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People’s Biennial & Conference (part I): Looking for art on the road in America

March 2 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

“I come from a farming background,” Harrell Fletcher says. “My sense is that it’s better not to have a monoculture.”

At Haverford

Harrell on the right looking thoughtful. Photo: Lisa Boughter

Harrell, an artist known for his socially engaged, interdisciplinary projects, is talking about the art world. He and curator Jens Hoffmann are at ICA for People’s Conference, a two-day event growing out of People’s Biennial, an exhibition curated by Harrell and Jens that looks at art made outside the art world’s center of gravity. In collaboration with Independent Curators International (ICI), the two men traveled to five cities across the country, spreading the word through local community art centers, and galleries, and the radio, and fliers distributed by students on bicycles, that they were looking for art by anyone making things. They invited the public to bring their work to local gymnasiums; they drove around city streets looking for interesting objects in storefronts; they were invited into people’s kitchens. And in the end, they choose works by 36 artists for an exhibition that traveled to each of those five communities—a kind of snapshot of creativity across America.

Figueroa photograph

Jorge Figueroa, Untitled, 2007

Here are some of the things that are in People’s Biennial: Black and white paintings of neighborhoods that look, at first glance, like photographs. Videos of microscopic backyard life. A series of photographs of riders at the rodeo, and another series documenting life on a South Dakota military base. A battle scene made in Lego. Family portraits painted on cross sections of tree trunks. Soap sculptures. (“We joked about finding a soap carver,” Harrell said, “and then we did.”)

Peterson soap carving of soap dish

Bernie Peterson, Soap Carvings: soap dish, 1983–1994. Soap.

Bernie Peterson, the soap sculptor, was among the artists represented here who wasn’t interested in selling his work, even when the offering price was raised several times. The artists wrote their own wall text and catalogue notes, and judging from those, as well as from reports from the curators, they’re a diverse group who came to the project with a wide range of motivations. Some considered the biennial a delightful but singular event in lives that were focused elsewhere; others were glad to use the opportunity as a stepping stone to a more mainstream art career.

Tupac portrait

Robert Smith-Shabazz, Tupac, 2007. Watercolor on carved wood.

And what of the motivations of the curators?

“To highlight these other practices that exist and might otherwise slip through the cracks,” Harrell said. “Questioning the roles of curator and artist,” Jens said. “I’ve had this sense that in the art world there’s this homogenized quality,” Harrell said. “Our departure point for the project was certainly some issues we had with the world of art…how certain structures or codes are created and how we break through them,” Jens said. “You don’t need to be trained as a professional to be an artist,” Harrell said. “That’s one of the things I think is super exciting about art.”

Of course, all art institutions wrestle with these issues, sometimes in ways quite similar to the People’s Biennial project and other times in different ways. Most of the curators I’ve met, both at ICA and elsewhere, feel it’s their job to look broadly, to travel, to talk to artists about what they’re excited about, to constantly test the boundaries of what’s considered art, bringing a steady stream of the new and strange into the galleries along with more traditional work.

At one point on Friday night, Harrell talked about how, after he got his MFA, he felt he had lost something important to him: some feeling about or attitude toward art that he had had before he was trained. He was interested, then, in looking at what untrained artists were doing—and, I think, at how they were feeling about their work as well.

Lego battle

Dennis Newell, Lego Battle with Droids and Clones, 2010. Legos and lights.

Obviously there is joy in making art that people see, that you get paid for, that gets written about in magazines. Is there also a different kind of joy in making art without the spectral art world lurking around at the edges of your consciousness, rattling its chains like a Victorian ghost? That, I think, is one of the questions the exhibition explores. Though of course, one might equally well contrast the discomfort of making art inside the system with the melancholia of laboring outside of it.

At the conference

Photo: C.J. Morrison

Jens and Harrell on their journey remind me of Huck Finn lighting out for the territories, of Steinbeck traveling the country with his dog Charley, of Kerouac’s Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty on the road. Whether or not you agree with the audience member last week who called curators’ journey a Quixotic quest, how deeply American to take to the highway in search of something authentic, joyful, and surprising.

* * *

People’s Biennial is a traveling exhibition organized by Independent Curators International (ICI), New York. Guest curators for the exhibition are Harrell Fletcher and Jens Hoffmann. The exhibition, tour, and catalogue are made possible in part by a grant from The Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, and The Cowles Charitable Trust; the ICI Board of Trustees; and ICI Benefactors Barbara and John Robinson.

To learn more about People’s Biennial, click here. To order the catalogue, click here.

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After the Monkeys: The stories exhibitions tell

February 24 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

“Okay,” Mary Grace says. “What do we have after the monkeys?”

“The mirror,” Paul suggests.

“That’s another thing we should try out,” Stefan agrees. Stefan Sagmeister, a graphic designer known for his innovative typography and his work with bands like The Talking Heads, is at ICA this sunny Monday for meetings about The Happy Show, his upcoming exhibition. When I came in to work this morning, he and his staff were already busy, measuring the stairs and taking pictures and examining the doors on the elevator.

The Happy Show will not only fill ICA’s upstairs galleries and Ramp, it will extend out onto the mezzanine, into the elevator, down the stairs, and even onto the mirrors in the bathrooms.

Enormous inflatable white monkeys—currently en route from Europe by ship —will hold a banner out on the Terrace. A long acrylic tube will lead from a coin drop on the mezzanine, down out of the building into a bowl on the street. There’s a lot more besides—things I don’t know about, things alluded to in mysterious bits of conversation as good as dialogue you’d find in a novel:

“The arms were hanging on a wall with gloves on them.”

“Once we run out, are you okay with American chocolates?”

“If we keep the Bali dancer instead of the sugar installation…”

During lunch, Stefan talks about the movie he’s making. Like the ICA exhibition, The Happy Film is a piece of the designer’s ten-year exploration of happiness, and parts of it will be on view as part of The Happy Show. Stefan clearly enjoys the challenge of working on the film, though it’s hard, he says, to figure out how to sustain such a long narrative.

This reminds me of something I’ve been thinking about ever since ICA’s Senior Curator, Ingrid Schaffer, remarked that a curator is someone who knows the stories. “Does an exhibition have a narrative?” I ask.

Anthony is the one curator in this room, and he answers quickly and unequivocally: “Yes.”

Stefan seems less sure. He wonders out loud about the narrative of the exhibitions currently on view.

“Well, there are lots of different kinds of narratives,” Anthony says. “You could have Dickens, or you could have David Foster Wallace.”

“What’s the narrative of The Happy Show?” I want to know.

“In this case it’s not easy,” Stefan says, “because there are so many points of entry.” He means the way you’ll be able to enter the show either via the Ramp downstairs, or up the museum’s main staircase and through the mezzanine. Still, he outlines it for me: The background information about his own thinking about happiness. Statistical information from studies he finds interesting:

The print work:

The video and film work:

So far, so good. But when I think about narrative (and, as it happens, I think about narrative a lot), I think about change. By the end of a story, as a result of all the events that have occurred, something has shifted —Cinderella has become a princess; Odysseus has finally returned home; Anna has thrown herself under the train. I wonder, when we’re talking about an exhibition, who is the protagonist? Is it the work itself that shifts? Is the artist the invisible hero, changing by implication? Is it us—is the idea that we ourselves are changed by the experience of the exhibition?

I remember when I started working at ICA, I used the word “design” to say what a curator did. No, I was told. Curators don’t design; they organize.

The object of that sentence, of course, is exhibition, as in: The curator organized the exhibition. But I’m coming to understand that they also organize our experience. A curator may not tell us a story in a Once upon a time sense, but they create a space in which we can experience a rise and fall of tension, or a sequence of things that gradually (or suddenly) change, or a series of events leading up to a moment of insight or intense emotion.

Mostly, in my experience, these changes, insights, and emotions are beyond words—outside of language. But The Happy Show, being a largely text-based exhibition, may be at least partly an exception.

Stefan has said that expecting a show about happiness to make you happier is like expecting a commercial for exercise equipment to make you slimmer; at best it can be a spur to make you take action. Still, given what I’ve seen of his plans for the exhibition, I won’t be surprised if The Happy Show does make me happier—if not for ever after, at least while the monkeys are in view.

* * *

The Happy Show opens at ICA on April 4.

Images (except for measuring the staircase) courtesy of Sagmeister, Inc.

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Charline von Heyl: The right kind of frustration

February 17 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

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

Installation view

Installation view. Photo: Aaron Igler / Greenhouse Media.

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

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

Buffet self-portrait

Bernard Buffet, 1981

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

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

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

"Daydreamer"

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

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

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

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

*          *          *

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

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

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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.”

* * *

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.

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East of Borneo: Seventies Flashback

February 3 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

The first things to show up were the chairs: those brightly colored stacking chairs you used to see everywhere in the 1970s. Madison, ICA’s building administrator, found them in the bowels of a neighboring building, and they were just what was wanted.

40/4 4 chairs in a circle

After that, a couple of tables appeared. They weren’t the right color though, so Paul painted the tops a misty gray. Next some posters arrived, big, grainy, black-and-white images of students at CalArts in the 1970s sitting together in spaces not unlike this one. It took a while to decide where to hang them.

Trying out the pictures

Photo: Alex Klein

That night—in what Tom joked was the I Ching of curatorial practice—there was an excursion to a bookstore to buy a bunch of used paperbacks: The Second Sex, A Marx Reader, Maria Montessori’s Education and Peace, Rubyfruit Jungle. Pretty soon it was looking just like the 1970s on ICA’s Mezzanine, site of our second Excursus project, East of Borneo. This reading room / exhibition / series of programs / online residency, loosely based around ideas of alternative pedagogies, is organized by Thomas Lawson and Stacey Allan, who run an online art magazine, also called East of Borneo, from their base in Los Angeles.

L.A. has been practically one big art exhibition lately (or at least, an endlessly hatching series of many art exhibitions large and small) as Pacific Standard Time (PST), the year-long celebration of art in Los Angeles between 1945 and 1980, rolls on. Tom Lawson, who is also Dean of the Art School of the California Institute of the Arts, concocted the art school’s contribution to PST: a two-year seminar exploring the art and artists of the post-war era. The time period the students got excited about turned out to be the 70s. That class helped develop the exhibition The Experimental Impulse at REDCAT in LA, material and ideas from which informed ICA’s installation. It’s exciting to have a bit of warm PST weather here in the chilly East.

What interested the students, according to Tom, was not so much the art of that decade, but rather “the alternative strategies that artists used in LA in response to various institutional collapses.” In the sixties, there had seemed to be a way to have a career as an artist; there were paths to follow. But by the seventies, that sense had disappeared. Young artists kept making art, but in many ways it was more for themselves and for one another than for a public. They formed collectives and published small magazines. This ethos of making art for the sake of making it—for opening oneself to new methods and ideas—this was what resonated for the CalArts students. The installation on ICA’s mezzanine, with its 40/4 chairs by David Rowland and its “Blueprint for Counter Education” posters (originals in the flat files; reproductions on the walls), is a portal to a moment in history from which to take inspiration.

Installation

Photo: Alex Klein

Maybe it’s just because I grew up during them, but I love the 1970s: the bright colors, the TV shows, the air of idealism. At my elementary school, ca. 1973, we sat on the floor and called our teachers Nell and Rich and Jewell. The Monarch butterfly project we enacted every year—watching the slow, striped caterpillars spin bright green chrysalises for themselves, then break out as brilliant winged creatures—would not be out of place up here on the ICA mezzanine.

Perhaps East of Borneo’s most potent installation object is the Metamorphokit table, which got delayed by UPS and didn’t show up till the very morning of the opening. Metamorphokit is a system of modular furniture designed for the CalArts dorms by Peter de Bretteville and Toby Cowan in 1971. The pieces could be put together in all different kinds of ways. Students would arrive at school, go up to their dorm room, and find a pile of unassembled Metamorphokit pieces. Thus, a student’s first task upon entering CalArts would be to design her own environment. “The idea,” Tom explained, “was that you would build your own dorm room, and in the process you would figure out what kind of artist you were.”

Alex, the Excursus curator, added, “But we found out they aren’t that easy to put together.”

“But they’re very easy to take apart,” Stacey said.

Metamorphokit dorm room, 1972

CalArts dorm room interior featuring Metamorphokit modular furniture (1972).

It makes me think of those caterpillars again. Didn’t they too create their own environments, then slip inside them for a while to do something mysterious, until they were ready to dry their new wings and take flight?

* * *

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The Infinite Museum

January 27 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

I’m standing in a room in ICA I’ve never been in before—a room I didn’t know existed—looking at a wall of circuit breakers. “This is the breaker we need,” Kate says, “because it goes to the Jennifer Bolande phonograph.” She’s referring to the piece “Aerial Phonograph,” an actual record player on which an actual record turns, small parachuters on the label slowly spinning.

Aerial Phonograph

Photo: Aaron Igler / Greenhouse Media

Two of ICA’s current shows use a lot of technology, both old and new: video projectors and computers, phonographs and slide projectors. So getting the museum ready for visitors requires a lot more than unlocking the doors and switching on the lights. On ordinary mornings it’s not a problem, but sometimes we need to get the shows running unexpectedly, so Kate, Robert, Anthony, and I are learning to turn on the shows.

After the circuit breaker room, we visit another hidden place. Jennifer Burris, who curated the show with the slide projectors (Living Document / Naked Reality: Toward an Archival Cinema), leads us through the upstairs galleries and back into the shop, where she opens a hidey hole in the wall. There’s a computer in there, and a lot of cords, and some dust.

Hidey hole

Another computer runs the program that works the carousel slide projectors, four of which are lined up on a table as part of the piece “Sample Frames” by Alexandra Navratil. Landscapes from the twenties click by in a nostalgic wash of color, four related images at a time like notes making up a single chord. “It’s old school,” Jennifer says as we wait for the slow computer to start up. “To start the program, you just hit the down arrow.”

"Sample Frames"

Alexandra Navratil, Sample Frames, 2011, installation with 4 synchronized slide-projectors, 81 images on each projector (loop). Courtesy of the artist.

We take notes, ask questions. I look around for hobbits or gremlins, for other doors to other rooms. In February, ICA will host a program called “An exhibition to hear read,” activating many of the museum’s “interstitial spaces” (the lobby, the elevator, the coat closet, the bathrooms) through the perfomative reading of various texts. The performers won’t use these secret places where equipment lives, but for a moment I imagine how it would be to open a hatch and find a person in there, reciting.

There’s a dream common to people who live in Manhattan. One day they suddenly discover a room in their apartment they never noticed before. For me today, the ICA is becoming a dream museum, hatching new spaces as though it were infinite.

In a different way (temporally rather than spatially), maybe the ICA is infinite. A proud parade of shows stretches back to Clyfford Still in 1963 and forward into the unknown, like the ghostly procession of kings in Macbeth. Centuries from now—millennia from now—who’s to say someone won’t be standing right here, powering up tiny nuclear reactors, perhaps, to project light onto the very air.

* * *

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Welcome All Citizens of the Universe

January 20 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

In 1967, the hamlet of St. Paul, Canada (population 3,000) built a UFO landing pad in the Alberta prairie. This was the town’s contribution to the year-long celebration of the Canadian Centennial. For this activity, Canada’s Centennial Comity baptized St. Paul the Centennial Star.

Artist Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen got interested in this bit of history when she found a medallion presented to St. Paul to commemorate their achievement on Ebay. She bought it and photographed the front and the back, creating a diptych, Centennial Star, currently on view at ICA as part of the exhibition Living Document / Naked Reality: Toward an Archival Cinema. The diptych shows both sides of the medallion: a star inside a circle with the words “Centennial of Canadian Confederation” written around the edge in English and French on the front, and the landing pad, looking something like a round trampoline with a staircase leading down, on the back. Each image is perhaps ten inches across.

The Centennial Star

Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen, The Centennial Star, 2011. Photograph of found ephemera (coin), archival inkjet on paper (diptych). Courtesy of the artist.

Centennial Star is part of a larger, research-based project Jacqueline is working on. When she traveled to St. Paul to interview its inhabitants and tour the site, she was struck by the impulse behind the landing pad. St. Paul hadn’t experienced any recent UFO sightings in 1967: “It wasn’t built in response to a need,” she says. Rather, the landing pad was intended as a symbolic gesture of the town’s hospitality, tolerance, commitment to diversity, and openness to all. For Jacqueline, the landing pad becomes a “conceptual vessel” for the exploration of issues around multiculturalism: how broadly, for instance, you can think about what “alien” means. (You can—and should—listen to Jacqueline talk about the project here.)

On her way to an artist’s residency in Banff a couple of weeks ago, Jacqueline came to ICA to work with exhibition curator Jennifer Burris on the installation of the diptych. I stopped by as ICA’s Chief Preparator, Paul Swenbeck, was opening the cardboard carton Jacqueline had brought with her. Layer by layer they undid the package: cardboard, bubble wrap, tape, brown paper. “Did you fly with it?” Paul asked.

“No. I took the train.”

Wearing white art handling gloves, Paul lifted each photograph onto blocks, where they leaned against the wall. Jennifer wanted to place the diptych directly across from the entrance to the gallery, so it was the first the thing you’d see when you came in.

“I don’t have a preference for which goes where,” Jacqueline said, as Paul carefully adjusted the placement of the photographs, centering them on the opposite door. Jennifer and Jacqueline backed out of the gallery and peered through the entrance, consulting and considering.

Jennifer and Jacqueline considering

Jacqueline and Jennifer considering The Centennial Star

“I wonder if the star should be on the right?” Jacqueline said.

Paul switched the images.

“A bit more distance?”

Paul took out his measuring tape and moved the photographs two inches further apart.

“That’s better,” Jennifer said. The images weren’t too crowded. The way the staircase was situated drew the eye in.

Now the conversation turned to lighting: exactly how dim (in candles) the gallery would be, the type of glass used in the frames, whether snoods were needed. Jennifer was pleased. “The idea is that the piece is lit so it looks like the moon,” she said.

Suddenly it was time for lunch. Paul climbed a tall ladder and began manually switching off lights. Against the wall, the two medallions leaned, the wooden blocks under them splayed out like feet, the coins and their white frames glowing in the dimness. Meanwhile, out in the galaxy perhaps, patient spaceships zipped and glided, looking for a fabled landing spot somewhere on the Canadian prairie.

ICA, too, welcomes visitors from everywhere. People come from Chicago, California, Berlin, Japan—why not from a distant planet orbiting a faraway star? In our upstairs gallery, the image of the landing pad calls to them.

* * *

Don’t miss Jacqueline’s performative lecture 1967: A People Kind of Place, on Wednesday, February 29, 6:30pm at ICA.

Living Document / Naked Reality: Towards an Archival Cinema will be on view at ICA through March 4.

To sign up for Miranda’s mailing list, email rpastan@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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Truffling Season at ICA

December 23 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

Cinderella

Oliver Herford illustrated the fairy godmother inspired from the Perrault version

Every fall I, along with hundreds of other staff members from museums and dance companies and botanical gardens from around the Philadelphia region, start hunting down facts and figures like so many pigs in truffle season. How many people came through our doors last year? Of these, how many were school children in groups? How many people made financial donations? How many interns do we have? What is the most popular sweater color among visitors? Okay, I made that last one up, but at this time of year I do feel like Cinderella when her step-mother tosses the lentils into the fireplaces and tells her to pick them all out if she wants to go to the ball. Of course, it’s all for a good cause.

I am not a data person, but I don’t deny the power of data. The bits and pieces I and my colleagues hunt down get funneled into an enormous and influential database, The Pennsylvania Cultural Data Project (PACDP), which collects information like this from all over the state. The accumulated data gets used, then, in a couple of ways. One of these ways is good for the organizations: we use our own portion of it when we apply for grants to reassure foundations that we are doing our job responsibility and deserve support.

But even more significantly, the whole kitchen full of information is used to promote arts and culture to the public and the government. Because of the truffles our little snouts root up, organizations like the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance (GPCA) are able to go public with statements like this: Cultural organizations and their audiences in greater Philadelphia spend $1.3 billion annually, and the economic activity of the cultural sector generates 40,000 jobs and returns $158 million in taxes to state and local communities (GPCA report, “Arts, Culture, & Economic Prosperity in Greater Philadelphia“). This helps keep pressure on City Hall and Harrisburg to support the arts.

Here at ICA, we’re also planning a more personal truffle hunt. Recently a bunch of us met to discuss what kinds of things we’d like to find out about our audience. In the galleries and at our public programs, I’m always wondering who our visitors are. That tall older guy with the faded tattoos, the well-dressed woman with the high gold sandals, the young couple in matching leather jackets: who are they, and why are they here, and will they come back? If not, why not? And if so, what is about what we’re doing that they like? My colleague Ingrid Schaffner recently got back from Europe where she said the art museums were full: families, young people, old people, all strolling through as though going to an art museum were just one more thing you might choose to do, like going to the movies or the mall.

Photo: J. Katz

This fall we called around to some of our peer institutions who sent along examples of their own surveys. Some are quite short, others fairly long. Almost all of them ask for age, sex, income, race: these are the usual pieces into which the pie chart gets sliced. Many of them also ask: Where do you get your arts and culture news? How satisfied were you with your experience today? What’s your email address? If you’re lucky, the museum will give a nice postcard in exchange for your cooperation.

I can’t help feeling—or maybe just dreaming—that there should be other questions we could ask that would get at something more essential about our audiences. What’s one of your favorite shows you’ve ever seen at an art museum? What magazines do you read? What country do you hope to visit? What do you believe to be the purpose of art?

ICA at night

Photo: J. Katz

Or wait, here are better questions still: What do like to wear when visiting museums? If the ICA were a kind of weather, what kind of weather would we be? Now that you’ve seen the shows, will you contact us tomorrow and let us know what you dream tonight?

The answers to questions like these wouldn’t feed us. They wouldn’t help us get us grants or lobby the government. The yield from these inquiries would be more like magic mushrooms than like truffles: heightening our perceptions, giving color to the air.

* * *

Let us know what questions you think an ICA visitors survey should ask. We’d love your input.

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

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Sag-Mania: Stefan Sagmeister and the Pursuit of Happiness

December 16 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

As I descend from the ICA offices to the lobby, I can hear the buzz of voices as the elevator passes the second floor—the Sagmeister buzz. Designer Stefan Sagmeister is giving a lecture at 6:30, and 300 people have signed up to hear him. Designers, font inventors, art educators, enthusiasts: for an hour they have been checking in, getting their hands stamped, and hurrying upstairs to claim a seat. There are far too many people to fit in ICA’s auditorium. Luckily the upstairs shows closed on Sunday. We rushed deinstallation and set up rows of chairs and benches in the same gallery where ICA will present The Happy Show, a new installation by Sagmeister himself, in April.

Sagmeister, a still from The Happy Film

Sagmeister in a still from The Happy Film, 2011. Courtesy of Sagmeister Inc.

Before the lecture starts, I ask the women sitting behind me why they’re here. “It’s Stefan Sagmeister!” they explain.

“What do you like about him?”

“He breaks all the rules,” one of them says.

Kenny Goldsmith, a conceptual poet who (in collaboration with ICA) is teaching a whole class on Sagmeister at Penn this year, comes by in his kilt and magenta sweater to say hello. I tell him I’m looking for an angle for the piece I want to write on Sagmeister.

“The man himself is the angle,” Kenny says.

“Why’s that?”

“Design is the last thing on this mind.”

“What’s on his mind?”

“Film, performance, body art, language.” This afternoon, introducing Stefan at a lunchtime conversation with former ICA Director Claudia Gould at Kelly Writers House, Kenny said of the class, “We’ve studied everything from the Helvetica typeface to body art to the psychopharmacological exploits of the Romantic poets onwards…Sagmeister is a pedagogic dream.” A little later he added, “He’s an iconoclast, a boundary breaker, which makes him a perfect match for ICA.”

Kenny Goldsmith

Photo: © Cameron Wittig, Walker Art Center

The Happy Show will certainly break boundaries, as Stefan’s lecture does tonight. Part personal narrative, part history of the psychological study of happiness (both positive psychology and cognitive therapy were, it turns out, invented here at Penn), Sagmeister showcases his own work only, it seems, incidentally. He does, of course, use good design to communicate his message. The guy makes great slides.

For ten years Sagmeister has been exploring happiness. Maxims, taken from his diaries (“Trying to look good limits my life,” “Obsessions make my life worse and my work better,” and so on) spelled out in spectacular, innovative, and often interactive typography will form the basis of the ICA show. In one interactive video installation, the words appear as spider webs, fragmented by the body of the viewer stepping in front of them, and then reforming. In another, a visitor can pedal a stationary bike to power lights that spell out alternating phrases. A magnetized wall that organizes iron filings into letters is a work in progress. It may or may not make the show.

Credits for The Happy Film

Photo: Jenna Weiss

The exhibition will also feature parts of The Happy Film, a personal project that follows Sagmeister as he explores three categories of mental intervention that may or may not affect happiness: meditation, cognitive therapy (the film crew is in the sessions with him, but he says he forgets about them after a few minutes), and finally drugs.

Sagmeister claims his work won’t affect people’s happiness: “It would be foolish to expect that the film will make anyone happier any more than watching a Jane Fonda workout video would make you skinnier.”

Still, there’s this. Toward the beginning of the lecture, Sagmeister asks the audience to raise their hands to show how happy they are. The lowest level is 0 (“I feel like shit”) and the highest is 10 (“I love life”). At the end of the lecture, he asks for another show of hands. This time, there are a lot more 8s and 10s.

Happiness chart

Photo: Jenna Weiss

After the applause, I ask some listeners (more designers) if they’re disappointed Sagmeister didn’t talk more about design tonight. They’re not. All the other designers lecture about design, they tell me. They are happy to hear about happiness instead.

* * *

The Happy Show opens at ICA on April 4.

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