Archive for September, 2010

Free For All: Contemporary Tamales

September 27 2010

post by Rachel Pastan

Many Wednesday evenings something cool happens at ICA. This Wednesday, September 29, we’re holding a Free For All, the name an homage to the fact that we no longer charge admission (thanks, Glenn!) and to convey the sense that you never know what might happen. Contemporary art is always wild and crazy, right?

Well, sometimes. You’ll be able to answer that question for yourself after the Free For All, because at 6:30 ICA curator Ingrid Schaffner is going to kick the evening off with her yearly lecture “What Is Contemporary?”—a kind of roller coaster ride (with pictures) through what’s happening in the art world right now. Ingrid’s interests are broad, and she’s a witty, thoughtful, energetic speaker. I don’t know exactly what she’s planning this year, but last year she organized her survey by these themes: identity, terrain, reference, history, ornament, alchemy, evocation, flesh, storage, resistance, technology. If you don’t know much about contemporary art and you want a smart, informed survey, don’t miss this Wednesday’s talk. Even if you do know a lot, it’s still good to find out what Ingrid knows, because her brain is more interesting than most people’s.

Lots of people are doing a lot of work to get ready for Wednesday. Jenna has been making sure the computer set ups are working, and that the sound guys from Red Planet Sound know what we need, and generally coordinating everything. Molly has been making sure we have tamales from Don Memo’s, and Grace chose the band, Reading Rainbow, that will play on the Terrace after the talk. She’s also been distributing posters around the city. The waiters at Honey’s really liked them.

Kate has been helping Ingrid get images, and someone called the cupcake truck, which will be parked on the street, while out on the Terrace Penn printmaking professor Matt Neff and his students will be screen printing T-shirts with ICA logos designed by Print Liberation (bring your own T-shirt—or else buy one from the American Apparel table on-site). Print Liberation will also have other work on hand to sell, though I can’t say whether they’ll have the notorious Sarah Palin T-shirt that made them an internet sensation a couple of years back.

The band, Reading Rainbow, is two people—Sarah (a recent art school grad) and Rob—on drums, guitar, and vocals. Grace, who books shows all over the city in art galleries and warehouses, chose them because our second-floor exhibition, Mineral Spirits: Anne Chu and Matthew Monahan, made her think of their music, which she describes as mystical, ethereal, and with bears in it.

What I like about the Free For All is its eclecticism: the mixture of seriousness and fun, art and play, inside and outside, talking and doing. It’s a blend we’re good at here at ICA. Come Wednesday at 6:30 and see how you think we do this time, and let us know in the comment section.

You can also tell me which of Ingrid’s themes the Free For All should go in. I’m guessing alchemy.

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Posted in Mineral Spirits: Anne Chu and Matthew Monahan, Public Programs | Comments Off

Sleeping Princess

September 20 2010

The PMA's Joe Rishel at the mike.
Photo: Jill Katz

post by Rachel Pastan

It’s the night of the fall opening at ICA, and Joe Rishel is standing just inside the downstairs gallery holding a microphone, looking at an 1876 model of the Philadelpia Waterworks. Joe is a curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), a lively, charming man with round owlish glasses, and he tells the gathered crowd that the Waterworks used to be a big tourist attraction back in the 19th century. He points out the silvery Schuylkill river in the model, and the little boat houses, and a tiny carousel on the pleasure ground. The model, under its plexiglass vitrine, is one of the touchstones of this show, Set Pieces, which is made up of little scenes Philadelphia artist Virgil Marti composed from objects he found in the storage facilities of the PMA. “Look,” Joe says of the silent model. “It’s a sleeping princess.” He says the exhibition puts you in mind of “toys in a toy shop: close the door and they start talking.”

It’s true that there is a strange animation to the objects here, many of which seem to be pretending to be something they’re not. A ceramic pitcher is dressed up as a piece of wood. A writing desk has decorated itself with inlaid books. Prim tilt-top tables half-shield our view of an erotic couch sculpture by the surrealist artist Dorothea Tanning, now one hundred, who apparently made a lot of erotic furniture sculptures.

Joe, who recently curated the PMA’s blockbuster, Cezanne and Beyond, is talking about juxtapositions—how Virgil’s juxtaposition of objects is like Cezanne’s juxtaposition of colors. He’s talking about “the enounter of artists with older works of art,” how revealing it can be. Virgil, who is known largely for his super-Pop installations—his over-the-top wallpapers and bright chandeliers and decadent poufs—has chosen rather austerely here, though there is a whole row of ceramic George Washingtons and an enormous Renaissance bench painted with a women in a billowing dress.

Wearing a checked shirt and a purple tie, Virgil explains about the forest of small bronze animals casting shadows on the wall. Apparently the Elkins family (as in Elkins Park) donated a large collection of small bronze elk to the PMA, though here there is also a goat, a handsome bear, a buffalo (or perhaps a yak?) and a boyscout. A woman in stripes whispers, “The shadows are so…” but I can’t hear what adjective she chooses. A different woman with bright green toe nail polish regards a handsome silver goose. People mill and wander, looking and gossiping.

After weeks with the museum doors locked and only the staff inside, it’s a bit of shock to see all these strangers here. I find myself wondering who they are, and how would Virgil arrange them. Would he put the tall man in the linen cap next to the grumpy-looking woman with curly hair? The woman in yellow silk with the short woman looking for something in her purse? The artist in jeans with the funder in the gorgeous black dress?

One of Virgil’s gifts is to be alive to the stories these objects are telling, and to organize them so that we start to hear them too: Once upon a time there was silver goose. Once upon a time, four identical men in wigs each said, “I am the real George Washington!” Once upon a time there was a pitcher that wished it were a tree. Once upon a time an artist was let loose in the store house of a great museum, but he could take with him only as much as he could carry.

Of course—even if that were the rule—he could take all the stories he wanted. Stories, though they order the world, weigh nothing, and are infinite.

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What’s in the Box?

September 14 2010

post by Rachel Pastan

The crew is unpacking the crates for the Anne Chu and Matthew Monahan show, Mineral Spirits (Matthew’s sculpture “Roots For Ryan” is pictured above). Music drifts in from the back room, packing blankets are spread on the floor: rust, pink, maroon and black. Robert is making notes for the condition reports and taking pictures with his digital camera. “Hey Robert,” says Jenelle, the show’s curator, “remember when I started here and it was all Polaroids?”

Some things about installing a show change, but the important things don’t. Carefulness is always the watchword here. Carefully Casey unscrews the top of a crate, and carefully she takes the lid off. Underneath are layers of cardboard, layers of wood, layers of styrofoam, bundles of plastic sheeting and bubblewrap. One by one she lifts them out, and only then do we see what’s in there: something wooden, brown and pale, chunky and lovely—like a block of cheese that someone impatient has taken a knife to. Jenelle walks over to take a closer look. “It’s like Christmas morning every time you unwrap a show,” she says.

This show, Mineral Spirits, has been living in Jenelle’s head for years. She knew Anne Chu’s sculpture first, and then she saw Matthew Monahan’s at an exhibition in L.A., and it just came to her: how cool their work would look in a room together! Both artists work with the human figure, both disassemble and reassemble it to make it their own, both share a range of influences. It made sense to Jenelle in her head, but the idea didn’t come from there. It came from somewhere else, from what I think of as the curator’s instinct.

Most people who walk through an exhibition never think about the curator at all, but her hand is everywhere. In the works she chooses and how she organizes them, she affects how we understand the art we’re looking at. More than that, she influences how we experience it, as light influences the way we experience a landscape. If the curator’s vision is cloudy, the art looks dull, dimmed, flat. But if her vision is clear, we see the works before us with an acuity and a brightness that makes them glow with vibrant life.

A good curator needs a lot of things: a good eye, a knowledge of art history, a way with artists, the gift of contagious excitement; but maybe this mysterious quality—this instinctive sense of what would be interesting—is the thing she needs most. Maybe the best shows grow out of the kind of moment Jenelle describes: from a hunch, an impulse, an inspired guess.

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Posted in Mineral Spirits: Anne Chu and Matthew Monahan | 1 Comment »

Big Truck Unloading

September 7 2010

post by Rachel Pastan

Photo: Darcey Sawicz

It’s installation season at ICA, which is maybe more fun even than exhibition season. Every day something new happens: a wall gets painted bright orange, or it disappears altogether to reveal a row of windows that was there all along, or you walk into a gallery and find six elegant cloudy mirrors reflecting the world back to you, but differently. (Isn’t that what art does—let in light in unexpected ways? Reflect the world back to you, but differently?)

Today Darcey, ICA’s assistant registrar, stopped by my desk to tell me the art delivery trucks were coming with the objects for the upstairs shows: Mineral Spirits, Ann Chu and Matthew Monahan and Erin Shirreff: Still, Flat, and Far. The crates holding Shirreff’s work were so heavy, she said, they might need two side-by-side trucks with lift gates to unload them. During the morning, while she was waiting for the trucks to arrive, Darcey was on the phone a lot saying things like: “All three of the clocks are going together,” and “The Benjamin Franklin wasn’t on the schedule till next week,” and other intriguing, unlikely sentences.

When the truck finally arrived around lunchtime, it pulled up in front of the museum in the No Stopping Any Time zone. The crew came out of the museum and got ready to carry things, and Darcey took out her clipboard and her red pencil, and I stood under a tree trying to look inconspicuous. It was a beautiful, sunny, late summer day. People walking by in suits and scrubs and miniskirts turned their heads to watch.

It takes four people to lift the first big crate onto the dollies. The crates, which are built by specialized art crate builders, are lovely, pale and sturdy with useful glyphs printed on them in red: two up arrows, a broken wine glass, an umbrella with rain falling on it. A good crate for a big piece of art can cost $4,000 or more.

Another crate comes off, even bigger than the first, and then an oddly shaped bundle the size of a shrub shrouded in bubble wrap and pink packing tape, then four long cardboard tubes that look like they might hold bazookas. What can be in all these crates and boxes and tubes? Will the art live up to the dream of what the art might be before anyone sees it?

Down the crates go from the tailgate onto the dollies, around the truck on the street side and up the curb cut, over the metal threshold into the museum with a one, two, three and lift. Then across the floor, down the ramp, and up in the elevator to the second floor. So far all the crates have fit into the elevator. Darcey is checking them off on her clipboard as they go by, but I don’t see how she knows what they are until she shows me their markings: AC for Anne Chu’s work, MM for Matthew Monahan’s, and then a number corresponding to a number on her clipboard for a particular object, and then sometimes “1 of 3” or “2 of 3” for the big objects that come in several section. When I get closer, I see that some of the crates are labeled with titles too: “Seventeen Candlesticks Black Sides,” one says. “Nine Hellish Spirits #3,” says another. Upstairs in the gallery, the crew lines the crates up in neat rows and goes down for more.

“Will they unpack them this afternoon?” I ask Darcey.

“No,” she says. “We let everything acclimatize for 24 hours before we open it.” It’s a humidity and temperature thing.

The last crate so enormous it might hold a small rhinoceros. It won’t fit in the elevator. Eight sweaty, panting men and women stand around talking about what to do. They’ll have to uncrate down here tomorrow and see if it will fit then. Darcey says she knows of museums that carry oversized pieces on top of their elevators, but it’s dangerous, and we don’t do that here.

People start to drift away. The truck guys leave to bring another load. Shannon gives the crew an hour for lunch. Darcey and one of the art deliverers go upstairs to go over the paperwork. Robert locks the front doors. The big crate sits in the sunny lobby with its cheerful red up arrows and open umbrellas. If there’s a rhinoceros in there, it’s being very quiet. Probably it’s asleep

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So Many Amazing Ideas!

September 1 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.”

Video excerpts from their talk can be viewed here.

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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