Accidental street art: riverside park

October 19, 2023 by joachim

After days and days of staying home, because of a nasty cold, this was my first walk outside in Riverside Park. Here we look south with the New Jersey skyline and the majestic Hudson river — Muh-he-kun-ne-tuk, or the “river that flows two ways,” as the Mohicans called it when they were still masters of this terrain.

The eye looks far, boats are on the water, birds are in the sky, squirrels wind their slender bodies around the branches of the cherry trees, but the eye also looks down on the asphalt, occasionally, for fresh evidence of accidental art.

What I find first is an oval with an eccentric circular inclusion, size like the palm of a child’s hand — abstract art on concrete, as it were.

Who knows how it came into being: a painter in great hurry, spilling paint from one of those half-gallon cans? A fungus spreading out on a flattened piece of chewing gum, thriving on the leftover sugar?

Related, you might say, but you would be wrong. The superficial similarity comes from the absence of the third dimension in this depiction. This is a structure, in reality, that is in the process of rising. A kind of baby volcano.

It is one of those geological processes that take millions of years, and if you would stand there and watch it for an hour I doubt you would see anything happening.

Here is another one, much further developed and matured than the previous one. Cracks have begun to form in the immediate surroundings.

I put my hand on it to feel the temperature, but it is still unchanged.

We have jumped from the abstract to the figurative in today’s little street gallery. A worm of sorts, a mini-phallus?

Ingenious in this assembly are the coarse grains of the background, which partially obliterate and partially amplify the periodic markings of the beast.