Archive for February, 2012

After the Monkeys: The stories exhibitions tell

February 24 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

“Okay,” Mary Grace says. “What do we have after the monkeys?”

“The mirror,” Paul suggests.

“That’s another thing we should try out,” Stefan agrees. Stefan Sagmeister, a graphic designer known for his innovative typography and his work with bands like The Talking Heads, is at ICA this sunny Monday for meetings about The Happy Show, his upcoming exhibition. When I came in to work this morning, he and his staff were already busy, measuring the stairs and taking pictures and examining the doors on the elevator.

The Happy Show will not only fill ICA’s upstairs galleries and Ramp, it will extend out onto the mezzanine, into the elevator, down the stairs, and even onto the mirrors in the bathrooms.

Enormous inflatable white monkeys—currently en route from Europe by ship —will hold a banner out on the Terrace. A long acrylic tube will lead from a coin drop on the mezzanine, down out of the building into a bowl on the street. There’s a lot more besides—things I don’t know about, things alluded to in mysterious bits of conversation as good as dialogue you’d find in a novel:

“The arms were hanging on a wall with gloves on them.”

“Once we run out, are you okay with American chocolates?”

“If we keep the Bali dancer instead of the sugar installation…”

During lunch, Stefan talks about the movie he’s making. Like the ICA exhibition, The Happy Film is a piece of the designer’s ten-year exploration of happiness, and parts of it will be on view as part of The Happy Show. Stefan clearly enjoys the challenge of working on the film, though it’s hard, he says, to figure out how to sustain such a long narrative.

This reminds me of something I’ve been thinking about ever since ICA’s Senior Curator, Ingrid Schaffer, remarked that a curator is someone who knows the stories. “Does an exhibition have a narrative?” I ask.

Anthony is the one curator in this room, and he answers quickly and unequivocally: “Yes.”

Stefan seems less sure. He wonders out loud about the narrative of the exhibitions currently on view.

“Well, there are lots of different kinds of narratives,” Anthony says. “You could have Dickens, or you could have David Foster Wallace.”

“What’s the narrative of The Happy Show?” I want to know.

“In this case it’s not easy,” Stefan says, “because there are so many points of entry.” He means the way you’ll be able to enter the show either via the Ramp downstairs, or up the museum’s main staircase and through the mezzanine. Still, he outlines it for me: The background information about his own thinking about happiness. Statistical information from studies he finds interesting:

The print work:

The video and film work:

So far, so good. But when I think about narrative (and, as it happens, I think about narrative a lot), I think about change. By the end of a story, as a result of all the events that have occurred, something has shifted —Cinderella has become a princess; Odysseus has finally returned home; Anna has thrown herself under the train. I wonder, when we’re talking about an exhibition, who is the protagonist? Is it the work itself that shifts? Is the artist the invisible hero, changing by implication? Is it us—is the idea that we ourselves are changed by the experience of the exhibition?

I remember when I started working at ICA, I used the word “design” to say what a curator did. No, I was told. Curators don’t design; they organize.

The object of that sentence, of course, is exhibition, as in: The curator organized the exhibition. But I’m coming to understand that they also organize our experience. A curator may not tell us a story in a Once upon a time sense, but they create a space in which we can experience a rise and fall of tension, or a sequence of things that gradually (or suddenly) change, or a series of events leading up to a moment of insight or intense emotion.

Mostly, in my experience, these changes, insights, and emotions are beyond words—outside of language. But The Happy Show, being a largely text-based exhibition, may be at least partly an exception.

Stefan has said that expecting a show about happiness to make you happier is like expecting a commercial for exercise equipment to make you slimmer; at best it can be a spur to make you take action. Still, given what I’ve seen of his plans for the exhibition, I won’t be surprised if The Happy Show does make me happier—if not for ever after, at least while the monkeys are in view.

* * *

The Happy Show opens at ICA on April 4.

Images (except for measuring the staircase) courtesy of Sagmeister, Inc.

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Charline von Heyl: The right kind of frustration

February 17 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

“When I went to Marfa last time,” Charline said, “I was totally burned out.” She was speaking at a program at ICA, where her survey exhibition Charline von Heyl, curated by Jenelle Porter, closes this Sunday. Charline spoke passionately and memorably about painting, abstraction, representation, desire, frustration, and how she began her newest body work, during a long stay at her studio in Marfa, Texas. It was one of most dynamic and generous lectures I’ve heard in a long time.

Installation view

Installation view. Photo: Aaron Igler / Greenhouse Media.

“I’m always fascinated by the stupidity of the painter,” Charline declared, meaning the way a painting grows out of small steps taken in the studio—out of doing things that might seem dumb at first glance but are necessary to awaken what she calls the right kind of frustration. This is the active frustration that leads to solving problems in paint, as opposed to the passive frustration that leads to nothing but sitting gloomily on the couch.

Not that sitting around on the couch can’t be a part of the process too. In Marfa, Charline did a lot of reading and looking at books, a lot of walking in the parched Texas landscape and whiskey-drinking and lonely mulling. Among the books she spent time with were catalogues of work by Willi Baumeister and Bernard Buffet. Of an early Buffet self-portrait she said, “It’s so weird and stubborn and awkward, but also right.” I think that’s one of the most profound compliments I’ve ever heard an artist give another.

Buffet self-portrait

Bernard Buffet, 1981

I love listening to artists talk about the work of other artists. It’s almost better than hearing them talk about their own art, maybe because the way they see the work of others isn’t clouded by desire or intention, insecurity or pride.

Or maybe, on the other hand, it’s precisely because their own particular artistic desires and intentions, insecurities and/or pride, make them see other artists’ work in ways the rest of us don’t.

One of my favorite parts of the talk was a discussion of the work of the figurative painter Dana Schutz—in particular, of Schutz’s 2007 portrait of Mike Kelley. “It’s visionary,” Charline said. “It takes you someplace.” Schutz, Charline suggested, imagined the figure (she worked without a photograph), then tweaked it: the fist is too small to be realistic, for example, and the elbow lines up conveniently with the edge of the canvas. “In abstraction,” she said, “it’s the same thing. I’m tweaking, too.” But, since she’s not working from an original in nature, the viewer can’t identify what she’s tweaking from: “You just feel the strangeness. It’s charged with something.”

"Daydreamer"

"Daydreamer," Dana Schutz, oil on canvas, 2007. Courtesy of Friedrich Petzel Gallery.

In relation to Buffet, Charline also said this: “I am interested in artists who are considered second rate, or third rate, because they get onto something, but then they get stuck repeating themselves.” Maybe this insight is part of Charline’s determination not to repeat herself. It is often said about her work that each painting is utterly different, a world in itself. Yet of course there are things that unify the work: her taste, the way she handles color, the way the scale of the paintings is an outgrowth of the size of her gestures. All these things are part of what she calls “a little of the red thread that runs through,” which I take to mean the continuity that comes from her singular hand: her singular self.

The other week, when curator Bennett Simpson was speaking at ICA, he said something interesting about inevitability. Whenever a mode of working, or an artist, becomes a major focus of the art world (Bennett said), that mode or person takes on an air of inevitability; but really, there is no inevitability. There are always a million things we might be talking about, so it’s worth asking what constellation of circumstances makes that one thing so present in the public imagination. He was referring to the incorporation of props and stagecraft in current art; but I’ve been thinking about the extent to which Charline von Heyl and her work have—apparently suddenly—sprung into the public imagination. Witness recent pieces on the painter in Artforum, Parkett, The Huffington Post, Art in America, and elsewhere, as well as a major upcoming exhibition at the Tate Liverpool.

It’s impossible to say how much of this sudden spotlighting is because of the nature of the current artistic moment, the reassessment of abstraction, the sheer fascination of the work itself, the painter’s personal charisma, specific serendipitous meetings, or anything else. But as we get ready to say goodbye to Charline von Heyl at ICA, I like to think we’ve been a star in that constellation.

*          *          *

Charline von Heyl is on view at ICA through Sunday, February 19. Don’t miss it!

From March 21 – July 8, you can see the show at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston.

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Out of Hollywood: Bennett Simpson on William Leavitt and Kathryn Andrews on Herself

February 10 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

A west wind has been blowing through ICA lately, carrying with it art and artists from California. A recent program “Pictures and Props” (occasioned by ICA’s current exhibition of the work of Jennifer Bolande,) explored the work of West Coast artists working on the fringes of Hollywood. I suppose that’s no more surprising than artists in Alaska making art about snow, but it does seem slipperier, if only because Hollywood is such a slippery place. Questions of masquerade and authenticity, of surface and illusion, come with the territory.

Curator Bennett Simpson, who started his career at ICA and is now at MOCA, talked about the artist William Leavitt whose first museum retrospective, William Leavitt: Theater Objects, Bennett curated last summer. Leavitt grew up in the Midwest and went to L.A. to finish his National Guard service, which turned out to be conducted on the back lot of a Hollywood studio. In the year of the Watts riots, combat training was done using the studio’s props and sets. Leavitt stayed on in Hollywood, building sets and making props, and also making paintings and writing plays. Many of his paintings were made to serve as props on the sets of those plays.

There is a weird, quiet menace sometimes, and other times a human poignancy, in Leavitt’s art. You don’t see people, but the animals, plants, and objects you do see often seem human, for instance the pair of lawn recliners at dusk which seem almost to be communicating. And there are curtains—especially red velvet ones—about which Bennett says, “There’s never anything behind the curtain, it’s our imagination that allows us to think there is.”

One of Leavitt's curtains

Installation view of William Leavitt: Theater Objects at MOCA Grand Avenue, March 13, 2011-July 3, 2012, photo by Brian Forrest

Leavitt also makes installations: fake palm trees stuck in cement with a boom box twittering birdsong; a recreation of a California patio. Nothing’s happening in these places, but Leavitt creates a haunting sense that something might happen soon. The play is always about to begin, or maybe it has always just ended, as in a dream where we are always arriving too late and everyone has gone.

Patio

Installation view of William Leavitt: Theater Objects at MOCA Grand Avenue, March 13, 2011-July 3, 2012, photo by Brian Forrest

Kathryn Andrews, an artist whose work will be part of ICA’s upcoming exhibition First Among Equals, also makes art that explores what it means for something to be real. “After art school I spent seven years making and destroying objects,” she says. “At the end of the day, I was always left with a pile of debris.”

After that, she gave up making art for a while. To try something new, she organized a show of other artists. But then, something unexpected happened. Kathryn found herself making works for that show, works which inhabited a kind of liminal territory, visibly part of the exhibition, yet unsigned and unattributed. Functionally, they enhanced the other work in the show—for instance, a kind of sculptural line separating two works on a wall.

image credit below

As Kathryn moved back into making art, this interest in responding to the work of others remained with her. She started renting props from L.A.’s copious prop shops, first making work in response to them, and later incorporating the props into her sculptures and installations. “Gift Cart,” for example, consists of a shiny stainless steel cart holding bright but battered wrapped gifts that Kathryn rented (these days she goes for 99-year leases). Why rent wrapped gifts, she wondered, when it would be faster and cheaper to wrap empty boxes yourself? It was a Hollywood puzzle.

Gift cart

Kathryn Andrews, "Gift Cart," 2011. Stainless steel, rented props, 60 x 38 x 24 inches.

Paradox interests both Kathryn Andrews and William Leavitt. As Bennett Simpson says, “The prop is like the rematerialization of conceptual art’s idea.” The prop is an object—but it’s also the idea of the object: a stand-in.

“In L.A. I’ve started calling it the new medium,” Kathryn jokes. “Like, Oh, I’m a sculptor. Oh, I’m a prop artist!” She says, “One of the things I’m trying to do is remove the sign of my hand from the work.”

In Leavitt’s work, by contrast, the hand of the artist is very present. “It’s old-fashioned work in some ways,” Bennett says. “It’s about creating an atmosphere, a mood.”

Jaguar

William Leavitt Jaguar (from The Tropics), 1974. Oil on canvas. 34 1/4 x 44 1/4 in. (87 x 112.4 cm). Courtesy of the artist.

Still, if you make paintings that you think of as props, certain old-fashioned art values—for instance the value of conservation—may not apply. Toward the end of the evening, Bennett tells a story about installing Leavitt’s show at MOCA. One day the registrar came over to Bennett, very concerned. They had found a hole in the painting “Jaguar (from The Tropics).”

Bennett called Leavitt to break the news.

Leavitt was blasé. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “I made that hole a long time ago. It doesn’t make any difference.”

* * *

Image credit from above: On right, Stephanie Taylor, “Landscape of Geometry,” 2007, photo-collage, 12 x 12 inches (each). On left, Benjamin Lord, “Broken Instrument,” 2007 21.5″ tall x 26″ wide, Epson Pigment Print on paper.

You can see Kathryn Andrews work at ICA in First Among Equals from March 14 – August 12.

Jennifer Bolande Landmarks is on view at ICA through March 11.

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East of Borneo: Seventies Flashback

February 3 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

The first things to show up were the chairs: those brightly colored stacking chairs you used to see everywhere in the 1970s. Madison, ICA’s building administrator, found them in the bowels of a neighboring building, and they were just what was wanted.

40/4 4 chairs in a circle

After that, a couple of tables appeared. They weren’t the right color though, so Paul painted the tops a misty gray. Next some posters arrived, big, grainy, black-and-white images of students at CalArts in the 1970s sitting together in spaces not unlike this one. It took a while to decide where to hang them.

Trying out the pictures

Photo: Alex Klein

That night—in what Tom joked was the I Ching of curatorial practice—there was an excursion to a bookstore to buy a bunch of used paperbacks: The Second Sex, A Marx Reader, Maria Montessori’s Education and Peace, Rubyfruit Jungle. Pretty soon it was looking just like the 1970s on ICA’s Mezzanine, site of our second Excursus project, East of Borneo. This reading room / exhibition / series of programs / online residency, loosely based around ideas of alternative pedagogies, is organized by Thomas Lawson and Stacey Allan, who run an online art magazine, also called East of Borneo, from their base in Los Angeles.

L.A. has been practically one big art exhibition lately (or at least, an endlessly hatching series of many art exhibitions large and small) as Pacific Standard Time (PST), the year-long celebration of art in Los Angeles between 1945 and 1980, rolls on. Tom Lawson, who is also Dean of the Art School of the California Institute of the Arts, concocted the art school’s contribution to PST: a two-year seminar exploring the art and artists of the post-war era. The time period the students got excited about turned out to be the 70s. That class helped develop the exhibition The Experimental Impulse at REDCAT in LA, material and ideas from which informed ICA’s installation. It’s exciting to have a bit of warm PST weather here in the chilly East.

What interested the students, according to Tom, was not so much the art of that decade, but rather “the alternative strategies that artists used in LA in response to various institutional collapses.” In the sixties, there had seemed to be a way to have a career as an artist; there were paths to follow. But by the seventies, that sense had disappeared. Young artists kept making art, but in many ways it was more for themselves and for one another than for a public. They formed collectives and published small magazines. This ethos of making art for the sake of making it—for opening oneself to new methods and ideas—this was what resonated for the CalArts students. The installation on ICA’s mezzanine, with its 40/4 chairs by David Rowland and its “Blueprint for Counter Education” posters (originals in the flat files; reproductions on the walls), is a portal to a moment in history from which to take inspiration.

Installation

Photo: Alex Klein

Maybe it’s just because I grew up during them, but I love the 1970s: the bright colors, the TV shows, the air of idealism. At my elementary school, ca. 1973, we sat on the floor and called our teachers Nell and Rich and Jewell. The Monarch butterfly project we enacted every year—watching the slow, striped caterpillars spin bright green chrysalises for themselves, then break out as brilliant winged creatures—would not be out of place up here on the ICA mezzanine.

Perhaps East of Borneo’s most potent installation object is the Metamorphokit table, which got delayed by UPS and didn’t show up till the very morning of the opening. Metamorphokit is a system of modular furniture designed for the CalArts dorms by Peter de Bretteville and Toby Cowan in 1971. The pieces could be put together in all different kinds of ways. Students would arrive at school, go up to their dorm room, and find a pile of unassembled Metamorphokit pieces. Thus, a student’s first task upon entering CalArts would be to design her own environment. “The idea,” Tom explained, “was that you would build your own dorm room, and in the process you would figure out what kind of artist you were.”

Alex, the Excursus curator, added, “But we found out they aren’t that easy to put together.”

“But they’re very easy to take apart,” Stacey said.

Metamorphokit dorm room, 1972

CalArts dorm room interior featuring Metamorphokit modular furniture (1972).

It makes me think of those caterpillars again. Didn’t they too create their own environments, then slip inside them for a while to do something mysterious, until they were ready to dry their new wings and take flight?

* * *

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