Outdoor Art in London

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An integral part of the British summer is the music festival. Usually these are beer-fueled, mud-bound pursuits with a rock soundtrack, but one in particular is trying to offer something more.

This weekend’s Latitude, a program of music, dance, and theater headlined by Franz Ferdinand, Sigur Ros, and Interpol and set in the rolling Suffolk countryside on England’s east coast, has invited Lavish, an arts curating company, to commission installations for the festival site’s lake and woodlands. Artists Maslen & Mehra have created small, mirrored sculptural silhouettes of urban stereotypes (the stuffy businessman, the floppy-haired skater, etc.) that will be scattered about the forest, poking fun at the average city dweller’s concept of “roughing it” in the confines of a carefully organized festival. James Reuben has installed full-size doors throughout the woods, evoking portals to alternate realities while acknowledging the festival as a world of freedom and excesses away from the everyday. The curators are to be applauded for offering something complex and contemplative in the midst of the noisy, crowded festival.  

5. Portavillion, through September 28 (except The Wind House, on view July 26 – October 19)

Back to London’s parks, where the nonprofit Up Projects has commissioned leading artists to produce pavilions in several of the city’s best-known green spaces.

American artist Dan Graham combines glass and two-way mirrors in his Holland Park installation Triangular Pavilion with Circular Cut-out (2008). Annika Eriksson, from Sweden, offers The Smallest Cinema in the World – For the Wealthy and the Good, a six-person cinema in Regent Park that features a series of films meditating on the park’s users and visitors. And in Potters Fields Park, British artist Toby Patterson presents a geometric powder-blue structure meant to complement the Southbank Centre building, just a few blocks away.

But the best of the series may be Monika Sosnowska’s work, which opens July 26 on Primrose Hill, one of the most beautiful vistas in London. Like her contribution to the Polish Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale, in which she forced a too-large steel structure into the confines of the gallery space by bending and twisting the metal, the new installation shocks at first, then gives way to a peculiar, moving beauty. The Wind House looks at first glance like a building that has been partially, and violently, destroyed. But look closer and the dented walls and torn roof also suggest intrigue and narrative: What is the small, lonesome house doing here? Who might have lived here? What happened to them? The work’s seemingly desolate architecture cannot obscure its fundamental humanity.