So Many Amazing Ideas!

September 1st, 2010

Photo: Greenhouse Media

post by Rachel Pastan

What if you gave everyone who came into a museum a bell, and they wore it, and it rang as they wandered through the galleries?

What if you offered short, private concerts in the museum’s coat closet, for just two people at a time?

What if a museum offered plant vacations, where you could send your philodendron for a week of pampering: special water, poetry read aloud, intimate videos of pollination screened at midnight?

What if a museum hosted a lecture series, and each month you could get in free if you met a different random criterion: if you were a Virgo, or won a thumb wrestling match with a body builder, or could guess what a teenager had in her pocket?

These were some of the ideas tossed out by Mark Allen (an artist, educator, and founder of Machine Project in L.A.) and Adam Lerner (Director and Chief Animator of the Department of Structures and Fictions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver) at a Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative roundtable for the curatorial community last month—a truly fabulous presentation by two people who seem to breathe out good ideas as though they were air. Anyone who is reading this blog probably knows that this is a difficult time for museums, as it is for book publishers, orchestras, theaters, dance companies. Attendance is largely down, as is funding from both government and private sources. People’s leisure time is increasingly spent online, whether on Facebook or playing videogames or watching their favorite YouTube channel. Blah blah blah—that old story.

Yet, in direct opposition to these trends, real live people all over Los Angeles and Denver are getting themselves into cars and onto buses and using their feet to travel to the museums and galleries where Mark and Adam are, and once they get there they pay money to see—and participate in—art, art-making, and all kinds of fabulously wacky art programming. Adam’s tag-team lecture series Mixed Taste (two half-hour lectures on unrelated subjects, such as earth art and goat cheese, or Gertrude Stein and prairie dogs, with a combined Q&A at the end in which connections beautifully and serendipitously emerge) draw over 300 people each and sell out a month in advance. And while Mark claims that he would rather make something five people look at for a thousand minutes rather than something a thousand people look at for five minutes, he too is attracting a serious following for his programming.

Just sit in a room with these guys and you partly get it—the intensely creative, imaginative, topsy-turvy energy they send out is addictive. But this is not just a charisma thing. There are lessons here that can be learned by any institution interested in learning them.

For example: People are increasingly interested in experience-based programs rather than object-based programs.

Also: The way you frame what you’re doing matters. What you call things matters. Using humor draws people in. Being a little zany can help. As Adam says, “We create excitement through the trappings, but the trappings are not just trappings—they are part of the content.”

I know some of you are thinking this is just gimmicky, or that it detracts from the powerful experience art can offer, or that these jokers are merely pandering to the lowest common denominator. It seems to me, however, that what they are doing is exactly the opposite of that—that they are in fact trying to engage people who care more about substance and creativity than about the traditional formal accoutrements of the old-fashioned museum experience. That they are in fact trying to bring what you might call art to the entire experience of visiting a museum, not just to the authorized works that hang on the walls or stand on pedestals. That they are reaching for new forms of collaboration in which, in Mark’s words, “the voice of the institution and the voice of the artist blur together.”

Here at ICA we pride ourselves not only on our terrific exhibitions, but on inventive and thoughtful programming that helps connect the visitor to the art by way of experiences that are fun, memorable, enlightening, communal. I’ll never forget last year’s ecumenical celebration of spring with dogs in hats and deviled eggs and poetry, organized by artist Sarah McEneaney in the spirit of Maira Kalman; or Curator Jenelle Porter’s spectacular lecture on her show, Dance with Camera (complete with tons of video clips); or Tim Rollins joking with members of K.O.S. (Kids of Survival) in a way that enhanced rather than detracted from the life-and-death seriousness of their artistic and educational project.

This fall I’m looking forward to Art School Double Feature with curator Kate Kraczon and artist Matthew Ritchie (Wednesday, September 22); ICA’s first-ever Free For All, featuring the 2010 version of Ingrid Schaffner’s annual inquiry “What Is Contemporary?”, screen-printing by Print Liberation, and music by Reading Rainbow (Wednesday, September 29); and Jenelle Porter’s Travelogue series that will bring curators from all over the globe to talk about what’s going on in their backyards (the first lecture, on Wednesday, October 20, takes us to Vilnius, Lithuania—or rather, brings Vilnius to us).

In the meantime, a request. Please use the comment field below to tell us which ICA programs you’ve liked (or haven’t liked) in the past and why, and/or what kinds of programs you’d like to see us offer in the future. We’d be very grateful for your opinion.

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Cobra on Wood

August 13th, 2010

Cobra on Wood by Nick Payne. Photo: Carina Romano

post by Rachel Pastan

August is the season of vacations, and a lot of desks are empty here at ICA this month, but downstairs in the galleries people are busily at work. This is installation season, too, when ICA’s crew gets the new fall shows ready to open.

The cobra in this picture—drawn by ICA crew member and artist Nick Payne—is certainly visiting from out of town. Cobras, of course, aren’t native to Philadelphia (there are, in fact, very few venomous snakes in Pennsylvania); but then, Nick isn’t native either. He comes from Toronto by way of the Rhode Island School of Design. He drew this snake for Miranda (a blog named after a snake—click here for the backstory) as part of our occasional series on ICA crew members, most of whom are also artists.

I like how the cobra’s hood echoes the shape of the wood it’s drawn on—a shim Nick says he picked up off the genie.

“Genie?” I ask. I always suspected we had a genie at ICA. But Nick just meant the big machine that hoists people into the air to hang lights and stuff. Right now the crew is working in the downstairs gallery, getting it ready to receive Set Pieces, Virgil Marti’s restaging of lots of cool stuff borrowed from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which opens at ICA in September.

Nick says he saw a lot of snakes this summer in Vermont. He was up there studying ecological design, and the snakes were living in an old unused earthen oven. Garter snakes mostly, small and dark with greenish-yellow stripes. He tells me about his band, Bobo, which toured the East coast earlier in the summer, and about the gallery he and his bandmates Drew Gillespie and Phil Cote used to run that is now a website: www.boboson9th.com. It’s worth a visit. They have great Bobo-designed advertisements for coffee-stained tortilla flaps, Finks bigtime pollywog leaves, hydropuffball algae restoration, and other sundry products you didn’t know you needed.

Mostly these days the art Nick’s doing is “sort of weird drawings,” which he says are influenced by some underground comics people. “I like drawing,” he says, “because it doesn’t require much space or materials. Or money.”

Which brings us to jobs. He says he likes working at ICA because of the opportunity to be around artists and art he admires, like Mike Smith and R. Crumb. He says his old job at a sign shop putting vinyl on cars was good training, because it taught him to be precise and a good measurer. I ask him what makes a good art preparator, and he smiles.

“Being careful,” he says.

* * *

You can see Nick’s work at www.flickr.com/photos/nniicckkppaayynnee/, or check out Bobo at www.myspace.com/bobophiladelphia. You can also read more about both Nick and the band in an interview with The Kingsboro Press at http://asherpenn.tripod.com/bobointerview.html.

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ICA Mosaic

August 6th, 2010

ICA intern Charlotte Ickes with some of the many boxes she readied for the archives this summer. Photo: Carina Romano

post by Rachel Pastan

On days the museum is closed but the offices are open, you have to ring the doorbell if you want to get in. Some days it rings all day long, that bell: the mailman, the UPS guy, the FedEx guy, and the many interns who do so much of the heavy lifting here at ICA. Mostly they’re Penn grad students and undergrads, and they do everything from research to filing to helping plan and run events. They work in every department. Some of them have been here for years and know everything! If they all decided not to show up for work tomorrow, I suppose we wouldn’t actually close, but it would be a slow, dull, unproductive day.

Last week we had a lunch to thank them (that probably sounds fancier than it was—Mexican food around the conference room table), and I asked them to tell me something interesting they had done or learned about ICA this summer. Taken together, their answers make a nice snapshot of what goes on here—a kind of mosaic. Here are a few.

Sam (spent the summer resizing, organizing, and in many cases digitizing ICA’s old exhibition images for easy access): It’s interesting to see how many people you have to contact for a single show—artists, lenders, scholars, conservators. One exhibition will generate letters to maybe a hundred people! Also, I can now name every ICA show for the last ten years.

(***Actually, I didn’t write down what these people said word for word. Any errors, confusions, inelegant phrasings, embarrassing exclamation points, or slanderous remarks are entirely my own.)

Sara (going into her senior year at Penn; just elected head of her campus sketch comedy group): I’ve been sorting through the education files to get them ready for the archives, and I found a bunch of material on the controversy about ICA’s Robert Mapplethorpe show back in the eighties. I had no idea ICA was so involved in that! There were all kinds of petitions and statements from Penn in defense of the First Amendment.

Rachel (a graduate student at Penn’s School of Design and a competitive fencer): I’ve been going through the prints ICA offers for sale on the website, doing research about the artists and finding out how much their comparable work sells for. So far I’m at letter G.

Grace (writing her thesis at Penn on the representation of performance art in museums; has been reorganizing the ICA library): Sometimes great old letters fall out of books. And I got to pick the band for the ICA Free For All on September 29!

Lily (a rising senior at Moore College of Art majoring in curatorial studies and getting ready to start a zine): I learned how to make labels for the printer.

(I know Lily did lots of other stuff, too. But actually, if you can master labels on our printer, you can master the universe.)

Charlotte (a grad student at Penn writing her Masters thesis on two portraits of Pocahantas): For Summer Studio with Anthony Campuzano, I helped run the artists’ statement workshop, but it rained and hardly anyone showed up. I spent two hours working with this one guy! But I think we made his statement a little better. Also I spent a week with Anne Tyng [architect and subject of an upcoming ICA exhibition].

One of the interns who wasn’t at lunch was Carina Romano, a young professional photographer who spent the summer working in ICA’s marketing department, and who helped me out a lot with this blog. I don’t know what she’d say she did or learned this summer, but she certainly spruced up the look of Miranda. Thanks, Carina! Thank you Sara, Annika, Lily, Rashana, Sam! Thanks Grace, Rachel, Charlotte, Pericles, Seghen, Kristen! I hope you had fun, made an enduring connection to ICA, and got some good stories to entertain your friends.

Maybe consider sharing a story in the comments field below? Just between us?

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Weird but Useful Stuff

July 29th, 2010

Photo: Darcey Sawicz

post by Rachel Pastan

It’s the change of the seasons here at ICA. Just as you can feel the approach of autumn out on the street in September, here in the museum I feel the end of Queer Voice approaching and the murmurs of the new exhibition season getting ready to blow in. This Sunday evening the projectors and audio loops will be turned off for the last time. The guards will go home until the new shows open in mid-September, the tour guides will have a few weeks to bone up on some new artists, and the crew will show up to disassemble the silver Andy Warhol listening cube and the Jack Smith chaise longue and roll up the carpeting.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the preparations for Set Pieces (click here to read that piece), guest-curated for ICA by artist Virgil Marti from works from the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA). Since then, Virgil and Robert and Darcey have gone over to the PMA to measure some of the objects Virgil is using, especially some marble busts he’s going to put on a pouf. Actually he’s going to make poufs especially for the marbles, which include a bust of Napoleon and another big bust of a woman lying on her back. There are some concerns about the stability of the marble woman, who is actually designed to be displayed upright, but Virgil is confident that any mounts they need to use to secure her in place can be hidden in the fluff of the pouf. He can fluff up the fluff, he says.

Down at the PMA, he asks one of the art handlers to put the woman on a big piece of craft paper so he can trace her for reference when he builds the pouf. She’s so heavy, it takes two people in purple Nitrile gloves to lift her.

Not everything Virgil needs to see is down in storage. Some of it is up in photography already, waiting its turn to have its picture taken—along with a fabulous life-sized silver gander that I can’t wait to see in the show. Other stuff is up in conservation, including two ivory candlesticks that are being cleaned.

This, it turns out, is how you clean ivory candlesticks: with saliva. They have little pots of sterilized saliva up there in conservation, and they dip Q-tips into it and slowly clear away the dirt. Saliva! I go home and tell my husband, and he smiles and says, “Is it elephant saliva?”

Then he tells me about this nuclear fusion experiment he was once involved in where they suspended a tiny, frozen-hydrogen sphere inside a very small gold cylinder, then sent powerful laser beams in. (Doesn’t that sound like it could be a contemporary art installation??) The trick is, how do you suspend such a miniscule sphere inside such a puny gold cylinder without using metal bars that would mess up the experiment?

The answer: spiderwebs. Spider silk (as anyone who’s read Charlotte’s Web knows) is thin and strong and abundant. When my husband asked the guys at the lab if they used any special kind of spider, they told him, “We use whatever kind of spider we find around the lab. When they die, we send out an email asking people to bring in spiders from their offices, or from home or wherever.”

There’s something glorious in this—the way there are still problems nature can solve for us; the way the needs of both art and science can sometimes be answered by common stuff we usually think of as disgusting.

Also, the way people you never see—people behind the scenes—are resourcefully solving problems you never thought of in ways you never would have dreamed.

Do you have a story about people using weird stuff to solve unusual problems? If so, please describe it in the comments section below. I’ll try to drum up some weird ICA prizes for the best weird solutions. Deadline: August 15.

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Anne Tyng, Platonic Solids, and Penelope’s Bed

July 22nd, 2010

Photo: Chris Taylor

post by Rachel Pastan

Anne Tyng’s love of form had its roots in her childhood. The architect, now ninety, writes of “the sensual delight of feeling elemental forms of rocks, water and earth under my bare feet.” Born in 1920 in China to missionary parents, at sixteen Tyng toured the world and discovered its monuments: “the pyramids, temples and mosques, the castles and cathedrals.”1 At twenty-two she enrolled in the first Harvard Graduate School of Design class to admit women (though she says they were warned they would lower the standards), where she studied under Gropius and Breuer. Later she moved to Philadelphia and worked with Louis Kahn before teaching for almost thirty years at the University of Pennsylvania. In January, ICA will present a show of Tyng’s work and ideas.

Anne Tyng is retired now and lives in California, but she spent a week at ICA last month talking about plans for the exhibition. ICA’s architecture shows (Fertilizers, Holiday Home, etc.) tend to find a way to immerse the viewer—literally—in the forms and ideas being presented. The Anne Tyng exhibition will be no exception. Tyng is designing an installation that expresses and externalizes her thinking about three-dimensional forms: how buildings can and should grow out of basic geometries, and how these geometries are connected, in her view, to the human psyche and spirit.

All her working life, Tyng has been fascinated by the Platonic solids, those three-dimensional shapes with equal sides and equal angles (cube, dodecahedron, etc.) that the Greeks discovered, da Vinci drew, and Kepler wrongly but beautifully theorized formed the layers of the solar system. These five shapes are the driving forms behind Tyng’s architecture and form the spaces inside which she envisions life being lived: “living spaces were hollowed out of a consistent geometry as in a bee’s honeycomb.” For the ICA exhibition, the plan is to construct giant Platonic solids that the visitor can walk inside of! These will be connected to helical and spiral extensions, showing how one form is transformed into another. There will also be photographs and architectural plans and models, including an amazing three-foot-high facsimile of Tyng and Kahn’s design for City Tower (1952-6), which was never built.

The Tyng work I’m most excited about, though, is the “Four-Poster House” she designed for a site in Mt. Desert Island, Maine. For this house, the four-poster marital bed becomes the guiding geometry—as well as the metaphoric soul—of the building. The bed is built at the top of the house, and each of its posts becomes a column that supports the structure. The forms of the roof, rooms, dormers, deck, and balconies are all related to the form of the bed. At the same time, Tyng is careful to consider the site and the vernacular architecture of the neighborhood, so that the building, while conceptually radical, does not look out of place.

I love this idea, that the whole house grows—as the family does—from the marital bed. It makes me think of Odysseus and Penelope’s bed, that “pact and pledge” that binds them, though they are separated twenty years; that metaphor and reification of their love.

As Odysseus recounts:

An old trunk of olive
grew like a pillar on the building plot,
and I laid out our bedroom round that tree…
hewed and shaped that stump from the roots up
into a bedpost, drilled it, let it serve
as a model for the rest.2

Let it serve as a model for the rest. Just so with Tyng, though her bed is at the top of the house in the airy trees, and Odysseus and Penelope’s is on the ground. (You see that we are back with the Greeks, who discovered those Platonic solids.)

Thinking of Penelope, one thinks of patience. Anne Tyng, as I said, is ninety. There has never been a museum exhibition dedicated to her work.

ICA’s Anne Tyng show opens in our upstairs gallery on January 13. After a lifetime of patience, there are only six more months to wait.

* * *

1 This and all other Anne Tyng quotations are from her essay, “Architecture Is My Touchstone,” Radcliffe Quarterly 70 (September 1984).

2 From the Robert Fitzgerald translation of Homer’s Odyssey, published by Anchor Press (New York, 1962).

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Pieces of Set Pieces

July 17th, 2010

post by Rachel Pastan

On Monday, Virgil Marti came over to ICA to meet with Robert, Shannon, and Darcey, ICA’s crack team of exhibitions logisticians. Virgil is an artist and a long-time ICA friend. He did an installation for our Ramp space in 2003, and one of his beautiful pink chandeliers hangs in our lobby and is one of the things I like about coming to work in the morning.

Virgil is guest-curating an exhibition called Set Pieces that will open at ICA in September. A collaboration with the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), the exhibition will be made up of a series of tableaux assembled from objects borrowed from the PMA’s collections. Over the past few months, Virgil has spent a lot of time roaming around vast PMA storage locations and checking out the stuff no one ever sees. He’s selected dozens of pieces, largely from the decorative arts, to use in his installations: urns, oil lamps, busts, sofas, mirrors, portraits. The plan is to arrange them in scenes influenced by some of his favorite movies: Last Year at Marienbad, The Bitter Tears of Petra van Kant, Citizen Kane. I love how mixed up this is—old art objects used to make a new work of art, static scenes evoking the flowing form of cinema. Hidden things exposed.

It’s tricky, of course: making art out of somebody else’s art objects. You have to take good care of them. Part of Robert and Shannon and Darcey’s job is to figure out how to make sure the PMA pieces are protected while they’re at ICA, which means designing and building the right kinds of pedestals and plexiglass covers—things like that. In general, every pedestal has to extend out three feet in every direction from the object sitting on it—even if the object is really big, like a couch. But for one object, a model of Philadelphia’s Waterworks, Virgil wants a pedestal no wider than it is. All these things need to be negotiated.

Then there is the question of what color to paint the walls. Virgil saw some bright orange and purple object tags he liked at the PMA, so Robert called the registrar and asked her to send over some blank ones. She sent over a whole bunch of orange tags, but she said the PMA didn’t use purple object tags. Maybe, she suggested, Virgil was remembering the purple Post-it notes they sometimes used, so she sent some of those over too. Virgil also liked the pink color of some PMA storage crates. He’d taken a photograph of those, so it should have been easy to match the color; but it wasn’t easy.

Photo: Virgil Marti

Robert got out some color chip books, but none of the colors Virgil liked was in the books. When he started calling around to paint suppliers, he found out that pretty much no one makes a paint as fluorescent as the orange they were looking for, or a pink as bright (though Ralph Lauren’s “Blushing Bride” came close). Sam, one of ICA’s summer interns, suggested trying to match the colors through Photoshop. This seems like a promising avenue, but at the moment the problem lingers.

Another difficulty has to do with lights and shadows. One of Virgil’s scenes will be an arrangement of small bronze antelope throwing outsized shadows onto the wall behind them. These antelope will not be under plexiglass because the plexi would interfere with the shadows. Instead, they’ll be anchored to the pedestals with special clips that the PMA’s mount-makers make. (Is “mount-maker” a full-time job? What other unsuspected lines of work do they use over there?)

The original idea was for ICA to acquire a theatrical light to shine on the antelope. Our galleries have 40-foot-high ceilings, and our normal lights don’t make nice shadows. But it turned out that the theatrical light didn’t work the way we thought it would. Instead of sharp silhouettes, the first test produced big, vague, fuzzy shapes.

This is how it goes when you’re mounting an exhibition.

Next week the team is going over to the PMA to look at Virgil’s design for a pouf (Virgil is known for his poufs). Probably that won’t turn out to be simple, either, but I can tell you one thing for sure: stop by ICA on the evening of Wednesday, September 15 for the opening of Set Pieces, and somehow, some way, everything will look perfect.

* * *

Set Pieces is a Katherine Stein Sachs and Keith L. Sachs Guest Curator Program. It will be on view at ICA from September 16, 2010 to February 13, 2011, with the public opening on the evening of Wednesday, September 15.

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Summer Studio, Week Two: The Laboratory

July 8th, 2010

Kite Technique Drawing Class. Photo: Julia Blaukopf


post by Rachel Pastan

This week when I wandered into the cool, second-floor gallery where Anthony Campuzano is conducting Summer Studio—a free-form art school and working artist’s studio, both free and open to the public here at ICA throughout July—I found Campuzano (T.C. to his friends) chatting with a family from Connecticut. The man was a big guy in a Saab baseball cap who turned out to be an architect and photographer. The woman wore jeans and nice glasses (I didn’t find out what she did), and their girls, busy coloring on poster board at a table, were 6 and 3. It was hot outside—101 degrees—and an air conditioned art museum was a good place to be.

T.C. was talking: “We had a great class here Saturday,” he said enthusiastically, referring to the Sculpture Scavenger Hunt. “Everything here is like an experiment.”

Exactly.

Sometimes I think of ICA as a big laboratory where the questions pursued are not (as across so much of Penn’s campus) about the physical and physiological life of the body and the natural world, but rather about the nature of contemporary life, the boundaries of art, the intersections of the two, and—in this case—what one youngish, ambitious, talented artist might do given a big room and a bunch of materials and some willing friends and thirty days.

The people from Connecticut seemed happy. They’d spent the day before at the Philadelphia Museum of Art where the kids kept asking when they could do some drawing. The six year old, wearing a green dress, struggled with a pencil sharpener and an orange colored pencil. She was working on a drawing of a dinosaur and a flower. Her plastic triceratops (which I mistakenly called a stegosaurus) sat nearby, partially engulfed in a woolen hat. The younger girl had made some very nice red scribbles on her poster board.

T.C. told them about that night’s Kite Technique drawing class (offered Wednesdays from six to eight PM all month). The class is based on a lesson Campuzano learned from his teacher Elena Sisto, which she learned from the late Philip Guston. “It’s a modernist technique where first you plot the edges of the figure,” he said. “I still use it, even though I don’t draw the figure anymore.” He told them about the model he had lined up for the class, a guy named Ezra who’s doing an internship at the Fabric Workshop. Then he started rummaging around in a corner. “I got this cool thing from my parents’ house for the class,” he said, pulling out an old-fashioned bird cage strung through with ivy. The woman asked him how he was getting any work done with all the classes and field trips and film screenings.

“I haven’t actually gotten much done yet,” he admitted. But T.C. strikes me as someone—energetic, resourceful, overflowing with ideas—who will always find a way to get work done.

When I left, the girl in green was cutting off a sliver of poster board with big scissors, and T.C. was telling the family from Connecticut about Andy Warhol, how he had his first solo museum show here at ICA. “It’s a thrill for me,” he said, “because I had my first museum show here, too.”

ICA has been instrumental in the making of many careers. Could Campuzano’s be the next?

That’s exactly the kind of question that gets answered here in the ICA laboratory.

* * *

To see the whole Summer Studio calendar, click here.

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Summer Studio Opening Party on the Terrace

July 2nd, 2010

post by Rachel Pastan

For a couple of days earlier in the week, the artist Anthony Campuzano trekked in and out ICA carrying stuff: chairs, computers, art supplies, drawings, photographs, tacks, snacks. Campuzano—TC to friends—is known for using found language in his drawings, taking text from newspaper headlines, Wikipedia entries, the covers of paperback novels, song lyrics, etc. And as of yesterday, July 1, he has moved into ICA’s second-floor gallery for a month. He’s not exactly an exhibition, but any day the museum is open you can stop by and say hello and watch him making art.

There’s lots of other stuff going on too. TC asked friends and mentors (Anissa Mack, Kate Abercrombie, and others) to lend artwork to pin up on the walls. In the evenings and on weekends he’s offering free classes based on lessons that were important to him as he emerged as an artist. These lessons have great names like “Kite Technique Drawing Class” and “Sculpture Scavenger Hunt.” One, I’m told, involves cooking eggs. There are also video screenings, Friday night reading and discussion groups, workshops for artists on useful topics like writing artist statements, a day geared toward families and children, and probably lots of unscheduled activity and delight.

Last night there was music. Megajam Booze Band played on ICA’s terrace as we celebrated the opening of the Summer Studio project with cooler blues, beer, popcorn, and watermelon. There must have been close to two hundred people there: a woman in a short yellow silk beaded dress, a man in a Jerry Garcia T-shirt and a red ponytail, a woman with a kite tattoo on her arm (will she be at the Kite Technique Drawing Class, I wonder, or maybe she’s already taken it?). There was a man with a jaunty devil tattoo on his leg, a little girl in a pink sweater, a tall woman wearing purple sparkly shoes, and a taller woman in an Edwardian wedding dress and tall black boots: that was Kate Kraczon, the ICA curator who made this project happen.

photos: Carina Romano

One guy sported a “Campuzano Construction” T-shirt. He turned out to be TC’s dad, Anthony Campuzano, Sr.

I talked with TC in his new summer digs while the band set up. I asked him if he liked the size of room and he said yes, but that the best thing was—in contrast to his tiny Kensington studio—the absence of mice. Also, the air conditioning.

Campuzano had an exhibition at his gallery, Fleisher Ollman, just last month, and usually in the wake of a show he might let himself relax, but he said he was excited to be getting right back to work. He seemed excited. He told me about the art he’d borrowed to hang for the month, and the reproduction Rachel Harrison piece pinned up in the corner near his kindergarten diploma from St. Philomena’s in Landsdowne. He showed me the drawings he does to relax his hand, blue pencil copies of a postcard of Juan Gris’s “Portrait of Max Jacob” that one of his teachers, Elena Sistos, gave him. (Another version of these drawings by Campuzano was recently acquired by the Philadelphia Museum of Art.) “I like copying things,” he said. “Well, not copying—riffing off them.”

There was a lot of energy and excitement at ICA last night. When I left, the band was still playing and the beer was flowing and people were talking about which classes they wanted to sign up for. To see the whole calendar of events click here. They’re all free and open to the public, artists and non-artists alike. Or just stop by and chat with TC and watch him work. When will you have another opportunity to see what an artist actually does all day?

I’ll be there. I can’t wait to find out.

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Frankenstein Script

June 29th, 2010

post by Rachel Pastan

Fifteen days before Queer Voice opened, Darcey was in the conference room with all this stuff laid out on the table. She was wearing white art handling gloves and making notes.

“What’s that?” I asked.

She explained that it was a Jack Smith script for the exhibition, one of a bunch of scripts that would be on display for a work Smith eventually titled “Lucky Landlordism of Lotusland,” Modern Adaptation of R.B. Sheridan’s “The Critic.” (Yes, that whole long thing is the title.)

“What are you doing, exactly?” I asked.

“I’m doing a condition report,” she said.

“A what?”

Darcey is ICA’s Assistant Registrar, and part of her job is to look at every single object that arrives at the museum from a lender and write down exactly what condition it’s in when it gets here. That way we know if we damage the thing while it’s here, and—importantly—we can prove that we didn’t if we didn’t. With the opening of Queer Voice just around the corner, objects were arriving daily. Darcey seemed happy. “It’s like Christmas,” she said.

This script is from 1973, and it looks it. Darcey said they were calling it the Frankenstein Script, because it’s pieced out of bits of pages taped together. (This is how I used to edit, too, as late as the 80s, with scissors and tape—everyone did.) These bits of tape are browned now, and the paper is yellowed and dog-eared. The type is faded typewriter type. It’s a lovely, poignant object, one of eight scripts exhibited on a long narrow table I saw half-built down in the gallery during installation. Talk about something looking patched together like Frankenstein. In the photo here it’s been painted, so you’ll have to use your imagination.

The way we’re exhibiting the scripts shows how Smith worked on them. First he hand-wrote, then he typed up what he had written, then he edited that copy and retyped, and so on. The exhibition features four pages from each of the eight versions of the script—pp. 1-4 of the handwritten version, pp. 5-8 of the first typed version, pp. 9-12 of the first edited version, and so on, so you can read it in an orderly way but in increasingly finished drafts.

My question is: what kind of person saves all their drafts? A packrat or an egotist? How do you know, or intuit, that someday someone will want to exhibit them?

Or maybe just an exhibitionist? Is there a connection between being the sort of person who would make Flaming Creatures (which was banned as pornographic and denounced on the Senate floor by Strom Thurmond—always good publicity for an artist) and being the kind of guy who would save all your drafts?

I bet Jack Smith would have liked to see his scripts on exhibition. Sadly, he died in 1989 of AIDS-related pneumonia.

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You can see the script for “Lucky Landlordism of Lotusland,” Modern Adaptation of R.B. Sheridan’s “The Critic,” and many other cool things, in Queer Voice, which is open at ICA through August 1.

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John Kelly

June 22nd, 2010

post by Rachel Pastan

A few weeks before Queer Voice opened, John Kelly stopped by to see the gallery where the show was being installed—a series of black spaces and rooms that until recently had held Jenelle Porter’s Dance with Camera exhibition. Now the video screens and old-fashioned movie projectors were gone, and the crew was busy moving large scaffoldings around and painting black walls blacker. Kelly, a performance artist, dancer, and vocalist, was getting the tour, and then he and Ingrid Schaffner, Queer Voice’s curator, would discuss the video clips and scripts he’d brought along.

A lot of material got ordered for Queer Voice: records and dolls, a vocoder (the machine Laurie Anderson famously used to alter her voice). Director of Curatorial Affairs Robert Chaney spent a lot of time on the phone ordering things. John Kelly asked for old theater seats and Robert found some on ebay in Youngstown, Ohio. A guy drove them here in a truck that kept breaking down, and Robert had to come in at midnight to help unload. (I happened across them in the dark auditorium when I was looking for a quiet place to write and sat down on them for a while, not knowing they were special.) Ingrid took John Kelly in to see what he thought of the seats, and he liked them. “What year are they from?” he asked, but nobody knew.

“The guy on ebay told me they were historic,” Robert said. “He thought he could make a lot of money selling them to people with home theaters, but they only want big cushy chairs.”

Lucky theater seats! They got loose from their bolts and traveled halfway across the country to become part of this exhibition. Rejected by the wealthy, they have become art.

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Queer Voice will be open at ICA through August 1.

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