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His Twine: Marcel Duchamp and the Limits of Exhibition History

October 29 2012

[Note: The following piece was written by ICA’s Spiegel Fellow, Grace Ambrose, for Writing about Art: Marcel Duchamp, a program organized by ICA Student Board member Isaac Kaplan that was held at the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania on October 9, 2012.]

-post by Grace Ambrose

Open any account of the history of 20th century exhibitions and you will see this image.

 

The First Papers of Surrealism

John Schiff, Installation View of Exhibition ‘First Papers of Surrealism’ Showing String Installation. 1942. Gelatin silver print. Courtesy the Philadelphia Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY.

 

It is an installation view of the First Papers of Surrealism, an exhibition that opened seventy years ago at the Whitelaw Reid Mansion in midtown Manhattan. It was, at the time, the biggest surrealist show ever seen in the United States, and included works by Paul Klee, Max Ernst, Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, Rene Magritte and Giorgio de Chirico, amongst others.

The exhibition’s organizer, Andre Breton, asked Marcel Duchamp to propose a design for the installation. Duchamp had previously designed the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition, in Paris, lining the ceiling of the main hall of the Gallerie des Beaux-Arts with 1,200 empty coal bags, lighting the room with a single light bulb. Visitors were handed flashlights to navigate the space, which was filled with art objects that took the form of mannequins, plants, and even a taxi cab.

This time Breton had warned Duchamp to err on the side of economy. In response Duchamp purchased what was rumored to have been 16 miles of ordinary white string and used several hundred feet of it to festoon the mansion’s gilded moldings, ornate ceilings, and crystal chandeliers with a tangled mesh of webbing, stretching what came to be known as “his twine” across entrances and around the temporary walls which heaved with artworks. There were no mannequins this time, just lots and lots of paintings. The string criss-crossed the canvases, concealing the mansion’s opulent interior but also acting as what seems to be a literal barrier to the works on view.

Writing about Duchamp

Writing about Art: Marcel Duchamp. Photo: Arielle Brousse

Accounts of the experience of viewing the exhibition vary. Some said the twine was like a guide, directing them toward paintings. Others saw it as a metaphor for the complexities of contemporary art, saying that its presence “symbolized literally the difficulties to be circumvented by the unititiate in order to see, to perceive and understand, the exhibitions.”[i] Many of the participating artists were upset, insistent that visitors to the show would be unable to actually see the paintings that they had struggled to get out of war-torn Europe.

The exhibition’s legacy exists in the form of a handful of photographs. The one above, by John Schiff, is by far the most cited. Invariably, it will be accompanied by an emphasis on the string’s obfuscating qualities, a description of how Duchamp, when asked to display paintings, had actually made them impossible to see.  The image has come to stand in for the irretrievable experience of the exhibition itself. In it, there is no imaginative entry point to the room, no space that allows us to occupy the same area as the paintings themselves. The string stands in the way. It is difficult to visualize walking up to the Mondrian on the right, or even to the Klee directly in front of us, let alone proceeding through the rooms of the exhibition. We can only feel our ankles getting tangled in the web.

Duchamp himself posited the string as more transparent than opaque. “It was nothing,” he said. “You can always see through a window, through a curtain, thick or not thick, you can see always through if you want to, same thing there.”[ii] If you go to archives, if you look at other images of the exhibition, you can see that Duchamp’s intervention was in fact more permeable than the dominance of this one image has led us to believe. You could walk around in the space, you could approach the paintings. It must not have been so treacherous – during the opening, children ran through the rooms playing ball and tag. When asked what they were doing, they only said “Mr. Duchamp said we could.”

It cannot be denied that the presence of the string must have highlighted a series of confrontations: between the works and their installation, the installation and its viewers, the viewers and the work. It would have been an active force in any experience of the show, necessitating side-stepping and ducking and leaning and bending to get around. But rather than preventing us from seeing, it seems to have been Duchamp’s attempt to encourage a new awareness of the processes of vision. To this day, when we enter spaces lined with art, we fall into a set of prescribed choreography – we know that we should keep a certain distance from the objects, that we should look from afar. In the First Papers of Surrealism, these rules must be broken, if only out of necessity. Here, Duchamp reminds us that vision is corporeal – that it is made possible through the approach of the body. He questions what and how we see, and also, how art institutions themselves dictate both the subjects and the processes of our vision.

In the absence of being able to attend an exhibition that took place nearly a century ago, I think instead of an experience I have had many times, of the immediate approach to Duchamps’s Étant donnés. The terms of Duchamp’s gift of the work to the museum explicitly forbade any reproduction of the image through the peepholes for 15 years after his death. To this day, in order to properly experience it, we all must take the same steps into its dark room before leaning forward and pressing our faces on the grease-stained wooden door. I’m reminded also of the longer approach to it, of the idea that one cannot, and will not, ever see it without first passing through the shadow of The Large Glass. Here, Duchamp forces us into a new choreography, one that reveals his preoccupation with visuality. He famously shunned the retinal, embracing instead the whole body as eye.

It is funny, then, that our experience of the First Papers of Surrealism exhibition and Duchamp’s intervention in it is necessarily reduced to a two-dimensional photograph. We come up against the limits of an exhibition history, confronting the fact that as crucial as an understanding of individual exhibitions is for our conception of the trajectory of 20th century art, the shows that make up this trajectory are in fact unknowable, tied specifically to time, place, and lived experience. Looking at his twine, our vision becomes flat again, disembodied and autonomous. Separated from a physical experience, we once again are shut out.

*        *      *

Dancing Around the Bride, an exhibition exploring the interwoven lives of Marcel Duchamp and four major American artists—John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg—opens tomorrow at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Contemporary artist Phillipe Parreno collaborated on the exhibition design, choreographing encounters within the galleries which invite visitors to “dance” with the artists and objects on view. The exhibition runs through January 21, 2013.

Grace Ambrose is ICA’s Spiegel Programming Fellow. She recently received her Masters in Curatorial Studies from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, writing her thesis on the practice of restaging seminal exhibitions.

To sign up for the criss-crossing twine of Miranda’s mailing list, email miranda@icaphila.org.

 

[i] Harriet and Sidney Janis, “Marcel Duchamp, Anti-Artist,” View 5, no. 1 (March 1945), 18.

[ii] Lewis Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 183.

 

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Wild Imaginings: ICA @ 50

August 3 2012

WILD IMAGININGS: ICA @ 50

post by Rachel Pastan

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

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

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

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

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

What if… what if…

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

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

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

PEI Curatorial Intensive 2012 in session. Courtesy of ICI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ingrid speaking

Courtesy of PEI

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

Richard smiles. “A crusade,” he suggests.

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

* * *

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

To sign up for Miranda‘s mailing list, email miranda@icaphila.org

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Elegy for an Exhibition

February 25 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

Last week Set Pieces closed. For five months the exhibition, curated by artist Virgil Marti from the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, inhabited ICA’s big downstairs gallery. 6,200 people came to see it, 29 tours came through. The last few days, I spotted Virgil himself in there a bunch of times, talking with people, taking a last look.

On Monday, when I get in, the de-installers are already at work. Four yellow drill cases are lined up near the sculpture case where Claes Oldenburg’s “Miniature Drum Set,” Raymond Duchamp-Villon’s “Aesop,” and a marble “Head of St. John as a Boy” wait, their eyes elsewhere, pretending not to notice. Big wooden platforms and large pieces of Styrofoam lean against walls, and industrial lights cast unfamiliar shadows through which men in plaid shirts stride like cowboys, their drills casually dangling.

Photo: J. Katz

The tilt-top tables are the first to go. Their tops slide off to be wrapped separately, or else the whole piece is fitted into a wooden frame, shrouded in blankets, slipped into a crate. Table by table, the Dorothea Tanning erotic couch sculpture they’ve been shielding is exposed to view, but no one’s looking. Even the mirrors are going blind, lifted from the wall and covered, as Jews cover their mirrors at times of death. The carved wooden frames are labeled with bright orange identification tickets like toe tags.

In the next room—the bright white room with the marble busts displayed on fluffy poufs—two of the heads have already been crated. Braced like whiplash victims, they peer sadly out through wooden slats like children out of the back of a car at the end of summer camp. A few others, still in place, look on warily as a man in an orange T-shirt and purple Nitrile gloves changes his drill bit. The silver goose gleams murkily in its vitrine and is reflected in the great, gold-rimmed, fish-eye mirror still hanging on the wall. What else has this mirror reflected over the past five months? Arguments, illicit kisses, jealous artists, unhappy bankers solaced by art? And before that, back through the long centuries, what has it witnessed? Deaths, marriages, banquets, massacres? The long dull passage of empty days?

Perhaps, after all, like any eye that has watched so long without blinking, it is looking forward to its approaching rest.

Photo: J. Katz

* * *

Set Pieces was made possible by support from the Katherine Stein Sachs CW’69 and Keith L. Sachs W’67 Guest Curator Program.

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Look!

February 18 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul working on the new podium. Photo: William Hidalgo

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

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Last Call

February 10 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

“I’m trying to avoid gushing about this film,” Virgil Marti says. He’s talking about Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975), the last in a series of movies being screened in conjunction with Virgil’s exhibition, Set Pieces, curated from the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), which closes at ICA on Sunday. The exhibition’s staged assemblies of objects have been influenced by these films in various ways, and one of the pleasures of the screenings is listening to Virgil explain how: getting a peek into the way his mind works.

Courtesy of ABC Entertainment, American Broadcasting Company and Paramount Pictures

Close to a hundred people turned out at International House’s excellent theater, where ICA provided ribs, cornbread, and Nashvillian Goo Goo Clusters (mentioned in the film) in addition to the movie. Afterwards there was a discussion, led by Penn film professor Kathy DeMarco, that vividly demonstrated how many people out there love Nashville as much as Virgil does. I have seldom been in an audience as passionate and knowledgeable as this one was about Altman, people raising their hands to cite his more obscure films, to fill us in on the film projects the director was almost offered but then wasn’t, and to quote (verbatim) from reviews, like Pauline Kael writing about Nashville’s “love of the supreme juices of everyday life.”

Many of the other films in this series (The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, L’Avventura, Citizen Kane), had very specific influences on Set Pieces, inspiring a particular vignette or the inclusion of a particular piece. With Nashville the influence seems more general. “There’s a car wreck at the beginning that throws everyone together,” Virgil says—meaning singers, groupies, stars, political operatives, weirdos, ordinary folks—and Set Pieces is certainly an exercise in disparate things being thrown together.

But no, not exactly thrown. Placed, maybe, or assembled: positioned, arranged, ordered, organized. Organize is the verb for what curators do—they organize exhibitions. When I first came to ICA I made the mistake of using the word design, and I was nicely corrected. Designing, I was told, was for interior decorators. Not that there’s anything wrong with that (as Jerry Seinfeld might have said), only it doesn’t imply the intellectual work that is so much of a curator’s job, and maybe the part they want to make sure we keep in mind.

Of course Virgil, as an artist, “organized” his exhibition differently than another kind of curator would have. Trekking through the vast steppes of the PMA’s storage to make his selections, he wasn’t choosing objects because of their significance in the ouevre of the maker, or because of their provenance; he was selecting the pieces that spoke to him.

Photo: Darcey Moore

Well, or maybe that’s exactly what all curators do. So maybe the difference is in the way the objects, once selected, were arranged: in a series of displays suggesting stories: the little bronze animals casting their enormous shadows, the decorous tilt-top tables screening the erotic couch, and so on.

But no. I argued here just the other week that telling stories is exactly what curators do.

So maybe the difference between Virgil’s show (which is also sometimes described as an installation) and a more conventional exhibition lies in the way the story is told. Just as Robert Altman revels in presenting overlapping stories and including all kinds of different characters from many walks of life, so Virgil offers us a fabulous range of things: busts and benches, pitchers and paintings, mirrors and models. They shouldn’t go together but they do, because the hand that has arranged them is so artful and so shrewd, and because the vision that has assembled them is so open to all kinds of aesthetics, techniques, approaches, styles, and at the same time so singular that it can synthesize all this stuff, making of it not a jumble but a marvelous teeming order.

Before the screening, Virgil said, “I think of this film as doing what history painting would be doing today if film weren’t here doing it.” I’m starting to think about Set Pieces, then, as a history installation of the American decorative arts—though I don’t think that was Virgil’s idea, exactly, nor are all the objects here American (though most of them are). Still, there’s something here: some sense that the exhibition explores—as the film explores—the weird, gorgeous, diverse, sometimes perverse, contradictory expansiveness that is America.

Though it’s best enjoyed on the big screen, you can see Nashville on DVD any time. Set Pieces, though, is only on view through Sunday, February 13. Don’t miss it.

* * *
Set Pieces was made possible by support from the Katherine Stein Sachs CW’69 and Keith L. Sachs W’67 Guest Curator Program.

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Hall of Mirrors

January 28 2011

Artist/maker unknown, American, Model of the Fairmount Waterworks, c. 1875, painted and unpainted woods, painted and unpainted metals, mirrored glass, sand, paper-mache, cork and cardboard, 42 3/8 inches, 19 x 45 x 31 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of Priscilla Grace, 1998.

post by Rachel Pastan

Close to a hundred people turned out last Wednesday night to see Orson Welles’s masterpiece Citizen Kane at International House. The film was being screened as part of a series organized with ICA’s exhibition Set Pieces, curated by Virgil Marti from the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA). To make the exhibition, Virgil trawled through the vast rooms of the PMA’s storage, chose objects that appealed to him, and re-staged them in ICA’s galleries (read more about the exhibition here). Some of the objects are arranged in ways suggested by his favorite movies. The first thing you see when you enter the galleries is a gorgeous model of the Philadelphia Waterworks, which reminded Virgil of the vision of Kane’s unfinished palace, Xanadu.

Before the screening, Virgil got up and said a few words. He told us for example that Roger Ebert, after explicating what was groundbreaking about Citizen Kane, remarked, “It’s not the film I’d want to see again right now.” Ingmar Bergman is reported to have called it “a total bore,” opining that Welles was totally overrated as a filmmaker. On the plus side, Virgil advised us to look out for Kane walking zombie-like through the hall of mirrors; the vast shadowy spaces; and the stark, haunting scene of words going up in smoke. He also talked about the amazing vision Welles gives us of the boxes and cartons and crates containing Kane’s collections. Referring to his own visit to the PMA’s store rooms Virgil said, “It’s virtually impossible to walk into a storage space and not think about the storage scene in Citizen Kane.”

I’ll confess right here that my feelings about the film are more or less in line with Bergman’s. Despite the extraordinary, original shots and Welles’s larger-than-life presence, I was bothered by the story’s narrative, which is perfunctorily handled. Welles doesn’t seem to care that much about dramatizing the story. For example, characters are always screeching about how Kane gets everything and then loses it, but we seldom see him doing either—just looking energetic or grim or doomed in response to it having happened off-camera. In a narrative, the viewer (or reader) asks, What will happen next? and hopes to be surprised; but in Kane you can see the trajectory well in advance. The surprises are all in the camera work.

Which brings me to this question: Is a museum exhibition a work of narrative art, or is it more immediate, atemporal, like a painting or a candlestick?

In Set Pieces, Virgil has certainly arranged the objects to take us on a journey. After the Waterworks, we move past a ceramic coffee pot painted to look like wood, a cabinet with faux books made of inlay, a little scene of three sculptures arranged in an apparent vignette (two heads and a Claes Oldenburg soft drum set, all the same size). Then we come upon the back of an enormous Renaissance bench, which we move around to admire the grand painted angels on its front. Maybe the relation of the images is more associative than narrative—more like poetry than like a novel—but one can feel those images accumulate, feel themes emerging and see changes played on them: objects which are disguised as something they are not (the coffee pot that’s not really wood, the cabinet that’s not really books); matched sets that don’t really match (the three sculptures); objects viewed from unusual angles (the bench). You might speculate that this last trope—objects viewed from unusual angles—is something Marti gleaned from Welles.

Citizen Kane. Courtesy of Mercury Productions and RKO Radio Pictures.

Much of Set Pieces is dark and shadowy, a la Welles’s vast shadowy spaces. But the last room is different. The dark carpeting has been taken up to reveal the white concrete floor, and the walls are white (except for the one that’s pink), and an arrangement of white fluffy poufs holds an assortment of mostly white marble busts. In this room too the familiar themes recur: objects in disguise, matched sets that don’t quite match, objects presented at unconventional angles (there’s a lovely bust lying on its side in here). But instead of shadows, we have emerged into light.

On earlier viewings of the exhibition I had wondered why Virgil made this choice. But after watching Citizen Kane, I feel he understood that the exhibition had to take us somewhere, had to enact some change, had to offer the viewer a surprise.

This, of course, is my lesson. I’m not suggesting that Virgil organized his installation in conscious contrast to the film’s treatment of narrative. His interests were elsewhere. Still: on Wednesday, February 2, International House will screen the last film in the exhibition series, Virgil Marti’s favorite movie, Robert Altman’s 1975 classic Nashville. I wonder what more about Set Pieces I’ll understand after seeing that.

* * *
Set Pieces is on view at ICA until Sunday, February 13. The exhibition was made possible by support from the Katherine Stein Sachs CW’69 and Keith L. Sachs W’67 Guest Curator Program.

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Alluding to a Human Presence

January 11 2011

Foraging in PMA storage. Photo: I. Schaffner

post by Rachel Pastan

There’s no point in pretending there isn’t a flurry of excitement here at ICA when a critic from The New York Times comes around. Then of course, you have to hope they write a good review. And then you have to hope people read it.

There’s no point pretending, either, that one intention of this blog post isn’t to tell you that ICA’s exhibition Set Pieces, guest curated by Virgil Marti from the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), got a good review in the Times on Christmas Eve. Karen Rosenberg called the show “as irreverent as it is resourceful.” If you missed it, don’t worry; you can read it here.

Set Pieces restages objects from the PMA’s storage, often in little scenelets inspired by Virgil’s favorite films. Like the review, the catalogue too arrived shortly before Christmas, and it looks sensational: the size of a book of poetry, suffused with the bright orange and purple hues of the exhibition walls, with fold-out covers and Aaron Igler’s fabulous installation photography. ICA is a non-collecting museum, so we take our catalogues very seriously: they are our collection; they are what abides. ICA catalogues are published some time after the shows open, because it’s important to us that they document not just the art in the exhibitions but the exhibitions themselves: their arrangement, look, and mood. In addition to photographs and curatorial and critical essays, this one also has quotations from Joe Rishel, a senior curator at the PMA, who was Virgil’s main liaison there. Erudite, charming, witty, these quotations buzz through the pages like a wry wasp: “These objects were all sitting on the shelf in storage like that kids’ game called ‘dinner party.’ Who would you invite, if you had eight people to dinner, who would you put at the table and where?…I’d love to be at a dinner party with St. John the Baptist, Claes Oldenburg, and Aesop.” Those names refer to three sculptures grouped in a vitrine in the show as they were on a shelf in storage. A lucky accident, seen by an artist (Virgil) as an interestingly complicated conjunction, and presented to you, the viewer, to enjoy and consider. “Cinematic,” Rosenburg of the Times says.

Joe Rishel, Virgil, and Ingrid Schaffner. Photo: J. Katz

Virgil, who was brought up in St. Louis and moved to Philadelphia for art school in 1988, was in his first ICA show, You Talkin’ To Me? in 1996. “To have a show at the ICA made me feel like I was being taken seriously,” he told me. A Ramp project, Virgil Marti: Flowers of Romance, followed in 2003. Trained as painter but interested in printmaking, installations, and décor, Virgil is known for his exuberant, unlikely wallpapers and his colorful deer-antler chandeliers. Of the making of Set Pieces, he said, “I approached it much the way I would approach making work in the studio,” thinking of the juxtaposition of materials and the formal decisions to be made. But also, half-joking: “At least I didn’t have to make the work!”

Actually Virgil did make a little of the work in the show: the white furry poufs from which marble heads poke up in the exhibition’s final room in homage to a scene in Antonioni’s film L’Avventura.

The Set Pieces catalogue contains a great interview between Virgil and the art historian Richard Meyer, in which Meyer draws Virgil out about the artist-as-curator, about finding beauty in unwanted objects (“that unschooled way of seeing something as beautiful again,” Virgil says), about fakes and vitrines, and the humanizing quality of dust, and the way artists get attached to the museums in the cities they live in. Virgil is eloquent on the power of the decorative arts:

“I just don’t subscribe to the standard hierarchy of ‘fine’ art being necessarily more important than ‘decorative’ arts. One thing about furniture is that it’s made for people to use. A chair alludes to a human presence even if nobody’s sitting on it. One of my favorite paintings…is a painting that Van Gogh did of Gaugin’s chair, just an empty chair. I find it incredibly moving.”

There is an air of quiet expectation in the galleries of Set Pieces, as though you could catch the objects moving if you turned your head quickly enough. But really the only thing that moves is us: our bodies as we sidle around a great Renaissance bench and detour to explore the shadows of small metal animals thrown up dramatically against one wall, and our minds as we make odd elliptical connections between the objects Virgil has brought together. Maybe they’re the same connections he made, and maybe they’re our own. Either way is good.

* * *
Set Pieces was made possible by support from the Katherine Stein Sachs CW’69 and Keith L. Sachs W’67 Guest Curator Program.

Set Pieces, curated by Virgil Marti from the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is on view at ICA through February 13.

On Wednesday, January 19, 6:30 PM, the next of the Set Pieces screenings, Citizen Kane (dir. Orson Welles, 1941, 119 minutes), will be presented at International House.

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Inhabiting Geometry

January 2 2011

Photo: J. Katz

post by Rachel Pastan

Paul and two guys from the crew are 35 feet up on the Genie lift, examining the first couple of loops of an airy helix.

“I think it looks cool,” Paul says. “But I think he’s going to want it tighter.” He turns a switch and the Genie squeals, lowering them to the floor.

Weeks from now, when the exhibition Anne Tyng: Inhabiting Geometry opens, the helix, made of crisscrossed pieces of Luan plywood, will fill that part of the gallery, looping down to meet up with its geometric forbearers: a cube, a triangular pyramid, a dodecahedron, and a couple of others. These shapes too will be big—big enough to stand in, to walk around in, to experience and explore. Big enough, as the show’s name implies, to inhabit if ICA were open 24/7, which we’re not. You’re welcome to spend the day in there, but we’ll ask you to leave at closing time.

One feels that Anne Tyng, who designed this installation and whose work the exhibition explores, does actually inhabit geometry. Or maybe it inhabits her. I’ve written before in this space about how Tyng’s love of architecture goes back to her childhood in China where her parents were missionaries, how she takes a sensual delight in form. She writes of the “magic revelation in my first creation of space for human use,” and of her “passionate search for essences of form and space.” Now ninety, having worked as an architect for thirty years and taught architecture for nearly another thirty, Tyng’s passion for form is literally taking shape in ICA’s gallery. Architect and professor Srdjan Weiss and his assistant Kristen Smith have been working with Tyng to realize her vision, and now ICA’s crew is bolting together thin strips of wood, dangling wires from wall and ceiling, and erecting octahedrons the size of minivans.

I love this moment in the museum, when everyday an exhibition comes a little further to life. When music is playing on speakers in the background and all kinds of bric-a-brac washes up on long tables as on a beach: scissors, work gloves, plans, newspapers, a camera, a pile of white art handling gloves, a notebook, time sheets, books, balls of wire, balls of yarn. Today the gallery floor is marked with angular spirals laid out in blue tape, as though an English garden maze is being planned. More blue tape brightens the walls at eye level, mysterious figures scribbled on it. The room smells of paint.

Photo: Paul Swenbeck

I imagine Anne Tyng enjoyed moments like these all her life—moments when her plans and renderings began to take shape on building sites. You can see some of her buildings rise from the ground in photographs that will also be part of the exhibition. Darcey, ICA’s registrar, showed me the working checklist this morning. I was excited to see plans and pictures of the buildings I’ve read about, particularly the Four-Poster House in which the bed serves as the central organizing form and metaphor.

The plans and photos come from Penn’s Architectural Archive, which is co-presenting the show with ICA. Yesterday Ingrid, who is organizing the show, came back from the Archives with articles about Tyng’s early life and career. “Petite Blonde Succeeds As Architect in Phila” a headline in The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Women’s section proclaims in May of 1950. How’s that for news! “Just under five feet,” the article explains, Anne Tyng “has the look of ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ but don’t be misled by the façade for she has the astuteness of a woman who knows every facet of architecture.”

Is that use of the word “façade” an intentional joke? Did articles about architects in the men’s sections include their height?

A more interesting question: could Tyng, exploring secret passages in her childhood home in Jiangxi, China, imagine what the future held in store for her?

Well, maybe she could. She was always a visionary.

* * *
Anne Tyng: Inhabiting Geometry, opens at ICA on January 13 and runs through March 20. The exhibition is organized by ICA Senior Curator Ingrid Schaffner; consulting curator Srdjan Jovanović Weiss, Assistant Professor, Tyler Architecture, Temple University; and William Whitaker, Curator and Collections Manager, The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania. The exhibition is a collaboration between ICA and Penn’s Architectural Archives.

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Mouse Tooth Marks and Other Adventures in Conservation

November 15 2010

Photo: J. Katz


post by Rachel Pastan

One of the things I try to do in this blog is give readers a sense of some of what goes on behind the scenes here at ICA: what the people are doing while the art is out there posing for you in the galleries. I was delighted when, the other night, ICA presented a program all about what happens behind the scenes at other kinds of museums—the kinds with permanent collections, something ICA doesn’t have. “Conversation: On Conservation” was not just a panel we put together because we liked the title (though it is a good title). It was fantastically interesting look at what conservators do: not just how they care for, clean, and repair art (you may remember my post from last summer about Q-tips and saliva), but the ways they decide when and how to do these things.

Contemporary art is notorious for being made out of weird stuff. How do you conserve a Matthew Barney Idaho potato, or some Chris Ofili elephant dung, or Zoe Leonard lemon peel and thread? Say you have a Kelley Walker silkscreen of two kinds of chocolate over an inkjet print: what do you do when bits of the chocolate start falling off? This was one of many surprising challenges panelist Johanna Hoffman has faced in her job as Chief Conservator at Contemporary Conservation Ltd., a private art conservation company. Indeed, not only was the unstable chocolate naturally coming loose, but mice were finding their way to the artwork and nibbling it off. They especially liked the white chocolate. What to do? In this case, the artist was still alive, so Johanna contacted him and asked his advice. Walker, apparently, thought the mouse participation was cool—he said he’d had a dog licking one of his works once. But the owner of the artwork felt differently (if there’s no chocolate left, is it really a Kelley Walker?), so Hoffman figured out how to secure the chocolate, refitting loose particles back into their original positions like doing a jigsaw puzzle.

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s Gwynne Ryan spoke about a different kind of challenge, that presented by time-based media like video and film. How do you conserve an artwork made of 30 CRT monitors, like the ones in Gary Hill’s “Suspension of Disbelief (for Marine),” if no one makes CRT monitors any more, and even eBay has run out? The Hirshhorn, which co-owns this work with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, has eight back ups, but those will only last so long. Like Walker, Hill is alive, and he’s working with the Hirshhorn to plan for future conservation, but Paul Sharits, the creator of “Shutter Interface,” consisting of many 16 mm film loops running on many film projectors, is not, so conservators like Ryan just have to do their best. She said she thinks about “stepping away from the material and looking at what’s at the heart of the piece—and how to preserve that.”

Sally Malenka, Conservator of Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) worked with ICA on Set Pieces, which is made up of PMA works restaged by artist Virgil Marti. Malenka talked about more conventional works of art than the other two panelists, but in some ways this made her presentation all the more interesting—the familiarity of the materials seemed to make the issues surrounding them loom larger.

Malenka was positive about the experience of working with Virgil on Set Pieces. She talked about how watching him visit PMA’s storage facilities often made her smile, because through his eyes she’d see afresh objects she’d known for many years. Still, her priorities and his were sometimes different. “The most difficult objects from my point of view were the marble busts,” she said. They were dirty, constraints of time made it difficult to clean them, and—as she remarked—“cleaning is a subjective process.” You might allow fingerprints on a Paul Thek Brillo box with meat (“Meat Piece with Warhol Brillo Box”), where they don’t look incongruous because we’re used to seeing boxes handled, but you might not want any on the nose and cheeks of a marble bust. “I have an expectation that marble will look a certain way,” she said, and when she showed a photograph of a marble head that looked as though it had used newspaper for a washcloth, it was hard to disagree.

Photo: Aaron Igler / Greenhouse Media

Then there was the question of exhibiting the 1780s sculpture, believed to be by Guiseppe Ceracchi, Bust of the Countess of Albany, on her back—as Virgil had encountered her in storage—rather than upright as she was originally intended to be displayed. The marble bust on its back was clearly a delight to Virgil, but for Sally Malenka it was difficult. Part of her job is to think about artistic intent, even if she can’t call the artist up to discuss it like Johanna Hoffman and Gwynne Ryan often can. Malenka presented a wonderful brief biography of Ceracchi, showing us other works of his and making us remember that he was not some anonymous shlub from long ago, but a real person, a serious artist, who had a certain understanding of the way his work would appear in public. He’s not here to enforce that understanding, but conservators like Malenka are trained to do it for him. It’s a trust they take very seriously.

I’m not saying Virgil was wrong to exhibit the Countess lying down. But he might be glad to know that, a hundred years after he’s dead and gone, people like Sally Malenka and Gwynne Ryan and Johanna Hoffman will still have his back.

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Sleeping Princess

September 20 2010

The PMA's Joe Rishel at the mike.
Photo: Jill Katz

post by Rachel Pastan

It’s the night of the fall opening at ICA, and Joe Rishel is standing just inside the downstairs gallery holding a microphone, looking at an 1876 model of the Philadelpia Waterworks. Joe is a curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), a lively, charming man with round owlish glasses, and he tells the gathered crowd that the Waterworks used to be a big tourist attraction back in the 19th century. He points out the silvery Schuylkill river in the model, and the little boat houses, and a tiny carousel on the pleasure ground. The model, under its plexiglass vitrine, is one of the touchstones of this show, Set Pieces, which is made up of little scenes Philadelphia artist Virgil Marti composed from objects he found in the storage facilities of the PMA. “Look,” Joe says of the silent model. “It’s a sleeping princess.” He says the exhibition puts you in mind of “toys in a toy shop: close the door and they start talking.”

It’s true that there is a strange animation to the objects here, many of which seem to be pretending to be something they’re not. A ceramic pitcher is dressed up as a piece of wood. A writing desk has decorated itself with inlaid books. Prim tilt-top tables half-shield our view of an erotic couch sculpture by the surrealist artist Dorothea Tanning, now one hundred, who apparently made a lot of erotic furniture sculptures.

Joe, who recently curated the PMA’s blockbuster, Cezanne and Beyond, is talking about juxtapositions—how Virgil’s juxtaposition of objects is like Cezanne’s juxtaposition of colors. He’s talking about “the enounter of artists with older works of art,” how revealing it can be. Virgil, who is known largely for his super-Pop installations—his over-the-top wallpapers and bright chandeliers and decadent poufs—has chosen rather austerely here, though there is a whole row of ceramic George Washingtons and an enormous Renaissance bench painted with a women in a billowing dress.

Wearing a checked shirt and a purple tie, Virgil explains about the forest of small bronze animals casting shadows on the wall. Apparently the Elkins family (as in Elkins Park) donated a large collection of small bronze elk to the PMA, though here there is also a goat, a handsome bear, a buffalo (or perhaps a yak?) and a boyscout. A woman in stripes whispers, “The shadows are so…” but I can’t hear what adjective she chooses. A different woman with bright green toe nail polish regards a handsome silver goose. People mill and wander, looking and gossiping.

After weeks with the museum doors locked and only the staff inside, it’s a bit of shock to see all these strangers here. I find myself wondering who they are, and how would Virgil arrange them. Would he put the tall man in the linen cap next to the grumpy-looking woman with curly hair? The woman in yellow silk with the short woman looking for something in her purse? The artist in jeans with the funder in the gorgeous black dress?

One of Virgil’s gifts is to be alive to the stories these objects are telling, and to organize them so that we start to hear them too: Once upon a time there was silver goose. Once upon a time, four identical men in wigs each said, “I am the real George Washington!” Once upon a time there was a pitcher that wished it were a tree. Once upon a time an artist was let loose in the store house of a great museum, but he could take with him only as much as he could carry.

Of course—even if that were the rule—he could take all the stories he wanted. Stories, though they order the world, weigh nothing, and are infinite.

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