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SOMETHING'S happening at Central Park's Doris C. Freedman Plaza, just off Fifth Avenue and 60th Street. Passersby approach, slow down, often double back for another look. Plunked down in their path is a triangular hunk of brick and metal sprawling about 12 feet on each side and rising a few feet like a low-level pyramid.
Did a building fragment fall onto the ground? Or was it just unearthed from below? And what is all that stuff crammed inside?
The structure and its innards are in fact "Corner Plot," a public artwork that will be on display in the plaza through late October. And according to sculptor Sarah Sze, who conceived it, this "Plot" had a specific inspiration.
"How do you get people to look twice in Manhattan?" she asks. "You're dealing with an environment where the spectacle is so high, and your senses are so stimulated, that in some ways you actually turn off. You have to figure out how to get people's attention."
So Sze, 37, did what she always does, plopping familiar items in unfamiliar places. First she created a building fragment similar to a brick postwar building just across Fifth Avenue. Then she turned it sort of on its side, added little windows, then nestled it below the ground and filled the submerged part with toothpicks, towels, plants and hundreds of other familiar, often fragile items native to places such as Target, Walgreens and Home Depot.
"Sarah was very conscious of the fact that you can't compete with the architecture of New York, but you can take it on as a topic or theme," says Rochelle Steiner, director of New York's...