Thursday Noguchi Museum in Queens and some duds

In my efforts to visit  all 5 of the boroughs , today I went to Queens.  I  had to change trains at Bryant Park , so I thought I would save my first morning coffee for there. ( you donot generally come out of the subway to change trains  but I have a  monthly pass so it did not matter) . I like Bryant Park. All the way there I had been looking forward to some fruit salad.  Trouble is there was none available  today. Nevermind, I spent my time looking at an interior design magazine of houses significantly  more up-market than mine. This magazine was from the rack available for people to borrow in the Reading Room of the park. I had intended to finish my postcards.

I caught the train to Long Island City – the part of Queens just over the East river from Roosevelt Island - and walked  a fair way to the  museum. It houses some of the work of Isamu Noguchi ( 1904 to 1988) the influential Japanese American designer and sculptor. Several people I know have copies of his furniture. The museum focussed on his large stone sculptures – some bigger than me. I particularly liked the basalt ones . They often had many different colours in them. There was a courtyard with more sculptures and a Japanese inspired garden.   I sat on a bench for a while. It was very peaceful. Then I had a mushroom wrap and chatted to a lady from Los Angeles. She was born there to Japanese parents and had met the sculptor.  She was 85 and still travelling the world on her own. A small spritely woman.

I back tracked on the train a few stops so that I could take the number 7 to Flushing, the end of the line in Queens – to the NE of Manhattan. I had read that from the train – part of the subway system but the only thing it was ‘sub’ to was the sky – you could see the different ethnic  communities along the route. Maybe so if you had  x-ray glasses that could see through the factories, run-down buildings, occasional new apartment blocks etc that lined the route. I got to the end and came straight back.  It was a waste of time and I was a bit grumpy when I got to my next destination – still in Queens, but back near Manhattan – an art gallery called PS1 which is an offshoot of MoMA.  A dud. It has 3 floors and some outside of installation space and it was just about all closed for new installations going in. Why the guy I spoke to yesterday at MoMA did not tell me I donot know. The elevator was also not working and my knees are sore. I climbed to the top floor ( there were some black silhouettes on the white walls of the stairwell)  and found the only thing there – a work by James Turrell  ( he who did the green dome thing in the front of the NGA). Trouble is, it was a small room with no roof and what seemed like plywood seats round 3 sides – nothing much in comparison.  The lady in the foyer ( who was also grumpy) said there was more in the basement. More steps! I found the room – an old boiler room with lots of old big machinery – and finally found an inscription. I did not write down the name of the work, but the medium was ‘gold paint and human spit’.  No explanation of the significance.  I looked further and realised that some of the old machinery was painted  in gold paint. 

That is clearly enough for the day I thought, and set off  back to the train station without much thought.  After too long I realised I was walking in the wrong direction and finally got back to the station. I walked along 2  long sides of a very pointy isosceles triangle.  I got off the train at my stop and came up the stairs and realised that at least I can come out the correct ( i.e. closest) exit without thinking now.  The postcards had to be written so I stopped for a coffee and a biscuit –   a good experience.