Archive for the ‘Installation’ Category

Welcome All Citizens of the Universe

January 20 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

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

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

The Centennial Star

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

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

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

“No. I took the train.”

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

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

Jennifer and Jacqueline considering

Jacqueline and Jennifer considering The Centennial Star

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

Paul switched the images.

“A bit more distance?”

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

Opening Night Day 2011: Adrenaline buzz

September 9 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

I WANT TO WRITE THIS WHOLE BLOG POST IN CAPITAL LETTERS!

It’s the pre-opening energy, that jazzy adrenaline buzz that floats up the elevator shaft and down again through the heating vents on every ICA opening day, making me feel like shouting. I have finished my own last-minute assignments for tonight so I’m free for a few minutes to wander around the building watching other people hurry to finish theirs. At five o’clock the doors will open. It’s two-thirty now.

Becket moving the podium

Becket moving the podium

Three new shows will open tonight. The big downstairs gallery hosts Charline von Heyl’s paintings, enormous planes of color that seem to vibrate on the walls as though they too can feel the excitement. A few minutes ago I let in some people from Friedrich Petzel, Charline’s New York gallery, and as they turned the corner into the show I heard them say, “Wow!”

On the second floor, there’s a lot of activity in Blowing on a Hairy Shoulder / Grief Hunters, the big group show guest curated by Doron Rabina. There are a lot of animals in here—at least on video—enormous peacocks, a cawing raven, a quick fox, and a man with a chicken on his head on the wall just outside the gallery. There’s a supine figure lying on the floor (last week I saw it creepily unwrapped from the plastic sheet it was packed in), and a video fire blazing in an overturned desk. Some guys are moving equipment around, and the wall labels are provisionally tacked in place with blue tape, and Thom is walking through with a push broom, sweeping. It’s vibrant and noisy and wonderfully weird in here. Last week, when ICA’s director came through, she announced enthusiastically, “It’s a show about poetry! A poetic show.”

Sound guys setting up

Sound guys setting up

Stepping through the door into the Project Space is like stepping into a pool of stillness. ICA has recreated the studio of sculptor, print-maker, and teacher Bill Walton, complete with tools and works-in-progress, sweatshirts and coffee cups. Last week, when Grace was unpacking and arranging the contents, she told me some of the coffee cups contained old cigarette butts, making it extra important not to spill. With drawers ajar and slippers under the table, it looks like Walton, who died last year, has just gone out for a cigarette.

Out on the terrace, some guys are setting up the tent for the dinner while Jeff arranges tables. Becket is moving the podium. Alex and Jenna are looking for Doron to record an interview about his show for the website. William is tucking boxes away in a closet. Jacob is painting a wall. The sound guys are setting up in a corner. Thom is now sweeping out on the mezzanine, near where an exhausted figure, worn out from the week’s installation, naps on a pouf.

Some ICA staff members are already dressed in their opening finery: black dresses with cut-out sleeves, black dresses with elegant collars, high-heeled shoes showing off new pedicures. Others have hung dresses on the coat hooks, sheathed in garment bags, making for more surprise later, just as the locked museum doors this past month make for surprise tonight. I hope that, as I type this on Wednesday afternoon, you are somewhere putting your own finery on, getting ready to join us.

Of course, by the time you’re reading this, it will all be over: the party dresses put away, the speeches faded, the adrenaline spent, the spills mopped up. The art, though, will still be at the ready, waiting on the walls and plinths and video screens for you to come in.

Thom sweeping.

Thom sweeping.

* * *

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Posted in Bill Walton, Blowing on a Hairy Shoulder, Charline von Heyl, Installation | No Comments »

In Between Times, part 2

August 19 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

Last week I wrote about ICA’s summer shows closing; this week we’re more focused on opening the new, a shift that seemed to happen early Tuesday afternoon. On Tuesday morning, when I poked my head into the downstairs gallery, all I could see were sealed up crates and a push broom leaning up against the wall. When I stopped by later, though, Paul and Robert were in there untaping boxes. The first material for Blowing on a Hairy Shoulder / Grief Hunters had arrived.

Paul and Robert opening a crate.

“Look at this,” Robert said. He held up a baseball cap with a slogan reading, “I wish I could afford a Borsalino like my son in Kollel.” The hat, along with the other things in the boxes, is for a scatter piece by Eli Petel, a Tel Aviv artist who works in video and installation. I don’t know what a Borsalino is—a car? A stereo? A fancy golf club? And where is Kollel? The joke seems to be that the words are in English but we English speakers can’t parse them, we can only try to glork the meaning from context.

Other items emerge: Mendelssohn LPs, an expired passport, an old coin, a hand broom you might use to sweep a hearth. What can we guess about Eli Petel (or the persona he’s constructed) from this assortment? Is he nostalgic for the past, or does he maybe want to sweep it away?

More stuff.

Photo: J. Katz

And what is a Borsalino? I ask Jenna if she knows.

“Maybe people who hang out at the Bourse in Old City?” she suggests.

Out in the lobby, Paul and Jacob are wheeling carts with boxes holding the work Alex Da Corte made for a show that just closed in the Project Space. Alex was in yesterday to de-install it, after which (I’m told) everyone was covered with baby powder. Before I can find out why, Eliza comes down the stairs with news of some problem with the carpet that’s being installed in the auditorium. Robert goes off to investigate.

Yes, ICA’s auditorium is getting a makeover! Earlier this summer, Thom painted its walls a lovely gray. Next time you come for a program, we should have new, more comfortable chairs as well. I could write a whole blog post, actually, about the Quest for the Perfect Chair. Or possibly a novella.

Upstairs again, I ask William what he thinks about the Borsalino. “A plumbing thing,” he guesses. “Or something you wear around your neck. Or maybe a hat.” He’s in the conference room, where the programming people are getting ready for their weekly meeting. On the agenda: revamping our Guide by Cell. Call me biased, but ICA does a wicked job with this bit of auditory interpretation. Still, it’s on the table for an upgrade. They talk logistics: different platforms for recording the speakers, the best time to get people to sit down and tape a segment. Robert, finished with the carpet crisis, asks, “Do we think we should choose the show that’s hardest to understand to focus on for Guide by Cell?” Which fall show would that be, anyway? It’s not as easy a question to answer as you might think.

Hand with passport.

Snacks are always an important topic at programming meetings. At this one we discuss what to serve at the reception for graduate students we’re hosting in a couple of weeks, and where to serve it. Wine or beer? (Wine.) Auditorium or terrace? (Auditorium first for a quick slide presentation, then up onto the terrace for snacks.)

“I was thinking about a DiBruno’s mediterranean tray,” Jenna says.

“Is that the one with candied pecans?” William says.

“Tell the story about when you had that allergic reaction to nitrates,” Kate says.

“The next agenda item is front desk coverage,” Alex says.

I ask Alex if she knows what a Borsalino is.

“A kind a cheese?”

Back downstairs, the Eli Petel unpacking is going well.

More stuff.

Photo: William Hidalgo

Grace carefully records each item: every coin, every stick, every scrap of paper. My eye snags on that hat again, and I go back upstairs to Google it.

A hat! A Borasalino is a special, name-brand hat, like a Stetson. An Italian company, Borsalino is known for its fedoras made of felt made from Belgian rabbit fur. So, Petel’s hat is self-referential, like the T-shirt that tells everyone that all you got was this lousy T-shirt.

And Kollel? That one you’re going to have to look up for yourself. Or maybe come by ICA and ask William.

“I told you a Borsalino was a hat,” William says.

What can I say? William is always right.

*           *           *

NEXT WEEK: Look for a Miranda’s first-ever guest post by very special pinch hitter.

ICA’s three new shows, Charline von Heyl, Blowing on a Hairy Shoulder / Grief Hunters, and Bill Walton’s Studio, open on the evening of Wednesday, September 7.

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

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In Between Times (or, Not yet, not yet…)

August 12 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

The shows closed on Sunday, all three of them: Sheila Hicks, One is the loneliest number, and That’s How We Escaped. It was super busy at ICA the last few weeks as people flooded in to see them before they closed. We probably set a record for summer attendance. The current unofficial count is upward of 10,000 people, including 1,665 who came for programs and events.

Sign on door says ICA is closed

One of the main contributors to that solid program attendance number was last Wednesday’s Sister Ray Slam. Close to 400 people crowded into ICA to see Andy Warhol films (care of Jay Schwartz and Secret Cinema), eat Little Baby’s Ice Cream (Earl Grey Sriracha, Balsamic Banana, Birch Beer Vanilla Bean, and other flavors), and hear Dry Feet, Megajam Booze Band, and the Sweet Sister Ray band each offer up their own rendition of the Velvet Underground’s classic “Sister Ray.” Having planned to have the Slam outdoors on the terrace, we were upset when the forecast called for rain. But as it turned out, the energy inside that packed building was fabulous, a contemporary echo of a 60s Warhol Factory bash. The only downside was how utterly totally drenched people got taking the trash out to the dumpster at the one in the morning.

Even with the shows closed and the museum doors locked, there’s plenty to do. There are new shows to open, loose ends to tie up from old ones, and groundwork to lay for projects that won’t be in the galleries for years. I spent a lot of the day copy editing the proof of the catalogue for last winter’s Anne Tyng exhibition, which also documents the show’s run at the Graham Foundation in Chicago in the spring. ICA often publishes its catalogues after the shows open, because for us these books document the exhibitions as they are presented here in our space. Installation photography is crucial, so even if the photographers get in as soon as the show opens, there’s a delay. This catalogue is going to be gorgeous—well worth the wait—with vivid images of two very different installations of the same work in Philadelphia and Chicago. I love what the book designers, Project Projects, have done with Tyng’s life chronology, laying it out with photographs and relevant quotations from the architect like this aphoristic one: “It takes more than effort to make something simple.”

Also today, Becket was arranging travel for Ingrid to research a show scheduled for 2013, and Kate was ordering two versions of part of the wall vinyl because there might only be 19 artists in an upcoming show instead of 20, and Jacqueline was revising the bios of the 20 (or perhaps 19) artists in that show, and Alex was trying to nail down presenters for the fall programs, and Nikyia was adding installation crew members into the payroll system, and Annie was sealing stacks of invitations to the fall opening dinner into envelopes.

At noon, though, everyone took a break for the intern goodbye lunch.

Intern lunch

Photo: William Hidalgo

Luckily the weather was good, so this time we could be on the terrace. It’s impossible to overstate the amount of work the interns do for ICA, and it’s always sad to see them go, but they are en route to new adventures. One is going off to study in China, another to a programming job at an art center in her home town, and a third to finish her degree in painting. Pretty soon these people and others like them will be running museums all over the world.

It’s amazing how fast the shows come down. On Monday, the crew took all the crates out of storage and put them near the pieces that would be packed into them. On Tuesday, I finally got to see the inside of the crate from the Stedelijk Museum that Sheila Hicks compared to a boat during installation last March. Annie and I marveled over its J-shaped compartments, while Enrico Martignoni, here from Paris for the de-install, explained that the Stedelijk crates are always the same size—so that storing them doesn’t become a jigsaw puzzle—and therefore the inside parts must be custom designed for the art. By Wednesday, nearly everything had been packed up. The geometric green sculptural pieces by Lucas Ajemian and Julien Bismuth looked lonely in the upstairs gallery like the last autumn leaves still clinging to the tree.

Next week construction will begin for the new shows, which open September 7. ICA is presenting a major retrospective of the work of painter Charline von Heyl; a group show of mostly young, mostly Israeli artists, guest curated by Tel Aviv-based Doron Rabina; and a re-creation of the studio of the minimalist sculptor Bill Walton, who was important to so many artists in Philadelphia. I’m excited about all of these shows, but it’s difficult how quickly they surge toward us. Not yet, not yet, I want to say. Give us a little silence first—or perhaps a tolling of bells—to mark the passage.

*           *           *

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Maira Kalman: Suitcases in the Fireplace

August 5 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

“Look,” I said. “The suitcases are in the fireplace!”

“They look good there,” David said.

Suitcases in the fireplace

Photo: Bradford Robotham

David and I were in New York seeing Maira Kalman: Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World) before it closed last weekend at The Jewish Museum. The exhibition was organized at ICA by Senior Curator Ingrid Schaffner, and it was on view there during the spring of 2010. If you’re lucky, you’ve seen it at one of its four venues: the ICA in Philadelphia, the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, or The Jewish Museum. If you’re super lucky, you got to see it at more than one.

Like diplomats or rock bands, exhibitions travel all the time. It’s always sad to see a show packed into its crates, but it softens the blow a little when you know it’s moving on someplace else. It’s a little like sending a child off to college: you’ve done your best by them, and you have to trust they’ll thrive. Still, you may feel better if you visit on Parents Weekend and see for yourself.

Several ICA staff members have seen Maira Kalman in all its venues, but I only saw it in Philadelphia and New York. I’d heard it looked very different ensconced in the elegant New York townhouse of The Jewish Museum, and I was eager to see for myself what that meant.

Dress and ironing board

Dress and ironing board against Sol LeWitt mural. Photo: John Aquino

How strange and delightful it was to enter a new space and encounter old friends! There was that familiar ironing board, only hanging on a wall now, with the pink dress nearby. There was the man who looked like he was skating, and the pink package tied with string, and all the dogs. There was our own wall text—which I had proofread a dozen times—and our funding credits and Ingrid’s name. There was the picture my mother liked best, the one of Emily Dickinson, and there was Ben Franklin in his fur hat wearing an expression suggesting that he at least was not at all sure he wanted to be out of Philadelphia. It was as though all these items had arranged to meet David and me in Manhattan, perhaps for dinner and a show.

At ICA, the whole Kalman exhibition fit in one room. In the middle was an installation, composed by Maira, referred to as “many tables of many things”—though there weren’t just tables of things but also ladders and buckets, a pie chest of linens, some chairs, and those suitcases. The pictures themselves were installed in one long ribbon, frame often right up against frame, giving a feeling of the long sweep of Maira’s work. It suggested a continuous narrative you could fall into, a shaggy dog story maybe, or a fanciful epic.

ICA installation view

ICA installation view. Photo: Greenhouse Media

At The Jewish Museum the rooms are smaller, so works and objects were necessarily divided up among connected rooms. Within each room there might be space for only three pictures between a doorway and a corner, though on other walls you could see perhaps twenty together. Here the mind was more likely to absorb the work in smaller bites, to think about how a handful of pictures related to each other, and then another handful, as though the show were a book of poems.

The gallery where the exhibition was presented at ICA is a big open space with white walls and high ceilings. At The Jewish Museum, the door frames are made of dark wood, an ornate frieze runs along the top of the walls, and there are marble fireplaces like the one in which I spied the suitcases. Something about the contrast between the old fashioned New York surroundings and the signature Kalman whimsy (not that all her work is whimsical) felt alive in a very Kalmanesque way. It was nice, too, to look past the objects and see the city outside the windows. The trees waving in Central Park looked as though Maira had painted them, and I thought about how, when we look at art, we begin to see the whole world inflected by the vision of whatever artist we’re immersed in.

Installation at The Jewish Museum

At The Jewish Museum. Photo: Bradford Robotham/The Jewish Museum

When it was time to go, David and I took one last look. The pictures seemed as fresh as ever, even after so much time in the public view. Most of these pictures were made in New York after all, and the installation objects were largely New Yorkers too; it was hard to escape the feeling that, after an exhilarating national tour, the objects in Various Illuminations felt they had come home.

* * *

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NOTE: Miranda is ready for a new fall look! If you have suggestions of images in the public domain–or that you would like to donate–that stick to the snake theme, she would be most grateful. Send ideas to: rpastan@upenn.edu

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Warhol Blouse

May 5 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

We’re in my station wagon driving up Lancaster Avenue past the trolley tracks and the boarded up houses, but when we cross the city line into Montgomery County the streets are suddenly lined with blooming cherry trees. Virginia, ICA’s Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow, points out a sign that looks like it spells “SIN,” though really it’s just pointing out South and North on Route 1. Robert, ICA’s Director of Curatorial Affairs, asks Hillary, a Penn freshman, how she traced the Andy Warhol blouse, the piece of clothing patterned with Warhol’s Green Stamps print which we are on a mission to fetch. She says she used the White Pages.

Robert and Hillary looking at The Blouse

The blouse was worn by ICA Board Chair Eleanor Biddle “Lally” Lloyd to Warhol’s first solo museum show, which was held at ICA in October 1965. ICA is displaying it as part of “That’s How We Escaped”: Reflections on Warhol, an exhibition in ICA’s Project Space on view this spring and summer. Hillary is part of the freshman seminar “Contemporary Art and the Art of Curating”—the original undergraduate course in curating in the country—which is organizing the exhibition. She tells us how she called various relatives of Lally Lloyd’s; how Lally’s son led her to his two sisters, the one who had photos of the ‘65 Warhol show, and this one, who has the blouse. Hillary is an impressive young woman: I can’t imagine making calls like that at eighteen.

In fact, the whole freshman seminar is impressive! Guided by their instructors, these kids have researched Warhol and his ICA exhibition; tracked down soup cans, articles, programs, and photographs; obtained permissions; written press releases and wall text; and done everything else that goes into curating a show. It’s fitting: Sam Green, ICA’s one-time director, who organized that original Warhol exhibition, was only in his twenties at the time. (Warhol himself, on the other hand, had already had a career as a commercial artist and was pushing forty.)

Hillary and Minney

The gray stucco house sits behind rhododendron bushes. It looks modest from the outside, but there’s a lot of space when you go in. Minney Robb, Lally Lloyd’s daughter, introduces us to her husband Ted. If they didn’t expect a whole troop of us, they’re too polite to let on. In her purple sneakers, Minney show us into the dining room, where a large white box lies on the table. Robert pulls on his art handling gloves before he lifts the lid and unwraps the blouse, which, like the house, is bigger than I expected.

“This was made by my mother’s dress maker,” Minney says, showing us where Warhol signed his name.

“Is there a name for that style of blouse?” Virginia asks.

“Sixties,” Minney says, and she laughs, pointing out the bowl neck, the three quarter sleeves.

We ooh and ahh. “Where do you keep something like that?”

“Under the bed,” Ted says. “In the guest room.” He smiles, and the talk turns to insurance.

The Blouse, with photos of an earlier installation it was in

Hillary asks about a painting on the wall. “Is that one of your children?”

“No, it was me as a child,” Minney says. The painting, by Franklin Watkins, shows a young girl with red ribbons in her hair, scissoring a piece of cloth. I imagine it must have been painted around the same time Lally was donning her Green Stamps blouse and waiting for the babysitter who would watch Minney and her siblings while Lally attended the Warhol opening, a crazy manic celebrity event with crowds on the silver-painted floor chanting for Andy, who sought refuge with Edie Sedgwick on a metal staircase and ultimately escaped through a hole cut in the roof.

Think of all the bits of history packed in boxes, waiting in attics and closets and under guest beds for someone like Hillary to come calling. I’m glad we’re able to offer this blouse a little air and the company of other Warhol mementos for a while. Think of the conversations that go on in stagey whispers under the vitrine: soup can and blouse comparing signatures; invitation and newsletter swapping memories; photographs and articles arguing over the details. Climb the steps to the Project Space, put your ear to the Plexiglas, and listen.

Warhol show opening! Photo: J. Katz

“That’s How We Escaped”: Reflections on Warhol is on view at ICA through August 7.

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Posted in Andy Warhol, Installation | 3 Comments »

Sheila Hicks: The most beautiful belly buttons

April 15 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

“The Swedes are known to have the most beautiful belly buttons,” Sheila Hicks says. It is a few days before her show, Sheila Hicks: 50 Years opens at ICA, and we are sitting on a bench in ICA’s lobby watching Enrico Martignoni, 35 feet up in the air on a Genie, hang Raining Baby Bands from the ceiling. This work consists of clean white baby bands—pieces of cotton cloth used in Swedish hospitals to wrap the umbilical stumps of newborns—tied together in long, lovely strands. It is the use of these bands, Sheila explains, that makes the Swedes’ navals so attractive.

Photo: J. Katz

Sheila points to the other lobby work, Baby Time Again, which is already hung. This one is made of newborns’ white cotton shirts unsewn and then reassembled and stitched together in great sheets with gaps where the heads would have gone through, and more gaps where the body of the shirt curves into the sleeve. She takes my notebook and makes a drawing to show me, pointing out the almond-shaped spaces where “the little patches of things come through—the light, the sky.” On a sunny day like this, in our spacious glassy lobby, the two bright hangings flutter cheerfully like sails before the blue of the clear March morning.

Photo: J. Katz

Sheila goes on explaining things. “In the eighties, I made a series of shows, and instead of shipping materials, they shipped me!” She tells me about going to Oslo, Norway and Lund, Sweden and making work out of freshly washed hospital laundry, partly for the pleasure (and economy) of using what was to hand, and also “for the unity of it—it was white. And it was snow, it was January.” In Paris they hung the baby shirt panel in a gallery on Boulevard Saint Germain in front of a bus stop. In Jerusalem she made a similar work out of soldiers’ uniforms.

“The concept originated on the avenue of the Grande-Armée in Paris,” Sheila says. This was in the seventies, and she had applied to the Tapestry Biennial of Lausanne, which required a work made of six square meters of material. Her proposal drawing was accepted, but Sheila didn’t have time to make the piece. One day, however, she was driving down the Avenue de la Grande-Armée, and there was a laundry truck in front of her, making its round of the hotels, picking up dirty sheets and delivering clean ones. That’s when she had the idea: borrow linens from a local Lausanne hospital to make her tapestry. “That was the year I got thrown out of the Biennial!” she exclaims. “They considered it blasphème. But I got a lot of press, and it was a turning point in the Biennale Tapisseire.” People started to look at ready-mades and other new forms. “It was 1977,” she says, but her daughter, Itaka, who is standing nearby, disagrees.

“It was 1975,” Itaka says. She remembers because of what year she was in at school. They argue peaceably. Itaka says she remembers telling her mother not to do the laundry tapestry, and Sheila says this was how she knew it was a good idea. “She was very conservative,” she says of her daughter, and they smile at each other, remembering.

Photo: J. Katz

Itaka says, “I love the baby bands! I love the way they catch the light, and that they swaddled so many babies. And they go on, from exhibition space to exhibition space.” Take a moment to consider those babies of Lund and Lausanne, all grown up. Are the Swedes displaying their beautiful navels complacently on some sunny beach even now? Are the Swiss pondering the boundaries of art?

High in the air Enrico, who is married to Itaka, measures a distance from the high windows along the ceiling, makes a mark, drills a hole, measures again. Behind us in ICA’s auditorium, the installation crew irons and knots more baby bands for Enrico to hang. Something has shifted: baby clothes become art, readied for use by the hands of men, their new handmaidens, under the direction of women.

Not that it matters: men or women, tapestry or blasphemy, 1975 or 1977. What matters is the snowy cloth, the patches of sky coming through, and the people passing on the street who peer in, their day illuminated briefly by the light that has traveled here from that long-ago moment on the Avenue de la Grande-Armée as from a distant star.

Photo: J. Katz

* * *

Sheila Hicks: 50 Years is on view at ICA through August 7, but don’t wait that long!

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Elegy for an Exhibition

February 25 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

Last week Set Pieces closed. For five months the exhibition, curated by artist Virgil Marti from the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, inhabited ICA’s big downstairs gallery. 6,200 people came to see it, 29 tours came through. The last few days, I spotted Virgil himself in there a bunch of times, talking with people, taking a last look.

On Monday, when I get in, the de-installers are already at work. Four yellow drill cases are lined up near the sculpture case where Claes Oldenburg’s “Miniature Drum Set,” Raymond Duchamp-Villon’s “Aesop,” and a marble “Head of St. John as a Boy” wait, their eyes elsewhere, pretending not to notice. Big wooden platforms and large pieces of Styrofoam lean against walls, and industrial lights cast unfamiliar shadows through which men in plaid shirts stride like cowboys, their drills casually dangling.

Photo: J. Katz

The tilt-top tables are the first to go. Their tops slide off to be wrapped separately, or else the whole piece is fitted into a wooden frame, shrouded in blankets, slipped into a crate. Table by table, the Dorothea Tanning erotic couch sculpture they’ve been shielding is exposed to view, but no one’s looking. Even the mirrors are going blind, lifted from the wall and covered, as Jews cover their mirrors at times of death. The carved wooden frames are labeled with bright orange identification tickets like toe tags.

In the next room—the bright white room with the marble busts displayed on fluffy poufs—two of the heads have already been crated. Braced like whiplash victims, they peer sadly out through wooden slats like children out of the back of a car at the end of summer camp. A few others, still in place, look on warily as a man in an orange T-shirt and purple Nitrile gloves changes his drill bit. The silver goose gleams murkily in its vitrine and is reflected in the great, gold-rimmed, fish-eye mirror still hanging on the wall. What else has this mirror reflected over the past five months? Arguments, illicit kisses, jealous artists, unhappy bankers solaced by art? And before that, back through the long centuries, what has it witnessed? Deaths, marriages, banquets, massacres? The long dull passage of empty days?

Perhaps, after all, like any eye that has watched so long without blinking, it is looking forward to its approaching rest.

Photo: J. Katz

* * *

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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Inhabiting Geometry

January 2 2011

Photo: J. Katz

post by Rachel Pastan

Paul and two guys from the crew are 35 feet up on the Genie lift, examining the first couple of loops of an airy helix.

“I think it looks cool,” Paul says. “But I think he’s going to want it tighter.” He turns a switch and the Genie squeals, lowering them to the floor.

Weeks from now, when the exhibition Anne Tyng: Inhabiting Geometry opens, the helix, made of crisscrossed pieces of Luan plywood, will fill that part of the gallery, looping down to meet up with its geometric forbearers: a cube, a triangular pyramid, a dodecahedron, and a couple of others. These shapes too will be big—big enough to stand in, to walk around in, to experience and explore. Big enough, as the show’s name implies, to inhabit if ICA were open 24/7, which we’re not. You’re welcome to spend the day in there, but we’ll ask you to leave at closing time.

One feels that Anne Tyng, who designed this installation and whose work the exhibition explores, does actually inhabit geometry. Or maybe it inhabits her. I’ve written before in this space about how Tyng’s love of architecture goes back to her childhood in China where her parents were missionaries, how she takes a sensual delight in form. She writes of the “magic revelation in my first creation of space for human use,” and of her “passionate search for essences of form and space.” Now ninety, having worked as an architect for thirty years and taught architecture for nearly another thirty, Tyng’s passion for form is literally taking shape in ICA’s gallery. Architect and professor Srdjan Weiss and his assistant Kristen Smith have been working with Tyng to realize her vision, and now ICA’s crew is bolting together thin strips of wood, dangling wires from wall and ceiling, and erecting octahedrons the size of minivans.

I love this moment in the museum, when everyday an exhibition comes a little further to life. When music is playing on speakers in the background and all kinds of bric-a-brac washes up on long tables as on a beach: scissors, work gloves, plans, newspapers, a camera, a pile of white art handling gloves, a notebook, time sheets, books, balls of wire, balls of yarn. Today the gallery floor is marked with angular spirals laid out in blue tape, as though an English garden maze is being planned. More blue tape brightens the walls at eye level, mysterious figures scribbled on it. The room smells of paint.

Photo: Paul Swenbeck

I imagine Anne Tyng enjoyed moments like these all her life—moments when her plans and renderings began to take shape on building sites. You can see some of her buildings rise from the ground in photographs that will also be part of the exhibition. Darcey, ICA’s registrar, showed me the working checklist this morning. I was excited to see plans and pictures of the buildings I’ve read about, particularly the Four-Poster House in which the bed serves as the central organizing form and metaphor.

The plans and photos come from Penn’s Architectural Archive, which is co-presenting the show with ICA. Yesterday Ingrid, who is organizing the show, came back from the Archives with articles about Tyng’s early life and career. “Petite Blonde Succeeds As Architect in Phila” a headline in The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Women’s section proclaims in May of 1950. How’s that for news! “Just under five feet,” the article explains, Anne Tyng “has the look of ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ but don’t be misled by the façade for she has the astuteness of a woman who knows every facet of architecture.”

Is that use of the word “façade” an intentional joke? Did articles about architects in the men’s sections include their height?

A more interesting question: could Tyng, exploring secret passages in her childhood home in Jiangxi, China, imagine what the future held in store for her?

Well, maybe she could. She was always a visionary.

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Anne Tyng: Inhabiting Geometry, opens at ICA on January 13 and runs through March 20. The exhibition is organized by ICA Senior Curator Ingrid Schaffner; consulting curator Srdjan Jovanović Weiss, Assistant Professor, Tyler Architecture, Temple University; and William Whitaker, Curator and Collections Manager, The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania. The exhibition is a collaboration between ICA and Penn’s Architectural Archives.

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Big Truck Unloading

September 7 2010

post by Rachel Pastan

Photo: Darcey Sawicz

It’s installation season at ICA, which is maybe more fun even than exhibition season. Every day something new happens: a wall gets painted bright orange, or it disappears altogether to reveal a row of windows that was there all along, or you walk into a gallery and find six elegant cloudy mirrors reflecting the world back to you, but differently. (Isn’t that what art does—let in light in unexpected ways? Reflect the world back to you, but differently?)

Today Darcey, ICA’s assistant registrar, stopped by my desk to tell me the art delivery trucks were coming with the objects for the upstairs shows: Mineral Spirits, Ann Chu and Matthew Monahan and Erin Shirreff: Still, Flat, and Far. The crates holding Shirreff’s work were so heavy, she said, they might need two side-by-side trucks with lift gates to unload them. During the morning, while she was waiting for the trucks to arrive, Darcey was on the phone a lot saying things like: “All three of the clocks are going together,” and “The Benjamin Franklin wasn’t on the schedule till next week,” and other intriguing, unlikely sentences.

When the truck finally arrived around lunchtime, it pulled up in front of the museum in the No Stopping Any Time zone. The crew came out of the museum and got ready to carry things, and Darcey took out her clipboard and her red pencil, and I stood under a tree trying to look inconspicuous. It was a beautiful, sunny, late summer day. People walking by in suits and scrubs and miniskirts turned their heads to watch.

It takes four people to lift the first big crate onto the dollies. The crates, which are built by specialized art crate builders, are lovely, pale and sturdy with useful glyphs printed on them in red: two up arrows, a broken wine glass, an umbrella with rain falling on it. A good crate for a big piece of art can cost $4,000 or more.

Another crate comes off, even bigger than the first, and then an oddly shaped bundle the size of a shrub shrouded in bubble wrap and pink packing tape, then four long cardboard tubes that look like they might hold bazookas. What can be in all these crates and boxes and tubes? Will the art live up to the dream of what the art might be before anyone sees it?

Down the crates go from the tailgate onto the dollies, around the truck on the street side and up the curb cut, over the metal threshold into the museum with a one, two, three and lift. Then across the floor, down the ramp, and up in the elevator to the second floor. So far all the crates have fit into the elevator. Darcey is checking them off on her clipboard as they go by, but I don’t see how she knows what they are until she shows me their markings: AC for Anne Chu’s work, MM for Matthew Monahan’s, and then a number corresponding to a number on her clipboard for a particular object, and then sometimes “1 of 3” or “2 of 3” for the big objects that come in several section. When I get closer, I see that some of the crates are labeled with titles too: “Seventeen Candlesticks Black Sides,” one says. “Nine Hellish Spirits #3,” says another. Upstairs in the gallery, the crew lines the crates up in neat rows and goes down for more.

“Will they unpack them this afternoon?” I ask Darcey.

“No,” she says. “We let everything acclimatize for 24 hours before we open it.” It’s a humidity and temperature thing.

The last crate so enormous it might hold a small rhinoceros. It won’t fit in the elevator. Eight sweaty, panting men and women stand around talking about what to do. They’ll have to uncrate down here tomorrow and see if it will fit then. Darcey says she knows of museums that carry oversized pieces on top of their elevators, but it’s dangerous, and we don’t do that here.

People start to drift away. The truck guys leave to bring another load. Shannon gives the crew an hour for lunch. Darcey and one of the art deliverers go upstairs to go over the paperwork. Robert locks the front doors. The big crate sits in the sunny lobby with its cheerful red up arrows and open umbrellas. If there’s a rhinoceros in there, it’s being very quiet. Probably it’s asleep

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