Posts Tagged ‘First Among Equals’

Something Comes Down, Something New Goes Up: Dog Days at ICA

August 20 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

“Anyone using this cart?”

“Yeah, just for another minute.”

“That’s okay, I’ll take the carpet dolly. And a ratchet wrench.”

I went away for a week on vacation, and when I came back, ICA’s shows had closed and the museum was full of art installers—or, in this case, de-installers—busily taking everything apart.

Stefan Sagmeister: The Happy Show is going on to enjoy new life in Chicago, Canada, Los Angeles, and France, and the art crate firm Wormwood and Haze has built a flotilla of custom crates, painted Happy Show yellow, to cocoon it on its way.

First Among Equals, as seems fitting given its interest in the fleeting dynamics of collaboration, is gone forever. There are just some Plexiglas stands and iron bars still screwed to the wall suggesting something was here.

Looking for a quiet place to write this blog post, I come across Alex Da Corte in ICA’s auditorium packing up his “SCENE TAKE SIX,” a piece I’ve written about several times in this space.

It was magical to see his installation come together last April, and I’m sad to see it packed into boxes. “So it’s all over,” I say.

“Yes,” Alex says. “It’s fun.”

“Fun?” I think he’s joking, but he’s not.

“You get to take it apart and see how you can use the parts again in different ways. It’s not precious.” Tugging at some long tubes that had been part of a scaffolding, he adds, “I haven’t thought about these colors for a long time.” He stacks more boxes on the cart and wheels them out to his PhillyCarShare van for the trip back to the studio, while banging noises float in from the gallery, and someone cuts pieces of foam on the screaming band saw. Upstairs on the terrace, the huge Happy Show monkeys lie in great heaps on the concrete, deflated for the final time.

It’s an odd, poignant moment at ICA: the dog days of summer, hot and stormy. Something comes down, something else—not quite known—gets ready to go up. William, counting up the summer attendance, reports that we recently broke a weekday record—250 visitors on a single August Wednesday!

What will fall bring?

Starting September 19, Jeremy Deller: Joy in People—a mid-career retrospective of the unpredictable, vibrant, British, Turner Prize-winning artist—will fill the whole museum. It will include a life-size recreation of Deller’s first show (in his boyhood bedroom in his parents’ house when they were away), a celebration of Goth culture (including an actual Goth brooding on a sofa), banners and videos and a parade float tea room where you can enjoy an actual cup of tea. Also, a section called My Failures.

Jeremy Deller, “Joy in People” banner (made by Ed Hall). Photographed in London, November 9, 2011, by Linda Nylind.

I have read about Joy in People, seen photographs, even helped draft the press release, yet I can’t quite imagine it—not really—the new environment that’s moving closer like a weather front. Before long I will enter it every day when I come to work, it will become my climate. Which is to say that not only will the environment change, but it will change me too. At least a little bit. At least I hope it will. Isn’t changing us—penetrating us, prying us open like oysters—what we most hope art will do?

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“Hooverville Torqued Ellipse”: What’s In Stars

July 23 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

Abigail DeVille, whose “Hooverville Torqued Ellipse” went on view at ICA last week as part of the exhibition First Among Equals, is reading a book about black holes. It’s early, and she’s getting ready for the last day of installation. When I ask her if she’s interested in black holes for her art, she tells me yes. “I use them as metaphors for historical erasure,” she says.

Bones of Ellipse

“Hooverville Torqued Ellipse” is an installation within an installation. Abigail was invited by Yuka Yokoyama and David Dempewolf, who run Marginal Utility gallery, to participate in their series of installations as part of First Among Equals, a big show at ICA that explores different ways that artists work together. In their exhibition-space-within-the-exhibition-space, Marginal Utility has organized a new installation every few weeks, reconfiguring 15 large black wall panels in different shapes each time to enclose and define each artist’s work. Abigail is the last in the series, and for her run, the black panels have been pushed back and nailed to the gallery walls, providing the generous space her “Ellipse” needs.

Abigail’s construction is a distressed version of Richard Serra’s 1998 sculpture, “Torqued Ellipse IV,”

Serra's "Torqued Ellipse IV"

Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. Photo by Dirk Reinartz.

only done in scavenged wood and cardboard instead of steel. The distinctive Serra-like shape rises from the floor in ICA’s first floor space, gracefully dipping and lifting. So far it is mostly a skeleton of reclaimed two-by-fours, with a few patches of old cardboard stapled to the frame. Abigail pulls a large cart piled with more big scraps and patches into position, chooses a piece, and staples it to the structure with a staple gun. Then she goes back and chooses another.

Abigail working

“You’re good at stapling,” David notes. He and Yuka join in, pounding and screwing the distressed, waterlogged, ripped material into place. Abigail works the fastest, seeming to know in advance where everything should go. She is quiet and confident, occasionally picking up a scissors to cut or rip the cardboard into a different shape. The noise of her stapling is steady and sure. When David uses the drill, it resounds like thunder, drowning out the Beach Boys music playing through someone’s ipod. David sets up a ladder and climbs to reach the high parts. Slowly, the stark ribs disappear under a rich patchwork of trash.

Ellipse half done

This project grew out of a week Abigail spent at RAIR—Recycled Artist-In-Residency—a Philadelphia group that brings artists together with the waste stream. RAIR’s Billy Dufala and Lucia Thome provided crucial support, and Abigail sings their praises along with RAIR’s: “It was beautiful,” she says happily, “all these piles of materials.” A perfect fit for an artist whose MFA-student studio could barely hold all the found materials she pulled in from the New Haven Streets. Like Serra, Abigail got her MFA in painting from Yale.

Later, in the lobby, during a break, I ask Abigail about David and Yuka helping with the work.

“I love it,” she says. “It’s not the same handling of the material throughout. I’ll go back at the end and put the finishing touches on myself.”

Abigial on ladder

I ask, too, about the connection to her interest in astronomy. There aren’t any black holes here, but the ellipse is a quintessentially astronomical form, the shape of the orbits of heavenly bodies: planets around suns, moons around planets. “I’m always thinking of an astronomical relationship,” Abigail says. “Everything is connected—what’s in us is in stars. It’s a shame to get bogged down with what’s down here.”

Back in the gallery, the almost-finished piece looks monumental yet provisional, graceful but unkempt. The hues are mostly shades of brown, but bits of reddish orange plastic wind up one side. Further along, a square hole gapes like a missing tooth. A flap of cardboard hangs like a flap of skin, revealing white and brown bits underneath. Wounds, patches, decay, reclamation. The structure rises from the floor like a hastily built ark—though with no bottom and no top. It would neither float a desperate crew over a flood nor shelter a family in a storm.

Hooverville Torqued Ellipse

One thing about RAIR is that all the materials used in its projects need to be returned to the waste stream when the project is over. Just as what’s in us is in stars, so this stained, pock-marked lumber and weary cardboard may, months or years from now, resurface as another—entirely different—work of art.

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Guest Post: Q&Q

July 2 2012

by Jennifer Burris

“We were discussing how to arrive, and one idea was helicopter drones.”

The comment appears flippant, and is met with audience laughter. Projected in high-definition against a back wall of the ICA first floor space, the speaker (Mashinka Firunts) is discussing possible ways to begin the event currently taking place. In the video, she is bordered by an empty black frame and lit to the side, both composition and tone evoking the silently breathing beauties of Warhol’s screen tests.

This strategic performance of process and methodology, citation and erudition, anchors Unsearchable, an endlessly digressive evening of questions and questioning that took place at ICA on Wednesday, May 23rd, as part of the group exhibition First Among Equals. Machete Group—a Philadelphia-based union of philosophers, writers, and critics—invited artists Mashinka Firunts and Daniel Snelson to collaborate in a performative lecture that explored ideas related to the database: archiving, searching, classifying, compiling. As Machete Group member Avi Alpert explained in his spoken introduction:

“When God was thought of as the unsearchable, this was the mystical paradox. When the self was unsearchable, this was the paradox of consciousness. Now that the world is searchable, our paradox is to find something that escapes being found.”

Divided into three segments, this search for what remains beyond the database began with the video mentioned above. A montage of 1950s films, original footage, and randomly generated Google searches, this entry point showcased the three performers informally discussing how to construct and order the evening. The following two segments were performed live. Seated at a long table facing the audience, the same three participants, clad in film noir black, took turns stepping up to the podium where they introduced themselves and attempted to clarify (or perhaps obfuscate) the topic at hand. Each explanation was from the vantage point of an assumed “role” specified by their chosen methodological approach to searching. Avi was the “Theorist,” Daniel was the “Archivist,” and Mashinka was a ratatatat detective nicknamed “Narrative.” Rounding out the evening was a rapid-fire questioning directed towards the audience: an overtly theatricalized demonstration of confusion in which most people on the receiving end of a question could do little more than stammer out one-word answers.

If this is sounding excessively meta-analytical, self-reflexive, and contrived—that’s because it was. And that was the point. Playing around and through the adopted rhetoric and confused nomenclature so often evoked in discussions of contemporary art, the event gently mocked such self-aggrandizing critiques and justifications; that little trick of making the question sound sufficiently impenetrable and obscure enough in order to convey intelligence without genuine comprehension being a readymade tool of art and academia alike. Yet the mockery was sweetly done, with humor and an air of inclusion. As one question directed towards the audience by the performers demanded:

“Galloway’s tactics of non-existence seem to figure centrally in all your remarks tonight. If you are, indeed, invested in practicing the aesthetics of non-existence, why can I see you plain as day?”(1)

In this way, Unsearchable appears an appropriated heir to work like James Lee Byars’s 1969 performance The World Question Center.(2) But there is something else, as well, at play. By performing this abstracted opacity, winking to academic language and detective narratives, they also seemed to be performing something much more insidious; which brings us back to drones.

A growing flight of unmanned aerial vehicles deployed primarily in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, drones are used for surveillance and reconnaissance as well as to carry out air strikes. Transmitting live video feeds and still images to remotely located operators, this new wave of military intelligence facilitates a video game mentality towards war. Understood in this wider context of international politics and negotiation, the referencing of drones both opens up the initial impenetrability of Unsearchable while also adding a reverberation of discomfiting meaning for both contemporary art and political compliance alike.

It is impossible to “arrive” on a drone, as Firunts joked about doing at the start of the evening; the machine’s very structure renders the proposal paradoxical. But what is apparently an illogical throwaway in actuality introduces an underlying premise of the performance. The three central characters, or figures, should not be thought of as human subjects but as search agents, operating within the framework of each of their chosen methodologies.

These agents’ indifferent search for the unsearchable also shares a disconcerting similarity to the military’s use of surveillance drones to discover what is, by definition, just as unstable and impossible to find: terrorism, networks, terror. What is produced by this paranoiac search engine, operating through thousands of computerized flight vehicles, is an endless deluge of images and video clips leading to a crisis of information for analysts on the other end.(3)

By playing out these contemporary structures of paranoia and information overload within the camp theatricality of a dinner theater, the performers enact a rigorous cross-examination of the processes of contemporary surveillance and the mechanisms of a perverse governmentality without an immediate referencing of either politics or emotion. As the evening’s final set of questions plaintively put forth: “I’ve heard coded references at this point to almost every imaginable topic: what is it to search? Is there anything that is not searchable? Is there a relationship between searching/targeting and war? Is narrative a mode of liberation? Can you say, definitively, what the major concern of the event here tonight has been?”

No, you could not; and so we go on searching, lost, looking for something to find.

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All images are from Unsearchable, 2012, by Avi Alpert, Mashinka Firunts, and Daniel Snelson. Photos by William Hidalgo.

(1) An Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, Alexander R. Galloway is a founding member of the software collective RSG and creator of the data surveillance engine Carnivore. With Eugene Thacker, he co-authored a book entitled The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minnesota, 2007), which proposes an idea of non-existence as a form of indifference. Seb Franklin describes this notion of non-existence in his article “On Game Art, Circuit Bending and Speedrunning as Counter-Practice” as follows: “It’s not a question of hiding, or living off the grid, but of living on the grid, in potentially full informatics view, but in a way that makes one’s technical specification or classification impossible.” Cory Arcangel is a contemporary artist often discussed within this framework.

(2) “In 1969, the American artist James Lee Byars developed a performance piece entitled The World Question Center. The original idea, which was not brought to fruition, entailed gathering one hundred brilliant minds including thinkers, scientists, and artists together in a room, locking them behind closed doors and inviting them to ask each other questions they had been asking themselves. The final version of this project, produced for Belgian Radio and Television, is a performance piece in which Byars contacts all of them by telephone” (www.ubu.com/film/byars_world-question.html). Many thanks to Kenneth Goldsmith for pointing me to this work.

(3) The effects of this crisis of information have been explicitly, and consistently, skewered in the work of artists like Harun Farocki, whose ingenious films and video installations—from Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1988) to Serious Games (2009-2010)—unravel the militarization of imaging technologies and perception. Other artists, such as Seth Price, propose opportunities for individual resistance; Price’s 2008 artist book/exhibition catalogue How to Disappear in America provides internet-sourced instructions for the ways one can drop out of a mainstream society and evade law enforcement.

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Gallery within the Gallery: Marginal Utility in First Among Equals

May 18 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

“We asked each artist to dream up their ideal show,” David Dempewolf says. “Each artist determines the footprint of the space.” He is speaking quite literally. David and his partner, Yuka Yokoyama, who run the non-profit exhibition space Marginal Utility, have organized a gallery-within-the-gallery as their contribution to ICA’s exhibition, First Among Equals, a group show exploring different ways artists work together. Sixteen 4’ x 8’ panels are rearranged every few weeks as Yuka and David present serial exhibitions in a portion of ICA’s spacious first floor.

For the first Marginal Utility presentation here, The I Lesson, Part I, 2012 by Alexi Kukuljevic, the panels were provocatively arranged in the shape of a coffin.

Coffin shape

Photo: Aaron Igler / Greenhouse Media

Next, some of the panels were used to form a tight box in which Mike Vass’s video essay, Vancouver #1-13 (Notes for a report…) was screened, while the unneeded panels leaned against the gallery wall.

Mike Vass installation

Photo: Alex Klein

For Jayson Scott Musson’s Early Imperial Luxury Arts, a V shape was arranged.

Musson installation

Photo: Alex Klein

Over the last couple of days, David and Yuka, some of ICA’s crew, and several Marginal Utility interns have reconfigured the panels into a shallow U—a wide embrace for Daniel Lefcourt’s exhibition, Active Surplus. “Daniel locked into this shape four days ago,” David says. I imagine this is the only time in his artistic career that Lefcourt will be able to determine the literal shape of the gallery five days before a show opens.

It’s easy to see how much David and Yuka enjoy being able to give their artists this luxury. Marginal Utility has its own gallery on North 11th Street, but of course that L-shaped space is, well, always the same L-shaped space. “Every time people deal with us, they have to conform their work to our space,” David says. Here, though, they are able to offer flexibility, choice, a suspension of the usual boundaries.

Lefcourt installation

Photo: Alex Klein

It’s important for Yuka and David to give their artists this kind of freedom. Other kinds, too. Though they live in New York these days (David and Yuka are married as well as gallery partners), they opened Marginal Utility in Philadelphia to put some distance between artists and the commercial imperatives of New York galleries—to offer space to experiment, to take new risks, perhaps to fail. Yuka (who interned at ICA years ago), puts it this way: “People say ‘site-specific.’ Instead, we’re saying we’re artist specific.”

I look at Daniel Lefcourt’s painting on the far wall and ask what the old-fashioned overhead projector in the middle of the space is for. Only then do I see that the painting isn’t a painting at all. It’s a projection of dust from the bed of the projector onto panels on the wall: MDF dust onto MDF panels. *

“It looks like an abstract painting, but it’s all shadow,” Yuka says.

“We filmed him putting the dust on,” David says, taking out his phone to show me. “He’s teasing painting.”

Yuka picks up a tape measure. It’s getting late, and there are still three pieces to hang. The show opens tomorrow (May 16) and will remain on view through June 3. Marginal Utility’s next show, with work by John Hawke, will open June 6. I’m tempted to call it speed-curating, except that the thoughtful care Yuka and David exude makes it seem more like curating as moving meditation.

Measuring

While Yuka is measuring the wall, Gracie, ICA’s Spiegel Fellow, comes downstairs, looks around, then sums things up: “It’s totally different again!” she says.

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First Among Equals is on view at ICA through August 12.

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Stuff to Art: A Conversation with Alex Da Corte

April 20 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

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

Venus with Scene Take Six

photo: Constance Mensh

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

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

photo: William Hidalgo

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

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

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

The black and white side

photo: Alex Klein

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

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

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

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

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

Venus pushing the fence

photo: Constance Mensh

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

First Among Equals is open through August 12.

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Man of Your Dreams: Installing First Among Equals and Stefan Sagmeister The Happy Show

April 6 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

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

Sugar installation

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

Stefan writing

“How are you, Stefan?” I asked him.

“I’m having fun!” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Installing the Paul Thek

Photo: Alex Klein

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

“No,” Paul says.

“Does it feel brittle?” Alex asks.

“Yeah,” Paul says.

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

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

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

Looking at the Paul Thek

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

* * *

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

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The Golden Jester: A performance/sculpture in First Among Equals

March 30 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

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

Jester posing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Dedication Monuments: Alex Da Corte and First Among Equals

March 16 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

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

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

SCENE TAKE SIX install

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

SCENE TAKE SIX install

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

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

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

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

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

SCENE TAKE SIX install

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

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

SCENE TAKE SIX install

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

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

SCENE TAKE SIX install

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

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

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

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

SCENE TAKE SIX install

*                  *                *

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

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Out of Hollywood: Bennett Simpson on William Leavitt and Kathryn Andrews on Herself

February 10 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

A west wind has been blowing through ICA lately, carrying with it art and artists from California. A recent program “Pictures and Props” (occasioned by ICA’s current exhibition of the work of Jennifer Bolande,) explored the work of West Coast artists working on the fringes of Hollywood. I suppose that’s no more surprising than artists in Alaska making art about snow, but it does seem slipperier, if only because Hollywood is such a slippery place. Questions of masquerade and authenticity, of surface and illusion, come with the territory.

Curator Bennett Simpson, who started his career at ICA and is now at MOCA, talked about the artist William Leavitt whose first museum retrospective, William Leavitt: Theater Objects, Bennett curated last summer. Leavitt grew up in the Midwest and went to L.A. to finish his National Guard service, which turned out to be conducted on the back lot of a Hollywood studio. In the year of the Watts riots, combat training was done using the studio’s props and sets. Leavitt stayed on in Hollywood, building sets and making props, and also making paintings and writing plays. Many of his paintings were made to serve as props on the sets of those plays.

There is a weird, quiet menace sometimes, and other times a human poignancy, in Leavitt’s art. You don’t see people, but the animals, plants, and objects you do see often seem human, for instance the pair of lawn recliners at dusk which seem almost to be communicating. And there are curtains—especially red velvet ones—about which Bennett says, “There’s never anything behind the curtain, it’s our imagination that allows us to think there is.”

One of Leavitt's curtains

Installation view of William Leavitt: Theater Objects at MOCA Grand Avenue, March 13, 2011-July 3, 2012, photo by Brian Forrest

Leavitt also makes installations: fake palm trees stuck in cement with a boom box twittering birdsong; a recreation of a California patio. Nothing’s happening in these places, but Leavitt creates a haunting sense that something might happen soon. The play is always about to begin, or maybe it has always just ended, as in a dream where we are always arriving too late and everyone has gone.

Patio

Installation view of William Leavitt: Theater Objects at MOCA Grand Avenue, March 13, 2011-July 3, 2012, photo by Brian Forrest

Kathryn Andrews, an artist whose work will be part of ICA’s upcoming exhibition First Among Equals, also makes art that explores what it means for something to be real. “After art school I spent seven years making and destroying objects,” she says. “At the end of the day, I was always left with a pile of debris.”

After that, she gave up making art for a while. To try something new, she organized a show of other artists. But then, something unexpected happened. Kathryn found herself making works for that show, works which inhabited a kind of liminal territory, visibly part of the exhibition, yet unsigned and unattributed. Functionally, they enhanced the other work in the show—for instance, a kind of sculptural line separating two works on a wall.

image credit below

As Kathryn moved back into making art, this interest in responding to the work of others remained with her. She started renting props from L.A.’s copious prop shops, first making work in response to them, and later incorporating the props into her sculptures and installations. “Gift Cart,” for example, consists of a shiny stainless steel cart holding bright but battered wrapped gifts that Kathryn rented (these days she goes for 99-year leases). Why rent wrapped gifts, she wondered, when it would be faster and cheaper to wrap empty boxes yourself? It was a Hollywood puzzle.

Gift cart

Kathryn Andrews, "Gift Cart," 2011. Stainless steel, rented props, 60 x 38 x 24 inches.

Paradox interests both Kathryn Andrews and William Leavitt. As Bennett Simpson says, “The prop is like the rematerialization of conceptual art’s idea.” The prop is an object—but it’s also the idea of the object: a stand-in.

“In L.A. I’ve started calling it the new medium,” Kathryn jokes. “Like, Oh, I’m a sculptor. Oh, I’m a prop artist!” She says, “One of the things I’m trying to do is remove the sign of my hand from the work.”

In Leavitt’s work, by contrast, the hand of the artist is very present. “It’s old-fashioned work in some ways,” Bennett says. “It’s about creating an atmosphere, a mood.”

Jaguar

William Leavitt Jaguar (from The Tropics), 1974. Oil on canvas. 34 1/4 x 44 1/4 in. (87 x 112.4 cm). Courtesy of the artist.

Still, if you make paintings that you think of as props, certain old-fashioned art values—for instance the value of conservation—may not apply. Toward the end of the evening, Bennett tells a story about installing Leavitt’s show at MOCA. One day the registrar came over to Bennett, very concerned. They had found a hole in the painting “Jaguar (from The Tropics).”

Bennett called Leavitt to break the news.

Leavitt was blasé. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “I made that hole a long time ago. It doesn’t make any difference.”

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Image credit from above: On right, Stephanie Taylor, “Landscape of Geometry,” 2007, photo-collage, 12 x 12 inches (each). On left, Benjamin Lord, “Broken Instrument,” 2007 21.5″ tall x 26″ wide, Epson Pigment Print on paper.

You can see Kathryn Andrews work at ICA in First Among Equals from March 14 – August 12.

Jennifer Bolande Landmarks is on view at ICA through March 11.

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

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