan Society)

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Ever Heard of Noh Theater? Our Primer to Three Major Productions Arriving in New York City This Fall

Two winters ago, I picked up a copy of Penguin Classics’ Japanese Nō Dramas, a volume of two dozen translations by Royall Tyler I’d been meaning to read since tearing through Yukio Mishima’s Five Modern Noh Plays a decade previous. I had moved into a New York City gem (an apartment with a fireplace), and with Covid cases skyrocketing and temperatures dropping, I decided that a winter fireside with a handful of centennia-old ghost stories (cat in my lap, or reading aloud to a friend) might carry me away from the pandemic—from Brooklyn, 2020—to somewhere entirely distinct.

Cover of “The Seed Detective” (left). Adam Alexander (right). (Courtesy Chelsea Green Publishing)

nature

future

“Seed Detective” Adam Alexander Imagines a Better World—Through Rare, Endangered, and Unusual Vegetable Varieties

For British author, TV gardening producer, and “seed detective” Adam Alexander, the supermarket serves as perhaps the finest symbol of our modern food systems and their discontents. Of course, there’s undeniable quantitative material abundance, with aisles upon aisles of vegetable varieties—chopped, pickled, canned, and fresh—all that one could imagine within the confines of some idea of a generic palette. But it arrives at a qualitative price, and not just in terms of flavor, but also in context, in our ability to see this food as a part of our own story—as a connection to the land we live on or a cornerstone of the traditions we uphold. Vegetables are more than just so many anonymous pounds on a scale. “This strong connection with the land and what we grow and what we put in our own mouths has been lost, especially in the U.K.,” Alexander says. “To me, it’s really important that we try to reconnect and recognize that these vegetables are part of our human story and, in that way, we can do a lot to serve rare and endangered varieties.”

Courtesy Assouline

culture

Why Audemars Piguet’s Royal Oak Remains One of the Most Enduring Watches Ever

Designed in 1972, at a time when a luxury watch made of steel was still a radical concept, Audemars Piguet’s nautical-inspired Royal Oak captured the “stealth wealth” style of the moment, mirroring the cutting-edge ethos of the French fashion scene (think: Hubert de Givenchy, Yves Saint Laurent, Emanuel Ungaro, Pierre Cardin), as well as the era’s groundbreaking architecture, such as Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano’s inside-out postmodernist Pompidou Centre in Paris, completed in 1977. “To me, the Royal Oak is a work of art that happens to be a watch,” says British GQ editor Bill Prince, author of the new book Royal Oak: From Iconoclast to Icon (Assouline), coming out October 12. “It’s one of those works of culture that has managed to cut through time, in the sense that it was born of an era, but it already had the criteria to be bigger than the era.”

Courtesy Olivia Sammons

culture

A New Zine Highlights the Poetry and Beauty of Food

Each of us has our own individual way of following the changing of the seasons, a private choreography in relationship to the calendar. For interior designer and prop stylist Olivia Sammons, the produce available from the farms, orchards, and markets near her family’s Hudson Valley home marks time for her, leading her forward through the year. “I spend so much time thinking about food,” she says. “What I’m going to eat, where I’m going to find it, which orchard has the best blueberries.” This focus led her to create the new zine Is My Favorite Flavor, which just launched its first issue, appropriately titled Summer! Is My Favorite Flavor, at the design-focused Head Hi bookshop and café in Brooklyn.

Photo: John C. Hawthorne. Courtesy Alex Tatarsky.

culture

Alex Tatarsky on Art as a Means to Live Out the Absurd

It’s late August, and I’m walking on Grand Street in Lower Manhattan. It’s one of those summer evenings that’s cooler than expected, a pleasant foreshadowing of fall. I’m on my way to discuss compost with the artist Alex Tatarsky, and as I head east from the subway, I pass through the dense, networked scents of the edge of Chinatown: the briny tang of fish markets, the sweet snatch of a fresh egg waffle from a rolled ice cream shop, the yeasty cloud that floats around the famous bialy shop. Approaching Abrons Art Center, where Tatarsky is doing pick-up rehearsals for an out-of-town run of their show Dirt Trip, this close-packed olfactory landscape opens up into something with more space: a faint vegetal whiff from a small vacant lot, the not unpleasant chemical tang from a passing truck, and beyond these, the smell of a certain rot rolling in from the East River.

Courtesy Blue Note Records

culture

An Album of Cover Songs Honors the Legacy of Leonard Cohen

Though nearly six years have gone by since Leonard Cohen’s passing, the long shadow cast by his legacy as one of the 20th century’s most esteemed and idiosyncratic singer-songwriters shows no signs of lifting from the public’s imagination anytime soon. From the enveloping warmth of “Suzanne,” to the high drama of “Hallelujah,” to the chilling minimalist and gospel juxtaposition of his swansong “You Want it Darker,” Cohen managed to constantly reinvent himself, leaving behind the rare achievement of a musical body of work whose most impressive moments exist across eras.