Archive for the ‘Artists’ Category

Welcome All Citizens of the Universe

January 20 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

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

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

The Centennial Star

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

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

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

“No. I took the train.”

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

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

Jennifer and Jacqueline considering

Jacqueline and Jennifer considering The Centennial Star

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

Paul switched the images.

“A bit more distance?”

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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Posted in Artists, Installation, Living Document/Naked Reality | 1 Comment »

The Transfiguration of Bill Walton’s Studio

December 9 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

If you walked into ICA last Sunday afternoon and went up to the second floor, you would have seen a small crowd around the installation Bill Walton’s Studio. Completing the exhibition together, people shared remembrances of the late sculptor and printmaker who touched so many in the Philadelphia art community over the last half-century. Others talked about their feelings about Bill’s work and the studio on view.

The group

Photo: Jenna Weiss

Artist Paul Swenbeck, for example, who has been busy working on an exhibition of his own, described his envy of the “calm and zen” in Bill’s studio. Molly Dougherty, executive director of the Philadelphia Art Alliance, told how, at a difficult time in her life, Bill issued an invitation: “There’s a class going on in West Philadelphia—Argentine Tango. Are you in?”

Some people who spoke, like the young woman going off to apprentice with a woodworker in Maine, hadn’t known Bill at all, but what lingered of him here touched them too. Samantha Sharf, a Penn senior who worked on the exhibition, talked about what a strong sense of the man she’d acquired through his space. A young man who had used his grandfather’s tools to build a guitar made a connection to that experience; he had never known his grandfather, but his closeness to him grew through using the tools.

In return for their words, each speaker got to choose a piece of the installation to take home: a drill bit, a painted block of wood, an old red chair. Paul Swenbeck, for example, took home a log. Sam Sharf took home a tiny skeleton key.

Curator Richard Torchia quoted Brancusi: “Things are not difficult to make; what is difficult is putting ourselves in the state of mind to make them.” Then he added, “I think standing here makes anyone who isn’t an artist want to be an artist.” Richard took a jar of pencils.

Photo: Jenna Weiss

Pretty much the only things people couldn’t take were the artworks themselves—not that it was always easy to tell what was art and what wasn’t. As exhibition curator Ingrid Schaffner said, pointing to the workbench, “One of those c-clamps is a work of art, and the others are just c-clamps…There’s some Duchampian terrain to navigate here.” Later, Ingrid took a jar of sticks.

Painter Jane Irish, one of the conduits who made the exhibition possible, told how one time Bill, who was her neighbor, came into her studio when Jane was working on a drawing involving a shower of gold. Having trouble getting the drawing right, she’d made a model for herself: “I took a silver lampshade and I put plaster on it, and I poured my penny jar over it so that the pennies stuck in the plaster. And Bill said, ‘That’s the best thing you’ve ever made!’” Jane took some palette knives.

A young artist just setting up his own first studio spoke. A friend of a fishing buddy of Bill’s spoke. A colleague at Moore College of Art to whom Bill taught letterpress told how she and Bill traded sculptures: “I look at his piece every morning when I have breakfast,” she said. Bill’s first Philadelphia gallerist spoke, as did his last.

Bill’s daughter told us how she used to play on and around the big artworks her dad had in the yard, sliding down them, or having the dog jump through them. She also used to go into his studio and move things around: “That would make him so mad!” A little later, when someone extolled the economical quality of Bill’s work, she spoke up again: “It’s nice you used that word, ‘economical.’ We called it cheap.” Everybody laughed.

Artist Sarah McEneaney brought her dog. “Bill loved Trixie, and she loved him,” she said. Bill’s last home was in the building above Sarah’s office, and Trixie used to go upstairs to nap in the room near him. “She still goes up, there,” Sarah said, though the room is empty.

Photo: Jenna Weiss

We hope visitors to ICA exhibitions always go home with something they didn’t have when they came in—an idea, an image, an inspiration. This wasn’t so different, really, just that this time those inspirations were condensed into things. For a few hours that afternoon everyone in the room played their part, and the moment that had been suspended because of the exhibition—the moment for the dispersal of Bill’s material possessions—took place at last. It was a strange alchemy, words building up a picture of the man even as the objects he had touched and made were taken up by other hands.

The many artists in the room mostly took away talismans that were also useful: a jar of brushes, a wood plane, a T-square, a ball peen hammer. Tools that will keep on doing work, only in someone else’s studio now.

* * *

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Field Trip: The Artist’s Studio

December 2 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

Last month, along with some other ICA staff, I was out in San Francisco for a tour of the contemporary art collection in the new IT building at Williams-Sonoma, Inc. (You can read about the tour and my thoughts about art in the workplace here.)

The next day, gallery owner (and Penn alumna) Katie Clark drove some of us out to an industrial part of the city for a studio visit with one of her artists, Stephanie Syjuco.

Curators, of course, are always going on studio visits with artists they’re interested in. I have perhaps a romantic notion of these occasions, with artist and curator drinking tea (or something stronger) as they wander from artwork to artwork in a large airy space. The artist’s ideas about a piece and the curator’s ideas come together (in my fantasy) to form something new—something bigger and brighter than anything either of them could give rise to alone. And then, if the chemistry is right, an exhibition is conceived. Some months later, after a period of gestation and a hard, last-minute push, it arrives with a flourish in the world.

This tour wasn’t like that. Still, it was its own kind of revelation.

An artist must think twice before permitting strangers into her sanctum, the place where fragile notions are still wobbling about like new foals, trying to find their legs. It was generous of Stephanie to invite us in, to let us wander around and stare at enigmatic or talismanic objects—coffee cans bristling with tools, remnants of cloth, a life-sized, two-dimensional Eames chair—and to take the time to talk with us about her work.

“Most of my projects are very large scale,” Stephanie told us. And most, it turns out, have to do with ownership, counterfeiting, and the economy of the art world. For a recent project at the Catherine Clark Gallery—RAIDERS: International Booty, Bountiful Harvest (Selections from the A_ _ _ _ A _ _ M _ _ _ _ _)—Stephanie downloaded images of vases from the Asian Art Museum’s website, blew them up to size, printed them on photo paper, and mounted them on laser-cut plywood. The resulting collection was put on display facing forward in the gallery, so that it looked to people coming in as though they were entering a vase store. “You’d notice the moment they’d realize that what they were looking at was a cultural prop,” Katie Clark said.

Vase installation

Courtesy of Catharine Clark Gallery

“Essentially I’m raiding the collection of the Asian Art Museum,” Stephanie explained, “to challenge our idea of ownership.” She was also, as an Asian-American artist not deeply connected to Asian art, seeing whether she might find a resonant relationship.

An earlier project, “notMOMA” at Washington State University, invited undergraduate art students to produce replicas of 70 artworks from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art out of whatever materials they could scrounge up: color Xeroxes printed out and pinned to boards, pieces of cardboard cut out and painted to resemble metal, paint dripped Pollock-style onto canvases. “You have all the greatest hits,” Stephanie said: Warhol’s soup cans and a Calder sculpture and that Eames chair I mentioned earlier. “Then you go up closer and you start to see that they fall apart.”

Stephanie gives a terrific studio presentation. I was captivated by her ideas and her images, by her account of inviting crocheters around the world to make counterfeit designer bags and her adventure at the 2009 Frieze Art Fair hiring artists to make replicas of art works on offer elsewhere at the fair and selling them at cut-rate prices. The insights she gave are ones she might offer anywhere, but somehow being in the room where she dreams things up gives her story a seductive intimacy. It almost makes one think one could do it oneself—sit in a room like this and wait for the bright, lively ideas to coming flocking in like birds.

Back in Philadelphia, ICA’s exhibition Bill Walton’s Studio runs through the weekend. For the show, we catalogued and moved all the items from the studio of the late minimalist sculptor into our Project Space, where it fits beautifully—though there is a bit less dust.

Bill Walton's studio, installation

Bill Walton

This Sunday at 2:00 the public is invited to share remembrances of the artist in exchange for an object from the installation (finished works excepted, of course). It’s an extraordinary opportunity to participate in the alchemy of the studio, where bits of wood and tubes of pigment and the spark of an idea incandesce into art.

*       *      *

Join us for Bill Walton: Gifting the Studio Sunday, December 4 at 2:00.

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From the Archive: Agnes Martin reconsidered

November 18 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

“I’m interested in how art and writing have relationships with each other,” Becky Hunter says.

Oh! I think. Me, too.

Agnes Martin, Untitled

It’s a sunny Sunday afternoon on the ICA mezzanine, and Becky is talking about Agnes Martin, a painter whose first museum retrospective was held at ICA in 1973.

Becky is a young art critic, book reviewer, and fiction writer who moved to Philadelphia from London not long ago. Her presentation is part of ICA’s new Excursus series, a platform for more intimate programming than you’ll find on Wednesday nights in our auditorium: a conversation over a cup of tea, a pop-up bookstore, a dramatic reading, or a game of chess with a Wharton Esherick chess set.

Becky leading discussion

Another aspect of Excursus is that it engages ICA’s archive. Becky spent time in the archive researching Agnes Martin, and part of what she’s doing today—as we sit around the table passing images of her paintings from hand to hand—is bringing to us what she unearthed there. Also she is telling a personal story about her own engagement with the artist, whose work she once knew only through two paintings hung in the Tate: bright white, plain grid paintings—some of the only work of Martin’s on permanent view in Britain. Because it was so hard to see the work, Becky, like many people, found herself engaging with Martin largely through her writings. These, often aphoristic and contemplative, concern her spiritual quest. Her lectures, such as “An Untroubled Mind” and “On The Perfection Underlying Life” helped cement some of the myth that grew up around the artist, who abandoned a budding New York career in 1967, driving around the country in a camp van until she found herself in New Mexico. There in the desert she built an adobe house in which to live and work alone.

Holding photo of Agnes

The stories of artists that come down to us are irresistible: The shepherd boy Giotto, discovered drawing in the fields by 13th century master Cimabue; Van Gogh never selling anything; Andy Warhol going home from the blaze of his silver Factory to the quiet house he shared with his mother. The narrative of the artist as hermit, the artist alone in nature, the artist repudiating worldly success is compellingly romantic. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to live like that, alone with the Muse and silence, maybe a dog? Is it perhaps the integrity of renunciation that brings acclaim in the long run? Oh, how pretty to think so.

Becky told us that the prevailing view of Martin’s often stark paintings is to see them as controlled, passive, modest: quintessentially a woman’s work. But, as Becky spent more time with the work, she began to develop different ideas. This happened in 2009 when she took a trip to Edinburgh to see Agnes Martin: Artists Rooms. When she got to the museum, having had a fight with someone just before getting aboard the train, Becky was in a bad mood. Contrary to her expectations, the paintings—darker and grayer than the ones she had seen at the Tate—seemed to reflect her state of mind. “All the paintings seemed to me to have an element of anxiety or aggression,” she said. “There was a real tension between these thick, horizontal gesso brushstrokes and these vertical spaces.”

Was what she had seen real? Or was she so steeped in her own mood that she saw the paintings through that scrim? What to make of an experience of Martin’s work so at odds with the conventional wisdom, so antithetical to the myth of the zen-like desert denizen from whose lips koans calmly dropped?

It was this question that led Becky to ICA’s archive. Were there writings to be unearthed that would support her alternative view? Would she find some objective truth to back up her instincts and feelings?

When she got to this point in her presentation, Becky stopped to ask us—the audience—what we thought. Was research born of an emotional response valid? What an unexpected, brave, truly intimate moment this was: offering her approach up to us to judge!

Group at table

This is what I think: we all have personal, emotional responses to art, and this is good—it’s indispensable. I want an art critic or scholar who has an open mind and an open heart, one aware of her own prejudices so that she will not be in thrall to them, not one who approaches art or artists blind to her own preconceptions, or with the intellect only.

And anyway, are there fixed answers when it comes to questions like these about Martin? In her research, Becky found an essay she believes is by Frank Kolbert in which he discusses Martin’s grid as a “two-dimensional prison.” Becky spoke to a woman who knew the painter at the end of her life and asserted that her use of line was an attempt to hold onto control. Are the paintings prisons, or are they airy meditations? Are they exercises in self-discipline, or are they Taoist paths?

Or—more plausibly—do they partake of both modes, and likely many more besides? Doesn’t Martin’s work—doesn’t any art—take its energy from contradiction, from the complexity that allows for multiple interpretations? From the submerged, intricate, fragmented tumult of a whole life.

* * *

Image credits: Agnes Martin, “Untitled #1,” 1989, acrylic and graphite on linen, 72″ x 72″ (182.9 cm x 182.9 cm). Photo by: G. R. Christmas / Courtesy The Pace Gallery.

Excursus event photos by Tiala Glabau.

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Make Your Own Luck

November 4 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

“Those are finished,” Charline von Heyl says, pointing out some paintings along one wall of her Chelsea studio. “The ones on that side I’m still working on.”

It’s a bright October afternoon and Charline, whose work first appeared at ICA in the 2006 exhibition Make Your Own Life: Artists in and out of Cologne—and whose ten-year retrospective is on view at the museum this fall and winter—is hosting a studio visit for ICA’s Leadership Circle and Art Council members. Tubes of paint are lined up neatly on a table, and there’s a battered couch under the window with tea, cigarettes, glue, books, and a bottle of whiskey close at hand. A corner of the room is crowded with shelves, and Charline goes over there a couple of times to find something to show us: a volume on Juan Gris, a French book of fairy tales told largely through pictures—Épinal-sheets—that used to belong to her mother and on the pages of which Charline’s own childish marks can be seen. “It’s funny,” she says, flipping through the pages. “I still know most of the images by heart. Your taste is done very early.”

Every day when I go to work at ICA, I peek into the gallery at Charline’s big paintings, which look elegant and formal spaced out on our big white walls.

Charline von Heyl, 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.

In here, clustered closely together and propped up on bricks and blocks, they look more casual, their scale somehow more human. Or maybe it’s that Charline is here touching them, moving them around, and talking about them.

“I love stripes,” she says, pointing to one of the paintings. “If I can’t get anywhere and I don’t know what to do, I paint some stripes.” The stripes may or may not not stay. They may be painted over later—just a way in, something to help open up the canvas. “The first demand is always the white square,” she says. “To tickle something out of it.”

Charline, who was born in Germany, has lived in the US for decades. She is tall and confident in jeans and boots, a vest over her shirt, her blond hair pulled back into a ponytail. Her easy, self-deprecating way of joking about herself is striking. “I’m one of those people no one believes exists, who always knew she wanted to be a painter,” she says. “I was so convinced I was a painter that for an eternity I didn’t paint.”

She points to a canvas. “That painting is just slowly building up, and I don’t know where it’s going yet.” She moves to another, foggy blacks and grays with black splotches of spray paint across the surface. “I knew when I went at that one with the spray paint, either it would work or I would destroy it.”

“It’s like you’re vandalizing your own painting,” Ingrid says.

Charline agrees. Either it works, or you throw it away—that’s her attitude. She doesn’t seem bothered by that. She says she gets easily bored: “I am always just in love with change.” Change, layers, newness, ugliness. “It’s really following a desire to see, and to see something else again. Obviously it gets harder as you get older. It’s the original motor that makes me want to work.”

We look at the paintings, turning slowly around the room, pointing, looking harder. We ask questions about titles, influences, how many paintings she works on at a time. She shows us African Kuba cloths she likes, exercises in abstraction made of raffia: “The pattern shifts and you can’t see where it shifts…Only women are allowed to do them.”

She points out a snake in one of her paintings, a frame painted into another, a highly representational piece of skin in a third. She tells the story of how she ended up in America, one piece in a group show leading to a cheap apartment, leading to meeting people, leading to the next thing and then the next. And here she is.

“I was often in the right place at the right time,” Charline von Heyl says of her career. And while that may be true, it’s also clear that through some combination of stubbornness, risk-taking, perseverance, and talent, this is a painter who makes her own luck.

* * *
For more information about ICA’s Art Council and Leadership Circle opportunities, email Christianna Miller at chmille@ica.upenn.edu.

Charline von Heyl is on view at ICA through February 19, 2012.

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Puppy Cerberus. Or, What Is Art?

July 7 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

Jenna and I are in her car driving across town to pick up some printed folders from Jesse Olanday at Space 1026. All kinds of stuff goes on at Space 1026, which I will describe as a cooperative artists’ space on Arch Street in Philadelphia’s Chinatown, although, according to its website, that’s way too simple an explanation. “Space 1026 has been a 13 year experiment,” the site explains. “It has developed from a handful of founders to dozens of co-conspirators.” Also, “Space 1026 is not a collaboration! Yes it is! No its not! Yes it is! Exactly.”

Entry to Space 1026

Printmaking is definitely a big piece of what happens at Space 1026. Jesse, who has been part of the place for a decade, gives us a tour, showing us the exhibition space, the printing vacuum table, the exposure rack. “I went to school with the guys who started this. The were inspired by a Live/Work/Venue space of fellow RISD students called ‘Fort Thunder’ in Providence, Rhode Island,” he says. “This used to be a jewelers, so we have vaults.” One vault is for flammable stuff, and they do their coating in another. He takes us up to the third floor, which was condemned until 1999 but today holds artists’ studios, high shelves crammed with LPs (part of the building used to house a recording studio), and all kinds of miscellaneous mysterious equipment. Jesse knocks on a door and we go in to find Thom Lessner, an artist and member of ICA’s installation crew, drawing. He holds up what he’s working on to show us:

“A farting centaur!”

Photo: Jenna Weiss

Jenna, a painter and ICA’s Spiegel Fellow working with programs, asks, “Do you always draw sitting down?”

“Yeah,” Thom says. “That’s why I’m hunched over like this.”

On the way over in the car, I asked Jenna a lot of questions about her painting, her teachers at the Tyler School of Art where she got her MFA, and her excitement about making programs, which she sees as another mode of art-making. We talked about the Big Questions: How do you hold on to what’s essential to you as an artist? What is the relationship of an artist to her studio? Where do object-oriented artists fit into an increasingly conceptual contemporary aesthetic? As usual, these questions proved resistant to easy answers. Now, listening to her chat with Thom, I think maybe the Road to Truth lies through these little questions instead.

Jesse digs up some chairs, and we sit down to talk about his design of Cerberus, the three-headed puppy, which has become ICA’s most coveted T-shirt design.

“I got that image from a puppy calendar,” Jesse says. “You know you get these free calendars?” This was in 2006, when Jesse, as part of Space 1026, participated in ICA’s exhibition Locally Localized Gravity which invited artists and artists’ groups to create installations and host creative public programs. Jesse had been looking for an idea for a screen printing event. In the calendar photo, three puppies rushed pell-mell toward a bowl of food. “I thought it would be cool if four of the legs were gone, and it was a Cerberus.”

“Why do you think it’s so popular?”

“”I think it’s got the attitude you want in a shirt,” Jesse says. “Cute and tough.”

“Succinct without being logo-y,” Jenna says.

I ask Jesse to tell me about himself and his association with ICA. “I started as a gallery preparator in 2002,” he says. “When I got to Philadelphia I was renovating houses in Northern Liberties, and ICA was short-handed installing the Rudy Gernreich show. It was perfect for me at the time. Back then the installs were long and really intense.” He could do an install for ICA, save his money, and then do his own work for three months. Also, “it was a good way to learn the inner workings of a gallery to bring back here to 1026.” He gestures around the room. “I rebuilt this gallery more professionally with the techniques I learned at the ICA—everything was square and true and solid.”

Now Jesse does custom screen work and animation for various clients and runs his own art handling business. I realize I don’t quite understand to what extent Jesse is an artist and to what extent he is a designer, or custom printer, or whatever, and I’m trying to figure out if it’s okay to ask. Finally I put together some words basically inquiring whether he does much of his own art these days, and he indicates that he doesn’t: “It’s really tiring.” I guess that means that what he does now is less tiring—or maybe just less tiring to the soul, since he also describes doing print runs of a 1,000 pieces by hand.

And here I am again, stumbling into one of those Big Questions: What is the difference, really, between art and design? In other words: What Is Art?

I think about Jenna talking about programs as art, and how making programs was part of the artistic project of Locally Localized Gravity too. Is art anything an artist says it is? Is it the job of curators and museums to decide? ICA has a history of presenting exhibitions of design, so we have likely done our part to blur the boundaries. Or maybe the point is to ask the questions and not worry too much about the answers? These mysteries and confusions spiral through my head like the summer heat, and when they clear this is what I’m left with:

An image of Jesse standing in the organized anarchy of 1026, looking at the puppy calendar and seeing something else beyond it, something he might shape with his own particular vision. Intuiting possibilities invisible to everyone else.

* * *

Note: When I showed a draft of this post to Jesse, he sent me the following response:

When I joined 1026, I aimed towards a fine arts / gallery career. For me, it was exciting, uncharted territory. There was a freedom to make and create. I made (or made attempts at) anything that came to mind. After about the sixth year of pursuing that path, my priorities slowly shifted though. I felt accomplished and the drive to make “fine-art” relaxed. Not that I was out of ideas but rather I felt satiated in that respect. I felt that the challenges had been met, and the fulfillment of the pursuit dwindled. That was roughly around the time of the ‘Locally Localized’ exhibit. I managed the 1026 team and worked on most of the exhibit design and construction. It was a huge undertaking and felt like a great send off to that aspect of my life.

Also around then my standard of living became more of a priority, and grown-up responsibilities (like handling bills) became more vital. I began concentrating efforts on business, production and more on technical craft. There was a new challenge. I pumped the brakes on gallery shows and personal work. I worked at being more professional in production and in business relations. Working in various disciplines gave a wider perspective and relevance to the aspect of making art.

Full circle a few years after that, I became proficient in the administrative side of art-business and eventually bored of that as well. The thought of making art for art’s sake became appealing again. The creative side and logistical side are now second nature, and in that, I feel a second wind. I am starting to get back into creating more personal work. Learning better time management and when to step back/away is crucial this time around to avoid the burn out.

Creative work takes a long time to internally process and continually question. That could lead to never finishing a project and in turn losing momentum. Plus finding the funds to back outlandish endeavors can gnaw on the conscience too.

So how would i define myself? Now when people ask, i reply Artist & Craftsman. Still ambiguous, I know, but I am able to give a solid answer while leaving it open to delve deeper and deeper if the person is still curious. Some mornings I don’t even know which hat I’ll be wearing for the day; I could be fabricating light fixtures or art directing a company’s re-branding. But it will always require creative problem solving and presentation.

“Is it art or is it design?” It’s similar to asking, “Is that a painting, drawing or illustration?” If you look at an illustrator’s portfolio site, they will categorize their work into these categories. What an artist would label as a painting, the visitor may consider an illustration. But it’s the artist’s site, so that is how it is categorized. In a store Campbell’s soup is package design; in a museum it’s art. I’ve heard that art leans heavy on concept and theory, while design lives on the functional side.

I think whichever the label is dictated by the means it is presented to the viewer.

J.O.

* * *

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Josiah McElheny: Like a Dream of Something Better

March 11 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

This year ICA is playing host to some of the University of Pennsylvania’s Fine Arts lectures, which means that on Thursday nights you’ll often find an artist in our auditorium, talking about his or her work to an audience made up largely of art students—that is, aspiring artists. Recently, listening to one of these talks by Josiah McElheny, whose glass sculptures mapping the development of the cosmos I have admired in photographs, I was reminded how all artists are aspiring artists—makers who learn to live with failure much of the time.

Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York

McElheny—a very successful artist who has shown all over the world and is a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow as well—started out by showing us a film clip from a recent project, an adaptation of The First Light Club of Batavia, a Ladies’ Novelette, by visionary German novelist Paul Scheerbart (1863–1915). This book tells the story of a quixotic group that builds a spa in an abandoned mine far underground and outfits it with electricity so they can bathe luxuriously in light. The clip, which lasted perhaps ten minutes, featured voices reading the translated text while colors unfurled and flickered down the screen in an endless array, shapes and shadows suggesting themselves, light brightening gradually and then dimming again, patterns slowly repeating. After a while you stopped expecting the shapes to resolve into anything, and the endless unspooling started to connect up to the description of the mine shaft in the story. I fell into the reverie of it.

Afterwards McElheny said, “I showed the same clip at Cooper Union, and people laughed quite a lot. But here, no one laughed. In Berlin when I showed it, in private people laughed, but in public no one did.” Then he said, “I’m trying to understand who I am, who we are, and what the role of aesthetics is.”

He talked about Austrian architect Adolph Loos and his influential 1908 essay, “Ornament and Crime.” He talked about modernism, and visions of utopias, and the American Bar in Vienna which Loos designed and which is filled with mirrors (“the coolest bar ever!”), and about his own project to make a reproduction of the interior of that bar only entirely in white. The concept, he said, was to take the idea of reducing ornament to an extreme by eliminating color as well. He showed a lot of fabulous images, and every now and then he said something that struck me like a knife striking crystal.

McElheny's ghostly white American Bar barware as shown in lecture presentation. Photo: D. Cohen

For example, McElheny talked about his struggle to expand and interrogate his own aesthetic, which I take to mean trying to open the mind to work that isn’t intuitively appealing, an admirable contrast to the increasing narrow-mindedness most of us acquire over time. He talked openly about the disappointment he sometimes feels in his work—with the way it comes out, or how it ends up looking in an exhibition. He talked about “trying to make something that looks beautiful but turns out not to be,” which he joked was the opposite of what most twentieth century artists have tried to do. Only actually I guess it wasn’t a joke.

He told us how sometimes the work seemed to end up making a point that was exactly the opposite of what he intended—and I can see how that must be a frustrating experience, but on the other hand, isn’t it also wonderful? Doesn’t it mean that the work is alive, not subject to its maker’s control but with its own instincts and agency? I can imagine God having just the same complaint about Adam and Eve in the Garden.

I loved hearing McElheny talk about the time he spent in Europe as a young man, trying to learn about glass. “I learned that the factory was a hard place”, he said, speaking of the center of one of the towns where he washed up. This made me think that there were stories lurking in the shadows of that remark, darknesses traversed and endured in the pursuit of light. And as he went on speaking—about light and dark and color and crystals—the louder the moral overtones of his undertaking rang out, and the clearer became his utopian vision, his interest in “making worlds better than worlds that exist.”

“It’s so hard to see glass!” McElheny said, and I thought he was lamenting. But when he went on, “It can be like a dream of something better, because you can’t see what it is,” I understood he was, on the contrary, exulting.

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You can see artists talk about their work many Thursday nights at ICA. Coming up: Michelle Grabner (March 31).

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