Balanchine and Maria Tallchief, in her costume for Le Baiser de la Fée. Photo: Irving Penn via
This winter’s Art Series installation at the David H. Koch Theater, an annual event commissioned by the New York City Ballet, filled the promenade with an eerie corps de ballet. Spaced in five rows of three, fifteen “dancers” appeared to be flash-frozen in rectangular blocks of ice. These monoliths, futuristic in feeling and weighing 3,000 pounds each, were the work of the Brooklyn artist Dustin Yellin, who calls them “Psychogeographies.” While some of Yellin’s figures are virtually complete, others, missing heads or extremities, seem to be caught in the process of Star Trek-like teleportation—coalescing or evaporating. Viewed from an angle, Yellin’s beings glow holographically. Viewed directly from the side they disappear like phantoms or fairies. Or like dance itself.
What are these figures made of? Paper and splotches of paint. Countless thousands of tiny images have been cut—as with cuticle scissors—from illustrations in books and magazines on culture, history, myth, nature, science, everything under the sun, and then, in a kind of surgical decoupage, with tint and color added, they are suspended in glass. Upon closer inspection we see that the monoliths consist of many layers of glass, large rectangles shaped like giant microscope slides. Each slide has its own smear of cell-sized pictures, synaptic spaces, and glimmering MRI intensities; when the slides are fused together they create a volumetric being, retinal memories whirling into human shape.
