Archive for July, 2010

Weird but Useful Stuff

July 29 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 22 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 17 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 8 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 2 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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