FACE TIME

This winter’s Polar Vortex turned our city into a festival of silly hats. People ran around dressed conventionally from foot to forehead, and then topped themselves off with extravagant, irrational headware. I saw fur-trimmed hunters’ hats, lacy cashmere skull caps, mink pillboxes, extravagantly twisted turbans, and even balaclavas. There’s something essentially menacing about the balaclava. This mask, that only leaves a person’s eyes and mouth open, always conjures for me the famous photograph of a rooftop terrorist at the Munich Olympics in 1972. In the context of face-burning cold, the balaclava might be acceptable city headware. But it’s a sinister fashion; it evokes violence and fear.

So Pussy Riot, the all-female Russian punk/art collective who disguise themselves in crayon-colored balaclavas, seized a ripe symbol. They took the balaclava and charged it further, with justice politics and female rage. Two former Pussy Riot members, Maria Alekhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, appeared this winter at an Amnesty International concert at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. They’d been imprisoned for performing, while masked, an anti-Putin rant in a Moscow church. Here they were without their masks, in hipsterish street clothes, tasteful makeup, and long, loose hair. Though they’d lost the assaultive impact of the balaclava, they gained a different kind of power by showing their faces. They are stunning, radiant young women. To see them plainly makes their politics personal, and drives home powerfully the price they paid for their actions.

Maria and Nadezhda addressed the audience that night in a feverish Russian that was translated sentence-by-sentence, moments afterward, into placid English by an American translator. But their intentions shone through. They shouted in barely-controlled bursts, held their microphones like knives, and paced the stage like wild cats. I was sitting in the stadium’s highest tier, and even from there the spectacle of this – two attractive young women lit by pure fury – was transfixing. As both performance artists and political activists they possess monstrous charisma. They might not need the masks.

Photo by Igor Mukhin.

April 21, 2014 by Nalina Moses

ASTRONOMIES

The first time I saw the Barclays Center, the controversial new stadium in Brooklyn by SHoP, it was peripherally, as I was rushing from the Atlantic Avenue subway station to meet friends for dinner. At that moment it looked like an enormous spaceship. It’s not an instantly likable structure. Its low, swirling, swollen, turtle-like shell has no perceptible symmetries, front and back, or roofline. Its entrance canopy – a gigantic, cantilevered loop – offers no protection from the elements. And its skin, a lattice of rusting steel tiles the size of pizza boxes, gives it the desolate aspect of an abandoned parking garage. As I ran by the stadium seemed unmoored: to Atlantic Avenue, to Brooklyn, and to earth.

Then, months later, on a lazy, sunny summer afternoon, as I walked through the plaza on my to the subway station, I got a different feeling altogether. When I reached the center of the canopy and looked up I stopped in my tracks. The big loop circled the cloudless sky and pulled it down around me. It was if the sun had fallen right through to my feet. The web of LED lights that line the inside of the canopy flickered happily, signs of the building’s inner life. Standing there, I felt rooted in that place, under the skies and inside the city. The building was like an astronomical instrument that called the sky down to the street.

Photograph by Magda Biernat, courtesy of SHoP.

April 17, 2014 by Nalina Moses