Nicole Eisenman’s Fantastic Crashed Crane and Other Mind-Altering Artworks Around NYC

How do you measure the success of a public artwork? Maybe when it becomes a landmark, like Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s sly Spoonbridge and Cherry (1988) in Minneapolis. Or perhaps when it delights the cognoscenti with conceptual innovations, like Pierre Huyghe’s surreal dog park from Documenta 13. Or maybe when it comes to deliver a potent message, a la Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’s Liberty Enlightening the World (1876–86)—a.k.a. the Statue of Liberty.

Nicole Eisenman’s enthralling new work in Manhattan’s Madison Square Park, Fixed Crane (2024), manages all that, as well as another feat as well: It delights kids. The piece is a 90-foot-long Link-Belt crane that Eisenman has flipped onto its side in the center of the park. When I stopped by last week, children of all ages were climbing this absolute beast of a machine. Bigger ones had mounted its overturned cab, nine feet in the air (which looked wonderfully dangerous), while little tikes were carefully moving along its skeletal red boom, guided by caregivers.

A tiny opening in the back of Eisenman’s sculpture contains a secret. Photo by Andrew Russeth

Potential readings—some spelled out in a concise curatorial text—are clear enough. Eisenman, a Brooklyner, has brought down a potent symbol of growth, making the vertical horizontal, and she is perhaps mocking the unlovely “supertall” buildings that have gone up nearby to serve the ultra-wealthy. This crane is old, from 1969, and so there is also a layer of melancholy: An already outmoded belief in progress is now a beached whale. It is its own graveyard.

The piece is not gloomy, though, because of playful little alterations that Eisenman has made. Bandages are wrapped around part of the boom, as if mending a fracture, and a (Jeff Koons-style) shiny magenta nipple ring is affixed to part of it. Some of its components have been transformed into benches and chairs (always welcome in a park). Oh, and look over there, on the back of the cab: There’s a little rectangular opening. Look inside and you will see—spoiler alert—a tiny figure who is hiding from the cold, roasting something over an open flame. (It’s not the first time that Eisenman has built an Étant donnés-like peephole.)

Refashioning dilapidated equipment for new ends, Eisenman invites viewers to dream a bit, and to ask more of public space. Where else might someone seek shelter now? What else could be reengineered for productive—or just joyous—uses today? Her work is on view only through March 5 of next year— but those questions are not going to become less important anytime soon.

Sydney Shen’s SBNO (Standing But Not Operating), 2024, in Riverside Park. Photo by Andrew Russeth

When I stopped by Sydney Shen’s enormous new sculpture in Riverside Park on the Hudson River at West 61st Street one recent morning, there were no children present, which was just as well because it is much less easy to climb than Eisenman’s crane, and it would frighten a certain percentage of them, I suspect. The work takes the form of a metronome that has come to a halt mid-beat—a memento mori whose deathly radiance is heightened by the rather unsettling presence of a white spinal column at its center. The piece’s scale makes it at once frightening and a little amusing. (Behold: a partially anthropomorphized skeleton keeper of time.)

Shen, who’s based in Manhattan, is presenting her thrilling piece as part of “Works in Public 2024,” an exhibition from the Art Students League of New York and the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation that runs through August 31, 2025. She has titled it SBNO (Standing But Not Operating), a term for decommissioned amusement park attractions. There is a hint that her sculpture is also a carnival ride (or a model for one): a wooden seat takes the place of the pendulum’s weight, and while it is too small for an actual rider, it is easy enough to imagine the fear that you overtake you, perched high up in the air as it sways back and forth. Given the state of the world, in some sense, we are all up there right now.

A mighty 60-year-old locomotive in Riverside Park in Manhattan.

A bonus attraction sits a few feet away from Shen’s Halloween delight, a massive locomotive that was relocated from Brooklyn to this riverside park in a nod to the area’s former life as a train yard. A walkway has been erected that allows you to get up close to this finely wrought 95-ton behemoth (which is just five years older than Eisenman’s crane). It’s a beauty. Seeing it, I suddenly found myself mourning the fact that Jeff Koons’s ridiculous 2012 proposal to hang a replica 1942 steam locomotive above the High Line was never realized. (It was estimated to cost $25 million back then. Even if the cost has quadrupled, it’d still be less than half the cost of Thomas Heatherwick’s horrible Vessel. Someone, please, get this done.)

Installation view of “Sungsil Ryu: Return to Roots” at Tiger Strikes Asteroid. Photo courtesy Tiger Strikes Asteroid

One more show about public space, in a more general sense: Remember those halcyon days when there was a widespread belief that the internet was shaping up to be a great digital agora, an open marketplace for good-faith discussion and debate? That was a long time ago. Over at Tiger Strikes Asteroid in Bushwick, the superb South Korean artist Sungsil Ryu is offering a super-charged satire of the current digital hellscape in a show titled “Return to Roots” that runs through this Sunday. (The exhibition is a collaboration with the Doosan Art Center in Seoul, organized by its chief curator, Hyejung Jang.)

Dressed as an indefatigable YouTube influencer of her own creation, “BJ Cherry Jang,” Ryu spews misinformation (about a North Korean missile attack, for instance) and self-help advice (about how to obtain “first-class citizenship”) in videos that are overloaded with graphics. Screened in a room-filling installation that suggests a fleshy, earthen mound, Ryu’s works are hypnotizing, alluring, and a touch repulsive. Claustrophobia threatens. Jang (who, in this show’s intricate backstory, actually “died” five years ago) has all the answers, and she wants to help, if only you would listen. Are we being hoodwinked? Naturally. Sometimes, she knows, that is exactly what we want.