Archive for March, 2012

The Golden Jester: A performance/sculpture in First Among Equals

March 30 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

The golden jester makes her way into the gallery, dragging her suitcase behind her. She is lovelier than I imagined, a darker shade of gold with an elaborate costume, standing on a low gold plinth. Bells jingle on the peaks of her cap, on her boots, and on the long points of her elaborate collar. She’s here for her photo shoot before the opening of First Among Equals, a new exhibition at ICA exploring different ways artists work together and reach across generations.

Jester posing

The golden jester is part of a work by Kathryn Andrews, who is consulting with photographer Aaron Igler about whether the images should be vertical or horizontal. “Do you see it as a landscape, or as a tall sculpture?” he asks.

They agree that horizontal works best. Kathryn snaps a picture on her phone and shows it to the jester, who smiles to see what she looks like.

Kathryn’s artwork, “Serial Killer,” consists of a freestanding chain link fence on wheels and a series of six performances, of which the jester’s is the first. The exhibition First Among Equals will open with the fence blocking the gallery entrance. Then the jester will push it across the floor to a spot quite close to a work by Wu Tsang, a silkscreen and glitter poster advertising his film Wildness which will be screened here this summer. “I hope he doesn’t mind,” Kathryn says. “It’s kind of a violent thing to throw your work against someone else’s.”

Which is the point. Kathryn’s piece, the title of which invites the question of who the serial killer is here, will abut each of six other artists’ pieces over the run of the show—the fence pushed to a new position once a month by a new statue who will pose in front of it for two hours before exiting the gallery. “Certain formal relationships will emerge,” Kathryn says, admiring the way the jester looks next to Wu Tsang’s piece: “She’s all gold, and he has this gold text.”

What happens when one artist’s work begins to encroach on another? Is it a detraction or an enhancement, a problem or a gift? How different is this juxtaposition from what happens in every gallery every day—works changing subtly because of the context in which they are installed? “This functions as a critique of that,” Kathryn says. “In a joking way.”

While Aaron finishes setting up his equipment, the gallery buzzes with last minute preparations for the opening. One crew member hangs wall labels. Paul, the chief preparator, shows the guards where visitors can’t walk, and what walls they can’t lean against. The jester stretches, bows, shakes out her arms, making her bells jingle. “I’m ready!” she announces, getting up on the plinth and striking a pose.

“That’s better,” Kathryn says. “More confrontational.”

In her mask and puffy sleeves, the jester shakes out her hips and makes some disco moves.

“Can you look down?” Kathryn asks. “Now look at us again.” She asks me, “Which way do you like it?”

I like the eyes up. It makes the statue look more alive, more sentient. Kathryn agrees. “It looks weirder,” she decides.

Aaron takes some shots. No one is paying any attention. The jester is motionless, a human turned, by the Midas touch of art, into gold.

(l to r) Kathryn Andrews, Serial Killer, 2012, mobile chain-link fence with intermittent performance, installation view. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery and Christian Nagel Gallery. Wu Tsang, WILDNESS, 2012, silkscreen and glitter. Courtesy the artist and Clifton Benevento. “First Among Equals,” March 14- August 12, 2012, installation views, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. Photo: Aaron Igler + Matthew Suib / Greenhouse Media.

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First Among Equals is open at ICA through August 12. The next performance/sculpture will be on view Wednesday, April 4, from 6-8PM, as part of the official exhibition opening.

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Winter Salon: Strange New Worlds

March 23 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

“You never know what’s going to happen at auction,” Meredith says, “because you can get outbid in a minute.”

“And if you don’t,” Bryan says, smiling, “you wonder why.”

We are in Meredith and Bryan’s spacious apartment not far from the Whitney Museum of American Art where, earlier this afternoon, members of ICA’s Leadership Circle and Art Council enjoyed a private tour of the Whitney Biennial.

At the Whitney

At the Whitney

The tour was a prelude to ICA’s annual Winter Salon, a chance for donors and curators to come together for a drink and some conversation about art. Bryan and Meredith, an ICA board member and his wife, are enthusiastic Penn alums and art collectors. You can see their passion hung on every wall, even in the children’s rooms.

“Are there pieces you fall out of love with?” Ingrid asks.

“I won’t say who the artist is,” Bryan says, “but the first piece my wife and I bought we couldn’t live with anymore.”

“At first we liked it because it was so disturbing,” Meredith explains. “But then it was so disturbing.”

“I’d rather have the story than the piece of art,” Bryan says.

The talk shifts to the Biennial. Ingrid teases out some of its connections to ICA shows of the past: work by the Cologne artists Kai Althoff and Jutta Koether, who ICA showed in “Make Your Own Life” (2006); artist-as-curator installations by Nick Mauss and Robert Gober, à la Set Pieces, Virgil Marti’s tableaux staging of works from the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2010); Dawn Kasper bringing her whole studio into the Whitney as Anthony Campuzano did at ICA in 2010, delighted to make art for a hot July in air conditioning.

Artist and ICA board member Sarah McEneaney casts further back: “Dawn Kasper’s installation made me remember when Janine Antoni spent seven nights in ICA preparing for her exhibition. She slept in the gallery, recording her brain waves while sleeping and weaving them into a piece… with threads from her nightgown!”

Another connection is the emphasis on performance. For this Biennial, the Whitney has dedicated the fourth floor to music, dance, theater, and special events. If you’re in Philadelphia, you can follow our own performance series all spring and summer in the new ICA exhibition First Among Equals.

Performance is on Anthony’s mind, too. When Ingrid asks him—jokingly—what he hated most in the Biennial, he says, “What I hated most was what I loved the most. It’s kind of tiring when you realize that you’re going to miss the Biennial if you don’t go back every week.”

The performance emphasis is bemusing in a slightly different way to many here who come to art as collectors. There is a sense that this Biennial’s goal wasn’t to put objects a person might want to live with in room, but—as one Salon-goer put it—privileging artists’ studios and processes over the things themselves. “Do you feel this biennial is continuing the tradition of what a biennial is supposed to do?” someone asks Ingrid.

“I do,” she answers. “This was about turning down the volume and listening to artists.”

ICA prides itself on taking that attitude all the time: listening to artists about what’s interesting to them, looking at what they’re looking at, thus presenting work that other museums aren’t—or at least aren’t yet. Sometimes I wonder about the gap—now narrowing, now widening—between what artists look at and what the rest of us want to see. Artists are like brave Away Teams on old Star Trek episodes, investigating unknown planets that may prove, ultimately, inhospitable to life.

Anthony in the middle, Ingrid right

Often these conversations come around to taste. As Len, a long-time ICA supporter, says, “At the end of the day for me, it’s about do I like the work or do I not like the work.” In the next breath, however, he credits ICA for opening him up to art that was unfamiliar to him: video art, for example.

This is the line the ICA, the Whitney, and every other museum that presents contemporary art negotiates, each in its own way: how to give the viewer shows that will delight, but that also push us a little further, that open up new territory. That explore strange new worlds and new cultures…

I think an art exhibition should feel like a new world, with its own colors and textures, its own atmosphere and customs and seasons. We want art to transport us, to make us feel we’ve stepped through a portal to another way of seeing—of being—even as we stand still.

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For information about ICA’s Leadership Circle or Art Council, email Christy Miller at chmille@ica.upenn.edu

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Dedication Monuments: Alex Da Corte and First Among Equals

March 16 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

Alex Da Corte is standing in the gallery with what looks like a big, dripping piece of meat under his arm. It’s Monday, two days before the opening celebration of First Among Equals, the show he’s part of at ICA. He has the gallery to himself this morning as he installs his piece, SCENE TAKE SIX, which he describes as a two-sided painting.

To me, it looks more like an installation—or maybe a sculptural collage—with a wall down the middle dividing it in two. On one side, big, gray, framed pictures look as though they’re made of aluminum, riddled with bullet holes. A kind of reaper’s staff draped in zebra-hide cloth leans nearby, and in a vitrine a dark rattlesnake with a mouth like a cave full of crystals erects its glittering tail.

SCENE TAKE SIX install

On the other side of the wall the colors are paler, brighter: pinks and corals and beiges.

SCENE TAKE SIX install

“There’s a beautiful moment in Fantasia,” Alex says, “when a character pulls the sunset across the sky.” That’s the vision that animates this side, the light side, while the other is “Night on Bald Mountain.” As Alex says, “Both sides of the wall mirror each other formally, like a set for night and day.”

“Did you like Fantasia when you were a kid?”

“Oh, yeah, I loved it. I went to school to be an animator before I really knew what sculpture was.”

I ask him about the small sculpture he’s holding in his hand.

“This is a Sam Anderson piece. It’s called ‘Talent.’ She also did this bust of Aretha Franklin. And this is a Polly Apfelbaum piece.” He points to what look like pillowcases overflowing with bright raffia, explaining, “I’ve taken work from different artists and collaged it into my own.”

SCENE TAKE SIX install

There is a lot of this kind of work—wheels within wheels—in First Among Equals, a show exploring how artists collaborate with peers and reach across generations. For his piece, Alex called up artists he admired and asked if he could use their work in his presentation—either an actual piece or a recreation. “Everyone was really open and generous, and that made me so happy,” he says. “I think any artists wouldn’t like to think that their work couldn’t change.”

One piece Alex wanted to recreate was Karen Kilimnik’s, “Whiteberry Nest,” which he first saw in ICA’s Kilimnik retrospective in 2007.  That’s what he’s doing now, twisting branches into a nest, trying to get the shape right, small twigs breaking off and falling to the floor.

SCENE TAKE SIX install

He explains that the pink and beige framed prints hanging on the wall on this side—the day side—make up a Kilimnik self-portrait he photocopied, enlarged, collaged together, framed in Ikea frames (plastic wrapping and all) and then painted over, “so it becomes analog again.” The framed pieces on the other side are parts of a Rory Mulligan self-portrait showing the artist with an egg in his mouth. The dark rattler with its sparkling jaws mimics Mulligan’s open mouth—an informal riffing and gesturing that is how many of these pieces relate to each other. The rattlesnake is a Da Corte, but Alex says, “It’s not mine any more, because it’s in a collection.”  The question of what it means for a work of art to belong to someone is important to Alex. He calls the pieces he is assembling that include or allude to the work of other artists “dedication monuments.”

One of the most important dedication monuments here venerates Paul Thek, who turns out to be one of the presiding spirits of this piece—something I might have guessed earlier when I saw the faux, foam meat.

SCENE TAKE SIX install

When Alex was in grad school, visitors to his studio were always telling him his pieces reminded them of Thek, whose work Alex had never seen. “So many people asked me about Paul Thek that I decided I’d never look at Paul Thek,” he says, smiling. But of course he did eventually. He agrees with those who saw something Theklike. “It’s about the disembodied body,” he says.  “Looking at things that are beautiful but falling apart underneath. And a kind of cartoonyness to it.”

“I don’t use meat,” he adds, fetching a bunch of artificial greenery for his Kilimnik, “but I use flies.” It turns out a collector is lending a real Thek for SCENE TAKE SIX. “I’m happy that the first time I’ll be in contact with a Paul Thek will be here,” he says.

I look around the largely empty space. “Where is it?”

Alex sticks the greenery into his crown of branches. “It’s coming tomorrow,” he says, concentrating. “In an armored truck.”

SCENE TAKE SIX install

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You can see SCENE TAKE SIX in First Among Equals at ICA through August 12.

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People’s Conference, Part II: Art in Your Own Back Yard

March 9 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

“I’ve taken art to non-art spaces,” Astria Suparak says, “and non-art to art spaces. Before YouTube, when people had much less access to alternative, unconventional, experimental work, I did a lot of shows in places like bars, skating rinks, and living rooms…Some people have called this the rock band model: taking the work to the people, rather than waiting for the people to find to the work.”

Left to right: Andrew Suggs, Nato Thompson, Astria Suparak, and Jens Hoffmann. Photo: William Hidalgo

Astria, curator of the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University, is the first of the flock of creative, forward-thinking curators to speak at People’s Conference at ICA. They’re here to discuss the variety of relationships art institutions can have with their local neighborhoods, what’s alternative about alternative art spaces, and other issues arising from People’s Biennial, an exhibition organized by Harrell Fletcher and Jens Hoffmann, in collaboration with Independent Curators International (ICI), which looked for art in unconventional places. One of the artists in that show, Warren Hatch, makes nature films of microscopic life he finds in his Portland, Oregon neighborhood. This is a good metaphor for most of the curators here today, whose missions are bound up with the art and artists in their own backyards.

Astria, for example, told us about a show she organized in Syracuse, Embracing Winter, “repositioning winter as an opportunity to view your surroundings in new ways.” Video, installation, and photography were all on view, along with an enormous knitted sculpture of a mitten. A chart on the wall showed area snow fall levels over fifty years. Big piles of sparkling, environmentally sensitive ice melt were arrayed on the floor for people to take, decreasing in proportion to the increase in the snow outside. Perhaps most delightfully, in what Astria called “a reversal of Duchamp’s readymades,” an array of snow shovels was hung on the wall for visitors to borrow as needed—the object returned to its usefulness.

Embracing Winter, curated by Astria Suparak, at Warehouse Gallery, Syracuse University, 2007.

Andrew Suggs, director of Philadelphia’s Vox Populi, recounted how this alternative artist collective was launched (legend has it) at a bar called Dirty Frank’s one night in the late 80s “by a group of art students who were drunk and decided they wanted a place to show their work.” Andrew raised useful questions about the world alternative, for instance: An alternative to what? He quoted curator Lia Gangitano who wrote, “While some of us continue (perhaps out of respect) to use terms such as ‘alternative space’…it’s not clear anymore what, exactly, we mean.”

The biggest institution heard from was the Queens Museum of Art whose director, Tom Finkelpearl, gave an eloquent overview of how his museum—located in a borough where 47.6% of the residents are foreign born—serves, woos, and otherwise engages with its community. Art exhibitions, usually with some tie to the area, are an important part of the program, but so are local community festivals that offer cultural celebration along with access to social services. The museum staff speaks eight languages. “Our goal is to be the most community-engaged museum in America, without giving up on the complex contemporary art practices,” Tom declares. “We may be outside of the mainstream of the art world, but we’re not outsider artists.”

Photo: William Hidalgo

A third model for combining art and community was presented by Ruthie Stringer and Dana Bishop-Root of Transformazium, a small artists collective working in Braddock, Pennsylvania, outside of Pittsburgh. The young members of Transformazium originally moved to Braddock from New York City on a wave of optimism, largely because a lovely old building was available for sale very cheap. Part of the building, however, turned out to be uninhabitable and had to be deconstructed, a huge undertaking that Transformazium approached in the spirit of an art project. Once settled in the community, the artists worked hard to develop good relationships with their neighbors, seeking creative ways to kindle meaningful conversations. One program they dreamed up paired artists with Braddock youth to create site specific installations in the kids’ neighborhoods. A screen printing shop was opened, and an artist-in-residency program begun—all on the proverbial shoestring.

Jim Kidd, Resident Artist in Residence, and Leslie Stem, Transformazium at the Neighborhood Print Shop

Which brings us to the crucial, interesting, and often uncomfortable question of money. At about this point in the conversation, an audience member called out, “Who gets paid? Where does the money come from?” I was relieved, having been wondering about this myself.

In this realm, too, many models were represented. Transformazium members, for example, have day jobs, get small grants, collaborate with established non-profits like the local library, and sell art when they can, plowing the proceeds back into their project. The Queens Museum, by contrast, is largely foundation funded. Tom Finkelpearl went right to the heart of the issue when he said, “Can you remain idealistic and true to your goals if you take money from foundations and corporations? That’s the challenge. But it’s important to have health insurance for your employees.”

So many important, awkward, interesting questions raised over the course of one day! Not just Where does the money come from? and An alternative to what? but also, What if you’re somewhere there’s nothing you’re an alternative to? What happens when social practices are framed in terms of artistic production? Could it be an advantage to a curator to be untrained? Have we moved beyond the provocation of Duchamp’s urinal?

Coincidentally, I was in the Philadelphia Museum of Art last weekend and happened upon Duchamp’s “Fountain” sitting placidly in a bright room at the end of a hallway. A man was showing friends the gallery. One of the women, after looking around, turned to the man. “But is it art?” she said.

I confess I felt a little thrill. My guess is that object is not quite ready to be returned to the restroom yet.

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917

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People’s Biennial & Conference (part I): Looking for art on the road in America

March 2 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

“I come from a farming background,” Harrell Fletcher says. “My sense is that it’s better not to have a monoculture.”

At Haverford

Harrell on the right looking thoughtful. Photo: Lisa Boughter

Harrell, an artist known for his socially engaged, interdisciplinary projects, is talking about the art world. He and curator Jens Hoffmann are at ICA for People’s Conference, a two-day event growing out of People’s Biennial, an exhibition curated by Harrell and Jens that looks at art made outside the art world’s center of gravity. In collaboration with Independent Curators International (ICI), the two men traveled to five cities across the country, spreading the word through local community art centers, and galleries, and the radio, and fliers distributed by students on bicycles, that they were looking for art by anyone making things. They invited the public to bring their work to local gymnasiums; they drove around city streets looking for interesting objects in storefronts; they were invited into people’s kitchens. And in the end, they choose works by 36 artists for an exhibition that traveled to each of those five communities—a kind of snapshot of creativity across America.

Figueroa photograph

Jorge Figueroa, Untitled, 2007

Here are some of the things that are in People’s Biennial: Black and white paintings of neighborhoods that look, at first glance, like photographs. Videos of microscopic backyard life. A series of photographs of riders at the rodeo, and another series documenting life on a South Dakota military base. A battle scene made in Lego. Family portraits painted on cross sections of tree trunks. Soap sculptures. (“We joked about finding a soap carver,” Harrell said, “and then we did.”)

Peterson soap carving of soap dish

Bernie Peterson, Soap Carvings: soap dish, 1983–1994. Soap.

Bernie Peterson, the soap sculptor, was among the artists represented here who wasn’t interested in selling his work, even when the offering price was raised several times. The artists wrote their own wall text and catalogue notes, and judging from those, as well as from reports from the curators, they’re a diverse group who came to the project with a wide range of motivations. Some considered the biennial a delightful but singular event in lives that were focused elsewhere; others were glad to use the opportunity as a stepping stone to a more mainstream art career.

Tupac portrait

Robert Smith-Shabazz, Tupac, 2007. Watercolor on carved wood.

And what of the motivations of the curators?

“To highlight these other practices that exist and might otherwise slip through the cracks,” Harrell said. “Questioning the roles of curator and artist,” Jens said. “I’ve had this sense that in the art world there’s this homogenized quality,” Harrell said. “Our departure point for the project was certainly some issues we had with the world of art…how certain structures or codes are created and how we break through them,” Jens said. “You don’t need to be trained as a professional to be an artist,” Harrell said. “That’s one of the things I think is super exciting about art.”

Of course, all art institutions wrestle with these issues, sometimes in ways quite similar to the People’s Biennial project and other times in different ways. Most of the curators I’ve met, both at ICA and elsewhere, feel it’s their job to look broadly, to travel, to talk to artists about what they’re excited about, to constantly test the boundaries of what’s considered art, bringing a steady stream of the new and strange into the galleries along with more traditional work.

At one point on Friday night, Harrell talked about how, after he got his MFA, he felt he had lost something important to him: some feeling about or attitude toward art that he had had before he was trained. He was interested, then, in looking at what untrained artists were doing—and, I think, at how they were feeling about their work as well.

Lego battle

Dennis Newell, Lego Battle with Droids and Clones, 2010. Legos and lights.

Obviously there is joy in making art that people see, that you get paid for, that gets written about in magazines. Is there also a different kind of joy in making art without the spectral art world lurking around at the edges of your consciousness, rattling its chains like a Victorian ghost? That, I think, is one of the questions the exhibition explores. Though of course, one might equally well contrast the discomfort of making art inside the system with the melancholia of laboring outside of it.

At the conference

Photo: C.J. Morrison

Jens and Harrell on their journey remind me of Huck Finn lighting out for the territories, of Steinbeck traveling the country with his dog Charley, of Kerouac’s Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty on the road. Whether or not you agree with the audience member last week who called curators’ journey a Quixotic quest, how deeply American to take to the highway in search of something authentic, joyful, and surprising.

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People’s Biennial is a traveling exhibition organized by Independent Curators International (ICI), New York. Guest curators for the exhibition are Harrell Fletcher and Jens Hoffmann. The exhibition, tour, and catalogue are made possible in part by a grant from The Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, and The Cowles Charitable Trust; the ICI Board of Trustees; and ICI Benefactors Barbara and John Robinson.

To learn more about People’s Biennial, click here. To order the catalogue, click here.

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

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