This fall, a pair of monumental scrolls presided over Baruch College’s Mishkin Gallery in Decision at a Desk, an exhibition by Bronx-based artist Christian Hincapié. Up close, their gridded masses of diazotype blue were revealed to be magnified spreadsheet cells pulled from a publicly available, 1,836-page PDF listing all officially recognized artworks within the jurisdiction of the New York City Parks Department, its strings of coordinates and litanies of toponyms illegibly enlarged in a parody of government transparency.
A lacuna in this data dump, and one of particular concern to the artist, is a series of cast art deco monkeys that once appeared shackled to the restrooms serving Riverside Park’s 148th Street playground, developed under the supervision of Robert Moses in the 1930s. Hincapié first learned of the sculptures from a few lines (scanned and entered into the exhibition) in The Power Broker, and his ensuing work bolstered the successful campaign to remove them. In the show’s titular piece, one of the statues returns as a negative impression sunk into k…
