Archive for the ‘Set Pieces’ Category

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

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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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Look!

February 18 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

Last week’s ICA lecture, “The Artist as Curator,” was introduced by ICA director Claudia Gould standing behind an unfamiliar podium. “For those of you who are regulars here,” she said, “this is a very new podium, made by Paul Swenbeck [ICA’s head preparator] and his team. It smells of paint.” The new podium is indeed very nice: sleek and white, with a convenient shelf for presenters’ laptops. As someone who cannot make anything, I love working at a place where no one would think of going online and ordering a podium. Obviously someone who works here would just make one.

Over the last few weeks I’ve written a series of essays for this blog about Virgil Marti’s show Set Pieces, curated from the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), for which Virgil explored the depths of PMA storage and arranged an assortment of the pieces he found there in intriguing mash-ups and suggestive vignettes. In these posts I’ve been poking away at the question of how Virgil approached that task, and, more generally, what it means to curate an exhibition. How do curators organize the art they present? Is it their job to make a story out of it? An argument? To show the art off to its best advantage? To make you see it in a new way?

Virgil and Ingrid squaring off in Virgil's show, Set Pieces. Photo: J. Katz

How serendipitous that all the time I was writing those little pieces, ICA’s Ingrid Schaffner—a thoughtful and insightful person and an actual curator—was getting ready to address herself to this very topic! It was, in fact, the underlying subject of tonight’s lecture.

Standing at the new podium, Ingrid told an audience of about 100 that the idea of an artist making an exhibition out of a museum’s collection goes back to 1969, when Andy Warhol lifted all kinds of things from the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art’s storage and arranged them—or sometimes declined to arrange them—in the galleries. The resulting show, Raid the Icebox, featured rows and ranks of Windsor chairs, racks of shoes, clusters of hanging umbrellas, and lots of baskets, blankets, paintings, ceramics.

Even before artists were raiding museums’ iceboxes, of course, they were curating. In 1938 Andre Breton invited Marcel Duchamp to organize a surrealism show in Paris, which Duchamp did. There were no lights in this exhibition; visitors were given flashlights to illuminate the paintings as they made their way through piles of leaves and under the 1,200 empty coal sacks dangling from the ceiling.

I’d love to just list all the intriguing shows Ingrid mentioned. A 1989 Brancusi exhibition at MoMA organized by Scott Burton helped viewers see that Brancusi’s pedestals should themselves be seen as sculpture. Fred Wilson’s 1992 exhibition at the Maryland Historical Society displayed artifacts from that state’s history—like iron shackles and silver spoons—side by side. John Waters Curates Andy’s “Porn”, at the Andy Warhol Museum in 2005, was viewable in a wooden cubicle complete with glory holes. Of this last, Ingrid quoted then-Warhol museum curator John Smith who said, perhaps a little wistfully, “I don’t think I could have gotten away with that.”

Which brings us to the crux of her lecture: what is the difference between the way an artist curates and the way a curator curates?

“It’s my job as a curator to minimize the distance between the viewer and the object,” Ingrid opined, whereas, as an artist, “Virgil inserts himself.” He paints the wall purple; he builds white fluffy poufs to display stuff on; he offers us a marble bust resting on its side. The professional curator is not supposed to indulge in such high jinx.

But doesn’t the professional curator have a point of view, too? Doesn’t she have style? Of course she does. But she’s supposed to be less flamboyant in the way she conveys it to us, adhering to a kind of institutionalized modesty. If you stop to think about it, though, what’s the least bit modest about choosing art, spending a decent amount of money to organize it in a room, inviting the public, and saying: Look! This is worth looking at!

At the end of her talk, Ingrid related that thinking about how Virgil inserted himself into the making of Set Pieces threw into relief for her how made all exhibitions are, implying that the exhibition-maker—the curator—is really a species of artisan. I liked that: the exhibition-making artisan (Ingrid) talking about an exhibition made by an artist (Virgil) known for his décor-as-fine-art (chandeliers, wallpaper, poufs), while standing at the podium made by an artisan (Paul) who is, in fact, also an artist.

Paul working on the new podium. Photo: William Hidalgo

I’m starting to think of the curator as a kind of marionettist, pulling the strings from behind the curtain. Just because we don’t see her hand doesn’t mean her hand isn’t there: assured, controlling, and potent.

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Last Call

February 10 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

“I’m trying to avoid gushing about this film,” Virgil Marti says. He’s talking about Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975), the last in a series of movies being screened in conjunction with Virgil’s exhibition, Set Pieces, curated from the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), which closes at ICA on Sunday. The exhibition’s staged assemblies of objects have been influenced by these films in various ways, and one of the pleasures of the screenings is listening to Virgil explain how: getting a peek into the way his mind works.

Courtesy of ABC Entertainment, American Broadcasting Company and Paramount Pictures

Close to a hundred people turned out at International House’s excellent theater, where ICA provided ribs, cornbread, and Nashvillian Goo Goo Clusters (mentioned in the film) in addition to the movie. Afterwards there was a discussion, led by Penn film professor Kathy DeMarco, that vividly demonstrated how many people out there love Nashville as much as Virgil does. I have seldom been in an audience as passionate and knowledgeable as this one was about Altman, people raising their hands to cite his more obscure films, to fill us in on the film projects the director was almost offered but then wasn’t, and to quote (verbatim) from reviews, like Pauline Kael writing about Nashville’s “love of the supreme juices of everyday life.”

Many of the other films in this series (The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, L’Avventura, Citizen Kane), had very specific influences on Set Pieces, inspiring a particular vignette or the inclusion of a particular piece. With Nashville the influence seems more general. “There’s a car wreck at the beginning that throws everyone together,” Virgil says—meaning singers, groupies, stars, political operatives, weirdos, ordinary folks—and Set Pieces is certainly an exercise in disparate things being thrown together.

But no, not exactly thrown. Placed, maybe, or assembled: positioned, arranged, ordered, organized. Organize is the verb for what curators do—they organize exhibitions. When I first came to ICA I made the mistake of using the word design, and I was nicely corrected. Designing, I was told, was for interior decorators. Not that there’s anything wrong with that (as Jerry Seinfeld might have said), only it doesn’t imply the intellectual work that is so much of a curator’s job, and maybe the part they want to make sure we keep in mind.

Of course Virgil, as an artist, “organized” his exhibition differently than another kind of curator would have. Trekking through the vast steppes of the PMA’s storage to make his selections, he wasn’t choosing objects because of their significance in the ouevre of the maker, or because of their provenance; he was selecting the pieces that spoke to him.

Photo: Darcey Moore

Well, or maybe that’s exactly what all curators do. So maybe the difference is in the way the objects, once selected, were arranged: in a series of displays suggesting stories: the little bronze animals casting their enormous shadows, the decorous tilt-top tables screening the erotic couch, and so on.

But no. I argued here just the other week that telling stories is exactly what curators do.

So maybe the difference between Virgil’s show (which is also sometimes described as an installation) and a more conventional exhibition lies in the way the story is told. Just as Robert Altman revels in presenting overlapping stories and including all kinds of different characters from many walks of life, so Virgil offers us a fabulous range of things: busts and benches, pitchers and paintings, mirrors and models. They shouldn’t go together but they do, because the hand that has arranged them is so artful and so shrewd, and because the vision that has assembled them is so open to all kinds of aesthetics, techniques, approaches, styles, and at the same time so singular that it can synthesize all this stuff, making of it not a jumble but a marvelous teeming order.

Before the screening, Virgil said, “I think of this film as doing what history painting would be doing today if film weren’t here doing it.” I’m starting to think about Set Pieces, then, as a history installation of the American decorative arts—though I don’t think that was Virgil’s idea, exactly, nor are all the objects here American (though most of them are). Still, there’s something here: some sense that the exhibition explores—as the film explores—the weird, gorgeous, diverse, sometimes perverse, contradictory expansiveness that is America.

Though it’s best enjoyed on the big screen, you can see Nashville on DVD any time. Set Pieces, though, is only on view through Sunday, February 13. Don’t miss it.

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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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Hall of Mirrors

January 28 2011

Artist/maker unknown, American, Model of the Fairmount Waterworks, c. 1875, painted and unpainted woods, painted and unpainted metals, mirrored glass, sand, paper-mache, cork and cardboard, 42 3/8 inches, 19 x 45 x 31 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of Priscilla Grace, 1998.

post by Rachel Pastan

Close to a hundred people turned out last Wednesday night to see Orson Welles’s masterpiece Citizen Kane at International House. The film was being screened as part of a series organized with ICA’s exhibition Set Pieces, curated by Virgil Marti from the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA). To make the exhibition, Virgil trawled through the vast rooms of the PMA’s storage, chose objects that appealed to him, and re-staged them in ICA’s galleries (read more about the exhibition here). Some of the objects are arranged in ways suggested by his favorite movies. The first thing you see when you enter the galleries is a gorgeous model of the Philadelphia Waterworks, which reminded Virgil of the vision of Kane’s unfinished palace, Xanadu.

Before the screening, Virgil got up and said a few words. He told us for example that Roger Ebert, after explicating what was groundbreaking about Citizen Kane, remarked, “It’s not the film I’d want to see again right now.” Ingmar Bergman is reported to have called it “a total bore,” opining that Welles was totally overrated as a filmmaker. On the plus side, Virgil advised us to look out for Kane walking zombie-like through the hall of mirrors; the vast shadowy spaces; and the stark, haunting scene of words going up in smoke. He also talked about the amazing vision Welles gives us of the boxes and cartons and crates containing Kane’s collections. Referring to his own visit to the PMA’s store rooms Virgil said, “It’s virtually impossible to walk into a storage space and not think about the storage scene in Citizen Kane.”

I’ll confess right here that my feelings about the film are more or less in line with Bergman’s. Despite the extraordinary, original shots and Welles’s larger-than-life presence, I was bothered by the story’s narrative, which is perfunctorily handled. Welles doesn’t seem to care that much about dramatizing the story. For example, characters are always screeching about how Kane gets everything and then loses it, but we seldom see him doing either—just looking energetic or grim or doomed in response to it having happened off-camera. In a narrative, the viewer (or reader) asks, What will happen next? and hopes to be surprised; but in Kane you can see the trajectory well in advance. The surprises are all in the camera work.

Which brings me to this question: Is a museum exhibition a work of narrative art, or is it more immediate, atemporal, like a painting or a candlestick?

In Set Pieces, Virgil has certainly arranged the objects to take us on a journey. After the Waterworks, we move past a ceramic coffee pot painted to look like wood, a cabinet with faux books made of inlay, a little scene of three sculptures arranged in an apparent vignette (two heads and a Claes Oldenburg soft drum set, all the same size). Then we come upon the back of an enormous Renaissance bench, which we move around to admire the grand painted angels on its front. Maybe the relation of the images is more associative than narrative—more like poetry than like a novel—but one can feel those images accumulate, feel themes emerging and see changes played on them: objects which are disguised as something they are not (the coffee pot that’s not really wood, the cabinet that’s not really books); matched sets that don’t really match (the three sculptures); objects viewed from unusual angles (the bench). You might speculate that this last trope—objects viewed from unusual angles—is something Marti gleaned from Welles.

Citizen Kane. Courtesy of Mercury Productions and RKO Radio Pictures.

Much of Set Pieces is dark and shadowy, a la Welles’s vast shadowy spaces. But the last room is different. The dark carpeting has been taken up to reveal the white concrete floor, and the walls are white (except for the one that’s pink), and an arrangement of white fluffy poufs holds an assortment of mostly white marble busts. In this room too the familiar themes recur: objects in disguise, matched sets that don’t quite match, objects presented at unconventional angles (there’s a lovely bust lying on its side in here). But instead of shadows, we have emerged into light.

On earlier viewings of the exhibition I had wondered why Virgil made this choice. But after watching Citizen Kane, I feel he understood that the exhibition had to take us somewhere, had to enact some change, had to offer the viewer a surprise.

This, of course, is my lesson. I’m not suggesting that Virgil organized his installation in conscious contrast to the film’s treatment of narrative. His interests were elsewhere. Still: on Wednesday, February 2, International House will screen the last film in the exhibition series, Virgil Marti’s favorite movie, Robert Altman’s 1975 classic Nashville. I wonder what more about Set Pieces I’ll understand after seeing that.

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Set Pieces is on view at ICA until Sunday, February 13. The exhibition 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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Alluding to a Human Presence

January 11 2011

Foraging in PMA storage. Photo: I. Schaffner

post by Rachel Pastan

There’s no point in pretending there isn’t a flurry of excitement here at ICA when a critic from The New York Times comes around. Then of course, you have to hope they write a good review. And then you have to hope people read it.

There’s no point pretending, either, that one intention of this blog post isn’t to tell you that ICA’s exhibition Set Pieces, guest curated by Virgil Marti from the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), got a good review in the Times on Christmas Eve. Karen Rosenberg called the show “as irreverent as it is resourceful.” If you missed it, don’t worry; you can read it here.

Set Pieces restages objects from the PMA’s storage, often in little scenelets inspired by Virgil’s favorite films. Like the review, the catalogue too arrived shortly before Christmas, and it looks sensational: the size of a book of poetry, suffused with the bright orange and purple hues of the exhibition walls, with fold-out covers and Aaron Igler’s fabulous installation photography. ICA is a non-collecting museum, so we take our catalogues very seriously: they are our collection; they are what abides. ICA catalogues are published some time after the shows open, because it’s important to us that they document not just the art in the exhibitions but the exhibitions themselves: their arrangement, look, and mood. In addition to photographs and curatorial and critical essays, this one also has quotations from Joe Rishel, a senior curator at the PMA, who was Virgil’s main liaison there. Erudite, charming, witty, these quotations buzz through the pages like a wry wasp: “These objects were all sitting on the shelf in storage like that kids’ game called ‘dinner party.’ Who would you invite, if you had eight people to dinner, who would you put at the table and where?…I’d love to be at a dinner party with St. John the Baptist, Claes Oldenburg, and Aesop.” Those names refer to three sculptures grouped in a vitrine in the show as they were on a shelf in storage. A lucky accident, seen by an artist (Virgil) as an interestingly complicated conjunction, and presented to you, the viewer, to enjoy and consider. “Cinematic,” Rosenburg of the Times says.

Joe Rishel, Virgil, and Ingrid Schaffner. Photo: J. Katz

Virgil, who was brought up in St. Louis and moved to Philadelphia for art school in 1988, was in his first ICA show, You Talkin’ To Me? in 1996. “To have a show at the ICA made me feel like I was being taken seriously,” he told me. A Ramp project, Virgil Marti: Flowers of Romance, followed in 2003. Trained as painter but interested in printmaking, installations, and décor, Virgil is known for his exuberant, unlikely wallpapers and his colorful deer-antler chandeliers. Of the making of Set Pieces, he said, “I approached it much the way I would approach making work in the studio,” thinking of the juxtaposition of materials and the formal decisions to be made. But also, half-joking: “At least I didn’t have to make the work!”

Actually Virgil did make a little of the work in the show: the white furry poufs from which marble heads poke up in the exhibition’s final room in homage to a scene in Antonioni’s film L’Avventura.

The Set Pieces catalogue contains a great interview between Virgil and the art historian Richard Meyer, in which Meyer draws Virgil out about the artist-as-curator, about finding beauty in unwanted objects (“that unschooled way of seeing something as beautiful again,” Virgil says), about fakes and vitrines, and the humanizing quality of dust, and the way artists get attached to the museums in the cities they live in. Virgil is eloquent on the power of the decorative arts:

“I just don’t subscribe to the standard hierarchy of ‘fine’ art being necessarily more important than ‘decorative’ arts. One thing about furniture is that it’s made for people to use. A chair alludes to a human presence even if nobody’s sitting on it. One of my favorite paintings…is a painting that Van Gogh did of Gaugin’s chair, just an empty chair. I find it incredibly moving.”

There is an air of quiet expectation in the galleries of Set Pieces, as though you could catch the objects moving if you turned your head quickly enough. But really the only thing that moves is us: our bodies as we sidle around a great Renaissance bench and detour to explore the shadows of small metal animals thrown up dramatically against one wall, and our minds as we make odd elliptical connections between the objects Virgil has brought together. Maybe they’re the same connections he made, and maybe they’re our own. Either way is good.

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Set Pieces was made possible by support from the Katherine Stein Sachs CW’69 and Keith L. Sachs W’67 Guest Curator Program.

Set Pieces, curated by Virgil Marti from the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is on view at ICA through February 13.

On Wednesday, January 19, 6:30 PM, the next of the Set Pieces screenings, Citizen Kane (dir. Orson Welles, 1941, 119 minutes), will be presented at International House.

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Mouse Tooth Marks and Other Adventures in Conservation

November 15 2010

Photo: J. Katz


post by Rachel Pastan

One of the things I try to do in this blog is give readers a sense of some of what goes on behind the scenes here at ICA: what the people are doing while the art is out there posing for you in the galleries. I was delighted when, the other night, ICA presented a program all about what happens behind the scenes at other kinds of museums—the kinds with permanent collections, something ICA doesn’t have. “Conversation: On Conservation” was not just a panel we put together because we liked the title (though it is a good title). It was fantastically interesting look at what conservators do: not just how they care for, clean, and repair art (you may remember my post from last summer about Q-tips and saliva), but the ways they decide when and how to do these things.

Contemporary art is notorious for being made out of weird stuff. How do you conserve a Matthew Barney Idaho potato, or some Chris Ofili elephant dung, or Zoe Leonard lemon peel and thread? Say you have a Kelley Walker silkscreen of two kinds of chocolate over an inkjet print: what do you do when bits of the chocolate start falling off? This was one of many surprising challenges panelist Johanna Hoffman has faced in her job as Chief Conservator at Contemporary Conservation Ltd., a private art conservation company. Indeed, not only was the unstable chocolate naturally coming loose, but mice were finding their way to the artwork and nibbling it off. They especially liked the white chocolate. What to do? In this case, the artist was still alive, so Johanna contacted him and asked his advice. Walker, apparently, thought the mouse participation was cool—he said he’d had a dog licking one of his works once. But the owner of the artwork felt differently (if there’s no chocolate left, is it really a Kelley Walker?), so Hoffman figured out how to secure the chocolate, refitting loose particles back into their original positions like doing a jigsaw puzzle.

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s Gwynne Ryan spoke about a different kind of challenge, that presented by time-based media like video and film. How do you conserve an artwork made of 30 CRT monitors, like the ones in Gary Hill’s “Suspension of Disbelief (for Marine),” if no one makes CRT monitors any more, and even eBay has run out? The Hirshhorn, which co-owns this work with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, has eight back ups, but those will only last so long. Like Walker, Hill is alive, and he’s working with the Hirshhorn to plan for future conservation, but Paul Sharits, the creator of “Shutter Interface,” consisting of many 16 mm film loops running on many film projectors, is not, so conservators like Ryan just have to do their best. She said she thinks about “stepping away from the material and looking at what’s at the heart of the piece—and how to preserve that.”

Sally Malenka, Conservator of Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) worked with ICA on Set Pieces, which is made up of PMA works restaged by artist Virgil Marti. Malenka talked about more conventional works of art than the other two panelists, but in some ways this made her presentation all the more interesting—the familiarity of the materials seemed to make the issues surrounding them loom larger.

Malenka was positive about the experience of working with Virgil on Set Pieces. She talked about how watching him visit PMA’s storage facilities often made her smile, because through his eyes she’d see afresh objects she’d known for many years. Still, her priorities and his were sometimes different. “The most difficult objects from my point of view were the marble busts,” she said. They were dirty, constraints of time made it difficult to clean them, and—as she remarked—“cleaning is a subjective process.” You might allow fingerprints on a Paul Thek Brillo box with meat (“Meat Piece with Warhol Brillo Box”), where they don’t look incongruous because we’re used to seeing boxes handled, but you might not want any on the nose and cheeks of a marble bust. “I have an expectation that marble will look a certain way,” she said, and when she showed a photograph of a marble head that looked as though it had used newspaper for a washcloth, it was hard to disagree.

Photo: Aaron Igler / Greenhouse Media

Then there was the question of exhibiting the 1780s sculpture, believed to be by Guiseppe Ceracchi, Bust of the Countess of Albany, on her back—as Virgil had encountered her in storage—rather than upright as she was originally intended to be displayed. The marble bust on its back was clearly a delight to Virgil, but for Sally Malenka it was difficult. Part of her job is to think about artistic intent, even if she can’t call the artist up to discuss it like Johanna Hoffman and Gwynne Ryan often can. Malenka presented a wonderful brief biography of Ceracchi, showing us other works of his and making us remember that he was not some anonymous shlub from long ago, but a real person, a serious artist, who had a certain understanding of the way his work would appear in public. He’s not here to enforce that understanding, but conservators like Malenka are trained to do it for him. It’s a trust they take very seriously.

I’m not saying Virgil was wrong to exhibit the Countess lying down. But he might be glad to know that, a hundred years after he’s dead and gone, people like Sally Malenka and Gwynne Ryan and Johanna Hoffman will still have his back.

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Sleeping Princess

September 20 2010

The PMA's Joe Rishel at the mike.
Photo: Jill Katz

post by Rachel Pastan

It’s the night of the fall opening at ICA, and Joe Rishel is standing just inside the downstairs gallery holding a microphone, looking at an 1876 model of the Philadelpia Waterworks. Joe is a curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), a lively, charming man with round owlish glasses, and he tells the gathered crowd that the Waterworks used to be a big tourist attraction back in the 19th century. He points out the silvery Schuylkill river in the model, and the little boat houses, and a tiny carousel on the pleasure ground. The model, under its plexiglass vitrine, is one of the touchstones of this show, Set Pieces, which is made up of little scenes Philadelphia artist Virgil Marti composed from objects he found in the storage facilities of the PMA. “Look,” Joe says of the silent model. “It’s a sleeping princess.” He says the exhibition puts you in mind of “toys in a toy shop: close the door and they start talking.”

It’s true that there is a strange animation to the objects here, many of which seem to be pretending to be something they’re not. A ceramic pitcher is dressed up as a piece of wood. A writing desk has decorated itself with inlaid books. Prim tilt-top tables half-shield our view of an erotic couch sculpture by the surrealist artist Dorothea Tanning, now one hundred, who apparently made a lot of erotic furniture sculptures.

Joe, who recently curated the PMA’s blockbuster, Cezanne and Beyond, is talking about juxtapositions—how Virgil’s juxtaposition of objects is like Cezanne’s juxtaposition of colors. He’s talking about “the enounter of artists with older works of art,” how revealing it can be. Virgil, who is known largely for his super-Pop installations—his over-the-top wallpapers and bright chandeliers and decadent poufs—has chosen rather austerely here, though there is a whole row of ceramic George Washingtons and an enormous Renaissance bench painted with a women in a billowing dress.

Wearing a checked shirt and a purple tie, Virgil explains about the forest of small bronze animals casting shadows on the wall. Apparently the Elkins family (as in Elkins Park) donated a large collection of small bronze elk to the PMA, though here there is also a goat, a handsome bear, a buffalo (or perhaps a yak?) and a boyscout. A woman in stripes whispers, “The shadows are so…” but I can’t hear what adjective she chooses. A different woman with bright green toe nail polish regards a handsome silver goose. People mill and wander, looking and gossiping.

After weeks with the museum doors locked and only the staff inside, it’s a bit of shock to see all these strangers here. I find myself wondering who they are, and how would Virgil arrange them. Would he put the tall man in the linen cap next to the grumpy-looking woman with curly hair? The woman in yellow silk with the short woman looking for something in her purse? The artist in jeans with the funder in the gorgeous black dress?

One of Virgil’s gifts is to be alive to the stories these objects are telling, and to organize them so that we start to hear them too: Once upon a time there was silver goose. Once upon a time, four identical men in wigs each said, “I am the real George Washington!” Once upon a time there was a pitcher that wished it were a tree. Once upon a time an artist was let loose in the store house of a great museum, but he could take with him only as much as he could carry.

Of course—even if that were the rule—he could take all the stories he wanted. Stories, though they order the world, weigh nothing, and are infinite.

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Weird but Useful Stuff

July 29 2010

Photo: Darcey Sawicz

post by Rachel Pastan

It’s the change of the seasons here at ICA. Just as you can feel the approach of autumn out on the street in September, here in the museum I feel the end of Queer Voice approaching and the murmurs of the new exhibition season getting ready to blow in. This Sunday evening the projectors and audio loops will be turned off for the last time. The guards will go home until the new shows open in mid-September, the tour guides will have a few weeks to bone up on some new artists, and the crew will show up to disassemble the silver Andy Warhol listening cube and the Jack Smith chaise longue and roll up the carpeting.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the preparations for Set Pieces (click here to read that piece), guest-curated for ICA by artist Virgil Marti from works from the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA). Since then, Virgil and Robert and Darcey have gone over to the PMA to measure some of the objects Virgil is using, especially some marble busts he’s going to put on a pouf. Actually he’s going to make poufs especially for the marbles, which include a bust of Napoleon and another big bust of a woman lying on her back. There are some concerns about the stability of the marble woman, who is actually designed to be displayed upright, but Virgil is confident that any mounts they need to use to secure her in place can be hidden in the fluff of the pouf. He can fluff up the fluff, he says.

Down at the PMA, he asks one of the art handlers to put the woman on a big piece of craft paper so he can trace her for reference when he builds the pouf. She’s so heavy, it takes two people in purple Nitrile gloves to lift her.

Not everything Virgil needs to see is down in storage. Some of it is up in photography already, waiting its turn to have its picture taken—along with a fabulous life-sized silver gander that I can’t wait to see in the show. Other stuff is up in conservation, including two ivory candlesticks that are being cleaned.

This, it turns out, is how you clean ivory candlesticks: with saliva. They have little pots of sterilized saliva up there in conservation, and they dip Q-tips into it and slowly clear away the dirt. Saliva! I go home and tell my husband, and he smiles and says, “Is it elephant saliva?”

Then he tells me about this nuclear fusion experiment he was once involved in where they suspended a tiny, frozen-hydrogen sphere inside a very small gold cylinder, then sent powerful laser beams in. (Doesn’t that sound like it could be a contemporary art installation??) The trick is, how do you suspend such a miniscule sphere inside such a puny gold cylinder without using metal bars that would mess up the experiment?

The answer: spiderwebs. Spider silk (as anyone who’s read Charlotte’s Web knows) is thin and strong and abundant. When my husband asked the guys at the lab if they used any special kind of spider, they told him, “We use whatever kind of spider we find around the lab. When they die, we send out an email asking people to bring in spiders from their offices, or from home or wherever.”

There’s something glorious in this—the way there are still problems nature can solve for us; the way the needs of both art and science can sometimes be answered by common stuff we usually think of as disgusting.

Also, the way people you never see—people behind the scenes—are resourcefully solving problems you never thought of in ways you never would have dreamed.

Do you have a story about people using weird stuff to solve unusual problems? If so, please describe it in the comments section below. I’ll try to drum up some weird ICA prizes for the best weird solutions. Deadline: August 15.

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Pieces of Set Pieces

July 17 2010

post by Rachel Pastan

On Monday, Virgil Marti came over to ICA to meet with Robert, Shannon, and Darcey, ICA’s crack team of exhibitions logisticians. Virgil is an artist and a long-time ICA friend. He did an installation for our Ramp space in 2003, and one of his beautiful pink chandeliers hangs in our lobby and is one of the things I like about coming to work in the morning.

Virgil is guest-curating an exhibition called Set Pieces that will open at ICA in September. A collaboration with the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), the exhibition will be made up of a series of tableaux assembled from objects borrowed from the PMA’s collections. Over the past few months, Virgil has spent a lot of time roaming around vast PMA storage locations and checking out the stuff no one ever sees. He’s selected dozens of pieces, largely from the decorative arts, to use in his installations: urns, oil lamps, busts, sofas, mirrors, portraits. The plan is to arrange them in scenes influenced by some of his favorite movies: Last Year at Marienbad, The Bitter Tears of Petra van Kant, Citizen Kane. I love how mixed up this is—old art objects used to make a new work of art, static scenes evoking the flowing form of cinema. Hidden things exposed.

It’s tricky, of course: making art out of somebody else’s art objects. You have to take good care of them. Part of Robert and Shannon and Darcey’s job is to figure out how to make sure the PMA pieces are protected while they’re at ICA, which means designing and building the right kinds of pedestals and plexiglass covers—things like that. In general, every pedestal has to extend out three feet in every direction from the object sitting on it—even if the object is really big, like a couch. But for one object, a model of Philadelphia’s Waterworks, Virgil wants a pedestal no wider than it is. All these things need to be negotiated.

Then there is the question of what color to paint the walls. Virgil saw some bright orange and purple object tags he liked at the PMA, so Robert called the registrar and asked her to send over some blank ones. She sent over a whole bunch of orange tags, but she said the PMA didn’t use purple object tags. Maybe, she suggested, Virgil was remembering the purple Post-it notes they sometimes used, so she sent some of those over too. Virgil also liked the pink color of some PMA storage crates. He’d taken a photograph of those, so it should have been easy to match the color; but it wasn’t easy.

Photo: Virgil Marti

Robert got out some color chip books, but none of the colors Virgil liked was in the books. When he started calling around to paint suppliers, he found out that pretty much no one makes a paint as fluorescent as the orange they were looking for, or a pink as bright (though Ralph Lauren’s “Blushing Bride” came close). Sam, one of ICA’s summer interns, suggested trying to match the colors through Photoshop. This seems like a promising avenue, but at the moment the problem lingers.

Another difficulty has to do with lights and shadows. One of Virgil’s scenes will be an arrangement of small bronze antelope throwing outsized shadows onto the wall behind them. These antelope will not be under plexiglass because the plexi would interfere with the shadows. Instead, they’ll be anchored to the pedestals with special clips that the PMA’s mount-makers make. (Is “mount-maker” a full-time job? What other unsuspected lines of work do they use over there?)

The original idea was for ICA to acquire a theatrical light to shine on the antelope. Our galleries have 40-foot-high ceilings, and our normal lights don’t make nice shadows. But it turned out that the theatrical light didn’t work the way we thought it would. Instead of sharp silhouettes, the first test produced big, vague, fuzzy shapes.

This is how it goes when you’re mounting an exhibition.

Next week the team is going over to the PMA to look at Virgil’s design for a pouf (Virgil is known for his poufs). Probably that won’t turn out to be simple, either, but I can tell you one thing for sure: stop by ICA on the evening of Wednesday, September 15 for the opening of Set Pieces, and somehow, some way, everything will look perfect.

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Set Pieces is a Katherine Stein Sachs and Keith L. Sachs Guest Curator Program. It will be on view at ICA from September 16, 2010 to February 13, 2011, with the public opening on the evening of Wednesday, September 15.

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