Archive for the ‘Guest Posts’ Category

The Best Ambassadors: ICA Says Goodbye to Its Graduating Student Board

June 10 2013

Post by Grace Ambrose

On a sunny morning in early May, the ICA’s Student Advisory Board is munching on croissants and chocolate babka and sipping cups of La Colombe coffee. They need the coffee. It is finals season at Penn and they are swamped with papers and projects and exams. They’ve torn themselves away from the library so we can congregate around the conference room table one final time. Today we will say goodbye to our graduating seniors and welcome a new batch of freshmen to our ranks.

2012-13 Student Board with artist Trevor Paglen.
Photo courtesy of Patterson Beckwith.

We’re lucky at ICA to have a group of talented and curious Penn undergraduates who volunteer their time to help us figure out the best ways to engage with the student body. Once a month they file into our conference room-cum-library, where they tackle all sorts of issues from grant writing to program imagining. They attend Board of Trustees meetings, brainstorm marketing strategies, and help plan and execute public programs. They are our women (and men) on the street, the best ambassadors we have to the University that sprawls outside our front door. They are artists and art history majors, but also future real estate moguls and urban studies students and creative writers. They are indispensable.

Today the students are reflecting on their favorite moments of their board tenures. Justin and Isaac recall interviewing associate curator Anthony Elms about his exhibition White Petals Surround Your Yellow Heart as the highlight of their first year on the board. The pair prepared questions and led a conversation at an event for some of our high-level donors. Anthony is always fun to talk to, and this time was no exception, but what they remember most is that all three wore gingham shirts that day. Matching bespectacled men sitting behind a table – pretty prescient for a discussion of a show about fashion.

Student Board member Ellie Levitt leads the Ribbon Bee at “Day With(out) Art,” 2011.

Ellie remembers watching ICA’s contribution to the worldwide Day With(out) Art movement grow exponentially. She brought the event to ICA’s Excursus space as a junior, playing host to an afternoon of fellowship, discussion, and button making over bagels and cream cheese. This year the event expanded tenfold and included a visit from the artist collective Fierce Pussy and a screening of the ACT UP documentary United in Anger at International House. Ellie is graduating, and she tells the freshman that they too can take an idea from imagination to reality. It’s one of the special things about ICA, a place where, when students want to meet with the director or bounce ideas off the Senior Curator, all they have to do is ask.

Student Board members Javi Battle and Kaegan Sparks
in conversation with artists Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch.

David remembers coming to see a program with Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch as a freshman. The artists, who were included in the exhibition Queer Voice, were in conversation with Student Board members and it was then that he decided he wanted to join the board, so he too could have access to artists he liked. He got a chance this year, when the board invited Trevor Paglen to our annual Free For All event in March.

At Free For All, Paglen discussed his project The Last Pictures, for which he chose 100 photographs—of the construction of the atomic bomb, smiling prisoners in an internment camp, the Hoover Dam, Bruegel’s Tower of Babel, the surface of the moon—and had them etched them onto a silicon disk which was attached to a communications satellite and sent into space, where it will orbit Earth forever. Made up of mathematical tables and animations of spacecraft in orbit, Paglen’s presentation was equal parts Astronomy 101 lecture, artist talk, and philosophy seminar. In many ways, it was representative of where we sit at Penn. The ICA is a home for artists and art lovers, but we’re tucked into a larger community of knowledge seekers and question askers, all searching for different ways to look at and learn about the world around us. We’re a home for all of them too.

 

Laundry Boat, ICA’s contribution to the 2011 Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts, organized by the Student Board.

The students seated around our table – the students responsible for bringing this and many other remarkable artists here to ICA – all have different degrees of interest in the art world. Some are throwing themselves in headfirst: one graduating senior will work at an auction house, two others will pursue graduate work, in art history and fine arts. Others will take different paths: interning with a District Attorney or spending the summer at an investment bank. They hail from London, Toronto, Kansas, New York, and Philadelphia, among other places. Many have cultivated a lifelong love of contemporary art, passed down from their parents and grandparents, while others discovered this world for themselves, when they arrived at Penn, through the ICA.

2009-2010 ICA Student Advisory Board. The author is second from the right.

I was one of those that fell in love with contemporary art at ICA. During my freshman year, I enrolled in a seminar taught by ICA Senior Curator Ingrid Schaffner. Six years later, I am still here, now as the Spiegel Fellow, following stints as intern and Student Board member and freelancer. I remember afternoons spent with artist Matthew Buckingham, who came to our Laundry Boat celebration, and nights on the ICA terrace, celebrating one opening or another with my cohorts. As an undergraduate, I sat around the conference table through countless meetings – discussions of which artist to invite or which tasty snack to have at an event. The latter was inevitably more heated.

Today, welcoming the new members, I am glad to be on the other side of the table. I look forward to helping them harness their ideas and make them reality. We can’t wait to see what they will do.

 

*****

Grace Ambrose organizes people. In addition to supporting programming at the ICA as Spiegel Fellow, she was a co-coordinator of Ladyfest Philadelphia and the Junior Fellow at the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is currently editing the project In Open Letters A Secret Appears: A People’s Guide to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

 

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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”

 

* * *

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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The Programs That Were: Grace Ambrose Reflects on Programming at ICA

January 7 2013

Post by Grace Ambrose

Here at ICA we’ve just said goodbye to Jeremy Deller’s Joy in People. When I walked through the doors on January 2nd, there were already boxes being packed. A few weeks before, we gave the blue hammock that sat on the mezzanine to Paul, our chief preparator. This morning I sent the last box of books from Excursus III: Ooga Booga back to Wendy Yao. My first season of exhibitions as Spiegel Fellow is over.

In the programming department, we’ve been looking toward the next round of shows for a while. And soon after they open, on February 6, we will look ahead further still. Recently, we started thinking about what we might try to do in conjunction with Jason Rhoades, Four Roads, which opens next September.

Program Curator Alex Klein and Spiegel Fellow Grace Ambrose. Photo: Patterson Beckwith

Robert, Dana, and Paul ably coordinate the objects you see in the galleries, which fly all over the country and the world and whose loans are carefully negotiated. I work with Program Curator Alex Klein to produce programs and exhibitions, including the Excursus series. We coordinate bodies, filling spaces with conversations and screenings and performances and readings and anything else that you can think of, getting interesting and interested people in a room together and seeing what happens. Though Jeremy Deller’s Valerie’s Snack Bar and I Heart Melancholy installations are gone, we programmers celebrate the Joy in People all year round. We depend on it. And people are difficult to pin down.

For one thing, schedules are complicated. We contend with the institution’s schedule, with the university’s, and with every individual’s own life. Though we’ve worked on them for months, next season’s programs are still coming together. It’s the nature of this kind of work. Fitting everything onto the calendar is like a series of turning cogs. When all is said and done, they’ll neatly lock together. It always works out, but waiting for the machinery to get up and running can be nerve wracking.

Behind every one of these public conversations is a series of many smaller, private ones. Unlike objects, people can talk back. As Spiegel Fellow I’m responsible for coordinating the logistics that go along with every program: making sure we have enough work studies and interns, booking airplanes and hotels, and processing C-Forms and W-9s. While we’re looking forward to the next season (we are always looking forward to the next season), we have to make sure of the current one first.

I help make the posters on our Risograph and set up the chairs in the auditorium. I drive around the city buying snacks from Trader Joe’s and special spices from the Pakistani market. I scour thrift stores for the perfect glass vessel for an artist’s performance and knickknacks to be transformed into coveted prizes. I pop popcorn. I brainstorm tweets. I order books and hammocks and lights and signs and flags and tarts and vegan, gluten-free, nut-free cookies. I help Alex stay on top of her correspondence with our guests and together we brainstorm each season of exhibitions with other curators, artists and grant writers. One weekend, I donned silk pants and a cape and joined in with performance collective My Barbarian.

Plants from Excursus III: Ooga Booga in the programming office, along with the sculpture produced by Dean Allen Spunt’s November 7th performance on the mezzanine.

Every program has its own needs, its own set of spinning cogs, and that means this job is different every day. While I support Alex on all that she does, I’m responsible for organizing some programs on my own. All fall I have worked on March 12th’s multi-part presentation “With Tomorrow’s Sun.” There will be a talk by the curator of Glitter and Folds, our Jennifer Burris; a reading by Philadelphia’s famed and fabulous CAConrad; and a performance by Field Kallop, whose pendulum will swing diamond dust across the floor of the Project Space. For that evening, the pieces fell neatly into place – but that doesn’t mean there isn’t more to be done. There will be thank you notes to write and photos to color correct and honoraria to be paid. The life of a program is long, much longer than the ninety minutes or so that it lives in our building.

By the time you read this, the art in the galleries will be gone, making its way in its special boxes toward St. Louis. The walls will be coming down and new ones rising in their places. The programs, of course, disappeared weeks ago, into the chilly nights and crisp afternoons when they occurred. I look around my office though, and find objects have replaced them. The plants that populated the Ooga Booga installation on our mezzanine line the windowsill. Jeremy’s I Heart Melancholy print from Free For All hangs above my desk. A Polaroid of me from Patterson Beckwith’s Portable Portrait Studio is tacked to the bulletin board. A slip of paper, one of Wendy’s cats from the flat file drawers, is pinned above it. A prize I received from Club Nutz, a bobblehead of Phil & Phillis, precursors to the Phanatic, sits next to the computer monitor.

From left: to-do lists, ICA’s Happy New Year card, a cat that lived in a flat file drawer, Polaroid portrait of the author by Patterson Beckwith

I’m excited for the coming season. I look forward to seeing the things that will arrive in our galleries over the next four weeks: the photographs and videos and sculptures and installations. I cannot wait to hang one of Sarah Crowner’s curtains across the mezzanine, as it is transformed by Primary Information for our final Excursus. But more even than that, I am looking forward to the objects that will end up on my desk once all those have disappeared: totems of the programs that were.

*****
Grace Ambrose organizes people. In addition to supporting programming at the ICA as Spiegel Fellow, she is a co-coordinator of Ladyfest Philadelphia and the current Junior Fellow at the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania. On February 5th, join her at the Writers House for the launch of her project In Open Letters A Secret Appears: A People’s Guide to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

To stay up to date with what Grace and the rest of the ICA are staff are up to via the machinery of Miranda, email miranda@icaphila.org.

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His Twine: Marcel Duchamp and the Limits of Exhibition History

October 29 2012

[Note: The following piece was written by ICA’s Spiegel Fellow, Grace Ambrose, for Writing about Art: Marcel Duchamp, a program organized by ICA Student Board member Isaac Kaplan that was held at the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania on October 9, 2012.]

-post by Grace Ambrose

Open any account of the history of 20th century exhibitions and you will see this image.

 

The First Papers of Surrealism

John Schiff, Installation View of Exhibition ‘First Papers of Surrealism’ Showing String Installation. 1942. Gelatin silver print. Courtesy the Philadelphia Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY.

 

It is an installation view of the First Papers of Surrealism, an exhibition that opened seventy years ago at the Whitelaw Reid Mansion in midtown Manhattan. It was, at the time, the biggest surrealist show ever seen in the United States, and included works by Paul Klee, Max Ernst, Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, Rene Magritte and Giorgio de Chirico, amongst others.

The exhibition’s organizer, Andre Breton, asked Marcel Duchamp to propose a design for the installation. Duchamp had previously designed the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition, in Paris, lining the ceiling of the main hall of the Gallerie des Beaux-Arts with 1,200 empty coal bags, lighting the room with a single light bulb. Visitors were handed flashlights to navigate the space, which was filled with art objects that took the form of mannequins, plants, and even a taxi cab.

This time Breton had warned Duchamp to err on the side of economy. In response Duchamp purchased what was rumored to have been 16 miles of ordinary white string and used several hundred feet of it to festoon the mansion’s gilded moldings, ornate ceilings, and crystal chandeliers with a tangled mesh of webbing, stretching what came to be known as “his twine” across entrances and around the temporary walls which heaved with artworks. There were no mannequins this time, just lots and lots of paintings. The string criss-crossed the canvases, concealing the mansion’s opulent interior but also acting as what seems to be a literal barrier to the works on view.

Writing about Duchamp

Writing about Art: Marcel Duchamp. Photo: Arielle Brousse

Accounts of the experience of viewing the exhibition vary. Some said the twine was like a guide, directing them toward paintings. Others saw it as a metaphor for the complexities of contemporary art, saying that its presence “symbolized literally the difficulties to be circumvented by the unititiate in order to see, to perceive and understand, the exhibitions.”[i] Many of the participating artists were upset, insistent that visitors to the show would be unable to actually see the paintings that they had struggled to get out of war-torn Europe.

The exhibition’s legacy exists in the form of a handful of photographs. The one above, by John Schiff, is by far the most cited. Invariably, it will be accompanied by an emphasis on the string’s obfuscating qualities, a description of how Duchamp, when asked to display paintings, had actually made them impossible to see.  The image has come to stand in for the irretrievable experience of the exhibition itself. In it, there is no imaginative entry point to the room, no space that allows us to occupy the same area as the paintings themselves. The string stands in the way. It is difficult to visualize walking up to the Mondrian on the right, or even to the Klee directly in front of us, let alone proceeding through the rooms of the exhibition. We can only feel our ankles getting tangled in the web.

Duchamp himself posited the string as more transparent than opaque. “It was nothing,” he said. “You can always see through a window, through a curtain, thick or not thick, you can see always through if you want to, same thing there.”[ii] If you go to archives, if you look at other images of the exhibition, you can see that Duchamp’s intervention was in fact more permeable than the dominance of this one image has led us to believe. You could walk around in the space, you could approach the paintings. It must not have been so treacherous – during the opening, children ran through the rooms playing ball and tag. When asked what they were doing, they only said “Mr. Duchamp said we could.”

It cannot be denied that the presence of the string must have highlighted a series of confrontations: between the works and their installation, the installation and its viewers, the viewers and the work. It would have been an active force in any experience of the show, necessitating side-stepping and ducking and leaning and bending to get around. But rather than preventing us from seeing, it seems to have been Duchamp’s attempt to encourage a new awareness of the processes of vision. To this day, when we enter spaces lined with art, we fall into a set of prescribed choreography – we know that we should keep a certain distance from the objects, that we should look from afar. In the First Papers of Surrealism, these rules must be broken, if only out of necessity. Here, Duchamp reminds us that vision is corporeal – that it is made possible through the approach of the body. He questions what and how we see, and also, how art institutions themselves dictate both the subjects and the processes of our vision.

In the absence of being able to attend an exhibition that took place nearly a century ago, I think instead of an experience I have had many times, of the immediate approach to Duchamps’s Étant donnés. The terms of Duchamp’s gift of the work to the museum explicitly forbade any reproduction of the image through the peepholes for 15 years after his death. To this day, in order to properly experience it, we all must take the same steps into its dark room before leaning forward and pressing our faces on the grease-stained wooden door. I’m reminded also of the longer approach to it, of the idea that one cannot, and will not, ever see it without first passing through the shadow of The Large Glass. Here, Duchamp forces us into a new choreography, one that reveals his preoccupation with visuality. He famously shunned the retinal, embracing instead the whole body as eye.

It is funny, then, that our experience of the First Papers of Surrealism exhibition and Duchamp’s intervention in it is necessarily reduced to a two-dimensional photograph. We come up against the limits of an exhibition history, confronting the fact that as crucial as an understanding of individual exhibitions is for our conception of the trajectory of 20th century art, the shows that make up this trajectory are in fact unknowable, tied specifically to time, place, and lived experience. Looking at his twine, our vision becomes flat again, disembodied and autonomous. Separated from a physical experience, we once again are shut out.

*        *      *

Dancing Around the Bride, an exhibition exploring the interwoven lives of Marcel Duchamp and four major American artists—John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg—opens tomorrow at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Contemporary artist Phillipe Parreno collaborated on the exhibition design, choreographing encounters within the galleries which invite visitors to “dance” with the artists and objects on view. The exhibition runs through January 21, 2013.

Grace Ambrose is ICA’s Spiegel Programming Fellow. She recently received her Masters in Curatorial Studies from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, writing her thesis on the practice of restaging seminal exhibitions.

To sign up for the criss-crossing twine of Miranda’s mailing list, email miranda@icaphila.org.

 

[i] Harriet and Sidney Janis, “Marcel Duchamp, Anti-Artist,” View 5, no. 1 (March 1945), 18.

[ii] Lewis Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 183.

 

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Guest Post: Q&Q

July 2 2012

by Jennifer Burris

“We were discussing how to arrive, and one idea was helicopter drones.”

The comment appears flippant, and is met with audience laughter. Projected in high-definition against a back wall of the ICA first floor space, the speaker (Mashinka Firunts) is discussing possible ways to begin the event currently taking place. In the video, she is bordered by an empty black frame and lit to the side, both composition and tone evoking the silently breathing beauties of Warhol’s screen tests.

This strategic performance of process and methodology, citation and erudition, anchors Unsearchable, an endlessly digressive evening of questions and questioning that took place at ICA on Wednesday, May 23rd, as part of the group exhibition First Among Equals. Machete Group—a Philadelphia-based union of philosophers, writers, and critics—invited artists Mashinka Firunts and Daniel Snelson to collaborate in a performative lecture that explored ideas related to the database: archiving, searching, classifying, compiling. As Machete Group member Avi Alpert explained in his spoken introduction:

“When God was thought of as the unsearchable, this was the mystical paradox. When the self was unsearchable, this was the paradox of consciousness. Now that the world is searchable, our paradox is to find something that escapes being found.”

Divided into three segments, this search for what remains beyond the database began with the video mentioned above. A montage of 1950s films, original footage, and randomly generated Google searches, this entry point showcased the three performers informally discussing how to construct and order the evening. The following two segments were performed live. Seated at a long table facing the audience, the same three participants, clad in film noir black, took turns stepping up to the podium where they introduced themselves and attempted to clarify (or perhaps obfuscate) the topic at hand. Each explanation was from the vantage point of an assumed “role” specified by their chosen methodological approach to searching. Avi was the “Theorist,” Daniel was the “Archivist,” and Mashinka was a ratatatat detective nicknamed “Narrative.” Rounding out the evening was a rapid-fire questioning directed towards the audience: an overtly theatricalized demonstration of confusion in which most people on the receiving end of a question could do little more than stammer out one-word answers.

If this is sounding excessively meta-analytical, self-reflexive, and contrived—that’s because it was. And that was the point. Playing around and through the adopted rhetoric and confused nomenclature so often evoked in discussions of contemporary art, the event gently mocked such self-aggrandizing critiques and justifications; that little trick of making the question sound sufficiently impenetrable and obscure enough in order to convey intelligence without genuine comprehension being a readymade tool of art and academia alike. Yet the mockery was sweetly done, with humor and an air of inclusion. As one question directed towards the audience by the performers demanded:

“Galloway’s tactics of non-existence seem to figure centrally in all your remarks tonight. If you are, indeed, invested in practicing the aesthetics of non-existence, why can I see you plain as day?”(1)

In this way, Unsearchable appears an appropriated heir to work like James Lee Byars’s 1969 performance The World Question Center.(2) But there is something else, as well, at play. By performing this abstracted opacity, winking to academic language and detective narratives, they also seemed to be performing something much more insidious; which brings us back to drones.

A growing flight of unmanned aerial vehicles deployed primarily in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, drones are used for surveillance and reconnaissance as well as to carry out air strikes. Transmitting live video feeds and still images to remotely located operators, this new wave of military intelligence facilitates a video game mentality towards war. Understood in this wider context of international politics and negotiation, the referencing of drones both opens up the initial impenetrability of Unsearchable while also adding a reverberation of discomfiting meaning for both contemporary art and political compliance alike.

It is impossible to “arrive” on a drone, as Firunts joked about doing at the start of the evening; the machine’s very structure renders the proposal paradoxical. But what is apparently an illogical throwaway in actuality introduces an underlying premise of the performance. The three central characters, or figures, should not be thought of as human subjects but as search agents, operating within the framework of each of their chosen methodologies.

These agents’ indifferent search for the unsearchable also shares a disconcerting similarity to the military’s use of surveillance drones to discover what is, by definition, just as unstable and impossible to find: terrorism, networks, terror. What is produced by this paranoiac search engine, operating through thousands of computerized flight vehicles, is an endless deluge of images and video clips leading to a crisis of information for analysts on the other end.(3)

By playing out these contemporary structures of paranoia and information overload within the camp theatricality of a dinner theater, the performers enact a rigorous cross-examination of the processes of contemporary surveillance and the mechanisms of a perverse governmentality without an immediate referencing of either politics or emotion. As the evening’s final set of questions plaintively put forth: “I’ve heard coded references at this point to almost every imaginable topic: what is it to search? Is there anything that is not searchable? Is there a relationship between searching/targeting and war? Is narrative a mode of liberation? Can you say, definitively, what the major concern of the event here tonight has been?”

No, you could not; and so we go on searching, lost, looking for something to find.

* * *

All images are from Unsearchable, 2012, by Avi Alpert, Mashinka Firunts, and Daniel Snelson. Photos by William Hidalgo.

(1) An Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, Alexander R. Galloway is a founding member of the software collective RSG and creator of the data surveillance engine Carnivore. With Eugene Thacker, he co-authored a book entitled The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minnesota, 2007), which proposes an idea of non-existence as a form of indifference. Seb Franklin describes this notion of non-existence in his article “On Game Art, Circuit Bending and Speedrunning as Counter-Practice” as follows: “It’s not a question of hiding, or living off the grid, but of living on the grid, in potentially full informatics view, but in a way that makes one’s technical specification or classification impossible.” Cory Arcangel is a contemporary artist often discussed within this framework.

(2) “In 1969, the American artist James Lee Byars developed a performance piece entitled The World Question Center. The original idea, which was not brought to fruition, entailed gathering one hundred brilliant minds including thinkers, scientists, and artists together in a room, locking them behind closed doors and inviting them to ask each other questions they had been asking themselves. The final version of this project, produced for Belgian Radio and Television, is a performance piece in which Byars contacts all of them by telephone” (www.ubu.com/film/byars_world-question.html). Many thanks to Kenneth Goldsmith for pointing me to this work.

(3) The effects of this crisis of information have been explicitly, and consistently, skewered in the work of artists like Harun Farocki, whose ingenious films and video installations—from Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1988) to Serious Games (2009-2010)—unravel the militarization of imaging technologies and perception. Other artists, such as Seth Price, propose opportunities for individual resistance; Price’s 2008 artist book/exhibition catalogue How to Disappear in America provides internet-sourced instructions for the ways one can drop out of a mainstream society and evade law enforcement.

* * *

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

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Friday Hideway: An ICA intern in Bill Walton’s Studio

August 26 2011

I begin this guest-post at a long white desk nestled between the racks of the New York art gallery where I am spending my summer. To my right is a painting composed of geometric shapes in black and white, behind me is a work piled high with earth tones, and upstairs a nude canvas with gestural stripes down the middle is waiting to be purchased. All by celebrated 20th century figures, each work is priced higher than four years of college at Penn. However, no matter the economic value placed on these works, each started with an artist in a studio surround by his tools.

Paintbrushes in jar.

A shelf in Bill Walton's studio.

The late Philadelphia sculptor Bill Walton highlighted this truth by allowing his tools and his art to become almost interchangeable. In Walton’s domain hammers and wrenches served as models, and in his hands stacks of plywood became eloquent monuments. Back in April Rachel Pastan wrote on this blog that Walton’s work “make[s] you look closer, think harder, press yourself against the question of the world and art and how to think about the difference between them.” As an ICA intern, I spent last semester packing and cataloguing the Spring Garden Street studio where Walton created his art, built a collection of tools, hid cigarette butts in used coffee cups, and listened to Sunday in the Park with George on cassette tape.

Paint Brushes. Courtesy of Fleisher/Ollman, Philadelphia. Photo: Karen Mauch

In an upcoming ICA exhibition, Bill Walton’s Studio, this space will be recreated in the museum’s Project Space, but for months Walton’s windowless studio was my Friday hideaway. Far from Penn’s campus, I spent much of my time there listening to classic rock on my iPod and considering my struggles and triumphs in life and love. But for a part of each visit and in the hours after, Walton’s personal space — complete with dirt and emotional debris — consumed my imagination. I slowly pieced together his process and found myself speculating on his character. A pair of green and blue slippers told me this was a man who valued comfort (and perhaps worked late into the night).  A browning roll of masking tape with the phrase “TILL THE FEAR IN ME SUBSIDES – MRS HERMIT LOVES MR HERMIT – 2 MOs. – FRANK S. HERMIT” inscribed in pencil on its side introduced me to a romantic. (After smiling at this find, swaddling it in bubble wrap and telling all my Twitter followers about it, I learned that this roll of masking tape may be a sculpture, even if it started life as a roll of masking tape.)

Virtually everything I know about Walton I know through his space. While I hope to one day learn more of the facts, as it stands I lay claim to a unique and beautiful portrait of a man I will never meet but relate to nonetheless. The exhibition that will open to the public on September 7 will not be beautiful only in the traditional aesthetic sense. The deeper beauty of this project comes from the fact that each visitor will experience a miniature version of my time on Spring Garden Street.

Or perhaps it is more apt to say that I experienced a heightened version of each museum goer’s visit. I have my own version of Bill Walton, and soon each visitor will have her’s.

Sam

Sam with some tape in Bill Walton's studio.

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Samantha Sharf is beginning her senior year at the University of Pennsylvania. She is an English major with a History of Art minor.

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