Article July 21, 2008 Issue

THROUGH A SPIRITUAL LENS

LOOK ANEW WHAT DO YOU SEE?

BY JEFFREY HILDNER

TOUGH. GRITTY. MESSY. Do we expect a metropolis to look any other way? Would we want it to? Maybe. But we might miss the street poetry. And the rooftop art.

We might miss the irresistible contradictions that invite us to see the strange in the familiar, the beauty in the mundane, to feel the imprompty rhythms of visual music.

One morning in Manhattan I look west toward the Hudson River and marvel at the cranky composition of construction elements dressing up the apartment house next door — a funky collage where water towers aim upward like rocket ships in perpetual countdown mode. Or are they pears in a Cezanne urban still life? Yes. Pears. Pears in an industrial fruit basket of vent stacks and railings and metal ladders to the sky.

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