Archive for April, 2011

Letterpress and Zine Making: Improvising at the End

April 22 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

Dan and Tony are consulting with a young woman named Colleen about the taped and stapled pages spread across the tables. “Remember how the pagination works differently with the saddle stitches we’re doing,” Tony says.

“The staples will show up,” Dan says.

“But that will be cool,” Tony says. “This is always part of the process—improvising at the end.”

It’s early on Saturday morning, and Dan and Tony, who form the collaborative Megawords, are beginning day three of a free four-day zine-making workshop sponsered by ICA, Kelly Writers House, and Common Press. This workshop is loosely associated with ICA’s exhibition One is the loneliest number, which explores two-person art making collaboratives and is organized by ICA Assistant Curator Kate Kraczon, whose idea this workshop was. Megawords is part of that show, and the zines produced this weekend will be on display in Megawords’ exhibition and programming space on ICA’s mezzanine.

Most of the people here this morning have never made a zine before. Maybe some of you reading this don’t even know what a zine is. Last week at an ICA curatorial meeting, where Kate filled us in about the zine she was dreaming up about “junk foods that I bring back from trips…a love letter to things like the Hubiq’s pies I brought back from New Orleans!” the question was discussed: how is a zine different from a magazine?

A zine is handmade, so each one is a little different—intentionally or unintentionally. Zines are often distributed for free, and they usually have small print runs: the ones made this weekend will have print runs of 25, courtesy of ICA’s copier. To me, zines have a pleasantly grungy feel about them, a scent of disaffection, a kinship with graffiti, tattoos, 2 AM subway rides, and underground music. But that doesn’t mean they’re not as considered, planned, sweated over, and obsessively reworked as any other work of art or literature. Spend half an hour with Tony and Dan, and you’ll see how seriously they take their work.

The same goes for Matt Neff, an artist who also runs Common Press at the University of Pennsylvania, which, he explains, is both a teaching tool and a professional shop. As he leads us down the steps of the Morgan building on 34th Street, he says, “It looks like a creepy basement, but it gets a lot of use.”

Matt gives us the tour: the two galley proof presses, one from the sixties and one from the fifties, and the old-fashioned, nineteenth century press like the kind Ben Franklin used. He talks about the type, some of which is wood and some metal. “The thing about wood type is it gets damaged, and that’s part of the aesthetic. They don’t make it anymore, so it’s hard to get a complete set. You might want to set something that has three ks, and we might only have two.”

He explains how letterpress has lots of parameters. “Working against those parameters really yields interesting results,” he says, and Tony adds, “And things will start to happen just in the process of doing it! The idea of the unpredictability of the zines and the photocopies, we get some of that here.”

The students decide to make a broadside, with all their names on it, that will advertise Megawords and everyone’s zines. Matt shows them the drawers of type, which are labeled with wonderful names: Wood Type, Dingbats, 14 Univers, 18 Univers Light, 24 Univers Bold. They start setting up the “beds” of the two galley proof presses, choosing type they like and spelling out their names. “Top is always top,” Matt says, demonstrating, “but if I want it to be readable, I have to stack it backwards.” He says, “There’s type as a way to communicate words, and there’s type as design. Sometimes we talk about filling a page with type or images, and sometimes we talk about using a page to make an image.”

Students mill around, pulling out drawers, laying out letters. “I’m starting to lose track of which way letters normally go,” someone says: “Did you mean Deb? Or Bed?”

Someone puts some music on. The room falls into a quiet, productive hum. Matt starts putting furniture into the beds—bars of wood or metal that fill up the extra spaces so the letters don’t move. He moves some of the pieces around like a puzzle, measures, finds some more furniture: “Let’s try that.” Soon Matt will lock the bed up, put pressure on it, apply ink. Each broadside will be a little different from the rest—intentionally or unintentionally.

The big-bellied, nineteenth century press sits in its corner, looking jealously on. If the young Ben Franklin were alive today, you can bet he would have been a zine-maker.

Finished zines! Photo: Kate Kraczon

* * *

One is the loneliest number, with Megawords on the mezzanine, is on view at ICA now!

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Sheila Hicks: The most beautiful belly buttons

April 15 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

“The Swedes are known to have the most beautiful belly buttons,” Sheila Hicks says. It is a few days before her show, Sheila Hicks: 50 Years opens at ICA, and we are sitting on a bench in ICA’s lobby watching Enrico Martignoni, 35 feet up in the air on a Genie, hang Raining Baby Bands from the ceiling. This work consists of clean white baby bands—pieces of cotton cloth used in Swedish hospitals to wrap the umbilical stumps of newborns—tied together in long, lovely strands. It is the use of these bands, Sheila explains, that makes the Swedes’ navals so attractive.

Photo: J. Katz

Sheila points to the other lobby work, Baby Time Again, which is already hung. This one is made of newborns’ white cotton shirts unsewn and then reassembled and stitched together in great sheets with gaps where the heads would have gone through, and more gaps where the body of the shirt curves into the sleeve. She takes my notebook and makes a drawing to show me, pointing out the almond-shaped spaces where “the little patches of things come through—the light, the sky.” On a sunny day like this, in our spacious glassy lobby, the two bright hangings flutter cheerfully like sails before the blue of the clear March morning.

Photo: J. Katz

Sheila goes on explaining things. “In the eighties, I made a series of shows, and instead of shipping materials, they shipped me!” She tells me about going to Oslo, Norway and Lund, Sweden and making work out of freshly washed hospital laundry, partly for the pleasure (and economy) of using what was to hand, and also “for the unity of it—it was white. And it was snow, it was January.” In Paris they hung the baby shirt panel in a gallery on Boulevard Saint Germain in front of a bus stop. In Jerusalem she made a similar work out of soldiers’ uniforms.

“The concept originated on the avenue of the Grande-Armée in Paris,” Sheila says. This was in the seventies, and she had applied to the Tapestry Biennial of Lausanne, which required a work made of six square meters of material. Her proposal drawing was accepted, but Sheila didn’t have time to make the piece. One day, however, she was driving down the Avenue de la Grande-Armée, and there was a laundry truck in front of her, making its round of the hotels, picking up dirty sheets and delivering clean ones. That’s when she had the idea: borrow linens from a local Lausanne hospital to make her tapestry. “That was the year I got thrown out of the Biennial!” she exclaims. “They considered it blasphème. But I got a lot of press, and it was a turning point in the Biennale Tapisseire.” People started to look at ready-mades and other new forms. “It was 1977,” she says, but her daughter, Itaka, who is standing nearby, disagrees.

“It was 1975,” Itaka says. She remembers because of what year she was in at school. They argue peaceably. Itaka says she remembers telling her mother not to do the laundry tapestry, and Sheila says this was how she knew it was a good idea. “She was very conservative,” she says of her daughter, and they smile at each other, remembering.

Photo: J. Katz

Itaka says, “I love the baby bands! I love the way they catch the light, and that they swaddled so many babies. And they go on, from exhibition space to exhibition space.” Take a moment to consider those babies of Lund and Lausanne, all grown up. Are the Swedes displaying their beautiful navels complacently on some sunny beach even now? Are the Swiss pondering the boundaries of art?

High in the air Enrico, who is married to Itaka, measures a distance from the high windows along the ceiling, makes a mark, drills a hole, measures again. Behind us in ICA’s auditorium, the installation crew irons and knots more baby bands for Enrico to hang. Something has shifted: baby clothes become art, readied for use by the hands of men, their new handmaidens, under the direction of women.

Not that it matters: men or women, tapestry or blasphemy, 1975 or 1977. What matters is the snowy cloth, the patches of sky coming through, and the people passing on the street who peer in, their day illuminated briefly by the light that has traveled here from that long-ago moment on the Avenue de la Grande-Armée as from a distant star.

Photo: J. Katz

* * *

Sheila Hicks: 50 Years is on view at ICA through August 7, but don’t wait that long!

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Tools and Slippers and All Kinds of Things

April 8 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

“I have a notebook filled with pages and pages of everything that’s here,” Sam says. “Tools, and slippers, and all kinds of things.”

It’s a windy spring Friday, one of the many Fridays that Sam, a University of Pennsylvania junior from Long Island, has spent in the late sculptor Bill Walton’s studio, cataloging and packing up its contents. Last year Sam worked as a summer intern at ICA, organizing our digital photo archive. She did such a good job that she is now entrusted with this artist’s studio. Next year, in our Project Space, ICA will recreate the studio in all its miraculous order and ambiguity. Walton’s sculptures often look like tools, or arrangements of tools, and his tools are often as carefully arranged as sculptures. This, for example, is a (blurry photograph of a) sculpture:


This, however, is just a jar of tools:


Sam has described it in her notebook like this: “Jar with compass, matchbook, mini flashlight, 2 exacto knives, screw driver, metal penlike tool, ‘r’-shaped green and gold metal tool.” Soon she will swaddle it in bubble wrap, tape it up, write a number on the tape, and store it gently in a carton with other things from the shelf she found it on. Photographs will help installers figure out how to arrange the items later, at ICA. “What’s difficult,” Sam says, “is trying to figure out how to organize the things so it makes sense to someone besides me.”

Here is part of a list from her notebook:

17. small glass w/ colored pencils
18. Windex
19. spray bottle
20. small sheet of paper w/ grid
21. sucking candy
22. end of paint brush
23. green apple soap

Her favorite object is Walton’s talking clock, though it scared the bejesus out of her the first time it went off.

Sam starts explaining about the connections between the workspace and the art, how Walton created mirrorings between the two. She points to a sculpture:

She says, “Apparently the sculpture that looks like two rags is mirrored back here with his hanging sweatshirt and apron.”

I first saw this studio last fall, when artist Jane Irish, a good friend of Walton’s, gave a tour to some ICA staff. I had never heard of the sculptor, who had recently died, but listening to Jane talk about his particular combination of workmanlike honesty and artistic integrity—and how he was well-known and beloved of other artists, if less known by the public—brought to mind the poet Bill Stafford, perhaps best remembered for his poem, “Traveling Through the Dark.”

        Traveling through the dark I found a deer
        dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.
        It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
        that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.

That’s the first stanza. There is a plain-spokenness about Stafford’s language that might make you mistake it for prose, the way you might mistake a Walton sculpture of a box of chisels for tools. Both artists make you look closer, think harder, press yourself against the question of the world and art, and how to think about the difference between them.

Sam is just the person to be mulling over these questions. An English major with an art history minor, she used to be editor of the Daily Pennsylvanian. Last year she took “Writing Through Literature and Art,” a collaboration between ICA and Penn’s Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, taught by Kenny Goldsmith. Twice she took the Fellows course at Kelly Writers House, taught by Al Filreis and Jamie-Lee Josselyn, and I ran into her there this winter giving a smart, passionate introduction of the non-fiction writer Susan Cheever. The relationship between life and art is one she’s already wrestling with.

It’s Friday again as I write this, so Sam is back in the studio, listing, wrapping, labeling. I like thinking of her there, asking herself these questions, and listening to Walton’s talking clock call out the time.

* * *

Sam has volunteered to write the first guest post for Miranda, so be sure to check back to see what she has to say about her experience with Bill Walton, ICA, art, life, etc. ICA’s Bill Walton exhibition will open September 8.

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Ornery

April 1 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

Photo: J. Katz

Everyone else on the steps is in black, but Sheila Hicks is wearing burgundy and purple. It’s only fitting. She is the royalty here tonight, the honored maker of the hundred plus pieces in the exhibition Sheila Hicks: 50 Years. Organized by Joan Simon and Susan Faxon for the Addison Gallery of American Art, and reconfigured with some new work here at ICA by Jenelle Porter, this brilliant and colorful career survey is opening tonight. ICA’s lobby is full, the bar is open, and the chatter drifts and floats forty feet up to the ceiling, where the hanging sculpture, Baby Time Again, made of dozens of hospital infant shirts, flutters and ripples in the late afternoon light.

(Muñeca, Zapallar, Blue Letter, Dimanche, Tenancingo.)

Joan Simon takes the microphone. “The important part of the show for me,” she says, “is that we haven’t made a distinction between art, design, textiles, weavings, commissions. The question is: Why hasn’t there been a major show of Sheila in the U.S.? The reason is that the work doesn’t fit into a category.”

When I first started writing about Sheila Hicks I made the mistake of calling her a fabric artist, but I was quickly corrected. She’s an artist, period. Or sometimes: an artist of international stature who works with color and line. A born Nebraskan who has lived in Paris for 45 years, an independent, spirited artist who has worked with and for international corporations, Sheila Hicks is a woman of contradictions. Tonight one of the many curators in attendance says of her, “Sheila is original, innovative, international,” but the artist slyly interrupts:

“I’m most often accused of being ornery.”

(Willow, Squiggle, Vanishing Yellow, Serpent à Sonnette, Grand Prayer Rug, Linen Lean-to, Cicatrices.)

Photo: J. Katz

We make our way into the galleries for the members-only walk through. Standing between a woman with raised gold dots all over her shirt and another with daisies braided through her hair, I listen to the curators describe the work and to Sheila resist their analyses. Jenelle points out a hanging piece “that begins to punch out from the surface of the wall.” Sheila counters, “The show speaks for itself.” Susan says, “For the first time a body of work has been collected so the conversation can begin.” Sheila pipes up, “If I have made anything in this show that requires an explanation, I apologize.” But she herself can’t quite resist the temptation. “There are two words that I think of in this room,” she says, looking around. “Precariousness and permanence…those two qualities I play with throughout the show.”

(The Principal Wife, Banisteriopsis—Dark Ink, The Principal Wife Goes On, Self-Portrait on a Blue Day.)

A little later, standing in front of Trapeze de Cristobal, which once hung in the Stedelijk museum in Amsterdam, she reaches her hand through the thickly twined thread and asks the Stedelijk curator, who is in attendance, to reach in too and take her hand. “I like that you can enter the work,” Sheila says. “It’s an inextricable involvement of the eye, the mind, and the hand.” (Visitors to the show, however, should keep their hands to themselves.)

(Footprints, Raining Baby Bands, Olympic Bravery, The Silk Invitation.)

In the next room, gazing up at the cascading enormity of May I Have This Dance?, Sheila calls over Enrico Martignoni who installed it. “Enrico, tell us how you installed this piece forty feet high!”

Sheila Hicks, Jenelle Porter, and others. Photo: J. Katz

Enrico beams. “It’s all about belief,” he says.

(Loosely Speaking, Kneeling Stones, Battle of Lexington, Battle of Lincoln, Battle of Omaha.)

As the walk through reaches the final room, Jenelle tells us how she tried to cull the show when she thought there wasn’t enough space to hang it all: “So I thought—because this is what curators do—does anything repeat?” Nothing did. As Jenelle told us, Joan Simon and Susan Faxon had made a perfect selection from Sheila’s hundreds of works. Luckily, there was enough room after all.

The tour is almost over. “Be sure to grab the gallery notes with the checklist,” Jenelle says, “because the titles take you places.” Titles like Les Escargots, La Lettre du Rupture, Déménageur, Embedded Voyage.

Jenelle and Sheila again. Photo: J. Katz

Sheila looks around. “Any pressing questions?”

Jenelle looks at her watch. “And I mean, really pressing,” she says.

Someone calls out, “What are you doing next?”

(A Certain Distance, Prophecy from Constantinople, Triumph.)

Sheila smiles. “Monday night, I’ll take a flight to Paris,” she says. “Tuesday at nine AM, I’ll be in my studio.”

* * *
Sheila Hicks: 50 Years, is on view at ICA through August 7, but don’t wait till summer.

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