If you walk East from the BDFV toward the Fifth Avenue exit at the Bryant Park/42nd Street stop, you will pass through a hall lined with tile art depicting what appears to be the roots of trees in the ground. Visually, it is interesting because while viewing it, you yourself are underground, so it intimates a more natural and organic subterranea than would a grimy white-walled hallway. This is all well and good but there is an aspect to this piece that confuses me completely. There are three quotations emblazoned upon the walls throughout it, all of which refer to (though I will not say are about) water.
The first that you see, from West to East, is attributed to Ovid and some years BC. It is in Latin but parenthetically translated to English as something akin to "Dripping water hollows a stone". I noticed this for the first time today and looked again at the art. Is there something visually here that represents water? It still looks like roots. Maybe it is supposed to be trickling water? But the Ovid quote itself is not really about water any more than it is about unhatched chickens or a rolling stone. Is the visual more about the gradual but severe effect humans have on enviroment? Are the drip of water and grip of roots one and the same? I really liked these questions and thought they complemented the aforementioned visual force of the piece phenomenally.
But my credit may have been overwrought. The second quote is the first couplet of the well-know nursery rhyme, "Jack and Jill went up a hill to fetch a pail of water." This puzzled me. "Jack and Jill" in its less-well-known 4-stanza version has some narrative quality and discernable meaning, but even the whole first verse (in which Jack breaks his crown) is arbitrary out of context or Icarian at best. But even if we acknowledge that the Jack and Jill verse warns of flying too close to the Sun (so to speak), this quote is still very loosely related to the Ovid quote. At best, a separate commentary in the same installation. But why then insist on tying together the element of water?
There is finally a third quote, I believe from James Joyce, the diction of which in passing I refuse to bother to interpret. I can only assume that it muddies the picture even more and confirms that this whole piece of art is completely arbitrary. Am I missing something?
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Maybe the only reason the art is there is to free up those tiles so they can be sold. People pay a lot of money to put subway tiles in their homes so their bathrooms or kitchens can look like "a grimy white-walled hallway."
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