A BANDIT ON THE HIGH LINE

The High Line park, recently converted from an elevated train track that snaked through the gallery district on Manhattan's west side, is one of New York City’s most constrained public places. Designed to preserve the native flora and rusted chic of industrial-age New York, it is rare among city parks for the way it controls visitor numbers. Riffraff are held at bay. People actually seem to behave.

Naturally such gentle authoritarianism has attracted a quasi-rebel: Jason Mones, a tall 30-something painter with a booming voice (pictured). Mones has been in prestigious group shows, including Everything All at Once at the Queens Museum of Art. He was granted a fellowship at the Providencetown Fine Arts Work Centre and has taught painting at Pont Aven School of Art in France. But Mones lacks the full-time gallery representation that could let him make a living exclusively off of his art.

So Mones figured out a plan: on July 24^th, afternoon visitors ascending a staircase to the High Line were treated to an impromptu--and unsanctioned--show of his work. “Like most artists, my motive was basically to show new work,” Mones said later. “You just need a venue."

Some official guests were present; about a week before, the artist had distributed invitations to the show--"My Last Buck”, hosted by the fictitious "Temp Gallery"--and he spent the afternoon in Chelsea handing out balloons printed with its location. But most visitors had already been bound for the park and were charmingly surprised by the small cooler of peppermint tea at the top of the stairs and two rows of tiny oil paintings hung along the riveted plate walls.

Mones, who had smuggled his work past the High Line volunteer keeping vigil at street level, stationed himself in the park above the installation, marking the area with leftover balloons. Occasionally he sent a shill down into the "gallery" to protect and draw attention to the paintings.

Mones paints rough, energetic, often angry images of men; the rusted steel background suited the paintings well. The juxtaposition somehow conjured up the austerity of the art world far more poignantly than the graffito-tagged canvases that were visible in the background, behind the windows of the luxury auction house Phillips de Pury & Company.

Considered as a performance, the Temp Gallery was as inspired and as carefully orchestrated as Mones’s paintings. The show was both social experiment and commentary, and just as evanescent as its name suggested.

As the evening progressed, the park’s hired security guards became increasingly nervous, asking him first to remove the cooler, then the balloons, then finally the artwork itself. In an hour it was all gone.

“I suppose it was successful,” Mones says. “I wasn't arrested for anything. My friends came and we drank coconut milk and iced tea. The only part that I felt was unsuccessful, or more so, depressing, was that not one person I gave a balloon to decided to come to the event. So it saddened me that the Chelsea art world isn't open to something new, or off the beaten business path. Last summer I was in Berlin, and the art crew there were all over the place, having events in many offbeat places. There is life in that.”

The High Line park is a splendid creation, but as some have complained, this privately funded space lacks something of the grit of the city. With its squads of volunteers armed with walkie-talkies and chilly demeanours, the park needs more peaceful bandits. Mones's Temp Gallery was a welcome, refreshing intervention.

~ JAMES MCGIRK

Pictures by James McGirk