The alien spider queen got inside your space station, and now every bulkhead is covered with intoxicating, shimmering night-silk. That’s what this new Park Avenue Armory installation by artist Ernesto Neto brings to mind, anyway.
We’ve raved about Ernesto Neto’s bizarre-looking, alien artworks before, but this is probably my favorite. Called “anthropodino,” it’s the first attempt at turning New York’s neglected Park Avenue Armory into a public art destination along the lines of London’s Tate Modern.
https://gizmodo.com/ernesto-netos-bouncy-white-humanoid-blobs-327808
Says the New York Times, the Armory was designed to be “a Gilded Age boys’ club for its wealthy regiment, an imposing palace of oak paneling, ironwork and ornamental armor under the majestic gaze of many a stuffed moose head,” but now it’s been filled with carpenters and craftspeople in their stocking feet, laboring to create this sweeping diaphanous installation that covers the whole space. The Times explains:
Made of hundreds of yards of stretched Lycra tulle, it looks something like a superfine spider web, laden with egg sacks, that has drifted down onto the skeleton of a forgotten species of dinosaur shaped like a cephalopod.
On Thursday it will open to visitors, who are invited for the next month to look at it, walk through it, touch it, lie down in it, even smell it.
Smell it? Oh yes, there are tons of ground spices, including cumin, cloves and turmeric, in the mix. This alien queen likes to smell fragrant. Or maybe like curry.
