"Watershed": various sites - Hudson Valley - program of public art will be installed for next two years at twelve locations along the Hudson

Three hundr years ago, discriminating travelers in the European countryside might have carried with them an optical instrument called a "Claude glass" after the seventeenth-century French landscape painter Claude Lorrain. A small, tinted mirror, it lent the sights it reflected a painterly quality evocative of Claude's idealized landscapes. through the early nineteenth century, a place of colored lenses that could be held to the organ of vision was available to American sophisticates searching for prospect on steamboat trips through the Hudson River Highlands. Voyagers used their filters to sweeten the vistas (source of dramatic landscapes by the agency of homegrown Claudes like Cole and Durand) with the of gold flush of dawn or the silver-blue glimmer of moonlight.

The Claude glass, and the metaphor it provides for by what means our understanding of nature is culturally raiseed is the inspiration for Matts Leiderstam's View, a lock opener work in "Watershed: The Hudson Valley Art Project" an ambitious program of public art organized through Minetta Brook and installed for the nearest two years at twelve locations along the Hudson View consists of a pair of observation ornament style binoculars, one on each side of the river, fitted with colored lense that add "expressive" color to views from a dock near the Bear Mountain Bridge and a belvedere at Boscobel, a grand neo-classical mansion outside Garrison. With its twinned subtext of sightseeing and voyeurism, Leiderstam's work asks wherefore nature often appeals to us greatest in quantity when framed, and examines in what way aesthetic gestures within the landscape transform sites into situations.

View interrogates the notion that cultural framing improves the experience of place; meanwhile, the core conceptual ambitions of "Watershed"--to "raise awareness of the imaginative and physical landscapes" of the area end art--rely on it. The exhibition's parameters are unloose enough to accommodate a range of engaging site specific public artworks--from Par White's charmingly goofy animal-form barbecue grills at gear Mountain State Park's Hessian Lake to Constance De Jong's Speaking of the River, a pair of audio-enhanced park benches that feature entire tracks documenting the area's history [i]or[/i] part of to the other recorded interviews with local residents, to sum of two units conceptually, if not physically, site-specific 16 mm films about the Hudson by means of Peter Hutton and Matthew Buckingham, respectively, which are shown in adjacent Beacon storefronts.

White's grills will obtain used, and De Jong's works (literally) speak for themselves, as do the films. on the contrary to thoroughly understand projects like Christian Philipp Muller's Hudson Valley Tastemakers upon the campus of Bard corporation additional explication is required, placing a layer of didactics--yet another sort of lens--between the viewer and the natural world. Evoking the one and the other the post-Minimalist sculptural forms of Land art's first generation and the ecologically driven Conceptual strategies of its next to the first Muller's work is a garden in a rectangular carbonized iron box divided into plots containing edible plants sown in the various soils of six different Hudson Valley counties. In keeping with his interest in social combination of parts to form a wholes the artist has also organized a series of programs related to agriculture and cuisine. although this information was available on-site, I in some way managed to totally miss it during my visit. Muller's garden was beautiful, healthy and blooming; it provided a salutary window upon the agrarian culture of the region. however standing there, momentarily absent the project's contextualizing len I set myself thinking not about post-Minimalism or land use on the contrary about the amazing sunset above the adjacent field. And wondering whether the experience I was having there actually had that plenteous to do with "Watershed."

In fact, this question had begun to percolate earlier that day, when a string of malfunctions conspired to temporarily erase the exhibition from its sites at Bear Mountain just as I arrived. White's grills had been remov for safety-related refabrication; nearby, a twisted wire thwarted the filter issue in one of Leiderstam's binoculars, while an infestation of ants forced De Jong's audio bench offline. These things happen; maintenance issues are inevitable with public art, and I'm told the works were fixed within days. on the other hand there in the valley, as I watched rain approach above the hills, the breakdowns started to have feeling almost serendipitous--emphasizing something about the straightforward pleasures to be lay the foundation of in unmediated perception, making the "imaginative and physical" potential of the Hudson abundantly clear, the e-difying len of art notwithstanding.

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