Archive for March, 2011

In Search of Anne Tyng

March 25 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

David and I weren’t sure we were going to be able to get on the bus. We had waited too long to reserve our spots for the Tyng Tour, an ICA field trip to look at houses architect Anne Tyng worked on in and around Philadelphia. I had seen the models, drawings, and photographs in ICA’s exhibition Anne Tyng: Inhabiting Geometry—which anyone who hasn’t visited should run out and see this weekend before it closes on Sunday, March 27. But I had never been inside a building she’d designed, or even stood outside one. I was willing to tag along in the Volvo behind the bus, but luckily for us one couple didn’t show up. We were in.

It was a beautiful Saturday morning as we drove along the Schuylkill River out of the city, then through the hilly fields of Valley Forge Park toward the Wharton Esherick studio in Paoli. Esherick, the extraordinary sculptor and wood craftsman, died in 1970, and his daughter and son-in-law, Ruth and Bob Bascom, have made his studio/home into a museum. What had been his workshop they turned into a house for themselves, not open to the public, but through their generosity open today to us.

Bob Bascom chatting with Tyng tourers in Esherick's former studio. Photo: Chris Taylor

The house is extraordinary. The ceilings rise and angle, and the beams “chase each other around,” in Bob Bascom’s words. Colored glass bottles line the sills of the enormous windows that look out over the countryside. Masks and paintings and Esherick wooden trays hang on the blue walls, and a couple of chairs are lashed to the ceiling. You can see old tool marks on the floors. The wood to build the place and its furnishings came from the local forest; Esherick is reputed to have said, “If I can’t make something beautiful out of what grows in my own backyard, I should quit.”

Bathroom in the Esherick studio. Photo: David H. Cohen

“The roof is three hexagons,” Mr. Bascom, an architect himself, told us. “The hexagons gave flexibility to how to put the building on the site. And each hexagon is the upper half of a dodecahedron.” That sounds like Anne Tyng, who saw the world through geometry, and particularly through the five Platonic solids: tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, icosahedron.

Now Bill Whitaker, Penn’s Architectural Archivist and a co-curator, with ICA’s Ingrid Schaffner and architect Srdjan Weiss, of the Anne Tyng show, talks. “A lot has been said about Wharton Esherick and Lou Kahn,” he says.

Stop a moment. I would have liked to write this piece without mentioning Lou Kahn, who is so often spoken of by way of explaining Anne Tyng: who she is, what she did, what her work means. The show at ICA, however, is about her: her work, her intellectual passion for geometry and architecture, her vision. But Tyng did not build a lot of houses, and many of the ones she did work on were collaborations with Kahn whose office employed her and who is the architect of record. That is the situation with three of the four buildings we will see today: the Esherick workshop, the Erdman Hall dormitory at Bryn Mawr College, and a private home. Only the final house, in Fitler Square, was designed by Tyng alone.

An hour later, we stand in the cold bright day in front of Erdman Hall, a warren of square forms connected at the corners. At the core of each square is a public space—a cube—with bedrooms around the edges. The design of Erdman Hall is based on Anne’s ideas about geometry, but the plan she herself drew for the building ultimately wasn’t used. “This is a sad period in Lou and Anne’s relationship,” Bill says. “There are some real tensions between them artistically…Lou is working in one part of the office, and Anne is working in another.”

The group outside Erdman Hall. Photo: Jenna Weiss

We don’t go in. This is a dormitory after all, young women are living in there. They come and go in twos and threes, ignoring us. Probably groups stand out here all the time, looking. What do these girls know about this building, about the people who designed it? What would they think of Anne Tyng, graduate of a sister school, who forged an extraordinary life for herself through the force of her will and vision, decades before feminism or employment discrimination protections or the pill?

(The next day, by fate or coincidence, I will run into a woman who lived in Erdman Hall as a student a decade ago. It was cold, she’ll say. Her room was in the basement. She’ll tell me Kahn was famously reputed to have said that the slate and concrete materials might be cold, but the bodies of the young women living there would warm the rooms.)

The next stop on the Tyng tour is warmer, a family home on a bluff in a nearby suburb. The original owner, who commissioned the house in 1958, still lives here, and she shows us around. “Anne Tyng and Lou Kahn were both short,” she says as we duck through the front door. “The problem here is that it’s hard for tall people.”

This house, like Erdman Hall, is made up of cubes arranged in a kind of L. The ceilings of the crowded dining room rise from the four walls toward the middle, forming half an octagon. The big windows look out over a creek. “There isn’t a lot of space here, but it’s nice space,” the owner says. “We have thirteen doors to the outside! When we change the locks, we have to change all thirteen of them. We had three designs for this house, and we built the third. We couldn’t afford the first two. Lou Kahn gave a lecture afterwards saying he would never again build a house where price was an object.”

Kahn didn’t come by much after the building started on the site. He wasn’t much interested in the realization of the project—it was the design that obsessed him. But Tyng came. And later, after Kahn had died, she came again and built an addition for the family: a final square. The Tyng wing.

Tyng tourers in front of our bus. Photo: Chris Taylor

The last stop on the tour is Anne Tyng’s own house, the one she lived in with her daughter Alex beginning in 1955. It’s a cramped Philadelphia row house, on the top of which Tyng designed an airy aerie under the mansard roof, with a seating area and a sleeping loft with triangular windows. It’s stunningly beautiful. I sit on one of the built-in seats and listen as Bill Whitaker points out the details: how the bevels on the edge of the windows “make the room feel quite open, because the corners disappear”; how the heating registers are cleverly placed and hidden; how the ends of the central closet drop down, one to reveal an ironing board and another a double mirror. “She looked for a cabinet maker who was willing to build a house like a cabinet,” he says, as we take turns climbing the steps to peer at the high bed, and ask questions of the current owner, and rest gratefully in the late afternoon light. Bill points out where Tyng had her drafting table, where she found space for a tiny bathroom, how every detail was lovingly considered. This space isn’t cold in any way. It feels personal, assured, particular, alive. I don’t know what its geometry is—what Platonic solids shape the space I’m sitting in—but for the moment I don’t care. It’s peaceful and yet vibrant up here among the tree tops, a space unlike any I’ve been in before.

And now I remember something Bob Bascom said hours ago: “I got into architecture because it’s the only profession people go to when they’re happy. You go to a dentist when your tooth hurts, you go to a lawyer when you’re in trouble. But you go to an architect when you want to build something, and you have a little money in your pocket.”

Anne Tyng's house. Photo: David H. Cohen

Anne Tyng never had much money in her pocket. She became an architect when the profession was entirely dominated by men. She made a house and a life for herself and her daughter in this city at mid-century, and pursued her intellectual passion as far as it would take her. She designed buildings, made calculations, wrote papers, taught students, raised her child, ate yogurt, mentored aspiring architects. And when she got tired, she climbed up the ladder to the loft she’d designed for herself and dreamed, perhaps, Platonic dreams of tetrahedrons and cubes.

* * *

Anne Tyng: Inhabiting Geometry closes at ICA THIS SUNDAY, March 27. Don’t miss it.

If you’re in Chicago, you can see the show at the Graham Foundation, 4 West Burton Place, between April 15 and June 18.

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Cristobal’s Trapeze

March 18 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

The crew has been working in the gallery for weeks, transforming it from the shape it was when it held Set Pieces to the shape it needs to be to hold Sheila Hicks: 50 Years*, which opens on Thursday. By this morning when I got to work, the walls were painted and the floor exposed and the light barrier in place at the entrance. The crates and cartons containing Sheila’s pieces were lined up neatly on the left, while on the right thick snakes of color were coiled inside translucent plastic, looking like lifeboats. This, I could see, was “May I Have This Dance,” specially loaned to ICA by Target for our presentation of the show. Enrico Martignoni, Sheila’s son-in-law, has come all the way from France to install it.

At ten Sheila herself arrives, smiling and carrying bags. Enrico kisses her on both cheeks and greets her in French (she lives in Paris, even if she grew up in Nebraska). Sheila sets down one of her bags and takes out a small framed piece she has brought for the show: muted gray and white stripes, very much the mood of this cloudy, not quite spring day.

I introduce myself and explain that I’ll be poking around, waiting to see something interesting, but with Sheila there’s no need for waiting. She takes me by the arm and leads me over to a crate marked Stedelijk, Amsterdam. “The most interesting thing,” she says, “is here in this crate.” The work inside, she explains, used to hang in the entrance to the Stedelijk museum. “People who are forty and fifty come up to me and tell me this is the first work of art they ever saw,” she says. “Their parents would drag them to the museum, and they wouldn’t want to go, and there it would be when they went in! They’d go over and touch it, and it would be their friend.”

“You mean they’d sneak a touch?”

“There weren’t any guards in the front,” Sheila explains. “Just the ticket sellers.”

We look at the crate, on which are neatly printed the words: Trapeze de Cristobal. “It was named for my son,” Sheila says. “He and his friends would climb up it when it hung over the balcony in my studio, so I named it “Cristobal’s Trapeze.” When the curators at the Stedelijk wanted it, I took it over to the museum in duffel bags in an old Volvo station wagon. And now this crate! It’s a work of art. Wait till you see the inside—how beautiful.” The inside of the crate, she means.

Cristobal's Trapeze unpacked. Photo: J. Katz

The outside of the crate is pale and smooth, not so different in size itself than a Volvo station wagon. Sheila tells me it’s made of poplar—it took three poplar trees to make this crate! When she expressed her dismay to the people at the Stedelijk, they told her it was all right. “Poplar grows very fast,” they said. “We make our klompen out of it”—their wooden clogs.

Sheila says she always wanted to make things she could roll up and carry under her arm; but many of these works have been loaned by places like MoMA and the Met, so no one will be tossing them under any arm, or even so much as touching them without art handling gloves.

At noon, a young photographer on assignment to The New York Times shows up. He takes photographs of the crates; of Sheila sketching with rectangular crayons; of the crew starting install. Music plays quietly over the sound system. Some of the guys are sweeping the floor. They unfold plastic sheeting and tape it down with blue tape. Then Enrico and Isaac slit the heavy plastic around the colorful lifeboats and begin to unfurl the huge coiled snakes of linen thread.

“Flip it this way?” Isaac asks.

“Just twist it,” Enrico says.

“It’s kind of like a garden hose, you know?” Isaac says.

More like a fire hose! Or like an anaconda, or maybe a family of anacondas. One long tail of it stretches the entire length of the room.

At one o’clock, Enrico is 30 feet up in the air on the Genie. Somehow he has attached an end of one anaconda to the ceiling. It cascades down in indigo and green, olive and black. “It has to look like it’s coming down from the floor above,” Sheila says. “I want it to be part of the architecture.”

An hour later, four strands are dangling, a red and a brighter blue moving into green and black—underwater colors—and suddenly I see what the piece looks like. Not a hose, not a snake, but rather the tremendous tentacles of an unimaginably large sea creature whose body is hidden somewhere out of sight. Up on the next floor, I guess! The blues are sea water in and out of sunlight, the green is seaweed, the red is coral. The silvery gray bands are fish scales, or fragments of the fleshy skin of sharks. The dusky purple is the inside of an oyster shell.

Down on the ground, three men are wrestling with another tentacle. They twist it one way, then back the other way, lifting it high over their heads with their white gloved hands until they finally get it right. “There we go,” Paul says, and carefully they pile a heap of tentacles on a platform while Enrico gives directions, and Sheila smiles her inscrutable smile, and the photographer snaps away. The aquarium gallery grows still. Fifty years of work are condensed by a kind of dream-time into this single moment.

* * *

*Sheila Hicks: 50 Years, is organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art. The exhibition opens to the public at ICA on Thursday evening, March 24, at 6:00.

Uncredited photos above are of: Sheila Hicks, Variation of “May I Have This Dance?”, 2002-2003, dyed and twisted linen with cork and synthetic core. Courtesy of the artist and Target Corporation. Photos by J. Katz.

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Josiah McElheny: Like a Dream of Something Better

March 11 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

This year ICA is playing host to some of the University of Pennsylvania’s Fine Arts lectures, which means that on Thursday nights you’ll often find an artist in our auditorium, talking about his or her work to an audience made up largely of art students—that is, aspiring artists. Recently, listening to one of these talks by Josiah McElheny, whose glass sculptures mapping the development of the cosmos I have admired in photographs, I was reminded how all artists are aspiring artists—makers who learn to live with failure much of the time.

Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York

McElheny—a very successful artist who has shown all over the world and is a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow as well—started out by showing us a film clip from a recent project, an adaptation of The First Light Club of Batavia, a Ladies’ Novelette, by visionary German novelist Paul Scheerbart (1863–1915). This book tells the story of a quixotic group that builds a spa in an abandoned mine far underground and outfits it with electricity so they can bathe luxuriously in light. The clip, which lasted perhaps ten minutes, featured voices reading the translated text while colors unfurled and flickered down the screen in an endless array, shapes and shadows suggesting themselves, light brightening gradually and then dimming again, patterns slowly repeating. After a while you stopped expecting the shapes to resolve into anything, and the endless unspooling started to connect up to the description of the mine shaft in the story. I fell into the reverie of it.

Afterwards McElheny said, “I showed the same clip at Cooper Union, and people laughed quite a lot. But here, no one laughed. In Berlin when I showed it, in private people laughed, but in public no one did.” Then he said, “I’m trying to understand who I am, who we are, and what the role of aesthetics is.”

He talked about Austrian architect Adolph Loos and his influential 1908 essay, “Ornament and Crime.” He talked about modernism, and visions of utopias, and the American Bar in Vienna which Loos designed and which is filled with mirrors (“the coolest bar ever!”), and about his own project to make a reproduction of the interior of that bar only entirely in white. The concept, he said, was to take the idea of reducing ornament to an extreme by eliminating color as well. He showed a lot of fabulous images, and every now and then he said something that struck me like a knife striking crystal.

McElheny's ghostly white American Bar barware as shown in lecture presentation. Photo: D. Cohen

For example, McElheny talked about his struggle to expand and interrogate his own aesthetic, which I take to mean trying to open the mind to work that isn’t intuitively appealing, an admirable contrast to the increasing narrow-mindedness most of us acquire over time. He talked openly about the disappointment he sometimes feels in his work—with the way it comes out, or how it ends up looking in an exhibition. He talked about “trying to make something that looks beautiful but turns out not to be,” which he joked was the opposite of what most twentieth century artists have tried to do. Only actually I guess it wasn’t a joke.

He told us how sometimes the work seemed to end up making a point that was exactly the opposite of what he intended—and I can see how that must be a frustrating experience, but on the other hand, isn’t it also wonderful? Doesn’t it mean that the work is alive, not subject to its maker’s control but with its own instincts and agency? I can imagine God having just the same complaint about Adam and Eve in the Garden.

I loved hearing McElheny talk about the time he spent in Europe as a young man, trying to learn about glass. “I learned that the factory was a hard place”, he said, speaking of the center of one of the towns where he washed up. This made me think that there were stories lurking in the shadows of that remark, darknesses traversed and endured in the pursuit of light. And as he went on speaking—about light and dark and color and crystals—the louder the moral overtones of his undertaking rang out, and the clearer became his utopian vision, his interest in “making worlds better than worlds that exist.”

“It’s so hard to see glass!” McElheny said, and I thought he was lamenting. But when he went on, “It can be like a dream of something better, because you can’t see what it is,” I understood he was, on the contrary, exulting.

* * *
You can see artists talk about their work many Thursday nights at ICA. Coming up: Michelle Grabner (March 31).

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Checklist for the Prince of Pop

March 3 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

Here is a list of some of the items likely be on view in ICA’s upcoming show, That’s How We Escaped: Reflections on Warhol:

* An invitation to the preview party for Andy Warhol’s 1965 exhibition at ICA—his first solo museum show—printed on the back of a genuine Campbell’s soup label.

Courtesy of Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania

* Photographs of the crazy, legendary opening night of that exhibition, which was attended by up to 4,000 people, and during which Andy, along with 60s It Girl Edie Sedgwick, took refuge from the shouting crowd by climbing a metal staircase that went nowhere, and on which they were stuck for four hours, waving and signing autographs, until curator Sam Green finally convinced University of Pennsylvania officials to cut a hole in the ceiling, through which the artist and his consort escaped into the rare books room of the art history library.

* A three-dimensional model of the exhibition design, painstakingly recreated from installation photographs by Penn undergrad Shaye Roseman and Architectural Archivist Bill Whitaker, and constructed by architecture student Ben Loughin, showing where Andy’s art hung—or at least where it hung until it was taken down from the walls after the preview so it wouldn’t get hurt in the crush of opening night fans, meaning that there was no art on the walls during the opening, and also no room to dance on the glittering silver-painted floor despite the fabulous pop music playing in the gallery.

* Empty walls lit here and there by track lights to represent the blank places where the art wasn’t back in 1965 (though that exhibition was held in temporary ICA quarters in Penn’s Furness Building, not in our current permanent home at 36th and Sansom).

* A photo of Sam Green and exhibition fairy godmother Eleanor Biddle “Lallie” Lloyd, chair of ICA’s board at the time and the woman for whom one of ICA’s galleries is named—not to mention wife of CIA deputy director H. Gates Lloyd—in which she is wearing a blouse made of fabric patterned with Andy’s Green Stamps print, and he, Sam, is wearing a matching Green Stamps tie, and they are standing in front of wall papered entirely in Green Stamps.

Courtesy of Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania

This 1965 exhibition is part of ICA’s origin story. The museum was founded in 1963 by the dean of Penn’s architecture school, Holmes Perkins (who you can see chatting up Edie Sedgwick in another of the photos likely to be in the exhibition), but the Warhol show was what put ICA on the map. What happened on that wild, transformative night is the original example of what we pride ourselves on doing: giving significant exposure to emerging artists and thereby helping launch their careers. The fabulous media event that was Warhol’s ICA show helped catapult him to superstardom, and it helped define ICA’s role in the world of contemporary art.

But despite its iconic status, many of the details of the show slipped quickly into the fog of history. The records disappeared long ago, and in recent years no one seemed to know what works were on view, or where the hole was cut in the roof, or who was there, or what exactly the public response was.

Then last year, Kenny Goldsmith—conceptual poet, Warhol fan, writing teacher, provocateur-at-large—was asked to teach “Contemporary Art and the Art of Curating,” a year-long course co-offered by ICA and Penn’s Department of the History of Art, along with ICA’s Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow, Virginia Solomon. This class always curates a show in ICA’s Project Space at the end of the year, and Kenny thought it would be fun to revisit that original Warhol exhibition, to put the students to work and see what they could dig up.

Dig they did. They spent time in the library, learned to use the archives, located and interviewed people who had been at the opening, talked to former reporters for the DP (Daily Pennsylvanian) who covered the show and the protests it spawned. Amazingly, they tracked down the missing archival materials from the Warhol show after nearly half a century’s absence. The documents were apparently resting after all that hoopla in Penn’s Architectural Archives—which doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense until you remember that Holmes Perkins, ICA’s founder, was the architecture dean. The kids had hit pay dirt.

Courtesy of Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania

Last week the class invited some guests to a presentation of their ideas for the show. Donna Brandolisio of Penn’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library was there, and Architectural Archivist Bill Whitaker, and ICA Marketing and Communications Director Jill Katz, and Ben Laughin the model builder, and artist Alex De Corte who has been engaged to do a special commission for the show representing the iconic staircase, and me. The students’ presentations were not only clear, they were exhilarating, and the images they showed were fantastic. Kenny kept bouncing out of his chair and enthusing, “Isn’t this cool?!”

It was cool.

I can’t promise that the opening of Reflections on Warhol on April 21 will still be talked about 46 years later—that crowds will chant and protesters wave signs and helicopters rescue stranded celebrities—but it might happen. So tell your friends, don your hippest duds, wear a wig, bring your own can of soup, and also a tape recorder, and while you’re at it a hacksaw. This is ICA, after all. You never know when you might need one.

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