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Frieze: An Afternoon at the Fair

May 27 2013

post by Rachel Pastan

It’s been a few weeks since the Frieze Art Fair ended. The white tents on Randall’s Island have been taken down, and Paul McCarthy’s “Balloon Dog” has been (I assume) deflated. During the few days the fair was up and running, hundreds of people fell in love and wrote big checks and sent iPhone pictures of newly acquired artworks to their friends, and thousands of pairs of feet ached as they paraded up and down in their stylish shoes, and tens of thousands of air kisses were exchanged. Roberta Smith wrote in The New York Times, “Some people hate art fairs all of the time, and most people hate them some of the time. It’s fashionable to be snarky and condescending about them, but that’s too easy…” I already knew I shouldn’t use this forum to recount the funny and ridiculous things I heard people say at Frieze (though I did write them down), but reading those words strengthened my resolve. If that’s the blog post you want, you can click on by.

I spent much of my Frieze afternoon trailing two of ICA’s curators, Ingrid and Alex, around the fair, seeing new things and learning new names and being introduced to new people.

Discovering the new is certainly one of the pleasures of the fair, but sometimes it’s even nicer to stumble across the familiar. Many booths featured works by artists ICA has shown, or is about to show, or hopes to show one day. Karla Black, whose gorgeous sculpture Practically In Shadow is currently on view at ICA, was represented by a beautiful, much smaller scale paper and chalk work in Galerie Gisela Capitain

which was also exhibiting a lovely older painting by Charline von Heyl, who had a survey at ICA in 2011.

We stopped to admire a piece by Zoe Leonard, whose work currently appears in White Petals Surround Your Yellow Heart. It consisted of a table holding hundreds of vintage postcards of Niagara Falls, organized in stacks of different heights representing different views—a mapping of the Falls and a meditation on the way it has been beheld over time. Mateo Tannatt, whose work was part of last year’s ICA show First Among Equals, was represented by a series of benches painted in bright colors with mini-dialogues posted above them. Apparently Mateo agreed with me that there weren’t enough places in that humming warren to rest.

Later in the afternoon we found ourselves in the Galerie Kadel Willborn booth, where Moritz Willborn showed us some spectacular Cibachromes by Barbara Kasten, whose major ICA retrospective—organized by Alex—is scheduled for fall 2014. Kasten is a complex and wide-ranging artist mostly known for her photography, but whose work embraces sculpture, architecture, painting, theater, textile, and installation as well. I have looked at a lot of her work on computer screens this year, but this was the first time I had seen it in person. The Cibachromes are part of a series she made with large format cameras beginning in the late 1980s, portraying huge, postmodern architectural spaces with dizzying perspectives and lush colors. We stood oohing and aahing over her images of LACMA, and then Moritz took out his iPad and showed us some amazing photos of Kasten actually making the work. A quick glance at the Cibachromes might make you think they were digitally manipulated, but Kasten used crews of people, giant mirrors, colored lights, and huge fabrications to make these pictures.

At four o’clock the curators were scheduled to give tours to members of ICA’s newly created Curator’s Circle and a few Board members—though tour perhaps isn’t quite the right word. They were unique opportunities, rather, for a donor and a curator to look at art together. At three, in the VIP lounge where weary fair-goers sipped peach-colored drinks at the white bar, the curators sat around a big wooden table for a few moments of exchange. They compared notes, circled booth numbers on their maps, shared things they’d liked (“I can’t believe I missed the watermelon with the pipe!” someone said), and discussed what not to miss as they walked around with the ICA supporters—like the Tino Sehgal work in which an uncanny young girl performer, inhabiting a Manga avatar, tells her story and asks questions of the audience.

What I had felt earlier on my own, unofficial tour was that the pleasure of seeing the art was superseded by the pleasure of watching Ingrid and Alex taking everything in: absorbing, appreciating, assessing. At one point Ingrid stopped in front of a silver gelatin print of what looked like an old fashioned checked picnic tablecloth with a hole in the middle. When I asked her what compelled her about this gigantic image, which must have been as big as the tablecloth it was representing, she said, “It’s how the print on the piece of paper and the cloth are somehow the same thing—both picture and object—making that one powerful hole.”

Ingrid and Alex looked with such avidity that, even when I got tired, I wanted to keep up. To broaden my own vision by trying to match it to theirs. To stop reading labels and open myself to what looking at something might do to me.

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For more information about Curator’s Circle and other ICA donor clubs, email Christianna Miller at chmille@ica.upenn.edu

To stay up to date with everything ICA’s curators are looking at, email miranda@icaphila.org.

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Dinner Partners: Benefit 2013 Honors Leonard Lauder

May 13 2013

post by Rachel Pastan

When I come downstairs mid-afternoon, the second floor hums with men and women dressed in black being briefed on how to serve the late harvest Indian panzanella salad. Also the braised short ribs with burgundy demi-glace, the apple confection, and the assorted truffles. The gallery has been carpeted and filled with long tables and a podium. At ICA we are accustomed to quick transformations: just last week this room was divided into five chambers hung with Brian Weil’s photographs; before that it was cut in two and sported pink shag rugs and long-haired male mannequins for the Jeremy Deller show. Still, the conversion from gallery to high-end feast hall takes my breath away. This morning we had our staff meeting in here among bare, stacked rental tables and shrouded chairs; now, with gold cloths discreetly glittering and orange roses blooming in long rows, it’s a stage set for a banquet from a dream.

photo: Sunny Miller

The banquet being prepared is for ICA’s major fundraiser, our annual benefit—but this year with a special twist. The museum turns fifty in 2013, and to mark the occasion we are honoring Leonard Lauder: emeritus chairman of the Estée Lauder Companies, Inc., emeritus chairman of the Whitney Museum of American Art, emeritus trustee of Penn, tenacious art collector, exuberant philanthropist. Just this morning (this morning!) Mr. Lauder was on the front page of The New York Times for donating his unparalleled collection of Cubist art to the Metropolitan Museum. In a few short hours the Met’s director, Thomas Campbell, will be sampling the short ribs in the company of the directors of the Whitney, MoMA, the Barnes Collection, the deputy director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and former ICA director Claudia Gould. Claudia, who now leads New York’s Jewish Museum, helped inaugurate the venture this evening celebrates, ICA’s Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellows (WLCF) program, which brings fabulous young curators to us for a year or two, enriching our museum beyond measure.

Now ICA’s director, Amy Sadao, is welcoming the guests as the late harvest panzanella salad is expertly served. Now the short ribs, accompanied by a video: a lively, charming piece that chronicles the WLCF program and its ten fellows to date.

photo: Sunny Miller

This impressive array of curators has fanned out from Philadelphia over the past decade, bringing their talents and skills to museums, galleries, festivals, and universities all over the world. Back in January, I watched the videographers, Matt Suib and Aaron Igler of Greenhouse Media (good friends of ICA who also document our exhibitions), tape their interview with Senior Curator Ingrid Schaffner. First Aaron transformed Ingrid’s office into a stage set, plugging in lights, microphones, and a big contraption called a “soft box” for creating an even glow. It was crowded. “Can we get about ten more people in here?” Ingrid suggested. “How about some flying squirrels?”

Matt told jokes to put Ingrid at ease. “We’re interviewing fourteen people for a seven-minute video,” he reminded her. “Whatever you say will be boiled down to probably thirty seconds.”

Matt with his soft box.

And now, tonight, here’s the finished piece projected high up on the wall! Interviews with the fellows themselves interweave with gorgeous images of their ICA shows. Kathy Sachs, ICA’s former board chair and chair of tonight’s event, tells the camera, “I first met Leonard Lauder when the [Penn] Trustees came to ICA, and I was very lucky in that I ended up sitting right next to Leonard. He just turned to me and he said, ‘What’s happening at ICA?’ ”

A little later, when Mr. Lauder himself gets up to speak, he smiles at Kathy: “I pay attention to my dinner partners—especially if they’re young and gorgeous!” Then he says, “ICA is the crown jewel not just of Penn, but of the country.”

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Kathy Sachs gives print by Ellsworth Kelly, specially commissioned for ICA’s Benefit 2013, to Leonard Lauder. Photo: Sunny Miller

Seeing the Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellows gathered in this room and hearing the program’s origin story is disorienting in the best possible way—like sitting in this room twice in one day and having it seem like two different rooms. So often in life we are presented with something—a successful program, an exhibition, a fancy dinner—and the mind takes it for granted, sliding over it as over glass, no friction. Learning how things are made, and what was there before, makes the experience richer.

Behind every successful curator lies the first chance to organize a show. Behind every successful program lies the first spark of an idea.

Everyone here tonight has this in common: behind whatever they are—curator, collector, museum director, artist, or museum intern—lies the first encounter with a work of art that lit their heart and mind on fire. We hope that, from time to time, that fire is ignited here at ICA.

 

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To stay up to date with all ICA’s sparks and anniversaries, email miranda@icaphila.org.

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The Beginner’s Guide to Curating: Judith Tannenbaum Revisits ICA

April 29 2013

post by Alina Grabowski

To have Judith Tannenbaum sitting across a table from me, eating a sandwich, is a bit surreal. I had imagined her taller. With curly hair. And perhaps a pair of cat eye glasses. Having spent many hours leafing through the former ICA interim director’s papers, I’d had plenty of time to construct her in my imagination. To see her in the flesh, petite and sporting a red-streaked bob, is jarring—like remembering that your favorite character in a memoir isn’t merely fiction.

Some clarification is necessary; I have not been snooping through Judith Tannenbaum’s files illicitly. I am part of the Spiegel Contemporary Art Freshman Seminar at Penn, where our first semester was dedicated to studying artist Glenn Ligon, with a particular focus on his 1998 exhibition at ICA, Glenn Ligon: Unbecoming.

Original exhibition card for “Unbecoming,” January 16 – March 8, 1998

As part of my midterm paper first semester, I was assigned to research the Unbecoming archive housed in Penn’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library. I would ride the elevator to the fifth floor of Van Pelt Library, ring the bell to the sequestered room, and after stowing my belongings (save for a pencil), sit at a long wooden table and wait to be brought one of the four manila boxes in which the letters, faxes, press materials, images, and publications from that show are housed.

The most interesting file by far was the one dedicated to the ICA’s correspondence with Ligon. This thick folder consisted mainly of letters and faxes between Judith and the artist, detailing everything from potential installation configurations to party guest lists. Before taking this class, I had naively assumed curators conceived their exhibition concepts then organized the works and installed them—surely they didn’t have to worry about event invitations or hotel reservations. As I explored the archive, however, it became clear that a curator’s job was just as much about organizing people as it was the physical artwork, especially when working with a living artist. The archive served as an intimate guide to a curatorial process I hadn’t even known existed. The road map was a welcome one. This semester our class has been planning our own exhibition. Each One As She May, featuring works by Ligon, Steve Reich, and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. The show, which references Unbecoming while exploring its own themes of language, movement, and understanding, opens in ICA’s Project Space on April 24.

The reason I’m sitting across from Judith on this Thursday afternoon is that she’s been generous enough to visit our class to speak about Unbecoming and to answer our questions about the exhibition and her experience with it. My four classmates, our two professors, Jennifer Burris and Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Ingrid Schaffner, Senior Curator at ICA, and I have gathered in the ICA’s library, sitting around a table amidst trays of sandwiches and bowls of salad. Judith is warm and open about the process of organizing Unbecoming, often chuckling when we mention particular documents we’ve found in the archive. “Oh yes, I remember that!” she says, or, “I’m not quite sure I recall…”

Diagram of “Unbecoming” installation, 1997
Courtesy of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library
University of Pennsylvania

First she tells us the basics: she was drawn to Ligon’s work after hearing him talk about it  and being struck by his eloquence and intellect. We discuss the Ligon coal dust drawings we will be showing in our exhibition, in which a phrase from Gertrude Stein’s story “Melanctha” is repeated. “He uses media to mediate personal experience,” Judith says, referring to the artist’s use of appropriated language.

She explains that when she approached Ligon about a possible show in 1997, it was a time of transition for him—very different from now, when he’s just had a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York. “The show was an autobiographical one, but also guarded,” she says of Unbecoming, noting that in Ligon’s Feast of Scraps (a series of photo albums featuring pornographic photographs of men alongside family photos), Ligon doesn’t specify which family photos are his own. It’s shocking to see a photo of a family gathered around dinner share a page with a naked, well-oiled man, but this juxtaposition is not merely for shock value: it questions our reaction. Why are some of these images considered vulgar, some wholesome?

Not only does Judith tell us about the process of organizing Unbecoming, she also shares her views on the curatorial process generally, advising us, for example, to keep our written materials in the gallery concise. When the issue of wall labels comes up, Ingrid shares a story about unwieldy labels she once encountered. Judith laughs. “I hate wall labels that ask questions,” she says, throwing up her hands.

After the laughter dies down, we receive perhaps the most valuable lesson of the afternoon. Judith opens her hands toward us. “If you’re going to say something,” she says,“ stand by what you say.”

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Installation view of “Unbecoming”

 

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Each One As She May is on view at ICA through July 28.

To stay up to date with all ICA’s curatorial lessons, email miranda@icaphila.org.

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A Painting with a Purpose: Sarah Crowner and Primary Information at ICA

April 15 2013

post by Rachel Pastan

“This might be easier than we thought,” Paul says, pulling the curtain onto the long dowel. Sarah, who made the curtain, carefully adjusts the folds.

Off-white and flame red, lipstick pink and lime green and black, the curtain is twenty-two feet long and made of irregular linen panels. Sarah, who is a painter—and who thinks of the curtain as a kind of portable painting—colored the bright sections with fabric paint, then ironed them, then stitched the whole thing together on an industrial machine. “I had to make a giant pattern for it,” she says, “like one would make for a giant jacket.”

Up on a ladder, David finishes installing brackets over the windows. He and Paul lift the curtain onto the brackets and let it unfurl. Suddenly ICA‘s mezzanine space seems more orderly, the chairs and tables and library carrel given context, orientation. Sarah frowns at the three-inch strip of glass showing above the curtain. “Is that distracting?” she asks.

David and Paul try raising it up a little. It doesn’t quite reach the ground, now, but it’s definitely better. Finally, it’s perfect. “It looks like it was made for the space.” Sarah seems pleased.

Actually, Sarah made the curtain as a backdrop for a Spanish-language staging of Robert Ashley’s opera, Perfect Lives. Partly because the opera, now called Vidas Perfectas, was set in the desert between Mexico and the U.S., she brought ideas from Mexican Modernism to the work. She also found inspiration in the early twentieth century Polish artist Maria Jarema, who designed costumes in theatrical collaboration with Tadeusz Kantor.

Then a few months ago, James Hoff and Miriam Katzeff asked Sarah if they could use the curtain as a backdrop for a very different kind of presentation: their spring Excursus project at ICA. James and Miriam are Primary Information—a non-profit that (re)prints new and out-of-print artist books and writings. Their Excursus IV is an archival exploration of ICA’s 1975 Video Art show, with lots of books and pamphlets and letters and diagrams; they liked that the curtain would introduce color into this largely black-and-white project.

Catalogue for the ICA exhibition “Video Art” (1975).

There was a practical consideration as well. Works from Video Art are being projected in one corner of the bright, open mezzanine, and the curtain helps dims the light. “It’s nice to think of a painting having a purpose,” Sarah says. Then she turns a critical eye to the creases in the fabric: “We’ll have to steam it.”

How does a painter of canvases come to curtains?

“I was thinking about duration in art,” Sarah explains. “In sitting in front of a painting for forty-five minutes instead of going into a gallery where you might look at something for maybe three.”

And then, she wondered, what happens when you put a painting behind a stage on which things are constantly happening? Does the painting still the action? Or, conversely, does the action make the painting move?

In Vidas Perfectas, the curtain’s white panels became screens onto which the text of the opera was projected. Here on ICA’s mezzanine, it will frame public programs and stand sentry to private chats and reading experiences, to casual browsing. I find myself wondering which of the scheduled programs it might particularly enjoy: the conversation about camouflage and mimicry perhaps? Or maybe it’s interested, as I am, in chapbooks .

Coffee and Conversation program in front of the curtain. Photo: Emily Wu

In past presentations, the curtain has been backlit or illuminated with stage gels. “Here,” Sarah tells me, “it’s beautiful, because it’s all natural light.” Almost as she speaks, the sun comes out from behind a cloudbank, casting pale streaks across the linen. The fabric brightens irregularly, the pinks glowing, the greens becoming as translucent as beach glass.

Primary Information will be ICA’s final Excursus project. Excursus, which invites artists, designers, publishers, and others to delve into ICA’s archive and use what they find as a starting point for an installation (and also an online residency) was started by Alex Klein when she came to ICA as Program Curator in 2011. The four Excursus projects she has organized—Reference Library, East of Borneo, Ooga Booga, and now Primary Information—have enlivened ICA’s physical space and enriched its intellectual compass. I urge you to experience it this spring while you have the chance. After that, the curtain is coming down.

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Excursus IV: Primary Information is on view at ICA through June 16. Follow the project and learned about upcoming programs at the Excursus website.

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with tomorrow’s sun: public program as glittering vortex at ICA

April 1 2013

post by Rachel Pastan

The clear afternoon has darkened, and from ICA’s high glass lobby we watch the rain fall sideways across the sky. Wind sends garbage spinning down 36th Street and pulls umbrellas inside out. Jennifer, who has been working on her presentation for tonight, seems delighted. “I’m talking about the twister in the Wizard of the Oz!” she says, then hurries back upstairs.

Jennifer’s lecture is not the only feature of tonight’s program, which ICA Spiegel Fellow Grace Ambrose, who organized it, has named “with tomorrow’s sun.”

Grace was a student intern at ICA when I started working here in 2009, then got a Masters in curating at the Cortauld in London, and now she’s back. She has been assisting with all aspects of ICA programs since September, but with tomorrow’s sun is the first one that’s hers entirely.

At 6:00, artist Field Kallop starts her ten pendulums swinging in the Project Space.

Diamond dust pours through their tips, tracing elliptical patterns on the floor. The room is crowded, quiet, dim. Field moves from pendulum to pendulum, filling each one, testing it, setting it going like the master clockmaker starting the planets in their motions. The ropes swing fast, then they slow as others start to move, until the whole room sways with hypnotic motion. One man sits on the floor with his two small boys in his lap: images of wonder.

Out on the mezzanine, the programming team uncorks prosecco, its golden effervescence in keeping with the night. They arrange cookies, brew coffee, and admire the newly installed lights with their green and red gels. “I brought them for My Barbarian,” Alex recalls. “And we also used them for Open Video Call on Halloween.” The gaudy lights infuse the space with a moody glow.

Slowly the mezzanine fills up, grows noisy. Behind me, two men discuss physics and Field’s work—the relationship between how she pushes the pendulums and the patterns the diamond dust makes. One of them says that, after earthquakes disalign moving pendulums, those pendulums gradually and inevitably begin to trace figures eights. Before I can ask if this is true, the subject changes to randomness, then random number generators. Figure eights turned on their sides are infinity signs. The evening spirals on.

Jennifer’s talk starts with a film clip.

photo: Pamela Yau

In shimmering black and white, a blond woman sits on a piano, smoking. Then, putting the burning cigarette down to smolder on the piano, she begins to sing. “You’re the cream in my coffee,” she warbles, then breaks off to yell—in a language that might be German—at the piano player, off-camera. After a while she smiles and sings again—in English—only to break off and yell some more. At the end of the clip, Jennifer explains that we have been watching Marlene Dietrich’s screen test for The Blue Angel. “Let me tell you why I’m starting with the Weimer Republic in a talk about contemporary art,” she says.

photo: Pamela Yau

It would be foolish to attempt to summarize the subtle clockwork of Jennifer’s thinking, but I can tell you that her talk organized various familiar (and unfamiliar) stars into a new constellation: Robert Smithson and Spiral Jetty; Liam Gillick washing gallery floors with vodka and glitter; Jack Smith and Flaming Creatures; Plato; Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes; Dorothy’s ruby slippers; Gilles Deleuze; Weimar-era children playing with stacks of near-worthless banknotes (hyperinflation) ; Max Beckmann and Otto Dix; the first credit card; and the New York City blackout, which happened the same year—1977—that the World Trade Center towers were completed. Within this constellation she situated the artists in her show, Glitter and Folds—Crystal Z. Campbell, Field Kallop, Jayson Keeling, and Carter Mull—explaining how she came to their work through her interest in a historical unfolding of the cultural capital of glitter, what she calls “a surfacing of shimmering abandon at times of political and economic precariousness.”

photo: Pamela Yau

From here, it seems an easy leap to poetry. David Bowie’s Major Tom serves as segue, and now here we are, listening to a reading by poet Frank Sherlock, who writes what Grace calls “utopian verse.”

“When I think of the mixture of glitter and alcohol in this city,” Sherlock says, “I think of New Year’s Day.” He means, of course, Philadelphia’s annual spectacle, the Mummer’s Parade. He reads a poem, “The Ballad of Bill McIntyre,” a tribute to the man he calls “the glitteriest of all the mummers,” who founded the first fancy brigade, the Shooting Stars, in 1947:

                                                       Toast the founder
                                     Auld Lang Syne again
                           Plumbers Carpenters Face-painted stars
They take him with them once again                            onto that Golden Street

Tonight, ICA seems to spangle on that golden street as though painted with stars.

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For information about future ICA programs—including a rare performance by Leif Elggren on April 17—visit the events page of our website.

To stay up to date with all ICA’s glitter, email miranda@icaphila.org.

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Meaning Something: A Conversation About Brian Weil at ICA

March 4 2013

post by Rachel Pastan

“I worked with Brian for a year before I knew he was an artist,” Ric says. “We were more focused on building the movement.”

“ACT UP was awash with artists in the eighties,” Patrick adds. “Because everyone was an artist, no one talked about it…There was a feeling that art was not a responsible response to the crisis.”

Patrick, Ric, and Stamatina, with a rare image of Brian on the screen.

It’s Sunday afternoon, and we’re in ICA’s auditorium for a conversation about photographer and activist Brian Weil—about how his art and his AIDS activism intersected. How to think about the grainy, scratched, sometimes blown out, often riveting black-and-white images he made before dying in 1996 at 42? The Brian Weil retrospective currently on view at ICA presents several bodies of work, each exploring one of several insular, marginal communities in which Weil immersed himself and which he then photographed. The Sex pictures show images of S&M and bestiality, the Miami Crime series shows the bodies of the dead Weil encountered while riding sixteen-hour shifts with the police. There are pictures of boxers and bodybuilders, photographs of Hasidic Jews, and video for a final project, never completed, about the transgendered community. But it’s the AIDS photos Weil is best known for, and he himself believed his AIDS work was the most important he would ever do.

In a talk preceding this afternoon’s conversation, curator Stamatina Gregory, who organized the show at ICA, tells us that at the start of his involvement with groups like ACT UP, Weil had no intention of photographing AIDS subjects. It wasn’t until an HIV-positive graduate student he knew asked him to photograph her baby daughter, Flavia, who was dying of AIDS, that Brian brought his camera to the cause.

Brian Weil
Maria eight months pregnant with Adriana, Brooklyn, NY, 1985
Gelatin silver print
Private collection
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Brian Weil Archive

“Photography for Brian became a way of making sense of the crisis,” Stamatina says. Eventually he would travel all over the world, imaging the crisis in Haiti, in South Africa, in the Dominican Republic, and elsewhere. But over the course of this more than ten-year undertaking, a number of intriguing, difficult tensions emerged. For example:

* That Weil characterized this work as alternatively an activist project and as an artistic one, depending on who was asking.

* That Weil welcomed the use of his images to educate the public, but remained ambivalent about his own artistic endeavor.

* That he believed “artistic skill can engage the viewer without them turning away,” but at the same time he had concerns about presenting the work as art.

Ric Curtis, now a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, worked with Weil on New York City’s first needle exchange program, which Weil founded. Of Weil’s AIDS photography, he says, “I think Brian felt it [taking photographs] might cheapen the process.”

Patrick Moore, Deputy Director of the Andy Warhol Museum, who worked with the photographer in ACT UP, says, “I think it’s really hard to take a picture of someone who’s dying.” He describes an exhibition of AIDS photographs at MoMA in the eighties by a different artist—how the activist community protested that show, feeling it objectified its subject. “How do you have it mean something?” he asks. “Not just shock.”

What makes a given body of work art or exploitation? Art or education? Good art or bad art? Does the intention behind the work matter, or only the result? There are, of course, no easy answers to these questions, but viewing Weil’s work makes them palpable, urgent. The answers seem to shimmer in the stark, hugely mediated images, then recede before one can grasp them.

Patrick speaks admiringly about the intimacy of Weil’s photographs. He talks about the supersaturated blacks and the blown-out whites—how they make you feel about the photograph’s subject that “this person is almost somewhere else.” There is a way in which the essential humanity of the subject is captured even as the details of the physical body blur and fade. One image of a woman in bed catches my eye every time it cycles by on the projection screen. Because of the overexposure, all we see of her is hair, hands, eyes, lips. The rest of her’s bleached out as though she’s already bone, or ghost. Pure light.

Brian Weil
Woman with AIDS at Baragwana Hospital, Soweto, South Africa, 1990
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Brian Weil Archive

When he died, not of AIDS as many assume, but of a heroin overdose, Weil was right in the middle of his work. He was still using all the tools at his disposal—time, an extraordinary ability to connect with people, and of course a camera—to capture experience as most people never see it. To open our eyes to the brilliant lights and the terrible darks, to the grainy indeterminacy, of life.

In regard to his AIDS project, Brian Weil was clear-eyed about the way a difficult photograph should operate: “You need to seduce them, you need to amuse them, and then you need to show them the truth.”

* * *
Brian Weil is on view at ICA through March 31.

To stay up to date with all ICA’s complications, email miranda@icaphila.org.

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One New Idea: A Visitor Survey

January 21 2013

post by Rachel Pastan

“Words can be visual art.”

Photo: Aaron Igler/Greenhouse Media

“The bike-powered art piece prompted me to consider that art can be participatory.”

Photo: Aaron Igler/Greenhouse Media

“I’m inspired to paint my stairs!”

I could fill this whole post with comments like these in response to the question, “What is one new idea you are taking away with you?” from a visitor survey ICA commissioned recently. Here are a few more:

“How can I apply the language of design?”

“Be more open minded.”

“Seek discomfort!”

“Museums = awesome.”

Of course, many of the questions in the survey were more straightforward: What did you come to see today? What is your age? Before today, were you aware that ICA is free?

Useful though responses to those questions are, we also wanted to understand what happens to people when they come to ICA. Maybe one day tiny functional MRI machines can be attached to visitors as they tour the museum to answer this question, but until then, asking about new ideas sparked by time in the galleries seemed like a place to start.

On a warm, cloudy Saturday last fall, I sat on a bench in ICA’s lobby and watched Claire Cossaboon, a masters student in museum communication at University of the Arts, administer the survey she developed for us. “So many people are excited about sharing their opinions,” she told me, which—somewhat to my surprise—turned out to be true. Maybe this is partly because of Claire herself. She’s enthusiastic without being chirpy, warm and attentive and good at listening. “So much of this is engaging in the conversation,” she explained, “so people don’t feel they’re taking a test.”

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I watch her chat with a couple in their fifties. “This show has been a flashback to my life,” the woman says. (She’s referring to Jeremy Deller: Joy in People, which reflects the artist’s interests in popular music and acts of rebellion among other things, and which includes a life-sized reproduction of a Manchester, England tea room, where you can get an actual cup of tea.) These people came in today because they just happened to be walking by. That’s their answer to question #3, “What prompted your visit?” Their suggestion of one thing they might change? “There should be free tea all the time!”

It’s gratifying to see how few changes our visitors request. Aside from some complaints about signage (“Have more panels with explanations about the meaning of the work”; “The way-finding was a bit confusing”; “I wasn’t sure if I could use the back ramp”) many of the suggestions are of the “It would be nice to incorporate music more into a future exhibition” variety. Or, “Bigger, I want more!”

I was surprised to learn how young our audience is—65% between the ages of 18 and 32—and thrilled to see how many say they would return again (98%) or recommend ICA to a friend (the same 98%).

Of course, the whole issue of surveying one’s audience raises questions. While it’s vital to know who our visitors are, how they learn about our shows, and if they’re confused about whether they’re allowed in the Ramp (they are), the bigger question of the relationship between audience and museum is complicated. What is our responsibility to please audiences? If we present a show that crowds the galleries, is that by definition more of a success than an exhibition that speaks deeply to just a few people and confounds or even annoys others? Is our first responsibility to the audience or to the art?

It’s easy to say (and I do say it) that there has to be a balance. We have more than one gallery after all, and more than one slot per exhibition season. In any given year we offer variety: the monographic and the thematic, the established and the emerging, works in different media by a diverse range of artists, work that’s more accessible and work that’s harder.

Still, there’s a part of me that wants to read the results of all these surveys, think about them, get better signage about the Ramp, and then forget the whole thing—sort of like a tennis player forgets the individual element of her stroke when she’s in the zone.

We believe—we believe passionately—in connecting the best new art to audiences. But the art itself is where we begin.

* * *

To stay up to date with all of ICA’s percentages, email miranda@icaphila.org.

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My Barbarian at ICA: The Mandate to Participate

December 17 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

“Who votes for the sanctity of marriage?” Malik asks. “Who votes for the war on women? If we had to write a musical about the war on women, who would the main characters be?”

It’s a brisk autumn Friday, and Malik Gaines and Alex Segade of the performance collective My Barbarian are working with an enthusiastic group from the University of Pennsylvania, doing exercises and playing games that will culminate in a public performance at ICA on Sunday.

Photo: Tiala Glabau

The group sprawls on the wooden floor tossing around ideas, both narrative and political. They talk about equal pay, “legitimate rape,” and Hillary Clinton’s pant suits. Malik says, “Let’s try a war-on-women machine. Start with a motion and a sound you can repeat.”

“I’ve got one.” A young woman with long hair jumps up on the stage and mimes knocking on a glass ceiling.

“Anyone want to add on?” Malik asks.

Pretty soon the whole group is up there, stomping, pointing, knocking, and groaning. “Go!” one says, and another says “Stay!” One accuses, “Slut,” while another begs, “Aspirin?” Together they make a lively, noisy, funny, animatronic organism, growing more complex and increasing in volume until Malik calls, “Freeze!” Everyone takes turns demonstrating their bit amid much laughter. Next they construct an “Apologizing for America” machine (eerie and solemn) and then a machine for “Drone Attacks”—this one frenetic with drones zooming all over the stage.

“What if drones fell in love with people?” Malik asks.

“I was born to kill but learned to love!” one of the drones, an art history student, cries.

“Let’s animate it one more time,” Malik suggests, and they do.

Welcome to Post-Living Ante-Action Theater. Serious and irreverent, political and participatory, PoLAAT (its name refers to two important avant-garde theater collectives of the past) is a collaborative project that My Barbarian has staged all over the world, engaging audiences with a seductive combination of spectacle, politics, camp, and critique. In a little while, the group will improvise scenes literally ripped from the headlines, using newspaper stories as the basis of skits, some of which they will refine and perform on Sunday. One will be about ambiguous election laws in Pennsylvania; another will concern cheerleading safety.

This first afternoon of the three-day workshop, the group seems tentative. They throw out ideas with some effort, laugh nervously as they organize scenes, shift positions. But as the scenes are performed, games are played, and pizza is eaten, everyone relaxes. With Malik and Alex’s guidance, you can see them learning to trust each other.

By Sunday, with a storm brewing outside and members of the public filing in, the performers have found their groove.

Photo: Tiala Glabau

They are lying on the floor as we enter ICA’s auditorium and take our seats around the walls. A voice is chanting: “Six a.m., seven a.m., eight a.m…” Bodies begin to get up, to mime brushing teeth, texting, eating. Characters chatter into invisible phones, drive invisible cars, change channels on invisible TVs, type. A woman in a red dress does jumping jacks. We watch the day go by in a hypnotic whoosh of time until, before we know it, it’s evening again. People lie down in their invisible beds and the room grows still—though around one a.m. two of them get up in their separate spaces and dance. On the wall, a screens light up: “PoLAAT: Born to Kill, Learn to Love,” it says. The joke, tossed out during the workshop Friday, has become a catchphrase, summing up some essence of the work the group has done, a mixture of irony and sincerity, provocation and humor.

One of the five principles of PoLAAT is “Mandate to Participate,” which Alex described on Friday as “friendly and coercive at the same time.” The workshop group wants the audience to join with them, and they invite us in, gently at first, but with increasing persistence. Malik goes around with a microphone, asking us our names and our astrological signs. We watch some of the scenes I saw being developed on Friday, listen to some songs, and enjoy a fabulous costume parade. Then Malik asks for volunteers for an act of levitation, and two people are passed back and forth over a row of actors.

Photo: Tiala Glabau

After that feat, Alex wants us to all get up and try out different kinds of walks. We mostly do. We circle the room like gorillas, like queens of England, like Hurricane Sandy. It’s not too scary—at least not until we find ourselves playing a game called Binary, crossing to one side of the room or the other to declare our allegiance to an eclectic assortment of objects, qualities, aesthetics.

Peanut butter, or jelly?

People divide, right and left.

Prefer to live in the past or the future?

We divide again.

Photo: Tiala Glabau

Spiritualist or Satanist? Cops or robbers? Those who identify as part of the minority and those who identify as part of the majority?

“Theater can be a model for the forms we hope to create,” Malik says, as almost everybody crosses to the minority side. “Each show is a rehearsal for a better life.” He and Alex are smiling now. They look pleased with their latest PoLAAT experiment, and with this disparate group of initiates who, having met only two days ago, have come together and made something new. Who have entertained and provoked us. Who have drawn us into their performance and gently coerced us into—literally—taking sides. Who have put on a show.

* * *
My Barbarian’s residency was sponsored by ICA and Penn’s Theatre Arts Program, and was supported in part by a grant from the Provost of the University of Pennsylvania.

To stay up to date with the costume parade of Miranda, email miranda@icaphila.org.

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Salon of Ghosts: Staging (and Restaging) at ICA

November 19 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

In the way that autumn, redolent of falling leaves and new notebooks, is always the same autumn, so the first Salon is always the same first Salon. Here we are again—students and artists, neighbors and teachers—together in ICA’s auditorium with its carpeting and its round, comfortable poufs. My mind spirals back to last fall—to the last first Salon—when Alex (as she does tonight) invoked Gertrude Stein, that quintessential Salon hostess, dressed in brown corduroy, sitting in a high-backed Renaissance chair, facilitating “polite and perhaps animated conversation.” For a dizzy half-moment, I don’t know quite where I am. Those three guests at the front of the room with their presentations ready, are they painters here to talk about abstraction? No; tonight is Staging / Restaging, and that trio of guests is Terry Adkins, an artist, musician, and a fine arts professor at Penn; Homay King, an art historian at Bryn Mawr College, and Sharon Lockhart, an artist, filmmaker, and professor at USC. “I hope you’re all properly caffeinated from the La Colombe coffee,” Alex says.

(primary)

Photo: J. Katz

Staging and restaging: What is that, exactly? The spark for tonight’s program is a work by Jeremy Deller, on view in the gallery upstairs. The Battle of Orgreave is a video and related archive that reanimate a restaging Deller organized in 2001, for which he marshaled 1,000 volunteers (and some horses) to recreate a violent confrontation in Thatcherite England between striking coal miners and police. That restaging was unlike the sort of Civil War reenactments common in America in a very important way: many of the people doing the reenacting were the same ones who had been in the clash in the first place. That’s like a married couple reenacting their divorce trial. “This isn’t about healing wounds,” Deller has said. “It’s going to take more than an art project to heal wounds.”

Jeremy Deller, “The Battle of Orgreave,” 2001
Commissioned and produced by Artangel
© the artist. Image courtesy the artist
Photo: Parisah Taghizadeh

What, then, is the role of such a project? And how is a restaging of a past event like (and unlike) a photograph of the event, or a memoir, or a documentary, or a song written to commemorate it? Each kind of restaging has its own quality, its own particular haunting power. Ghosts flit in and out in different guises, some white as clouds, some sticky with ectoplasm, others groaning and clanking chains.

In this room tonight, for instance, Terry Adkins powerfully summons the spirit of John Brown—“America’s first terrorist and leading shepherd,” he says, half-ironically—the American abolitionist who mounted a doomed raid on the armory in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia. Adkins (who hints that he has his own invented shadow self) has worked on a number of reanimations of Brown. He has played Brown’s ghost in a video (backed by ibises), refabricated the iron pipes with which Brown armed fugitive slaves (if they didn’t know how to use firearms), and resurrected a procession to commemorate Martyr Day, the day—December 2, 1859—Brown was hanged for his crimes.

Terry Adkins presenting his work. Photo: Ted Gerike

“I’m working on a project about the virtual,” Homay King says. Suddenly the room is open to the ghosts in the machines—computers—that have now become, like faithful dogs, our constant companions. In addition to introducing us to Ming Wong, an artist who restages films like Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (which is itself a remaking of Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows), with Wong playing all the roles, King speculates about what it might be about digital culture that encourages restagings, which are proliferating on YouTube this very moment like bright, tenacious dandelions. At the same time, she reminds us that, in the ancient world, recital—oral repetition—was how stories were spread; at the other extreme, she mentions the current fad whereby politicians are made, via software, to sing. Restaging has a long history, but things seem to be speeding up.

There is no speeding up, however, in Sharon Lockhart’s current work, which is disciplined by the steady pulse of a metronome counting out 120 beats per minutes. In her new show, Sharon Lockhart | Noa Eshkol, which just opened at The Jewish Museum in New York, Lockhart engages the work of Israeli dance composer and movement theorist Noa Eshkol (1924 –2007). Through a film installation featuring dancers who worked with Eshkol, combined for the first time with textiles (“wall carpets”) Eshkol made from scraps of fabric, Lockhart reanimates the choreographer’s fierce creative spirit. In fact, I think I see Eshkol now, entering the room in her leotards, cigarette in hand, bare feet hard with phantasmal callouses.

Installation view of Sharon Lockhart | Noa Eshkol exhibition at The Jewish Museum, New York City. Courtesy of Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels; Blum & Poe, Los Angeles; and neugerriemschneider, Berlin. Photo by Alex Slade.

As the Salon moves into its final act, audience members ask questions, make suggestions, speculate, fabulate. “This idea of anonymity and authorship is in the air,” someone says.

“It’s about the current generation’s inability to think about the future,” conjectures another.

By now the auditorium is thick with ghosts. See: in the corner, Gertrude Stein offers a glass of wine to John Brown. A British policeman raises a night stick over Fassbinder’s head. Noa Eskhol rescues the scraps of Ming Wong’s costumes to make a wall carpet. I peer over her shimmering shoulder, half-expecting to see our own visages given form there, as we lean eagerly forward in our chairs, not wanting to miss a word.

Table full of ghosts celebrating after the Salon. Photo: Alex Klein

* * *
Don’t miss the last Salon of the fall, Folk / Subculture, with Alex Baker, Matthew Higgs, and William E. Jones, on Wednesday, November 28 at 6:30.

Join Terry Adkins for this year’s Martyr Day procession down Locust Walk at Penn on December 2.

To join Miranda’s mailing list, email miranda@icaphila.org.

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Valerie’s Snack Bar: Tea Time at ICA

November 4 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

People who come into the gallery often look over at Valerie’s Snack Bar from the other side of the room, not quite sure how to respond to it.

Valerie's Snack Bar

Photo: Aaron Igler / Greenhouse Media

When they get close enough, I ask them if they would like tea. Mostly they would. During my first shift in Valerie’s, I served a woman who works at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, over on the other side of Penn’s campus, who often comes to ICA on her lunch hour. Later, a man in a white baseball cap came in. “Do you have espresso?” he asked. But although the café has signs advertising crumpets, or a toasted tea cake for £1, or a hot beef barm (sandwich) with or without onions, we only have tea.

Between now and the end of December, all ICA staff members are taking turns serving tea in Valerie’s, which is part of the exhibition Jeremy Deller: Joy in People. Valerie’s Snack Bar is a replica of a real tea room, really called Valerie’s Snack Bar, in Manchester, England. It was in Manchester that Jeremy Deller organized a procession (called Procession) with dozens of local clubs, committees, bands, and social groups of all kinds. During the year and a half he worked on the project, he liked to hang out in the real Valerie’s so much that he built this replica and put it on a float in the parade. You can see it going down the street in a video on a little TV on the counter here. There are also black-plumed horses, and a Hindu bagpipe band wearing kilts, and old cars, and people dancing and carrying banners.

Designed and sewn by the extraordinary Ed Hall, many of the banners are on view here in the gallery. One says, “Remember Ian Tomlinson” and another one says, “Carnival Queens.” A somewhat different-looking banner, which turns out to have been designed by David Hockney, says “Unrepentant Smokers.” I suppose this is what Deller meant when he said that he wanted to celebrate social group activities that are “lazily referred to as antisocial when in reality they are the exact opposite.”

Procession

Aaron Igler / Greenhouse Media

It wasn’t easy to get the tea room here. It had to come by ship—in pieces, in two shipping containers loaded onto a truck that parked outside ICA one afternoon last September. Dana tried to get the city to close off our block of 36th Street, but the target date kept changing as the ocean freight was delayed—by weather, or customs hold-ups, or some other foggy oceanic mystery. Then, the crates were too heavy to get into the building, so the crew had to unload the pieces out in the street and bring them inside. The trucking company gave us two hours. If we went over, we would have to pay a penalty.

After asking me how I would sum up Jeremy Deller’s work in one sentence, the woman who works at Children’s Hospital told me about her favorite ICA show of all time, back in the nineties. It was about the senses. You entered a dark room, and after a while purple lights slowly came up. She saw the exhibition, the name of which she no longer remembers, several times before she realized that actually the lights, though very dim, were always there—that seeing them was a matter of waiting for her eyes adjust. “I have always remembered it,” she said. I have served tea to an artist who had a show at ICA some years ago and was visiting the museum with her sister. One afternoon a class from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore came in and filled every seat.

Tea

Students having tea, author serving.

Karen Beckman, a professor of Cinema Studies at Penn, volunteered to serve tea and hold office hours in the café, and I have eavesdropped as ICA Senior Curator Ingrid Schaffner held a series of meetings in here, taking time out to chat with customers about the exhibition.

One day I even met my daughter’s high school English teacher—now retired—drinking tea and chatting with Associate Curator Anthony Elms about different Philadelphia museums! The surrealness of this particular experience reminded me of something else Jeremy Deller said about this project, that he hoped the parade might be “full of bizarre, funny, wrong-seeming things,” like a parade you might see on The Simpsons.

I am not prepared to sum up Jeremy Deller in a single sentence, but his work certainly has to do with constructing situations—a café, a restaged police-and-miners confrontation, a bombed-out car as a conversational prompt—in which people are invited to come together and interact. Given that, this modest tea room with its white Formica tables and sole libation is in a way the heart of the exhibition. This is the place where the viewer is invited to step through the invisible looking glass and become part of the art on view.

* * *

Jeremy Deller: Joy in People is open at ICA through December 30. The author of this post will serve you tea in Valerie’s on alternate Wednesdays between 1-3 PM.

To step through the invisible looking glass into Miranda’s mailing list, email miranda@icaphila.org.

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