Archive for the ‘From the Archive’ Category

The Beginner’s Guide to Curating: Judith Tannenbaum Revisits ICA

April 29 2013

post by Alina Grabowski

To have Judith Tannenbaum sitting across a table from me, eating a sandwich, is a bit surreal. I had imagined her taller. With curly hair. And perhaps a pair of cat eye glasses. Having spent many hours leafing through the former ICA interim director’s papers, I’d had plenty of time to construct her in my imagination. To see her in the flesh, petite and sporting a red-streaked bob, is jarring—like remembering that your favorite character in a memoir isn’t merely fiction.

Some clarification is necessary; I have not been snooping through Judith Tannenbaum’s files illicitly. I am part of the Spiegel Contemporary Art Freshman Seminar at Penn, where our first semester was dedicated to studying artist Glenn Ligon, with a particular focus on his 1998 exhibition at ICA, Glenn Ligon: Unbecoming.

Original exhibition card for “Unbecoming,” January 16 – March 8, 1998

As part of my midterm paper first semester, I was assigned to research the Unbecoming archive housed in Penn’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library. I would ride the elevator to the fifth floor of Van Pelt Library, ring the bell to the sequestered room, and after stowing my belongings (save for a pencil), sit at a long wooden table and wait to be brought one of the four manila boxes in which the letters, faxes, press materials, images, and publications from that show are housed.

The most interesting file by far was the one dedicated to the ICA’s correspondence with Ligon. This thick folder consisted mainly of letters and faxes between Judith and the artist, detailing everything from potential installation configurations to party guest lists. Before taking this class, I had naively assumed curators conceived their exhibition concepts then organized the works and installed them—surely they didn’t have to worry about event invitations or hotel reservations. As I explored the archive, however, it became clear that a curator’s job was just as much about organizing people as it was the physical artwork, especially when working with a living artist. The archive served as an intimate guide to a curatorial process I hadn’t even known existed. The road map was a welcome one. This semester our class has been planning our own exhibition. Each One As She May, featuring works by Ligon, Steve Reich, and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. The show, which references Unbecoming while exploring its own themes of language, movement, and understanding, opens in ICA’s Project Space on April 24.

The reason I’m sitting across from Judith on this Thursday afternoon is that she’s been generous enough to visit our class to speak about Unbecoming and to answer our questions about the exhibition and her experience with it. My four classmates, our two professors, Jennifer Burris and Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Ingrid Schaffner, Senior Curator at ICA, and I have gathered in the ICA’s library, sitting around a table amidst trays of sandwiches and bowls of salad. Judith is warm and open about the process of organizing Unbecoming, often chuckling when we mention particular documents we’ve found in the archive. “Oh yes, I remember that!” she says, or, “I’m not quite sure I recall…”

Diagram of “Unbecoming” installation, 1997
Courtesy of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library
University of Pennsylvania

First she tells us the basics: she was drawn to Ligon’s work after hearing him talk about it  and being struck by his eloquence and intellect. We discuss the Ligon coal dust drawings we will be showing in our exhibition, in which a phrase from Gertrude Stein’s story “Melanctha” is repeated. “He uses media to mediate personal experience,” Judith says, referring to the artist’s use of appropriated language.

She explains that when she approached Ligon about a possible show in 1997, it was a time of transition for him—very different from now, when he’s just had a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York. “The show was an autobiographical one, but also guarded,” she says of Unbecoming, noting that in Ligon’s Feast of Scraps (a series of photo albums featuring pornographic photographs of men alongside family photos), Ligon doesn’t specify which family photos are his own. It’s shocking to see a photo of a family gathered around dinner share a page with a naked, well-oiled man, but this juxtaposition is not merely for shock value: it questions our reaction. Why are some of these images considered vulgar, some wholesome?

Not only does Judith tell us about the process of organizing Unbecoming, she also shares her views on the curatorial process generally, advising us, for example, to keep our written materials in the gallery concise. When the issue of wall labels comes up, Ingrid shares a story about unwieldy labels she once encountered. Judith laughs. “I hate wall labels that ask questions,” she says, throwing up her hands.

After the laughter dies down, we receive perhaps the most valuable lesson of the afternoon. Judith opens her hands toward us. “If you’re going to say something,” she says,“ stand by what you say.”

(primary)

Installation view of “Unbecoming”

 

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Each One As She May is on view at ICA through July 28.

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

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ICA’s Story

September 2 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

“I like thinking of ICA as a character in a book,” Ingrid says.

We are at a presentation by Sarah Fritchey, a graduate student in curatorial studies at Bard, who has spent her summer in Penn’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library combing through ICA’s archives. She has dug out treasures from many of our past exhibitions and made wonderful outlines and lists to describe her findings.

She has unearthed historic images, like this one of Marcel Duchamp talking to ICA board chair Lally Lloyd at the opening of The Other Tradition (1966).

The idea is to take representative images from landmark shows throughout our history and put them online as part of ICA’s 50th anniversary observances next year.

Sarah shows a slide of our first-ever announcement card, for ICA’s inaugural exhibition of Clyfford Still paintings in 1963.

Clyfford Still invitation

There are press releases, attendance counts, newspaper articles, floor plans. There is a letter describing how ICA’s early trustees worried over whether or not the new museum should be called an “institute,” and one between the curator of 1974’s Robert Morris/Projects and the fire chief about concerns that the installation would break fire code. Some shows have almost no artifacts at all; on the other end of the spectrum, there are thirteen boxes of material about the incendiary Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition in 1988.

The Highway (1970) falls somewhere in between. “The invitation was kind of eccentric.” Sarah shows an image of a yellow-and-red paper stop sign. “The r.s.v.p. says, ‘Informal or highway gear.’ People literally wore street signs!”

“Do you have a picture, please?” Ingrid asks.

Sarah does.

Inquirer piece on The Highway

She also has radio announcements—PR blurbs for radio announcers to read, composed in 10, 20, and 30 second spots. “I’m really obsessed with these: ‘There’s no toll charge for The Highway…’ ”

One of the most interesting discoveries is a short, unpublished essay by the late curator Harald Szeemann on “the death of groovy,” intended for the catalogue of 1977’s Paul Thek exhibition. Invited to contribute a piece of 3,000 words, Szeemann instead wrote a mere 1,000; the essay was not, ultimately, included.

More images slide by: the galleries in ICA’s three locations; letterhead designs; correspondence from various directors in a wide variety of tones; a ticket to a Joan Jonas performance of A Juniper Tree. Slowly but surely the nature of ICA is revealed, the way the nature of a leading character is revealed over the course of a book.

As Ingrid says, “This is ICA’s story, after all.”

* * *

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Not Just Papers: A Visit to the ICA Archive

July 9 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Invitation to Opening

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Imagining Ourselves Into The Virtual: A Visit to the Penn Museum’s Archives

April 27 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

“Where is this?” Ingrid asks.

“This is Mexico. 1933,” Kate says. On the computer screen, women scrub clothes on the banks of a river. An old trolley rumbles by, scarred with graffiti. Palm trees wave.

We are looking at film from the Watson Kintner collection on a computer in the archives of the Penn Museum of Archeology and Anthropology with film archivist Kate Pourshariati. “The reason that it looks so great is that it’s Kodachrome,” she says. It does look great: the rushing water, the blue sky, oranges ripening in the sun.

This visit grows out of ICA’s Jennifer Burris’s interest in contemporary artists working with archival footage, together with Kate’s desire for artists to work with the Archives’ material. More practically, we hope to learn from Archives’ experience with digitizing material, storing it, and making it available on the web, a project ICA is also embarked upon.

At the Archives

The Archives’ material, of course, is quite different from ours: drawings by archeologists in the field, maps, notes, photographs, and these extraordinary 16 mm films—close to a century’s worth!—documenting daily life, clothing, dwellings, and the manufacture of artifacts and implements in over 30 countries around the world. They also have 25,000 lantern slides, many of them hand-tinted, of American Indians, scenes from the Ottoman Empire, and many other subjects. Kate has pulled images from the Philippines for us to look at.

Kalinga group

A group of Kalingas from Northern Luzon, ca. 1910. Penn Museum image no. 219041.

Some of these are faked, intended to make people look more primitive than they were—too primitive to rule themselves—in a propagandist attempt by Dean C. Worcester, an infamous character, to justify the continuation of colonial rule. He also made a 1913 film for the same purpose, which Kate is working to repatriate.

Kalinga girl

D. C. Worcester or C. Martin, Kalinga girl, ca.1913. Penn Museum image 219033.

Even though ICA is focused on the art of today, we don’t want to lose our lively and significant history—ground-breaking exhibitions that helped propel many important artists to wider recognition, including Andy Warhol’s first museum show. As a non-collecting museum, we rely on catalogues, installation photographs, and various ephemera like exhibition cards and posters (also blog posts) to document the work we do. There’s lots of this stuff in flat files and cartons in our archive room, and much more in Penn’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which people can look at if they go over there, know basically what they want, and fill out a request form.

But what if you’re in Omaha, or Oslo, or Osaka? What if you’re just in Manyunk but don’t want to bother crossing the river into West Philly? What then? We’d like you to be able to go to our website and access our wonders from there.

Damian Ortega

Damián Ortega Untitled, 2002 courtesy of the artist, galeria kurimanzutto and D'Amelio Terras

Polly Apfelbaum

Polly Apfelbaum, 2003 Installation, Institute of Contemporary Art. Photo: Aaron Igler.

Dirt on Delight

Photo: Aaron Igler/Greenhouse Media

Charline von Heyl

Photo: Aaron Igler/Greenhouse Media

ICA is currently working on a new website, to be launched for our 50th anniversary in fall 2013. Part of the idea is that the site will be a living archive: a rich, emergent territory with portals to past shows and programs where people will want to spend time exploring, and where even those who never physically come to ICA can participate in the ICA experience. We envision the website as a real expansion of our physical space into the fluid world of the virtual, propelling us to the acute edge of what’s contemporary: a museum without boundaries.

Heady stuff.

The visit to the Penn Museum’s Archives is both an inspiration and a wake-up call. On the one hand, here is this extraordinary collection of over 700 reels of film from all over the world, available at the click of a mouse. As Senior Archivist Alex Pezzati says, “In the 1980s, when everything went to video, all the film became totally inaccessible. You couldn’t even project it, it was too delicate. Now, what was inaccessible has become our most accessible collection.”

On the other hand, the organization that digitized this material and put it online, the Internet Archive, won’t be doing another project like that anytime soon. After the tour, we sit around the big table talking about digital asset managers and format issues and standards for file naming and image management systems. (“Do your images first,” Alex advises. “Documents are complicated.”) Alex and Kate are full of information, opinions, and experiences both cautionary and otherwise. It’s sobering to realize that, even with all their expertise, their advice can sometimes sound like this: “Nobody really knows what to do.”

Meanwhile the lantern slides sit in the middle of the table, glowing faintly yellow and red. Kate has explained to us that, before motion pictures, people would crowd the museum’s auditorium for illustrated travelogues. Picture a time when lantern slides were the latest thing, the YouTube of the age! People sat together, straining to imagine themselves into distant countries—unknown worlds.

Hemp cart in Philippines

A hemp cart in Albay, Luzon, ca. 1910. Penn Museum image no. 219115.

I like to think that’s what we’re doing now at ICA as we plan our new website: imagining ourselves into the unknown world of the virtual.

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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.

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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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