Before the voting, there is the tour. Last April this group threw its support to Stefan Sagmeister The Happy Show, so tonight, in preparation for this year’s ballot, they walk through the galleries to see how the show looks.

Videos show truisms spelled out in moving Jello. There is a bike that lights up a big neon sign when you ride it. The group approaches the sugar sculpture, complete with lights and face recognition software. “If you look through the Plexiglas,” says Anthony, who is leading the tour, “the lights change color depending on how much you smile.”

John puts his face in the frame and tries it out, grinning. The sugar cubes light up brightly, green and blue. It’s as though the show itself is saying he made a good choice last year.

Every spring, members of ICA’s Leadership Circle listen to pitches by three curators about three upcoming ICA exhibitions, then vote on which show to support. “It’s like the battle of the Titans,” Ingrid says, revving up the crowd. “I feel very powerful,” one voter confides as the group settles in with sandwiches and wine. Outside, the giant inflatable Happy Show monkeys peer in as though they want to know what’s going on.

Stamatina goes first. She is organizing an exhibition of photographer Brian Weil who died in 1996. “Weil is a very under-recognized artist right now,” she says, “but a generation ago he was very well known.” She talks about Weil’s life and work, showing images of his photographs of people with AIDS and their families, of Hasidic Jews in New York, of murder victims in Miami. Weil was known for immersing himself in the communities of people he wanted to photograph, living with them for months sometimes before taking out his camera. Later, after the pictures were taken, he made visible his role as intermediary, scratching, blurring, or overexposing the negatives.

Untitled self-portrait (from Hasidim), n.d., gelatin silver print

Stamatina shows us the only known Weil self-portrait, a contact sheet of many images of the photographer in the guise of a Hasid. In these pictures, in hat and full beard, Weil gazes into the camera wearing a multitude of expressions as though trying to find one that fits.

Kate is up next. “Karla Black makes site-specific sculptures,” she says, clicking through her slides. Pink and white and baby blue, fabulously gauzy and powdery, these big constructions burgeon forth, dangling from ceilings or piling precariously up toward them.

Karla Black, “Nature Does The Easiest Thing,” 2011 (Detail). Installation view, Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Photo: © Lothar Schnepf, Cologne. Courtesy Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne

Often made from chalk, paper, body creams, toothpaste, and make up, they have what Kate describes as “a pastry or confectionary quality,” like macaroons at a giant’s tea party. This exhibition will be Black’s first solo show in an American museum.

Going last, Anthony explains the title of his group show, White Petals Surround Your Yellow Heart. It’s what the gods said to Narcissus when—fed up with him gazing at his reflection in the pool—they decided to turn him into flower. Anthony’s show is about pose, clothing, and self-presentation—how we “multiply our personalities” by what we put on our bodies. He tells us that it takes inspiration from a JG Ballard quote—“Fashion: A recognition that nature has endowed us with one skin too few, and that a fully sentient being should wear its nervous system externally.” Anthony has a long list of artists he hopes to include. Wardell Milan makes drawings and collages of people—part outer skin, part skeleton—overlayed with paint, paper, or swatches of fabric.

Wardell Milan, “Naomi and Landscape #1” 2009, c-print

Zoe Leonard’s photographs of runway shows catch the models looking at each other as though in lesbian flirtation. Frances Stark has a sculptural dress in the form of an old-fashioned dial telephone that she wears for performances that touch on sex-phone-chatting.

When the three curators sit back down, the serious ruminating begins. “Can we rate them 1-2-3?” someone asks. “Are any of the shows going to travel?” someone else wants to know. “Raise your hand when you’re done,” Sam calls, “and we’ll come around and collect your ballot.” Pencils scribble, hands go up. Sam and Christy disappear into the kitchen to count the ballots.

A moment later, they’re back. “And the winner,” Sam declares, “is Brian Weil!”

Stamatina looks happy.

Actually, everybody looks happy! People voting to spend money for art is not something you see every day.

Only the monkeys, out on the terrace, glower. They are like children whose mother is pregnant again, angry at the prospect of being displaced.

Photo: Pam Yau

* * *

Learn more about Leadership Circle here.

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For six months, from the fall well through the winter, the large, vibrant paintings of Charline von Heyl hung on the walls of the first-floor gallery at the ICA in Philadelphia. I remember peeking into the gallery as they were uncrating them, how even half unwrapped they caught and drew the eye with their great splashes and zigzags, their stripes and squiggles and harlequin diamonds, their cloudy, ambiguous orbs. These are big paintings, each one nearly seven feet tall, and the 17 of them on view in the exhibition here made the space vibrate with energy and color.

The other week, I had the opportunity to see the show at the ICA/Boston, where—pruned and reconfigured— it is currently on view. I wanted to see how different it would look in that quite different space. Would it be like seeing the same dress on two sisters? Like meeting an old friend after a long absence? Or perhaps it would be like revisiting a familiar city in a different season. (Note: There is no institutional relationship between the two ICAs.)

In Philadelphia, the gallery opens off a tall, sunlit lobby. Entering the show was like plunging into a pool: paintings all around you, a wealth of choices as to where to swim.

Photo: Alex Klein

The works were generously separated, but in that big, open space you were always aware of more of them to your left and right, behind the partial walls, and all the way back in the depths of room. Color shimmered everywhere, calling out for you to look.

In Boston, you enter the show through a kind of anteroom, a narrow gallery with one painting on the left: Phoenix, with its swoop of red and its diamonds of blue and black, its white background and lozenges. Rather than plunging, one eases into the show, absorbing the fiery colors and bold shapes of Phoenix like a mountain climber pausing at base camp to get acclimated to the new air.

I pass through a doorway into the second room.

Photo: John Kennard. From left to right: It’s Vot’s Behind Me That I Am (Krazy Kat), 2010. Acrylic, oil on linen and canvas. 82 x 72 inches. Private collection, New York; courtesy of Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York; Yellow Guitar, 2010. Acrylic, oil and charcoal on linen. 82 x 78 inches. Private collection, New York; Alastor, 2008. Acrylic on linen. 82 x 78 inches. Courtesy of the artist, Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York, and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne.

The three paintings in here happen to be three of the von Heyl paintings I know best. I think of them as the drippy purple one, the bright yellow one with the knife, and the one with the squid shapes and the bloody hand prints. I’m happy to see them again after our months apart, but something is strange. I seem to see shapes and patterns I don’t remember: a curving ribbon of black triangles in the drippy purple one, inky tracings in the purple wash in the squid one. In fact, I don’t really remember the purple wash itself—I would have said it was more of a gray. I start to wonder—did I not look at the paintings as closely as I thought I had back in Philadelphia?

This feeling of unfamiliarity is intensified in the final room, where I spend a lot of time staring at a painting I don’t remember, wondering how I could have forgotten it (it turns out it wasn’t in the Philadelphia iteration of the show). I circle around a couple of times, eavesdropping on visitors, looking for Untitled (aka: Greetings), the favorite of the Philadelphia ICA’s guard, Linda, but it isn’t here. This show has fewer paintings than the Philadelphia version, which feels like a loss to me, except that I find myself looking more carefully at the paintings that are here, which feels like a gain. Because of the smaller size of the rooms, I’m standing closer to the paintings. I wonder if that’s why the colors look so different.

Photo: John Kennard. From left to right: Time Waiting, 2010. Acrylic and oil on linen. 82 x 78 inches. Courtesy of the artist, Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York, and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne; Solo Dolo, 2010. Oil and charcoal on linen. 82 x 74 inches. Private collection.

According to Jenelle Porter, the show’s curator, the lighting here—a filtered northern light from shaded skylights plus bulbs—has a huge impact on the way the show looks. “I think it’s the light that makes the show look like a jewel box,” she wrote me in an email. “Also, the galleries are very ‘white’ which really makes the color of the painting pop….But all in all, it’s the same show—we even hung the works in essentially the same relationships we established in Philly.”

Still, it’s the differences that stay with me. The word that keeps surfacing in my mind here in Boston is intimate. When I think back on the show in Philadelphia, I think electric, I think buzzing. I loved that electric, buzzing energy, and it was always a delight to wander through the gallery and visit the paintings on my way in to or out of work. But it’s here in Boston, for the first time, that I can imagine living with one.

* * *
Charline von Heyl is on view at ICA/Boston through July 15.

You can read more about Charline von Heyl here and here.

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“Where is this?” Ingrid asks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo: Aaron Igler/Greenhouse Media

Photo: Aaron Igler/Greenhouse Media

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

Heady stuff.

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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At the opening of First Among Equals earlier this month, a pink Boticellian Venus—a living statue—pushed a rolling piece of chain link fence right up against Alex Da Corte’s installation, SCENE TAKE SIX, then stood nearby on her half shell for a couple of hours. When she left, the fence remained, jutting into Alex’s piece: an ambiguous guest.

photo: Constance Mensh

“When Kathryn Andrews first came here and said she was going to make a big fence and put it in front of someone’s work, I said, ‘Me first!’” Alex says. “There’s nothing to be gained in a group show by people’s work sitting politely and not looking at each other.”

We’re at ICA’s spring Free For All event, where later this evening there will be pistachio doughnuts, ice cream sandwiches, and a band. First, though, there is this tasty conversation hosted by two members of ICA’s student advisory board, David and Julie, who pose questions about how First Among Equals came about, how Alex thinks about making art, and how his work will exist after the show ends.

photo: William Hidalgo

The fence intervention—and the living statues that periodically move it around the gallery—comprise a piece by Kathryn Andrews called Serial Killer which vividly dramatizes many of the issues the show explores: What happens when artists work together? Where does cooperation end and competition begin? What does it mean when one artist uses other artists’ works of art as material for their own?

This unlikely sounding situation can be found in many forms in First Among Equals, including Alex’s SCENE TAKE SIX itself, a two-sided installation that uses works by six artists on one side and six on the other to make a new whole—almost the way a group exhibition, organized through a curator’s vision, makes a new whole. Alex, though, takes marvelous liberties it’s hard to imagine a curator taking. He has fashioned a microphone for Sam Anderson’s bust of Aretha Franklin, for instance, and piled works by Anna Betbeze, Paul Thek, and Karen Kilimnik on top of each other. Some of the works have been borrowed from collectors for the run of the show. Others, which Alex calls dedication monuments, are recreations he built himself with direction from the original artists. Which are which, though, he’d rather not say: “I don’t want to say if it’s real or fake, because in my mind it’s all real. I was thinking that all these materials are equal, even if some have a greater monetary value.”

Among other things, SCENE TAKE SIX is a kind of meditation on memory. Black-and-white on one side, color on the other, the two sides formally mirror one another; but since you can’t look at them both at once, all the time you’re looking at one side, you’re also thinking about what’s on the side you can’t see.

photo: Alex Klein

Alex relates this constant presence of absence to the nature of the scavenged materials he often uses as material: “Most of the things I scavenge are missing parts, and I don’t know what they are.” A little later he says, “My work is just stuff—just a bunch of crap piled together—but the minute it’s in a white cube being photographed…” He trails off.

It becomes art, he means, that trailing ellipsis alluding to the moment of transformation without naming it. Another missing piece, though this time we can see what it is.

Stuff to art: when exactly does that happen? I was in the gallery last month watching as Alex put SCENE TAKE SIX together: spray-painting vitrines, twisting branches, nailing painted flowers to the wall. Was I there for that elusive, magical moment? Did I miss it?

A little earlier, talking about all the disparate elements that go into a work of his, Alex said, “It’s a bit like a dream where your mother, your pet dog, and Johnny Depp are all there.”

And what of Kathryn Andrews’s fence? Is that too part of the dream? Or is it, with its bright steel bars, the ringing alarm clock that threatens to wake us from the dream? Or perhaps it’s the ringing alarm clock that we, unwilling to wake, incorporate into the dream so that we may sleep and dream just a little while longer.

photo: Constance Mensh

* * *

The next living statue, an evergreen tree, will move the fence on Saturday, May 12th at 2:00.

First Among Equals is open through August 12.

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

“I’m not sure what table size you need,” Eric says. “I did the ultimate. If you get 250 people at this party, you can fit them in.”

We all look down at the sketch of possible table arrangements while Eric, who runs the interior design firm Fury Design with his partner Jim, talks about birch trees and the mise-en-scene he envisions for the center of the space. “My idea is that they’re going to hover. I’ll have nine-foot saplings that they’ll cut early.” He has plans for real sod growing with rye grass, for glitter sprayed lightly through the branches as though the wind has blown it there, and for seventy yards of white scrim fabric to be drawn dramatically back when it’s time for the dinner to begin. A glittering ball will hang above the birches: an indoor moon.

“You don’t see any live flowers?” Sam asks.

“Not enough impact. But if we knew anyone who had ten little French chairs! Or those gold ballroom chairs people rent.”

“I have a lot of those,” Hilarie says. “Like a hundred.”

This is a meeting of the décor committee for ICA’s 2012 spring benefit, our big annual fundraiser at which we honor a significant member of the museum community. This year the honoree is Karen Kilimnik, whose mid-career retrospective—curated at ICA by Ingrid Schaffner—traveled the country in 2007, exposing thousands of new admirers to the artist’s work in photography, installation, drawing, and painting. A native Philadelphian, Karen Kilimnik explores perceptions of glamor and fantasy from Kate Moss to ballerinas, from Madonna to Diana Rigg in The Avengers.

From the moment she agreed to be honored at this event, we have been imagining how to shape the Benefit around Karen’s distinctive sensibility, which draws on the romantic tradition and pop culture, on nature and history. I’ve heard the look we’re going for described variously as “whimsical and glittery” and as “decrepit elegance.” The pale pink invitations, designed by Ominvore, boast two gold Ks intertwined to form an elegant chandelier. How to translate this into tablecloths and centerpieces is, however, still an open question.

Karen herself, when asked about the evening’s look, suggested an alpine, winter, farm animal motif. She even made a new artwork—a small pastel of two alert, pinkish sheep in a greenish meadow—for the invitation. The original pastel will be raffled off to a donor at our Golden Muse donor level. (A Charline von Heyl print will be given to donors at both the Golden Muse and the lower-tiered Muse level, permitting many guests to go home with more art than they had when they arrived.)

At the décor meeting, the talk turns to candles: simple glass votives lining the tables, enhanced here and there, perhaps, by a leaning chandelier.

“I’m happy to have a big chandelier leaning against the dessert table as though it fell out of the ceiling,” Eric says.

“That’s very Karen,” Babs says. “People are going to feel they’re walking into a different space than they’ve ever walked into before.”

The committee discusses about the dessert table. Cupcakes are suggested, decorated with sheep reproduced in icing from Karen’s pastel. (“Half the people don’t eat dessert,” one committee member warns, but another says, “They’ll eat cupcakes.) From cupcakes, the conversation turns (naturally) to chocolate farm animals and marshmallow Peeps.

“Peeps are made locally,” Eric observes, gathering up color samples as the meeting winds down.

“Yes,” Babs agrees. “They’re made in Philadelphia.”

Just like Karen Kilimnik.

* * *

Sheep image above: Karen Kilimnik, Sheep in England, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and 303 Gallery. photo: Simon Greenberg

For more information about Benefit 2012, click here.

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In the second-floor gallery, some of the crew are working on the sugar cube installation. Stacks of cubes of different heights spell out “Step up to it,” one of the truisms, or rules to live by, that anchor the new ICA exhibition, Stefan Sagmeister The Happy Show, which is a romp, and a serious exploration of happiness and the human condition, and a glimpse into the mind of one of America’s leading graphic designers all at once.

Elsewhere in the gallery, other people are busy with other happiness installations. The exercise bike is being hooked up to light a neon sign if you peddle hard enough. The interactive spider web video is being fine tuned. Sagmeister himself is busy with a black marker, writing on the walls. He looks busy and full of energy. A couple of days ago, when I got into the elevator to go home, I found him in there writing on the interior doors.

“How are you, Stefan?” I asked him.

“I’m having fun!” he said.

There’s a lot to be done before the show opens 25 hours from now. Luckily First Among Equals, the exhibition in the big downstairs gallery about ways artists work together, has been unofficially open for a few weeks, so that part of the museum is calm.

Of course, the last few days before First Among Equals opened, its doors were busy too. That busyness had a different rhythm, with little pockets of activity blazing up around the gallery as various artists came and went. Then, on the last afternoon before the show opened, everything in the gallery came to a stop when the Paul Thek sculpture showed up. Alex Da Corte, whose SCENE TAKE SIX installation incorporates works of a dozen or so artists, had received permission to use a small Thek as part of his piece. It arrived in an array of custom-made crates which the crew lined up on a table.

“A beautiful packing job,” Paul says as Mary Grace begins untaping boxes. One crate has lots of small ceramic pieces—green and blue and brown—embedded in cradles of foam. A second crate reveals a big conch shell with a plug and a light bulb. Mary Grace checks what’s in the crates against pictures, and she makes notes, documenting the condition the pieces are in when we receive them. Shell generally abraded and built out of dirt and grime, she writes. Light in shell not secure. The rest of us wait, trying not to crowd her.

“This is so terrifying,” Alex says. “It’s like meeting the man of your dreams and knowing it.”

“I remember when I had to condition check the Damien Hirst shark,” Mary Grace says. “And the cow head with the flies. We were sitting there counting all the flies and the larvae.”

Paul, wearing white art handling gloves, begins placing pieces into a terrarium. Mary Grace stands nearby and hands them to him one by one. “This one goes in there,” she says, but it doesn’t fit where she points. They consult the pictures and try again.

Photo: Alex Klein

Brendan, another artist with work in Alex’s installation, comes over. “Does it feel soft?” he wants to know.

“No,” Paul says.

“Does it feel brittle?” Alex asks.

“Yeah,” Paul says.

“Is this the first time you’ve ever handled a Paul Thek, Paul?” Alex asks.

“Man, do I enjoy this part of my job,” Paul says.

Standing nearby with my notepad, scribbling, I’m thinking the same thing.

Left to right: Robert, Paul, Rachel, and Alex. Photo: Alex Klein

* * *

First Among Equals and Stefan Sagmeister The Happy Show are open through August 12.

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

The golden jester makes her way into the gallery, dragging her suitcase behind her. She is lovelier than I imagined, a darker shade of gold with an elaborate costume, standing on a low gold plinth. Bells jingle on the peaks of her cap, on her boots, and on the long points of her elaborate collar. She’s here for her photo shoot before the opening of First Among Equals, a new exhibition at ICA exploring different ways artists work together and reach across generations.

The golden jester is part of a work by Kathryn Andrews, who is consulting with photographer Aaron Igler about whether the images should be vertical or horizontal. “Do you see it as a landscape, or as a tall sculpture?” he asks.

They agree that horizontal works best. Kathryn snaps a picture on her phone and shows it to the jester, who smiles to see what she looks like.

Kathryn’s artwork, “Serial Killer,” consists of a freestanding chain link fence on wheels and a series of six performances, of which the jester’s is the first. The exhibition First Among Equals will open with the fence blocking the gallery entrance. Then the jester will push it across the floor to a spot quite close to a work by Wu Tsang, a silkscreen and glitter poster advertising his film Wildness which will be screened here this summer. “I hope he doesn’t mind,” Kathryn says. “It’s kind of a violent thing to throw your work against someone else’s.”

Which is the point. Kathryn’s piece, the title of which invites the question of who the serial killer is here, will abut each of six other artists’ pieces over the run of the show—the fence pushed to a new position once a month by a new statue who will pose in front of it for two hours before exiting the gallery. “Certain formal relationships will emerge,” Kathryn says, admiring the way the jester looks next to Wu Tsang’s piece: “She’s all gold, and he has this gold text.”

What happens when one artist’s work begins to encroach on another? Is it a detraction or an enhancement, a problem or a gift? How different is this juxtaposition from what happens in every gallery every day—works changing subtly because of the context in which they are installed? “This functions as a critique of that,” Kathryn says. “In a joking way.”

While Aaron finishes setting up his equipment, the gallery buzzes with last minute preparations for the opening. One crew member hangs wall labels. Paul, the chief preparator, shows the guards where visitors can’t walk, and what walls they can’t lean against. The jester stretches, bows, shakes out her arms, making her bells jingle. “I’m ready!” she announces, getting up on the plinth and striking a pose.

“That’s better,” Kathryn says. “More confrontational.”

In her mask and puffy sleeves, the jester shakes out her hips and makes some disco moves.

“Can you look down?” Kathryn asks. “Now look at us again.” She asks me, “Which way do you like it?”

I like the eyes up. It makes the statue look more alive, more sentient. Kathryn agrees. “It looks weirder,” she decides.

Aaron takes some shots. No one is paying any attention. The jester is motionless, a human turned, by the Midas touch of art, into gold.

(l to r) Kathryn Andrews, Serial Killer, 2012, mobile chain-link fence with intermittent performance, installation view. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery and Christian Nagel Gallery. Wu Tsang, WILDNESS, 2012, silkscreen and glitter. Courtesy the artist and Clifton Benevento. “First Among Equals,” March 14- August 12, 2012, installation views, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. Photo: Aaron Igler + Matthew Suib / Greenhouse Media.

* * *

First Among Equals is open at ICA through August 12. The next performance/sculpture will be on view Wednesday, April 4, from 6-8PM, as part of the official exhibition opening.

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

“You never know what’s going to happen at auction,” Meredith says, “because you can get outbid in a minute.”

“And if you don’t,” Bryan says, smiling, “you wonder why.”

We are in Meredith and Bryan’s spacious apartment not far from the Whitney Museum of American Art where, earlier this afternoon, members of ICA’s Leadership Circle and Art Council enjoyed a private tour of the Whitney Biennial.

At the Whitney

The tour was a prelude to ICA’s annual Winter Salon, a chance for donors and curators to come together for a drink and some conversation about art. Bryan and Meredith, an ICA board member and his wife, are enthusiastic Penn alums and art collectors. You can see their passion hung on every wall, even in the children’s rooms.

“Are there pieces you fall out of love with?” Ingrid asks.

“I won’t say who the artist is,” Bryan says, “but the first piece my wife and I bought we couldn’t live with anymore.”

“At first we liked it because it was so disturbing,” Meredith explains. “But then it was so disturbing.”

“I’d rather have the story than the piece of art,” Bryan says.

The talk shifts to the Biennial. Ingrid teases out some of its connections to ICA shows of the past: work by the Cologne artists Kai Althoff and Jutta Koether, who ICA showed in “Make Your Own Life” (2006); artist-as-curator installations by Nick Mauss and Robert Gober, à la Set Pieces, Virgil Marti’s tableaux staging of works from the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2010); Dawn Kasper bringing her whole studio into the Whitney as Anthony Campuzano did at ICA in 2010, delighted to make art for a hot July in air conditioning.

Artist and ICA board member Sarah McEneaney casts further back: “Dawn Kasper’s installation made me remember when Janine Antoni spent seven nights in ICA preparing for her exhibition. She slept in the gallery, recording her brain waves while sleeping and weaving them into a piece… with threads from her nightgown!”

Another connection is the emphasis on performance. For this Biennial, the Whitney has dedicated the fourth floor to music, dance, theater, and special events. If you’re in Philadelphia, you can follow our own performance series all spring and summer in the new ICA exhibition First Among Equals.

Performance is on Anthony’s mind, too. When Ingrid asks him—jokingly—what he hated most in the Biennial, he says, “What I hated most was what I loved the most. It’s kind of tiring when you realize that you’re going to miss the Biennial if you don’t go back every week.”

The performance emphasis is bemusing in a slightly different way to many here who come to art as collectors. There is a sense that this Biennial’s goal wasn’t to put objects a person might want to live with in room, but—as one Salon-goer put it—privileging artists’ studios and processes over the things themselves. “Do you feel this biennial is continuing the tradition of what a biennial is supposed to do?” someone asks Ingrid.

“I do,” she answers. “This was about turning down the volume and listening to artists.”

ICA prides itself on taking that attitude all the time: listening to artists about what’s interesting to them, looking at what they’re looking at, thus presenting work that other museums aren’t—or at least aren’t yet. Sometimes I wonder about the gap—now narrowing, now widening—between what artists look at and what the rest of us want to see. Artists are like brave Away Teams on old Star Trek episodes, investigating unknown planets that may prove, ultimately, inhospitable to life.

Anthony in the middle, Ingrid right

Often these conversations come around to taste. As Len, a long-time ICA supporter, says, “At the end of the day for me, it’s about do I like the work or do I not like the work.” In the next breath, however, he credits ICA for opening him up to art that was unfamiliar to him: video art, for example.

This is the line the ICA, the Whitney, and every other museum that presents contemporary art negotiates, each in its own way: how to give the viewer shows that will delight, but that also push us a little further, that open up new territory. That explore strange new worlds and new cultures…

I think an art exhibition should feel like a new world, with its own colors and textures, its own atmosphere and customs and seasons. We want art to transport us, to make us feel we’ve stepped through a portal to another way of seeing—of being—even as we stand still.

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For information about ICA’s Leadership Circle or Art Council, email Christy Miller at chmille@ica.upenn.edu

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Alex Da Corte is standing in the gallery with what looks like a big, dripping piece of meat under his arm. It’s Monday, two days before the opening celebration of First Among Equals, the show he’s part of at ICA. He has the gallery to himself this morning as he installs his piece, SCENE TAKE SIX, which he describes as a two-sided painting.

To me, it looks more like an installation—or maybe a sculptural collage—with a wall down the middle dividing it in two. On one side, big, gray, framed pictures look as though they’re made of aluminum, riddled with bullet holes. A kind of reaper’s staff draped in zebra-hide cloth leans nearby, and in a vitrine a dark rattlesnake with a mouth like a cave full of crystals erects its glittering tail.

On the other side of the wall the colors are paler, brighter: pinks and corals and beiges.

“There’s a beautiful moment in Fantasia,” Alex says, “when a character pulls the sunset across the sky.” That’s the vision that animates this side, the light side, while the other is “Night on Bald Mountain.” As Alex says, “Both sides of the wall mirror each other formally, like a set for night and day.”

“Did you like Fantasia when you were a kid?”

“Oh, yeah, I loved it. I went to school to be an animator before I really knew what sculpture was.”

I ask him about the small sculpture he’s holding in his hand.

“This is a Sam Anderson piece. It’s called ‘Talent.’ She also did this bust of Aretha Franklin. And this is a Polly Apfelbaum piece.” He points to what look like pillowcases overflowing with bright raffia, explaining, “I’ve taken work from different artists and collaged it into my own.”

There is a lot of this kind of work—wheels within wheels—in First Among Equals, a show exploring how artists collaborate with peers and reach across generations. For his piece, Alex called up artists he admired and asked if he could use their work in his presentation—either an actual piece or a recreation. “Everyone was really open and generous, and that made me so happy,” he says. “I think any artists wouldn’t like to think that their work couldn’t change.”

One piece Alex wanted to recreate was Karen Kilimnik’s, “Whiteberry Nest,” which he first saw in ICA’s Kilimnik retrospective in 2007.  That’s what he’s doing now, twisting branches into a nest, trying to get the shape right, small twigs breaking off and falling to the floor.

He explains that the pink and beige framed prints hanging on the wall on this side—the day side—make up a Kilimnik self-portrait he photocopied, enlarged, collaged together, framed in Ikea frames (plastic wrapping and all) and then painted over, “so it becomes analog again.” The framed pieces on the other side are parts of a Rory Mulligan self-portrait showing the artist with an egg in his mouth. The dark rattler with its sparkling jaws mimics Mulligan’s open mouth—an informal riffing and gesturing that is how many of these pieces relate to each other. The rattlesnake is a Da Corte, but Alex says, “It’s not mine any more, because it’s in a collection.”  The question of what it means for a work of art to belong to someone is important to Alex. He calls the pieces he is assembling that include or allude to the work of other artists “dedication monuments.”

One of the most important dedication monuments here venerates Paul Thek, who turns out to be one of the presiding spirits of this piece—something I might have guessed earlier when I saw the faux, foam meat.

When Alex was in grad school, visitors to his studio were always telling him his pieces reminded them of Thek, whose work Alex had never seen. “So many people asked me about Paul Thek that I decided I’d never look at Paul Thek,” he says, smiling. But of course he did eventually. He agrees with those who saw something Theklike. “It’s about the disembodied body,” he says.  “Looking at things that are beautiful but falling apart underneath. And a kind of cartoonyness to it.”

“I don’t use meat,” he adds, fetching a bunch of artificial greenery for his Kilimnik, “but I use flies.” It turns out a collector is lending a real Thek for SCENE TAKE SIX. “I’m happy that the first time I’ll be in contact with a Paul Thek will be here,” he says.

I look around the largely empty space. “Where is it?”

Alex sticks the greenery into his crown of branches. “It’s coming tomorrow,” he says, concentrating. “In an armored truck.”

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You can see SCENE TAKE SIX in First Among Equals at ICA through August 12.

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“I’ve taken art to non-art spaces,” Astria Suparak says, “and non-art to art spaces. Before YouTube, when people had much less access to alternative, unconventional, experimental work, I did a lot of shows in places like bars, skating rinks, and living rooms…Some people have called this the rock band model: taking the work to the people, rather than waiting for the people to find to the work.”

Left to right: Andrew Suggs, Nato Thompson, Astria Suparak, and Jens Hoffmann. Photo: William Hidalgo

Astria, curator of the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University, is the first of the flock of creative, forward-thinking curators to speak at People’s Conference at ICA. They’re here to discuss the variety of relationships art institutions can have with their local neighborhoods, what’s alternative about alternative art spaces, and other issues arising from People’s Biennial, an exhibition organized by Harrell Fletcher and Jens Hoffmann, in collaboration with Independent Curators International (ICI), which looked for art in unconventional places. One of the artists in that show, Warren Hatch, makes nature films of microscopic life he finds in his Portland, Oregon neighborhood. This is a good metaphor for most of the curators here today, whose missions are bound up with the art and artists in their own backyards.

Astria, for example, told us about a show she organized in Syracuse, Embracing Winter, “repositioning winter as an opportunity to view your surroundings in new ways.” Video, installation, and photography were all on view, along with an enormous knitted sculpture of a mitten. A chart on the wall showed area snow fall levels over fifty years. Big piles of sparkling, environmentally sensitive ice melt were arrayed on the floor for people to take, decreasing in proportion to the increase in the snow outside. Perhaps most delightfully, in what Astria called “a reversal of Duchamp’s readymades,” an array of snow shovels was hung on the wall for visitors to borrow as needed—the object returned to its usefulness.

Embracing Winter, curated by Astria Suparak, at Warehouse Gallery, Syracuse University, 2007.

Andrew Suggs, director of Philadelphia’s Vox Populi, recounted how this alternative artist collective was launched (legend has it) at a bar called Dirty Frank’s one night in the late 80s “by a group of art students who were drunk and decided they wanted a place to show their work.” Andrew raised useful questions about the world alternative, for instance: An alternative to what? He quoted curator Lia Gangitano who wrote, “While some of us continue (perhaps out of respect) to use terms such as ‘alternative space’…it’s not clear anymore what, exactly, we mean.”

The biggest institution heard from was the Queens Museum of Art whose director, Tom Finkelpearl, gave an eloquent overview of how his museum—located in a borough where 47.6% of the residents are foreign born—serves, woos, and otherwise engages with its community. Art exhibitions, usually with some tie to the area, are an important part of the program, but so are local community festivals that offer cultural celebration along with access to social services. The museum staff speaks eight languages. “Our goal is to be the most community-engaged museum in America, without giving up on the complex contemporary art practices,” Tom declares. “We may be outside of the mainstream of the art world, but we’re not outsider artists.”

Photo: William Hidalgo

A third model for combining art and community was presented by Ruthie Stringer and Dana Bishop-Root of Transformazium, a small artists collective working in Braddock, Pennsylvania, outside of Pittsburgh. The young members of Transformazium originally moved to Braddock from New York City on a wave of optimism, largely because a lovely old building was available for sale very cheap. Part of the building, however, turned out to be uninhabitable and had to be deconstructed, a huge undertaking that Transformazium approached in the spirit of an art project. Once settled in the community, the artists worked hard to develop good relationships with their neighbors, seeking creative ways to kindle meaningful conversations. One program they dreamed up paired artists with Braddock youth to create site specific installations in the kids’ neighborhoods. A screen printing shop was opened, and an artist-in-residency program begun—all on the proverbial shoestring.

Jim Kidd, Resident Artist in Residence, and Leslie Stem, Transformazium at the Neighborhood Print Shop

Which brings us to the crucial, interesting, and often uncomfortable question of money. At about this point in the conversation, an audience member called out, “Who gets paid? Where does the money come from?” I was relieved, having been wondering about this myself.

In this realm, too, many models were represented. Transformazium members, for example, have day jobs, get small grants, collaborate with established non-profits like the local library, and sell art when they can, plowing the proceeds back into their project. The Queens Museum, by contrast, is largely foundation funded. Tom Finkelpearl went right to the heart of the issue when he said, “Can you remain idealistic and true to your goals if you take money from foundations and corporations? That’s the challenge. But it’s important to have health insurance for your employees.”

So many important, awkward, interesting questions raised over the course of one day! Not just Where does the money come from? and An alternative to what? but also, What if you’re somewhere there’s nothing you’re an alternative to? What happens when social practices are framed in terms of artistic production? Could it be an advantage to a curator to be untrained? Have we moved beyond the provocation of Duchamp’s urinal?

Coincidentally, I was in the Philadelphia Museum of Art last weekend and happened upon Duchamp’s “Fountain” sitting placidly in a bright room at the end of a hallway. A man was showing friends the gallery. One of the women, after looking around, turned to the man. “But is it art?” she said.

I confess I felt a little thrill. My guess is that object is not quite ready to be returned to the restroom yet.

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