Archive for January, 2012

The Infinite Museum

January 27 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

I’m standing in a room in ICA I’ve never been in before—a room I didn’t know existed—looking at a wall of circuit breakers. “This is the breaker we need,” Kate says, “because it goes to the Jennifer Bolande phonograph.” She’s referring to the piece “Aerial Phonograph,” an actual record player on which an actual record turns, small parachuters on the label slowly spinning.

Aerial Phonograph

Photo: Aaron Igler / Greenhouse Media

Two of ICA’s current shows use a lot of technology, both old and new: video projectors and computers, phonographs and slide projectors. So getting the museum ready for visitors requires a lot more than unlocking the doors and switching on the lights. On ordinary mornings it’s not a problem, but sometimes we need to get the shows running unexpectedly, so Kate, Robert, Anthony, and I are learning to turn on the shows.

After the circuit breaker room, we visit another hidden place. Jennifer Burris, who curated the show with the slide projectors (Living Document / Naked Reality: Toward an Archival Cinema), leads us through the upstairs galleries and back into the shop, where she opens a hidey hole in the wall. There’s a computer in there, and a lot of cords, and some dust.

Hidey hole

Another computer runs the program that works the carousel slide projectors, four of which are lined up on a table as part of the piece “Sample Frames” by Alexandra Navratil. Landscapes from the twenties click by in a nostalgic wash of color, four related images at a time like notes making up a single chord. “It’s old school,” Jennifer says as we wait for the slow computer to start up. “To start the program, you just hit the down arrow.”

"Sample Frames"

Alexandra Navratil, Sample Frames, 2011, installation with 4 synchronized slide-projectors, 81 images on each projector (loop). Courtesy of the artist.

We take notes, ask questions. I look around for hobbits or gremlins, for other doors to other rooms. In February, ICA will host a program called “An exhibition to hear read,” activating many of the museum’s “interstitial spaces” (the lobby, the elevator, the coat closet, the bathrooms) through the perfomative reading of various texts. The performers won’t use these secret places where equipment lives, but for a moment I imagine how it would be to open a hatch and find a person in there, reciting.

There’s a dream common to people who live in Manhattan. One day they suddenly discover a room in their apartment they never noticed before. For me today, the ICA is becoming a dream museum, hatching new spaces as though it were infinite.

In a different way (temporally rather than spatially), maybe the ICA is infinite. A proud parade of shows stretches back to Clyfford Still in 1963 and forward into the unknown, like the ghostly procession of kings in Macbeth. Centuries from now—millennia from now—who’s to say someone won’t be standing right here, powering up tiny nuclear reactors, perhaps, to project light onto the very air.

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Welcome All Citizens of the Universe

January 20 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

In 1967, the hamlet of St. Paul, Canada (population 3,000) built a UFO landing pad in the Alberta prairie. This was the town’s contribution to the year-long celebration of the Canadian Centennial. For this activity, Canada’s Centennial Comity baptized St. Paul the Centennial Star.

Artist Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen got interested in this bit of history when she found a medallion presented to St. Paul to commemorate their achievement on Ebay. She bought it and photographed the front and the back, creating a diptych, Centennial Star, currently on view at ICA as part of the exhibition Living Document / Naked Reality: Toward an Archival Cinema. The diptych shows both sides of the medallion: a star inside a circle with the words “Centennial of Canadian Confederation” written around the edge in English and French on the front, and the landing pad, looking something like a round trampoline with a staircase leading down, on the back. Each image is perhaps ten inches across.

The Centennial Star

Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen, The Centennial Star, 2011. Photograph of found ephemera (coin), archival inkjet on paper (diptych). Courtesy of the artist.

Centennial Star is part of a larger, research-based project Jacqueline is working on. When she traveled to St. Paul to interview its inhabitants and tour the site, she was struck by the impulse behind the landing pad. St. Paul hadn’t experienced any recent UFO sightings in 1967: “It wasn’t built in response to a need,” she says. Rather, the landing pad was intended as a symbolic gesture of the town’s hospitality, tolerance, commitment to diversity, and openness to all. For Jacqueline, the landing pad becomes a “conceptual vessel” for the exploration of issues around multiculturalism: how broadly, for instance, you can think about what “alien” means. (You can—and should—listen to Jacqueline talk about the project here.)

On her way to an artist’s residency in Banff a couple of weeks ago, Jacqueline came to ICA to work with exhibition curator Jennifer Burris on the installation of the diptych. I stopped by as ICA’s Chief Preparator, Paul Swenbeck, was opening the cardboard carton Jacqueline had brought with her. Layer by layer they undid the package: cardboard, bubble wrap, tape, brown paper. “Did you fly with it?” Paul asked.

“No. I took the train.”

Wearing white art handling gloves, Paul lifted each photograph onto blocks, where they leaned against the wall. Jennifer wanted to place the diptych directly across from the entrance to the gallery, so it was the first the thing you’d see when you came in.

“I don’t have a preference for which goes where,” Jacqueline said, as Paul carefully adjusted the placement of the photographs, centering them on the opposite door. Jennifer and Jacqueline backed out of the gallery and peered through the entrance, consulting and considering.

Jennifer and Jacqueline considering

Jacqueline and Jennifer considering The Centennial Star

“I wonder if the star should be on the right?” Jacqueline said.

Paul switched the images.

“A bit more distance?”

Paul took out his measuring tape and moved the photographs two inches further apart.

“That’s better,” Jennifer said. The images weren’t too crowded. The way the staircase was situated drew the eye in.

Now the conversation turned to lighting: exactly how dim (in candles) the gallery would be, the type of glass used in the frames, whether snoods were needed. Jennifer was pleased. “The idea is that the piece is lit so it looks like the moon,” she said.

Suddenly it was time for lunch. Paul climbed a tall ladder and began manually switching off lights. Against the wall, the two medallions leaned, the wooden blocks under them splayed out like feet, the coins and their white frames glowing in the dimness. Meanwhile, out in the galaxy perhaps, patient spaceships zipped and glided, looking for a fabled landing spot somewhere on the Canadian prairie.

ICA, too, welcomes visitors from everywhere. People come from Chicago, California, Berlin, Japan—why not from a distant planet orbiting a faraway star? In our upstairs gallery, the image of the landing pad calls to them.

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Don’t miss Jacqueline’s performative lecture 1967: A People Kind of Place, on Wednesday, February 29, 6:30pm at ICA.

Living Document / Naked Reality: Towards an Archival Cinema will be on view at ICA through March 4.

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

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A Stereoscopic Evening

January 13 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

As we come in, Jenna offers us a basket of 3-D glasses: red, yellow, or black. Ingrid chooses black, which matches her outfit. Standing at the podium she announces, “Greg wants his glasses back after the event!” Greg is Greg Dinkins, the co-founder of the New York Stereoscopic Society. He’s at ICA tonight to give a presentation about Max Margulis, a musician, writer, teacher, and a founder of Blue Note records; a hanger-out at the legendary Cedar Tavern with the hard-drinking New York School artists; and a stereo photographer.

Audience with glasses on

Photo: William Hidalgo

I have worn 3-D glasses before, but only for easy thrills at the movies. I have never really looked through them, and it takes some getting used to. At first the images shift and blur as my eyes settle in. What Greg has to say is as interesting as what he’s showing us. In the fifties, Max Margulis made 3-D portraits of his artist friends in their studios and photographed New York street scenes. One story about Margulis involves his friendship with Willem de Kooning. When the photographer first knew the painter, de Kooning was so poor he didn’t own an overcoat. In winter, Max would come over and lend him his coat so de Kooning could go out, then wait around the apartment for him to bring it back.

Once I get used to the glasses, it really is amazing how deep the images go. You can see how far back the divan is in one room, just where the easel sits, how a column defines the space. The column in particular seems so definitively placed that I succumb to the illusion, moving my head in vain to try to see around it. In another image, two people play duets at a piano that seems to stretch backward forever. In a third, de Kooning, wearing a blue shirt, poses in front of a portrait he painted of Margulis himself: a portrait of de Kooning with a portrait of Max. In the background, a bunch of paintings lean casually against a wall. “Think of all the museums they’re hanging in now,” Greg says. The Museum of Modern Art, for instance, which is currently presenting an enormous de Kooning retrospective. The curators working on that show used the Margulis images as an aid to their research. One stereophotograph shows the the monumental painting “Excavation” partly done, offering insight into the painter’s process and materials. The researchers asked Greg to blow up parts of the images to give them a closer look.

Margulis portrait of deDooning

Stereoscopic portrait of Willem de Kooning by Max Margulis, March 22, 1950. The painting behind de Kooning is his 1944 portrait of Margulis.

I like the glimpses into the artist’s studios, those mystical springs of inspiration with their battered furniture and empty bottles, their serious-faced men (they’re almost always men) looking potent and inscrutable. But even better, for my money, are the scenes of New York street life. The distance elongates like taffy, pulling you in. On Delancy Street on the Lower East Side, on the Succot holiday, a peddler cart bright with yellow citrus looms in the foreground, while the shoeshine boys and the old Jews with beards recede through space down the long street.

Greg says, “There’s a common phrase about 3-D photography—coming at you.” Comin’ attya. “I like to think, instead, that the images take me there.”

In one store window, vicious-looking squirrels pose, a taxidermist’s comment on city life, perhaps. In another, we gaze through the façade of an abandoned storefront at the giant hole in the ground that will become Lincoln Center. New York as it was—and in its becoming what it is—comes alive for us tonight in this Philadelphia auditorium. A face pressed to a window seems be peering back not only into space but also time, the illusion of seeing into the third dimension creating the sense of seeing into the fourth.

In a few images, you can see a flicker of Max’s reflection in the glass. A lingering ghost, documenting a place receding steadily into the past.

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