Fighting Urban Blight with Art

 

 

One hardly thinks of the folks at Amtrak as modern-day Medicis, but the government-subsidized company aspires to be more than just a passenger rail line. For denizens of the northeast corridor, at least, Amtrak wants to become known as a patron of the arts.

 

In recent weeks, as Amtrak and Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority commuter trains sped through the blighted neighborhoods of north Philadelphia, a team of eight artists dressed in safety vests and goggles took turns guiding a high-powered industrial spray gun across the facade of a long-abandoned garment factory. They were shooting gallons of white and neon-orange house paint at the five-story building to create a massively scaled, neon-colored, temporary public artwork by German artist Katharina Grosse, 52. The piece is now taking shape along a rail corridor north of the city's 30th Street station.

 

Ms. Grosse calls the project "psychylustro," a word combination connoting the psyche and radiance, suggesting that the multipart abstract work, which is meant to be seen from a moving train, will take shape inside the minds of the 34,000 Amtrak, Septa, and NJ Transit train commuters that pass by daily.

 

The project is spearheaded by the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, an organization founded in 1984 as a graffiti abatement program that became known for its folksy, representational murals. Eager to produce more sophisticated projects, Mural Arts sought out Ms. Grosse after staff saw "One Floor Up More Highly," her massive 2011 installation at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Once Ms. Grosse was on board, Mural Arts approached Amtrak, which helped identify the seven sites that make up the piece.

 

The $291,978 "psychylustro" project is funded by a group of foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts and includes in-kind contributions from Amtrak.

 

"There are some things that we can do better than other competing modes of transport, and that is to provide the traveler with a deeper engagement with the diverse landscape," says Stephen Gardner, an Amtrak vice president who oversees the improvement of track, rails and stations along the northeast corridor, the money-losing rail company's most profitable line. "One of our taglines is, "Enjoy the Journey."

 

Ms. Grosse is known for stretching the definition of painting—she paints on almost everything, and only rarely on canvas—and she uses a spray gun instead of a brush. Her large-scale, often public, installations merge painting, sculpture and architecture. She has worked in Denmark, New Orleans, Paris and Los Angeles and currently has a sprawling work installed in a public commons at Brooklyn's MetroTech Center. But "psychylustro" is perhaps her most radical project yet, not only because it includes the elements of velocity and time, but also because of its conceptual and logistical complexities.

 

The piece encompasses seven sites along the rails—trackside warehouses, bridges, trees and shrubbery. The sites are owned by multiple public and private entities that have some relationship with Amtrak, whose engineers and staff have given access to the track and rail corridor infrastructure that is Ms. Grosse's canvas.

 

Each site is painted in oversize neon brush strokes that look as if they were made by a human hand—if that hand belonged to a giant that could reach five stories up. Ms. Grosse considers each site a snippet of something larger: At the former Robert Bruce sweater factory, only about a third of the facade was covered, as if the artwork alighted on a corner and the rest were someplace else.

 

"It's a very different understanding of where a painting sits," Ms. Grosse says. "You just get a glimpse of something rather large, it's just touching the warehouse there on that little edge. The painting itself is far bigger, it's maybe in the sky but there is no surface where it can land."

 

"Psychylustro's" three-week installation is scheduled for completion on May 16. After that, the piece will be subject to elements, both human and natural —from erosion to graffiti to possible gentrification. Its life span may vary from a matter of weeks to several months or, potentially, years.

 

Members of Amtrak's engineering staff are overseeing the action at every site during the artwork's installation. The painting is dangerous work. An Amtrak watchman blows a shrill whistle to alert the artists each time a train approaches. The artists are required to turn from their work, face the train and keep their eyes on its full length until it rumbles out of view.

 

Painters hoofing their way to and from the sites have encountered the usual trackside detritus—discarded plastic bottles, lip-gloss tubes—alongside dozens of empty spray paint cans left behind by the track's other artists: the graffiti writers who have tagged nearly every accessible wall in the corridor. Much of "psychylustro" will cover those tags, potentially inciting writers to tag right back.

 

For the next six months, the Mural Arts Program and the City of Philadelphia's Graffiti Abatement Team have pledged to maintain "psychylustro" and protect it from defacement. After that, it is open season.

 

"I haven't thought about tagging at all," Ms. Grosse says. "I don't care. Raphael's frescoes in the Vatican were also painted over. We are in good company there."