Archive for November, 2010

Just Right

November 28 2010

post by Rachel Pastan

ICA has three exhibition spaces: a vast ocean liner of a gallery downstairs; a nice-sized fishing boat of a gallery upstairs; and behind that, like the dinghy the bigger vessels tow behind them for rowing to shore, the Project Space—650 square feet where exhibitions of emerging artists or experimental installations are presented. Last week I heard a couple of curators talking about how much they like that space, what a treat it is to organize art for it. Maybe it’s related to the way restaurant appetizers often give more pleasure than the main course. Just a bit of something can be precious—delicious—can be, as in the story of Goldilocks, just right.

Right now the Project Space is hosting Still, Flat, and Far, an exhibition of the work of Erin Shirreff, a sculptor who also works in photography and video. One of my favorite pieces is Moon, a video of that faithful satellite projected onto a screen that angles slightly out from the wall, perhaps to clue us in that something is askew. As you watch the video, the moon appears to wax and wane, yet something is odd about it. The lit portion and the shadowed portion are subtly unfamiliar. It turns out this isn’t a video of the moon at all, but a video of a handful of photographs of the moon that Shirreff took into her studio, shone light onto from various angles, and captured with her camera. It’s quite wonderful to look at it: our familiar moon doing an unfamiliar dance. In its “Picks” section ArtForum, writing about this piece, refers to “the thingness of this particular work,” which I think is wonderful. Every thing should have its thingness.

Shirreff really is interested in exploring what you might well call thingness: how a monument or a landscape (or moonscape) is distorted or transformed by the way we look at it. Certain inaccessible artworks are best known through iconic photographs, and those of us who’ve never seen the Grand Canyon think we know what it looks like because the camera’s limited eye has offered it up to us from a certain point of view. As exhibition curator Lucy Gallun writes, “Shirreff’s work explores how images of extraordinary landmarks and artifacts become seared into cultural memory through their persistent reproduction, and how our vision of them is shaped as much by their reproduction as by our own experience.”

Lucy Gallun is not at ICA anymore. She had a one-year Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellowship (WLCF) with us in 2009-10, and now she is working in the photography department at MoMA and finishing her PhD at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. These WLCFs permit young curators who have participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program to come to ICA for a year to do a kind of apprenticeship. While they’re here we keep them pretty busy. Last year Lucy curated Everyday Imaginary, a video show, also in the Project Space, that explored animation (I’ll never forget those ants carrying bits of bright post-Carnaval glitter over the leafy ground in Cao Guimarães and Rivane Neuenschwander’s Quarta-Feira de Cinzas.) She also helped teach a class for Penn undergraduates called “Writing Through Art and Literature,” coordinated ICA’s education programming, and worked on the “queer” catalogue for Ingrid Schaffner’s Queer Voice exhibition, among other things. We miss her, and we’re excited that Lucy will be back in Philadelphia on December 8 to introduce a conversation between Erin Shirreff and Penn’s new contemporary art professor, Kaja Silverman.

Still, Flat, and Far will close on December 5, and another exhibition, The Illuminations Project, will open in the dinghy in January. From moonlight to other kinds of illuminations: I think that’s just right.

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The Anti-Penelope

November 23 2010

Silk bas relief for interior of Boeing 747 aircraft, Air France, 1969-1977. Silk on cotton canvas, 53 1/8 in. x 157 1/2 in. Private collection.

post by Rachel Pastan

Born in Hastings, Nebraska in 1934, but since 1963 a resident of Paris.

A student of painting who found her true artistic vocabulary in fiber.

Maker of objects ranging from large commissions for corporate offices to small memory bundles—sentimental objects wrapped in yarn.

These are all characteristics of the extraordinary fiber artist Sheila Hicks, whose life and work seem to contain enough contradictions, originality, and triumph to sustain an HBO mini-series or a long novel by Willa Cather. Right now, though, you’ll have to settle for a blog post.

ICA is preparing to host an exhibition of Hicks’s work, co-curated by Joan Simon and Susan Faxon for the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts. Sheila Hicks: 50 Years just opened at the Addison and won’t be on view at ICA until March 24, 2011, but Curator Jenelle Porter is working hard on it right now. She went up to Andover for the opening, and when she came back she said, “Everything was bigger or smaller than I thought it would be…so I had a lot of Christmas morning surprises.” Jenelle is organizing a series of lectures that explore weaving in relation to four cultural themes: the economy, the built environment, science, and religion. She’s also deciding how the show will work in our big open gallery, which is very different from the Addison’s small classical rooms. She has a three-dimensional model of ICA’s space, and her intern Grace has made miniatures of each of the pieces that will be in the exhibition to help Jenelle envision the possibilities. Here are some photos of the very cool model (though the work in it is that of painter Charline von Heyl, who is having an ICA show next September):

Photo: J. Katz

Some of Hicks’s work is small: flattish woolen weavings with names like “Zapallar” and “Rallo,” “She” and “Squiggle,” framed and hung on the walls. Some of it is made up of weavings piled in heaps or dangling from the ceiling. I love the name as well as the look of this one from 1969, rich with loops and wrappings: “The Principal Wife Goes On.”

The Principal Wife, 1968, bundled and wrapped linen, rayon and acrylic yarns, 100 in. x 80 in. x 8 in. Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence (Gift in memory of Mary Josephine Cutting Blair 2005.42)

Hicks has designed fabrics for Knoll furniture. She has designed weavings that hung in Air France airplanes, back when flying was more of a luxury thing. She sometimes uses found objects as her raw material, as in her 1986 installation with Man Ray, “patchworks of disassembled nurses blouses,” or “Raining Baby Bands” (1978), which is made of strips of cloth with which Swedish women wrap their babies’ bellies to encourage the belly buttons to go in. She has travelled all over the world, working in Mexico and Chile, India and Japan, collaborating with local textile artisans in their workshops, advising tire engineers about threads of stainless steel, and (always) making art. These various practices overlap, interweave, braid, maybe sometimes snag.

Not a lot of women born in 1934 managed to have careers, let alone become artists—let alone become artists of international stature. The ones who did mostly didn’t have children, but Hicks managed all of it. There’s a story here I want to tell, though I don’t know how much of it is true and how much I’m piecing together out of the snippets of biography and art and other people’s lives—my own found objects. A young girl grows up in the Plains during the Depression, learns to sew and crochet and knit—the tools she’ll need as a wife and mother in that time and place. But instead of staying in Nebraska and becoming a homemaker, she turns these tools to something else entirely—something large and gorgeous, something for corporations and museums, those twin kingdoms ruled by men!

Hicks’s work can be monumental, yet it is soft. Sometimes it hangs in skyscraper lobbies, and sometimes it’s made of baby bands. There’s both an expansive embrace here and also a firm refusal: the work encompasses many cultures and many approaches, and it declines to be categorized as either masculine or feminine, traditional or modernist, art or craft.

A strong woman using the loom to control the situation. A woman who has the patience to make this much work. Can Penelope help but come to mind? But Penelope never left Ithaca, and everything she did she did while thinking of Odysseus, and she spent almost as much time unweaving that famous shroud as she spent weaving it.

I’ve begun to think of Sheila Hicks as the anti-Penelope: weaving many rooms full of vivid, gorgeous, wonderfully useless objects. Instead of shrouds, they are celebrations.

* * *

ICA is grateful for primary sponsorship of Sheila Hicks: 50 Years from The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage through the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, and for additional support from Elaine Hornick Finkelstein.

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Mouse Tooth Marks and Other Adventures in Conservation

November 15 2010

Photo: J. Katz


post by Rachel Pastan

One of the things I try to do in this blog is give readers a sense of some of what goes on behind the scenes here at ICA: what the people are doing while the art is out there posing for you in the galleries. I was delighted when, the other night, ICA presented a program all about what happens behind the scenes at other kinds of museums—the kinds with permanent collections, something ICA doesn’t have. “Conversation: On Conservation” was not just a panel we put together because we liked the title (though it is a good title). It was fantastically interesting look at what conservators do: not just how they care for, clean, and repair art (you may remember my post from last summer about Q-tips and saliva), but the ways they decide when and how to do these things.

Contemporary art is notorious for being made out of weird stuff. How do you conserve a Matthew Barney Idaho potato, or some Chris Ofili elephant dung, or Zoe Leonard lemon peel and thread? Say you have a Kelley Walker silkscreen of two kinds of chocolate over an inkjet print: what do you do when bits of the chocolate start falling off? This was one of many surprising challenges panelist Johanna Hoffman has faced in her job as Chief Conservator at Contemporary Conservation Ltd., a private art conservation company. Indeed, not only was the unstable chocolate naturally coming loose, but mice were finding their way to the artwork and nibbling it off. They especially liked the white chocolate. What to do? In this case, the artist was still alive, so Johanna contacted him and asked his advice. Walker, apparently, thought the mouse participation was cool—he said he’d had a dog licking one of his works once. But the owner of the artwork felt differently (if there’s no chocolate left, is it really a Kelley Walker?), so Hoffman figured out how to secure the chocolate, refitting loose particles back into their original positions like doing a jigsaw puzzle.

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s Gwynne Ryan spoke about a different kind of challenge, that presented by time-based media like video and film. How do you conserve an artwork made of 30 CRT monitors, like the ones in Gary Hill’s “Suspension of Disbelief (for Marine),” if no one makes CRT monitors any more, and even eBay has run out? The Hirshhorn, which co-owns this work with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, has eight back ups, but those will only last so long. Like Walker, Hill is alive, and he’s working with the Hirshhorn to plan for future conservation, but Paul Sharits, the creator of “Shutter Interface,” consisting of many 16 mm film loops running on many film projectors, is not, so conservators like Ryan just have to do their best. She said she thinks about “stepping away from the material and looking at what’s at the heart of the piece—and how to preserve that.”

Sally Malenka, Conservator of Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) worked with ICA on Set Pieces, which is made up of PMA works restaged by artist Virgil Marti. Malenka talked about more conventional works of art than the other two panelists, but in some ways this made her presentation all the more interesting—the familiarity of the materials seemed to make the issues surrounding them loom larger.

Malenka was positive about the experience of working with Virgil on Set Pieces. She talked about how watching him visit PMA’s storage facilities often made her smile, because through his eyes she’d see afresh objects she’d known for many years. Still, her priorities and his were sometimes different. “The most difficult objects from my point of view were the marble busts,” she said. They were dirty, constraints of time made it difficult to clean them, and—as she remarked—“cleaning is a subjective process.” You might allow fingerprints on a Paul Thek Brillo box with meat (“Meat Piece with Warhol Brillo Box”), where they don’t look incongruous because we’re used to seeing boxes handled, but you might not want any on the nose and cheeks of a marble bust. “I have an expectation that marble will look a certain way,” she said, and when she showed a photograph of a marble head that looked as though it had used newspaper for a washcloth, it was hard to disagree.

Photo: Aaron Igler / Greenhouse Media

Then there was the question of exhibiting the 1780s sculpture, believed to be by Guiseppe Ceracchi, Bust of the Countess of Albany, on her back—as Virgil had encountered her in storage—rather than upright as she was originally intended to be displayed. The marble bust on its back was clearly a delight to Virgil, but for Sally Malenka it was difficult. Part of her job is to think about artistic intent, even if she can’t call the artist up to discuss it like Johanna Hoffman and Gwynne Ryan often can. Malenka presented a wonderful brief biography of Ceracchi, showing us other works of his and making us remember that he was not some anonymous shlub from long ago, but a real person, a serious artist, who had a certain understanding of the way his work would appear in public. He’s not here to enforce that understanding, but conservators like Malenka are trained to do it for him. It’s a trust they take very seriously.

I’m not saying Virgil was wrong to exhibit the Countess lying down. But he might be glad to know that, a hundred years after he’s dead and gone, people like Sally Malenka and Gwynne Ryan and Johanna Hoffman will still have his back.

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Visitor from Vilnius

November 4 2010

Found Map

post by Rachel Pastan

Curators spend a lot of time traveling to where the art is. ICA’s curators make studio visits and go to galleries all over Philadelphia and in New York. This summer one went to San Francisco and Tel Aviv, another got a travel grant for Paris, and a third flew to Munich and Rome. This is lovely, of course, and useful—indispensable, in fact—but it still leaves a lot of cities unvisited and a lot of art unseen, especially given the global explosion of the art world over the last decade. Time is short, and money is always tight, so last fall—at the invitation of the Knight Foundation—Curator Jenelle Porter came up with an idea: write a grant to bring curators from all over the world here to Philadelphia to fill us in on the art scene where they’re from. Travelogue, the resulting series of programs, runs all this year at ICA and offers a taste of Singapore, Paris, Beirut, Santiago, and—first up—Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania.

I was personally interested in seeing the curator from Vilnius because my family is rumored to be descended from a famous 18th-century sage and Talmudist, the Vilna Gaon (“Vilna” being the city’s old name). Probably it’s only a tale, but I thought I’d go and hear what Virginija Januskeviciute of the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC) had to say about her country and its art.

Lithuania, one of the three Baltic republics, is a tiny country with a population of less than three million squashed between big eastern European states (Poland, Ukraine) on the west and Russia on the east. To orient the audience, Virginija showed us hand-drawn maps her friends had made showing how Lithuania is situated in Europe—differently in the mind’s eye of different mappers. On one map, the Baltic states looked like a double-dip ice cream, with Lithuania the cone. She also showed photos of the drive from the airport to the center of the city: lots of trees and fields and Soviet-era apartment blocks. In addition to their museums, Vilnians (Vilniysts? Vilnyiks?) like to show visitors the landscape too. There are apparently lots of artists there, a legacy of the Soviet system under which an artist was a prestigious thing to be. That’s a nice thing to imagine: boys and girls saying to their parents, “Well, I thought about medical school, but I’ve decided to be a painter instead,” and the parents being overjoyed!

One piece Virginija showed was an image of a sentence inscribed on the CAC facade by the French artist and screenwriter Pierre Bismuth. It read (in Lithuanian), “Everybody is an artist, but only artists know it,” a reworking of Joseph Beuys’s maxim, “Everybody is an artist.” Googling around, I also found a gloomier version, by Lithuanian artist Juozas Laivys, which reads, “Art has ended, but only artists don’t know it.”

Vilnius in Snow. Photo: Thomas Manneke

Like ICA, Virginija’s institution is non-collecting. Apparently, though, things have collected there anyway—sort of like in a lost and found. One of the recent exhibitions Virginija described was made up of art works that have washed up in the CAC over the last couple of decades. While she showed several images of pieces in this exhibition–by Bismuth, Blaziejus Krivickas, and Ulrich Ruckriem, for example–overall in the talk she didn’t show many particular artworks, saying at one point that she didn’t want to put the emphasis on specific works or specific artists. I wondered if this was a legacy of the Soviet system too.

She did show pictures of “black widows”—people made anonymous by black burkas walking all over the city to raise a debate about the use of public space. Apparently these apparitions caused panic in Vilnius, and participants were interrogated by the police. In a different approach to addressing politics in art, she described a recent project to reintroduce the bagel to a country whose once enormous Jewish population was virtually wiped out during World War Two. “A rare light-hearted Jewish event in Lithuania,” Virginija called it. I think the Vilna Gaon would have been pleased.

What can you learn about a place through its art? The impression I took away from this travelogue was that Lithuania is a country very much in search of itself, a country asking itself a lot of questions. How much of it is its history, and how much is it newly born? Should it exhibit the artifacts that have collected on its soil, or shut them away? Should it spend money to restore decaying Soviet statues or let them crumble? Should it serve bagels? Should it support artists?

It’s as though Lithuania itself is a shifting map that its citizens, artist and non-artist alike, are drawing freehand everyday. And the Lithuanian curators are doing what they can to present those maps—some of which are also works of art—to the world.

* * *

ICA thanks The Knight Foundation Donor-Advised Fund of The Philadelphia Foundation for sponsoring these programs, which are co-presented with the Curator’s Perspective series at Independent Curators International, New York.

The fourth installment of Travelogue, with Santiago-based curator Camila Marambio, will be held on Whatever Wednesday, April 20, at 6:30 at ICA.

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