Archive for the ‘Excursus’ Category

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.

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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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A Place to Share Things: Wendy Yao Brings Ooga Booga to ICA

October 8 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

“Do you want to paint?” Luke asks.

A woman in shorts takes a brush and dips it in a cup of ink, then gets busy at the back window where the shape of an open book has been taped out in blue.

“Do you want to paint?” Luke asks a man coming up the steps from the lobby, then explains how this works. “Each person makes a small mark, and then also adds to something someone else has started.”

I look at what’s been inked so far: a nose, a long curve, something that looks like roller skates.

This is cooperative painting, a project of Sumi Ink Club, which Luke Fischbeck and Sarah Rara founded to promote “participatory drawing”events across the country.

The goal today is to help finish the installation Wendy Yao has organized for Excursus III: Ooga Booga, her re-imagining of ICA’s mezzanine space as a place to read, peruse the ICA archival material she has selected, and attend a series of programs—largely by her circle of collaborators—that respond in some way to the exhibition currently on view.

Wendy is the founder of Los Angeles’s Ooga Booga, a space over a Chinatown bakery that overflows the categories and labels sometimes used to describe it: bookstore, music shop, clothing boutique, zine source, publishing imprint, exhibition space. You can buy stuff at Ooga Booga for sure, but if you want to come in, browse, hang out, chat, that’s all right too. As in ICA’s Excursus projects, enjoying the space, either alone or with others, can be an end in itself.

Among the objects Wendy has selected to make you want to linger in the ICA installation are:

* A big blue hammock on a hammock stand.

* A modular table (“Group Affinity Table,” it’s called) by Berlin designer Manuel Raeder, which can be assembled as a circle, a long snakey ribbon, or a sort of tailed C-curve that looks like a letter in a forgotten alphabet.

* Group Affinity Benches in aqua and red.

* Books, many of them made by friends and collaborators. (Wendy, who supports independent print culture, has produced an indispensable guide to print resources.)

Photo: Alex Klein

* A bunch of small round stools, of the kind that are ubiquitous in Chinatown.

Grace, ICA’s Spiegel Fellow, tells me about tracking the stools up and down 10th Street: “Everyone has them, but no one knows where they got them,” she says. Finally she found a store that had a bunch in the back they were willing to sell. After that, she turned her attention to finding a money tree—Pachira aquatica, a houseplant also common in Chinatown, thought to bring prosperity.

In the back corner, a wooden rack displays magazines, artists’ books, zines, ICA catalogues. As an all-caps letter from the artist Richard Tuttle, on view elsewhere in the installation, observes: “There is a certain pleasure in just looking through show catalogues—like being a spectator at a football match.”

For me, though, the heart of this installation is the flat files: five drawers of letters, articles, notes, photographs, and other ephemera that Wendy found in ICA’s archives. Drawer One features a lot of cats, including a page of Karen Kilimnik cat stickers; a “Sunday School Cat” postcard that critic and curator Lawrence Alloway sent to former ICA Director Suzanne Delahanty: “Delighted that you can reprint the Martin cat” (he meant catalogue, I guess); and a thank you note to Delahanty from collector Dorothy Vogel, this one featuring a striped cat.

Photo: Ted Gerike

There is, as well, a clipping of a 1975 article about Dorothy Vogel and her husband, Herb, who died last July. The Vogels, who had a long relationship with ICA, were famous for becoming important contemporary art collectors on a budget: he worked for the US Postal Service and she was a Brooklyn librarian. Sometimes, I am told, they received art works in barter for cat sitting.

A few hours from now, at the Excursus III: Ooga Booga opening, Wendy will say of her Los Angeles store, “I wanted to have a place to share things that people around me were making.”

Here at ICA, the scope of what she is sharing is larger—things not only from people she knows, like Manuel Raeder who designed the furniture; but from people she’s never met, like Suzanne Delahanty and Richard Tuttle; or who have died, like Herb Vogel (and Agnes Martin and Gertrude Stein); or whose identity has been lost, like the anonymous designers of several unidentified ICA posters in Drawer Four.

Also work by these friends and strangers, colleagues and passers-by, with brushes in their hands, who together are creating this inky jungle of flowers, hands, eyes, witch’s hats, umbrellas, and butterflies. This wild, improvisational, Ooga Booga world.

Luke waving. Photo: Alex Klein

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Excursus III: Ooga Booga is on view at ICA through December 16. You can follow the project on the Excursus website.

Luke Fischbeck will be back at ICA with his collaborator, Sarah Rara, in their incarnation as the band Lucky Dragons, to celebrate the closing of Excursus III: Ooga Booga on Sunday, December 16.

To sign up for the wild, improvisational world of Miranda’s mailing list, email miranda@icaphila.org.

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East of Borneo: Seventies Flashback

February 3 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

The first things to show up were the chairs: those brightly colored stacking chairs you used to see everywhere in the 1970s. Madison, ICA’s building administrator, found them in the bowels of a neighboring building, and they were just what was wanted.

40/4 4 chairs in a circle

After that, a couple of tables appeared. They weren’t the right color though, so Paul painted the tops a misty gray. Next some posters arrived, big, grainy, black-and-white images of students at CalArts in the 1970s sitting together in spaces not unlike this one. It took a while to decide where to hang them.

Trying out the pictures

Photo: Alex Klein

That night—in what Tom joked was the I Ching of curatorial practice—there was an excursion to a bookstore to buy a bunch of used paperbacks: The Second Sex, A Marx Reader, Maria Montessori’s Education and Peace, Rubyfruit Jungle. Pretty soon it was looking just like the 1970s on ICA’s Mezzanine, site of our second Excursus project, East of Borneo. This reading room / exhibition / series of programs / online residency, loosely based around ideas of alternative pedagogies, is organized by Thomas Lawson and Stacey Allan, who run an online art magazine, also called East of Borneo, from their base in Los Angeles.

L.A. has been practically one big art exhibition lately (or at least, an endlessly hatching series of many art exhibitions large and small) as Pacific Standard Time (PST), the year-long celebration of art in Los Angeles between 1945 and 1980, rolls on. Tom Lawson, who is also Dean of the Art School of the California Institute of the Arts, concocted the art school’s contribution to PST: a two-year seminar exploring the art and artists of the post-war era. The time period the students got excited about turned out to be the 70s. That class helped develop the exhibition The Experimental Impulse at REDCAT in LA, material and ideas from which informed ICA’s installation. It’s exciting to have a bit of warm PST weather here in the chilly East.

What interested the students, according to Tom, was not so much the art of that decade, but rather “the alternative strategies that artists used in LA in response to various institutional collapses.” In the sixties, there had seemed to be a way to have a career as an artist; there were paths to follow. But by the seventies, that sense had disappeared. Young artists kept making art, but in many ways it was more for themselves and for one another than for a public. They formed collectives and published small magazines. This ethos of making art for the sake of making it—for opening oneself to new methods and ideas—this was what resonated for the CalArts students. The installation on ICA’s mezzanine, with its 40/4 chairs by David Rowland and its “Blueprint for Counter Education” posters (originals in the flat files; reproductions on the walls), is a portal to a moment in history from which to take inspiration.

Installation

Photo: Alex Klein

Maybe it’s just because I grew up during them, but I love the 1970s: the bright colors, the TV shows, the air of idealism. At my elementary school, ca. 1973, we sat on the floor and called our teachers Nell and Rich and Jewell. The Monarch butterfly project we enacted every year—watching the slow, striped caterpillars spin bright green chrysalises for themselves, then break out as brilliant winged creatures—would not be out of place up here on the ICA mezzanine.

Perhaps East of Borneo’s most potent installation object is the Metamorphokit table, which got delayed by UPS and didn’t show up till the very morning of the opening. Metamorphokit is a system of modular furniture designed for the CalArts dorms by Peter de Bretteville and Toby Cowan in 1971. The pieces could be put together in all different kinds of ways. Students would arrive at school, go up to their dorm room, and find a pile of unassembled Metamorphokit pieces. Thus, a student’s first task upon entering CalArts would be to design her own environment. “The idea,” Tom explained, “was that you would build your own dorm room, and in the process you would figure out what kind of artist you were.”

Alex, the Excursus curator, added, “But we found out they aren’t that easy to put together.”

“But they’re very easy to take apart,” Stacey said.

Metamorphokit dorm room, 1972

CalArts dorm room interior featuring Metamorphokit modular furniture (1972).

It makes me think of those caterpillars again. Didn’t they too create their own environments, then slip inside them for a while to do something mysterious, until they were ready to dry their new wings and take flight?

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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.

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

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More Than Wrong: Wharton Esherick’s hammer-handle chairs and art in the world

September 16 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

I get to the Hedgerow Theatre in Rose Valley early, so I can take a look around. The others are coming down from the Wharton Esherick Museum in Paoli. They have been picking up some prints and books that museum is generously lending ICA for Up on My Back and I Will Take You Thither, the inaugural program in our new Excursus series. The Hedgerow Theater, for which Esherick made furniture and did carpentry work in trade for acting classes for his daughters, is lending us a special chair called a hammer-handle chair, because hammer handles were what Esherick used to make the frame.

I park in the gravel lot outside the old stone building. Inside, the lobby is beamed and low-ceilinged with wide floor boards and rough plaster walls. Wandering into a reception room, I see a long table—obviously by Esherick—where cookies are served at the intermissions of the plays.

Table

Written material and photographs on the walls tout Hedgerow’s history with the artist: the “No” sign he made to mark the private staircase to the actors’ quarters, and Jeeter and Cheeter, the life-sized horses he sculpted to stand outside the theater. Looking at the photograph, I realize I know these horses: one of them now stands in the turn-around at the School in Rose Valley, just down the road, where my daughter attended kindergarten. The kids used to sit on the horse while they waited to be picked up at the end of the day. No doubt they still do.

Andy, Alex, and Mark come in, excited from their visit to the Esherick Museum. Andy goes over the row of chairs where I have been sitting. These very chairs, it turns out, are the hammer-handle chairs! Comfortable, run-down seats in daily use for decades, they look like they were made for this particular room—which, of course, they were.

“Esherick bought a barrel of hammer handles at auction because it was cheap wood,” Andy says. “Then the theater wanted chairs.”

Mark points out how each one is slightly different. “This one has a crossbar here, and this one has a crossbar there.”

“Which one are we borrowing?”

Andy points to the chair next to the one I’ve been sitting in. “I liked the one with the darker straps,” he says.

It feels wrong to have been sitting (well, practically sitting) on the object we are here for—that we will swaddle in packing blankets, ask Hedgerow Director Penelope Reed to sign official paperwork for, and carefully transport back to ICA. We certainly won’t let anyone sit on it there!

More than wrong, though, it also feels right. I think it’s wonderful that these chairs are still being used today, in just the way Esherick intended them to be. It may wear them out faster, but it brings art out into the world.

Centaur

Photo: Andy Beach

Up on My Back and I Will Take You Thither, an ICA program by Andy Beach, is inspired by Philadelphia’s prohibition-era radical press, bookstore, and bohemian meeting place, The Centaur. From now through mid-December you can come to a series of talks, hands-on events, and informal conversations related to this piece of Philadelphia history. There will also be a play reading and a chance to play chess with Esherick’s own chess set—all in a space in ICA that Andy has reimagined, furnishing it with blue stools, a sectional table, books and prints in flat files, a re-creation in neon of the sign Esherick designed for The Centaur, and one worn hammer-handle chair perched on a plinth.

Hammer-handle chair

Now, with the chair stored snuggly in Alex and Mark’s car, there’s not room for Andy in the car, so I give him a ride. We pass the turn off for the school where my daughter went to kindergarten. It’s just about three o’clock. There must be children up on that Esherick horse right now, waiting for their parents. Art in the world.

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