Archive for July, 2011

PechaKucha(ish) Night: The Love of Doing

July 29 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

“This is going to be casual,” Kate says, referring to PechaKucha(ish) Night at ICA. Some of the artists in Kate’s current show, One is the loneliest number, along with some other artists, designers, and musicians, are here to present us their work, super fast. PechaKucha, a Japanese invention, is kind of like bonsai for lectures. The idea is that you show 20 slides for 20 seconds each. It’s not easy to stay within the time limit, but we have a buzzer if they run over.

Getting ready for PechaKucha(ish) Night

Waiting for dark. Photo: Jenna Weiss

Kate goes first, showing slides of and talking about her ideas for her show, which presents the work of collaborative duos. She explains that PechkKucha(ish) night is the brainchild of Megawords, a collaboration between Anthony Smyrski and Dan Murphy that makes zines, inhabits storefronts, and broadcasts a radio show. As one of the duos represented in One is the loneliest number, they have been programming events at ICA this spring and summer. “We are actually part of the Megawords project right now!” Kate says, and then the buzzer goes off.

After Kate, as the light fades from the sky out on ICA’s terrace, a diverse procession of artists and designers take the microphones, waving the remote like a magic wand at the computer projector. In the spirit of PechaKucha, I will evoke each one briefly, bonsai fashion.

Julien Bismuth and Lucas Ajemian: “I want to talk to you a little about efficiency…What we look at as inefficiency is sort of the point of making art.”

Gary Fogelson and Phil Lubliner: An idea for a new alert system for the U.S. to replace the current color coding. When everything’s okay, play the Beach Boys’ “Don’t Worry Baby.” When things are bad, play The Animals’ “We Gotta Get Out of This Place.”

Matt Suib and Nadia Hironaka: “We work in time-based media.” They showed gorgeous clips from their videos and might have been the only ones who didn’t get the buzzer!

Matt and Nadia

Matt and Nadia. Photo: Jenna Weiss

Megawords: There’s a piano in the People’s Museum in St. Louis you can carve your name in.

The Dufala Brothers: “We make exaggerated tools that are completely useless.” (I love the old-fashioned typewriter with keys the size of sunflower seeds.)

Rebekah and Sara Maysles (the Maysles sisters): They went away to an island alone together for four months to work on their book of interviews, collaged illustrations, and other archival material related to Grey Gardens, the cult film made by their father and uncle (the Maysles brothers). Also, they cook together.

Big Brad and Rachel (who deejayed the evening’s music): “We’re not crazy radical revolutionaries, but we’re ready for the revolution!”

A cardboard tank by the Dufala Brothers

Slide of project by Dufala brothers. Photo: Jenna Weiss

A last minute addition was John Taylor, a local carpenter who collaborates with his dad. John designed and built the chairs (he calls them love seats) currently on ICA’s mezzanine, as part of Megawords’ programming of that space. “Do things for the love of doing them,” he said. “I just wanted to remind everyone that that’s what’s important.”

Something about tonight’s event reveals how much these artists and designers do love what they’re doing. Sometimes, when you’re in a gallery standing in the implacable, finished presence of the made, you can forget about the maker. But listening to these collaborators joke with each other and interrupt each other—seeing the easy rhythm between them—reminds you that making things is something real people really do. It makes you want to look around for a project, and someone to share it with.

* * *

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Secret Cinema at ICA: “Summer Means Fun!”

July 22 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

It’s four in the afternoon, and Jacob and Paul are painting the huge projection screen out on ICA’s terrace. “You want some Aunt Polly’s fence action?” Paul asks, offering me a roller.

I don’t, but I always like seeing what’s happening in and around the building on a Wednesday afternoon, as the staff gets ready for the coming evening’s Whenever Wednesday progam. The big sandwich board is set up outside the front door, and people go up and down in the elevator toting tubs and tables, while downstairs in the back of the lobby microphone stands, video cameras, and computer carts emerge from locked closets like flocks of black birds. There’s a different kind of energy at ICA on Wednesdays, as though people are getting ready for a party. Which in a way we are.

Tonight ICA is hosting Secret Cinema, a program founded and run by Jay Schwartz, in which he screens pieces of his extensive collection of obscure films and other “celluloid treasures.” Jay began Secret Cinema in 1992 “after sensing a need to expose new audiences to neglected films of all kinds,” he writes on the Secret Cinema website. “As the media conglomerates abandon chemical-mechanical technologies in favor of direct electronic distribution schemes and ‘virtual’ realities, it will be up to the cineastes and collectors to keep real movie screens lit, and to introduce new audiences to the joys of the collective film experience. That is the real mission of the Secret Cinema.”

Photo: William Hidalgo

The theme of tonight’s screening is “Summer Means Fun!” Summer also means thunderstorms, and a big one threatens to blow in at dusk, just as set up is running full tilt out on the terrace. For a few minutes, with the tree tops whipping and waving, it looks as though the program will have to move indoors to the auditorium; but then the clouds blow away again, and everyone sighs with relief and crosses their fingers.

By nine o’clock close to a hundred people have shown up. Some are Secret Cinema regulars, some are ICA regulars, and some are newcomers to both groups. The first film we see is Swim Parade (1949), a ten minute documentary short by Robert Youngson featuring visions of Coney Island bathing beauties from 1917. “You could see debutantes there, but you couldn’t see much of them,” the narrator deadpans, and then lots of other women in scanty(ish) swimming costumes appear for a few moments, representing the various decades of the first half of the twentieth century. Mostly what we see throughout the film are women, though we do get a glimpse of Johnny Weissmuller in his pre-Tarzan days, in a one-piece bathing suit that covers much of his powerful chest. After some shots of extraordinary high dives, the narrator sums up portentously (with perhaps just a hint of camp?): “Dreams and desires, fads and fashions, you’ll find them all on the Swim Parade!”

The next short—heart-wrenchingly sweet—contains a different kind of camp. It chronicles the adventures of mid-century New York City school children taken out to the New Jersey countryside to experience nature. The vision of girls in dungarees making beds in the open air and boys brushing out the fur of stolid mules would be hokey if it weren’t so utterly sincere. That’s the feeling I get from many of these films: a flickering glimpse into a lost world where young women swim in heavy bloomers, city children learn to cook eggs on hot rocks, and cowboys twirl ropes and lasso calves like, like…something out of a movie!

View of audience with sky behind

Photo: William Hidalgo

After a while the wind picks up again, and Jay walks around checking the speaker poles for stability and staring worriedly at the sky. But we’re lucky: the weather holds, and the films delight. In “Helter Swelter” (1950) there’s even a sing-a-long, and we all join in, following the bouncing ball. “In the good old summertime,” we sing, half out of tune, under the dim, twinkling city stars. And for a moment, under the spell of celluloid, even this twenty-first century crowd is suddenly washed clean of cynicism, enjoying pleasures so old fashioned they almost seem new.

* * *

The second Secret Cinema screening at ICA, coming up on Wednesday, July 27 at 9:00, will feature short films about art and artists.

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Virginia Solomon: The Same Things with Different Pictures

July 15 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

“It’s been a happy reason for my dissertation to gather dust and cobwebs,” Virginia says of her year at ICA. We’re sitting around the conference table at her final staff meeting. Virginia Solomon was the ICA’s 2010-11 Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow (WLCF), which means that she spent a year here learning the museum trade. She organized a show, helped teach a class, and oversaw much of last year’s programming. The WLCF program, going into its 12th year, has brought many bright young curators to work at ICA who have then gone on to jobs at museums like MOCA and MCA Chicago, or running their own galleries, or working to promote and expand public art. Once Virginia finishes that dissertation at USC on the Canadian artist group General Idea, she’ll be on the job market, looking to become a professor of art history. As though that’s not ambitious enough, she hopes to be a professor who curates too, something she says is more possible now than it used to be: “Rare but doable!”

Virginia, on right, with artists at her opening. Photo: J. Katz

For Virginia, the teaching and the curating seem very much intertwined. “Contemporary art history is in flux,” she says, “and the teaching of it is in flux too.” Working at ICA has influenced the whole package, helping her hone the practice “of putting the object first and the idea coming from the object…Objects don’t always come first in the study of art history.” Being here offered her the opportunity to get her hands into every aspect of curating, not just working with artists but negotiating loan forms, publications, shipping, budgets, transportation.

Virginia’s ICA show, Shary Boyle & Emily Duke: The Illuminations Project, showcased two artists, one of whom works primarily with images and the other primarily with text, working together in a new kind of collaboration, responding to one another’s work but resisting straightforward ideas of illustration or narrative explication. The bright, often violent work that resulted was both political and visceral in its effect. About how making the show affected her, Virginia says, “It made me realize that I’m always talking about the same things, but with different pictures.”

Photo: Jenna Weiss

Working with the class “Contemporary Art and the Art of Curating,” Virginia helped the students—Penn freshmen—curate their own show, which was an exploration of ICA’s iconic 1965 Andy Warhol exhibition. She lectured the students on contemporary art, put issues of queer identity and politics on the table, helped them learn to do archival research, and shepherded them through the gazillion details that go into presenting an exhibition.

It was Virginia who asked last winter if ICA should respond to the removal, after protests from the Catholic League and some members of Congress, of the controversial David Wojnarowicz video “A Fire in My Belly” from an exhibition of gay portraiture at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. A week later, the video was on view in the ICA lobby.

What else did Virginia do during her sojourn in Philly?

Drank coffee. Went on studio visits. Rode her bike. “I love the Wissahickon. I went mountain biking there as much as I could with my dog, Georgia,” a large and lovely mixed breed who will miss the friends she made in Clark Park.

What will people at ICA remember about Virginia?

“That I walked around the office in Spandex all the time,” she speculates, smiling.

Photo: Jenna Weiss

That’s true, of course. And who could forget the boxes of fresh vegetables delivered to the museum offices? We will also remember her good humor and positive attitude, her gregarious laughter and her awesome mix tapes. Jenna Weiss, who shared an office with her, said the best thing: “She made you aware of small things like recycling, and big things like being aware of being attentive and sensitive to difference, if you sometimes got lazy.”

Virginia, good luck out there in the world of freeways and movie stars! We’ll think of you when we think about art and politics, and when we drink coffee, and when we laugh.

* * *

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Puppy Cerberus. Or, What Is Art?

July 7 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

Jenna and I are in her car driving across town to pick up some printed folders from Jesse Olanday at Space 1026. All kinds of stuff goes on at Space 1026, which I will describe as a cooperative artists’ space on Arch Street in Philadelphia’s Chinatown, although, according to its website, that’s way too simple an explanation. “Space 1026 has been a 13 year experiment,” the site explains. “It has developed from a handful of founders to dozens of co-conspirators.” Also, “Space 1026 is not a collaboration! Yes it is! No its not! Yes it is! Exactly.”

Entry to Space 1026

Printmaking is definitely a big piece of what happens at Space 1026. Jesse, who has been part of the place for a decade, gives us a tour, showing us the exhibition space, the printing vacuum table, the exposure rack. “I went to school with the guys who started this. The were inspired by a Live/Work/Venue space of fellow RISD students called ‘Fort Thunder’ in Providence, Rhode Island,” he says. “This used to be a jewelers, so we have vaults.” One vault is for flammable stuff, and they do their coating in another. He takes us up to the third floor, which was condemned until 1999 but today holds artists’ studios, high shelves crammed with LPs (part of the building used to house a recording studio), and all kinds of miscellaneous mysterious equipment. Jesse knocks on a door and we go in to find Thom Lessner, an artist and member of ICA’s installation crew, drawing. He holds up what he’s working on to show us:

“A farting centaur!”

Photo: Jenna Weiss

Jenna, a painter and ICA’s Spiegel Fellow working with programs, asks, “Do you always draw sitting down?”

“Yeah,” Thom says. “That’s why I’m hunched over like this.”

On the way over in the car, I asked Jenna a lot of questions about her painting, her teachers at the Tyler School of Art where she got her MFA, and her excitement about making programs, which she sees as another mode of art-making. We talked about the Big Questions: How do you hold on to what’s essential to you as an artist? What is the relationship of an artist to her studio? Where do object-oriented artists fit into an increasingly conceptual contemporary aesthetic? As usual, these questions proved resistant to easy answers. Now, listening to her chat with Thom, I think maybe the Road to Truth lies through these little questions instead.

Jesse digs up some chairs, and we sit down to talk about his design of Cerberus, the three-headed puppy, which has become ICA’s most coveted T-shirt design.

“I got that image from a puppy calendar,” Jesse says. “You know you get these free calendars?” This was in 2006, when Jesse, as part of Space 1026, participated in ICA’s exhibition Locally Localized Gravity which invited artists and artists’ groups to create installations and host creative public programs. Jesse had been looking for an idea for a screen printing event. In the calendar photo, three puppies rushed pell-mell toward a bowl of food. “I thought it would be cool if four of the legs were gone, and it was a Cerberus.”

“Why do you think it’s so popular?”

“”I think it’s got the attitude you want in a shirt,” Jesse says. “Cute and tough.”

“Succinct without being logo-y,” Jenna says.

I ask Jesse to tell me about himself and his association with ICA. “I started as a gallery preparator in 2002,” he says. “When I got to Philadelphia I was renovating houses in Northern Liberties, and ICA was short-handed installing the Rudy Gernreich show. It was perfect for me at the time. Back then the installs were long and really intense.” He could do an install for ICA, save his money, and then do his own work for three months. Also, “it was a good way to learn the inner workings of a gallery to bring back here to 1026.” He gestures around the room. “I rebuilt this gallery more professionally with the techniques I learned at the ICA—everything was square and true and solid.”

Now Jesse does custom screen work and animation for various clients and runs his own art handling business. I realize I don’t quite understand to what extent Jesse is an artist and to what extent he is a designer, or custom printer, or whatever, and I’m trying to figure out if it’s okay to ask. Finally I put together some words basically inquiring whether he does much of his own art these days, and he indicates that he doesn’t: “It’s really tiring.” I guess that means that what he does now is less tiring—or maybe just less tiring to the soul, since he also describes doing print runs of a 1,000 pieces by hand.

And here I am again, stumbling into one of those Big Questions: What is the difference, really, between art and design? In other words: What Is Art?

I think about Jenna talking about programs as art, and how making programs was part of the artistic project of Locally Localized Gravity too. Is art anything an artist says it is? Is it the job of curators and museums to decide? ICA has a history of presenting exhibitions of design, so we have likely done our part to blur the boundaries. Or maybe the point is to ask the questions and not worry too much about the answers? These mysteries and confusions spiral through my head like the summer heat, and when they clear this is what I’m left with:

An image of Jesse standing in the organized anarchy of 1026, looking at the puppy calendar and seeing something else beyond it, something he might shape with his own particular vision. Intuiting possibilities invisible to everyone else.

* * *

Note: When I showed a draft of this post to Jesse, he sent me the following response:

When I joined 1026, I aimed towards a fine arts / gallery career. For me, it was exciting, uncharted territory. There was a freedom to make and create. I made (or made attempts at) anything that came to mind. After about the sixth year of pursuing that path, my priorities slowly shifted though. I felt accomplished and the drive to make “fine-art” relaxed. Not that I was out of ideas but rather I felt satiated in that respect. I felt that the challenges had been met, and the fulfillment of the pursuit dwindled. That was roughly around the time of the ‘Locally Localized’ exhibit. I managed the 1026 team and worked on most of the exhibit design and construction. It was a huge undertaking and felt like a great send off to that aspect of my life.

Also around then my standard of living became more of a priority, and grown-up responsibilities (like handling bills) became more vital. I began concentrating efforts on business, production and more on technical craft. There was a new challenge. I pumped the brakes on gallery shows and personal work. I worked at being more professional in production and in business relations. Working in various disciplines gave a wider perspective and relevance to the aspect of making art.

Full circle a few years after that, I became proficient in the administrative side of art-business and eventually bored of that as well. The thought of making art for art’s sake became appealing again. The creative side and logistical side are now second nature, and in that, I feel a second wind. I am starting to get back into creating more personal work. Learning better time management and when to step back/away is crucial this time around to avoid the burn out.

Creative work takes a long time to internally process and continually question. That could lead to never finishing a project and in turn losing momentum. Plus finding the funds to back outlandish endeavors can gnaw on the conscience too.

So how would i define myself? Now when people ask, i reply Artist & Craftsman. Still ambiguous, I know, but I am able to give a solid answer while leaving it open to delve deeper and deeper if the person is still curious. Some mornings I don’t even know which hat I’ll be wearing for the day; I could be fabricating light fixtures or art directing a company’s re-branding. But it will always require creative problem solving and presentation.

“Is it art or is it design?” It’s similar to asking, “Is that a painting, drawing or illustration?” If you look at an illustrator’s portfolio site, they will categorize their work into these categories. What an artist would label as a painting, the visitor may consider an illustration. But it’s the artist’s site, so that is how it is categorized. In a store Campbell’s soup is package design; in a museum it’s art. I’ve heard that art leans heavy on concept and theory, while design lives on the functional side.

I think whichever the label is dictated by the means it is presented to the viewer.

J.O.

* * *

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The Happiest Moment

July 1 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

“People who make things with wood are the happiest people,” Stefan Sagmeister says. “You see what you’ve accomplished every evening. And the wood smells good.”

Paul, an artist who is also a professional art crate builder and ICA’s head preparator, affirms that he is happy; he does a lot of wood working. I say I have heard that orchestra musicians, when surveyed, turn out to be quite unhappy, and we speculate as to why this might be. Happiness is a slippery creature, which may be partly why Stefan is so interested in it. A well-known and influential graphic designer (you might know his album covers for the Talking Heads, Lou Reed, and the Rolling Stones even if you don’t recognize his name), Stefan has been making a personal and professional study of happiness for the last decade. You can see him talk about it in some great TED videos, and he is currently at work on a documentary called The Happy Film. The reason he’s here at ICA on this sunny June Monday, along with two designers, Jessica and Michael, who work for him, is that he’s making a show at ICA next spring: The Happy Show.

Peeking into ICA's wood shop

It’s not exactly clear yet what will be in The Happy Show. Organized by ICA Director Claudia Gould, it will partly showcase Stefan’s work and partly be a new installation he’s dreaming up. So far, Stefan is conceiving a series of encounters, experiences, experiments, and sets of instructions that not only explore and embody happiness, but are intended to make visitors happier as they move through the space. There may be therapy sessions, meditation classes, music. There may be chocolate, ladders, windows with views, tickling machines, instructions for taking cell phone pictures with a stranger with your eyelids touching. There will undoubtedly be good design.

Today we’re touring the space, giving Stefan a sense of the container he has to work with. We take a peek inside ICA’s wood shop, behind a locked door in one of the galleries, filled with saws and ladders, sheet goods and lumber, screws and nails, and a hammer drill.

“It looks like it’s fun to work in here, no?” Stefan says. He is a tall man in a light blue shirt, his Austrian accent lilting through the air.

“It’s great,” Paul says.

“Maybe we keep the door open and put some Plexi here,” Stefan says. “If we do this woodworking thing.”

“I thought Stefan would like it,” Claudia says.

Up on the roof. Photo: Robert Chaney

We wander out into the main upstairs gallery where One is the loneliest number, a show exploring artistic collaborations, is on view. Michael and Jessica take pictures of all the angles with their phones. Claudia talks about other exhibitions that have been presented in this space in the past: Trisha Donnelly’s paintings lined up tightly along one wall, the work of Dutch designers Hella Jongerius and Jurgen Bey, Damián Ortega’s disassembled VW bug. “He paid someone in Mexico City to take it apart,” Claudia says. “We hung it here, and then MOCA bought it. There’s a big history in this space.”

We look at the Ramp, a long V-shaped corridor with windows on 36th Street, discussing the challenges of lighting and what to do about a tree that has filled out, partly blocking the view. We talk about which entrance people will use to get into the show, which museum walls are permanent and which can be removed. Stefan says something about building super complicated things, and Paul smiles. “We love a challenge,” he says.

We look at the mezzanine, the lobby, the staff kitchen. “What parts of the museum are up for grabs?” Stefan asks.

“Everything is possible,” Claudia says.

The June sun shines through the glass onto the mezzanine, and traces of exhibitions past seem to hang in the air. You can almost see the ideas beginning to spin in Stefan’s head. Good weather, inspirational history, no immediate pressure, and an expansive vision as yet uncompromised by logisitics or budgets: this may be the happiest moment in the creation of any work of art.

* * *

The Happy Show will open at ICA in April 2012.

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