Posts Tagged ‘Blowing on a Hairy Shoulder’

Opening Night Day 2011: Adrenaline buzz

September 9 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

I WANT TO WRITE THIS WHOLE BLOG POST IN CAPITAL LETTERS!

It’s the pre-opening energy, that jazzy adrenaline buzz that floats up the elevator shaft and down again through the heating vents on every ICA opening day, making me feel like shouting. I have finished my own last-minute assignments for tonight so I’m free for a few minutes to wander around the building watching other people hurry to finish theirs. At five o’clock the doors will open. It’s two-thirty now.

Becket moving the podium

Becket moving the podium

Three new shows will open tonight. The big downstairs gallery hosts Charline von Heyl’s paintings, enormous planes of color that seem to vibrate on the walls as though they too can feel the excitement. A few minutes ago I let in some people from Friedrich Petzel, Charline’s New York gallery, and as they turned the corner into the show I heard them say, “Wow!”

On the second floor, there’s a lot of activity in Blowing on a Hairy Shoulder / Grief Hunters, the big group show guest curated by Doron Rabina. There are a lot of animals in here—at least on video—enormous peacocks, a cawing raven, a quick fox, and a man with a chicken on his head on the wall just outside the gallery. There’s a supine figure lying on the floor (last week I saw it creepily unwrapped from the plastic sheet it was packed in), and a video fire blazing in an overturned desk. Some guys are moving equipment around, and the wall labels are provisionally tacked in place with blue tape, and Thom is walking through with a push broom, sweeping. It’s vibrant and noisy and wonderfully weird in here. Last week, when ICA’s director came through, she announced enthusiastically, “It’s a show about poetry! A poetic show.”

Sound guys setting up

Sound guys setting up

Stepping through the door into the Project Space is like stepping into a pool of stillness. ICA has recreated the studio of sculptor, print-maker, and teacher Bill Walton, complete with tools and works-in-progress, sweatshirts and coffee cups. Last week, when Grace was unpacking and arranging the contents, she told me some of the coffee cups contained old cigarette butts, making it extra important not to spill. With drawers ajar and slippers under the table, it looks like Walton, who died last year, has just gone out for a cigarette.

Out on the terrace, some guys are setting up the tent for the dinner while Jeff arranges tables. Becket is moving the podium. Alex and Jenna are looking for Doron to record an interview about his show for the website. William is tucking boxes away in a closet. Jacob is painting a wall. The sound guys are setting up in a corner. Thom is now sweeping out on the mezzanine, near where an exhausted figure, worn out from the week’s installation, naps on a pouf.

Some ICA staff members are already dressed in their opening finery: black dresses with cut-out sleeves, black dresses with elegant collars, high-heeled shoes showing off new pedicures. Others have hung dresses on the coat hooks, sheathed in garment bags, making for more surprise later, just as the locked museum doors this past month make for surprise tonight. I hope that, as I type this on Wednesday afternoon, you are somewhere putting your own finery on, getting ready to join us.

Of course, by the time you’re reading this, it will all be over: the party dresses put away, the speeches faded, the adrenaline spent, the spills mopped up. The art, though, will still be at the ready, waiting on the walls and plinths and video screens for you to come in.

Thom sweeping.

Thom sweeping.

* * *

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In Between Times, part 2

August 19 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

Last week I wrote about ICA‘s summer shows closing; this week we’re more focused on opening the new, a shift that seemed to happen early Tuesday afternoon. On Tuesday morning, when I poked my head into the downstairs gallery, all I could see were sealed up crates and a push broom leaning up against the wall. When I stopped by later, though, Paul and Robert were in there untaping boxes. The first material for Blowing on a Hairy Shoulder / Grief Hunters had arrived.

Paul and Robert opening a crate.

“Look at this,” Robert said. He held up a baseball cap with a slogan reading, “I wish I could afford a Borsalino like my son in Kollel.” The hat, along with the other things in the boxes, is for a scatter piece by Eli Petel, a Tel Aviv artist who works in video and installation. I don’t know what a Borsalino is—a car? A stereo? A fancy golf club? And where is Kollel? The joke seems to be that the words are in English but we English speakers can’t parse them, we can only try to glork the meaning from context.

Other items emerge: Mendelssohn LPs, an expired passport, an old coin, a hand broom you might use to sweep a hearth. What can we guess about Eli Petel (or the persona he’s constructed) from this assortment? Is he nostalgic for the past, or does he maybe want to sweep it away?

More stuff.

Photo: J. Katz

And what is a Borsalino? I ask Jenna if she knows.

“Maybe people who hang out at the Bourse in Old City?” she suggests.

Out in the lobby, Paul and Jacob are wheeling carts with boxes holding the work Alex Da Corte made for a show that just closed in the Project Space. Alex was in yesterday to de-install it, after which (I’m told) everyone was covered with baby powder. Before I can find out why, Eliza comes down the stairs with news of some problem with the carpet that’s being installed in the auditorium. Robert goes off to investigate.

Yes, ICA’s auditorium is getting a makeover! Earlier this summer, Thom painted its walls a lovely gray. Next time you come for a program, we should have new, more comfortable chairs as well. I could write a whole blog post, actually, about the Quest for the Perfect Chair. Or possibly a novella.

Upstairs again, I ask William what he thinks about the Borsalino. “A plumbing thing,” he guesses. “Or something you wear around your neck. Or maybe a hat.” He’s in the conference room, where the programming people are getting ready for their weekly meeting. On the agenda: revamping our Guide by Cell. Call me biased, but ICA does a wicked job with this bit of auditory interpretation. Still, it’s on the table for an upgrade. They talk logistics: different platforms for recording the speakers, the best time to get people to sit down and tape a segment. Robert, finished with the carpet crisis, asks, “Do we think we should choose the show that’s hardest to understand to focus on for Guide by Cell?” Which fall show would that be, anyway? It’s not as easy a question to answer as you might think.

Hand with passport.

Snacks are always an important topic at programming meetings. At this one we discuss what to serve at the reception for graduate students we’re hosting in a couple of weeks, and where to serve it. Wine or beer? (Wine.) Auditorium or terrace? (Auditorium first for a quick slide presentation, then up onto the terrace for snacks.)

“I was thinking about a DiBruno’s mediterranean tray,” Jenna says.

“Is that the one with candied pecans?” William says.

“Tell the story about when you had that allergic reaction to nitrates,” Kate says.

“The next agenda item is front desk coverage,” Alex says.

I ask Alex if she knows what a Borsalino is.

“A kind a cheese?”

Back downstairs, the Eli Petel unpacking is going well.

More stuff.

Photo: William Hidalgo

Grace carefully records each item: every coin, every stick, every scrap of paper. My eye snags on that hat again, and I go back upstairs to Google it.

A hat! A Borasalino is a special, name-brand hat, like a Stetson. An Italian company, Borsalino is known for its fedoras made of felt made from Belgian rabbit fur. So, Petel’s hat is self-referential, like the T-shirt that tells everyone that all you got was this lousy T-shirt.

And Kollel? That one you’re going to have to look up for yourself. Or maybe come by ICA and ask William.

“I told you a Borsalino was a hat,” William says.

What can I say? William is always right.

*           *           *

NEXT WEEK: Look for a Miranda’s first-ever guest post by very special pinch hitter.

ICA’s three new shows, Charline von Heyl, Blowing on a Hairy Shoulder / Grief Hunters, and Bill Walton’s Studio, open on the evening of Wednesday, September 7.

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

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In Between Times (or, Not yet, not yet…)

August 12 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

The shows closed on Sunday, all three of them: Sheila Hicks, One is the loneliest number, and That’s How We Escaped. It was super busy at ICA the last few weeks as people flooded in to see them before they closed. We probably set a record for summer attendance. The current unofficial count is upward of 10,000 people, including 1,665 who came for programs and events.

Sign on door says ICA is closed

One of the main contributors to that solid program attendance number was last Wednesday’s Sister Ray Slam. Close to 400 people crowded into ICA to see Andy Warhol films (care of Jay Schwartz and Secret Cinema), eat Little Baby’s Ice Cream (Earl Grey Sriracha, Balsamic Banana, Birch Beer Vanilla Bean, and other flavors), and hear Dry Feet, Megajam Booze Band, and the Sweet Sister Ray band each offer up their own rendition of the Velvet Underground’s classic “Sister Ray.” Having planned to have the Slam outdoors on the terrace, we were upset when the forecast called for rain. But as it turned out, the energy inside that packed building was fabulous, a contemporary echo of a 60s Warhol Factory bash. The only downside was how utterly totally drenched people got taking the trash out to the dumpster at the one in the morning.

Even with the shows closed and the museum doors locked, there’s plenty to do. There are new shows to open, loose ends to tie up from old ones, and groundwork to lay for projects that won’t be in the galleries for years. I spent a lot of the day copy editing the proof of the catalogue for last winter’s Anne Tyng exhibition, which also documents the show’s run at the Graham Foundation in Chicago in the spring. ICA often publishes its catalogues after the shows open, because for us these books document the exhibitions as they are presented here in our space. Installation photography is crucial, so even if the photographers get in as soon as the show opens, there’s a delay. This catalogue is going to be gorgeous—well worth the wait—with vivid images of two very different installations of the same work in Philadelphia and Chicago. I love what the book designers, Project Projects, have done with Tyng’s life chronology, laying it out with photographs and relevant quotations from the architect like this aphoristic one: “It takes more than effort to make something simple.”

Also today, Becket was arranging travel for Ingrid to research a show scheduled for 2013, and Kate was ordering two versions of part of the wall vinyl because there might only be 19 artists in an upcoming show instead of 20, and Jacqueline was revising the bios of the 20 (or perhaps 19) artists in that show, and Alex was trying to nail down presenters for the fall programs, and Nikyia was adding installation crew members into the payroll system, and Annie was sealing stacks of invitations to the fall opening dinner into envelopes.

At noon, though, everyone took a break for the intern goodbye lunch.

Intern lunch

Photo: William Hidalgo

Luckily the weather was good, so this time we could be on the terrace. It’s impossible to overstate the amount of work the interns do for ICA, and it’s always sad to see them go, but they are en route to new adventures. One is going off to study in China, another to a programming job at an art center in her home town, and a third to finish her degree in painting. Pretty soon these people and others like them will be running museums all over the world.

It’s amazing how fast the shows come down. On Monday, the crew took all the crates out of storage and put them near the pieces that would be packed into them. On Tuesday, I finally got to see the inside of the crate from the Stedelijk Museum that Sheila Hicks compared to a boat during installation last March. Annie and I marveled over its J-shaped compartments, while Enrico Martignoni, here from Paris for the de-install, explained that the Stedelijk crates are always the same size—so that storing them doesn’t become a jigsaw puzzle—and therefore the inside parts must be custom designed for the art. By Wednesday, nearly everything had been packed up. The geometric green sculptural pieces by Lucas Ajemian and Julien Bismuth looked lonely in the upstairs gallery like the last autumn leaves still clinging to the tree.

Next week construction will begin for the new shows, which open September 7. ICA is presenting a major retrospective of the work of painter Charline von Heyl; a group show of mostly young, mostly Israeli artists, guest curated by Tel Aviv-based Doron Rabina; and a re-creation of the studio of the minimalist sculptor Bill Walton, who was important to so many artists in Philadelphia. I’m excited about all of these shows, but it’s difficult how quickly they surge toward us. Not yet, not yet, I want to say. Give us a little silence first—or perhaps a tolling of bells—to mark the passage.

*           *           *

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Virginia Solomon: The Same Things with Different Pictures

July 15 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

“It’s been a happy reason for my dissertation to gather dust and cobwebs,” Virginia says of her year at ICA. We’re sitting around the conference table at her final staff meeting. Virginia Solomon was the ICA’s 2010-11 Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow (WLCF), which means that she spent a year here learning the museum trade. She organized a show, helped teach a class, and oversaw much of last year’s programming. The WLCF program, going into its 12th year, has brought many bright young curators to work at ICA who have then gone on to jobs at museums like MOCA and MCA Chicago, or running their own galleries, or working to promote and expand public art. Once Virginia finishes that dissertation at USC on the Canadian artist group General Idea, she’ll be on the job market, looking to become a professor of art history. As though that’s not ambitious enough, she hopes to be a professor who curates too, something she says is more possible now than it used to be: “Rare but doable!”

Virginia, on right, with artists at her opening. Photo: J. Katz

For Virginia, the teaching and the curating seem very much intertwined. “Contemporary art history is in flux,” she says, “and the teaching of it is in flux too.” Working at ICA has influenced the whole package, helping her hone the practice “of putting the object first and the idea coming from the object…Objects don’t always come first in the study of art history.” Being here offered her the opportunity to get her hands into every aspect of curating, not just working with artists but negotiating loan forms, publications, shipping, budgets, transportation.

Virginia’s ICA show, Shary Boyle & Emily Duke: The Illuminations Project, showcased two artists, one of whom works primarily with images and the other primarily with text, working together in a new kind of collaboration, responding to one another’s work but resisting straightforward ideas of illustration or narrative explication. The bright, often violent work that resulted was both political and visceral in its effect. About how making the show affected her, Virginia says, “It made me realize that I’m always talking about the same things, but with different pictures.”

Photo: Jenna Weiss

Working with the class “Contemporary Art and the Art of Curating,” Virginia helped the students—Penn freshmen—curate their own show, which was an exploration of ICA’s iconic 1965 Andy Warhol exhibition. She lectured the students on contemporary art, put issues of queer identity and politics on the table, helped them learn to do archival research, and shepherded them through the gazillion details that go into presenting an exhibition.

It was Virginia who asked last winter if ICA should respond to the removal, after protests from the Catholic League and some members of Congress, of the controversial David Wojnarowicz video “A Fire in My Belly” from an exhibition of gay portraiture at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. A week later, the video was on view in the ICA lobby.

What else did Virginia do during her sojourn in Philly?

Drank coffee. Went on studio visits. Rode her bike. “I love the Wissahickon. I went mountain biking there as much as I could with my dog, Georgia,” a large and lovely mixed breed who will miss the friends she made in Clark Park.

What will people at ICA remember about Virginia?

“That I walked around the office in Spandex all the time,” she speculates, smiling.

Photo: Jenna Weiss

That’s true, of course. And who could forget the boxes of fresh vegetables delivered to the museum offices? We will also remember her good humor and positive attitude, her gregarious laughter and her awesome mix tapes. Jenna Weiss, who shared an office with her, said the best thing: “She made you aware of small things like recycling, and big things like being aware of being attentive and sensitive to difference, if you sometimes got lazy.”

Virginia, good luck out there in the world of freeways and movie stars! We’ll think of you when we think about art and politics, and when we drink coffee, and when we laugh.

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Blowing on a Hairy Shoulder: Origins

December 21 2010

Doron Rabina


post by Rachel Pastan

Ingrid, Paul, and Robert are showing Doron Rabina the gallery. “Sometimes we have a wall here,” Ingrid says, “and sometimes we don’t.”

Doron nods. He’s come all the way from Tel Aviv to talk about the exhibition he’s guest curating at ICA next year, Blowing on a Hairy Shoulder/Grief Hunters, which will showcase many Israeli—along with other international—artists in a variety of media. Ingrid, ICA’s Senior Curator, was in Israel last summer scoping things out, and now Doron is here in his bright blue pants and his hip black glasses, looking around, trying to imagine the art he’s chosen in this space he barely knows. He’s trying to picture what the space can do, what it can offer him.

Mineral Spirits: Anne Chu and Matthew Monahan, which was here this fall, is coming down—is in fact mostly packed up already. Packing boxes lie open, bright packing rugs laid out before them in neat squares. The lively figures of wood and paper and beeswax are gone, and the air seems dull and listless. Ingrid is busy asking questions, moving things along. She asks Robert how many square feet the gallery is. She asks Doron,“Are you still considering cinderblocks?”

“No, too complicated,” Doron says.

What to use, then, to divide up the space? Ingrid says she liked the idea of cinderblocks, but Paul looks alarmed. “The problem is engineering it so the floor can support it,” he says. Paul, the chief preparator, is in charge of hanging the show and building anything that needs to be built. Making sure the floor doesn’t collapse is his job.

“Maybe just a few cinderblocks,” Ingrid says, but the others are talking about one of the videos in the show, about the lighting in the space. “It can be dark,” Ingrid notes.

“Completely dark?” Doron asks.

“Yes,” Robert says. Director of Curatorial Affairs, he has worked at ICA for ten years, about the same time as Ingrid. Together they have seen dozens of shows come and go up here on the second floor. They know what the space can do, what its limitations and possibilities are. “It’s good for you to see how adaptable the space is—it performs!” Ingrid says, and we all look around at the gallery as though it might start performing any minute.

Later, in the offices, Ingrid asks Doron to talk about the theme of the show. Doron says, “It explores the relationship between two concepts—origin and originality.” The show will present art that takes the concept of originality to the extreme, but the subject matter of the art will be mythological, precultural, looking back to begininings. Doron turns the pages of the booklet he has brought with images of artworks he’s considering.

Photo: J. Katz

“Is this unfired clay?” Paul asks, pointing to one of the images. Doron says it’s actually colored bronze. Paul says, “If it’s bronze, it’s heavy as hell, and if it’s wet clay it’s delicate as hell.”

On and on the discussion goes. Would it be better to hang this object on the wall or display it on a stand? Should those large photographs be printed in Israel and shipped, which is expensive, or printed in Philadelphia where the artists won’t be able to approve them? I can see they’re going to be here for a long time, asking, considering, explaining, mulling. This is the origin of this show about origins: pretty much the same as the origin of every show. An idea encounters a particular physical space, financial constraints, personalities, institutional culture. A little later, something will emerge. Maybe it will have cinderblocks, shades on the windows, photographs shipped from Tel Aviv, and maybe it will have something else.

For now, though, the space is resting. Air is moving through it like cleansing yoga breaths. The gallery is gathering itself, getting ready to perform.

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