Archive for February, 2011

Elegy for an Exhibition

February 25 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

Last week Set Pieces closed. For five months the exhibition, curated by artist Virgil Marti from the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, inhabited ICA’s big downstairs gallery. 6,200 people came to see it, 29 tours came through. The last few days, I spotted Virgil himself in there a bunch of times, talking with people, taking a last look.

On Monday, when I get in, the de-installers are already at work. Four yellow drill cases are lined up near the sculpture case where Claes Oldenburg’s “Miniature Drum Set,” Raymond Duchamp-Villon’s “Aesop,” and a marble “Head of St. John as a Boy” wait, their eyes elsewhere, pretending not to notice. Big wooden platforms and large pieces of Styrofoam lean against walls, and industrial lights cast unfamiliar shadows through which men in plaid shirts stride like cowboys, their drills casually dangling.

Photo: J. Katz

The tilt-top tables are the first to go. Their tops slide off to be wrapped separately, or else the whole piece is fitted into a wooden frame, shrouded in blankets, slipped into a crate. Table by table, the Dorothea Tanning erotic couch sculpture they’ve been shielding is exposed to view, but no one’s looking. Even the mirrors are going blind, lifted from the wall and covered, as Jews cover their mirrors at times of death. The carved wooden frames are labeled with bright orange identification tickets like toe tags.

In the next room—the bright white room with the marble busts displayed on fluffy poufs—two of the heads have already been crated. Braced like whiplash victims, they peer sadly out through wooden slats like children out of the back of a car at the end of summer camp. A few others, still in place, look on warily as a man in an orange T-shirt and purple Nitrile gloves changes his drill bit. The silver goose gleams murkily in its vitrine and is reflected in the great, gold-rimmed, fish-eye mirror still hanging on the wall. What else has this mirror reflected over the past five months? Arguments, illicit kisses, jealous artists, unhappy bankers solaced by art? And before that, back through the long centuries, what has it witnessed? Deaths, marriages, banquets, massacres? The long dull passage of empty days?

Perhaps, after all, like any eye that has watched so long without blinking, it is looking forward to its approaching rest.

Photo: J. Katz

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Set Pieces 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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Look!

February 18 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

Last week’s ICA lecture, “The Artist as Curator,” was introduced by ICA director Claudia Gould standing behind an unfamiliar podium. “For those of you who are regulars here,” she said, “this is a very new podium, made by Paul Swenbeck [ICA’s head preparator] and his team. It smells of paint.” The new podium is indeed very nice: sleek and white, with a convenient shelf for presenters’ laptops. As someone who cannot make anything, I love working at a place where no one would think of going online and ordering a podium. Obviously someone who works here would just make one.

Over the last few weeks I’ve written a series of essays for this blog about Virgil Marti’s show Set Pieces, curated from the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), for which Virgil explored the depths of PMA storage and arranged an assortment of the pieces he found there in intriguing mash-ups and suggestive vignettes. In these posts I’ve been poking away at the question of how Virgil approached that task, and, more generally, what it means to curate an exhibition. How do curators organize the art they present? Is it their job to make a story out of it? An argument? To show the art off to its best advantage? To make you see it in a new way?

Virgil and Ingrid squaring off in Virgil's show, Set Pieces. Photo: J. Katz

How serendipitous that all the time I was writing those little pieces, ICA’s Ingrid Schaffner—a thoughtful and insightful person and an actual curator—was getting ready to address herself to this very topic! It was, in fact, the underlying subject of tonight’s lecture.

Standing at the new podium, Ingrid told an audience of about 100 that the idea of an artist making an exhibition out of a museum’s collection goes back to 1969, when Andy Warhol lifted all kinds of things from the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art’s storage and arranged them—or sometimes declined to arrange them—in the galleries. The resulting show, Raid the Icebox, featured rows and ranks of Windsor chairs, racks of shoes, clusters of hanging umbrellas, and lots of baskets, blankets, paintings, ceramics.

Even before artists were raiding museums’ iceboxes, of course, they were curating. In 1938 Andre Breton invited Marcel Duchamp to organize a surrealism show in Paris, which Duchamp did. There were no lights in this exhibition; visitors were given flashlights to illuminate the paintings as they made their way through piles of leaves and under the 1,200 empty coal sacks dangling from the ceiling.

I’d love to just list all the intriguing shows Ingrid mentioned. A 1989 Brancusi exhibition at MoMA organized by Scott Burton helped viewers see that Brancusi’s pedestals should themselves be seen as sculpture. Fred Wilson’s 1992 exhibition at the Maryland Historical Society displayed artifacts from that state’s history—like iron shackles and silver spoons—side by side. John Waters Curates Andy’s “Porn”, at the Andy Warhol Museum in 2005, was viewable in a wooden cubicle complete with glory holes. Of this last, Ingrid quoted then-Warhol museum curator John Smith who said, perhaps a little wistfully, “I don’t think I could have gotten away with that.”

Which brings us to the crux of her lecture: what is the difference between the way an artist curates and the way a curator curates?

“It’s my job as a curator to minimize the distance between the viewer and the object,” Ingrid opined, whereas, as an artist, “Virgil inserts himself.” He paints the wall purple; he builds white fluffy poufs to display stuff on; he offers us a marble bust resting on its side. The professional curator is not supposed to indulge in such high jinx.

But doesn’t the professional curator have a point of view, too? Doesn’t she have style? Of course she does. But she’s supposed to be less flamboyant in the way she conveys it to us, adhering to a kind of institutionalized modesty. If you stop to think about it, though, what’s the least bit modest about choosing art, spending a decent amount of money to organize it in a room, inviting the public, and saying: Look! This is worth looking at!

At the end of her talk, Ingrid related that thinking about how Virgil inserted himself into the making of Set Pieces threw into relief for her how made all exhibitions are, implying that the exhibition-maker—the curator—is really a species of artisan. I liked that: the exhibition-making artisan (Ingrid) talking about an exhibition made by an artist (Virgil) known for his décor-as-fine-art (chandeliers, wallpaper, poufs), while standing at the podium made by an artisan (Paul) who is, in fact, also an artist.

Paul working on the new podium. Photo: William Hidalgo

I’m starting to think of the curator as a kind of marionettist, pulling the strings from behind the curtain. Just because we don’t see her hand doesn’t mean her hand isn’t there: assured, controlling, and potent.

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Last Call

February 10 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

“I’m trying to avoid gushing about this film,” Virgil Marti says. He’s talking about Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975), the last in a series of movies being screened in conjunction with Virgil’s exhibition, Set Pieces, curated from the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), which closes at ICA on Sunday. The exhibition’s staged assemblies of objects have been influenced by these films in various ways, and one of the pleasures of the screenings is listening to Virgil explain how: getting a peek into the way his mind works.

Courtesy of ABC Entertainment, American Broadcasting Company and Paramount Pictures

Close to a hundred people turned out at International House’s excellent theater, where ICA provided ribs, cornbread, and Nashvillian Goo Goo Clusters (mentioned in the film) in addition to the movie. Afterwards there was a discussion, led by Penn film professor Kathy DeMarco, that vividly demonstrated how many people out there love Nashville as much as Virgil does. I have seldom been in an audience as passionate and knowledgeable as this one was about Altman, people raising their hands to cite his more obscure films, to fill us in on the film projects the director was almost offered but then wasn’t, and to quote (verbatim) from reviews, like Pauline Kael writing about Nashville’s “love of the supreme juices of everyday life.”

Many of the other films in this series (The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, L’Avventura, Citizen Kane), had very specific influences on Set Pieces, inspiring a particular vignette or the inclusion of a particular piece. With Nashville the influence seems more general. “There’s a car wreck at the beginning that throws everyone together,” Virgil says—meaning singers, groupies, stars, political operatives, weirdos, ordinary folks—and Set Pieces is certainly an exercise in disparate things being thrown together.

But no, not exactly thrown. Placed, maybe, or assembled: positioned, arranged, ordered, organized. Organize is the verb for what curators do—they organize exhibitions. When I first came to ICA I made the mistake of using the word design, and I was nicely corrected. Designing, I was told, was for interior decorators. Not that there’s anything wrong with that (as Jerry Seinfeld might have said), only it doesn’t imply the intellectual work that is so much of a curator’s job, and maybe the part they want to make sure we keep in mind.

Of course Virgil, as an artist, “organized” his exhibition differently than another kind of curator would have. Trekking through the vast steppes of the PMA’s storage to make his selections, he wasn’t choosing objects because of their significance in the ouevre of the maker, or because of their provenance; he was selecting the pieces that spoke to him.

Photo: Darcey Moore

Well, or maybe that’s exactly what all curators do. So maybe the difference is in the way the objects, once selected, were arranged: in a series of displays suggesting stories: the little bronze animals casting their enormous shadows, the decorous tilt-top tables screening the erotic couch, and so on.

But no. I argued here just the other week that telling stories is exactly what curators do.

So maybe the difference between Virgil’s show (which is also sometimes described as an installation) and a more conventional exhibition lies in the way the story is told. Just as Robert Altman revels in presenting overlapping stories and including all kinds of different characters from many walks of life, so Virgil offers us a fabulous range of things: busts and benches, pitchers and paintings, mirrors and models. They shouldn’t go together but they do, because the hand that has arranged them is so artful and so shrewd, and because the vision that has assembled them is so open to all kinds of aesthetics, techniques, approaches, styles, and at the same time so singular that it can synthesize all this stuff, making of it not a jumble but a marvelous teeming order.

Before the screening, Virgil said, “I think of this film as doing what history painting would be doing today if film weren’t here doing it.” I’m starting to think about Set Pieces, then, as a history installation of the American decorative arts—though I don’t think that was Virgil’s idea, exactly, nor are all the objects here American (though most of them are). Still, there’s something here: some sense that the exhibition explores—as the film explores—the weird, gorgeous, diverse, sometimes perverse, contradictory expansiveness that is America.

Though it’s best enjoyed on the big screen, you can see Nashville on DVD any time. Set Pieces, though, is only on view through Sunday, February 13. Don’t miss it.

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Set Pieces 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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Art, Math, Cosmology

February 4 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

We’re upstairs in ICA’s second-floor gallery and Ingrid says, “You know how in architect’s models they always have these tiny plastic people? Well we are the tiny people in this model of Anne Tyng’s new project.”

URBAN HIERARCHY (1969-71; unbuilt), model. Courtesy of the Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania, by the gift of Anne G. Tyng

ICA’s new exhibition, Anne Tyng: Inhabiting Geometry, opened last month, and it looks magnificent. I’ve written before about the huge plywood helixes the architect designed for the show, how they circle gracefully down from the high ceiling, and about the enormous shapes—tetrahedron, cube, dodecahedron—big enough to stand in. But I hadn’t quite made the leap Ingrid is making: that the whole installation is an architect’s model that has tasted the right side of the mushroom.

This is the docent walkthrough, the time when the people who will give tours to the public get the ur-tour from the curators. ICA’s Senior Curator, Ingrid Schaffner, organized the Anne Tyng exhibition, along with consulting curator and architect Srdjan Weiss—who translated Tyng’s extensive diagrams and exacting calculations into these fine built forms we’re standing in the midst of—and William Whitaker, the curator of Penn’s architectural archives which collaborated with ICA on the project and lent the drawings, models, letters, and plans. (It seems like there should be a joke in here: how many curators does it take to change a light bulb? But I don’t know what the punch line is.) Ingrid knows what she’d like the docents to emphasize, and sometimes what she’d like them to leave out, and this is the moment for her to make her pitch. You can see her delight in how well the installation turned out as she points out the shadows the helixes cast on the walls: “I like to encourage people to look at these things as a sculpture in the space,” she says.

Photo: J. Katz

Ingrid points out the two C-shaped tables on which the models of Tyng’s projects sit, explaining that these are bigger versions of Tyng’s actual desk (putting them into the show was Srdjan’s idea). She takes us through the models: the Buck’s county elementary school, the four-poster house, the famous City Tower project, saying, “She’s thinking in the most literal way about how architecture fits into the cosmos.” Then she shows us the drawings of the house Tyng designed for her parents in Eastern Maryland, a house that survived many a hurricane before fire finally took it. The structure—the space frame—is radical, but the expression is vernacular, so the house fits in with the local cottages and barns. “I think it’s important to point visitors to the drawing,” Ingrid says. “It’s a kind of incredible minimalist drawing, and it’s also an engineering drawing.” As architecture itself is half art, half math. Or maybe in Tyng’s case, a third each art, math, and cosmology.

“I think, in all the years I’ve been at ICA, this is the best use of the space,” one of the docents says, looking up into the open spiraling helix. We all nod, converts to the religion of geometry.

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