Archive for January, 2011

Hall of Mirrors

January 28 2011

Artist/maker unknown, American, Model of the Fairmount Waterworks, c. 1875, painted and unpainted woods, painted and unpainted metals, mirrored glass, sand, paper-mache, cork and cardboard, 42 3/8 inches, 19 x 45 x 31 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of Priscilla Grace, 1998.

post by Rachel Pastan

Close to a hundred people turned out last Wednesday night to see Orson Welles’s masterpiece Citizen Kane at International House. The film was being screened as part of a series organized with ICA’s exhibition Set Pieces, curated by Virgil Marti from the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA). To make the exhibition, Virgil trawled through the vast rooms of the PMA’s storage, chose objects that appealed to him, and re-staged them in ICA’s galleries (read more about the exhibition here). Some of the objects are arranged in ways suggested by his favorite movies. The first thing you see when you enter the galleries is a gorgeous model of the Philadelphia Waterworks, which reminded Virgil of the vision of Kane’s unfinished palace, Xanadu.

Before the screening, Virgil got up and said a few words. He told us for example that Roger Ebert, after explicating what was groundbreaking about Citizen Kane, remarked, “It’s not the film I’d want to see again right now.” Ingmar Bergman is reported to have called it “a total bore,” opining that Welles was totally overrated as a filmmaker. On the plus side, Virgil advised us to look out for Kane walking zombie-like through the hall of mirrors; the vast shadowy spaces; and the stark, haunting scene of words going up in smoke. He also talked about the amazing vision Welles gives us of the boxes and cartons and crates containing Kane’s collections. Referring to his own visit to the PMA’s store rooms Virgil said, “It’s virtually impossible to walk into a storage space and not think about the storage scene in Citizen Kane.”

I’ll confess right here that my feelings about the film are more or less in line with Bergman’s. Despite the extraordinary, original shots and Welles’s larger-than-life presence, I was bothered by the story’s narrative, which is perfunctorily handled. Welles doesn’t seem to care that much about dramatizing the story. For example, characters are always screeching about how Kane gets everything and then loses it, but we seldom see him doing either—just looking energetic or grim or doomed in response to it having happened off-camera. In a narrative, the viewer (or reader) asks, What will happen next? and hopes to be surprised; but in Kane you can see the trajectory well in advance. The surprises are all in the camera work.

Which brings me to this question: Is a museum exhibition a work of narrative art, or is it more immediate, atemporal, like a painting or a candlestick?

In Set Pieces, Virgil has certainly arranged the objects to take us on a journey. After the Waterworks, we move past a ceramic coffee pot painted to look like wood, a cabinet with faux books made of inlay, a little scene of three sculptures arranged in an apparent vignette (two heads and a Claes Oldenburg soft drum set, all the same size). Then we come upon the back of an enormous Renaissance bench, which we move around to admire the grand painted angels on its front. Maybe the relation of the images is more associative than narrative—more like poetry than like a novel—but one can feel those images accumulate, feel themes emerging and see changes played on them: objects which are disguised as something they are not (the coffee pot that’s not really wood, the cabinet that’s not really books); matched sets that don’t really match (the three sculptures); objects viewed from unusual angles (the bench). You might speculate that this last trope—objects viewed from unusual angles—is something Marti gleaned from Welles.

Citizen Kane. Courtesy of Mercury Productions and RKO Radio Pictures.

Much of Set Pieces is dark and shadowy, a la Welles’s vast shadowy spaces. But the last room is different. The dark carpeting has been taken up to reveal the white concrete floor, and the walls are white (except for the one that’s pink), and an arrangement of white fluffy poufs holds an assortment of mostly white marble busts. In this room too the familiar themes recur: objects in disguise, matched sets that don’t quite match, objects presented at unconventional angles (there’s a lovely bust lying on its side in here). But instead of shadows, we have emerged into light.

On earlier viewings of the exhibition I had wondered why Virgil made this choice. But after watching Citizen Kane, I feel he understood that the exhibition had to take us somewhere, had to enact some change, had to offer the viewer a surprise.

This, of course, is my lesson. I’m not suggesting that Virgil organized his installation in conscious contrast to the film’s treatment of narrative. His interests were elsewhere. Still: on Wednesday, February 2, International House will screen the last film in the exhibition series, Virgil Marti’s favorite movie, Robert Altman’s 1975 classic Nashville. I wonder what more about Set Pieces I’ll understand after seeing that.

* * *
Set Pieces is on view at ICA until Sunday, February 13. The exhibition was made possible by support from the Katherine Stein Sachs CW’69 and Keith L. Sachs W’67 Guest Curator Program.

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Ambassador of Art

January 21 2011

Javi & other members of ICA's Student Board. Photo: J. Katz


post by Rachel Pastan

Last Wednesday afternoon, as on many afternoons over the last two years, Penn student Javi Battle was in ICA’s conference room for a meeting of the Student Advisory Board. It would be his last. Javi is graduating this winter and moving to New York to start an executive training program at Lord and Taylor. He’s crossing that potent, invisible threshold from school into the world.

ICA has a complex relationship with Penn. We are part of it, we sit in the midst of it, its students work in our offices and tour our galleries and surge past us down the sidewalk on their way to Urban Outfitters across the street. Each year we collaborate with the School of Arts and Sciences to co-teach a class for undergraduates, and some of our programs, like last fall’s Free For All, are specifically geared toward Penn students. At the same time, the museum raises most of its own money and has independent relationships with the art world. Still, education is at the heart of much of what we do, and having students advise us, offering us their perspective and their energy, helps. In return we trust that being part of ICA will be a memorable and influential part of our student board members’ education. Listening to Javi’s enthusiasm makes me optimistic that it is.

Javi is passionate about art and about ICA. Growing up in Arizona, he played a lot of soccer, but his mother took him to art museums too. Coming to Penn to study at The Wharton School of Business, he quickly found his way to the museum, coming to shows and attending programs. One day ICA Director Claudia Gould came up to him after he’d asked an interesting question at a lecture. She’d seen him around the museum a lot and wondered if he wanted to join the student board. He did.

One important role the board plays is liaison to fellow students, letting them know what’s going on at the museum and motivating them to come by. Last year, at their request, student board members were trained as docents and gave tours. “The first one was tough,” Javi says. “But after two or three I got the hang of it.”

I asked him what he likes about ICA. There were a lot of things on the list:

“I love that I can go there and be by myself and look at art. I love seeing things I’ve never seen before. ICA has really opened my eyes to video art, especially with the Dance with Camera show. I also had the honor of co-hosting along with Kaegan Sparks (Penn ’10/ICA Student Advisory Board) a screening and discussion with the video artist Ryan Trecartin that was truly amazing. I love to see artists sticking to their guns, doing what they want to do.”

What Javi himself wants to do is and isn’t clear. He’s excited about his upcoming work at Lord and Taylor, where he interned in the buying department last summer, but he has ambitions beyond retail management. We talked about ICA’s 2009 Tim Rollins and K.O.S. exhibition—“so poignant, so introspective,” Javi said, adding that he liked it partly for the way it brought together art, education, and activism. Javi, who volunteers teaching saxophone at the Penn Alexander School feels that art and social engagement are as much in his future as business is. “I think there’s a way to bring them together,” he said.

I love the art students involved at ICA, and I love the art history majors. But engaging students in other fields—medicine, engineering, business—has a particular delectation. They are true ambassadors, sailing away on ships to other places, bringing the good news of art.

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Alluding to a Human Presence

January 11 2011

Foraging in PMA storage. Photo: I. Schaffner

post by Rachel Pastan

There’s no point in pretending there isn’t a flurry of excitement here at ICA when a critic from The New York Times comes around. Then of course, you have to hope they write a good review. And then you have to hope people read it.

There’s no point pretending, either, that one intention of this blog post isn’t to tell you that ICA’s exhibition Set Pieces, guest curated by Virgil Marti from the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), got a good review in the Times on Christmas Eve. Karen Rosenberg called the show “as irreverent as it is resourceful.” If you missed it, don’t worry; you can read it here.

Set Pieces restages objects from the PMA’s storage, often in little scenelets inspired by Virgil’s favorite films. Like the review, the catalogue too arrived shortly before Christmas, and it looks sensational: the size of a book of poetry, suffused with the bright orange and purple hues of the exhibition walls, with fold-out covers and Aaron Igler’s fabulous installation photography. ICA is a non-collecting museum, so we take our catalogues very seriously: they are our collection; they are what abides. ICA catalogues are published some time after the shows open, because it’s important to us that they document not just the art in the exhibitions but the exhibitions themselves: their arrangement, look, and mood. In addition to photographs and curatorial and critical essays, this one also has quotations from Joe Rishel, a senior curator at the PMA, who was Virgil’s main liaison there. Erudite, charming, witty, these quotations buzz through the pages like a wry wasp: “These objects were all sitting on the shelf in storage like that kids’ game called ‘dinner party.’ Who would you invite, if you had eight people to dinner, who would you put at the table and where?…I’d love to be at a dinner party with St. John the Baptist, Claes Oldenburg, and Aesop.” Those names refer to three sculptures grouped in a vitrine in the show as they were on a shelf in storage. A lucky accident, seen by an artist (Virgil) as an interestingly complicated conjunction, and presented to you, the viewer, to enjoy and consider. “Cinematic,” Rosenburg of the Times says.

Joe Rishel, Virgil, and Ingrid Schaffner. Photo: J. Katz

Virgil, who was brought up in St. Louis and moved to Philadelphia for art school in 1988, was in his first ICA show, You Talkin’ To Me? in 1996. “To have a show at the ICA made me feel like I was being taken seriously,” he told me. A Ramp project, Virgil Marti: Flowers of Romance, followed in 2003. Trained as painter but interested in printmaking, installations, and décor, Virgil is known for his exuberant, unlikely wallpapers and his colorful deer-antler chandeliers. Of the making of Set Pieces, he said, “I approached it much the way I would approach making work in the studio,” thinking of the juxtaposition of materials and the formal decisions to be made. But also, half-joking: “At least I didn’t have to make the work!”

Actually Virgil did make a little of the work in the show: the white furry poufs from which marble heads poke up in the exhibition’s final room in homage to a scene in Antonioni’s film L’Avventura.

The Set Pieces catalogue contains a great interview between Virgil and the art historian Richard Meyer, in which Meyer draws Virgil out about the artist-as-curator, about finding beauty in unwanted objects (“that unschooled way of seeing something as beautiful again,” Virgil says), about fakes and vitrines, and the humanizing quality of dust, and the way artists get attached to the museums in the cities they live in. Virgil is eloquent on the power of the decorative arts:

“I just don’t subscribe to the standard hierarchy of ‘fine’ art being necessarily more important than ‘decorative’ arts. One thing about furniture is that it’s made for people to use. A chair alludes to a human presence even if nobody’s sitting on it. One of my favorite paintings…is a painting that Van Gogh did of Gaugin’s chair, just an empty chair. I find it incredibly moving.”

There is an air of quiet expectation in the galleries of Set Pieces, as though you could catch the objects moving if you turned your head quickly enough. But really the only thing that moves is us: our bodies as we sidle around a great Renaissance bench and detour to explore the shadows of small metal animals thrown up dramatically against one wall, and our minds as we make odd elliptical connections between the objects Virgil has brought together. Maybe they’re the same connections he made, and maybe they’re our own. Either way is good.

* * *
Set Pieces was made possible by support from the Katherine Stein Sachs CW’69 and Keith L. Sachs W’67 Guest Curator Program.

Set Pieces, curated by Virgil Marti from the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is on view at ICA through February 13.

On Wednesday, January 19, 6:30 PM, the next of the Set Pieces screenings, Citizen Kane (dir. Orson Welles, 1941, 119 minutes), will be presented at International House.

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Inhabiting Geometry

January 2 2011

Photo: J. Katz

post by Rachel Pastan

Paul and two guys from the crew are 35 feet up on the Genie lift, examining the first couple of loops of an airy helix.

“I think it looks cool,” Paul says. “But I think he’s going to want it tighter.” He turns a switch and the Genie squeals, lowering them to the floor.

Weeks from now, when the exhibition Anne Tyng: Inhabiting Geometry opens, the helix, made of crisscrossed pieces of Luan plywood, will fill that part of the gallery, looping down to meet up with its geometric forbearers: a cube, a triangular pyramid, a dodecahedron, and a couple of others. These shapes too will be big—big enough to stand in, to walk around in, to experience and explore. Big enough, as the show’s name implies, to inhabit if ICA were open 24/7, which we’re not. You’re welcome to spend the day in there, but we’ll ask you to leave at closing time.

One feels that Anne Tyng, who designed this installation and whose work the exhibition explores, does actually inhabit geometry. Or maybe it inhabits her. I’ve written before in this space about how Tyng’s love of architecture goes back to her childhood in China where her parents were missionaries, how she takes a sensual delight in form. She writes of the “magic revelation in my first creation of space for human use,” and of her “passionate search for essences of form and space.” Now ninety, having worked as an architect for thirty years and taught architecture for nearly another thirty, Tyng’s passion for form is literally taking shape in ICA’s gallery. Architect and professor Srdjan Weiss and his assistant Kristen Smith have been working with Tyng to realize her vision, and now ICA’s crew is bolting together thin strips of wood, dangling wires from wall and ceiling, and erecting octahedrons the size of minivans.

I love this moment in the museum, when everyday an exhibition comes a little further to life. When music is playing on speakers in the background and all kinds of bric-a-brac washes up on long tables as on a beach: scissors, work gloves, plans, newspapers, a camera, a pile of white art handling gloves, a notebook, time sheets, books, balls of wire, balls of yarn. Today the gallery floor is marked with angular spirals laid out in blue tape, as though an English garden maze is being planned. More blue tape brightens the walls at eye level, mysterious figures scribbled on it. The room smells of paint.

Photo: Paul Swenbeck

I imagine Anne Tyng enjoyed moments like these all her life—moments when her plans and renderings began to take shape on building sites. You can see some of her buildings rise from the ground in photographs that will also be part of the exhibition. Darcey, ICA’s registrar, showed me the working checklist this morning. I was excited to see plans and pictures of the buildings I’ve read about, particularly the Four-Poster House in which the bed serves as the central organizing form and metaphor.

The plans and photos come from Penn’s Architectural Archive, which is co-presenting the show with ICA. Yesterday Ingrid, who is organizing the show, came back from the Archives with articles about Tyng’s early life and career. “Petite Blonde Succeeds As Architect in Phila” a headline in The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Women’s section proclaims in May of 1950. How’s that for news! “Just under five feet,” the article explains, Anne Tyng “has the look of ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ but don’t be misled by the façade for she has the astuteness of a woman who knows every facet of architecture.”

Is that use of the word “façade” an intentional joke? Did articles about architects in the men’s sections include their height?

A more interesting question: could Tyng, exploring secret passages in her childhood home in Jiangxi, China, imagine what the future held in store for her?

Well, maybe she could. She was always a visionary.

* * *
Anne Tyng: Inhabiting Geometry, opens at ICA on January 13 and runs through March 20. The exhibition is organized by ICA Senior Curator Ingrid Schaffner; consulting curator Srdjan Jovanović Weiss, Assistant Professor, Tyler Architecture, Temple University; and William Whitaker, Curator and Collections Manager, The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania. The exhibition is a collaboration between ICA and Penn’s Architectural Archives.

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