The first things to show up were the chairs: those brightly colored stacking chairs you used to see everywhere in the 1970s. Madison, ICA’s building administrator, found them in the bowels of a neighboring building, and they were just what was wanted.

After that, a couple of tables appeared. They weren’t the right color though, so Paul painted the tops a misty gray. Next some posters arrived, big, grainy, black-and-white images of students at CalArts in the 1970s sitting together in spaces not unlike this one. It took a while to decide where to hang them.

Photo: Alex Klein

That night—in what Tom joked was the I Ching of curatorial practice—there was an excursion to a bookstore to buy a bunch of used paperbacks: The Second Sex, A Marx Reader, Maria Montessori’s Education and Peace, Rubyfruit Jungle. Pretty soon it was looking just like the 1970s on ICA’s Mezzanine, site of our second Excursus project, East of Borneo. This reading room / exhibition / series of programs / online residency, loosely based around ideas of alternative pedagogies, is organized by Thomas Lawson and Stacey Allan, who run an online art magazine, also called East of Borneo, from their base in Los Angeles.

L.A. has been practically one big art exhibition lately (or at least, an endlessly hatching series of many art exhibitions large and small) as Pacific Standard Time (PST), the year-long celebration of art in Los Angeles between 1945 and 1980, rolls on. Tom Lawson, who is also Dean of the Art School of the California Institute of the Arts, concocted the art school’s contribution to PST: a two-year seminar exploring the art and artists of the post-war era. The time period the students got excited about turned out to be the 70s. That class helped develop the exhibition The Experimental Impulse at REDCAT in LA, material and ideas from which informed ICA’s installation. It’s exciting to have a bit of warm PST weather here in the chilly East.

What interested the students, according to Tom, was not so much the art of that decade, but rather “the alternative strategies that artists used in LA in response to various institutional collapses.” In the sixties, there had seemed to be a way to have a career as an artist; there were paths to follow. But by the seventies, that sense had disappeared. Young artists kept making art, but in many ways it was more for themselves and for one another than for a public. They formed collectives and published small magazines. This ethos of making art for the sake of making it—for opening oneself to new methods and ideas—this was what resonated for the CalArts students. The installation on ICA’s mezzanine, with its 40/4 chairs by David Rowland and its “Blueprint for Counter Education” posters (originals in the flat files; reproductions on the walls), is a portal to a moment in history from which to take inspiration.

Photo: Alex Klein

Maybe it’s just because I grew up during them, but I love the 1970s: the bright colors, the TV shows, the air of idealism. At my elementary school, ca. 1973, we sat on the floor and called our teachers Nell and Rich and Jewell. The Monarch butterfly project we enacted every year—watching the slow, striped caterpillars spin bright green chrysalises for themselves, then break out as brilliant winged creatures—would not be out of place up here on the ICA mezzanine.

Perhaps East of Borneo’s most potent installation object is the Metamorphokit table, which got delayed by UPS and didn’t show up till the very morning of the opening. Metamorphokit is a system of modular furniture designed for the CalArts dorms by Peter de Bretteville and Toby Cowan in 1971. The pieces could be put together in all different kinds of ways. Students would arrive at school, go up to their dorm room, and find a pile of unassembled Metamorphokit pieces. Thus, a student’s first task upon entering CalArts would be to design her own environment. “The idea,” Tom explained, “was that you would build your own dorm room, and in the process you would figure out what kind of artist you were.”

Alex, the Excursus curator, added, “But we found out they aren’t that easy to put together.”

“But they’re very easy to take apart,” Stacey said.

CalArts dorm room interior featuring Metamorphokit modular furniture (1972).

It makes me think of those caterpillars again. Didn’t they too create their own environments, then slip inside them for a while to do something mysterious, until they were ready to dry their new wings and take flight?

* * *

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I’m standing in a room in ICA I’ve never been in before—a room I didn’t know existed—looking at a wall of circuit breakers. “This is the breaker we need,” Kate says, “because it goes to the Jennifer Bolande phonograph.” She’s referring to the piece “Aerial Phonograph,” an actual record player on which an actual record turns, small parachuters on the label slowly spinning.

Photo: Aaron Igler / Greenhouse Media

Two of ICA’s current shows use a lot of technology, both old and new: video projectors and computers, phonographs and slide projectors. So getting the museum ready for visitors requires a lot more than unlocking the doors and switching on the lights. On ordinary mornings it’s not a problem, but sometimes we need to get the shows running unexpectedly, so Kate, Robert, Anthony, and I are learning to turn on the shows.

After the circuit breaker room, we visit another hidden place. Jennifer Burris, who curated the show with the slide projectors (Living Document / Naked Reality: Toward an Archival Cinema), leads us through the upstairs galleries and back into the shop, where she opens a hidey hole in the wall. There’s a computer in there, and a lot of cords, and some dust.

Another computer runs the program that works the carousel slide projectors, four of which are lined up on a table as part of the piece “Sample Frames” by Alexandra Navratil. Landscapes from the twenties click by in a nostalgic wash of color, four related images at a time like notes making up a single chord. “It’s old school,” Jennifer says as we wait for the slow computer to start up. “To start the program, you just hit the down arrow.”

Alexandra Navratil, Sample Frames, 2011, installation with 4 synchronized slide-projectors, 81 images on each projector (loop). Courtesy of the artist.

We take notes, ask questions. I look around for hobbits or gremlins, for other doors to other rooms. In February, ICA will host a program called “An exhibition to hear read,” activating many of the museum’s “interstitial spaces” (the lobby, the elevator, the coat closet, the bathrooms) through the perfomative reading of various texts. The performers won’t use these secret places where equipment lives, but for a moment I imagine how it would be to open a hatch and find a person in there, reciting.

There’s a dream common to people who live in Manhattan. One day they suddenly discover a room in their apartment they never noticed before. For me today, the ICA is becoming a dream museum, hatching new spaces as though it were infinite.

In a different way (temporally rather than spatially), maybe the ICA is infinite. A proud parade of shows stretches back to Clyfford Still in 1963 and forward into the unknown, like the ghostly procession of kings in Macbeth. Centuries from now—millennia from now—who’s to say someone won’t be standing right here, powering up tiny nuclear reactors, perhaps, to project light onto the very air.

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

“No. I took the train.”

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

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

Jacqueline and Jennifer considering The Centennial Star

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

Paul switched the images.

“A bit more distance?”

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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As we come in, Jenna offers us a basket of 3-D glasses: red, yellow, or black. Ingrid chooses black, which matches her outfit. Standing at the podium she announces, “Greg wants his glasses back after the event!” Greg is Greg Dinkins, the co-founder of the New York Stereoscopic Society. He’s at ICA tonight to give a presentation about Max Margulis, a musician, writer, teacher, and a founder of Blue Note records; a hanger-out at the legendary Cedar Tavern with the hard-drinking New York School artists; and a stereo photographer.

Photo: William Hidalgo

I have worn 3-D glasses before, but only for easy thrills at the movies. I have never really looked through them, and it takes some getting used to. At first the images shift and blur as my eyes settle in. What Greg has to say is as interesting as what he’s showing us. In the fifties, Max Margulis made 3-D portraits of his artist friends in their studios and photographed New York street scenes. One story about Margulis involves his friendship with Willem de Kooning. When the photographer first knew the painter, de Kooning was so poor he didn’t own an overcoat. In winter, Max would come over and lend him his coat so de Kooning could go out, then wait around the apartment for him to bring it back.

Once I get used to the glasses, it really is amazing how deep the images go. You can see how far back the divan is in one room, just where the easel sits, how a column defines the space. The column in particular seems so definitively placed that I succumb to the illusion, moving my head in vain to try to see around it. In another image, two people play duets at a piano that seems to stretch backward forever. In a third, de Kooning, wearing a blue shirt, poses in front of a portrait he painted of Margulis himself: a portrait of de Kooning with a portrait of Max. In the background, a bunch of paintings lean casually against a wall. “Think of all the museums they’re hanging in now,” Greg says. The Museum of Modern Art, for instance, which is currently presenting an enormous de Kooning retrospective. The curators working on that show used the Margulis images as an aid to their research. One stereophotograph shows the the monumental painting “Excavation” partly done, offering insight into the painter’s process and materials. The researchers asked Greg to blow up parts of the images to give them a closer look.

Stereoscopic portrait of Willem de Kooning by Max Margulis, March 22, 1950. The painting behind de Kooning is his 1944 portrait of Margulis.

I like the glimpses into the artist’s studios, those mystical springs of inspiration with their battered furniture and empty bottles, their serious-faced men (they’re almost always men) looking potent and inscrutable. But even better, for my money, are the scenes of New York street life. The distance elongates like taffy, pulling you in. On Delancy Street on the Lower East Side, on the Succot holiday, a peddler cart bright with yellow citrus looms in the foreground, while the shoeshine boys and the old Jews with beards recede through space down the long street.

Greg says, “There’s a common phrase about 3-D photography—coming at you.” Comin’ attya. “I like to think, instead, that the images take me there.”

In one store window, vicious-looking squirrels pose, a taxidermist’s comment on city life, perhaps. In another, we gaze through the façade of an abandoned storefront at the giant hole in the ground that will become Lincoln Center. New York as it was—and in its becoming what it is—comes alive for us tonight in this Philadelphia auditorium. A face pressed to a window seems be peering back not only into space but also time, the illusion of seeing into the third dimension creating the sense of seeing into the fourth.

In a few images, you can see a flicker of Max’s reflection in the glass. A lingering ghost, documenting a place receding steadily into the past.

* * *
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Oliver Herford illustrated the fairy godmother inspired from the Perrault version

Every fall I, along with hundreds of other staff members from museums and dance companies and botanical gardens from around the Philadelphia region, start hunting down facts and figures like so many pigs in truffle season. How many people came through our doors last year? Of these, how many were school children in groups? How many people made financial donations? How many interns do we have? What is the most popular sweater color among visitors? Okay, I made that last one up, but at this time of year I do feel like Cinderella when her step-mother tosses the lentils into the fireplaces and tells her to pick them all out if she wants to go to the ball. Of course, it’s all for a good cause.

I am not a data person, but I don’t deny the power of data. The bits and pieces I and my colleagues hunt down get funneled into an enormous and influential database, The Pennsylvania Cultural Data Project (PACDP), which collects information like this from all over the state. The accumulated data gets used, then, in a couple of ways. One of these ways is good for the organizations: we use our own portion of it when we apply for grants to reassure foundations that we are doing our job responsibility and deserve support.

But even more significantly, the whole kitchen full of information is used to promote arts and culture to the public and the government. Because of the truffles our little snouts root up, organizations like the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance (GPCA) are able to go public with statements like this: Cultural organizations and their audiences in greater Philadelphia spend $1.3 billion annually, and the economic activity of the cultural sector generates 40,000 jobs and returns $158 million in taxes to state and local communities (GPCA report, “Arts, Culture, & Economic Prosperity in Greater Philadelphia“). This helps keep pressure on City Hall and Harrisburg to support the arts.

Here at ICA, we’re also planning a more personal truffle hunt. Recently a bunch of us met to discuss what kinds of things we’d like to find out about our audience. In the galleries and at our public programs, I’m always wondering who our visitors are. That tall older guy with the faded tattoos, the well-dressed woman with the high gold sandals, the young couple in matching leather jackets: who are they, and why are they here, and will they come back? If not, why not? And if so, what is about what we’re doing that they like? My colleague Ingrid Schaffner recently got back from Europe where she said the art museums were full: families, young people, old people, all strolling through as though going to an art museum were just one more thing you might choose to do, like going to the movies or the mall.

Photo: J. Katz

This fall we called around to some of our peer institutions who sent along examples of their own surveys. Some are quite short, others fairly long. Almost all of them ask for age, sex, income, race: these are the usual pieces into which the pie chart gets sliced. Many of them also ask: Where do you get your arts and culture news? How satisfied were you with your experience today? What’s your email address? If you’re lucky, the museum will give a nice postcard in exchange for your cooperation.

I can’t help feeling—or maybe just dreaming—that there should be other questions we could ask that would get at something more essential about our audiences. What’s one of your favorite shows you’ve ever seen at an art museum? What magazines do you read? What country do you hope to visit? What do you believe to be the purpose of art?

Photo: J. Katz

Or wait, here are better questions still: What do like to wear when visiting museums? If the ICA were a kind of weather, what kind of weather would we be? Now that you’ve seen the shows, will you contact us tomorrow and let us know what you dream tonight?

The answers to questions like these wouldn’t feed us. They wouldn’t help us get us grants or lobby the government. The yield from these inquiries would be more like magic mushrooms than like truffles: heightening our perceptions, giving color to the air.

* * *

Let us know what questions you think an ICA visitors survey should ask. We’d love your input.

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As I descend from the ICA offices to the lobby, I can hear the buzz of voices as the elevator passes the second floor—the Sagmeister buzz. Designer Stefan Sagmeister is giving a lecture at 6:30, and 300 people have signed up to hear him. Designers, font inventors, art educators, enthusiasts: for an hour they have been checking in, getting their hands stamped, and hurrying upstairs to claim a seat. There are far too many people to fit in ICA’s auditorium. Luckily the upstairs shows closed on Sunday. We rushed deinstallation and set up rows of chairs and benches in the same gallery where ICA will present The Happy Show, a new installation by Sagmeister himself, in April.

Sagmeister in a still from The Happy Film, 2011. Courtesy of Sagmeister Inc.

Before the lecture starts, I ask the women sitting behind me why they’re here. “It’s Stefan Sagmeister!” they explain.

“What do you like about him?”

“He breaks all the rules,” one of them says.

Kenny Goldsmith, a conceptual poet who (in collaboration with ICA) is teaching a whole class on Sagmeister at Penn this year, comes by in his kilt and magenta sweater to say hello. I tell him I’m looking for an angle for the piece I want to write on Sagmeister.

“The man himself is the angle,” Kenny says.

“Why’s that?”

“Design is the last thing on this mind.”

“What’s on his mind?”

“Film, performance, body art, language.” This afternoon, introducing Stefan at a lunchtime conversation with former ICA Director Claudia Gould at Kelly Writers House, Kenny said of the class, “We’ve studied everything from the Helvetica typeface to body art to the psychopharmacological exploits of the Romantic poets onwards…Sagmeister is a pedagogic dream.” A little later he added, “He’s an iconoclast, a boundary breaker, which makes him a perfect match for ICA.”

Photo: © Cameron Wittig, Walker Art Center

The Happy Show will certainly break boundaries, as Stefan’s lecture does tonight. Part personal narrative, part history of the psychological study of happiness (both positive psychology and cognitive therapy were, it turns out, invented here at Penn), Sagmeister showcases his own work only, it seems, incidentally. He does, of course, use good design to communicate his message. The guy makes great slides.

For ten years Sagmeister has been exploring happiness. Maxims, taken from his diaries (“Trying to look good limits my life,” “Obsessions make my life worse and my work better,” and so on) spelled out in spectacular, innovative, and often interactive typography will form the basis of the ICA show. In one interactive video installation, the words appear as spider webs, fragmented by the body of the viewer stepping in front of them, and then reforming. In another, a visitor can pedal a stationary bike to power lights that spell out alternating phrases. A magnetized wall that organizes iron filings into letters is a work in progress. It may or may not make the show.

Photo: Jenna Weiss

The exhibition will also feature parts of The Happy Film, a personal project that follows Sagmeister as he explores three categories of mental intervention that may or may not affect happiness: meditation, cognitive therapy (the film crew is in the sessions with him, but he says he forgets about them after a few minutes), and finally drugs.

Sagmeister claims his work won’t affect people’s happiness: “It would be foolish to expect that the film will make anyone happier any more than watching a Jane Fonda workout video would make you skinnier.”

Still, there’s this. Toward the beginning of the lecture, Sagmeister asks the audience to raise their hands to show how happy they are. The lowest level is 0 (“I feel like shit”) and the highest is 10 (“I love life”). At the end of the lecture, he asks for another show of hands. This time, there are a lot more 8s and 10s.

Photo: Jenna Weiss

After the applause, I ask some listeners (more designers) if they’re disappointed Sagmeister didn’t talk more about design tonight. They’re not. All the other designers lecture about design, they tell me. They are happy to hear about happiness instead.

* * *

The Happy Show opens at ICA on April 4.

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If you walked into ICA last Sunday afternoon and went up to the second floor, you would have seen a small crowd around the installation Bill Walton’s Studio. Completing the exhibition together, people shared remembrances of the late sculptor and printmaker who touched so many in the Philadelphia art community over the last half-century. Others talked about their feelings about Bill’s work and the studio on view.

Photo: Jenna Weiss

Artist Paul Swenbeck, for example, who has been busy working on an exhibition of his own, described his envy of the “calm and zen” in Bill’s studio. Molly Dougherty, executive director of the Philadelphia Art Alliance, told how, at a difficult time in her life, Bill issued an invitation: “There’s a class going on in West Philadelphia—Argentine Tango. Are you in?”

Some people who spoke, like the young woman going off to apprentice with a woodworker in Maine, hadn’t known Bill at all, but what lingered of him here touched them too. Samantha Sharf, a Penn senior who worked on the exhibition, talked about what a strong sense of the man she’d acquired through his space. A young man who had used his grandfather’s tools to build a guitar made a connection to that experience; he had never known his grandfather, but his closeness to him grew through using the tools.

In return for their words, each speaker got to choose a piece of the installation to take home: a drill bit, a painted block of wood, an old red chair. Paul Swenbeck, for example, took home a log. Sam Sharf took home a tiny skeleton key.

Curator Richard Torchia quoted Brancusi: “Things are not difficult to make; what is difficult is putting ourselves in the state of mind to make them.” Then he added, “I think standing here makes anyone who isn’t an artist want to be an artist.” Richard took a jar of pencils.

Photo: Jenna Weiss

Pretty much the only things people couldn’t take were the artworks themselves—not that it was always easy to tell what was art and what wasn’t. As exhibition curator Ingrid Schaffner said, pointing to the workbench, “One of those c-clamps is a work of art, and the others are just c-clamps…There’s some Duchampian terrain to navigate here.” Later, Ingrid took a jar of sticks.

Painter Jane Irish, one of the conduits who made the exhibition possible, told how one time Bill, who was her neighbor, came into her studio when Jane was working on a drawing involving a shower of gold. Having trouble getting the drawing right, she’d made a model for herself: “I took a silver lampshade and I put plaster on it, and I poured my penny jar over it so that the pennies stuck in the plaster. And Bill said, ‘That’s the best thing you’ve ever made!’” Jane took some palette knives.

A young artist just setting up his own first studio spoke. A friend of a fishing buddy of Bill’s spoke. A colleague at Moore College of Art to whom Bill taught letterpress told how she and Bill traded sculptures: “I look at his piece every morning when I have breakfast,” she said. Bill’s first Philadelphia gallerist spoke, as did his last.

Bill’s daughter told us how she used to play on and around the big artworks her dad had in the yard, sliding down them, or having the dog jump through them. She also used to go into his studio and move things around: “That would make him so mad!” A little later, when someone extolled the economical quality of Bill’s work, she spoke up again: “It’s nice you used that word, ‘economical.’ We called it cheap.” Everybody laughed.

Artist Sarah McEneaney brought her dog. “Bill loved Trixie, and she loved him,” she said. Bill’s last home was in the building above Sarah’s office, and Trixie used to go upstairs to nap in the room near him. “She still goes up, there,” Sarah said, though the room is empty.

Photo: Jenna Weiss

We hope visitors to ICA exhibitions always go home with something they didn’t have when they came in—an idea, an image, an inspiration. This wasn’t so different, really, just that this time those inspirations were condensed into things. For a few hours that afternoon everyone in the room played their part, and the moment that had been suspended because of the exhibition—the moment for the dispersal of Bill’s material possessions—took place at last. It was a strange alchemy, words building up a picture of the man even as the objects he had touched and made were taken up by other hands.

The many artists in the room mostly took away talismans that were also useful: a jar of brushes, a wood plane, a T-square, a ball peen hammer. Tools that will keep on doing work, only in someone else’s studio now.

* * *

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Last month, along with some other ICA staff, I was out in San Francisco for a tour of the contemporary art collection in the new IT building at Williams-Sonoma, Inc. (You can read about the tour and my thoughts about art in the workplace here.)

The next day, gallery owner (and Penn alumna) Katie Clark drove some of us out to an industrial part of the city for a studio visit with one of her artists, Stephanie Syjuco.

Curators, of course, are always going on studio visits with artists they’re interested in. I have perhaps a romantic notion of these occasions, with artist and curator drinking tea (or something stronger) as they wander from artwork to artwork in a large airy space. The artist’s ideas about a piece and the curator’s ideas come together (in my fantasy) to form something new—something bigger and brighter than anything either of them could give rise to alone. And then, if the chemistry is right, an exhibition is conceived. Some months later, after a period of gestation and a hard, last-minute push, it arrives with a flourish in the world.

This tour wasn’t like that. Still, it was its own kind of revelation.

An artist must think twice before permitting strangers into her sanctum, the place where fragile notions are still wobbling about like new foals, trying to find their legs. It was generous of Stephanie to invite us in, to let us wander around and stare at enigmatic or talismanic objects—coffee cans bristling with tools, remnants of cloth, a life-sized, two-dimensional Eames chair—and to take the time to talk with us about her work.

“Most of my projects are very large scale,” Stephanie told us. And most, it turns out, have to do with ownership, counterfeiting, and the economy of the art world. For a recent project at the Catherine Clark Gallery—RAIDERS: International Booty, Bountiful Harvest (Selections from the A_ _ _ _ A _ _ M _ _ _ _ _)—Stephanie downloaded images of vases from the Asian Art Museum’s website, blew them up to size, printed them on photo paper, and mounted them on laser-cut plywood. The resulting collection was put on display facing forward in the gallery, so that it looked to people coming in as though they were entering a vase store. “You’d notice the moment they’d realize that what they were looking at was a cultural prop,” Katie Clark said.

Courtesy of Catharine Clark Gallery

“Essentially I’m raiding the collection of the Asian Art Museum,” Stephanie explained, “to challenge our idea of ownership.” She was also, as an Asian-American artist not deeply connected to Asian art, seeing whether she might find a resonant relationship.

An earlier project, “notMOMA” at Washington State University, invited undergraduate art students to produce replicas of 70 artworks from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art out of whatever materials they could scrounge up: color Xeroxes printed out and pinned to boards, pieces of cardboard cut out and painted to resemble metal, paint dripped Pollock-style onto canvases. “You have all the greatest hits,” Stephanie said: Warhol’s soup cans and a Calder sculpture and that Eames chair I mentioned earlier. “Then you go up closer and you start to see that they fall apart.”

Stephanie gives a terrific studio presentation. I was captivated by her ideas and her images, by her account of inviting crocheters around the world to make counterfeit designer bags and her adventure at the 2009 Frieze Art Fair hiring artists to make replicas of art works on offer elsewhere at the fair and selling them at cut-rate prices. The insights she gave are ones she might offer anywhere, but somehow being in the room where she dreams things up gives her story a seductive intimacy. It almost makes one think one could do it oneself—sit in a room like this and wait for the bright, lively ideas to coming flocking in like birds.

Back in Philadelphia, ICA’s exhibition Bill Walton’s Studio runs through the weekend. For the show, we catalogued and moved all the items from the studio of the late minimalist sculptor into our Project Space, where it fits beautifully—though there is a bit less dust.

Bill Walton

This Sunday at 2:00 the public is invited to share remembrances of the artist in exchange for an object from the installation (finished works excepted, of course). It’s an extraordinary opportunity to participate in the alchemy of the studio, where bits of wood and tubes of pigment and the spark of an idea incandesce into art.

*       *      *

Join us for Bill Walton: Gifting the Studio Sunday, December 4 at 2:00.

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

“I’m interested in how art and writing have relationships with each other,” Becky Hunter says.

Oh! I think. Me, too.

It’s a sunny Sunday afternoon on the ICA mezzanine, and Becky is talking about Agnes Martin, a painter whose first museum retrospective was held at ICA in 1973.

Becky is a young art critic, book reviewer, and fiction writer who moved to Philadelphia from London not long ago. Her presentation is part of ICA’s new Excursus series, a platform for more intimate programming than you’ll find on Wednesday nights in our auditorium: a conversation over a cup of tea, a pop-up bookstore, a dramatic reading, or a game of chess with a Wharton Esherick chess set.

Another aspect of Excursus is that it engages ICA’s archive. Becky spent time in the archive researching Agnes Martin, and part of what she’s doing today—as we sit around the table passing images of her paintings from hand to hand—is bringing to us what she unearthed there. Also she is telling a personal story about her own engagement with the artist, whose work she once knew only through two paintings hung in the Tate: bright white, plain grid paintings—some of the only work of Martin’s on permanent view in Britain. Because it was so hard to see the work, Becky, like many people, found herself engaging with Martin largely through her writings. These, often aphoristic and contemplative, concern her spiritual quest. Her lectures, such as “An Untroubled Mind” and “On The Perfection Underlying Life” helped cement some of the myth that grew up around the artist, who abandoned a budding New York career in 1967, driving around the country in a camp van until she found herself in New Mexico. There in the desert she built an adobe house in which to live and work alone.

The stories of artists that come down to us are irresistible: The shepherd boy Giotto, discovered drawing in the fields by 13th century master Cimabue; Van Gogh never selling anything; Andy Warhol going home from the blaze of his silver Factory to the quiet house he shared with his mother. The narrative of the artist as hermit, the artist alone in nature, the artist repudiating worldly success is compellingly romantic. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to live like that, alone with the Muse and silence, maybe a dog? Is it perhaps the integrity of renunciation that brings acclaim in the long run? Oh, how pretty to think so.

Becky told us that the prevailing view of Martin’s often stark paintings is to see them as controlled, passive, modest: quintessentially a woman’s work. But, as Becky spent more time with the work, she began to develop different ideas. This happened in 2009 when she took a trip to Edinburgh to see Agnes Martin: Artists Rooms. When she got to the museum, having had a fight with someone just before getting aboard the train, Becky was in a bad mood. Contrary to her expectations, the paintings—darker and grayer than the ones she had seen at the Tate—seemed to reflect her state of mind. “All the paintings seemed to me to have an element of anxiety or aggression,” she said. “There was a real tension between these thick, horizontal gesso brushstrokes and these vertical spaces.”

Was what she had seen real? Or was she so steeped in her own mood that she saw the paintings through that scrim? What to make of an experience of Martin’s work so at odds with the conventional wisdom, so antithetical to the myth of the zen-like desert denizen from whose lips koans calmly dropped?

It was this question that led Becky to ICA’s archive. Were there writings to be unearthed that would support her alternative view? Would she find some objective truth to back up her instincts and feelings?

When she got to this point in her presentation, Becky stopped to ask us—the audience—what we thought. Was research born of an emotional response valid? What an unexpected, brave, truly intimate moment this was: offering her approach up to us to judge!

This is what I think: we all have personal, emotional responses to art, and this is good—it’s indispensable. I want an art critic or scholar who has an open mind and an open heart, one aware of her own prejudices so that she will not be in thrall to them, not one who approaches art or artists blind to her own preconceptions, or with the intellect only.

And anyway, are there fixed answers when it comes to questions like these about Martin? In her research, Becky found an essay she believes is by Frank Kolbert in which he discusses Martin’s grid as a “two-dimensional prison.” Becky spoke to a woman who knew the painter at the end of her life and asserted that her use of line was an attempt to hold onto control. Are the paintings prisons, or are they airy meditations? Are they exercises in self-discipline, or are they Taoist paths?

Or—more plausibly—do they partake of both modes, and likely many more besides? Doesn’t Martin’s work—doesn’t any art—take its energy from contradiction, from the complexity that allows for multiple interpretations? From the submerged, intricate, fragmented tumult of a whole life.

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Image credits: Agnes Martin, “Untitled #1,” 1989, acrylic and graphite on linen, 72″ x 72″ (182.9 cm x 182.9 cm). Photo by: G. R. Christmas / Courtesy The Pace Gallery.

Excursus event photos by Tiala Glabau.

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

“I want to make sure they’re in a space that inspires,” Laura Alber says, gesturing around the new Williams-Sonoma, Inc. IT building in San Francisco. She’s talking about her colleagues who work in the building, the walls of which have recently been hung with works of art by contemporary artists: Walead Beshty, Shannon Ebner, Tamar Halpern, and others. Laura, who graduated from Penn in 1990, is President and CEO of Williams-Sonoma, Inc., and she is hosting a tour of the new collection for local alumni, ICA staff, and friends.

Laura Alber, in black, chatting with guests

Before we look at the art, though, she tells a story. Having purchased a building known as the Ice House for the company’s new headquarters—a very pricey piece of real estate—Howard Lester, Laura’s predecessor at Williams-Sonoma, Inc., proceeded to fill the place with mid-century art. Appalled at the expense, Laura questioned his decision. Wouldn’t the money spent on art be better used in other ways?

In response, Mr. Lester had his own question: “How would you like to work in a building in a basement with no windows?”

And so Laura’s mind began to change.

I like this story for a lot of reasons. For one thing, it’s rare for someone to pinpoint an a-ha moment in their lives—a specific occurrence that opened their mind to something new. For another, the story relates to a longstanding conversation I’ve had with myself about where art belongs.

For the most part, art is either in the home, where it is a rich part of the daily life for a very few people, or it’s in a museum in the good company of others of its kind (and available for visits by many strangers) but without any daily domestic intimacy to animate it. Then there are in-between spaces like public buildings and parks: in a City Hall, for example, or on a University Green.

None of these places, however, is where most of us spend most of our waking hours. Rather, we spend them at work: in offices, factories, stores, classrooms, and cubicles—many, many cubicles—with safety notices or family snapshots the only things hanging. One of the things I love about working at ICA is that there is art on the walls even upstairs in the offices. Behind me, in my own cubicle, hangs a poster from a 1968 Christo exhibition, and in front of me over the partition I can see a beautiful print, Sarah McEneaney’s self-portrait of the artist (and ICA board member) in her bathtub. I have never worked anywhere else where this was true, and chances are you don’t work someplace like this either.

But why not? Isn’t the office arguably the place that needs art the most? Isn’t art good for morale, productivity, imagination? Shouldn’t hanging it be a good investment for a business—an investment in the mental well-being of its employees, a kind of health plan for the soul?

At our tour Jimmy Castelucci, a Williams-Sonoma, Inc. associate, tours us through the collection. “The art in this building was inspired by innovation and technology,” he says. He points out the Roland Flexners in the lobby, explaining how they were made by the artist putting India ink and soap in a straw and blowing bubbles that burst against the paper. He shows us the Walead Beshty photographic print made in a process precipitated by what happened to a roll of film going through an x-ray machine shortly after 9/11. He takes us upstairs, past the cubicles and the white boards, past Huddle Room 2A and Conference Room 2B.

What do the people who sit in these cubicles and scribble on these white boards think of this art? Does it grow more meaningful to them over time? More invisible? Might the guy at this desk here look right past all of it for months, and then one day—a difficult afternoon, perhaps, tangled in intractable computer code—look up and really see the Cornelia Parker piece of wires spun from bullets? Might it make some difference?

Some of the Penn alumns at the Williams-Sonoma tour

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