My Barbarian at ICA: The Mandate to Participate

December 17th, 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

“Who votes for the sanctity of marriage?” Malik asks. “Who votes for the war on women? If we had to write a musical about the war on women, who would the main characters be?”

It’s a brisk autumn Friday, and Malik Gaines and Alex Segade of the performance collective My Barbarian are working with an enthusiastic group from the University of Pennsylvania, doing exercises and playing games that will culminate in a public performance at ICA on Sunday.

Photo: Tiala Glabau

The group sprawls on the wooden floor tossing around ideas, both narrative and political. They talk about equal pay, “legitimate rape,” and Hillary Clinton’s pant suits. Malik says, “Let’s try a war-on-women machine. Start with a motion and a sound you can repeat.”

“I’ve got one.” A young woman with long hair jumps up on the stage and mimes knocking on a glass ceiling.

“Anyone want to add on?” Malik asks.

Pretty soon the whole group is up there, stomping, pointing, knocking, and groaning. “Go!” one says, and another says “Stay!” One accuses, “Slut,” while another begs, “Aspirin?” Together they make a lively, noisy, funny, animatronic organism, growing more complex and increasing in volume until Malik calls, “Freeze!” Everyone takes turns demonstrating their bit amid much laughter. Next they construct an “Apologizing for America” machine (eerie and solemn) and then a machine for “Drone Attacks”—this one frenetic with drones zooming all over the stage.

“What if drones fell in love with people?” Malik asks.

“I was born to kill but learned to love!” one of the drones, an art history student, cries.

“Let’s animate it one more time,” Malik suggests, and they do.

Welcome to Post-Living Ante-Action Theater. Serious and irreverent, political and participatory, PoLAAT (its name refers to two important avant-garde theater collectives of the past) is a collaborative project that My Barbarian has staged all over the world, engaging audiences with a seductive combination of spectacle, politics, camp, and critique. In a little while, the group will improvise scenes literally ripped from the headlines, using newspaper stories as the basis of skits, some of which they will refine and perform on Sunday. One will be about ambiguous election laws in Pennsylvania; another will concern cheerleading safety.

This first afternoon of the three-day workshop, the group seems tentative. They throw out ideas with some effort, laugh nervously as they organize scenes, shift positions. But as the scenes are performed, games are played, and pizza is eaten, everyone relaxes. With Malik and Alex’s guidance, you can see them learning to trust each other.

By Sunday, with a storm brewing outside and members of the public filing in, the performers have found their groove.

Photo: Tiala Glabau

They are lying on the floor as we enter ICA’s auditorium and take our seats around the walls. A voice is chanting: “Six a.m., seven a.m., eight a.m…” Bodies begin to get up, to mime brushing teeth, texting, eating. Characters chatter into invisible phones, drive invisible cars, change channels on invisible TVs, type. A woman in a red dress does jumping jacks. We watch the day go by in a hypnotic whoosh of time until, before we know it, it’s evening again. People lie down in their invisible beds and the room grows still—though around one a.m. two of them get up in their separate spaces and dance. On the wall, a screens light up: “PoLAAT: Born to Kill, Learn to Love,” it says. The joke, tossed out during the workshop Friday, has become a catchphrase, summing up some essence of the work the group has done, a mixture of irony and sincerity, provocation and humor.

One of the five principles of PoLAAT is “Mandate to Participate,” which Alex described on Friday as “friendly and coercive at the same time.” The workshop group wants the audience to join with them, and they invite us in, gently at first, but with increasing persistence. Malik goes around with a microphone, asking us our names and our astrological signs. We watch some of the scenes I saw being developed on Friday, listen to some songs, and enjoy a fabulous costume parade. Then Malik asks for volunteers for an act of levitation, and two people are passed back and forth over a row of actors.

Photo: Tiala Glabau

After that feat, Alex wants us to all get up and try out different kinds of walks. We mostly do. We circle the room like gorillas, like queens of England, like Hurricane Sandy. It’s not too scary—at least not until we find ourselves playing a game called Binary, crossing to one side of the room or the other to declare our allegiance to an eclectic assortment of objects, qualities, aesthetics.

Peanut butter, or jelly?

People divide, right and left.

Prefer to live in the past or the future?

We divide again.

Photo: Tiala Glabau

Spiritualist or Satanist? Cops or robbers? Those who identify as part of the minority and those who identify as part of the majority?

“Theater can be a model for the forms we hope to create,” Malik says, as almost everybody crosses to the minority side. “Each show is a rehearsal for a better life.” He and Alex are smiling now. They look pleased with their latest PoLAAT experiment, and with this disparate group of initiates who, having met only two days ago, have come together and made something new. Who have entertained and provoked us. Who have drawn us into their performance and gently coerced us into—literally—taking sides. Who have put on a show.

* * *
My Barbarian’s residency was sponsored by ICA and Penn’s Theatre Arts Program, and was supported in part by a grant from the Provost of the University of Pennsylvania.

To stay up to date with the costume parade of Miranda, email miranda@icaphila.org.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Public Programs

Comments are closed.

It’s Really Great to Have You Here: Lunch with Amy Sadao

December 3rd, 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

Susan, an intern in the curatorial department, tells us how she ordered the books for The Uses of Literacy, one of the installations in ICA’s current exhibition, Jeremy Deller: Joy in People. She says she was surprised to learn “how much work goes into the tiniest details…the different arrangement of the books on the shelf. The colors and how they looked against the wall—whether the orange should be in the middle and the green should be on the side.”

It’s a sunny lunchtime on the mezzanine, and Amy Sadao, ICA’s new director as of September, is having lunch with ICA’s other newcomers: this fall’s crop of interns and work study students. Some are Penn students, others have graduated recently from other universities, and a few have even curated their own shows. Over turkey or avocado-and-cheese sandwiches, Amy asks them to go around the table and share what they found most surprising when they started working here.

Ian, a Penn senior, says, “I think it’s really interesting that not everyone at ICA has a PhD in art history.”

Joanna, who wants to go into conservation, says she’s amazed by how much the museum changes from show to show: “It’s not just a passive space for art,” she says.

Lindsay, who works in the development department, says, “How much work goes into making it free for everyone!”

“I’ve been an intern,” Amy says. “That’s how I learned a lot about art institutions.” She sketches her background, how she went to Cooper Union for her BFA—“but I knew halfway through that I wasn’t going to be an artist.” Later she attended a PhD program at Berkeley in Ethnic Studies. For ten years, before beginning this job, Amy was Executive Director of Visual AIDS in New York City, an ambitious institution with a small staff that relies on interns and volunteers perhaps even more than ICA does.

Photo: David Kelley

When it’s her turn to say what surprised her most about being here, Amy tells the interns, “I thought ICA’s staff of eighteen would be a lot! But now I see that eighteen: it’s really not that many people for the great ambitions and scale of what ICA does. So it’s really great to have you here!”

Eva, who is getting her masters at Tyler, says she’s surprised by how much research goes into marketing strategies for each individual show.

Egina, who has already done some independent curating, says, “What really surprises me is how democratic the space is upstairs [in the offices]. That wouldn’t necessarily happen at another museum.”

Tammy says, “How much paperwork there is.”

After the circle is completed, the conversation turns to other things. Amy talks about her own various internships, offers advice, and muses about art: “I like the idea that, if you are going to work with contemporary art, you might be interested in the unknown. Because that’s what artists are interested in.”

Getting a new director is itself an exercise in the unknown. It’s like moving into a house in early spring before anything has come up in the garden: every day reveals something new. So far the garden that is Amy Sadao is fast-growing, full of bright vines and flourishing berry bushes, bees buzzing everywhere. There has been lots of activity here this fall: new ideas and people, an energetic openness to connections in all corners of the art world, the University, the city, the region. Amy spent her first week at ICA meeting with every staff member, and her interest in all aspects of museum functioning is unmistakable. It was her idea to have this lunch, to make sure the interns knew that she appreciated their work, and to hear what they might have to tell her. “Your perceptions are valuable to the institution, and to me,” she says.

As lunch comes to an end, Anthony, ICA’s Associate Curator, comes up the steps, laden with grocery bags. He’s getting ready to make dinner for participants in tomorrow’s ICA Salon.

“Anthony!” Amy says. “What surprised you most when you first came to ICA?”

“That everybody cooks,” Anthony says.

* * *
To stay abreast of what surprises Miranda, email miranda@icaphila.org.

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Staff

Comments are closed.

Salon of Ghosts: Staging (and Restaging) at ICA

November 19th, 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

In the way that autumn, redolent of falling leaves and new notebooks, is always the same autumn, so the first Salon is always the same first Salon. Here we are again—students and artists, neighbors and teachers—together in ICA’s auditorium with its carpeting and its round, comfortable poufs. My mind spirals back to last fall—to the last first Salon—when Alex (as she does tonight) invoked Gertrude Stein, that quintessential Salon hostess, dressed in brown corduroy, sitting in a high-backed Renaissance chair, facilitating “polite and perhaps animated conversation.” For a dizzy half-moment, I don’t know quite where I am. Those three guests at the front of the room with their presentations ready, are they painters here to talk about abstraction? No; tonight is Staging / Restaging, and that trio of guests is Terry Adkins, an artist, musician, and a fine arts professor at Penn; Homay King, an art historian at Bryn Mawr College, and Sharon Lockhart, an artist, filmmaker, and professor at USC. “I hope you’re all properly caffeinated from the La Colombe coffee,” Alex says.

(primary)

Photo: J. Katz

Staging and restaging: What is that, exactly? The spark for tonight’s program is a work by Jeremy Deller, on view in the gallery upstairs. The Battle of Orgreave is a video and related archive that reanimate a restaging Deller organized in 2001, for which he marshaled 1,000 volunteers (and some horses) to recreate a violent confrontation in Thatcherite England between striking coal miners and police. That restaging was unlike the sort of Civil War reenactments common in America in a very important way: many of the people doing the reenacting were the same ones who had been in the clash in the first place. That’s like a married couple reenacting their divorce trial. “This isn’t about healing wounds,” Deller has said. “It’s going to take more than an art project to heal wounds.”

Jeremy Deller, “The Battle of Orgreave,” 2001
Commissioned and produced by Artangel
© the artist. Image courtesy the artist
Photo: Parisah Taghizadeh

What, then, is the role of such a project? And how is a restaging of a past event like (and unlike) a photograph of the event, or a memoir, or a documentary, or a song written to commemorate it? Each kind of restaging has its own quality, its own particular haunting power. Ghosts flit in and out in different guises, some white as clouds, some sticky with ectoplasm, others groaning and clanking chains.

In this room tonight, for instance, Terry Adkins powerfully summons the spirit of John Brown—“America’s first terrorist and leading shepherd,” he says, half-ironically—the American abolitionist who mounted a doomed raid on the armory in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia. Adkins (who hints that he has his own invented shadow self) has worked on a number of reanimations of Brown. He has played Brown’s ghost in a video (backed by ibises), refabricated the iron pipes with which Brown armed fugitive slaves (if they didn’t know how to use firearms), and resurrected a procession to commemorate Martyr Day, the day—December 2, 1859—Brown was hanged for his crimes.

Terry Adkins presenting his work. Photo: Ted Gerike

“I’m working on a project about the virtual,” Homay King says. Suddenly the room is open to the ghosts in the machines—computers—that have now become, like faithful dogs, our constant companions. In addition to introducing us to Ming Wong, an artist who restages films like Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (which is itself a remaking of Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows), with Wong playing all the roles, King speculates about what it might be about digital culture that encourages restagings, which are proliferating on YouTube this very moment like bright, tenacious dandelions. At the same time, she reminds us that, in the ancient world, recital—oral repetition—was how stories were spread; at the other extreme, she mentions the current fad whereby politicians are made, via software, to sing. Restaging has a long history, but things seem to be speeding up.

There is no speeding up, however, in Sharon Lockhart’s current work, which is disciplined by the steady pulse of a metronome counting out 120 beats per minutes. In her new show, Sharon Lockhart | Noa Eshkol, which just opened at The Jewish Museum in New York, Lockhart engages the work of Israeli dance composer and movement theorist Noa Eshkol (1924 –2007). Through a film installation featuring dancers who worked with Eshkol, combined for the first time with textiles (“wall carpets”) Eshkol made from scraps of fabric, Lockhart reanimates the choreographer’s fierce creative spirit. In fact, I think I see Eshkol now, entering the room in her leotards, cigarette in hand, bare feet hard with phantasmal callouses.

Installation view of Sharon Lockhart | Noa Eshkol exhibition at The Jewish Museum, New York City. Courtesy of Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels; Blum & Poe, Los Angeles; and neugerriemschneider, Berlin. Photo by Alex Slade.

As the Salon moves into its final act, audience members ask questions, make suggestions, speculate, fabulate. “This idea of anonymity and authorship is in the air,” someone says.

“It’s about the current generation’s inability to think about the future,” conjectures another.

By now the auditorium is thick with ghosts. See: in the corner, Gertrude Stein offers a glass of wine to John Brown. A British policeman raises a night stick over Fassbinder’s head. Noa Eskhol rescues the scraps of Ming Wong’s costumes to make a wall carpet. I peer over her shimmering shoulder, half-expecting to see our own visages given form there, as we lean eagerly forward in our chairs, not wanting to miss a word.

Table full of ghosts celebrating after the Salon. Photo: Alex Klein

* * *
Don’t miss the last Salon of the fall, Folk / Subculture, with Alex Baker, Matthew Higgs, and William E. Jones, on Wednesday, November 28 at 6:30.

Join Terry Adkins for this year’s Martyr Day procession down Locust Walk at Penn on December 2.

To join Miranda’s mailing list, email miranda@icaphila.org.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Jeremy Deller, Public Programs

Comments are closed.

Valerie’s Snack Bar: Tea Time at ICA

November 4th, 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

People who come into the gallery often look over at Valerie’s Snack Bar from the other side of the room, not quite sure how to respond to it.

Valerie's Snack Bar

Photo: Aaron Igler / Greenhouse Media

When they get close enough, I ask them if they would like tea. Mostly they would. During my first shift in Valerie’s, I served a woman who works at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, over on the other side of Penn’s campus, who often comes to ICA on her lunch hour. Later, a man in a white baseball cap came in. “Do you have espresso?” he asked. But although the café has signs advertising crumpets, or a toasted tea cake for £1, or a hot beef barm (sandwich) with or without onions, we only have tea.

Between now and the end of December, all ICA staff members are taking turns serving tea in Valerie’s, which is part of the exhibition Jeremy Deller: Joy in People. Valerie’s Snack Bar is a replica of a real tea room, really called Valerie’s Snack Bar, in Manchester, England. It was in Manchester that Jeremy Deller organized a procession (called Procession) with dozens of local clubs, committees, bands, and social groups of all kinds. During the year and a half he worked on the project, he liked to hang out in the real Valerie’s so much that he built this replica and put it on a float in the parade. You can see it going down the street in a video on a little TV on the counter here. There are also black-plumed horses, and a Hindu bagpipe band wearing kilts, and old cars, and people dancing and carrying banners.

Designed and sewn by the extraordinary Ed Hall, many of the banners are on view here in the gallery. One says, “Remember Ian Tomlinson” and another one says, “Carnival Queens.” A somewhat different-looking banner, which turns out to have been designed by David Hockney, says “Unrepentant Smokers.” I suppose this is what Deller meant when he said that he wanted to celebrate social group activities that are “lazily referred to as antisocial when in reality they are the exact opposite.”

Procession

Aaron Igler / Greenhouse Media

It wasn’t easy to get the tea room here. It had to come by ship—in pieces, in two shipping containers loaded onto a truck that parked outside ICA one afternoon last September. Dana tried to get the city to close off our block of 36th Street, but the target date kept changing as the ocean freight was delayed—by weather, or customs hold-ups, or some other foggy oceanic mystery. Then, the crates were too heavy to get into the building, so the crew had to unload the pieces out in the street and bring them inside. The trucking company gave us two hours. If we went over, we would have to pay a penalty.

After asking me how I would sum up Jeremy Deller’s work in one sentence, the woman who works at Children’s Hospital told me about her favorite ICA show of all time, back in the nineties. It was about the senses. You entered a dark room, and after a while purple lights slowly came up. She saw the exhibition, the name of which she no longer remembers, several times before she realized that actually the lights, though very dim, were always there—that seeing them was a matter of waiting for her eyes adjust. “I have always remembered it,” she said. I have served tea to an artist who had a show at ICA some years ago and was visiting the museum with her sister. One afternoon a class from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore came in and filled every seat.

Tea

Students having tea, author serving.

Karen Beckman, a professor of Cinema Studies at Penn, volunteered to serve tea and hold office hours in the café, and I have eavesdropped as ICA Senior Curator Ingrid Schaffner held a series of meetings in here, taking time out to chat with customers about the exhibition.

One day I even met my daughter’s high school English teacher—now retired—drinking tea and chatting with Associate Curator Anthony Elms about different Philadelphia museums! The surrealness of this particular experience reminded me of something else Jeremy Deller said about this project, that he hoped the parade might be “full of bizarre, funny, wrong-seeming things,” like a parade you might see on The Simpsons.

I am not prepared to sum up Jeremy Deller in a single sentence, but his work certainly has to do with constructing situations—a café, a restaged police-and-miners confrontation, a bombed-out car as a conversational prompt—in which people are invited to come together and interact. Given that, this modest tea room with its white Formica tables and sole libation is in a way the heart of the exhibition. This is the place where the viewer is invited to step through the invisible looking glass and become part of the art on view.

* * *

Jeremy Deller: Joy in People is open at ICA through December 30. The author of this post will serve you tea in Valerie’s on alternate Wednesdays between 1-3 PM.

To step through the invisible looking glass into Miranda’s mailing list, email miranda@icaphila.org.

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Jeremy Deller

One Response to “Valerie’s Snack Bar: Tea Time at ICA”

  1. Common Folk Collective » Snack Bar Performance says:
    November 14 2012 at 12:48 pm

    [...] Deller constructed a functioning piece of nostalgia inside Philly’s Institute of Contemporary Art: Between now and the end of December, all ICA staff members are taking turns serving tea [...]

His Twine: Marcel Duchamp and the Limits of Exhibition History

October 29th, 2012

[Note: The following piece was written by ICA’s Spiegel Fellow, Grace Ambrose, for Writing about Art: Marcel Duchamp, a program organized by ICA Student Board member Isaac Kaplan that was held at the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania on October 9, 2012.]

-post by Grace Ambrose

Open any account of the history of 20th century exhibitions and you will see this image.

 

The First Papers of Surrealism

John Schiff, Installation View of Exhibition ‘First Papers of Surrealism’ Showing String Installation. 1942. Gelatin silver print. Courtesy the Philadelphia Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY.

 

It is an installation view of the First Papers of Surrealism, an exhibition that opened seventy years ago at the Whitelaw Reid Mansion in midtown Manhattan. It was, at the time, the biggest surrealist show ever seen in the United States, and included works by Paul Klee, Max Ernst, Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, Rene Magritte and Giorgio de Chirico, amongst others.

The exhibition’s organizer, Andre Breton, asked Marcel Duchamp to propose a design for the installation. Duchamp had previously designed the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition, in Paris, lining the ceiling of the main hall of the Gallerie des Beaux-Arts with 1,200 empty coal bags, lighting the room with a single light bulb. Visitors were handed flashlights to navigate the space, which was filled with art objects that took the form of mannequins, plants, and even a taxi cab.

This time Breton had warned Duchamp to err on the side of economy. In response Duchamp purchased what was rumored to have been 16 miles of ordinary white string and used several hundred feet of it to festoon the mansion’s gilded moldings, ornate ceilings, and crystal chandeliers with a tangled mesh of webbing, stretching what came to be known as “his twine” across entrances and around the temporary walls which heaved with artworks. There were no mannequins this time, just lots and lots of paintings. The string criss-crossed the canvases, concealing the mansion’s opulent interior but also acting as what seems to be a literal barrier to the works on view.

Writing about Duchamp

Writing about Art: Marcel Duchamp. Photo: Arielle Brousse

Accounts of the experience of viewing the exhibition vary. Some said the twine was like a guide, directing them toward paintings. Others saw it as a metaphor for the complexities of contemporary art, saying that its presence “symbolized literally the difficulties to be circumvented by the unititiate in order to see, to perceive and understand, the exhibitions.”[i] Many of the participating artists were upset, insistent that visitors to the show would be unable to actually see the paintings that they had struggled to get out of war-torn Europe.

The exhibition’s legacy exists in the form of a handful of photographs. The one above, by John Schiff, is by far the most cited. Invariably, it will be accompanied by an emphasis on the string’s obfuscating qualities, a description of how Duchamp, when asked to display paintings, had actually made them impossible to see.  The image has come to stand in for the irretrievable experience of the exhibition itself. In it, there is no imaginative entry point to the room, no space that allows us to occupy the same area as the paintings themselves. The string stands in the way. It is difficult to visualize walking up to the Mondrian on the right, or even to the Klee directly in front of us, let alone proceeding through the rooms of the exhibition. We can only feel our ankles getting tangled in the web.

Duchamp himself posited the string as more transparent than opaque. “It was nothing,” he said. “You can always see through a window, through a curtain, thick or not thick, you can see always through if you want to, same thing there.”[ii] If you go to archives, if you look at other images of the exhibition, you can see that Duchamp’s intervention was in fact more permeable than the dominance of this one image has led us to believe. You could walk around in the space, you could approach the paintings. It must not have been so treacherous – during the opening, children ran through the rooms playing ball and tag. When asked what they were doing, they only said “Mr. Duchamp said we could.”

It cannot be denied that the presence of the string must have highlighted a series of confrontations: between the works and their installation, the installation and its viewers, the viewers and the work. It would have been an active force in any experience of the show, necessitating side-stepping and ducking and leaning and bending to get around. But rather than preventing us from seeing, it seems to have been Duchamp’s attempt to encourage a new awareness of the processes of vision. To this day, when we enter spaces lined with art, we fall into a set of prescribed choreography – we know that we should keep a certain distance from the objects, that we should look from afar. In the First Papers of Surrealism, these rules must be broken, if only out of necessity. Here, Duchamp reminds us that vision is corporeal – that it is made possible through the approach of the body. He questions what and how we see, and also, how art institutions themselves dictate both the subjects and the processes of our vision.

In the absence of being able to attend an exhibition that took place nearly a century ago, I think instead of an experience I have had many times, of the immediate approach to Duchamps’s Étant donnés. The terms of Duchamp’s gift of the work to the museum explicitly forbade any reproduction of the image through the peepholes for 15 years after his death. To this day, in order to properly experience it, we all must take the same steps into its dark room before leaning forward and pressing our faces on the grease-stained wooden door. I’m reminded also of the longer approach to it, of the idea that one cannot, and will not, ever see it without first passing through the shadow of The Large Glass. Here, Duchamp forces us into a new choreography, one that reveals his preoccupation with visuality. He famously shunned the retinal, embracing instead the whole body as eye.

It is funny, then, that our experience of the First Papers of Surrealism exhibition and Duchamp’s intervention in it is necessarily reduced to a two-dimensional photograph. We come up against the limits of an exhibition history, confronting the fact that as crucial as an understanding of individual exhibitions is for our conception of the trajectory of 20th century art, the shows that make up this trajectory are in fact unknowable, tied specifically to time, place, and lived experience. Looking at his twine, our vision becomes flat again, disembodied and autonomous. Separated from a physical experience, we once again are shut out.

*        *      *

Dancing Around the Bride, an exhibition exploring the interwoven lives of Marcel Duchamp and four major American artists—John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg—opens tomorrow at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Contemporary artist Phillipe Parreno collaborated on the exhibition design, choreographing encounters within the galleries which invite visitors to “dance” with the artists and objects on view. The exhibition runs through January 21, 2013.

Grace Ambrose is ICA’s Spiegel Programming Fellow. She recently received her Masters in Curatorial Studies from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, writing her thesis on the practice of restaging seminal exhibitions.

To sign up for the criss-crossing twine of Miranda’s mailing list, email miranda@icaphila.org.

 

[i] Harriet and Sidney Janis, “Marcel Duchamp, Anti-Artist,” View 5, no. 1 (March 1945), 18.

[ii] Lewis Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 183.

 

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Guest Posts

Comments are closed.

Negotiating Utter Darkness: What Is Contemporary?

October 15th, 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

Early on in her annual “What Is Contemporary?” lecture last week, when ICA Senior Curator Ingrid Schaffner showed an image of Yayoi Kusama’s installation, “Fireflies on the Water,” the people on either side of me gasped with happiness. The slide showed a blue-black darkness sprinkled with tiny lights. For the installation itself—an exploration of infinite space—the viewer enters a small room with mirrored walls, a floor of water, and 150 colored lights. I have not experienced “Fireflies on the Water,” but it must be a potent and beautiful experience. As the person on my left said later, “Who isn’t interested in the infinite?”

"Fireflies on the Water"

Installation view of Yayoi Kusama Fireflies on the Water, 2002. Mirror, plexiglass, 150 lights and water. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (June 13- October 28, 2012) © Yayoi Kusama.

You can think of Ingrid’s lecture itself as an exploration of the infinite—the infinite space of contemporary art. Ingrid divides her annual whirlwind tour of art today into a taxonomy of thematic subsections—alchemy, systems, flesh, business, identity, and so on—to help give some order to this infinity, the way the ancient Greeks divided the heavens into constellations: Scorpio, Andromeda, the Great Bear.

Photo: Ted Gerike

In Ingrid’s taxonomy, “Fireflies on the Water” might have fallen into the constellation of terrain—one of my favorites—but in this case she used it in her lovely introductory exploration of works involving darkness. There was David Hammon’s “Concerto in Black and Blue,” in which the viewer is invited to explore a large empty space with the help of a small flashlight. There was Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s “Phantom Truck,” in which a kind of three-dimensional artist’s rendering of the mobile bioweapons labs thought to exist in Iraq before the American invasion is half-hidden in a darkened corner. There was Tino Segal’s “This Variation,” in which performers sang and moved among audience members in almost total darkness. Indeed, Ingrid used the immersive, scary element as a metaphor for what contemporary art does: it takes you into the dark, challenges you to experience what’s there. “When it comes to contemporary art, that what it’s all about,” she said. “Going that far. Suspending doubt, overcoming inhibitions, having faith both in your own ability to negotiate what might be unfamiliar territory—or utter darkness—as well as faith in what artists do to engage us more deeply in the world we live in.”

This is the fourth time I have experienced “What Is Contemporary?” and one of the pleasures of tuning in each fall is to catch a glimpse of old favorites. There is Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty,” which we get an updated picture of each fall—sometimes clear and bright in the sunshine, other times barely visible under the water’s surface. There is Joseph Beuys’s “Fat Chair,” which never ceases to perplex me. And there is Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s “maintenance art,” in which the artist scrubs the steps of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. Every year I wait for Ingrid to recite Ukeles’s wonderful rhetorical question cum slogan: “After the revolution, who is going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?”

I also like encountering artists who are currently showing at ICA, or whose work will be in our galleries soon. Their names splash over me in pleasant waves of recognition: Wendy Yao, whose Ooga Booga project showed up in the category of Ornament.

Karla Black, who will make a new installation at ICA next April, in Alchemy.

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

Jeremy Deller with his “The Battle of Orgreave”—in which 1,000 participants and some horses reenacted a violent British miner’s strike—in History. (“In contemporary art, the past doesn’t lie still,” Ingrid says, which, when it comes to “The Battle of Orgreave,” seems like an understatement.)

Jeremy Deller, “The Battle of Orgreave,” 2001
Commissioned and produced by Artangel
© the artist. Image courtesy the artist
Photo: Parisah Taghizadeh

Ingrid returned to the theme of darkness at the end of her talk, referring to a lecture that artist Liam Gillick gave at ICA last spring, in which he talked about making art as a kind of not-knowing—or, more accurately, as lying somewhere between knowing and not knowing: “It’s that balance between not knowing and knowing—that’s the being an artist bit,” he said.

Of course, this isn’t a new insight. There is a quotation I have long loved by the writer Robert Boswell, who says in his book on writing, The Half-Known World, “A crucial part of the writing endeavor is the practice of remaining in the dark.”

Then there is Keats, who in 1817 described his idea of negative capability this way: “[W]hen a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason…”

Not that there is anything wrong with being reminded of the importance of not knowing. As with “Spiral Jetty,” it looks different on each new encounter: now dimly grasped, now clear as day. Even in the dark it’s there, leading us stone by stone into the heart of things.

Spiral Jetty

photo: Chris Taylor/Land Arts of the American West

* * *

Penn alumni: Ingrid will give a condensed version of “What Is Contemporary?” as part of “Classes Without Quizzes” at Penn’s Homecoming on Friday, October 26 at 4:00 PM at ICA.

To sign up for the knowing and not-knowing of Miranda’s mailing list, email miranda@icaphila.org.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Public Programs

3 Responses to “Negotiating Utter Darkness: What Is Contemporary?”

  1. Judy Herman says:
    October 15 2012 at 2:55 pm

    I was lucky enough to know about Ingrid’s first “What is Contemporary” lecture, sat in and still have my notes. i had no idea it was the first and now want to be sure I know about the fifth. Are the talks listed on iCA’s calendar? Are they always in September. i do not want to miss the next.

    Also this write up was terrific and it makes me want to hear the whole lecture. Is there a recording?

    Judy

  2. admin says:
    October 15 2012 at 6:52 pm

    I wish I had heard that one! They are usually in late September or early October, and yes, they are on the ICA calendar on the website. Or you can sign up for our mailing list and make sure you hear about all the events.

    Sadly, I don’t think there’s a recording of the lecture available. But do come next year! It will be the 50th anniversary edition!

  3. Michael says:
    October 19 2012 at 10:43 am

    Rachael thank you for this post! I absolutely love the “Fireflies on water” piece. Like Judy said it would have been nice to see a recording! :)

    Beauty Lauren Conrad

A Place to Share Things: Wendy Yao Brings Ooga Booga to ICA

October 8th, 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

“Do you want to paint?” Luke asks.

A woman in shorts takes a brush and dips it in a cup of ink, then gets busy at the back window where the shape of an open book has been taped out in blue.

“Do you want to paint?” Luke asks a man coming up the steps from the lobby, then explains how this works. “Each person makes a small mark, and then also adds to something someone else has started.”

I look at what’s been inked so far: a nose, a long curve, something that looks like roller skates.

This is cooperative painting, a project of Sumi Ink Club, which Luke Fischbeck and Sarah Rara founded to promote “participatory drawing”events across the country.

The goal today is to help finish the installation Wendy Yao has organized for Excursus III: Ooga Booga, her re-imagining of ICA’s mezzanine space as a place to read, peruse the ICA archival material she has selected, and attend a series of programs—largely by her circle of collaborators—that respond in some way to the exhibition currently on view.

Wendy is the founder of Los Angeles’s Ooga Booga, a space over a Chinatown bakery that overflows the categories and labels sometimes used to describe it: bookstore, music shop, clothing boutique, zine source, publishing imprint, exhibition space. You can buy stuff at Ooga Booga for sure, but if you want to come in, browse, hang out, chat, that’s all right too. As in ICA’s Excursus projects, enjoying the space, either alone or with others, can be an end in itself.

Among the objects Wendy has selected to make you want to linger in the ICA installation are:

* A big blue hammock on a hammock stand.

* A modular table (“Group Affinity Table,” it’s called) by Berlin designer Manuel Raeder, which can be assembled as a circle, a long snakey ribbon, or a sort of tailed C-curve that looks like a letter in a forgotten alphabet.

* Group Affinity Benches in aqua and red.

* Books, many of them made by friends and collaborators. (Wendy, who supports independent print culture, has produced an indispensable guide to print resources.)

Photo: Alex Klein

* A bunch of small round stools, of the kind that are ubiquitous in Chinatown.

Grace, ICA’s Spiegel Fellow, tells me about tracking the stools up and down 10th Street: “Everyone has them, but no one knows where they got them,” she says. Finally she found a store that had a bunch in the back they were willing to sell. After that, she turned her attention to finding a money tree—Pachira aquatica, a houseplant also common in Chinatown, thought to bring prosperity.

In the back corner, a wooden rack displays magazines, artists’ books, zines, ICA catalogues. As an all-caps letter from the artist Richard Tuttle, on view elsewhere in the installation, observes: “There is a certain pleasure in just looking through show catalogues—like being a spectator at a football match.”

For me, though, the heart of this installation is the flat files: five drawers of letters, articles, notes, photographs, and other ephemera that Wendy found in ICA’s archives. Drawer One features a lot of cats, including a page of Karen Kilimnik cat stickers; a “Sunday School Cat” postcard that critic and curator Lawrence Alloway sent to former ICA Director Suzanne Delahanty: “Delighted that you can reprint the Martin cat” (he meant catalogue, I guess); and a thank you note to Delahanty from collector Dorothy Vogel, this one featuring a striped cat.

Photo: Ted Gerike

There is, as well, a clipping of a 1975 article about Dorothy Vogel and her husband, Herb, who died last July. The Vogels, who had a long relationship with ICA, were famous for becoming important contemporary art collectors on a budget: he worked for the US Postal Service and she was a Brooklyn librarian. Sometimes, I am told, they received art works in barter for cat sitting.

A few hours from now, at the Excursus III: Ooga Booga opening, Wendy will say of her Los Angeles store, “I wanted to have a place to share things that people around me were making.”

Here at ICA, the scope of what she is sharing is larger—things not only from people she knows, like Manuel Raeder who designed the furniture; but from people she’s never met, like Suzanne Delahanty and Richard Tuttle; or who have died, like Herb Vogel (and Agnes Martin and Gertrude Stein); or whose identity has been lost, like the anonymous designers of several unidentified ICA posters in Drawer Four.

Also work by these friends and strangers, colleagues and passers-by, with brushes in their hands, who together are creating this inky jungle of flowers, hands, eyes, witch’s hats, umbrellas, and butterflies. This wild, improvisational, Ooga Booga world.

Luke waving. Photo: Alex Klein

* * *

Excursus III: Ooga Booga is on view at ICA through December 16. You can follow the project on the Excursus website.

Luke Fischbeck will be back at ICA with his collaborator, Sarah Rara, in their incarnation as the band Lucky Dragons, to celebrate the closing of Excursus III: Ooga Booga on Sunday, December 16.

To sign up for the wild, improvisational world of Miranda’s mailing list, email miranda@icaphila.org.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Excursus, Installation

Comments are closed.

Open Bedroom: Jeremy Deller at ICA

October 1st, 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

Three days before the opening of Jeremy Deller: Joy in People, Jeremy himself is lying on his stomach on a single bed in ICA’s first floor gallery, scribbling on the wall with a Sharpie. “I’m a boy,” he writes. “US vs. UK.” “We’re gonna make you a star-ar-ar.” To one side of the bed, a lamp sits on a table, and across the way cupboards and drawers have been specially built. The walls of the room, which is a kind of gallery within the gallery, are hung with posters and photographs. “A Special Event: Jack the Ripper’s Norwich” one poster says. “Brian Epstein Died for You,” says another. A photograph near the bed shows three guys—one of them has got to be a younger Jeremy—posing with a gravity-defying tower of beer bottles.

Bedroom view

Over the door a third poster reads, “Home Sweet Home.”

Jeremy gets off the bed and starts opening and shutting the new drawers. “This one is a bit sticky,” he says.

Edwige nods. She’s nailing a hook into the top of one of the cabinets, but she’ll go tell the crew about the sticking in a minute. Jeremy’s assistant, Edwige has shepherded the show through its various international venues. Right now she hangs up a T-shirt bearing a legend from a Philip Larkin poem that I, too, am fond of. “They f*** you up, your Mum and Dad,” it begins; I learned it by heart in college.

Larkin T-shirt

If this looks more like a boy’s bedroom—music fan, middle class, late twentieth century—than like an art museum hosting the first mid-career retrospective of a major artist, well, that’s the point. This installation, “Open Bedroom,” recreates one of Jeremy’s first shows, which he organized in his parents’ house in 1993 when they were out of town. In those days many of Jeremy’s friends were in art school hosting Open Studios, but he had studied art history (the Baroque period), and he had no studio to open. He had done some paintings, though—of Keith Moon, mostly—and made some posters and T-shirts. “It was an opportunistic way to get a bit of attention,” he says now. Most of the other works in Joy in People showcase his later, ambitious orchestrations of groups of people doing surprising things—from improvising impromptu slapstick routines to restaging a violent clash between striking British miners and police—or they document his imaginative quests and propositions. “Open Bedroom” is more modest, but it offers a sense of intimacy, the feeling of peeking behind the façade of The Artist to the face of the young man he used to be.

Edwige needs stickers to affix to the Bedroom drawers, so I take her up to the offices where we raid the supply closet for mailing labels. We bring them down to Jeremy, and he sits on the floor writing on them: “Suburban Scenes,” “Gallery Cards,” “At Home Invitations,” “Beer Mats,” etc. Visitors will be invited to open the drawers and rummage through the contents, but it’s hard to do that now because there aren’t any handles.

Drawers

Edwige disappears, then turns up again with a package of handles for Jeremy’s approval. “You okay with these?”

He is.

Soon Ingrid, who together with Kate is coordinating the show at ICA, comes in and starts opening cupboards, checking out the contents. “There’ll be a black light in this one,” she says.

“There is,” Jeremy says. “We just need to turn it on.”

One of the crew, passing through pushing a large crate, pipes up: “You just have to turn the bulb.” Ingrid screws it in, illuminating a sign about Annie Leibovitz photographing President Reagan, and another about Tony Curtis in the Playboy Mansion.

View-Masters hanging

Ingrid looks through one of the red plastic View-Masters dangling from the ceiling. “Who are these guys?” she asks.

Jeremy comes over to look. “Some posh guys I know.”

She points to a picture on the wall. “What’s this?”

“That’s the mayor of a town in France. Whenever I’d go there, I’d visit the mayor and bring him a present. A record usually. Spreading good will.”

“Are you going to visit the mayor of Philadelphia?”

“I met your mayor in 2009. Is it the same guy? He came to see the car.”

The car Mayor Michael Nutter came to see is the wreckage of a vehicle blown up by a bomb in a Baghdad market. Traveling with a US soldier and an Iraqi, Jeremy towed the car on a trailer across the United States between New York and Los Angeles museum venues. “We stopped in about fifteen towns,” he’s said, “and just waited for people to come by…What we didn’t do was present it as an overtly political artwork. We presented it in a very bland way.”

A lot of people did come by, in Philadelphia, Nashville, Dallas, Santa Fe, and elsewhere, to look at the car and to talk. Some were veterans, or relatives of veterans—from the Vietnam era as well as the recent past—each with their own stories and points of view. Students came, and proselytizers, mothers and waitresses. Cheerleaders, migrant workers, Hurricane Katrina survivors, golf dads, nuns. Sometimes the conversation was about politics, or war, or religion. Other times it veered to art.

With Jeremy’s work, it’s not always easy to tell the difference. Categories bleed into each other, actions and people are transformed, or transform themselves. As Ralph Rugoff, Director of the Hayward Gallery in London, who organized Joy in People, said at the walkthrough for ICA members—his tone teasing at first, then serious—“Jeremy is not an artist who started out with a conventional toolkit. He can’t draw, he can’t paint, he can’t sculpt….He links things up. That’s what artists do. They connect things in ways other people don’t see.”

Home Sweet Home

* * *

Jeremy Deller: Joy in People is on view at ICA through December 30.

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

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Installation, Jeremy Deller

One Response to “Open Bedroom: Jeremy Deller at ICA”

  1. Annette says:
    October 1 2012 at 12:32 pm

    DUCHAMPIAN>……

Art and People, People and Art: An ICA Field Trip

September 24th, 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

Except in the dead of night, I have never seen the Turnpike so empty. It was just after seven a.m. when we climbed into the van, and up we sped through what should have been rush hour, glad to be moving, taking advantage of the time. Amy and Sam strategized about development issues, Ingrid worked on a presentation on her laptop, and Alex and Jeffrey talked about the fashion scene in Philadelphia. In my head, the Simon and Garfunkel song was playing, the one about counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike: They’ve all gone to look for America. The rest area where we stopped for coffee—named for a president, crowded with customers of many races, your choice of hotdogs, fried chicken, or ice cream—seemed like a place you might find it.

Not much in the way of art there, though.

With New York City so close, ICA curators and other staff often head up for the day for meetings, or to see a show or three. Today the destination was the suburbs rather than city, and the purpose was a field trip with ICA’s donor club, Art Council, to see Karen Kilimnik’s installation at the Brant Foundation Art Study Center in Greenwich, Connecticut.

View of the Brant

Our group at the Brant.

Even with the stop for coffee, we arrived extremely early for lunch, which was graciously hosted by ICA board member Joey Schlank. There were twenty or thirty of us there, everyone chatting, happy about the day, excited to see the Kilimnik installation. ICA director Amy Sadao, in her welcome before the poached salmon and the fruit tarts, stressed how wonderful it is to look at art together. “That’s what ICA is about,” she said. “Art and people, people and art.”

Karen Kilimnik is an artist with a long history with ICA. The museum first showed her work in 1992, and in 2007 we organized a major traveling retrospective. Karen, who lives in Philadelphia, often comes to ICA’s openings and public programs, and we honored her at our spring benefit last May. It was a particular treat, then, to see what she had done at the Brant, a former apple storage barn in the middle of Greenwich polo fields that collector Peter Brant has converted into a bright, airy, contemporary art space.

On the porch

Two artists a year are given the opportunity to create anything they want here, with minimal financial or logistical constraints.

It is wonderful to look at art with other people. I let myself float in the stream of them, looking at the paintings, videos, photographs, and installations, listening to people point things out to one another: the painted ballerinas in the painted trees, the real books on the real mantelpiece, the photographic self-portrait Karen permitted Alex Da Corte to blow up and use as the background in his SCENE TAKE SIX installation in ICA’s First Among Equals exhibition last spring. “With Karen, it’s important to think about the theater,” I heard someone say.

Karen’s installation at the Brant is definitely theatrical. The first objects you come upon are dramatic turquoise drapes, fringed in gold, beckoning you into a room where a video features Karen’s designs for the Paris Opera.

Peering behind the curtain

Some of the rooms are wonderfully wallpapered, and floors are scattered with objects and photographs. Several of the installations feature candles, colored lights, bowls of shells, voodoo dolls. Paintings of animals, children, and grand decrepit staircases hang on the walls. (One of these, featuring pinkish sheep in a forest, is reminiscent of the drawing Karen did for ICA’s benefit invitation last spring.)

Kilimnik lambs

Benefit 2012 invitation: Karen Kilimnik, “Sheep in England,” 2012. Courtesy of the artist and 303 Gallery. Photo: Simon Greenberg

 

Upstairs, in perhaps the most magical Kilimnikian intervention, we find a topiary garden with a working fountain in the middle, the grass strewn with candy-colored soaps and cosmetic bottles. “It’s like a Fabergé egg,” Ingrid says. “You can peek in, but you can’t get in.” Out the window, workmen in straw hats are grooming the polo grounds.

Fountain

Asked by a guest to say something about the work, Ingrid says, “Karen is always making the worlds she’d like to be in out of the trash and tinsel of popular culture.”

Here in the Brant, she’s made a world anyone would like to be in: a lush Fabergé egg universe with wise-eyed children and tinkling fountains. With its faded splendor and velvet-clad figures, it feels like a Europeanish world—yet in its blending of high and low, its celebration of fantasy and promise of self-transformation, isn’t it as American as any rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike?

Out we set in the morning, looking for America, and here we are, at the end of the day, having found it.

* * *

Learn more about Art Council here.

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

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Donor Clubs

Comments are closed.

Painting on a Giant Scale: David Guinn Paints Jeremy Deller’s Head and Other Enormous Ephemera

September 17th, 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

Paul and Robert are talking with David Guinn, the mural painter, about the gigantic mouth. “I’m just going to bring the lips out a little more,” David says.

“I’m not sure if we should make the teeth an inch shorter,” Paul says. They stare at the wall in ICA’s downstairs gallery, where a transparency of a face is being projected. David is copying a cartoony picture of artist Jeremy Deller’s head around an arched doorway, which serves as the open mouth.

The drawing David was working from.

Visitors will walk through that mouth into the small room beyond to view Beyond the White Walls, a narrative slide show that is part of the major retrospective of Deller’s work, Jeremy Deller: Joy in People, opening at ICA on September 19.

“Do you think the nostrils really get that close to the lips?” Robert asks, as David marks their placement above the doorway with blue tape.

Paul pulls the projector back a few feet to see if it looks better. Everyone stares at the wall, dissatisfied.

Then David has an idea. “The nostrils could be half way,” he suggests, and—just like that—the problem resolves.

Jeremy Deller: Joy in People is an exuberant, unconventional, wide-ranging show. Deller, who won Britain’s prestigious Turner Prize in 2004, often makes work that involves people doing things: a massive re-enactment of 1984’s violent clash between striking coal miners and police (An Injury to One is an Injury to All); music fans making art inspired by their favorite band (The Uses of Literacy); and a Mancunian procession featuring a local cafe on a float, fish-and-chips enthusiasts, handmade banners (including a pro-smoking banner designed by David Hockney), and a Hindu bagpipe band (Procession). People are, literally, part of the show: for instance, a rotating sequence of melancholy teenagers will lounge on a couch under a mural—also painted by David Guinn—spelling out I ♥ Melancholy (the name of the piece) in shiny black letters on a matte black wall.

Black on black has its own challenges, maybe bigger ones than the relationship of mouth to nose on a cartoon face. When gloss paint doesn’t render the letters shiny enough, David tries varnishing them, being careful not to scuff the surrounding area. “Flat black is fickle,” he tells me. “It will look different if you touch it up with a brush than with a roller. It has to go on perfectly. To have it look mechanical but to do it by hand…” he trails off, checking the straightness of a letter with a level.

David, who also teaches at Moore College of Art and Design, is one of Philadelphia’s foremost mural painters. He is particularly known for his seasons series, including Crystal Snowscape at 10th and Bainbridge and Spring at 13th and Pine, and he recently completed an indoor mural for La Colombe’s Dilworth Plaza cafe about the craft and traditions of espresso. This summer David worked on a mural in North Philadelphia representing the dogs of neighborhood residents, spending the sweltering August days high on a ladder against a south-facing wall. He has recently launched Freewall, an outdoor space for temporary artist-centered murals. Working at ICA is a day job for him, but it’s a good day job. “It’s cool to work in this space,” he says. “The mural I just finished was totally different. Nothing needed to be precise. There’s a huge crack in the wall, and there’s nothing to do about it. Here, the wall is perfectly smooth. And if you have a question, you just ask.”

 

David with mural at 47th and Baltimore

David with his mural “The Heart of Baltimore Avenue” at 47th and Baltimore

David also says that executing someone else’s work keeps him honest. Here he is, transferring a little eight-by-ten-inch color drawing onto a ten-foot wall of slightly different proportions, and next week Jeremy Deller will come by and see how it looks.

I ask David if he considers himself a muralist, or a painter who paints murals.

“I’m a painter,” he says. “I look at the murals as big paintings.”

I watch as he applies pinkish paint to the outlined mouth around the doorway, following the contour of the lip exactly. “What do you like about painting murals?”

“I like the impact: it’s so big. It’s powerful—you can’t deny it—when you see something that’s so much larger than the body.” He dips his brush again, then adds, “I like how it’s part of the world. People live with it.”

That sounds like an answer Jeremy Deller would appreciate.

* * *

Jeremy Deller: Joy in People is on view at ICA from September 19 – December 30, 2012.

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

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Installation, Jeremy Deller

2 Responses to “Painting on a Giant Scale: David Guinn Paints Jeremy Deller’s Head and Other Enormous Ephemera”

  1. Webdesigner says:
    October 8 2012 at 8:55 am

    There should be more murals like that. In big cities there are enough ugly buildings that could be embellished that way. And new artists could get some recognition for it.

  2. Brad Johson says:
    October 16 2012 at 1:12 pm

    This mural reminds me of Russel Industrial in Detroit… Have any of you guys been there? Its a 80 year old empty industrial building and pretty much looks like what you expect for it being in detroit. Windows are broken out and kinda has a eary feelling to it…

    But the inside is all artwork. Artist rent out rooms/studios inside and every type of artwork is in there. The walls are painted. One of the outside walls are painted (Russel is a 7 story building so the mural on the outside wall is huge). One of the floors even has a club on it…

    If you guys ever get a change check it out :) Its off of I-75 in Detroit

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »