Archive for July, 2012

“Hooverville Torqued Ellipse”: What’s In Stars

July 23 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

Abigail DeVille, whose “Hooverville Torqued Ellipse” went on view at ICA last week as part of the exhibition First Among Equals, is reading a book about black holes. It’s early, and she’s getting ready for the last day of installation. When I ask her if she’s interested in black holes for her art, she tells me yes. “I use them as metaphors for historical erasure,” she says.

Bones of Ellipse

“Hooverville Torqued Ellipse” is an installation within an installation. Abigail was invited by Yuka Yokoyama and David Dempewolf, who run Marginal Utility gallery, to participate in their series of installations as part of First Among Equals, a big show at ICA that explores different ways that artists work together. In their exhibition-space-within-the-exhibition-space, Marginal Utility has organized a new installation every few weeks, reconfiguring 15 large black wall panels in different shapes each time to enclose and define each artist’s work. Abigail is the last in the series, and for her run, the black panels have been pushed back and nailed to the gallery walls, providing the generous space her “Ellipse” needs.

Abigail’s construction is a distressed version of Richard Serra’s 1998 sculpture, “Torqued Ellipse IV,”

Serra's "Torqued Ellipse IV"

Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. Photo by Dirk Reinartz.

only done in scavenged wood and cardboard instead of steel. The distinctive Serra-like shape rises from the floor in ICA’s first floor space, gracefully dipping and lifting. So far it is mostly a skeleton of reclaimed two-by-fours, with a few patches of old cardboard stapled to the frame. Abigail pulls a large cart piled with more big scraps and patches into position, chooses a piece, and staples it to the structure with a staple gun. Then she goes back and chooses another.

Abigail working

“You’re good at stapling,” David notes. He and Yuka join in, pounding and screwing the distressed, waterlogged, ripped material into place. Abigail works the fastest, seeming to know in advance where everything should go. She is quiet and confident, occasionally picking up a scissors to cut or rip the cardboard into a different shape. The noise of her stapling is steady and sure. When David uses the drill, it resounds like thunder, drowning out the Beach Boys music playing through someone’s ipod. David sets up a ladder and climbs to reach the high parts. Slowly, the stark ribs disappear under a rich patchwork of trash.

Ellipse half done

This project grew out of a week Abigail spent at RAIR—Recycled Artist-In-Residency—a Philadelphia group that brings artists together with the waste stream. RAIR’s Billy Dufala and Lucia Thome provided crucial support, and Abigail sings their praises along with RAIR’s: “It was beautiful,” she says happily, “all these piles of materials.” A perfect fit for an artist whose MFA-student studio could barely hold all the found materials she pulled in from the New Haven Streets. Like Serra, Abigail got her MFA in painting from Yale.

Later, in the lobby, during a break, I ask Abigail about David and Yuka helping with the work.

“I love it,” she says. “It’s not the same handling of the material throughout. I’ll go back at the end and put the finishing touches on myself.”

Abigial on ladder

I ask, too, about the connection to her interest in astronomy. There aren’t any black holes here, but the ellipse is a quintessentially astronomical form, the shape of the orbits of heavenly bodies: planets around suns, moons around planets. “I’m always thinking of an astronomical relationship,” Abigail says. “Everything is connected—what’s in us is in stars. It’s a shame to get bogged down with what’s down here.”

Back in the gallery, the almost-finished piece looks monumental yet provisional, graceful but unkempt. The hues are mostly shades of brown, but bits of reddish orange plastic wind up one side. Further along, a square hole gapes like a missing tooth. A flap of cardboard hangs like a flap of skin, revealing white and brown bits underneath. Wounds, patches, decay, reclamation. The structure rises from the floor like a hastily built ark—though with no bottom and no top. It would neither float a desperate crew over a flood nor shelter a family in a storm.

Hooverville Torqued Ellipse

One thing about RAIR is that all the materials used in its projects need to be returned to the waste stream when the project is over. Just as what’s in us is in stars, so this stained, pock-marked lumber and weary cardboard may, months or years from now, resurface as another—entirely different—work of art.

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Not Just Papers: A Visit to the ICA Archive

July 9 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

High up in the Van Pelt library, a group of ICA curators sits expectantly around a table where several archive boxes are lined up. Pale and silent as ghosts, carefully labeled, reinforced with metal for durability, these boxes contain bits of ICA’s official records, but most of us have never seen them. They have existed at a distance, like uncles whom one is always intending to visit. Today, though, we are making good on our good intentions.

Next year ICA will turn fifty, a good moment for taking stock. We plan not only to revisit our history, but to make significant pieces of it available on our website. Today we have asked Penn Manuscripts Cataloger Donna Brandolisio and Curator of Manuscripts Nancy Shawcross to be our guides on an excursion into the past—a dry run for a more thorough exploration to take place this summer.

“I just happened to pull Machineworks first,” Donna says, pulling a box toward her.

Machineworks was an ICA exhibition from 1981 featuring mechanistic art by Vito Acconci, Alice Aycock, and Dennis Oppenheim and curated by Janet Kardon. In each of the several Machineworks boxes, documents from the exhibition are neatly filed in pale buff folders with a title and a number penciled in tiny letters on the tab. Donna hands piles of folders down the table. We hold them warily, divers at the edge of the boat. Then, opening them, in we plunge.

Letters typed on onion skin paper flutter softly. Contracts and schematic drawings pull away from marketing ephemera, while photographs cling stubbornly to their plastic sleeves. For a while there is the collective, concentrated silence of a room full of people reading. Then:

“Here’s a handwritten dinner invitation,” Alex says. “It looks like a punk flier.”

“Here’s a postcard of a steam engine,” Ingrid says, holding it up.

Kate finds a checklist and a bill from the Holiday Inn. There are handwritten letters from artists to the curator, Oppenheim’s on stationary with his name in bold red curvy lettering. There are photographs of the show being installed, a missive in the form of a poem about pigeons, an advertising flier. There is a note apologizing for bad behavior at the opening.

Invitation to Opening

As a non-collecting museum, at ICA we often say that our archive is our collection. But the fact is that we are less conversant with our history than we might be. Certainly we know the highlights—Andy Warhol’s first museum show in 1965, the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition that helped spark the culture wars, and so on—as well as most of the shows from the twentieth century. From the beginning, the mission of ICA has been about looking forward, but at some point it’s time to consider what all those forward glances add up to. Which were prescient, and which misguided? What did the future look like when envisioned in the past?

In the conference room, paging through the material, it becomes clear that the original idea for Machineworks was an exploration of artists and cars, but that at some point this idea was abandoned in favor of a show about machines.

Alice Aycock – From the series entitled “The Miraculating Machine: Mock Suns and Halos ‘Round the Moon” (1981) in process. “Machineworks” installation photo.

“But why?” Ingrid wonders. She turns pages, hoping in vain to find something that explains how the ground fell out from under one idea and came together under the new one.

This, of course, is the nature of an archive: interesting snippets, pages of dullness, provocative gaps. Given this, how do we proceed? Which papers should we refile, which set aside for digitizing? What will give a lively and useful picture of what the Machineworks show—or any show—was like? What might students want to look at? Or scholars? Or artists? What will represent us the way we see ourselves?

Coming into the library today, it was the exhibitions we were thinking about—how best to represent, or memorialize, them. But the archive itself is a living presence: being in this room makes that palpable. As Donna says of the painstakingly and thoughtfully organized files and boxes that make up the ICA records, “It’s a life. It’s an organism. It’s not just papers to me.”

There is something appealingly quixotic about this project: attempting to create a legible representation of an archive, that is itself a representation of an exhibition, that was an attempt to convey something essential about an artistic moment on which the light has dimmed.

Maybe the best way to think of it is as a distillation, as when a maple tree gives sap, boiled down with much labor, becoming at last a drop of perfect sweetness on the tongue.

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Guest Post: Q&Q

July 2 2012

by Jennifer Burris

“We were discussing how to arrive, and one idea was helicopter drones.”

The comment appears flippant, and is met with audience laughter. Projected in high-definition against a back wall of the ICA first floor space, the speaker (Mashinka Firunts) is discussing possible ways to begin the event currently taking place. In the video, she is bordered by an empty black frame and lit to the side, both composition and tone evoking the silently breathing beauties of Warhol’s screen tests.

This strategic performance of process and methodology, citation and erudition, anchors Unsearchable, an endlessly digressive evening of questions and questioning that took place at ICA on Wednesday, May 23rd, as part of the group exhibition First Among Equals. Machete Group—a Philadelphia-based union of philosophers, writers, and critics—invited artists Mashinka Firunts and Daniel Snelson to collaborate in a performative lecture that explored ideas related to the database: archiving, searching, classifying, compiling. As Machete Group member Avi Alpert explained in his spoken introduction:

“When God was thought of as the unsearchable, this was the mystical paradox. When the self was unsearchable, this was the paradox of consciousness. Now that the world is searchable, our paradox is to find something that escapes being found.”

Divided into three segments, this search for what remains beyond the database began with the video mentioned above. A montage of 1950s films, original footage, and randomly generated Google searches, this entry point showcased the three performers informally discussing how to construct and order the evening. The following two segments were performed live. Seated at a long table facing the audience, the same three participants, clad in film noir black, took turns stepping up to the podium where they introduced themselves and attempted to clarify (or perhaps obfuscate) the topic at hand. Each explanation was from the vantage point of an assumed “role” specified by their chosen methodological approach to searching. Avi was the “Theorist,” Daniel was the “Archivist,” and Mashinka was a ratatatat detective nicknamed “Narrative.” Rounding out the evening was a rapid-fire questioning directed towards the audience: an overtly theatricalized demonstration of confusion in which most people on the receiving end of a question could do little more than stammer out one-word answers.

If this is sounding excessively meta-analytical, self-reflexive, and contrived—that’s because it was. And that was the point. Playing around and through the adopted rhetoric and confused nomenclature so often evoked in discussions of contemporary art, the event gently mocked such self-aggrandizing critiques and justifications; that little trick of making the question sound sufficiently impenetrable and obscure enough in order to convey intelligence without genuine comprehension being a readymade tool of art and academia alike. Yet the mockery was sweetly done, with humor and an air of inclusion. As one question directed towards the audience by the performers demanded:

“Galloway’s tactics of non-existence seem to figure centrally in all your remarks tonight. If you are, indeed, invested in practicing the aesthetics of non-existence, why can I see you plain as day?”(1)

In this way, Unsearchable appears an appropriated heir to work like James Lee Byars’s 1969 performance The World Question Center.(2) But there is something else, as well, at play. By performing this abstracted opacity, winking to academic language and detective narratives, they also seemed to be performing something much more insidious; which brings us back to drones.

A growing flight of unmanned aerial vehicles deployed primarily in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, drones are used for surveillance and reconnaissance as well as to carry out air strikes. Transmitting live video feeds and still images to remotely located operators, this new wave of military intelligence facilitates a video game mentality towards war. Understood in this wider context of international politics and negotiation, the referencing of drones both opens up the initial impenetrability of Unsearchable while also adding a reverberation of discomfiting meaning for both contemporary art and political compliance alike.

It is impossible to “arrive” on a drone, as Firunts joked about doing at the start of the evening; the machine’s very structure renders the proposal paradoxical. But what is apparently an illogical throwaway in actuality introduces an underlying premise of the performance. The three central characters, or figures, should not be thought of as human subjects but as search agents, operating within the framework of each of their chosen methodologies.

These agents’ indifferent search for the unsearchable also shares a disconcerting similarity to the military’s use of surveillance drones to discover what is, by definition, just as unstable and impossible to find: terrorism, networks, terror. What is produced by this paranoiac search engine, operating through thousands of computerized flight vehicles, is an endless deluge of images and video clips leading to a crisis of information for analysts on the other end.(3)

By playing out these contemporary structures of paranoia and information overload within the camp theatricality of a dinner theater, the performers enact a rigorous cross-examination of the processes of contemporary surveillance and the mechanisms of a perverse governmentality without an immediate referencing of either politics or emotion. As the evening’s final set of questions plaintively put forth: “I’ve heard coded references at this point to almost every imaginable topic: what is it to search? Is there anything that is not searchable? Is there a relationship between searching/targeting and war? Is narrative a mode of liberation? Can you say, definitively, what the major concern of the event here tonight has been?”

No, you could not; and so we go on searching, lost, looking for something to find.

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All images are from Unsearchable, 2012, by Avi Alpert, Mashinka Firunts, and Daniel Snelson. Photos by William Hidalgo.

(1) An Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, Alexander R. Galloway is a founding member of the software collective RSG and creator of the data surveillance engine Carnivore. With Eugene Thacker, he co-authored a book entitled The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minnesota, 2007), which proposes an idea of non-existence as a form of indifference. Seb Franklin describes this notion of non-existence in his article “On Game Art, Circuit Bending and Speedrunning as Counter-Practice” as follows: “It’s not a question of hiding, or living off the grid, but of living on the grid, in potentially full informatics view, but in a way that makes one’s technical specification or classification impossible.” Cory Arcangel is a contemporary artist often discussed within this framework.

(2) “In 1969, the American artist James Lee Byars developed a performance piece entitled The World Question Center. The original idea, which was not brought to fruition, entailed gathering one hundred brilliant minds including thinkers, scientists, and artists together in a room, locking them behind closed doors and inviting them to ask each other questions they had been asking themselves. The final version of this project, produced for Belgian Radio and Television, is a performance piece in which Byars contacts all of them by telephone” (www.ubu.com/film/byars_world-question.html). Many thanks to Kenneth Goldsmith for pointing me to this work.

(3) The effects of this crisis of information have been explicitly, and consistently, skewered in the work of artists like Harun Farocki, whose ingenious films and video installations—from Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1988) to Serious Games (2009-2010)—unravel the militarization of imaging technologies and perception. Other artists, such as Seth Price, propose opportunities for individual resistance; Price’s 2008 artist book/exhibition catalogue How to Disappear in America provides internet-sourced instructions for the ways one can drop out of a mainstream society and evade law enforcement.

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