post by Rachel Pastan

Last week at an ICA screening I discovered a whole new genre. Buttons, Volume 2, is a series of very short movies about everyday life by Red Bucket Films, a cooperative (or “motley crew of thinkers and doers”) that includes Josh Safdie and Alex Kalman, son of Maira Kalman, an exhibition of whose work is up at ICA through June 6. Maira Kalman’s work is part illustration, part journalism, part painting, part something else—and though I don’t believe a son’s work must be related to his parent’s, I was struck by the way they both seem to be inventing new forms.

Buttons, Red Bucket Films says, are “found films of the everyday.” Some are a minute long, some a few minutes, and each one captures some human moment on the streets of New York (or other cities): an old man sunning himself with a homemade reflector, a man dancing on a subway platform, an old couple arguing on a street corner, two children walking under an umbrella. Like haiku, these films are powerfully imagistic, and they often have some sort of small movement that registers powerfully—though the movement may be the camera’s rather than within the subject. A slow pan reveals the bottle in the pocket of the tenement painter in “Short Sips and Long Strokes,”or gradually unspools the long string of losing lottery tickets on the pavement in “I Almost Won.” The interplay between the titles and the films is one of the delights here, as is the balance between humor and pathos, sweetness and unflinchingness. I’ve never seen anything quite like these buttons, some of which you can view on Red Bucket’s website.

After Buttons, we watched a more conventional film, Mon Oncle by Jaques Tati, a French comedy from 1958 (by more conventional, I mean only that it’s in a recognizable genre). Mon Oncle, one of Maira Kalman’s favorite movies, shares this with the buttons: it drew me in with its human warmth and also chilled me with its vision of what people are and how they live. The movie follows the wonderfully hapless uncle of an adoring nine-year-old boy, a shabby, childlike man who is impervious to the attempts of his sister and brother-in-law to “civilize” him. There are a lot of dogs in this movie, and cheerful accordion music, and a searing critique of the developing suburban culture of post-war France.

It’s interesting to consider the different ways different works of art approach the problem of how to make a powerfully dark point while keeping the viewer looking. In Buttons, brevity and humor are part of what makes us want to keep watching. In Mon Oncle, it’s Tati’s incredible visual sense and his heartbreaking comic timing. Also the dogs.
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In the Maira Kalman show (which also features a lot of dogs), you have to look for a while sometimes to see the darkness she hides in plain sight—as in the bright lovely blue of the sky in her depiction of the planes about to the hit the Towers.

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Maira Kalman: Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World) is open at ICA through June 6. Come see it before it moves out to California!

post by Rachel Pastan

It’s been a good week in the Development department. Today I got an email from a foundation in Chicago saying we made it to the second stage in their application process, and on Monday we heard from the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative (PEI) that we’d got a planning grant for a proposed exhibition on the late American overload artist, Jason Rhoades. If it happens, the Rhoades exhibition will be huge—literally. It’s going to take over the whole museum and maybe spill into other Philadelphia spaces as well. This PEI grant is the first competitive application I wrote when I started working at ICA last fall. It’s a slow process, this foundation grant cycle. A little faster than gestating a child, but not much.

Of course, gestating an exhibition takes much longer. Ingrid Schaffner, the curator of the proposed Rhoades exhibition, would be working on it for years. This grant will allow her to “travel to the cities where Rhoades lived, worked, and exhibited his art: Los Angeles, New York City, Zurich, and Germany. Schaffner will immerse herself in the work and in the archive, sorting through papers, sketches, notebooks, correspondence, boxes, collections, photographs, and so on, developing a sense of the most useful and persuasive way to organize them into an exhibition that will engage, inform, and animate visitors.” That’s a (heavily edited) version of what I wrote in our application last October (long sentences work better in grant applications than in blogs), and now Ingrid is making plane reservations! It makes me feel prophetic, writing these words and watching them come true.

Of course, most of the time one doesn’t get the grants. It’s a numbers thing, a horse race, a zero sum game. Having a good project helps, of course, and writing a compelling narrative helps, and having a good relationship with the funder helps; but in the end—as with pretty much everything in life—there’s a lot of luck involved.

The grant from PEI is significant, but it isn’t huge, and the other one won’t be either, if we get it. ICA’s budget is made up of hundreds of little pieces–$25 dollar on-line donations, $40 individual memberships, $5,000 tickets to our annual benefit, interest from endowment gifts, foundations grants for $2,000 or $20,000 or—once in a blue moon—as much as $200,000. This is what we do in our little development department of four: cast our lines into the sea and try to pull in a little cash to keep the bathrooms clean, the curators (and ourselves) paid, and the art on the walls (or the floor, or the video screen, or drifting down from the ceiling-mounted speakers as in our current exhibition, Queer Voice). The museum suspended admission in 2008, so development is pretty much the whole game. ICA is free, but if you drop a little something in the donation box—or buy a Maira Kalman T-shirt—we’ll be grateful.

Go one step further and become a museum member, and we’ll be thrilled.

Once last fall, when I was new here, one of my colleagues, perhaps half-jokingly, called me a “suit.” It was a bit of a shock (I don’t even own a suit), but I’m over it. Writer, prophet, fundraiser, fisher, suit: what’s in a name?

I’m interested in the intersection of art and money (though we don’t use the word “money” much in development, but rather funding, sponsorship, gift, support). Art and money seem like they should be worlds apart, but really they’re tightly bound. I’m still getting my mind around the crazy wealth floating around the art world—and also the crazy disparities, so that a handful of artists sell works for seven figures and the rest are struggling to heat the studio. I don’t know of any museums that haven’t seen budgets slashed, staff laid off, and exhibitions scaled back in recent years. Raising money to support good art and good exhibitions seems to me a worthy way to earn a living.

If you agree, perhaps you’ll consider making a donation. You can click here.

post by Rachel Pastan

Once a week, usually on Wednesday, I’ve been stopping by ICA’s Project Space, a small gallery on the second floor, and watching the video. There’s a new one every week pretty much all year as part of ICA’s 3-part exhibition, Video Art: Replay. I was particularly interested in the second part—Everyday Imaginary, curated by ICA’s Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow Lucy Gallun—because it explored the boundary between make believe and the everyday, which is something I think about a lot.

The videos in this show range from just over a minute (it’s fun to watch these repeat and repeat again) to about half an hour. Sometimes I’m the only person in the Project Space, which makes watching feel like a secret, and sometimes there are other people, which makes it feel like a shared meal.

This show looks at short videos that use animation, or animation-like techniques, but the subjects of these works are not fairy tales or aliens or cartoon mice. Mostly they treat the ordinary experiences—the nature of cities, playing pool, ants foraging—but render them in such a way that they seem almost magical; or rather, they enable us to see what’s magical in the everyday ordinary world around us. How strange to remember that the black boxes of buildings hold people yearning (Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Signs Facing the Sky, 2005); that the shapes of letters could almost be the shapes of animals (Shahzia Sikander, Dissonance to Detour, 2006); that ants, carrying the glittering detritus of Carnaval, can make the parched earth shimmer (Cao Guimarães and Rivane Neuenschwander’s Quarta-Feira de Cinzas, 2006)!

In one of my favorite videos (Rob Carter’s Metropolis, 2008), we see an empty landscape gradually overlaid with a house, a church, ten houses, city streets, skyscrapers, baseball stadiums, and finally what I take to be nuclear ash. New additions push up with audible squeaks and grunts, and new maps snap loudly into place over the old. A whole city comes to life, sprouts and burgeons and explodes into modernity before our eyes.

Best of all—most poignant—is the way Carter uses sound. The early minutes of the video are so peaceful, the silence broken only by the wind and the sound of bells, while toward the end we are accosted by car horns, airplanes, the endless roar of highway noise.

Walking home after I saw that video, I couldn’t stop hearing the city sounds all around me—sounds I’m not usually aware of—and straining unconsciously to hear the bells, the silence, beneath. I was aware, too, of the earth under the concrete: the farmland it must once have been. The field, the forest, birds in the trees and foxes hunting and panthers waiting for dusk. That was weeks ago, but I still think about it, walking up from the R-3 in the mornings past Franklin Field, the food trucks, the library with its five million books. Is that world less real because it’s vanished? Is it now purely imaginary? Or maybe impurely imaginary.

Everyday imaginary.

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Part 3 of ICA’s Video Show, Ludicrous!—curated by Jenelle Porter—is open at ICA through June 6. This week’s video, “The Corner,” by Shannon Plumb, features “elaborate but obvious disguises,” according to the gallery notes.