Archive for June, 2010

Frankenstein Script

June 29 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.

* * *

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 22 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.

* * *

Queer Voice will be open at ICA through August 1.

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Index

June 16 2010

post by Rachel Pastan

“Do we have vibrato?” Ingrid asks. “I thought we had vibrato.”

“No,” Lucy says. “We have vibration. We have staccato. We have ululation.”

“Let’s put it in,” Ingrid says. “Page 32.” Ingrid Schaffner, ICA’s Senior Curator, and Lucy Gallun, the museum’s Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow, are working on the index for the catalogue to Queer Voice exhibition, Ingrid’s exhibition of audio recordings and scripts that investigates what it means to “sound strange.” Last month Ingrid sent out an email to a whole bunch of people—artists, curators, scholars, singers—asking them what they thought “queer voice” was, and she got back a whole bunch of responses: 87 poems, reminiscences, stories, photographs, lists, recipes. Some people wrote one sentence; others, many pages. And Ingrid, who has never done an index, decided it would be fun to do one now.

An index, it turns out, is a lot of work. Days from now, checking and rechecking references, everyone involved will be a little tired of it, but right this minute, reading through the compendium of responses and deciding what words will go in, it’s irresistible.

It’s fun to see what names show up over and over again: Kenneth Anger, Roland Barthes, John Cage, Truman Capote, Paul Lynde. By contrast, Boy George and Allen Ginsberg (next to each other) are only referenced once. Some words, too, come up a lot: activism, AIDS, blood, laughter, lisp, throat, truth. I love the words for sounds (and sound’s opposite): cackle, crackle, cry, hiss, sigh, silence.

“Does dyke go in?” someone asks. How to decide? Queer itself is out (it appears too often), as is gay for the same reason (though gay pride celebration is in), but we have fag and faggot. We have lesbian (one entry only). We have multiple drag queens: Lady Bunny, Dirty Martini, Mistress Formika, Dynasty Handbag.

Dyke goes in. So do elephant, erasure, mock-turtlenecks, and ventriloquism, which has four references. We have everything from ACT-UP to Xenobia.

For a while we argue about alphabetizing acronyms, always a tricky business. We argue about whether you include The at the end of titles after a comma, as in Wizard of Oz, The, or whether you just leave it out. I consult The Chicago Manual of Style and am surprised to find it more personal on the subject of indexing than on any other subject for which I’ve ever consulted it: “Whoever the indexer is, he or she should be intelligent, widely read, and well acquainted with publishing practices—also level-headed, patient, scrupulous in handling detail, and analytically minded. This rare bird must…work at top speed to meet an almost impossible deadline.” I look around the room, suddenly doubtful, then read on: “Copyediting a well-prepared index can be a minor pleasure, an ill-prepared one, a major nightmare.”

Neither pleasure nor nightmare appear in our index (though we do have fuck and dream), but both words seem like they should.

What The Chicago Manual of Style doesn’t say is that an index can also be a kind of poetry. Reading through ours is an almost sensual pleasure: Cape, Castratti, Cavett (Dick), Celtic Frost, Chic. Tone, tongue, transcendence, translation. Ukulele, Ululation, Underline. Feel the syllables on your lips. Cackle them, growl them, lisp them, speak them in tongues.

* * *

Queer Voice is open at ICA through August 1. Pick up a copy of the catalogue there or order on line here.

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De-install

June 10 2010

post by Rachel Pastan
Photo: Carina Romano

The Maira Kalman show closed. On Sunday 67 people walked through the gallery, looked at the pictures on the walls and at the ladders and linens and language primers on the floor and tables, and walked back out. The doors locked behind them.

This morning, de-installation has begun, complex and choreographed as a ballet. Crew members, in white archival gloves like mimes, move carefully around the gallery. I ask what they are doing, and this is what I’m told: First the flatwork is taken down and leashed to the D-ring.

Got that?

The “flatwork” is the pictures on the walls. Each picture has been attached to the wall with a thin metal leash to discourage theft (who knew?). Now these leashes are getting tied to fasteners on the back of the frames called “D-rings,” and then the pictures are wrapped for packing. There is a short discussion about what kind of tape to use for this, the regular blue masking tape or the white archival tape. Shannon, the head preparator, decides archival tape is best. Next, each picture will be covered with plastic and placed in a large tray with a few other pictures, foam buffering them on all sides. Illustrated labels are taped in place underneath so that, once the pictures are taken out, the next crew at the next museum (in this case the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco) will know where to put them in again. Then each tray is placed in a crate made specially for the show. The crates are a beautiful green, halfway between grass and avocado. I think Maira Kalman would like to see them lying around the gallery with all her collections. She might well start collecting the crates, which would necessitate bigger crates being built to house these crates, carefully wrapped, for some future show.

On the far side of the room Joy, from the crating company, is making careful bundles of tissue paper to support the Isaac Mizrahi jackets. She buttons the first one carefully around the tissue and lays it in a box while Robert takes a photograph, documenting the procedure. In a corner, Jacob is fitting the children’s table and chairs into a long cardboard box and wrapping them in packing blankets. Extra tape is brought in. The plastic vitrine holding the onion ring collection is taken apart, and the onion rings just lie there out in the open, next to the watches and the Prozac paperweight. I don’t know how they’re going to pack them, but I wonder if any onion rings in the history of the world have ever been handled so elaborately.

It’s getting messy in here, in what was yesterday a pristine, organized exhibition space. People are working hard to keep everything in order, but for the moment it looks like entropy is winning. Screws roll on the floor, screwdrivers lie on tables, crates and trays and cardboard boxes are placed at convenient but messy angles.

This is a transitional season, a kind of museum autumn. The beautiful garden of summer is blowing apart, littering the ground, and busy squirrels hurry about, gathering and hoarding. Soon these walls will be returned to a perfect January whiteness. The gallery will rest a while, until the cycle starts up again.

Photo: Carina Romano

Even though the Kalman show has closed, there is lots going on at ICA this summer. Come see Queer Voice through August 1, and check out our fantastic and original Summer Studio program throughout the month of July with artist Anthony Campuzano.

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Adam Blumberg

June 8 2010

Photo: Robert Chaney

post by
Rachel Pastan

The snake currently in the rotation on ICA’s home page was made by Adam Blumberg out of the foil wrapper of a bottle of sparkling juice. Adam has worked as a part-time preparator for ten years, the past two at ICA.

Like most ICA crew members, Adam is an artist. A graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Bard’s International Center of Photography, he works in photography, video, installation, sculpture, and sometimes he does a little bit of performance too. Right now he’s getting ready for a solo show at Tiger Strikes Asteroid in Philadelphia next September. Adam grew up in St. Louis, and he’s interested in identities issues around Midwesterners, especially Midwestern men. His work tends to involve cars, beer drinking, sometimes Nascar. At the moment, for instance, he’s taking the fender badge from a ’57 Corvette and casting it in bronze to make a 10” x 15” plaque. The ’57 Corvette is notable, apparently, for having been the first car to have fuel injection.

“So, how’s that project going?” I ask.

“Expensive,” he says, and laughs.

He’s also working on a triangular shelf on which will stand a bottle of Moet champagne, a bottle of Patron tequila, and a box of condoms.

Adam made the snake in the photograph as a kind of 3-D doodle when he heard we were looking for images of snakes for this blog. He was doing installation for ICA’s Queer Voice exhibition, and on the last day the curator brought cookies and sparkling juice for the crew. The purple foil from around the juice bottle felt scaly, so he thought he’d take some home to do something two-dimensional and snake-like with it. In the meantime he twirled a bit into a little sculpture, using the plastic pull tab from the bottle as the tongue.

Having lived in Wisconsin for seven years and studied herpetology there (briefly), I think snakes are good subjects for Midwesterners, but I forgot to ask Adam about this. Having made this little foil piece, maybe snakes will seep into his work almost against his will, and when I go see his show next fall I’ll see some blue racers or bullsnakes there among the Corvette badges and liquor bottles. I think that would be nice.

* * *

Adam Blumberg has exhibited in England, Germany, and Japan in addition to the United States. Last summer he had work in Vox V at Vox Populi Gallery, and The South Philadelphia Boat Show at Storage. When he’s not in his studio, you can find him here at ICA figuring out how to pack onion rings into archival foam.

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Milton

June 2 2010

post by Rachel Pastan

There are tables set up on the ICA’s sunny mezzanine by the glass doors to the Terrace, and they’re covered with computers. Students sit around chatting and telling each other what they’ve got on their hard drives and memory sticks. Lots of music of course, and old papers, and baby pictures. They have poetry and syllabi, study guides and snapshots and random icons and video clips. One person has brought in every file on her computer that has her name on it: Trisha photos, Trisha resumes, Trisha cover letters for jobs. One person has brought in a lot of harmonica music. None of it is in any particular order, but if you want any of it, go ahead and take it! It’s free, or at least it’s barter-able. Take a Megabyte, leave a megabyte.

This is a digital swap meet run by the students of Penn’s English 165, “Writing through Art and Culture: Transcribing the Wor(l)d,” a collaboration between ICA and Penn’s Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing. Under the guidance of their professor, avant garde poet and self-styled trickster Kenny Goldsmith, the students have spent the semester listening to and exploring the depths of the manipulated voice beginning with 78 RPM recordings of séances and working their way up to digital manipulation. Today is all about the digital but—in keeping with the spirit of Maira Kalman, whose works are on exhibition just around the corner in the second-floor gallery—it has a hands-on quality as well. Kalman spoke to the students last month about her ideas for an event she imagined—called “Milton” for no obvious reason—a conceptual space for ephemeral activities like ironing or selling pickles. She talked about exchange and pleasure, and these qualities are certainly on view here. There is a definite flea market quality. Since the files are not organized, students sit and scroll them, sifting and sampling. Or, as one student, Julia Nelson, says, it’s “not unlike going through someone else’s dirty laundry while he’s watching.”

Lucia della Paolera, one of the Miltonistas, says she likes the social aspect, the way you get to know people by chatting and hanging around the mezzanine as well as through the digital traces they leave behind them like fingerprints. “The model of the internet is insular,” she says, “but for this you have to physically be there.”

All weekend the students sit, scroll, download, chat, upload, snack, consider, discuss. Afternoon wanes and evening falls, and images on the screens succeed other images which replace and overlay and substitute for other images.

It’s strange to think that—if you carry the same thumb drive out of the museum that you carried in—what you have with you is different. It doesn’t feel quite like walking in with a hairbrush and leaving with a tea cup, which might have been more like what Maira Kalman had in mind. But in fact, that’s exactly what it is.

* * *

Come see our exhibition, Maira Kalman: Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World) before it closes on Sunday and head out to California! Or, if you’re in California, get ready to see it at the Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco, starting July 2, or the Skirball Cultural Center in L.A. starting November 16.

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