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A Painting with a Purpose: Sarah Crowner and Primary Information at ICA

April 15 2013

post by Rachel Pastan

“This might be easier than we thought,” Paul says, pulling the curtain onto the long dowel. Sarah, who made the curtain, carefully adjusts the folds.

Off-white and flame red, lipstick pink and lime green and black, the curtain is twenty-two feet long and made of irregular linen panels. Sarah, who is a painter—and who thinks of the curtain as a kind of portable painting—colored the bright sections with fabric paint, then ironed them, then stitched the whole thing together on an industrial machine. “I had to make a giant pattern for it,” she says, “like one would make for a giant jacket.”

Up on a ladder, David finishes installing brackets over the windows. He and Paul lift the curtain onto the brackets and let it unfurl. Suddenly ICA‘s mezzanine space seems more orderly, the chairs and tables and library carrel given context, orientation. Sarah frowns at the three-inch strip of glass showing above the curtain. “Is that distracting?” she asks.

David and Paul try raising it up a little. It doesn’t quite reach the ground, now, but it’s definitely better. Finally, it’s perfect. “It looks like it was made for the space.” Sarah seems pleased.

Actually, Sarah made the curtain as a backdrop for a Spanish-language staging of Robert Ashley’s opera, Perfect Lives. Partly because the opera, now called Vidas Perfectas, was set in the desert between Mexico and the U.S., she brought ideas from Mexican Modernism to the work. She also found inspiration in the early twentieth century Polish artist Maria Jarema, who designed costumes in theatrical collaboration with Tadeusz Kantor.

Then a few months ago, James Hoff and Miriam Katzeff asked Sarah if they could use the curtain as a backdrop for a very different kind of presentation: their spring Excursus project at ICA. James and Miriam are Primary Information—a non-profit that (re)prints new and out-of-print artist books and writings. Their Excursus IV is an archival exploration of ICA’s 1975 Video Art show, with lots of books and pamphlets and letters and diagrams; they liked that the curtain would introduce color into this largely black-and-white project.

Catalogue for the ICA exhibition “Video Art” (1975).

There was a practical consideration as well. Works from Video Art are being projected in one corner of the bright, open mezzanine, and the curtain helps dims the light. “It’s nice to think of a painting having a purpose,” Sarah says. Then she turns a critical eye to the creases in the fabric: “We’ll have to steam it.”

How does a painter of canvases come to curtains?

“I was thinking about duration in art,” Sarah explains. “In sitting in front of a painting for forty-five minutes instead of going into a gallery where you might look at something for maybe three.”

And then, she wondered, what happens when you put a painting behind a stage on which things are constantly happening? Does the painting still the action? Or, conversely, does the action make the painting move?

In Vidas Perfectas, the curtain’s white panels became screens onto which the text of the opera was projected. Here on ICA’s mezzanine, it will frame public programs and stand sentry to private chats and reading experiences, to casual browsing. I find myself wondering which of the scheduled programs it might particularly enjoy: the conversation about camouflage and mimicry perhaps? Or maybe it’s interested, as I am, in chapbooks .

Coffee and Conversation program in front of the curtain. Photo: Emily Wu

In past presentations, the curtain has been backlit or illuminated with stage gels. “Here,” Sarah tells me, “it’s beautiful, because it’s all natural light.” Almost as she speaks, the sun comes out from behind a cloudbank, casting pale streaks across the linen. The fabric brightens irregularly, the pinks glowing, the greens becoming as translucent as beach glass.

Primary Information will be ICA’s final Excursus project. Excursus, which invites artists, designers, publishers, and others to delve into ICA’s archive and use what they find as a starting point for an installation (and also an online residency) was started by Alex Klein when she came to ICA as Program Curator in 2011. The four Excursus projects she has organized—Reference Library, East of Borneo, Ooga Booga, and now Primary Information—have enlivened ICA’s physical space and enriched its intellectual compass. I urge you to experience it this spring while you have the chance. After that, the curtain is coming down.

*      *      *

Excursus IV: Primary Information is on view at ICA through June 16. Follow the project and learned about upcoming programs at the Excursus website.

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Meaning Something: A Conversation About Brian Weil at ICA

March 4 2013

post by Rachel Pastan

“I worked with Brian for a year before I knew he was an artist,” Ric says. “We were more focused on building the movement.”

“ACT UP was awash with artists in the eighties,” Patrick adds. “Because everyone was an artist, no one talked about it…There was a feeling that art was not a responsible response to the crisis.”

Patrick, Ric, and Stamatina, with a rare image of Brian on the screen.

It’s Sunday afternoon, and we’re in ICA’s auditorium for a conversation about photographer and activist Brian Weil—about how his art and his AIDS activism intersected. How to think about the grainy, scratched, sometimes blown out, often riveting black-and-white images he made before dying in 1996 at 42? The Brian Weil retrospective currently on view at ICA presents several bodies of work, each exploring one of several insular, marginal communities in which Weil immersed himself and which he then photographed. The Sex pictures show images of S&M and bestiality, the Miami Crime series shows the bodies of the dead Weil encountered while riding sixteen-hour shifts with the police. There are pictures of boxers and bodybuilders, photographs of Hasidic Jews, and video for a final project, never completed, about the transgendered community. But it’s the AIDS photos Weil is best known for, and he himself believed his AIDS work was the most important he would ever do.

In a talk preceding this afternoon’s conversation, curator Stamatina Gregory, who organized the show at ICA, tells us that at the start of his involvement with groups like ACT UP, Weil had no intention of photographing AIDS subjects. It wasn’t until an HIV-positive graduate student he knew asked him to photograph her baby daughter, Flavia, who was dying of AIDS, that Brian brought his camera to the cause.

Brian Weil
Maria eight months pregnant with Adriana, Brooklyn, NY, 1985
Gelatin silver print
Private collection
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Brian Weil Archive

“Photography for Brian became a way of making sense of the crisis,” Stamatina says. Eventually he would travel all over the world, imaging the crisis in Haiti, in South Africa, in the Dominican Republic, and elsewhere. But over the course of this more than ten-year undertaking, a number of intriguing, difficult tensions emerged. For example:

* That Weil characterized this work as alternatively an activist project and as an artistic one, depending on who was asking.

* That Weil welcomed the use of his images to educate the public, but remained ambivalent about his own artistic endeavor.

* That he believed “artistic skill can engage the viewer without them turning away,” but at the same time he had concerns about presenting the work as art.

Ric Curtis, now a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, worked with Weil on New York City’s first needle exchange program, which Weil founded. Of Weil’s AIDS photography, he says, “I think Brian felt it [taking photographs] might cheapen the process.”

Patrick Moore, Deputy Director of the Andy Warhol Museum, who worked with the photographer in ACT UP, says, “I think it’s really hard to take a picture of someone who’s dying.” He describes an exhibition of AIDS photographs at MoMA in the eighties by a different artist—how the activist community protested that show, feeling it objectified its subject. “How do you have it mean something?” he asks. “Not just shock.”

What makes a given body of work art or exploitation? Art or education? Good art or bad art? Does the intention behind the work matter, or only the result? There are, of course, no easy answers to these questions, but viewing Weil’s work makes them palpable, urgent. The answers seem to shimmer in the stark, hugely mediated images, then recede before one can grasp them.

Patrick speaks admiringly about the intimacy of Weil’s photographs. He talks about the supersaturated blacks and the blown-out whites—how they make you feel about the photograph’s subject that “this person is almost somewhere else.” There is a way in which the essential humanity of the subject is captured even as the details of the physical body blur and fade. One image of a woman in bed catches my eye every time it cycles by on the projection screen. Because of the overexposure, all we see of her is hair, hands, eyes, lips. The rest of her’s bleached out as though she’s already bone, or ghost. Pure light.

Brian Weil
Woman with AIDS at Baragwana Hospital, Soweto, South Africa, 1990
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Brian Weil Archive

When he died, not of AIDS as many assume, but of a heroin overdose, Weil was right in the middle of his work. He was still using all the tools at his disposal—time, an extraordinary ability to connect with people, and of course a camera—to capture experience as most people never see it. To open our eyes to the brilliant lights and the terrible darks, to the grainy indeterminacy, of life.

In regard to his AIDS project, Brian Weil was clear-eyed about the way a difficult photograph should operate: “You need to seduce them, you need to amuse them, and then you need to show them the truth.”

* * *
Brian Weil is on view at ICA through March 31.

To stay up to date with all ICA’s complications, email miranda@icaphila.org.

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Diamond Dust Ellipses: Field Kallop Installing

February 4 2013

post by Rachel Pastan

“This is my homemade pendulum,” Field Kallop says. “Two bottles pieced together with some epoxy and duct tape.” She measures out lengths, snips, then wraps tape around the middle of the plastic bottles like wide black belts. With a funnel she fills one with finely crushed glass—diamond dust—then attaches it to one of ten long strings dangling from the ceiling. She pulls her pendulum back and lets go. The hard glitter runs from the tip, tracing a sparkling line on the floor. Field catches the bottle, then releases it again, this time with a curved motion instead of straight. The glass inscribes patterns, overlapping ellipses, like the paths of planets moving through the sky. The curves shift slowly, accruing into kite shapes, distended trapezoids. Repeating sweeps of dazzle.

Field stops the pendulum again, detaches it.

She’s using lead fishing weights for heft, taping them to the bottles’ sides. They’re a good shape for her purposes, echoing the length of the bottles, but she’s not sure how many she’ll need. That’s part of why she’s at ICA today, a few weeks before the show her work is in, Glitter and Folds, opens. A heavier pendulum will travel faster and make bigger forms than a lighter one. “I’ve done two iterations of similar projects,” she says, “but they’ve never been this big, and never with a ceiling this high.” She has to experiment with each variable until she gets it right.

Organized by ICA’s Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow Jennifer Burris, Glitter and Folds isn’t the easiest show to describe. The text on the exhibition card begins: “What do we know to be true? That the earth rotates, time moves forward, gravity pulls, and mirrors reflect light.” This is a poetic statement rather than an analytical or descriptive one one, fitting for a show like Glitter and Folds which will present work by four artists, each of whom—like Field—strives to make visible some potent but ghostly force. Subterranean social currents. Gravity. The drift of time.

Field has always been drawn to science, particularly chemistry, physics, and astronomy with their immutable laws. Her installation is titled and upon each stood a siren, borne around in its revolution, which is how Plato described the musicality of the orbiting planets in The Republic. Part of the work’s appeal is in the tension between the immutability of the force it makes visible—gravity—and the ephemeral nature of the forms it creates: patterns of glitter on the floor which entropy (and visitors’ shoes) will quickly wear away.

Many traditions make art of ephemeral dust: sand or pollen or powered bark. Field tells me about the mandala painting of Tibetan Buddhists (whose whole theology is based on the impermanence of the world), the healing sandpainting of the Navajo, and the British tradition of “table decking”—decorating the dining tables of the rich for feasts. She is especially drawn to the bonseki craft of Japan—another Buddhist tradition—in which landscapes are created on black lacquered trays with bird feather brushes.

Field’s own early work was in paint, but one day she bought a toy pendulum for her desk. Its movement appealed to her so much that she attached a pendulum to her studio ceiling and began making drawings with it. “The elliptical forms were so perfect and so simple,” she says. At first she used bleach, running it through the pendulum onto cloth: “Each kind of bleach would reveal a different color in the fabric. I love working with the bleach, but it was really wearing on the system.” Jennifer remembers visiting Field in her studio and finding her basically wearing a hazmat suit. Diamond dust, for all its sharp glitter, is safer.

In the gallery, the strings dangling down through the space are not attached directly to the ceiling. Rather, they are suspended from other strings that run horizontally, thus introducing another force into the system, making what physicists call complex harmonic motion. The horizontal string moves back and forth, and the dangling one moves in a circle, and so the forms sketched on the floor are more elaborate, squarer, and more complexly textured than if only one kind of motion were in play.

(primary)

At the opening of the show at ICA on February 6, Field will set her pendulums in motion in an hour-long performance. She will start from the back wall and work forward, the bottles in the rear slowing as the ones at the front still swing fast. The performance will be repeated on February 27, and for a final time on March 13. Thus a work of art about cycles will exist in three cycles of its own. It’s as though a diligent deity were making the universe over thrice, inscribing the clockwork of its mind on the void in bright dust.

* * *

Glitter and Folds opens at ICA on February 6 and will be on view through March 31.

with tomorrow’s sun, A Night of Poetry & Performance, will be held in conjunction with Glitter and Folds on Wednesday, March 13, at 6:30pm

To stay up to date with all ICA’s sweeps of dazzle, email miranda@icaphila.org.

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Salon of Ghosts: Staging (and Restaging) at ICA

November 19 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

In the way that autumn, redolent of falling leaves and new notebooks, is always the same autumn, so the first Salon is always the same first Salon. Here we are again—students and artists, neighbors and teachers—together in ICA’s auditorium with its carpeting and its round, comfortable poufs. My mind spirals back to last fall—to the last first Salon—when Alex (as she does tonight) invoked Gertrude Stein, that quintessential Salon hostess, dressed in brown corduroy, sitting in a high-backed Renaissance chair, facilitating “polite and perhaps animated conversation.” For a dizzy half-moment, I don’t know quite where I am. Those three guests at the front of the room with their presentations ready, are they painters here to talk about abstraction? No; tonight is Staging / Restaging, and that trio of guests is Terry Adkins, an artist, musician, and a fine arts professor at Penn; Homay King, an art historian at Bryn Mawr College, and Sharon Lockhart, an artist, filmmaker, and professor at USC. “I hope you’re all properly caffeinated from the La Colombe coffee,” Alex says.

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Photo: J. Katz

Staging and restaging: What is that, exactly? The spark for tonight’s program is a work by Jeremy Deller, on view in the gallery upstairs. The Battle of Orgreave is a video and related archive that reanimate a restaging Deller organized in 2001, for which he marshaled 1,000 volunteers (and some horses) to recreate a violent confrontation in Thatcherite England between striking coal miners and police. That restaging was unlike the sort of Civil War reenactments common in America in a very important way: many of the people doing the reenacting were the same ones who had been in the clash in the first place. That’s like a married couple reenacting their divorce trial. “This isn’t about healing wounds,” Deller has said. “It’s going to take more than an art project to heal wounds.”

Jeremy Deller, “The Battle of Orgreave,” 2001
Commissioned and produced by Artangel
© the artist. Image courtesy the artist
Photo: Parisah Taghizadeh

What, then, is the role of such a project? And how is a restaging of a past event like (and unlike) a photograph of the event, or a memoir, or a documentary, or a song written to commemorate it? Each kind of restaging has its own quality, its own particular haunting power. Ghosts flit in and out in different guises, some white as clouds, some sticky with ectoplasm, others groaning and clanking chains.

In this room tonight, for instance, Terry Adkins powerfully summons the spirit of John Brown—“America’s first terrorist and leading shepherd,” he says, half-ironically—the American abolitionist who mounted a doomed raid on the armory in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia. Adkins (who hints that he has his own invented shadow self) has worked on a number of reanimations of Brown. He has played Brown’s ghost in a video (backed by ibises), refabricated the iron pipes with which Brown armed fugitive slaves (if they didn’t know how to use firearms), and resurrected a procession to commemorate Martyr Day, the day—December 2, 1859—Brown was hanged for his crimes.

Terry Adkins presenting his work. Photo: Ted Gerike

“I’m working on a project about the virtual,” Homay King says. Suddenly the room is open to the ghosts in the machines—computers—that have now become, like faithful dogs, our constant companions. In addition to introducing us to Ming Wong, an artist who restages films like Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (which is itself a remaking of Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows), with Wong playing all the roles, King speculates about what it might be about digital culture that encourages restagings, which are proliferating on YouTube this very moment like bright, tenacious dandelions. At the same time, she reminds us that, in the ancient world, recital—oral repetition—was how stories were spread; at the other extreme, she mentions the current fad whereby politicians are made, via software, to sing. Restaging has a long history, but things seem to be speeding up.

There is no speeding up, however, in Sharon Lockhart’s current work, which is disciplined by the steady pulse of a metronome counting out 120 beats per minutes. In her new show, Sharon Lockhart | Noa Eshkol, which just opened at The Jewish Museum in New York, Lockhart engages the work of Israeli dance composer and movement theorist Noa Eshkol (1924 –2007). Through a film installation featuring dancers who worked with Eshkol, combined for the first time with textiles (“wall carpets”) Eshkol made from scraps of fabric, Lockhart reanimates the choreographer’s fierce creative spirit. In fact, I think I see Eshkol now, entering the room in her leotards, cigarette in hand, bare feet hard with phantasmal callouses.

Installation view of Sharon Lockhart | Noa Eshkol exhibition at The Jewish Museum, New York City. Courtesy of Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels; Blum & Poe, Los Angeles; and neugerriemschneider, Berlin. Photo by Alex Slade.

As the Salon moves into its final act, audience members ask questions, make suggestions, speculate, fabulate. “This idea of anonymity and authorship is in the air,” someone says.

“It’s about the current generation’s inability to think about the future,” conjectures another.

By now the auditorium is thick with ghosts. See: in the corner, Gertrude Stein offers a glass of wine to John Brown. A British policeman raises a night stick over Fassbinder’s head. Noa Eskhol rescues the scraps of Ming Wong’s costumes to make a wall carpet. I peer over her shimmering shoulder, half-expecting to see our own visages given form there, as we lean eagerly forward in our chairs, not wanting to miss a word.

Table full of ghosts celebrating after the Salon. Photo: Alex Klein

* * *
Don’t miss the last Salon of the fall, Folk / Subculture, with Alex Baker, Matthew Higgs, and William E. Jones, on Wednesday, November 28 at 6:30.

Join Terry Adkins for this year’s Martyr Day procession down Locust Walk at Penn on December 2.

To join Miranda’s mailing list, email miranda@icaphila.org.

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Valerie’s Snack Bar: Tea Time at ICA

November 4 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

People who come into the gallery often look over at Valerie’s Snack Bar from the other side of the room, not quite sure how to respond to it.

Valerie's Snack Bar

Photo: Aaron Igler / Greenhouse Media

When they get close enough, I ask them if they would like tea. Mostly they would. During my first shift in Valerie’s, I served a woman who works at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, over on the other side of Penn’s campus, who often comes to ICA on her lunch hour. Later, a man in a white baseball cap came in. “Do you have espresso?” he asked. But although the café has signs advertising crumpets, or a toasted tea cake for £1, or a hot beef barm (sandwich) with or without onions, we only have tea.

Between now and the end of December, all ICA staff members are taking turns serving tea in Valerie’s, which is part of the exhibition Jeremy Deller: Joy in People. Valerie’s Snack Bar is a replica of a real tea room, really called Valerie’s Snack Bar, in Manchester, England. It was in Manchester that Jeremy Deller organized a procession (called Procession) with dozens of local clubs, committees, bands, and social groups of all kinds. During the year and a half he worked on the project, he liked to hang out in the real Valerie’s so much that he built this replica and put it on a float in the parade. You can see it going down the street in a video on a little TV on the counter here. There are also black-plumed horses, and a Hindu bagpipe band wearing kilts, and old cars, and people dancing and carrying banners.

Designed and sewn by the extraordinary Ed Hall, many of the banners are on view here in the gallery. One says, “Remember Ian Tomlinson” and another one says, “Carnival Queens.” A somewhat different-looking banner, which turns out to have been designed by David Hockney, says “Unrepentant Smokers.” I suppose this is what Deller meant when he said that he wanted to celebrate social group activities that are “lazily referred to as antisocial when in reality they are the exact opposite.”

Procession

Aaron Igler / Greenhouse Media

It wasn’t easy to get the tea room here. It had to come by ship—in pieces, in two shipping containers loaded onto a truck that parked outside ICA one afternoon last September. Dana tried to get the city to close off our block of 36th Street, but the target date kept changing as the ocean freight was delayed—by weather, or customs hold-ups, or some other foggy oceanic mystery. Then, the crates were too heavy to get into the building, so the crew had to unload the pieces out in the street and bring them inside. The trucking company gave us two hours. If we went over, we would have to pay a penalty.

After asking me how I would sum up Jeremy Deller’s work in one sentence, the woman who works at Children’s Hospital told me about her favorite ICA show of all time, back in the nineties. It was about the senses. You entered a dark room, and after a while purple lights slowly came up. She saw the exhibition, the name of which she no longer remembers, several times before she realized that actually the lights, though very dim, were always there—that seeing them was a matter of waiting for her eyes adjust. “I have always remembered it,” she said. I have served tea to an artist who had a show at ICA some years ago and was visiting the museum with her sister. One afternoon a class from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore came in and filled every seat.

Tea

Students having tea, author serving.

Karen Beckman, a professor of Cinema Studies at Penn, volunteered to serve tea and hold office hours in the café, and I have eavesdropped as ICA Senior Curator Ingrid Schaffner held a series of meetings in here, taking time out to chat with customers about the exhibition.

One day I even met my daughter’s high school English teacher—now retired—drinking tea and chatting with Associate Curator Anthony Elms about different Philadelphia museums! The surrealness of this particular experience reminded me of something else Jeremy Deller said about this project, that he hoped the parade might be “full of bizarre, funny, wrong-seeming things,” like a parade you might see on The Simpsons.

I am not prepared to sum up Jeremy Deller in a single sentence, but his work certainly has to do with constructing situations—a café, a restaged police-and-miners confrontation, a bombed-out car as a conversational prompt—in which people are invited to come together and interact. Given that, this modest tea room with its white Formica tables and sole libation is in a way the heart of the exhibition. This is the place where the viewer is invited to step through the invisible looking glass and become part of the art on view.

* * *

Jeremy Deller: Joy in People is open at ICA through December 30. The author of this post will serve you tea in Valerie’s on alternate Wednesdays between 1-3 PM.

To step through the invisible looking glass into Miranda’s mailing list, email miranda@icaphila.org.

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Open Bedroom: Jeremy Deller at ICA

October 1 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

Three days before the opening of Jeremy Deller: Joy in People, Jeremy himself is lying on his stomach on a single bed in ICA’s first floor gallery, scribbling on the wall with a Sharpie. “I’m a boy,” he writes. “US vs. UK.” “We’re gonna make you a star-ar-ar.” To one side of the bed, a lamp sits on a table, and across the way cupboards and drawers have been specially built. The walls of the room, which is a kind of gallery within the gallery, are hung with posters and photographs. “A Special Event: Jack the Ripper’s Norwich” one poster says. “Brian Epstein Died for You,” says another. A photograph near the bed shows three guys—one of them has got to be a younger Jeremy—posing with a gravity-defying tower of beer bottles.

Bedroom view

Over the door a third poster reads, “Home Sweet Home.”

Jeremy gets off the bed and starts opening and shutting the new drawers. “This one is a bit sticky,” he says.

Edwige nods. She’s nailing a hook into the top of one of the cabinets, but she’ll go tell the crew about the sticking in a minute. Jeremy’s assistant, Edwige has shepherded the show through its various international venues. Right now she hangs up a T-shirt bearing a legend from a Philip Larkin poem that I, too, am fond of. “They f*** you up, your Mum and Dad,” it begins; I learned it by heart in college.

Larkin T-shirt

If this looks more like a boy’s bedroom—music fan, middle class, late twentieth century—than like an art museum hosting the first mid-career retrospective of a major artist, well, that’s the point. This installation, “Open Bedroom,” recreates one of Jeremy’s first shows, which he organized in his parents’ house in 1993 when they were out of town. In those days many of Jeremy’s friends were in art school hosting Open Studios, but he had studied art history (the Baroque period), and he had no studio to open. He had done some paintings, though—of Keith Moon, mostly—and made some posters and T-shirts. “It was an opportunistic way to get a bit of attention,” he says now. Most of the other works in Joy in People showcase his later, ambitious orchestrations of groups of people doing surprising things—from improvising impromptu slapstick routines to restaging a violent clash between striking British miners and police—or they document his imaginative quests and propositions. “Open Bedroom” is more modest, but it offers a sense of intimacy, the feeling of peeking behind the façade of The Artist to the face of the young man he used to be.

Edwige needs stickers to affix to the Bedroom drawers, so I take her up to the offices where we raid the supply closet for mailing labels. We bring them down to Jeremy, and he sits on the floor writing on them: “Suburban Scenes,” “Gallery Cards,” “At Home Invitations,” “Beer Mats,” etc. Visitors will be invited to open the drawers and rummage through the contents, but it’s hard to do that now because there aren’t any handles.

Drawers

Edwige disappears, then turns up again with a package of handles for Jeremy’s approval. “You okay with these?”

He is.

Soon Ingrid, who together with Kate is coordinating the show at ICA, comes in and starts opening cupboards, checking out the contents. “There’ll be a black light in this one,” she says.

“There is,” Jeremy says. “We just need to turn it on.”

One of the crew, passing through pushing a large crate, pipes up: “You just have to turn the bulb.” Ingrid screws it in, illuminating a sign about Annie Leibovitz photographing President Reagan, and another about Tony Curtis in the Playboy Mansion.

View-Masters hanging

Ingrid looks through one of the red plastic View-Masters dangling from the ceiling. “Who are these guys?” she asks.

Jeremy comes over to look. “Some posh guys I know.”

She points to a picture on the wall. “What’s this?”

“That’s the mayor of a town in France. Whenever I’d go there, I’d visit the mayor and bring him a present. A record usually. Spreading good will.”

“Are you going to visit the mayor of Philadelphia?”

“I met your mayor in 2009. Is it the same guy? He came to see the car.”

The car Mayor Michael Nutter came to see is the wreckage of a vehicle blown up by a bomb in a Baghdad market. Traveling with a US soldier and an Iraqi, Jeremy towed the car on a trailer across the United States between New York and Los Angeles museum venues. “We stopped in about fifteen towns,” he’s said, “and just waited for people to come by…What we didn’t do was present it as an overtly political artwork. We presented it in a very bland way.”

A lot of people did come by, in Philadelphia, Nashville, Dallas, Santa Fe, and elsewhere, to look at the car and to talk. Some were veterans, or relatives of veterans—from the Vietnam era as well as the recent past—each with their own stories and points of view. Students came, and proselytizers, mothers and waitresses. Cheerleaders, migrant workers, Hurricane Katrina survivors, golf dads, nuns. Sometimes the conversation was about politics, or war, or religion. Other times it veered to art.

With Jeremy’s work, it’s not always easy to tell the difference. Categories bleed into each other, actions and people are transformed, or transform themselves. As Ralph Rugoff, Director of the Hayward Gallery in London, who organized Joy in People, said at the walkthrough for ICA members—his tone teasing at first, then serious—“Jeremy is not an artist who started out with a conventional toolkit. He can’t draw, he can’t paint, he can’t sculpt….He links things up. That’s what artists do. They connect things in ways other people don’t see.”

Home Sweet Home

* * *

Jeremy Deller: Joy in People is on view at ICA through December 30.

To sign up for Miranda‘s mailing list, email miranda@icaphila.org.

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Painting on a Giant Scale: David Guinn Paints Jeremy Deller’s Head and Other Enormous Ephemera

September 17 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

Paul and Robert are talking with David Guinn, the mural painter, about the gigantic mouth. “I’m just going to bring the lips out a little more,” David says.

“I’m not sure if we should make the teeth an inch shorter,” Paul says. They stare at the wall in ICA’s downstairs gallery, where a transparency of a face is being projected. David is copying a cartoony picture of artist Jeremy Deller’s head around an arched doorway, which serves as the open mouth.

The drawing David was working from.

Visitors will walk through that mouth into the small room beyond to view Beyond the White Walls, a narrative slide show that is part of the major retrospective of Deller’s work, Jeremy Deller: Joy in People, opening at ICA on September 19.

“Do you think the nostrils really get that close to the lips?” Robert asks, as David marks their placement above the doorway with blue tape.

Paul pulls the projector back a few feet to see if it looks better. Everyone stares at the wall, dissatisfied.

Then David has an idea. “The nostrils could be half way,” he suggests, and—just like that—the problem resolves.

Jeremy Deller: Joy in People is an exuberant, unconventional, wide-ranging show. Deller, who won Britain’s prestigious Turner Prize in 2004, often makes work that involves people doing things: a massive re-enactment of 1984’s violent clash between striking coal miners and police (An Injury to One is an Injury to All); music fans making art inspired by their favorite band (The Uses of Literacy); and a Mancunian procession featuring a local cafe on a float, fish-and-chips enthusiasts, handmade banners (including a pro-smoking banner designed by David Hockney), and a Hindu bagpipe band (Procession). People are, literally, part of the show: for instance, a rotating sequence of melancholy teenagers will lounge on a couch under a mural—also painted by David Guinn—spelling out I ♥ Melancholy (the name of the piece) in shiny black letters on a matte black wall.

Black on black has its own challenges, maybe bigger ones than the relationship of mouth to nose on a cartoon face. When gloss paint doesn’t render the letters shiny enough, David tries varnishing them, being careful not to scuff the surrounding area. “Flat black is fickle,” he tells me. “It will look different if you touch it up with a brush than with a roller. It has to go on perfectly. To have it look mechanical but to do it by hand…” he trails off, checking the straightness of a letter with a level.

David, who also teaches at Moore College of Art and Design, is one of Philadelphia’s foremost mural painters. He is particularly known for his seasons series, including Crystal Snowscape at 10th and Bainbridge and Spring at 13th and Pine, and he recently completed an indoor mural for La Colombe’s Dilworth Plaza cafe about the craft and traditions of espresso. This summer David worked on a mural in North Philadelphia representing the dogs of neighborhood residents, spending the sweltering August days high on a ladder against a south-facing wall. He has recently launched Freewall, an outdoor space for temporary artist-centered murals. Working at ICA is a day job for him, but it’s a good day job. “It’s cool to work in this space,” he says. “The mural I just finished was totally different. Nothing needed to be precise. There’s a huge crack in the wall, and there’s nothing to do about it. Here, the wall is perfectly smooth. And if you have a question, you just ask.”

 

David with mural at 47th and Baltimore

David with his mural “The Heart of Baltimore Avenue” at 47th and Baltimore

David also says that executing someone else’s work keeps him honest. Here he is, transferring a little eight-by-ten-inch color drawing onto a ten-foot wall of slightly different proportions, and next week Jeremy Deller will come by and see how it looks.

I ask David if he considers himself a muralist, or a painter who paints murals.

“I’m a painter,” he says. “I look at the murals as big paintings.”

I watch as he applies pinkish paint to the outlined mouth around the doorway, following the contour of the lip exactly. “What do you like about painting murals?”

“I like the impact: it’s so big. It’s powerful—you can’t deny it—when you see something that’s so much larger than the body.” He dips his brush again, then adds, “I like how it’s part of the world. People live with it.”

That sounds like an answer Jeremy Deller would appreciate.

* * *

Jeremy Deller: Joy in People is on view at ICA from September 19 – December 30, 2012.

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Objects and Ambiguities: A Studio Visit with Becket Flannery

June 19 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

A large green eye in a plastic face looks up at us from the floor as we go by. The door to the studio is shaped like a wave.

eye on the floor

Photo: Becket Flannery

Becket's door

Photo: Becket Flannery

We are here for an informal studio visit, to see the art Becket has been making on the days he is not arranging travel and organizing correspondence for ICA’s curatorial department, where he works part-time as an administrative assistant. In the office, he wears three-piece suits and ties, often with pocket square, so it’s strange at first to see him here in jeans and flannel shirt. Still, it’s clear that his gracious good humor, his excavating intelligence, and his self-possessed calm serve him in the studio as they do in the office. Becket will be leaving Philadelphia at the end of the summer to attend an MFA program in painting at the Roski School of Fine Arts at USC. His sturdy, polished shoes will be difficult to fill.

Passing through the wave-shaped doorway, Jennifer crosses the room to a table where Becket has laid out some of his artwork for us to see.

One piece began life as a VHS tape case. One is a big book of empty pages with drops of faux-marbled paint on the cover. A third is made of pieces of sky blue foam about the shape and size of sticks of butter, nestled in a white cardboard shell on top of a slab made from more blue foam.

blue piece

Photo: Becket Flannery

“You desperately want to touch it,” Jennifer says, leaning close.

“They’re carved,” Becket says. “They have this geometry, but they’re very, very handmade. I use this blue color a lot, but I try not to use it as a color. I use it as a substance.”

There are a lot of things to see in this small studio space—un-air conditioned in the summer, unheated in the winter—in a big, ramshackle building full of artist studios. On our way in, we passed rows of doors all shut with padlocks, the corridor walls flaking and strangely marked, and a derelict brush factory in a big open space. It’s a Monday afternoon, quiet. Becket asked the band upstairs if they could please not rehearse today.

In addition to the pieces on the table, there are works hung on the wall, still others standing or lying on the floor. “This is the brightest spot,” he says, pointing, “so whatever I’m working on at the moment is here.” He shows us the shadowy place further along where easy access is blocked by the end of the large table. That’s where he hangs his finished pieces when he wants them around for reference. Jennifer admires a shiny, deep red object, shaped not unlike a lightning bolt, on the floor.

red piece

Photo: Becket Flannery

“I feel like I could dive into it,” she says.

“I chose this color because the surface was hard to find,” Becket explains. “The great thing about some of those enamel surfaces is that they’re hard to see.” The talk turns to materials: enamel, foam, paper, found objects. “Material is incredibly seductive,” Becket says. “I don’t want to be an artist who’s naively interested in materials.”

“Why not?” I ask. I’m wondering whether the seductiveness of materials for an artist is like that of words for a writer. Ideas and stories tend to slip away when we swoon over language instead of organizing it in the service of something larger. Becket tells me that materials come with cultural meanings—symbologies—that it’s important to get away from those. “A lot of making things,” he says, “is the ambiguity between the material of an object and its appearance.”

Becket and Jennifer in the studio.

Ambiguity is a good word for Becket’s work, which resists easy categorization. Sometimes, looking around the room, I’m not sure what’s a painting and what’s a sculpture. I have to ask. If Becket minds answering, he gives no sign of it. He is a forthcoming, articulate, warm host, calmly introducing his guests around the room, helping us get to know the family of objects inhabiting the space. He says, “I think what’s great is that objects stick around. They resist being digested.” He explains that there is a point, when you are working on an object, when the piece seems to recognize its own existence: “You feel as though you’re being looked at when you’re looking at it. That’s how I answer the question about how I know when a piece is done.”

We go back for more time with the sky blue foam object. Jennifer is interested in the white cardboard bit. “It’s like a little shell or a little clam,” she says. Becket explains that the thing began life as a shoe insert, the kind you take out at the store before you put your foot in.

“It’s a stand-in for the organic,” Jennifer says.

“It puts it in an ambiguous place—not really technological, not really nature,” Becket says. Then he adds, “If you’re not paying attention to what’s interesting in the object, it doesn’t succeed.” A little later he says, “Things are not beautiful because there are rules about beauty; they’re beautiful because they’re attractive of desire.”

tape case

'vi deo t ape.' Photo: Becket Flannery

I think that’s exactly what these objects do: draw the eye to them, call to the hand. As Jennifer said earlier, you want to touch them—test their weight, feel their sheen, run your skin along their curves and angles.

When it’s time for us to go, Becket picks up the deep red floor sculpture and leans it prosaically against the wall, tidying up, making room for the other artists who share the space. “It kind of ruins the magic,” he says.

But it doesn’t, not really. The magic just takes a step back, moving into the shadows where it flickers patiently, preparing for the mythic journey west.

* * *

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Same Paintings, Different Rooms: Charline von Heyl in Boston

May 4 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

For six months, from the fall well through the winter, the large, vibrant paintings of Charline von Heyl hung on the walls of the first-floor gallery at the ICA in Philadelphia. I remember peeking into the gallery as they were uncrating them, how even half unwrapped they caught and drew the eye with their great splashes and zigzags, their stripes and squiggles and harlequin diamonds, their cloudy, ambiguous orbs. These are big paintings, each one nearly seven feet tall, and the 17 of them on view in the exhibition here made the space vibrate with energy and color.

The other week, I had the opportunity to see the show at the ICA/Boston, where—pruned and reconfigured— it is currently on view. I wanted to see how different it would look in that quite different space. Would it be like seeing the same dress on two sisters? Like meeting an old friend after a long absence? Or perhaps it would be like revisiting a familiar city in a different season. (Note: There is no institutional relationship between the two ICAs.)

In Philadelphia, the gallery opens off a tall, sunlit lobby. Entering the show was like plunging into a pool: paintings all around you, a wealth of choices as to where to swim.

Philly view

Photo: Alex Klein

The works were generously separated, but in that big, open space you were always aware of more of them to your left and right, behind the partial walls, and all the way back in the depths of room. Color shimmered everywhere, calling out for you to look.

In Boston, you enter the show through a kind of anteroom, a narrow gallery with one painting on the left: Phoenix, with its swoop of red and its diamonds of blue and black, its white background and lozenges. Rather than plunging, one eases into the show, absorbing the fiery colors and bold shapes of Phoenix like a mountain climber pausing at base camp to get acclimated to the new air.

I pass through a doorway into the second room.

Photo: John Kennard. From left to right: 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; Yellow Guitar, 2010. Acrylic, oil and charcoal on linen. 82 x 78 inches. Private collection, New York; Alastor, 2008. Acrylic on linen. 82 x 78 inches. Courtesy of the artist, Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York, and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne.

The three paintings in here happen to be three of the von Heyl paintings I know best. I think of them as the drippy purple one, the bright yellow one with the knife, and the one with the squid shapes and the bloody hand prints. I’m happy to see them again after our months apart, but something is strange. I seem to see shapes and patterns I don’t remember: a curving ribbon of black triangles in the drippy purple one, inky tracings in the purple wash in the squid one. In fact, I don’t really remember the purple wash itself—I would have said it was more of a gray. I start to wonder—did I not look at the paintings as closely as I thought I had back in Philadelphia?

This feeling of unfamiliarity is intensified in the final room, where I spend a lot of time staring at a painting I don’t remember, wondering how I could have forgotten it (it turns out it wasn’t in the Philadelphia iteration of the show). I circle around a couple of times, eavesdropping on visitors, looking for Untitled (aka: Greetings), the favorite of the Philadelphia ICA’s guard, Linda, but it isn’t here. This show has fewer paintings than the Philadelphia version, which feels like a loss to me, except that I find myself looking more carefully at the paintings that are here, which feels like a gain. Because of the smaller size of the rooms, I’m standing closer to the paintings. I wonder if that’s why the colors look so different.

Photo: John Kennard. From left to right: Time Waiting, 2010. Acrylic and oil on linen. 82 x 78 inches. Courtesy of the artist, Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York, and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne; Solo Dolo, 2010. Oil and charcoal on linen. 82 x 74 inches. Private collection.

According to Jenelle Porter, the show’s curator, the lighting here—a filtered northern light from shaded skylights plus bulbs—has a huge impact on the way the show looks. “I think it’s the light that makes the show look like a jewel box,” she wrote me in an email. “Also, the galleries are very ‘white’ which really makes the color of the painting pop….But all in all, it’s the same show—we even hung the works in essentially the same relationships we established in Philly.”

Still, it’s the differences that stay with me. The word that keeps surfacing in my mind here in Boston is intimate. When I think back on the show in Philadelphia, I think electric, I think buzzing. I loved that electric, buzzing energy, and it was always a delight to wander through the gallery and visit the paintings on my way in to or out of work. But it’s here in Boston, for the first time, that I can imagine living with one.

* * *
Charline von Heyl is on view at ICA/Boston through July 15.

You can read more about Charline von Heyl here and here.

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Stuff to Art: A Conversation with Alex Da Corte

April 20 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

At the opening of First Among Equals earlier this month, a pink Boticellian Venus—a living statue—pushed a rolling piece of chain link fence right up against Alex Da Corte’s installation, SCENE TAKE SIX, then stood nearby on her half shell for a couple of hours. When she left, the fence remained, jutting into Alex’s piece: an ambiguous guest.

Venus with Scene Take Six

photo: Constance Mensh

“When Kathryn Andrews first came here and said she was going to make a big fence and put it in front of someone’s work, I said, ‘Me first!’” Alex says. “There’s nothing to be gained in a group show by people’s work sitting politely and not looking at each other.”

We’re at ICA’s spring Free For All event, where later this evening there will be pistachio doughnuts, ice cream sandwiches, and a band. First, though, there is this tasty conversation hosted by two members of ICA’s student advisory board, David and Julie, who pose questions about how First Among Equals came about, how Alex thinks about making art, and how his work will exist after the show ends.

photo: William Hidalgo

The fence intervention—and the living statues that periodically move it around the gallery—comprise a piece by Kathryn Andrews called Serial Killer which vividly dramatizes many of the issues the show explores: What happens when artists work together? Where does cooperation end and competition begin? What does it mean when one artist uses other artists’ works of art as material for their own?

This unlikely sounding situation can be found in many forms in First Among Equals, including Alex’s SCENE TAKE SIX itself, a two-sided installation that uses works by six artists on one side and six on the other to make a new whole—almost the way a group exhibition, organized through a curator’s vision, makes a new whole. Alex, though, takes marvelous liberties it’s hard to imagine a curator taking. He has fashioned a microphone for Sam Anderson’s bust of Aretha Franklin, for instance, and piled works by Anna Betbeze, Paul Thek, and Karen Kilimnik on top of each other. Some of the works have been borrowed from collectors for the run of the show. Others, which Alex calls dedication monuments, are recreations he built himself with direction from the original artists. Which are which, though, he’d rather not say: “I don’t want to say if it’s real or fake, because in my mind it’s all real. I was thinking that all these materials are equal, even if some have a greater monetary value.”

Among other things, SCENE TAKE SIX is a kind of meditation on memory. Black-and-white on one side, color on the other, the two sides formally mirror one another; but since you can’t look at them both at once, all the time you’re looking at one side, you’re also thinking about what’s on the side you can’t see.

The black and white side

photo: Alex Klein

Alex relates this constant presence of absence to the nature of the scavenged materials he often uses as material: “Most of the things I scavenge are missing parts, and I don’t know what they are.” A little later he says, “My work is just stuff—just a bunch of crap piled together—but the minute it’s in a white cube being photographed…” He trails off.

It becomes art, he means, that trailing ellipsis alluding to the moment of transformation without naming it. Another missing piece, though this time we can see what it is.

Stuff to art: when exactly does that happen? I was in the gallery last month watching as Alex put SCENE TAKE SIX together: spray-painting vitrines, twisting branches, nailing painted flowers to the wall. Was I there for that elusive, magical moment? Did I miss it?

A little earlier, talking about all the disparate elements that go into a work of his, Alex said, “It’s a bit like a dream where your mother, your pet dog, and Johnny Depp are all there.”

And what of Kathryn Andrews’s fence? Is that too part of the dream? Or is it, with its bright steel bars, the ringing alarm clock that threatens to wake us from the dream? Or perhaps it’s the ringing alarm clock that we, unwilling to wake, incorporate into the dream so that we may sleep and dream just a little while longer.

Venus pushing the fence

photo: Constance Mensh

* * *

The next living statue, an evergreen tree, will move the fence on Saturday, May 12th at 2:00.

First Among Equals is open through August 12.

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