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What Is Contemporary? Pick your own metaphor

September 30 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

Ingrid Schaffner, ICA’s Senior Curator, started her fifth annual “What Is Contemporary?” lecture where she left off last year: talking about money. Or, as she more poetically put it: “purchase, patronage, price point.” She showed an image of Stephanie by Maurizio Cattelan—a sculpture that recently sold at auction for $2,434,500—then offered us a cheaper alternative. Charley, “a radical art work masquerading as a magazine,” is also a creation of Maurizio Cattelan (and friends) and available for only 16 Euro. “There are lots of ways to be in the art world,” Ingrid proclaimed expansively, which seemed a good way to launch the wide-ranging, hold-onto-your-hat talk she then embarked on, a talk that sometimes felt like a roller coaster but was in fact more like a butterfly lighting down briefly on a hundred flowers, each one more fragrant than the next.

Or, occasionally, just smellier.

Ingrid talking

Photo: William Hidalgo

This is the third version of this annual lecture I’ve heard, and I wish I’d been around for the first two. One of the pleasures of hearing the talk is noting how it evolves and grows while staying essentially itself—like a Christmas Cactus that blooms only on that holiday, or an old friend you meet for dinner once a year.

Ingrid seemed a little anxious about the fact that her talk would cover old ground as well as new. She quoted Gertrude Stein (courtesy of poet Tom Devaney), the Empress of Echoes, who is supposed to have remarked, “There is no such thing as repetition, only emphasis.” And indeed, the pieces Ingrid mentioned this year for the third (or maybe it was the fifth) time seemed more interesting and resonant this year than ever: Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty shimmering under water in a recent photograph; Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Hartford Wash, in which the artist spent hours on her knees scrubbing the steps of the Wadsworth Atheneum; and James Turrell’s aching Skyspaces that, as Ingrid says, “use light to sculpt space.”

I’m tempted to emulate the style of the lecture in this blog post, offering a kind of found poem of titles and subjects. Ingrid divides her lecture into themes, and the names of the themes alone are hypnotic: terrain, systems, reference, history, evocation, flesh…

Instead, I’m going to consider the structure and function of the lecture itself, jumping right to the end to consider a remark Ingrid made in closing, when she invited us to “think of this talk as a Leatherman—or Leatherwoman—to open the work up. Use it if it’s useful, or throw it away.”

Driving home in the car in the dark, I wondered what she meant exactly. What is it about categorization that’s useful? How does a survey like this open work up?

Banana wall

Stefan Sagmeister, Richard The, & Joe Shouldice for Deitch Projects, 2008

In the category of alchemy, for example, she mentioned the following artists and works: Joseph Beuys and his Fat Chair, Karla Black and her Venice Biennale installation made of make up, Stefan Sagmeister (whose show at ICA opens in April) and his self-affirmation written in bananas of different ripenesses, Bill Walton (whose show at ICA is open now) and his studio—“that wonderful machine for transforming materials into art,” and of course James Turrell. I knew of most of these artists and artworks before listening to the lecture, but something about the way she yoked them together made me see something at the core of them that was new to me. Instead of considering Turrell’s Skyspaces, for example—as I have before—and thinking only, That’s wonderful, but why?—I thought, Ah, they’re related to these other works, they belong somewhere. They have a center of gravity. I felt I had a road in.

Bill Walton's Studio

Bill Walton's Studio, Philadelphia, 2011. Photo: Karen Mauch

Of course, any good work of art, like a major city, has lots of roads in. Ingrid could shift works from one category to another each year if she wanted to; for all I know, she does. The point isn’t to pin art down like a butterfly in a collector’s case, but rather to offer the mind a shaft of light along which to swim up through the air and meet the butterfly.

Shaft of light, road, Leatherman: you can pick your own metaphor. All I know is that, speeding home down the highway that night, I felt that the next time I encountered a new, strange, enigmatic work of art, I’d be better able to open myself to it and make it at home.

* * *
If you have a metaphor for how you get connected to art, we’d love it if you shared it in the comments below.

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Re:Activism: Not a game at all

September 22 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

Erin hands out the red-white-and-blue bandanas left over from a Slaughterhouse Five event. “They’ll help distinguish you as part of the group,” she says, which is true, but I don’t think any of us are crazy about wearing them. When the real game is played in October, players will get T-shirts. But it’s only July now, and this is only a dry run, so bandanas it is.

The ReActivism Team

There are six of us at the Kelly Writers House this afternoon, test driving the game Re:Activism, which ICA, Kelly Writers House, and Penn’s Urban Studies Program have collaborated to bring to Penn as part of the Year of Games. Re:Activism, which was created by Colleen Macklin and PET Lab, has been played in New York, Minneapolis, and other cities. It asks teams of students armed with a map, a backpack of supplies, a smart phone, and their own creativity to reactivate histories of social activism and political protest from colonial times to the recent past.

This is what I wrote last spring in the grant application to the Provost’s Arts Fund that is largely supporting the project: “Part lesson in social history, part political engagement, and part performance art, Re:Activism encourages active participation, collaboration, and creativity.” But as I stand outside Kelly Writers House on this July afternoon, I realize I don’t really have any clear idea what that means—or what I’m in for. Of the six of us, I’m the oldest by a good twenty years, but that doesn’t mean I’m taking a leadership role here. Basically, my feeling is, I’m along for the ride.

At 2:45 we’re at the Betsy Ross House in Old City, our first stop. Thomson holds up the phone we’re using to send and receive the text messages. “I think Protest Central just gave us a call,” he says.

It’s a warm, sunny day, and the reenactors at the Betsy Ross House, dressed in breeches and long skirts, eye us curiously as Thomson unzips the red backpack. He takes out poster board, markers, a clipboard, a camera, and lays them out on the cobblestones around the fountain. We are reenactors too, in our own way, our mission to connect the issues of the past to those of today. The American flag, for instance, famously (if perhaps apocryphally) attributed to Betsy Ross: what has it meant to Americans down through the years? What does it mean to us now?

Anna-Lara drawing

In 1971—according to our game materials—Vietnam Veterans Against the War staged a protest right here at Betsy Ross House. One of our Re:Activism challenges for this spot involves drawing a sign that addresses complicated responses to the flag. Another is to engage passers-by and ask them about the ’71 protest. It’s interesting to see how our little group divides itself: who wants to draw, who wants to talk. Anna-Lara is soon kneeling on the sidewalk with poster board and marker. Thomson chats to a woman with a cane and a bright turquoise necklace. She doesn’t have much to say. At first we’re not sure if we’re doing this right—whatever it is we’re meant to be doing—but then a man and woman walking down Arch Street stop to watch us. The man says he’s a veteran, and he’s curious about what we’re doing. We explain as best we can, and I ask him, “What do you think the connection is between the Veterans Against the War and the Betsy Ross House?” It’s a question I’m still puzzling over myself.

“Well,” he says, “maybe because the veterans were the ones to use the flag—cutting it up and burning it.”

“And what do you think about that?”

“I’m very patriotic,” he says. “I support the flag. But I also support the rights it represents.”

It’s not much, but suddenly I feel that I’ve begun to get it. When have I ever talked with a veteran about the flag? When have I asked a stranger on the street—a fellow citizen—anything significant at all? The game is making that happen. In that way, it’s not a game at all.

Flag sign

After this, the challenges get easier, or maybe it’s that we’re getting the hang of it. By the time we reach Independence Hall an hour later, I have lost all self-consciousness about our red-white-and-blue bandanas, our eccentric activities, our obsessive picture-taking (we have to document what we do in order to get credit in the game). Everyone down here is dressed oddly, everyone is in groups, and all the groups are taking pictures. Horse-drawn carriages rattle past, and the air smells of manure. We’re getting tired, but at the next site we kneel on the sidewalk to chalk a message about gay rights. We don’t even have to stop people; they stop us to ask us what we’re doing. They want to take our picture.

Jenna chats with a group of kids who kneel to sign their names to the proposal she’s chalked. “Do you know what Stonewall was?” she asks.

When we’re done at this site, we leave the chalk. It’s not in the instructions, but it’s good to think about people coming by, reading what we’ve written, maybe adding their names to ours. It’s good to think that, like the activists whose trails we’re following today, we too may leave traces on the city for others to find. At least until it rains.

* * *

To sign up for Re:Activism, click here.

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

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PechaKucha(ish) Night: The Love of Doing

July 29 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

“This is going to be casual,” Kate says, referring to PechaKucha(ish) Night at ICA. Some of the artists in Kate’s current show, One is the loneliest number, along with some other artists, designers, and musicians, are here to present us their work, super fast. PechaKucha, a Japanese invention, is kind of like bonsai for lectures. The idea is that you show 20 slides for 20 seconds each. It’s not easy to stay within the time limit, but we have a buzzer if they run over.

Getting ready for PechaKucha(ish) Night

Waiting for dark. Photo: Jenna Weiss

Kate goes first, showing slides of and talking about her ideas for her show, which presents the work of collaborative duos. She explains that PechkKucha(ish) night is the brainchild of Megawords, a collaboration between Anthony Smyrski and Dan Murphy that makes zines, inhabits storefronts, and broadcasts a radio show. As one of the duos represented in One is the loneliest number, they have been programming events at ICA this spring and summer. “We are actually part of the Megawords project right now!” Kate says, and then the buzzer goes off.

After Kate, as the light fades from the sky out on ICA’s terrace, a diverse procession of artists and designers take the microphones, waving the remote like a magic wand at the computer projector. In the spirit of PechaKucha, I will evoke each one briefly, bonsai fashion.

Julien Bismuth and Lucas Ajemian: “I want to talk to you a little about efficiency…What we look at as inefficiency is sort of the point of making art.”

Gary Fogelson and Phil Lubliner: An idea for a new alert system for the U.S. to replace the current color coding. When everything’s okay, play the Beach Boys’ “Don’t Worry Baby.” When things are bad, play The Animals’ “We Gotta Get Out of This Place.”

Matt Suib and Nadia Hironaka: “We work in time-based media.” They showed gorgeous clips from their videos and might have been the only ones who didn’t get the buzzer!

Matt and Nadia

Matt and Nadia. Photo: Jenna Weiss

Megawords: There’s a piano in the People’s Museum in St. Louis you can carve your name in.

The Dufala Brothers: “We make exaggerated tools that are completely useless.” (I love the old-fashioned typewriter with keys the size of sunflower seeds.)

Rebekah and Sara Maysles (the Maysles sisters): They went away to an island alone together for four months to work on their book of interviews, collaged illustrations, and other archival material related to Grey Gardens, the cult film made by their father and uncle (the Maysles brothers). Also, they cook together.

Big Brad and Rachel (who deejayed the evening’s music): “We’re not crazy radical revolutionaries, but we’re ready for the revolution!”

A cardboard tank by the Dufala Brothers

Slide of project by Dufala brothers. Photo: Jenna Weiss

A last minute addition was John Taylor, a local carpenter who collaborates with his dad. John designed and built the chairs (he calls them love seats) currently on ICA’s mezzanine, as part of Megawords’ programming of that space. “Do things for the love of doing them,” he said. “I just wanted to remind everyone that that’s what’s important.”

Something about tonight’s event reveals how much these artists and designers do love what they’re doing. Sometimes, when you’re in a gallery standing in the implacable, finished presence of the made, you can forget about the maker. But listening to these collaborators joke with each other and interrupt each other—seeing the easy rhythm between them—reminds you that making things is something real people really do. It makes you want to look around for a project, and someone to share it with.

* * *

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Secret Cinema at ICA: “Summer Means Fun!”

July 22 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

It’s four in the afternoon, and Jacob and Paul are painting the huge projection screen out on ICA’s terrace. “You want some Aunt Polly’s fence action?” Paul asks, offering me a roller.

I don’t, but I always like seeing what’s happening in and around the building on a Wednesday afternoon, as the staff gets ready for the coming evening’s Whenever Wednesday progam. The big sandwich board is set up outside the front door, and people go up and down in the elevator toting tubs and tables, while downstairs in the back of the lobby microphone stands, video cameras, and computer carts emerge from locked closets like flocks of black birds. There’s a different kind of energy at ICA on Wednesdays, as though people are getting ready for a party. Which in a way we are.

Tonight ICA is hosting Secret Cinema, a program founded and run by Jay Schwartz, in which he screens pieces of his extensive collection of obscure films and other “celluloid treasures.” Jay began Secret Cinema in 1992 “after sensing a need to expose new audiences to neglected films of all kinds,” he writes on the Secret Cinema website. “As the media conglomerates abandon chemical-mechanical technologies in favor of direct electronic distribution schemes and ‘virtual’ realities, it will be up to the cineastes and collectors to keep real movie screens lit, and to introduce new audiences to the joys of the collective film experience. That is the real mission of the Secret Cinema.”

Photo: William Hidalgo

The theme of tonight’s screening is “Summer Means Fun!” Summer also means thunderstorms, and a big one threatens to blow in at dusk, just as set up is running full tilt out on the terrace. For a few minutes, with the tree tops whipping and waving, it looks as though the program will have to move indoors to the auditorium; but then the clouds blow away again, and everyone sighs with relief and crosses their fingers.

By nine o’clock close to a hundred people have shown up. Some are Secret Cinema regulars, some are ICA regulars, and some are newcomers to both groups. The first film we see is Swim Parade (1949), a ten minute documentary short by Robert Youngson featuring visions of Coney Island bathing beauties from 1917. “You could see debutantes there, but you couldn’t see much of them,” the narrator deadpans, and then lots of other women in scanty(ish) swimming costumes appear for a few moments, representing the various decades of the first half of the twentieth century. Mostly what we see throughout the film are women, though we do get a glimpse of Johnny Weissmuller in his pre-Tarzan days, in a one-piece bathing suit that covers much of his powerful chest. After some shots of extraordinary high dives, the narrator sums up portentously (with perhaps just a hint of camp?): “Dreams and desires, fads and fashions, you’ll find them all on the Swim Parade!”

The next short—heart-wrenchingly sweet—contains a different kind of camp. It chronicles the adventures of mid-century New York City school children taken out to the New Jersey countryside to experience nature. The vision of girls in dungarees making beds in the open air and boys brushing out the fur of stolid mules would be hokey if it weren’t so utterly sincere. That’s the feeling I get from many of these films: a flickering glimpse into a lost world where young women swim in heavy bloomers, city children learn to cook eggs on hot rocks, and cowboys twirl ropes and lasso calves like, like…something out of a movie!

View of audience with sky behind

Photo: William Hidalgo

After a while the wind picks up again, and Jay walks around checking the speaker poles for stability and staring worriedly at the sky. But we’re lucky: the weather holds, and the films delight. In “Helter Swelter” (1950) there’s even a sing-a-long, and we all join in, following the bouncing ball. “In the good old summertime,” we sing, half out of tune, under the dim, twinkling city stars. And for a moment, under the spell of celluloid, even this twenty-first century crowd is suddenly washed clean of cynicism, enjoying pleasures so old fashioned they almost seem new.

* * *

The second Secret Cinema screening at ICA, coming up on Wednesday, July 27 at 9:00, will feature short films about art and artists.

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

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In Search of Anne Tyng

March 25 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

David and I weren’t sure we were going to be able to get on the bus. We had waited too long to reserve our spots for the Tyng Tour, an ICA field trip to look at houses architect Anne Tyng worked on in and around Philadelphia. I had seen the models, drawings, and photographs in ICA’s exhibition Anne Tyng: Inhabiting Geometry—which anyone who hasn’t visited should run out and see this weekend before it closes on Sunday, March 27. But I had never been inside a building she’d designed, or even stood outside one. I was willing to tag along in the Volvo behind the bus, but luckily for us one couple didn’t show up. We were in.

It was a beautiful Saturday morning as we drove along the Schuylkill River out of the city, then through the hilly fields of Valley Forge Park toward the Wharton Esherick studio in Paoli. Esherick, the extraordinary sculptor and wood craftsman, died in 1970, and his daughter and son-in-law, Ruth and Bob Bascom, have made his studio/home into a museum. What had been his workshop they turned into a house for themselves, not open to the public, but through their generosity open today to us.

Bob Bascom chatting with Tyng tourers in Esherick's former studio. Photo: Chris Taylor

The house is extraordinary. The ceilings rise and angle, and the beams “chase each other around,” in Bob Bascom’s words. Colored glass bottles line the sills of the enormous windows that look out over the countryside. Masks and paintings and Esherick wooden trays hang on the blue walls, and a couple of chairs are lashed to the ceiling. You can see old tool marks on the floors. The wood to build the place and its furnishings came from the local forest; Esherick is reputed to have said, “If I can’t make something beautiful out of what grows in my own backyard, I should quit.”

Bathroom in the Esherick studio. Photo: David H. Cohen

“The roof is three hexagons,” Mr. Bascom, an architect himself, told us. “The hexagons gave flexibility to how to put the building on the site. And each hexagon is the upper half of a dodecahedron.” That sounds like Anne Tyng, who saw the world through geometry, and particularly through the five Platonic solids: tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, icosahedron.

Now Bill Whitaker, Penn’s Architectural Archivist and a co-curator, with ICA’s Ingrid Schaffner and architect Srdjan Weiss, of the Anne Tyng show, talks. “A lot has been said about Wharton Esherick and Lou Kahn,” he says.

Stop a moment. I would have liked to write this piece without mentioning Lou Kahn, who is so often spoken of by way of explaining Anne Tyng: who she is, what she did, what her work means. The show at ICA, however, is about her: her work, her intellectual passion for geometry and architecture, her vision. But Tyng did not build a lot of houses, and many of the ones she did work on were collaborations with Kahn whose office employed her and who is the architect of record. That is the situation with three of the four buildings we will see today: the Esherick workshop, the Erdman Hall dormitory at Bryn Mawr College, and a private home. Only the final house, in Fitler Square, was designed by Tyng alone.

An hour later, we stand in the cold bright day in front of Erdman Hall, a warren of square forms connected at the corners. At the core of each square is a public space—a cube—with bedrooms around the edges. The design of Erdman Hall is based on Anne’s ideas about geometry, but the plan she herself drew for the building ultimately wasn’t used. “This is a sad period in Lou and Anne’s relationship,” Bill says. “There are some real tensions between them artistically…Lou is working in one part of the office, and Anne is working in another.”

The group outside Erdman Hall. Photo: Jenna Weiss

We don’t go in. This is a dormitory after all, young women are living in there. They come and go in twos and threes, ignoring us. Probably groups stand out here all the time, looking. What do these girls know about this building, about the people who designed it? What would they think of Anne Tyng, graduate of a sister school, who forged an extraordinary life for herself through the force of her will and vision, decades before feminism or employment discrimination protections or the pill?

(The next day, by fate or coincidence, I will run into a woman who lived in Erdman Hall as a student a decade ago. It was cold, she’ll say. Her room was in the basement. She’ll tell me Kahn was famously reputed to have said that the slate and concrete materials might be cold, but the bodies of the young women living there would warm the rooms.)

The next stop on the Tyng tour is warmer, a family home on a bluff in a nearby suburb. The original owner, who commissioned the house in 1958, still lives here, and she shows us around. “Anne Tyng and Lou Kahn were both short,” she says as we duck through the front door. “The problem here is that it’s hard for tall people.”

This house, like Erdman Hall, is made up of cubes arranged in a kind of L. The ceilings of the crowded dining room rise from the four walls toward the middle, forming half an octagon. The big windows look out over a creek. “There isn’t a lot of space here, but it’s nice space,” the owner says. “We have thirteen doors to the outside! When we change the locks, we have to change all thirteen of them. We had three designs for this house, and we built the third. We couldn’t afford the first two. Lou Kahn gave a lecture afterwards saying he would never again build a house where price was an object.”

Kahn didn’t come by much after the building started on the site. He wasn’t much interested in the realization of the project—it was the design that obsessed him. But Tyng came. And later, after Kahn had died, she came again and built an addition for the family: a final square. The Tyng wing.

Tyng tourers in front of our bus. Photo: Chris Taylor

The last stop on the tour is Anne Tyng’s own house, the one she lived in with her daughter Alex beginning in 1955. It’s a cramped Philadelphia row house, on the top of which Tyng designed an airy aerie under the mansard roof, with a seating area and a sleeping loft with triangular windows. It’s stunningly beautiful. I sit on one of the built-in seats and listen as Bill Whitaker points out the details: how the bevels on the edge of the windows “make the room feel quite open, because the corners disappear”; how the heating registers are cleverly placed and hidden; how the ends of the central closet drop down, one to reveal an ironing board and another a double mirror. “She looked for a cabinet maker who was willing to build a house like a cabinet,” he says, as we take turns climbing the steps to peer at the high bed, and ask questions of the current owner, and rest gratefully in the late afternoon light. Bill points out where Tyng had her drafting table, where she found space for a tiny bathroom, how every detail was lovingly considered. This space isn’t cold in any way. It feels personal, assured, particular, alive. I don’t know what its geometry is—what Platonic solids shape the space I’m sitting in—but for the moment I don’t care. It’s peaceful and yet vibrant up here among the tree tops, a space unlike any I’ve been in before.

And now I remember something Bob Bascom said hours ago: “I got into architecture because it’s the only profession people go to when they’re happy. You go to a dentist when your tooth hurts, you go to a lawyer when you’re in trouble. But you go to an architect when you want to build something, and you have a little money in your pocket.”

Anne Tyng's house. Photo: David H. Cohen

Anne Tyng never had much money in her pocket. She became an architect when the profession was entirely dominated by men. She made a house and a life for herself and her daughter in this city at mid-century, and pursued her intellectual passion as far as it would take her. She designed buildings, made calculations, wrote papers, taught students, raised her child, ate yogurt, mentored aspiring architects. And when she got tired, she climbed up the ladder to the loft she’d designed for herself and dreamed, perhaps, Platonic dreams of tetrahedrons and cubes.

* * *

Anne Tyng: Inhabiting Geometry closes at ICA THIS SUNDAY, March 27. Don’t miss it.

If you’re in Chicago, you can see the show at the Graham Foundation, 4 West Burton Place, between April 15 and June 18.

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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.

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

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Look!

February 18 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

Last week’s ICA lecture, “The Artist as Curator,” was introduced by ICA director Claudia Gould standing behind an unfamiliar podium. “For those of you who are regulars here,” she said, “this is a very new podium, made by Paul Swenbeck [ICA’s head preparator] and his team. It smells of paint.” The new podium is indeed very nice: sleek and white, with a convenient shelf for presenters’ laptops. As someone who cannot make anything, I love working at a place where no one would think of going online and ordering a podium. Obviously someone who works here would just make one.

Over the last few weeks I’ve written a series of essays for this blog about Virgil Marti’s show Set Pieces, curated from the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), for which Virgil explored the depths of PMA storage and arranged an assortment of the pieces he found there in intriguing mash-ups and suggestive vignettes. In these posts I’ve been poking away at the question of how Virgil approached that task, and, more generally, what it means to curate an exhibition. How do curators organize the art they present? Is it their job to make a story out of it? An argument? To show the art off to its best advantage? To make you see it in a new way?

Virgil and Ingrid squaring off in Virgil's show, Set Pieces. Photo: J. Katz

How serendipitous that all the time I was writing those little pieces, ICA’s Ingrid Schaffner—a thoughtful and insightful person and an actual curator—was getting ready to address herself to this very topic! It was, in fact, the underlying subject of tonight’s lecture.

Standing at the new podium, Ingrid told an audience of about 100 that the idea of an artist making an exhibition out of a museum’s collection goes back to 1969, when Andy Warhol lifted all kinds of things from the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art’s storage and arranged them—or sometimes declined to arrange them—in the galleries. The resulting show, Raid the Icebox, featured rows and ranks of Windsor chairs, racks of shoes, clusters of hanging umbrellas, and lots of baskets, blankets, paintings, ceramics.

Even before artists were raiding museums’ iceboxes, of course, they were curating. In 1938 Andre Breton invited Marcel Duchamp to organize a surrealism show in Paris, which Duchamp did. There were no lights in this exhibition; visitors were given flashlights to illuminate the paintings as they made their way through piles of leaves and under the 1,200 empty coal sacks dangling from the ceiling.

I’d love to just list all the intriguing shows Ingrid mentioned. A 1989 Brancusi exhibition at MoMA organized by Scott Burton helped viewers see that Brancusi’s pedestals should themselves be seen as sculpture. Fred Wilson’s 1992 exhibition at the Maryland Historical Society displayed artifacts from that state’s history—like iron shackles and silver spoons—side by side. John Waters Curates Andy’s “Porn”, at the Andy Warhol Museum in 2005, was viewable in a wooden cubicle complete with glory holes. Of this last, Ingrid quoted then-Warhol museum curator John Smith who said, perhaps a little wistfully, “I don’t think I could have gotten away with that.”

Which brings us to the crux of her lecture: what is the difference between the way an artist curates and the way a curator curates?

“It’s my job as a curator to minimize the distance between the viewer and the object,” Ingrid opined, whereas, as an artist, “Virgil inserts himself.” He paints the wall purple; he builds white fluffy poufs to display stuff on; he offers us a marble bust resting on its side. The professional curator is not supposed to indulge in such high jinx.

But doesn’t the professional curator have a point of view, too? Doesn’t she have style? Of course she does. But she’s supposed to be less flamboyant in the way she conveys it to us, adhering to a kind of institutionalized modesty. If you stop to think about it, though, what’s the least bit modest about choosing art, spending a decent amount of money to organize it in a room, inviting the public, and saying: Look! This is worth looking at!

At the end of her talk, Ingrid related that thinking about how Virgil inserted himself into the making of Set Pieces threw into relief for her how made all exhibitions are, implying that the exhibition-maker—the curator—is really a species of artisan. I liked that: the exhibition-making artisan (Ingrid) talking about an exhibition made by an artist (Virgil) known for his décor-as-fine-art (chandeliers, wallpaper, poufs), while standing at the podium made by an artisan (Paul) who is, in fact, also an artist.

Paul working on the new podium. Photo: William Hidalgo

I’m starting to think of the curator as a kind of marionettist, pulling the strings from behind the curtain. Just because we don’t see her hand doesn’t mean her hand isn’t there: assured, controlling, and potent.

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Last Call

February 10 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

“I’m trying to avoid gushing about this film,” Virgil Marti says. He’s talking about Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975), the last in a series of movies being screened in conjunction with Virgil’s exhibition, Set Pieces, curated from the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), which closes at ICA on Sunday. The exhibition’s staged assemblies of objects have been influenced by these films in various ways, and one of the pleasures of the screenings is listening to Virgil explain how: getting a peek into the way his mind works.

Courtesy of ABC Entertainment, American Broadcasting Company and Paramount Pictures

Close to a hundred people turned out at International House’s excellent theater, where ICA provided ribs, cornbread, and Nashvillian Goo Goo Clusters (mentioned in the film) in addition to the movie. Afterwards there was a discussion, led by Penn film professor Kathy DeMarco, that vividly demonstrated how many people out there love Nashville as much as Virgil does. I have seldom been in an audience as passionate and knowledgeable as this one was about Altman, people raising their hands to cite his more obscure films, to fill us in on the film projects the director was almost offered but then wasn’t, and to quote (verbatim) from reviews, like Pauline Kael writing about Nashville’s “love of the supreme juices of everyday life.”

Many of the other films in this series (The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, L’Avventura, Citizen Kane), had very specific influences on Set Pieces, inspiring a particular vignette or the inclusion of a particular piece. With Nashville the influence seems more general. “There’s a car wreck at the beginning that throws everyone together,” Virgil says—meaning singers, groupies, stars, political operatives, weirdos, ordinary folks—and Set Pieces is certainly an exercise in disparate things being thrown together.

But no, not exactly thrown. Placed, maybe, or assembled: positioned, arranged, ordered, organized. Organize is the verb for what curators do—they organize exhibitions. When I first came to ICA I made the mistake of using the word design, and I was nicely corrected. Designing, I was told, was for interior decorators. Not that there’s anything wrong with that (as Jerry Seinfeld might have said), only it doesn’t imply the intellectual work that is so much of a curator’s job, and maybe the part they want to make sure we keep in mind.

Of course Virgil, as an artist, “organized” his exhibition differently than another kind of curator would have. Trekking through the vast steppes of the PMA’s storage to make his selections, he wasn’t choosing objects because of their significance in the ouevre of the maker, or because of their provenance; he was selecting the pieces that spoke to him.

Photo: Darcey Moore

Well, or maybe that’s exactly what all curators do. So maybe the difference is in the way the objects, once selected, were arranged: in a series of displays suggesting stories: the little bronze animals casting their enormous shadows, the decorous tilt-top tables screening the erotic couch, and so on.

But no. I argued here just the other week that telling stories is exactly what curators do.

So maybe the difference between Virgil’s show (which is also sometimes described as an installation) and a more conventional exhibition lies in the way the story is told. Just as Robert Altman revels in presenting overlapping stories and including all kinds of different characters from many walks of life, so Virgil offers us a fabulous range of things: busts and benches, pitchers and paintings, mirrors and models. They shouldn’t go together but they do, because the hand that has arranged them is so artful and so shrewd, and because the vision that has assembled them is so open to all kinds of aesthetics, techniques, approaches, styles, and at the same time so singular that it can synthesize all this stuff, making of it not a jumble but a marvelous teeming order.

Before the screening, Virgil said, “I think of this film as doing what history painting would be doing today if film weren’t here doing it.” I’m starting to think about Set Pieces, then, as a history installation of the American decorative arts—though I don’t think that was Virgil’s idea, exactly, nor are all the objects here American (though most of them are). Still, there’s something here: some sense that the exhibition explores—as the film explores—the weird, gorgeous, diverse, sometimes perverse, contradictory expansiveness that is America.

Though it’s best enjoyed on the big screen, you can see Nashville on DVD any time. Set Pieces, though, is only on view through Sunday, February 13. Don’t miss it.

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Set Pieces was made possible by support from the Katherine Stein Sachs CW’69 and Keith L. Sachs W’67 Guest Curator Program.

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Hall of Mirrors

January 28 2011

Artist/maker unknown, American, Model of the Fairmount Waterworks, c. 1875, painted and unpainted woods, painted and unpainted metals, mirrored glass, sand, paper-mache, cork and cardboard, 42 3/8 inches, 19 x 45 x 31 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of Priscilla Grace, 1998.

post by Rachel Pastan

Close to a hundred people turned out last Wednesday night to see Orson Welles’s masterpiece Citizen Kane at International House. The film was being screened as part of a series organized with ICA’s exhibition Set Pieces, curated by Virgil Marti from the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA). To make the exhibition, Virgil trawled through the vast rooms of the PMA’s storage, chose objects that appealed to him, and re-staged them in ICA’s galleries (read more about the exhibition here). Some of the objects are arranged in ways suggested by his favorite movies. The first thing you see when you enter the galleries is a gorgeous model of the Philadelphia Waterworks, which reminded Virgil of the vision of Kane’s unfinished palace, Xanadu.

Before the screening, Virgil got up and said a few words. He told us for example that Roger Ebert, after explicating what was groundbreaking about Citizen Kane, remarked, “It’s not the film I’d want to see again right now.” Ingmar Bergman is reported to have called it “a total bore,” opining that Welles was totally overrated as a filmmaker. On the plus side, Virgil advised us to look out for Kane walking zombie-like through the hall of mirrors; the vast shadowy spaces; and the stark, haunting scene of words going up in smoke. He also talked about the amazing vision Welles gives us of the boxes and cartons and crates containing Kane’s collections. Referring to his own visit to the PMA’s store rooms Virgil said, “It’s virtually impossible to walk into a storage space and not think about the storage scene in Citizen Kane.”

I’ll confess right here that my feelings about the film are more or less in line with Bergman’s. Despite the extraordinary, original shots and Welles’s larger-than-life presence, I was bothered by the story’s narrative, which is perfunctorily handled. Welles doesn’t seem to care that much about dramatizing the story. For example, characters are always screeching about how Kane gets everything and then loses it, but we seldom see him doing either—just looking energetic or grim or doomed in response to it having happened off-camera. In a narrative, the viewer (or reader) asks, What will happen next? and hopes to be surprised; but in Kane you can see the trajectory well in advance. The surprises are all in the camera work.

Which brings me to this question: Is a museum exhibition a work of narrative art, or is it more immediate, atemporal, like a painting or a candlestick?

In Set Pieces, Virgil has certainly arranged the objects to take us on a journey. After the Waterworks, we move past a ceramic coffee pot painted to look like wood, a cabinet with faux books made of inlay, a little scene of three sculptures arranged in an apparent vignette (two heads and a Claes Oldenburg soft drum set, all the same size). Then we come upon the back of an enormous Renaissance bench, which we move around to admire the grand painted angels on its front. Maybe the relation of the images is more associative than narrative—more like poetry than like a novel—but one can feel those images accumulate, feel themes emerging and see changes played on them: objects which are disguised as something they are not (the coffee pot that’s not really wood, the cabinet that’s not really books); matched sets that don’t really match (the three sculptures); objects viewed from unusual angles (the bench). You might speculate that this last trope—objects viewed from unusual angles—is something Marti gleaned from Welles.

Citizen Kane. Courtesy of Mercury Productions and RKO Radio Pictures.

Much of Set Pieces is dark and shadowy, a la Welles’s vast shadowy spaces. But the last room is different. The dark carpeting has been taken up to reveal the white concrete floor, and the walls are white (except for the one that’s pink), and an arrangement of white fluffy poufs holds an assortment of mostly white marble busts. In this room too the familiar themes recur: objects in disguise, matched sets that don’t quite match, objects presented at unconventional angles (there’s a lovely bust lying on its side in here). But instead of shadows, we have emerged into light.

On earlier viewings of the exhibition I had wondered why Virgil made this choice. But after watching Citizen Kane, I feel he understood that the exhibition had to take us somewhere, had to enact some change, had to offer the viewer a surprise.

This, of course, is my lesson. I’m not suggesting that Virgil organized his installation in conscious contrast to the film’s treatment of narrative. His interests were elsewhere. Still: on Wednesday, February 2, International House will screen the last film in the exhibition series, Virgil Marti’s favorite movie, Robert Altman’s 1975 classic Nashville. I wonder what more about Set Pieces I’ll understand after seeing that.

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Set Pieces is on view at ICA until Sunday, February 13. The exhibition was made possible by support from the Katherine Stein Sachs CW’69 and Keith L. Sachs W’67 Guest Curator Program.

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Still, Flat, and Far

December 6 2010

Photo: J. Katz

post by Rachel Pastan

“I’m intrigued by the staticness of form.”

That wonderful sentence was uttered last week at ICA by sculptor, photographer, and video-maker Erin Shirreff, whose show Still, Flat, and Far closed at the museum last weekend. Ordinarily I wouldn’t use this space to talk about a show you can’t see, but last week’s conversation between Shirreff and Penn’s brand new contemporary art professor, Kaja Silverman, with an introduction by exhibition curator Lucy Gallun, was such an interesting event that I thought I’d say just a few words about it. Also, I get the feeling you’re likely to run into Shirreff’s work somewhere or other over the next couple of years. At MoMA, for instance, or the Met.

What struck me, listening to Erin and Kaja, was how differently two people from different backgrounds can talk about the same work. Kaja is the consummate academic: thoughtful, informed, theoretical, curious, articulate. She started the conversation with a wonderfully complicated and captivating inquiry into the show’s title: what might each of those words mean, still, flat, far? Does “still” refer to photographs in their analog form? Is “far” a temporal term, expressing how distant analog photography is from today’s general practice? Does it allude to what Walter Benjamin says about photography bringing things closer?

In response, Erin smiled a lot and said, “They’re complicated words, and I liked them for their simplicity.”

I love that answer, which acknowledges contradictions while refusing to tease them out. That’s not her job, after all: it’s the curator’s job, the academic’s job. Possibly my job.

Erin Shirreff, Untitled (detail), 2009, Compressed ash, hydrocal, 86 x 41 x 13 1/2 inches, courtesy of the artist and Lisa Cooley, New York

Not that Erin wasn’t also extremely articulate about her own work, as well as about minimalist art, photography, monuments, and various other things. She was. But she was also resistant to too much interpretation, concerned about taking things too far. When Kaja asked her, “What did you mean when you said, You can see geologic time in the desert?” Erin replied, “That’s so pretentious sounding, I apologize!” Then she went on to talk evocatively about living in New Mexico, driving over knolls that are ancient volcanoes, explaining exactly what she meant in a way that wasn’t pretentious at all.

How does one find a language to talk about art? How do you know when you’ve properly or effectively expressed in language the essence of what the artist has made with her hands (and, well, maybe with her camera and her editing software)? I think what I liked so much about this conversation was the way three different modes of discourse came together—curator Lucy Gallun’s lovely prepared introduction, Kaja’s multi-layered analysis and penetrating questions, and Erin’s feints and qualifications and open-ended attempts to capture her own passionate preoccupations. Any one of them alone would have been partial, slanted, not quite satisfying. But woven together they created an experience as resonant, subtle, and compelling as any other work of art.

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