post by Rachel Pastan

There are tables set up on the ICA’s sunny mezzanine by the glass doors to the Terrace, and they’re covered with computers. Students sit around chatting and telling each other what they’ve got on their hard drives and memory sticks. Lots of music of course, and old papers, and baby pictures. They have poetry and syllabi, study guides and snapshots and random icons and video clips. One person has brought in every file on her computer that has her name on it: Trisha photos, Trisha resumes, Trisha cover letters for jobs. One person has brought in a lot of harmonica music. None of it is in any particular order, but if you want any of it, go ahead and take it! It’s free, or at least it’s barter-able. Take a Megabyte, leave a megabyte.

This is a digital swap meet run by the students of Penn’s English 165, “Writing through Art and Culture: Transcribing the Wor(l)d,” a collaboration between ICA and Penn’s Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing. Under the guidance of their professor, avant garde poet and self-styled trickster Kenny Goldsmith, the students have spent the semester listening to and exploring the depths of the manipulated voice beginning with 78 RPM recordings of séances and working their way up to digital manipulation. Today is all about the digital but—in keeping with the spirit of Maira Kalman, whose works are on exhibition just around the corner in the second-floor gallery—it has a hands-on quality as well. Kalman spoke to the students last month about her ideas for an event she imagined—called “Milton” for no obvious reason—a conceptual space for ephemeral activities like ironing or selling pickles. She talked about exchange and pleasure, and these qualities are certainly on view here. There is a definite flea market quality. Since the files are not organized, students sit and scroll them, sifting and sampling. Or, as one student, Julia Nelson, says, it’s “not unlike going through someone else’s dirty laundry while he’s watching.”

Lucia della Paolera, one of the Miltonistas, says she likes the social aspect, the way you get to know people by chatting and hanging around the mezzanine as well as through the digital traces they leave behind them like fingerprints. “The model of the internet is insular,” she says, “but for this you have to physically be there.”

All weekend the students sit, scroll, download, chat, upload, snack, consider, discuss. Afternoon wanes and evening falls, and images on the screens succeed other images which replace and overlay and substitute for other images.

It’s strange to think that—if you carry the same thumb drive out of the museum that you carried in—what you have with you is different. It doesn’t feel quite like walking in with a hairbrush and leaving with a tea cup, which might have been more like what Maira Kalman had in mind. But in fact, that’s exactly what it is.

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Come see our exhibition, Maira Kalman: Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World) before it closes on Sunday and head out to California! Or, if you’re in California, get ready to see it at the Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco, starting July 2, or the Skirball Cultural Center in L.A. starting November 16.

post by Rachel Pastan

Chee Pearlman is wearing a red shirt and red tights that match her red glasses frames, and she looks fantastic. She has a bright yellow legal pad too, on which she has made notes for this conversation between Michael Bierut (design luminary and partner at Pentagram), herself (editor-in-chief of the late ID Magazine, among other accomplishments), and special surprise guest Maira Kalman (illustrator, author, and subject of a ICA current exhibition), about the legacy of Maira Kalman’s husband, the designer, magazine editor, and manifesto writer Tibor Kalman, who died in 1999.

Words like “maverick” get thrown around a lot when people talk about Tibor, who never formally studied design: maverick, radical, visionary, non-conformist. Sitting on the stage, his widow uses blunter language: “Monster,” she says, half smiling. “People liked it when I came to the office,” she goes on, referring to M&Co, the “maverick” design firm Tibor ran, “because I tamed the beast.”

How do you evoke the charisma of someone who’s not there? It’s an inherently awkward proposition, but over the course of the evening the conversation among these three people—their stories, and the slides they show of Tibor’s work, and their palpable fondness—give a sense of the man who got his big chance when the window dresser at the bookstore where he worked was laid up sick and Tibor got to step in: And the rest is history!

Michael Bierut says: “Tibor did something the first time to prove he could do it, and the second time to prove how boring it was to repeat it.” Chee Pearlman, reading from her yellow pad, quotes Tibor’s dedication of the book Bierut and Peter Hall edited about him and his work, Perverse Optimist (Yale Architectural Press, 2000): “For my sexy girlfriend, beautiful wife, lifetime collaborator, humorista, goodness consultant, and fellow traveler on the international curiosity circuit.”

Maira says, “I like to keep it short.”

There is a lot of reminiscing about the Christmas gifts M&Co used famously to send their friends and clients: A bar of soap in a box engraved with the words “Basta nostalgia,” so recipients could wash that suspect quality away. An old book interleaved with cash: a one, a five, a ten, then a twenty, and finally an addressed envelope inviting you to put the money in, add some more, and send it all to a worthy charity! Tibor even turned giving upside down.

Toward the end of the evening, Michael Bierut asks Maira Kalman how Tibor influenced her as an artist, and she speaks quite beautifully about how he made her work. He believed in work, in finding the solution in the doing, in weaving together working and living. “He still influences everything I do,” Maira says.

Bierut says: “Really?”

Maira says: “I don’t know.”

Tibor’s maverick aura hangs in the room; what might it do? Order in pizza, as the man was known to during formal design conference presentations? Browbeat the audience? Make jokes? Brandish a ghostly bar of soap? Basta nostalgia! Time to get back to work.

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The exhibition of Maira Kalman’s work, Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World) is open at ICA through June 6.

Emily Dickinson

post by Rachel Pastan

On a cold Wednesday evening last winter, ICA Senior Curator Ingrid Schaffner spoke about and showed pictures by Maira Kalman, the illustrator, author, and designer who is the subject of ICA’s current exhibition, Maira Kalman: Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World). Schaffner began by telling the story she often tells about putting together this exhibition, describing the blank looks she gets when she mentions Kalman’s name. The artist, probably best known for her “New Yorkistan” cover for The New Yorker magazine—an early leavening of humor in the wake of 9/11—and for her children’s books featuring Max the dog-poet, is not a household name. But what’s an ICA exhibition for if not to put an interesting and important artist on the map?

That Kalman is interesting and important becomes clearer and clearer as Schaffner talks, showing images of the work and describing the way she organized the exhibition: thinking narratively, grouping the works by theme—self-portraits, family, dogs, mapping, cities, and so on—creating a ribbon of pictures around the walls. She explicates Kalman’s relationship to other artist-illustrators (Steig, Spiegelman, Crumb) as well as to painters like Chagall and Matisse. She raises and takes on the “c” word—charm. Kalman’s work is undeniably charming, so can it be serious, profound, important? Well, can Matisse’s? Is it bad to be decorative? Is it worse if you’re a woman and collect linens as well as onion rings and mosses (the exhibition includes several of Kalman’s collections, as well as illustrations of the collections). The questions linger, accumulate, resonate, the same way the images do.

Schaffner tells us a bit about Kalman’s life: her marriage to Tibor Kalman (founder of the revolutionary design firm M&Co, the “M” standing for “Maira”) who died in 1999, her Holocaust-surviver parents, her penchant for city wandering, for stealing towels from hotel rooms, her passion for snacks. There is darkness here, right in the middle of the lightness, and once Schaffner tells you about it, it’s impossible not to see it in the work. It’s not that you see the work differently, exactly. It’s that you understand more clearly what you’ve been seeing all along, what the human weight is that keeps this bright, decorative, and often whimsical work from preciousness.

And what’s an ICA curatorial lecture for, if not to help you understand more deeply what it is you’re seeing? If not to bring heat and illumination to a dark, late winter night?

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The exhibition Maira Kalman: Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World) is open at ICA through June 6.