Two Experts on Manhattan Primates

"DOING ART’ Bridget Polk, building rock sculptures near the Hudson. “It’s a mixed bag of fun.”

A WOMAN descended from the hero who unified Germany was chatting with a woman descended from a Puerto Rican matriarch raised in a family of 14. The setting was a cocktail party on the terrace of the Grand Suite at the Pierre and the subject was diet, always fit fuel for discussion in a town where startling numbers go hungry by choice.

“My mother called it the soap dish,” said Candy Pratts Price, a contributing editor at Vogue, referring to a collarbone hollow prized by social X-rays and judged by social scientists to be a sign of malnourishment.

Skinny does not come cheap, and Vanessa von Bismarck’s soap dish, set off by a cowl collar dress from Balenciaga, was attained at a West Coast spa popular with people who pay $4,000 a week to dine on spinach purée and leaves. “At the beginning I was furious because I only lost four pounds,” said Ms. von Bismarck, a power fashion publicist. “But when I got home my metabolism was so elevated” from a regime of mung beans and hikes, she said, “that I lost another 15 and 20 inches and kept it all off.”

Primates are silly creatures and cannot be counted on to act in their own best interest. This is something Michael Lorentz can attest to, as he did that particular night.

Mr. Lorentz is an African game guide who some — including Alexandra Penney, the best-selling writer and Madoff dupe who now blogs as The Bag Lady for the Daily Beast, and Richard David Story, the editor of Departures magazine — claim is the best on that continent. Mr. Lorentz views himself with more modesty, possibly because his familiarity with the African wild comes not by way of a storied White Hunter heritage. He got into guiding in his 20s after running a catering business in suburban Johannesburg.

Now 44, Mr. Lorentz operates an elephant camp in Botswana. He also conducts people from the rarefied stratum of “high net-worth individuals” on safaris that serve the dual purpose of showing off Africa’s imperiled fauna and holding up a mirror of interdependence to the hairless apes responsible for pushing so many fellow creatures to the brink.

“For all our supposed sophistication, a human is still an animal, a primate,” Mr. Lorentz said, as sunset flashed pink over Bergdorf Goodman. And primates, he added, “are probably among the most appalling offshoots that exist of mammalian evolution.” The more time one spends around other species, he added, “the more you realize how foolish humans are.”

But this you can learn without taking a trip to Botswana. This you can deduce from any stroll around New York. This you can glean by leaving the wilds of Central Park for the shores of the Hudson, walking north from 96th Street in the direction of Fairway on 125th Street to a place on the banks of the river where a woman is crouched on her haunches balancing rocks.

Is she making sculpture, meditating, working off karma, conjuring up metaphors for human struggle or making an elaborate joke? She is doing all of these things, the woman will tell you, as she pauses from marrying an 80-pound sliver of schist to a granite hunk.

“It’s a mixed bag of fun,” said Bridget Polk, who shares a name but little else in common with a famous Warhol actress. “I’m doing art, meditating, teaching and being a comedian.”

To a surprising degree it is comedy that takes the upper hand, Ms. Polk said, and this owes to the simple fact that humans, and maybe especially New Yorkers, have a funny way of nosing into one another’s affairs. “People watch and watch and then they work up the courage to ask a question,” she said. And what do they ask? “They say, ‘Do you do these here?’ ”

The sculptor laughed then, as she does a lot, at the absurdity of other people and her own. “People say, ‘Do you use glue?’ ” They ask whether she assembles the sculptures first and brings them with her to this stretch of shoreside riprap.

They stop and stare while she finds the sweet spot where gravity will miraculously hold a diamond-shaped slab of rock poised on a granite boulder.

“There are so many paradoxes about this,” said Ms. Polk, a California native who at 49 has been a waiter, actor, carpenter, accountant, personal assistant and creator of balloon sculptures for bar mitzvahs and weddings. A person of what she called addictive nature, Ms. Polk found an outlet for her compulsivity seven months ago when she made the idle but somehow fateful decision to get off her bike and start balancing rocks.

“If you Google rock-balancing, you are not going to think I am special at all, so don’t do that,” the sculptor said. Still, she added, “I get more attention for this than anything I’ve ever done.”

People reverently circle the sculptures. They add rocks of their own and turn them into cairns. They also, and not infrequently, shove them over. “I used to feel like: ‘Hey, wait, I did that! You’re ruining the symmetry!’ ” she said. “But then I got this sweet feeling of loving it that somebody felt free to add to the sculpture or knock it over if they felt like.”
Gravity, she pointed out, is not her invention. “These rocks are not mine.”
Like Mr. Lorentz’s animal treks, Ms. Polk’s rock balancing brings her into contact with an always revolving cast of strangers. Like the game guide’s more commercial projects, it creates accidental communities and sneaks up on them with some stealth philosophy. New York, for all the concrete jungle clichés, Ms. Polk said, “has always seemed to me to be to be about community and interdependence.”

“We have this reputation for being really nasty, but I prefer to think of us as a big dysfunctional happy family.”