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Workers install a sculpture by Nancy Rubins at MGM Mirage’s City Center project Thursday.
Published Sunday, May 3, 2009 | 2 a.m.
Updated Tuesday, May 5, 2009 | 6:38 p.m.
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- CityCenter: 'Only in Vegas' works for the art world, too (3-10-2008)
- Sculptor may leave her mark on Las Vegas (11-15-2006)
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Artist Nancy Rubins stands in the middle of the CityCenter construction site — a vast valley of gravel, concrete and machinery surrounded by towering glass architecture.
She secures her hard hat in 50 mph winds and directs crew members who are installing a canoe onto “Big Edge.”
More than 200 aluminum boats — canoes, rowboats and flat-bottomed boats — make up the wild bouquet of color and shape juxtaposed against surrounding monochromatic glass buildings.
Attached to an armature and to one another, the boats shoot upward and outward and are supported by cantilevers. It looks as if they were tossed into the air and captured in a freeze frame.
Her crew members climb the sculpture as if in trees, connecting the boats, weblike, with steel wires.
There are no blueprints to follow, no sketches to examine, no three-dimensional models to consider. Rubins is essentially flower arranging with more than 200 boats, weighing 60 to 125 pounds.
“You have to put it together in your brain,” she says. “It’s hard to grasp it all at once. But it comes quickly for me.”
Rubins walks the construction site, examining the work from various angles. Wearing red lipstick and dark glasses, she stands out amid the earth-moving machines and dust.
She has made several large sculptures during her career. This is one of her largest, larger even than a similar temporary boat sculpture at Lincoln Center in New York that measured 45 feet high and 55 feet long.
It’s been tested for earthquakes, windloads, weight, snow, sandstorms and flash floods. Holes were drilled for rain drainage.
“It’s beautiful,” she says, looking upward. “What I really love is the stainless steel wires because you’re kind of getting an engineering and physics lesson, and in the light, you see this really beautiful web work.”
It’s hard to believe that 10 years ago the San Diego Convention Center Authority shot down a similar boat sculpture as too controversial to be built with public money. Rubins was upset and outspoken. She was not too surprised, she was quoted as saying at the time, given the unsophistication of San Diego when it comes to art. But this is Las Vegas — the funding is private, the collection is private and so is its location. “Big Pleasure Point” likely will be plastered all over magazines, postcards, the Internet.
It’s not her first boat sculpture. Others have been installed outside the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego and Lincoln Center. A 1,000-pound sculpture of airplane parts stands outside the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles for visitors to contemplate while walking around and under the work. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including in France, Germany and Italy.
Rubins lives in Topanga Canyon, Calif., and is married to artist Chris Burden. She has created sculptures from water heaters, mattresses and recreational vehicles and considers the materials to be more medium than a message. Boats in the Mojave Desert are not making any kind of point, she says.
“I’m not really a message artist,” she says. “That’s not my job. My job is to make it so people can bring to it whatever they have got going, for the viewer to have their own interpretation.”
The boats, which came from across the United States, some used, have a human scale that Rubins appreciates.
“They’re vehicles for humans. They all refer to us,” she says. “Structurally there is something quite beautiful about them. Everything we make is figurative. I really love the boats that came from the Russian River (in California). They have an essence of the life they’ve led. There’s this odd scarring.”
Industrial silver canoes form the bulk of the sculpture. Slender shoots of color burst out via orange, blue, yellow, black, green and red canoes. The sculpture’s proportions and color composition change, depending on vantage point. A yellow canoe, jutting upward and lit by the sun, looks like a delicate petal.
Rubins has grimaced over the years at references to explosiveness or violence in her work. The piece outside of Los Angeles MOCA, “Chas’ Stainless Steel, Mark Thompson’s Airplane Parts,” was acquired in 2001 and, after the 9/11 attacks, horrified some viewers who thought it looked like a crash.
But standing under that airplane sculpture and then standing under “Big Pleasure Point” at CityCenter, there is the sense not of violence, but of vulnerability and beauty at witnessing gravity-defying, large-scale vehicles and appliances in a new context.
“We’re living in a vulnerable world,” Rubins says when asked about that. “Look at all of these buildings. I always think of my escape route. In hotels I stay on the fourth floor, not the 34th floor.”
Pointing to “Big Pleasure Point,” which is now complete, she says, “nothing is hidden. Everything is exposed. What’s keeping it together is exposed. There is tremendous honesty in that.”
Editor's Note: This story has been corrected. Since this story first ran, Nancy Rubins has named her massive boat sculpture “Big Edge.” It’s a larger version of her “Big Pleasure Point” in New York.
" Collision of the boats " looks better than all of City Center.
By Thumper
5/3/09 at 6:10 a.m.
12 dead bodies and counting, brought to you by Perini and OSHA.
Where is this coming from? How do you figure 12?
Thumper, you come across as bitter and your facts are askew, what gives?
I like the Art. It is cool. Can't wait to see the final product. City Center will be very nice.
Brian_Paco_Alvarez - Ahhh Just like at MOCA in LA... Nancy Rubins work is great addition to the landscape. Adding more public art to a city in desperate need for a cultural identity. City Center IS the primer for what Las Vegas will be well into the 21st Century. As a native I am looking forward to experiencing City Center many times...
Her "plane crash" sculpture's pretty interesting.
http://tinyurl.com/cptvj3
What a waste of space. They build a great City within a City and they deliver boats to our city in a drought with no water in sight? Thats funny!
Nice to read in the article today that the sculpture was going to happen regardless of the property finances. Nice to see the priorities are in order.
All in all, the theme just makes no sense. But hey, neither does anything else in the world these days.
Is this disrespectful to Mr. Wynn's development of Lake Bellagio next door, where he even kept a personal boat? Sort of the anti-boat property? It looks like a tornado hit a marina, but granted, provides a central photo op for tourists, which they want and expect. But it looks "urban cold" for a place like Vegas where people don the t shirts and shorts to unwind.
All hail Brian Paco Alvarez and his unwavering praise for anything in Las Vegas called "art". Why I'm sure he and his arty friends will single-handedly drag CityCenter up from the ashes with their lavish patronage.
I wonder if there has ever been any "art" presented in this town that the papers or the local "art" people didn't like? Culture is born just as much out of criticism as it is from praise. It's going to take a lot more than a pile of canoes and a Frank Stella painting, plopped in the middle of a development that may or may not ever open, to bring culture to Las Vegas. Ten to one this magnificent eyesore is going to become the favorite receptacle for the shorts and t-shirts crowd who'll use it to practice their empty plastic drink-by-the-yard-glass throwing skills. But there's always an upside. When CityCenter goes bankrupt Brian can buy the pile of canoes at the going-out-of-business sale and donate it to the local Art Museum. Whoops...that's right...we don't have one!
They build a 10 billion dollar project and THIS is what they put as the centerpiece?
Granted, art is in the eye of the beholder ..so setting aside the 'artistic merits' of this mess (sorry..giving praise to the 'stainless steel wires..making really beautiful webwork' is just plain silly), from a practical standpoint..I can envision the plastic drink cups mentioned by bbrummel, the other assorted trash etc that gets caught in the wires and assorted nooks and crannies in the boats, which also would serve as an ideal home for nesting birds leaving streaks of birdcrap all over the arriving guests. Welcome to Aria.
If in fact the artist wants "the viewer to have their own interpretation", then I feel justified in thinking someone got ripped off.
So let me get this straight...In the middle of the desert, in the midst of the worst drought in Las Vegas history, amid modern architecture that would make George Jetson blush, the Crown Jewel of the multi-Billion dollar Citi-Center is...used canoes??? Far be it from me to trash what is obviously a visually striking piece, but really...is this the venue for it?? I've seen many sculptures that would work here, particularly "The Greatest Las Vegas" sculpture by Paul Felix Montez of two boxing gloves that are 80 feet tall. Here in the fight capital of planet earth that sculpture would fit! But used boats?? What next, we build a faux desert in the Adirondacks and install 30 foot tall cacti and call it art? My personal interpretation is:"huh?"
Art? C'mon, the "piss christ" exhibit was art, this is a bunch of old conaoes creating the perfect nesting haven for pigeons, that will soon become the bird fecal fest of the city!
I'm sure if you put a big skulpture of a cactus in Anchorage Alaska they'd have the same reaction. I sure as hell hope this piece of junk was purchased with private funds because I don't even want to think about this being a tax purchase when our 215 beltway has been under construction for 10 years!
Like this type of contemporary art hasn't been done before with hubcaps, etc. And after reading the article and this self proclaimed artists perspective, I'll never look at my washing machine the same...oh dear god! What a loon!