Posts Tagged ‘artist studio’

Objects and Ambiguities: A Studio Visit with Becket Flannery

June 19 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

A large green eye in a plastic face looks up at us from the floor as we go by. The door to the studio is shaped like a wave.

eye on the floor

Photo: Becket Flannery

Becket's door

Photo: Becket Flannery

We are here for an informal studio visit, to see the art Becket has been making on the days he is not arranging travel and organizing correspondence for ICA’s curatorial department, where he works part-time as an administrative assistant. In the office, he wears three-piece suits and ties, often with pocket square, so it’s strange at first to see him here in jeans and flannel shirt. Still, it’s clear that his gracious good humor, his excavating intelligence, and his self-possessed calm serve him in the studio as they do in the office. Becket will be leaving Philadelphia at the end of the summer to attend an MFA program in painting at the Roski School of Fine Arts at USC. His sturdy, polished shoes will be difficult to fill.

Passing through the wave-shaped doorway, Jennifer crosses the room to a table where Becket has laid out some of his artwork for us to see.

One piece began life as a VHS tape case. One is a big book of empty pages with drops of faux-marbled paint on the cover. A third is made of pieces of sky blue foam about the shape and size of sticks of butter, nestled in a white cardboard shell on top of a slab made from more blue foam.

blue piece

Photo: Becket Flannery

“You desperately want to touch it,” Jennifer says, leaning close.

“They’re carved,” Becket says. “They have this geometry, but they’re very, very handmade. I use this blue color a lot, but I try not to use it as a color. I use it as a substance.”

There are a lot of things to see in this small studio space—un-air conditioned in the summer, unheated in the winter—in a big, ramshackle building full of artist studios. On our way in, we passed rows of doors all shut with padlocks, the corridor walls flaking and strangely marked, and a derelict brush factory in a big open space. It’s a Monday afternoon, quiet. Becket asked the band upstairs if they could please not rehearse today.

In addition to the pieces on the table, there are works hung on the wall, still others standing or lying on the floor. “This is the brightest spot,” he says, pointing, “so whatever I’m working on at the moment is here.” He shows us the shadowy place further along where easy access is blocked by the end of the large table. That’s where he hangs his finished pieces when he wants them around for reference. Jennifer admires a shiny, deep red object, shaped not unlike a lightning bolt, on the floor.

red piece

Photo: Becket Flannery

“I feel like I could dive into it,” she says.

“I chose this color because the surface was hard to find,” Becket explains. “The great thing about some of those enamel surfaces is that they’re hard to see.” The talk turns to materials: enamel, foam, paper, found objects. “Material is incredibly seductive,” Becket says. “I don’t want to be an artist who’s naively interested in materials.”

“Why not?” I ask. I’m wondering whether the seductiveness of materials for an artist is like that of words for a writer. Ideas and stories tend to slip away when we swoon over language instead of organizing it in the service of something larger. Becket tells me that materials come with cultural meanings—symbologies—that it’s important to get away from those. “A lot of making things,” he says, “is the ambiguity between the material of an object and its appearance.”

Becket and Jennifer in the studio.

Ambiguity is a good word for Becket’s work, which resists easy categorization. Sometimes, looking around the room, I’m not sure what’s a painting and what’s a sculpture. I have to ask. If Becket minds answering, he gives no sign of it. He is a forthcoming, articulate, warm host, calmly introducing his guests around the room, helping us get to know the family of objects inhabiting the space. He says, “I think what’s great is that objects stick around. They resist being digested.” He explains that there is a point, when you are working on an object, when the piece seems to recognize its own existence: “You feel as though you’re being looked at when you’re looking at it. That’s how I answer the question about how I know when a piece is done.”

We go back for more time with the sky blue foam object. Jennifer is interested in the white cardboard bit. “It’s like a little shell or a little clam,” she says. Becket explains that the thing began life as a shoe insert, the kind you take out at the store before you put your foot in.

“It’s a stand-in for the organic,” Jennifer says.

“It puts it in an ambiguous place—not really technological, not really nature,” Becket says. Then he adds, “If you’re not paying attention to what’s interesting in the object, it doesn’t succeed.” A little later he says, “Things are not beautiful because there are rules about beauty; they’re beautiful because they’re attractive of desire.”

tape case

'vi deo t ape.' Photo: Becket Flannery

I think that’s exactly what these objects do: draw the eye to them, call to the hand. As Jennifer said earlier, you want to touch them—test their weight, feel their sheen, run your skin along their curves and angles.

When it’s time for us to go, Becket picks up the deep red floor sculpture and leans it prosaically against the wall, tidying up, making room for the other artists who share the space. “It kind of ruins the magic,” he says.

But it doesn’t, not really. The magic just takes a step back, moving into the shadows where it flickers patiently, preparing for the mythic journey west.

* * *

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Charline von Heyl: The right kind of frustration

February 17 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

“When I went to Marfa last time,” Charline said, “I was totally burned out.” She was speaking at a program at ICA, where her survey exhibition Charline von Heyl, curated by Jenelle Porter, closes this Sunday. Charline spoke passionately and memorably about painting, abstraction, representation, desire, frustration, and how she began her newest body work, during a long stay at her studio in Marfa, Texas. It was one of most dynamic and generous lectures I’ve heard in a long time.

Installation view

Installation view. Photo: Aaron Igler / Greenhouse Media.

“I’m always fascinated by the stupidity of the painter,” Charline declared, meaning the way a painting grows out of small steps taken in the studio—out of doing things that might seem dumb at first glance but are necessary to awaken what she calls the right kind of frustration. This is the active frustration that leads to solving problems in paint, as opposed to the passive frustration that leads to nothing but sitting gloomily on the couch.

Not that sitting around on the couch can’t be a part of the process too. In Marfa, Charline did a lot of reading and looking at books, a lot of walking in the parched Texas landscape and whiskey-drinking and lonely mulling. Among the books she spent time with were catalogues of work by Willi Baumeister and Bernard Buffet. Of an early Buffet self-portrait she said, “It’s so weird and stubborn and awkward, but also right.” I think that’s one of the most profound compliments I’ve ever heard an artist give another.

Buffet self-portrait

Bernard Buffet, 1981

I love listening to artists talk about the work of other artists. It’s almost better than hearing them talk about their own art, maybe because the way they see the work of others isn’t clouded by desire or intention, insecurity or pride.

Or maybe, on the other hand, it’s precisely because their own particular artistic desires and intentions, insecurities and/or pride, make them see other artists’ work in ways the rest of us don’t.

One of my favorite parts of the talk was a discussion of the work of the figurative painter Dana Schutz—in particular, of Schutz’s 2007 portrait of Mike Kelley. “It’s visionary,” Charline said. “It takes you someplace.” Schutz, Charline suggested, imagined the figure (she worked without a photograph), then tweaked it: the fist is too small to be realistic, for example, and the elbow lines up conveniently with the edge of the canvas. “In abstraction,” she said, “it’s the same thing. I’m tweaking, too.” But, since she’s not working from an original in nature, the viewer can’t identify what she’s tweaking from: “You just feel the strangeness. It’s charged with something.”

"Daydreamer"

"Daydreamer," Dana Schutz, oil on canvas, 2007. Courtesy of Friedrich Petzel Gallery.

In relation to Buffet, Charline also said this: “I am interested in artists who are considered second rate, or third rate, because they get onto something, but then they get stuck repeating themselves.” Maybe this insight is part of Charline’s determination not to repeat herself. It is often said about her work that each painting is utterly different, a world in itself. Yet of course there are things that unify the work: her taste, the way she handles color, the way the scale of the paintings is an outgrowth of the size of her gestures. All these things are part of what she calls “a little of the red thread that runs through,” which I take to mean the continuity that comes from her singular hand: her singular self.

The other week, when curator Bennett Simpson was speaking at ICA, he said something interesting about inevitability. Whenever a mode of working, or an artist, becomes a major focus of the art world (Bennett said), that mode or person takes on an air of inevitability; but really, there is no inevitability. There are always a million things we might be talking about, so it’s worth asking what constellation of circumstances makes that one thing so present in the public imagination. He was referring to the incorporation of props and stagecraft in current art; but I’ve been thinking about the extent to which Charline von Heyl and her work have—apparently suddenly—sprung into the public imagination. Witness recent pieces on the painter in Artforum, Parkett, The Huffington Post, Art in America, and elsewhere, as well as a major upcoming exhibition at the Tate Liverpool.

It’s impossible to say how much of this sudden spotlighting is because of the nature of the current artistic moment, the reassessment of abstraction, the sheer fascination of the work itself, the painter’s personal charisma, specific serendipitous meetings, or anything else. But as we get ready to say goodbye to Charline von Heyl at ICA, I like to think we’ve been a star in that constellation.

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Charline von Heyl is on view at ICA through Sunday, February 19. Don’t miss it!

From March 21 – July 8, you can see the show at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston.

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A Stereoscopic Evening

January 13 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

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.

Audience with glasses on

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.

Margulis portrait of deDooning

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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The Transfiguration of Bill Walton’s Studio

December 9 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

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.

The group

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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Field Trip: The Artist’s Studio

December 2 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

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.

Vase installation

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's studio, installation

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.

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

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