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Negotiating Utter Darkness: What Is Contemporary?

October 15 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.

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Wild Imaginings: ICA @ 50

August 3 2012

WILD IMAGININGS: ICA @ 50

post by Rachel Pastan

What if you could reorganize the objects in your museum’s collection in a series of poetic interventions, grouping them—not by geography, culture, or era—but rather by their relation to human lived experience, perhaps setting a simple, 12th-century white jade Chinese vase inside an ornate 18th-century French salon?

Images courtesy of the PMA. See below for object information.

Or what if you decided to exhibit one single painting in your gallery—a very famous painting, perhaps—maybe owned by the Louvre—an impulse prompted by the coincidence of your gallery’s recent name change and its proximity to a cemetery? And what if the arrival of this painting was preceded by a series of tangentially related, preparatory experiments?

Or what if you decided to dispense with a formal display of objects altogether and instead created a clearing—a kind of scaffolding—for creative imagining on topics of common interest and concern?

What if you wanted to make a series of exhibitions that celebrated your museum’s history by pulling that history forward and molding into the shape of the present?

What if… what if…

Few people reading this would deny that curators have exciting, creative, stimulating jobs. It’s also true, however, that they operate under a great number of constraints—and here I’m thinking of two in particular: time and money. Money and time.

But what if… What if you didn’t have to worry about money? And what if you suddenly had oceans of time? Given those balmy circumstances, what exhibition might you organize then? What would be the exhibition of your dreams? And how would dreaming up such an exhibition stretch your daily, real world work in new directions?

These were the questions driving a program by the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative (PEI), which recently invited six local contemporary art curators to participate in a year-long series of seminars and workshops. Led by the director of Independent Curators International, Kate Fowle, with appearances by special guests from around the world, this Curatorial Intensive offered new perspectives, an exchange of ideas, and a structure for reflection and fantasy.

PEI Curatorial Intensive 2012 in session. Courtesy of ICI.

Earlier this summer, the six—including ICA’s Senior Curator Ingrid Schaffner—came together to present their wild imaginings to each other and an audience of their peers. Most of their projects were focused on their own home institution, almost as though they had all been asked to imagine an exhibition that would poetically express their museum or gallery’s deepest nature. The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Adelina Vlas, for example, contemplated reorganizing her museum’s historical rooms via a contemporary sensibility, an idea that came to her while walking through them between her far flung office and the rest of the contemporary department. Arcadia University’s Richard Torchia has been dreaming of the gravitational force a painting like Poussin’s “Et in Arcadia ego” might have, drawing tides of passionate audiences out to suburban Glenside. Temple Contemporary’s Rob Blackson talked about how public programming is becoming a new form of exhibition-making, and he seems to be bringing the dream of turning his gallery into a space for conversation and interaction quickly to life.

ICA’s own Ingrid Schaffner took the invitation to dream as an opportunity to consider how to mark ICA’s 50th anniversary, which will—incredibly—be upon us next year. Wary of the dangers of nostalgia and self-congratulation common to such occasions, Ingrid has conceived a series of micro-exhibitions—new presentations based on or inspired by important exhibitions from ICA’s past. In this way the past becomes not a fetish but a springboard, a catalyst, a point of departure. For example, ICA’s exhibition of the work of Agnes Martin might lead to a mini-exhibition of designer Eugene Feldman, whose Falcon Press designed the soulful, unhurried catalogue for Martin’s show in 1973.

1977’s Improbable Furniture might lead to an exhibition of an artist working with furniture forms today. Another presentation might reassemble a few of the talismantic objects from “The Other Tradition,” the tantalizing 1966 exhibition hypothesizing an alternate road to Pop through Surrealism. A giant timeline of ICA exhibitions hangs in Ingrid’s office, studded with constellations of Post-it notes proposing possible projects.

Ingrid’s expansive vision has a place for the points of view not just of ICA curators, whose various handwritings loop across the Post-its, but of friends and collaborators as well. Curators who began their careers at ICA, or guest-curated a show, or came to participate in a public program—how might they see our history? What connections or associations might they make that would never cross our own minds? And what of Penn professors or students, or ICA staff who aren’t professional curators but who swim in the culture of the contemporary in their own ways? Or what if we engaged an artist to work with ICA’s archives to create new work out of this old material?

We haven’t engaged any artists yet, but we have chartered a young curator, Sarah Fritchey, a Masters candidate in curatorial studies at Bard, to spend the summer immersed in the chilly air of Penn’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, combing through the archives and reporting back on what she finds. Every morning this hot summer she has plunged into the darkness of the unknown like a pearl diver, though with sweater, laptop, and camera rather than greased cotton in her ears and a stone to carry her down. Some of her finds, digitized, will be made public on ICA’s website in a year or so.

Back at PEI, Ingrid, still in dream mode, asks, “What if you started with an empty gallery and then kept filling?”

Ingrid speaking

Courtesy of PEI

She turns to Arcadia’s Richard Torchia. “Your exhibition is a quest,” she says.

Richard smiles. “A crusade,” he suggests.

Maybe all exhibition-making is a quest—a crusade. A journey into the dark in the faith that enlightenment is waiting somewhere.

* * *

PMA image information: European Decorative Arts and Sculpture, Architecture (including fragments), Grand Salon from the Château de Draveil, French c. 1735. Mirrors, carved and gilded oak paneling, and sculpted reliefs . Purchased with Museum funds, 1928 1928-58-1. Cup in the Form of a Flower, Artist/maker unknown, Chinese, Song Dynasty (960-1279). 12th century, Jade (nephrite), 2 x 2 1/2 inches. Gift of the Far Eastern Art Committee in honor of Henry B. Keep, 1978.

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Cooking for Liam Gillick

June 8 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

Liam Gillick, the artist and writer, is coming to ICA today to give a lecture, and up in the offices everyone is talking about tarts. Gracie has ordered two tarts for the dinner after the talk, blackberry almond and blueberry buttermilk. They are from a pink storefront bakery on Arch Street, and they are beautiful.

Blackberry tart

Dessert, then, is taken care of. But the rest of the dinner remains to be cooked. In ICA’s small kitchen, Ingrid fills pots to boil pasta for the macaroni and cheese that will accompany the ribs, while Gracie hunts for the cheese grater. Ingrid says that Thomas Jefferson himself brought a recipe for macaroni and cheese back from Italy, so it seems a good dish to serve to an honored European guest.

Stirring

As Ingrid heaves the heavy pots onto the stove, the elevator opens and a man comes out, wheeling a dolly with two big cartons. “The beer is here!” Alex says. “I thought we’d get Philadelphia varieties.” I see that the cartons are marked Walt Wit and Yards.

All year ICA has been hosting dinners for visiting artists and program participants in our mezzanine space.

Surveying the table

Ingrid, ICA’s Senior Curator, is the principal cook, but all the curators take turns. Gracie and Ingrid reminisce about a dinner at which Kate cooked Mexican food and there was lots of passing of dishes and many condiments. At another dinner—or maybe the same one—the guests sang.

“The reason we cook instead of going out to eat,” Ingrid says, opening the packages of ribs, “is that it allows us to be more inclusive. We can have fifteen people at the table.”

“There’s something nice about coming to give a lecture and the senior curator has made you dinner,” Gracie says. “I’ve seen your schedule, Ingrid.”

“It takes more planning,” Ingrid says. “But in the end it’s more relaxing.”

The elevator opens again and a different man comes out, this one with trays and bags. “I have cheese and things,” he announces, putting the bags on the counter.

DiBruno's delivery

Gracie finishes grating and begins hulling strawberries. “My very first day here, all I did was cook with Ingrid,” she says. “My favorite moment was when she dried herbs by putting them in a clean towel and spinning them around like a centrifuge. It was a nice day.”

The door opens and Anthony comes in. “Double, double, toil and trouble,” he says, spying the steaming pots.

“Now is the lull,” Gracie says after Anthony leaves. “There’s always a lull, and then everything happens at once. But that’s how I feel about this job in general.”

Next year, Gracie is leaving us to get her masters in art history at Oxford, having had a wide range of experiences here at ICA—from making budgets and inviting speakers to eating ribs with Liam Gillick and selecting tarts: a soup to nuts preparation for a career in contemporary art. We will miss her.

Gracie with strawberries

Gracie buying strawberries at the farmer's market on 36th St.

Now once more the door opens, and look—here is Liam Gillick himself! He comes in and shakes hands all around. When he gets to Ingrid he says, “You’re not supposed to shake hands with the chef, are you?” But he shakes her hand anyway.

Later, during his lecture, Gillick shows slides of his work. One early series involved attending political events with a tape recorder. A piece called “An Old Song and a New Drink” (a collaboration with Angela Bulloch) involved listening to music and drinking cocktails in a Paris bar beside the Pompidou Center. Still another involved Gillick editing a book at a big table in his gallery’s booth at an art fair and requesting the gallery staff do their work at the table as well. He also talked about other artists, including Rirkrit Tiravanija who is known for cooking Thai meals for audiences.

Liam Gillick

As the slides click by, I think about the afternoon in the kitchen: cooking and conversing, planning and improvising. Focused but spontaneous activity taking place within a set of pre-determined boundaries.

I’m not suggesting that cooking dinner for Liam Gillick was art. Perhaps, though, part of the intention of his work is to make me wonder about the nature of some of the activities in which we participate daily, and what their relationship to art might be. How is cooking dinner for Liam Gillick like and not like art? How is choosing tarts from an artisan tart maker in a pink storefront like and not like art? How is giving a lecture about your art like and not like art?

I don’t have the answers to these questions. But here it is a week later, and I’m still thinking about them.

* * *

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Winter Salon: Strange New Worlds

March 23 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

“You never know what’s going to happen at auction,” Meredith says, “because you can get outbid in a minute.”

“And if you don’t,” Bryan says, smiling, “you wonder why.”

We are in Meredith and Bryan’s spacious apartment not far from the Whitney Museum of American Art where, earlier this afternoon, members of ICA’s Leadership Circle and Art Council enjoyed a private tour of the Whitney Biennial.

At the Whitney

At the Whitney

The tour was a prelude to ICA’s annual Winter Salon, a chance for donors and curators to come together for a drink and some conversation about art. Bryan and Meredith, an ICA board member and his wife, are enthusiastic Penn alums and art collectors. You can see their passion hung on every wall, even in the children’s rooms.

“Are there pieces you fall out of love with?” Ingrid asks.

“I won’t say who the artist is,” Bryan says, “but the first piece my wife and I bought we couldn’t live with anymore.”

“At first we liked it because it was so disturbing,” Meredith explains. “But then it was so disturbing.”

“I’d rather have the story than the piece of art,” Bryan says.

The talk shifts to the Biennial. Ingrid teases out some of its connections to ICA shows of the past: work by the Cologne artists Kai Althoff and Jutta Koether, who ICA showed in “Make Your Own Life” (2006); artist-as-curator installations by Nick Mauss and Robert Gober, à la Set Pieces, Virgil Marti’s tableaux staging of works from the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2010); Dawn Kasper bringing her whole studio into the Whitney as Anthony Campuzano did at ICA in 2010, delighted to make art for a hot July in air conditioning.

Artist and ICA board member Sarah McEneaney casts further back: “Dawn Kasper’s installation made me remember when Janine Antoni spent seven nights in ICA preparing for her exhibition. She slept in the gallery, recording her brain waves while sleeping and weaving them into a piece… with threads from her nightgown!”

Another connection is the emphasis on performance. For this Biennial, the Whitney has dedicated the fourth floor to music, dance, theater, and special events. If you’re in Philadelphia, you can follow our own performance series all spring and summer in the new ICA exhibition First Among Equals.

Performance is on Anthony’s mind, too. When Ingrid asks him—jokingly—what he hated most in the Biennial, he says, “What I hated most was what I loved the most. It’s kind of tiring when you realize that you’re going to miss the Biennial if you don’t go back every week.”

The performance emphasis is bemusing in a slightly different way to many here who come to art as collectors. There is a sense that this Biennial’s goal wasn’t to put objects a person might want to live with in room, but—as one Salon-goer put it—privileging artists’ studios and processes over the things themselves. “Do you feel this biennial is continuing the tradition of what a biennial is supposed to do?” someone asks Ingrid.

“I do,” she answers. “This was about turning down the volume and listening to artists.”

ICA prides itself on taking that attitude all the time: listening to artists about what’s interesting to them, looking at what they’re looking at, thus presenting work that other museums aren’t—or at least aren’t yet. Sometimes I wonder about the gap—now narrowing, now widening—between what artists look at and what the rest of us want to see. Artists are like brave Away Teams on old Star Trek episodes, investigating unknown planets that may prove, ultimately, inhospitable to life.

Anthony in the middle, Ingrid right

Often these conversations come around to taste. As Len, a long-time ICA supporter, says, “At the end of the day for me, it’s about do I like the work or do I not like the work.” In the next breath, however, he credits ICA for opening him up to art that was unfamiliar to him: video art, for example.

This is the line the ICA, the Whitney, and every other museum that presents contemporary art negotiates, each in its own way: how to give the viewer shows that will delight, but that also push us a little further, that open up new territory. That explore strange new worlds and new cultures…

I think an art exhibition should feel like a new world, with its own colors and textures, its own atmosphere and customs and seasons. We want art to transport us, to make us feel we’ve stepped through a portal to another way of seeing—of being—even as we stand still.

* * *

For information about ICA’s Leadership Circle or Art Council, email Christy Miller at chmille@ica.upenn.edu

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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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What Is Contemporary? Pick your own metaphor

September 30 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

Ingrid Schaffner, ICA’s Senior Curator, started her fifth annual “What Is Contemporary?” lecture where she left off last year: talking about money. Or, as she more poetically put it: “purchase, patronage, price point.” She showed an image of Stephanie by Maurizio Cattelan—a sculpture that recently sold at auction for $2,434,500—then offered us a cheaper alternative. Charley, “a radical art work masquerading as a magazine,” is also a creation of Maurizio Cattelan (and friends) and available for only 16 Euro. “There are lots of ways to be in the art world,” Ingrid proclaimed expansively, which seemed a good way to launch the wide-ranging, hold-onto-your-hat talk she then embarked on, a talk that sometimes felt like a roller coaster but was in fact more like a butterfly lighting down briefly on a hundred flowers, each one more fragrant than the next.

Or, occasionally, just smellier.

Ingrid talking

Photo: William Hidalgo

This is the third version of this annual lecture I’ve heard, and I wish I’d been around for the first two. One of the pleasures of hearing the talk is noting how it evolves and grows while staying essentially itself—like a Christmas Cactus that blooms only on that holiday, or an old friend you meet for dinner once a year.

Ingrid seemed a little anxious about the fact that her talk would cover old ground as well as new. She quoted Gertrude Stein (courtesy of poet Tom Devaney), the Empress of Echoes, who is supposed to have remarked, “There is no such thing as repetition, only emphasis.” And indeed, the pieces Ingrid mentioned this year for the third (or maybe it was the fifth) time seemed more interesting and resonant this year than ever: Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty shimmering under water in a recent photograph; Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Hartford Wash, in which the artist spent hours on her knees scrubbing the steps of the Wadsworth Atheneum; and James Turrell’s aching Skyspaces that, as Ingrid says, “use light to sculpt space.”

I’m tempted to emulate the style of the lecture in this blog post, offering a kind of found poem of titles and subjects. Ingrid divides her lecture into themes, and the names of the themes alone are hypnotic: terrain, systems, reference, history, evocation, flesh…

Instead, I’m going to consider the structure and function of the lecture itself, jumping right to the end to consider a remark Ingrid made in closing, when she invited us to “think of this talk as a Leatherman—or Leatherwoman—to open the work up. Use it if it’s useful, or throw it away.”

Driving home in the car in the dark, I wondered what she meant exactly. What is it about categorization that’s useful? How does a survey like this open work up?

Banana wall

Stefan Sagmeister, Richard The, & Joe Shouldice for Deitch Projects, 2008

In the category of alchemy, for example, she mentioned the following artists and works: Joseph Beuys and his Fat Chair, Karla Black and her Venice Biennale installation made of make up, Stefan Sagmeister (whose show at ICA opens in April) and his self-affirmation written in bananas of different ripenesses, Bill Walton (whose show at ICA is open now) and his studio—“that wonderful machine for transforming materials into art,” and of course James Turrell. I knew of most of these artists and artworks before listening to the lecture, but something about the way she yoked them together made me see something at the core of them that was new to me. Instead of considering Turrell’s Skyspaces, for example—as I have before—and thinking only, That’s wonderful, but why?—I thought, Ah, they’re related to these other works, they belong somewhere. They have a center of gravity. I felt I had a road in.

Bill Walton's Studio

Bill Walton's Studio, Philadelphia, 2011. Photo: Karen Mauch

Of course, any good work of art, like a major city, has lots of roads in. Ingrid could shift works from one category to another each year if she wanted to; for all I know, she does. The point isn’t to pin art down like a butterfly in a collector’s case, but rather to offer the mind a shaft of light along which to swim up through the air and meet the butterfly.

Shaft of light, road, Leatherman: you can pick your own metaphor. All I know is that, speeding home down the highway that night, I felt that the next time I encountered a new, strange, enigmatic work of art, I’d be better able to open myself to it and make it at home.

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If you have a metaphor for how you get connected to art, we’d love it if you shared it in the comments below.

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Maira Kalman: Suitcases in the Fireplace

August 5 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

“Look,” I said. “The suitcases are in the fireplace!”

“They look good there,” David said.

Suitcases in the fireplace

Photo: Bradford Robotham

David and I were in New York seeing Maira Kalman: Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World) before it closed last weekend at The Jewish Museum. The exhibition was organized at ICA by Senior Curator Ingrid Schaffner, and it was on view there during the spring of 2010. If you’re lucky, you’ve seen it at one of its four venues: the ICA in Philadelphia, the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, or The Jewish Museum. If you’re super lucky, you got to see it at more than one.

Like diplomats or rock bands, exhibitions travel all the time. It’s always sad to see a show packed into its crates, but it softens the blow a little when you know it’s moving on someplace else. It’s a little like sending a child off to college: you’ve done your best by them, and you have to trust they’ll thrive. Still, you may feel better if you visit on Parents Weekend and see for yourself.

Several ICA staff members have seen Maira Kalman in all its venues, but I only saw it in Philadelphia and New York. I’d heard it looked very different ensconced in the elegant New York townhouse of The Jewish Museum, and I was eager to see for myself what that meant.

Dress and ironing board

Dress and ironing board against Sol LeWitt mural. Photo: John Aquino

How strange and delightful it was to enter a new space and encounter old friends! There was that familiar ironing board, only hanging on a wall now, with the pink dress nearby. There was the man who looked like he was skating, and the pink package tied with string, and all the dogs. There was our own wall text—which I had proofread a dozen times—and our funding credits and Ingrid’s name. There was the picture my mother liked best, the one of Emily Dickinson, and there was Ben Franklin in his fur hat wearing an expression suggesting that he at least was not at all sure he wanted to be out of Philadelphia. It was as though all these items had arranged to meet David and me in Manhattan, perhaps for dinner and a show.

At ICA, the whole Kalman exhibition fit in one room. In the middle was an installation, composed by Maira, referred to as “many tables of many things”—though there weren’t just tables of things but also ladders and buckets, a pie chest of linens, some chairs, and those suitcases. The pictures themselves were installed in one long ribbon, frame often right up against frame, giving a feeling of the long sweep of Maira’s work. It suggested a continuous narrative you could fall into, a shaggy dog story maybe, or a fanciful epic.

ICA installation view

ICA installation view. Photo: Greenhouse Media

At The Jewish Museum the rooms are smaller, so works and objects were necessarily divided up among connected rooms. Within each room there might be space for only three pictures between a doorway and a corner, though on other walls you could see perhaps twenty together. Here the mind was more likely to absorb the work in smaller bites, to think about how a handful of pictures related to each other, and then another handful, as though the show were a book of poems.

The gallery where the exhibition was presented at ICA is a big open space with white walls and high ceilings. At The Jewish Museum, the door frames are made of dark wood, an ornate frieze runs along the top of the walls, and there are marble fireplaces like the one in which I spied the suitcases. Something about the contrast between the old fashioned New York surroundings and the signature Kalman whimsy (not that all her work is whimsical) felt alive in a very Kalmanesque way. It was nice, too, to look past the objects and see the city outside the windows. The trees waving in Central Park looked as though Maira had painted them, and I thought about how, when we look at art, we begin to see the whole world inflected by the vision of whatever artist we’re immersed in.

Installation at The Jewish Museum

At The Jewish Museum. Photo: Bradford Robotham/The Jewish Museum

When it was time to go, David and I took one last look. The pictures seemed as fresh as ever, even after so much time in the public view. Most of these pictures were made in New York after all, and the installation objects were largely New Yorkers too; it was hard to escape the feeling that, after an exhilarating national tour, the objects in Various Illuminations felt they had come home.

* * *

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NOTE: Miranda is ready for a new fall look! If you have suggestions of images in the public domain–or that you would like to donate–that stick to the snake theme, she would be most grateful. Send ideas to: rpastan@upenn.edu

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THE TEXTILE MIRROR: A Visit to the Penn Museum

June 10 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

Sheila and Ingrid walking toward the Penn Museum.

“Lucy,” Ingrid says, “you’re living my Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler fantasy!”

We are in the Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and Keeper Lucy Fowler Williams, who specializes in American textiles, keeps bringing out the most extraordinary things from behind the poker-faced doors of numbered cabinets: fragments of thousand-year-old tunics, cactus spine needles, a tie-dyed Anasazi blanket. The comment might seem strange coming from a curator like Ingrid, who seems to practically live in ICA, our own museum; but the Penn Museum is a different animal: vast and historical rather than bright and emphatically new. ICA doesn’t have a permanent collection, but the Penn Museum’s collection, like a great tree, grows larger every year. There are 300,000 objects in the American collection alone!

This special tour is occasioned by the presence of artist Sheila Hicks, whose fabulous survey exhibition, Sheila Hicks: 50 Years, is on view at ICA through August 7. Sheila knows everything about textiles, and so does Lucy, though their two everythings don’t always exactly overlap. On the way in they talk about the magic Sheila performed at ICA’s benefit a few nights earlier. Subscribers brought her items of clothing—ties and shirts and underwear-and she wrapped them in layers of thread, transforming them into containers for memory. Sheila says the podium from which she worked was like a confessional: people brought their stories—both of their objects and of themselves—hoping for the absolution of art. We walk past an ancient bull with lapis horn tips and a headdress of gold. Sheila stops to admire a figure from Guanyin, China (900 – 1279 A.D.)—how the folds of the drapery are rendered in wood and stone.

We pass through a private hall where people are setting up for a dinner, clothed tables overlooked by stone sphinxes. Sheila and Lucy reminisce about potlatches.

It’s chilly in the white collections room. Lucy has pulled out some boxes for us, each one divided into smaller compartments, each compartment holding some small but extraordinary fragment: a 15th-century loop of a thread, or a bit of cloth, or a spiny needle, all from Pachacamac, Peru.

Photo: Pam Kosty

“The soil is very oily there,” Sheila says in her Nebraska-bred, Paris-refined voice. She’s been there.

“These were buried with women,” Lucy says. “Textiles or cloth for these cultures were the most important thing—like gold might be somewhere else.”

“Because it’s the most difficult thing to do,” Sheila says. “These are the superheroes!”

Lucy shows us a stretch of vicuna wool cloth, dark red with green, brown, and mustard woven in. “A lot of recent scholarship relates these to the sky, possibly to time,” she says, explaining where the colors come from: the red from cochineal—tropical insects—the bluish green at least partly indigo.

“I’m very fond of these positive/negative shapes,” Sheila says, pointing.

Photo: Pam Kosty

Lucy takes the lid off a box holding a khipu—threads of knotted cords used as a recording device. Different styles of knots—different colors, different turnings—mark different characteristics of whatever is being recorded. Sheila bends over to see. She makes khipus, too.

“The word khipu is very fun to say,” Ingrid says.

“You can imagine putting it on your belt and walking with it,” Sheila says.

“Recording how many llamas were born last year.”

“That’s why we do shows, to have an excuse to get out some of this material.”

After the khipus, Lucy shows us two mummy bundles: ancient bodies wrapped in cloth. One is an infant, another an adult with a mask where the face would be. She asks us not to take photographs. The discussion returns to the wrapping Sheila did at the benefit, to how wrapping something is an ancient, natural way to make it sacred. “In the relation of the human and the spiritual,” Sheila says, “cloth plays such an important role.”

Why cloth? I ask.

“It’s worn on the body,” Lucy says. “It holds the memory of you.”

“The fluids of the body are in it,” Sheila adds.

“But we wrap our dead in wood,” I say skeptically.

“But cloth first,” Lucy says. “First we dress them appropriately.”

Sheila nods. She bends her head over the bundle, and so does Lucy. The maker of cloth and the keeper of cloth meet over this sacred object. For both of them, textiles are mirrors in which you can see—if you know how to look—a human face.

* * *

Sheila Hicks: 50 Years is on view at ICA through August 7.

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Look!

February 18 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

Last week’s ICA lecture, “The Artist as Curator,” was introduced by ICA director Claudia Gould standing behind an unfamiliar podium. “For those of you who are regulars here,” she said, “this is a very new podium, made by Paul Swenbeck [ICA’s head preparator] and his team. It smells of paint.” The new podium is indeed very nice: sleek and white, with a convenient shelf for presenters’ laptops. As someone who cannot make anything, I love working at a place where no one would think of going online and ordering a podium. Obviously someone who works here would just make one.

Over the last few weeks I’ve written a series of essays for this blog about Virgil Marti’s show Set Pieces, curated from the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), for which Virgil explored the depths of PMA storage and arranged an assortment of the pieces he found there in intriguing mash-ups and suggestive vignettes. In these posts I’ve been poking away at the question of how Virgil approached that task, and, more generally, what it means to curate an exhibition. How do curators organize the art they present? Is it their job to make a story out of it? An argument? To show the art off to its best advantage? To make you see it in a new way?

Virgil and Ingrid squaring off in Virgil's show, Set Pieces. Photo: J. Katz

How serendipitous that all the time I was writing those little pieces, ICA’s Ingrid Schaffner—a thoughtful and insightful person and an actual curator—was getting ready to address herself to this very topic! It was, in fact, the underlying subject of tonight’s lecture.

Standing at the new podium, Ingrid told an audience of about 100 that the idea of an artist making an exhibition out of a museum’s collection goes back to 1969, when Andy Warhol lifted all kinds of things from the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art’s storage and arranged them—or sometimes declined to arrange them—in the galleries. The resulting show, Raid the Icebox, featured rows and ranks of Windsor chairs, racks of shoes, clusters of hanging umbrellas, and lots of baskets, blankets, paintings, ceramics.

Even before artists were raiding museums’ iceboxes, of course, they were curating. In 1938 Andre Breton invited Marcel Duchamp to organize a surrealism show in Paris, which Duchamp did. There were no lights in this exhibition; visitors were given flashlights to illuminate the paintings as they made their way through piles of leaves and under the 1,200 empty coal sacks dangling from the ceiling.

I’d love to just list all the intriguing shows Ingrid mentioned. A 1989 Brancusi exhibition at MoMA organized by Scott Burton helped viewers see that Brancusi’s pedestals should themselves be seen as sculpture. Fred Wilson’s 1992 exhibition at the Maryland Historical Society displayed artifacts from that state’s history—like iron shackles and silver spoons—side by side. John Waters Curates Andy’s “Porn”, at the Andy Warhol Museum in 2005, was viewable in a wooden cubicle complete with glory holes. Of this last, Ingrid quoted then-Warhol museum curator John Smith who said, perhaps a little wistfully, “I don’t think I could have gotten away with that.”

Which brings us to the crux of her lecture: what is the difference between the way an artist curates and the way a curator curates?

“It’s my job as a curator to minimize the distance between the viewer and the object,” Ingrid opined, whereas, as an artist, “Virgil inserts himself.” He paints the wall purple; he builds white fluffy poufs to display stuff on; he offers us a marble bust resting on its side. The professional curator is not supposed to indulge in such high jinx.

But doesn’t the professional curator have a point of view, too? Doesn’t she have style? Of course she does. But she’s supposed to be less flamboyant in the way she conveys it to us, adhering to a kind of institutionalized modesty. If you stop to think about it, though, what’s the least bit modest about choosing art, spending a decent amount of money to organize it in a room, inviting the public, and saying: Look! This is worth looking at!

At the end of her talk, Ingrid related that thinking about how Virgil inserted himself into the making of Set Pieces threw into relief for her how made all exhibitions are, implying that the exhibition-maker—the curator—is really a species of artisan. I liked that: the exhibition-making artisan (Ingrid) talking about an exhibition made by an artist (Virgil) known for his décor-as-fine-art (chandeliers, wallpaper, poufs), while standing at the podium made by an artisan (Paul) who is, in fact, also an artist.

Paul working on the new podium. Photo: William Hidalgo

I’m starting to think of the curator as a kind of marionettist, pulling the strings from behind the curtain. Just because we don’t see her hand doesn’t mean her hand isn’t there: assured, controlling, and potent.

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