Archive for October, 2011

Painters in a phone booth on a lonely road

October 27 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

So many people showed up at ICA’s Salon, Approaching Imagery, that we had to rearrange the chairs. It was a good kind of problem to have. The Salon, which was partly inspired by the presence of Charline von Heyl’s extraordinary paintings in ICA’s first-floor gallery, brought together three painters—Scott Olson, R.H. Quaytman, and Philadelphia’s own Dona Nelson—to discuss their own work and, more generally, current issues in painting and abstraction.

Charline von Heyl painting

Charline von Heyl, It's Vot's Behind Me That I Am (Krazy Kat), 2010, acrylic, oil on linen and canvas, 82 x 72 inches. Private collection, New York; courtesy of Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York.

To begin her presentation, Dona Nelson showed a movie clip. It was a chase scene from John Cassavetes’s The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, very dark and shadowy and hard to make out. After the chase, the protagonist has a long phone conversation in a lighted telephone booth in the middle of nowhere. “I can’t give you anything but love, baby,” he says to the person on the other end.

“I think Cassevetes films are very applicable to Charline von Heyl,” Nelson said. For one thing, they have a convoluted narrative. For another, they are riveting without being exactly entertaining. And finally, “You can never really identify the emotions, but they’re nonetheless very emotional.”

Later, during the discussion, R.H. Quaytman picked up the theme. “It’s interesting that you chose the Cassevetes clip,” she said. “If you’re a painter, you’re kind of in the broken-down car at night, and everyone is going past you.”

The Salon

Photo: William Hidalgo

It was wonderful to hear these painters—these passionate inheritors of a mantle older than history—discuss what they love and what they want to do. Scott Olson works with rabbit-skin glue and marble dust and vegetable pigment. He showed us an image of the industrial landscape outside his window, and another image of the Michigan woods covered snow, to give us a sense of the world he lives in that influences the art he makes. R.H. Quaytman, who declared her love for vitrines, conceives of each exhibition as a book. “I make a lot of rules,” she said. “But they don’t always help.” Dona Nelson likes to paint outside. “Sometimes I leave the paintings out overnight. Who knows what will happen to them? I try not to protect them.”

Best was when they asked each other questions. “How do you make decisions about what to cover up?” Dona Nelson asked Scott Olson. “What do you think that impulse of covering up is?” This from a woman who often uses both sides of her canvases, who seems as though she wants to open up everything.

“Shame,” R.H. Quaytman suggested.

“I try not to decide,” Scott Olson offered.

Then the audience, many of whom were painters themselves, joined in. In that warm room crowded with people who had come to think about painting, it was impossible to believe that making this kind of art was like being alone on a dark highway. For one night at least, all the cars stopped outside the phone booth, and everyone in them got out: “I can’t give you anything but love, baby!”

Who needs more than that?

Still from Chinese Bookie film

Still from Cassavetes, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, 1976

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The next ICA Salon, Art in Transit, will be held on Wednesday, November 2 at 6:30.

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The Happy Class: Art and design, art and life

October 21 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

“Kenny, it’s the first time I haven’t seen you all in white,” one of the students says.

“The seasons are changing,” Kenny replies. He’s wearing a madras shirt and a spotted bow tie as he leans over the conference table answering questions about his recent trip to Shanghai.

Kenny at the White House

Kenny in the Red Room at the White House earlier this year.

This is English 165: Writing through Culture and Art, a collaboration between ICA and Penn’s Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing. Every other year, poet, critic, and Ubuweb editor Kenny Goldsmith teaches this unique seminar for Penn undergraduates, giving them the opportunity to spend a year investigating a topic related to an upcoming exhibition at ICA. This year the topic is Stefan Sagmeister, a graphic designer known for his work with Lou Reed, The Talking Heads, The Rolling Stones, and others, and for his innovative work with typography. As Kenny says in his course description, “Sagmeister has pioneered the concept of graphic design as a way of living a free, happy, and creative life, providing a new take on the 20th-century idea of the intersection of Art and Life.” Sagmeister will design a new project at ICA in spring 2012. He envisions the exhibition, titled The Happy Show, as the culmination of his ten-year investigation of happiness.

Last week, while Kenny was in Shanghai, ICA Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow Jennifer Burris gave the students in English 165 a primer on body and performance art. She taught them about Tania Bruguera, a Cuban artist who played Russian Roulette in front of an audience with what was said to be a loaded gun; about Teresa Margolles, a Mexican artist whose work, which is engaged with her country’s drug violence, uses material traces of corpses and morgues; about Catherine Opie, a lesbian artist who has an image of two women holding hands in front of a childlike depiction of a house carved into her back—a gesture Sagmeister says helped inspire one of the works he is best known for: a poster for a lecture he gave at AIGA, the professional design association, which consisted of a photograph of his naked torso with advertising text carved into it.

The students loved Jennifer’s class, and they were clearly haunted by the art she talked about. They were eager to tell Kenny about it, but they were also troubled. What was the relationship between an artist bearing a deeply personal and political image on her back as Opie did, and a designer having an advertisement for a lecture cut into him? What is the relationship, exactly, between art and design? And furthermore, what does it mean for an art museum to present design work? Is art about passion and design about money? If so, what to make of an artist like Takashi Murakami who staged a Louis Vuitton boutique inside his 2009 exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles? The students struggled with these questions, framing and reframing them, while Kenny nudged them deeper. One of the students, who had initially asserted that art and design were interchangeable, seemed to shift her stance, suggesting that art was perhaps one of many tools a designer like Sagmeister keeps in his toolbox. Kenny seemed to agree: “The thing that’s great about Sagmeister is we’re jumping off into so many places: typography, process art, concrete poetry.”

He also said, “Art almost always admits ambiguity, whereas a designer needs to eradicate ambiguity…I think art has the power to transform lives, as Sagmeister is always saying he wants his life to be transformed.”

It’s extraordinary, in fact, the extent to which Sagmeister has embedded his personal quest for transformation into paid design work, which for years has featured creative and poetic typographical settings of sentences culled from his diary: “Everything I do always comes back to me;” “Trying to look good limits my life”; “Obsessions make my life worse and my work better”; and many others.

One of the purposes of today’s class is to hone questions the English 165 students have been preparing for Sagmeister, some of which will get asked by Claudia Gould, ICA’s curator for the The Happy Show, at a public conversation with Sagmeister in December. In case Stefan is reading this, I won’t give away the actual questions, but I was extraordinarily impressed at how thoughtful, smart, and informed they were, addressing not only these issues around art and design, but also those of self-portraiture, image, integrity, vulnerability, gender, and national culture. Kenny commented on each question as we went around the table, helping the students refine them. Some of the questions were pretty tough, but Kenny was pleased. “I think Sagmeister will appreciate the challenge,” he said.

I have to think this is true. Challenge seems to be central to Sagmeister’s project—to publicly commit himself to going farther than he otherwise might. He seems to me to be a man deeply familiar with his own shortcomings and always on the lookout for new ways to circumvent them. I think of him as a kind of trickster figure, crossing and recrossing the boundaries between art and design, the personal and public, the ironic and the sincere—and in the process calling the very existence of these boundaries into question in a way that often strikes me as more art-like than design-like—that is, admitting a great deal of ambiguity. At the same time, he has found a way to make the commercial world we’re all swimming (or drowning) in more lively, attractive, and engaging than it would otherwise be, and at the same time earning a living.

Still, as Sagmeister himself points out in one of his sentences, “I can’t please everybody.” This sentence is slated to be spelled out on a magnetized wall at ICA next April in cascading, dancing iron filings. I won’t venture an opinion as to whether this is art or design, but I will say this: you won’t want to miss it.

* * *
Broken up into 5 parts Trying/to look/good/limits/my life and displayed in sequence as typographic billboards, these phrases work like a sentimental greeting card left in a park north of Paris.

Design: Sagmeister Inc., New York
Art Direction: Stefan Sagmeister
Design: Stefan Sagmeister, Matthias Ernstberger
Photo: Matthias Ernstberger
Client: Art Grandeur Nature

The Happy Show opens at ICA on April 4, 2012.

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Claudia

October 14 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

“I should make it clear that Claudia did not want this reception,” the Provost says. “But once she understood we were determined, she immediately started suggesting color palettes.”

We are at a goodbye reception in honor of ICA director Claudia Gould, who is stepping down after twelve years to become the director of The Jewish Museum in New York City. The Provost (ICA is part of the University of Pennsylvania) presents Claudia with a commemorative statuette of Ben Franklin—painted pink—and describes her many accomplishments. Then Anne Papageorge, who worked with Claudia on a committee to oversee public art on campus, says, “Claudia was good at cutting through the issues and saying what needed to be said.”

None of us who have worked for her would have doubted it for a second.

Claudia on the mezzanine

Photo: Tommy Leonardi

There have been a lot of lasts around ICA since Claudia (and The New York Times) announced her departure: last opening, last public program, last board meeting, last staff meeting. I think it was at the staff meeting that Claudia said something I have been turning over in my mind ever since. It was about the first opening she attended at ICA, just after she took the job, for a show of the artist Sol LeWitt. There were only ten or fifteen people there. “This is your opening?” Claudia asked a board member, who explained that only museum members were invited to the openings. Immediately Claudia started plotting change.

There has been a lot of change over these twelve years—so much, in fact, that for people like me who have only worked at ICA for a fraction of that time, it’s hard to imagine what things used to be like. Claudia not only invited the public in for openings, she tripled the exhibition schedule, tripled the staff, tripled the budget. She divided the upstairs gallery, creating a Project Space for smaller and more experimental exhibitions. She invited students to serve on a new student board, initiated an architecture and design series, helped launch two classes for undergraduates—one in collaboration with Art History, the other with English—and made museum admission free to the public. Just this summer, she forged a connection with the iconic Philadelphia coffee company La Colombe, which plans to open a café in ICA’s building later this year. She is also responsible for the Rudy Gernreich wallpaper in the bathrooms, a souvenir of the exhibition of the radical Austrian fashion designer which she brought to ICA in 2001.

I sat down with Claudia the other day in her sunny office with its green velvet divan and shelves full of books not just about art (I always notice Marcella Hazan’s Classic Italian Cooking when I come in). Claudia had just gotten back from a visit with Stefan Sagmeister (she’s organizing a show of Sagmeister’s work at ICA in April, coming back to Philadelphia to do it), and she told me that the visit reminded her “how great it is to work with artists. I got to know so many artists at ICA. Their expansive minds! It’s amazing that these things come out of people.” She mentioned artist Lisa Yuskavage, whose 2000 show was one of the first Claudia organized here. “Where does she get it?” Claudia marveled. “How deep does she have to go?”

For me—for many of us at ICA—this is Claudia’s greatest quality: her genuine and passionate valuing of artists. ICA is a place where art and artists come first, where giving an exhibiting artist a fabulous experience is as important as (and inseparable from) organizing a fabulous show. I have never worked anywhere else where art genuinely came first.

Photo: Shira Yudkoff

Claudia talked about how important it was for staff—not just curators—to be out seeing art: “going to museums and galleries, and not just with vacation days.” She told me how happy she always is to write letters and make phone calls for interns and members of the student board to help them get jobs in the art world. I have often seen students in her office on the green divan. It’s obvious her conversations with them give her pleasure—no less than (though perhaps different in kind from) introducing a terrific new show, drinking tequila to celebrate an honoree at an ICA benefit, or exulting over a good review.

I asked Claudia what she would miss about Philadelphia. Before answering, she told me what she wouldn’t miss: “I want to say that I don’t like the taxi service in Philadelphia. I want that on the record.”

Luckily, the other list was longer: the Ritz movie theaters, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, all the wacky, off-beat museums. The staff and the board here at ICA. The Rodney Graham wallpaper in the hallway and the Rudy Gernreich wallpaper in the bathrooms. Modern Eye, John at Avril, La Colombe coffee, Class 165 (“the most visionary class”). The Philomatheon Society. Virgil Marti’s pink chandelier in the lobby.

It won’t be the same at ICA without Claudia, in yet another gorgeous black dress, sailing out of the elevator, gold rings sparkling, black hair clipped back from her face. ICA and Claudia Gould have bled into each other so long and so deeply, it’s hard to say where one stops and the other begins. When I ask her what her hopes for ICA’s future are, she says, “I hope somebody comes on and takes everything further. More money, more staff, more press. More, more, more!”

Then she tells me what she said to someone who asked how she felt about leaving behind the world of contemporary art.

“I’m not leaving contemporary art,” she’d answered. “I’m adding to it. Leaving contemporary art would be like leaving my life.”

Photo: J. Katz

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Field Trip: Alternative Spaces

October 7 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

It’s a bright, cool Saturday afternoon when I park on Callowhill Street beside a row of warehouses. I walk around the corner to 319 N. 11th Street, home to Vox Populi, Philadelphia’s longest running artist collective, and a bunch of newer collectives, studios, and artist spaces: Grizzly Grizzly, Marginal Utility, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Napoleon, and others. Oddly memorable names: they seem like they should belong to bright and strange new worlds—and they do.

Vox's green door

Guided by big arrows painted on the walls, we climb the battered wooden steps, duck through a red metal door, and find ourselves in a vestibule with bright green walls. We are on an ICA field trip, a special program for members of the museum’s donor clubs, Leadership Circle and Art Council, people whose financial and personal support of ICA underpins our ability to do our work.

Grizzly Grizzly door

The first stop is Grizzly Grizzly, founded in 2009, making it one of the older gallery spaces here. A cooperative, its seven members pay about $25 a month to rent the narrow room on the second floor where Skye Gilkerson and Sarah Steinwachs are sharing wall space this month. Perhaps because I’m a writer, I’m particularly taken by Gilkerson’s work in which printed texts are excised of all letters, leaving only a tracery of punctuation.

“We all contribute, we all look at the work, and we all curate,” says Mike Ellyson, one of the founding members of the cooperative. “It’s not about making money. I just want people to have the chance to show their work.”

Variations of this avowal—I almost want to call it a manifesto—ring out repeatedly over the course of the afternoon. David Dempewolf and Yuka Yokoyama, co-founders of Marginal Utility, talk to us about conversations they had with the artist they are showing now, Hadassa Goldvicht. When they told her the opening would be on a Friday (openings are always on Fridays), she said she wouldn’t be able to come because it was the Sabbath. After insisting there was no choice—the opening had to be on a Friday—they suddenly realized there was a choice after all. They opened the show on a Thursday, and on Friday, when the building was full of people attending other openings, a grate made it possible to see in: “Instead of changing the artist, we would change the gallery. We try to fulfill the artists’ needs rather than producing something for us.”

Show closed for Sabbath

Napoleon (the name is a joke based on the tiny size of the space) is the newest gallery in the building. “When we were putting this event together,” ICA Assistant Curator Kate Kraczon tells us, “Napoleon didn’t even exist yet.” For Commonplacing, Napoleon’s first group show, each member of the group chose work by an artist not associated with the space, “sharing a little of who we are through the things that inspire us,” according to Jordan Rockford’s curatorial statement.

In the Napoleon gallery space

Except for Vox, which is comparatively expansive, it’s difficult for all of us to squeeze into any of these spaces, which makes the experience of looking at this art feel intimate, slightly strenuous, and correspondingly valuable. Not many people have seen this work: we’re pioneers. When we like something, our response is peculiarly pure, a form of discovery. I love this, but at the same time, something else is happening to me: I can’t stop thinking about money. It’s like what happens when someone says, “Don’t be aware of your tongue.”

Let me back up. The people on this alternative spaces field trip are here because a.) they care about art, and b.) they have given a certain amount of money to ICA. Without this money, we could not do our work: could not present exhibitions, could not organize programs, could not publish catalogues—could not connect exciting and important new art to the world.

Artists need money too, of course, both in order to eat (and for all the other things in the category of supporting life) and to buy supplies (and for all the other things in the category of supporting art). The galleries we’re seeing today may operate on a shoestring, but even a shoestring costs something. I keep following the links of this chain around and around: these small galleries are giving value to our donor clubs, which supports us, which helps us support artists—maybe even some of the artists whose work we’ve seen today. The exposure to a broader audience is good for these spaces; the exposure to these spaces is good for this audience; connecting the two together is good for us. It’s like a water cycle, filling pools and making rain, or maybe it’s more like a Möbius strip, with no inside and no outside.

As I wrestle with metaphors, trying to find the right one, I think back to something Grizzly Grizzly’s Mike Ellyson said, trying to describe the trajectory of his gallery:

“It’s turning into…I don’t know what it’s turning into. But it’s turning into something wonderful.”

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To find out more about ICA’s Leadership Circle and Art Council, email Christianna Miller at chmille@ica.upenn.edu

To sign up for Miranda’s mailing list, email rpastan@ica.upenn.edu.

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