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Checklist for the Prince of Pop

March 3 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

Here is a list of some of the items likely be on view in ICA’s upcoming show, That’s How We Escaped: Reflections on Warhol:

* An invitation to the preview party for Andy Warhol’s 1965 exhibition at ICA—his first solo museum show—printed on the back of a genuine Campbell’s soup label.

Courtesy of Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania

* Photographs of the crazy, legendary opening night of that exhibition, which was attended by up to 4,000 people, and during which Andy, along with 60s It Girl Edie Sedgwick, took refuge from the shouting crowd by climbing a metal staircase that went nowhere, and on which they were stuck for four hours, waving and signing autographs, until curator Sam Green finally convinced University of Pennsylvania officials to cut a hole in the ceiling, through which the artist and his consort escaped into the rare books room of the art history library.

* A three-dimensional model of the exhibition design, painstakingly recreated from installation photographs by Penn undergrad Shaye Roseman and Architectural Archivist Bill Whitaker, and constructed by architecture student Ben Loughin, showing where Andy’s art hung—or at least where it hung until it was taken down from the walls after the preview so it wouldn’t get hurt in the crush of opening night fans, meaning that there was no art on the walls during the opening, and also no room to dance on the glittering silver-painted floor despite the fabulous pop music playing in the gallery.

* Empty walls lit here and there by track lights to represent the blank places where the art wasn’t back in 1965 (though that exhibition was held in temporary ICA quarters in Penn’s Furness Building, not in our current permanent home at 36th and Sansom).

* A photo of Sam Green and exhibition fairy godmother Eleanor Biddle “Lallie” Lloyd, chair of ICA’s board at the time and the woman for whom one of ICA’s galleries is named—not to mention wife of CIA deputy director H. Gates Lloyd—in which she is wearing a blouse made of fabric patterned with Andy’s Green Stamps print, and he, Sam, is wearing a matching Green Stamps tie, and they are standing in front of wall papered entirely in Green Stamps.

Courtesy of Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania

This 1965 exhibition is part of ICA’s origin story. The museum was founded in 1963 by the dean of Penn’s architecture school, Holmes Perkins (who you can see chatting up Edie Sedgwick in another of the photos likely to be in the exhibition), but the Warhol show was what put ICA on the map. What happened on that wild, transformative night is the original example of what we pride ourselves on doing: giving significant exposure to emerging artists and thereby helping launch their careers. The fabulous media event that was Warhol’s ICA show helped catapult him to superstardom, and it helped define ICA’s role in the world of contemporary art.

But despite its iconic status, many of the details of the show slipped quickly into the fog of history. The records disappeared long ago, and in recent years no one seemed to know what works were on view, or where the hole was cut in the roof, or who was there, or what exactly the public response was.

Then last year, Kenny Goldsmith—conceptual poet, Warhol fan, writing teacher, provocateur-at-large—was asked to teach “Contemporary Art and the Art of Curating,” a year-long course co-offered by ICA and Penn’s Department of the History of Art, along with ICA’s Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow, Virginia Solomon. This class always curates a show in ICA’s Project Space at the end of the year, and Kenny thought it would be fun to revisit that original Warhol exhibition, to put the students to work and see what they could dig up.

Dig they did. They spent time in the library, learned to use the archives, located and interviewed people who had been at the opening, talked to former reporters for the DP (Daily Pennsylvanian) who covered the show and the protests it spawned. Amazingly, they tracked down the missing archival materials from the Warhol show after nearly half a century’s absence. The documents were apparently resting after all that hoopla in Penn’s Architectural Archives—which doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense until you remember that Holmes Perkins, ICA’s founder, was the architecture dean. The kids had hit pay dirt.

Courtesy of Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania

Last week the class invited some guests to a presentation of their ideas for the show. Donna Brandolisio of Penn’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library was there, and Architectural Archivist Bill Whitaker, and ICA Marketing and Communications Director Jill Katz, and Ben Laughin the model builder, and artist Alex De Corte who has been engaged to do a special commission for the show representing the iconic staircase, and me. The students’ presentations were not only clear, they were exhilarating, and the images they showed were fantastic. Kenny kept bouncing out of his chair and enthusing, “Isn’t this cool?!”

It was cool.

I can’t promise that the opening of Reflections on Warhol on April 21 will still be talked about 46 years later—that crowds will chant and protesters wave signs and helicopters rescue stranded celebrities—but it might happen. So tell your friends, don your hippest duds, wear a wig, bring your own can of soup, and also a tape recorder, and while you’re at it a hacksaw. This is ICA, after all. You never know when you might need one.

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Posted in Andy Warhol | 3 Comments »

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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Her Air

December 13 2010

Photo: Aaron Igler


post by Rachel Pastan

HER AIR

Today is the first day at ICA without Jenelle. After six years as a curator here, Jenelle Porter has moved on to a senior curator position at another ICA—ICA Boston. It’s funny, because we made T-shirts just last October saying: “My ICA Is Better Than Your ICA!” But along with the jokey competition there’s a wonderful sense that the whole world is made up of ICAs, like islands in a contemporary art archipelago, and that a person could step from one of them to another for a whole long, various career.

When I got to ICA in fall 2009, Jenelle’s Dance with Camera show was just going up. The first thing you saw as you entered the semi-dark space was a series of large Kelly Nipper photographs of a dancer with her arms curved above her head. Half concealed behind a latticed screen, the dancer’s form is broken into pixel-like bits, seeming to invite the viewer to see how the dancer and the dance are changed—hidden and revealed—by the processes of setting up and taking the photograph. Step further into the darkness: the hallways and open spaces and enclosed rooms filled with light and shadows. Enormous images loom, flickering on the walls, while intimate ones unspool just for you on monitors, some serious and intense, others funny, some enacted by professional dancers and others by playful amateurs. The hand of the curator, as always, is both invisible and everywhere. Most people seeing the show don’t think about her, don’t know her name, but the experience they have and the ideas that spring into their heads as they walk through the rooms are shaped by her vision, her excitement, her education, and her hard work. The air in the room is her air.

Jenelle installing. Photo: Conny Purtill

Though visitors down in the galleries might not be quite aware of Jenelle’s presence, upstairs in the offices you always knew when she was around. Opinionated and outspoken, with a confident speaking voice and a loud, frequent laugh, it was no secret when Jenelle liked something, when she didn’t like something, and when she thought it was time for a meeting to be over. At Jenelle’s last staff meeting, ICA director Claudia Gould reviewed her career at ICA, asking about the show she was most proud of (Dance with Camera); the hardest show (Trisha Donnelly—“It was as great to do as it was challenging, we installed one wall of work for two weeks!”); the most surprisingly successful show (Locally Localized Gravity). In addition, Jenelle coordinated ICA publications, worked with her husband Conny Purtill to redesign ICA’s lobby and signage, served on the museum’s strategic planning committee, and on the search committee for the Department of the History of Art’s new contemporary art professor, Kaja Silverman. Claudia said, “You contributed exactly what I hoped. I couldn’t have asked for anything better.”

What I’ll remember most about Jenelle is her attitude that things are doable, that the fact that something is hard is no reason not to go ahead: ambitious exhibitions, long curatorial essays, and smaller things too. That first fall I told her I wanted to go to some of the evening screenings that were part of Dance with Camera, but that I couldn’t because I had to get home to my kids. “Just bring them!” she said. I didn’t, which I still regret. The next spring, after lending me Anne Truitt’s fabulous memoir of an artist’s life, Daybook, she told me Truitt was having a (posthumous) show in New York and that I should go see it. Again I said I couldn’t: New York was too far, I had family responsibilities. “It’s not that far!” she said. “Just go!” So I went. I’ll never forget that exhibition, the vibrant stillness of those tall simple sculptures, the feeling of them so unlike what I had guessed from the photographs. Thanks, Jenelle, for that.

One day last year, Jenelle mentioned to me that she’d been to a presentation of curators reading their manifestos. She didn’t have a manifesto, but she was going home to write one. Last week I asked her if she would share it with me, and with her permission I’m passing on a few highlights here:

• Encourage false constructs and arranged marriages
• Prod artists to get outside their own head/aesthetic/mannerisms
• Say yes until you absolutely have to say no
• Mentor your audience
• Make good design
• Be timely, but lead with your gut
• Fail better
• Don’t take art too seriously, but believe that art can change the world

Good luck on your new island, Jenelle! We’ll think of you on your new part of the archipelago, encouraging, prodding, mentoring, laughing, leading with your gut, and helping art change the world.

* * *

Just because Jenelle Porter is moving to Boston doesn’t mean you’ve lost your chance to see her exhibitions in Philadelphia. She will be back in March to install Sheila Hicks: 50 Years, an extraordinary exhibition of one of the world’s foremost fiber artists (organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art), and she is continuing to work on her Charline Von Heyl exhibition, which will open at ICA next fall.

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Visitor from Vilnius

November 4 2010

Found Map

post by Rachel Pastan

Curators spend a lot of time traveling to where the art is. ICA’s curators make studio visits and go to galleries all over Philadelphia and in New York. This summer one went to San Francisco and Tel Aviv, another got a travel grant for Paris, and a third flew to Munich and Rome. This is lovely, of course, and useful—indispensable, in fact—but it still leaves a lot of cities unvisited and a lot of art unseen, especially given the global explosion of the art world over the last decade. Time is short, and money is always tight, so last fall—at the invitation of the Knight Foundation—Curator Jenelle Porter came up with an idea: write a grant to bring curators from all over the world here to Philadelphia to fill us in on the art scene where they’re from. Travelogue, the resulting series of programs, runs all this year at ICA and offers a taste of Singapore, Paris, Beirut, Santiago, and—first up—Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania.

I was personally interested in seeing the curator from Vilnius because my family is rumored to be descended from a famous 18th-century sage and Talmudist, the Vilna Gaon (“Vilna” being the city’s old name). Probably it’s only a tale, but I thought I’d go and hear what Virginija Januskeviciute of the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC) had to say about her country and its art.

Lithuania, one of the three Baltic republics, is a tiny country with a population of less than three million squashed between big eastern European states (Poland, Ukraine) on the west and Russia on the east. To orient the audience, Virginija showed us hand-drawn maps her friends had made showing how Lithuania is situated in Europe—differently in the mind’s eye of different mappers. On one map, the Baltic states looked like a double-dip ice cream, with Lithuania the cone. She also showed photos of the drive from the airport to the center of the city: lots of trees and fields and Soviet-era apartment blocks. In addition to their museums, Vilnians (Vilniysts? Vilnyiks?) like to show visitors the landscape too. There are apparently lots of artists there, a legacy of the Soviet system under which an artist was a prestigious thing to be. That’s a nice thing to imagine: boys and girls saying to their parents, “Well, I thought about medical school, but I’ve decided to be a painter instead,” and the parents being overjoyed!

One piece Virginija showed was an image of a sentence inscribed on the CAC facade by the French artist and screenwriter Pierre Bismuth. It read (in Lithuanian), “Everybody is an artist, but only artists know it,” a reworking of Joseph Beuys’s maxim, “Everybody is an artist.” Googling around, I also found a gloomier version, by Lithuanian artist Juozas Laivys, which reads, “Art has ended, but only artists don’t know it.”

Vilnius in Snow. Photo: Thomas Manneke

Like ICA, Virginija’s institution is non-collecting. Apparently, though, things have collected there anyway—sort of like in a lost and found. One of the recent exhibitions Virginija described was made up of art works that have washed up in the CAC over the last couple of decades. While she showed several images of pieces in this exhibition–by Bismuth, Blaziejus Krivickas, and Ulrich Ruckriem, for example–overall in the talk she didn’t show many particular artworks, saying at one point that she didn’t want to put the emphasis on specific works or specific artists. I wondered if this was a legacy of the Soviet system too.

She did show pictures of “black widows”—people made anonymous by black burkas walking all over the city to raise a debate about the use of public space. Apparently these apparitions caused panic in Vilnius, and participants were interrogated by the police. In a different approach to addressing politics in art, she described a recent project to reintroduce the bagel to a country whose once enormous Jewish population was virtually wiped out during World War Two. “A rare light-hearted Jewish event in Lithuania,” Virginija called it. I think the Vilna Gaon would have been pleased.

What can you learn about a place through its art? The impression I took away from this travelogue was that Lithuania is a country very much in search of itself, a country asking itself a lot of questions. How much of it is its history, and how much is it newly born? Should it exhibit the artifacts that have collected on its soil, or shut them away? Should it spend money to restore decaying Soviet statues or let them crumble? Should it serve bagels? Should it support artists?

It’s as though Lithuania itself is a shifting map that its citizens, artist and non-artist alike, are drawing freehand everyday. And the Lithuanian curators are doing what they can to present those maps—some of which are also works of art—to the world.

* * *

ICA thanks The Knight Foundation Donor-Advised Fund of The Philadelphia Foundation for sponsoring these programs, which are co-presented with the Curator’s Perspective series at Independent Curators International, New York.

The fourth installment of Travelogue, with Santiago-based curator Camila Marambio, will be held on Whatever Wednesday, April 20, at 6:30 at ICA.

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Talk to the Boss

October 14 2010

Shannon Troweling
Photo: Casey Watson

post by Rachel Pastan

One of the most important invisible jobs at a museum is that of the preparator: the person who takes the art out of the crate it comes in and hangs it on the wall. Or, just as likely, dangles it from the ceiling, or lays it out on the floor, or puts it together out of the twenty pieces it came in. Preparators build walls to divide big spaces into smaller spaces, put up wallpaper, build pedestals, hang lights, make computers run video clips, and, perhaps most important of all, ensure that artists know their work is being well taken care of. The head preparator is the person who oversees all of it, orchestrating an infinity of details, staying on budget despite unforeseen obstacles, and making sure the show opens on time no matter what.

Last month, ICA’s long-time head preparator, Shannon Bowser, moved to New York to take a job at the New Museum. On one of her last days in Philadelphia, barely a week before ICA’s fall shows opened, she sat down with me and talked about the job, what she’d miss, and what she’ll remember.

There’s no training program for preparators. Shannon went to art school, where she studied sculpture, and she learned the preparator’s art on the job at her first gallery gig for Larry Becker Contemporary Art. She got hired on the ICA crew in 1999 and became head preparator a few years later when the position opened up. “We’ve never not been in time for opening,” she says, though sometimes they are sweeping out the last dust as the first visitors walk in.

What’s the most important thing a preparator needs to know?

“Take it slow when handling the art.” Indeed I never saw Shannon looking rushed or impatient, though surely she must have been sometimes. She never broke any art work, or was in charge when any art got broken, though she saw her share of that elsewhere.

What was the hardest project she had to build?

Fertilizers: Olin/Eisenman, in 2006, a huge installation that had to be built in two weeks from architectural blueprints—a new language for her.

She also told me about rehanging scores of small paintings by an artist who decided they were all hung a quarter inch too high. But when she talked about Barry Le Va, she got excited.

For the 2005 Barry Le Va survey, Accumulated Vision, ICA recreated a seminal work involving a lot of broken glass. A so-called scatter artist, Le Va would lay a big sheet of plate glass on the floor, and then he would pick up a sledge hammer and smash it. Then he’d do it again, and again. Then, the preparators got to do it.

Another Le Va piece involved shooting bullets (bullets!) into the gallery wall. A lot of permissions had to be gathered before this could happen, and the preparators didn’t get to pull the trigger, but they did get to do a lot of stuff to prepare the wall so that the integrity of the building wouldn’t be compromised. A cop was brought in, and he shot five times. “You can’t even describe how loud it was,” Shannon says. “It was physically thrilling.” After the show opened, La Va bought each crew member a bottle of champagne.

Like most preparators, Shannon is an artist herself. These days she works mostly in cast concrete and in watercolor, and she runs a custom fabrication business on the side. She showed most recently at Parlor Gallery in Lancaster last January, and you can see her beautiful sculpture and her custom furniture and doors at her website, www.shannonbowser.com.

ICA is a small museum, and our head preparator job is part-time. This is great for an artist in some ways and bad in others. I’m happy for Shannon that she’s working full-time at a big museum now, but I worry about her own art, where she’ll find the time for it. Of course, many of the artists whose work she hung over the years at ICA still had day jobs too. It takes a lot of energy, will, and persistence to live like that for as long as it takes to break through, for the few who do break through. This is just how it is, but it’s worth remembering.

At ICA we’ll remember Shannon for a long time. When I asked around the museum, these are a few things people said came to mind when they thought of her:

“Grace under pressure. Shannon always seemed very steady to me, even if installation was overwhelming and not steady. Nothing seemed too difficult.”

“It was to Shannon’s keen eye and calm demeanor that I would turn in those curatorial moments of installation indecision. As a sculptor, she had an artist’s affinity for objects in space and as a longtime colleague at ICA, she knew the galleries well. Of all the many installations we worked on, it was the Barry Le Va exhibition cemented our bond! The show was challenging–with bullets fired into the wall and major installations of Barry’s process art to realize and reconstruct—and Barry can be gruff. His admiration for Shannon and her crew, as shared by so many artists over the years, is one of ICA’s greatest tributes.”

“Her calm and her creativity.”

“Shannon can wrangle a team of men like nobody’s business.”

“I always told Shannon I could see her with her own show on HGTV. She is all about the details and fine craftsmanship, and of course cool sneaks and Tees! It’s amazing how on top of each project she was, always managing to be on budget without compromising the end product. She always had a calm way whether it was dealing with difficult vendors, or when it was getting close to an opening.”

“Six years ago we had several candidates for our Chief Preparator position. The job is an arduous one with many angles. At an art opening, Shannon Bowser sat next to me in a dark video room and told me, ‘I can do that job better than anyone.’ No one else being considered had said that to me, and at first it gave me pause. Here was a woman eager and driven to take on a job dominated by men. We gave her that chance, and she flourished. Our work at the ICA became instantly easier as she took command of the installations. Shannon often had uphill battles: colorful artists, skin-tight budgets, urgent deadlines, and working as a woman in a construction-oriented job. In too many instances to count, a contractor or artist would look me right in the eye and ask an important question about the installation. I would point to Shannon and say, “Talk to the boss.” Shannon loved that and was always able to quickly gain their confidence with her problem-solving and assured demeanor. After the first set of shows whose installation she oversaw, she turned to me at the opening dinner, held up her glass of wine, and said, ‘I told you I could do this job.’ I won’t forget that moment, or all of the other times Shannon made things fantastic at the ICA. We all miss her but wish her well in her big job in the Big Apple.”

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Anne Tyng, Platonic Solids, and Penelope’s Bed

July 22 2010

Photo: Chris Taylor

post by Rachel Pastan

Anne Tyng’s love of form had its roots in her childhood. The architect, now ninety, writes of “the sensual delight of feeling elemental forms of rocks, water and earth under my bare feet.” Born in 1920 in China to missionary parents, at sixteen Tyng toured the world and discovered its monuments: “the pyramids, temples and mosques, the castles and cathedrals.”1 At twenty-two she enrolled in the first Harvard Graduate School of Design class to admit women (though she says they were warned they would lower the standards), where she studied under Gropius and Breuer. Later she moved to Philadelphia and worked with Louis Kahn before teaching for almost thirty years at the University of Pennsylvania. In January, ICA will present a show of Tyng’s work and ideas.

Anne Tyng is retired now and lives in California, but she spent a week at ICA last month talking about plans for the exhibition. ICA’s architecture shows (Fertilizers, Holiday Home, etc.) tend to find a way to immerse the viewer—literally—in the forms and ideas being presented. The Anne Tyng exhibition will be no exception. Tyng is designing an installation that expresses and externalizes her thinking about three-dimensional forms: how buildings can and should grow out of basic geometries, and how these geometries are connected, in her view, to the human psyche and spirit.

All her working life, Tyng has been fascinated by the Platonic solids, those three-dimensional shapes with equal sides and equal angles (cube, dodecahedron, etc.) that the Greeks discovered, da Vinci drew, and Kepler wrongly but beautifully theorized formed the layers of the solar system. These five shapes are the driving forms behind Tyng’s architecture and form the spaces inside which she envisions life being lived: “living spaces were hollowed out of a consistent geometry as in a bee’s honeycomb.” For the ICA exhibition, the plan is to construct giant Platonic solids that the visitor can walk inside of! These will be connected to helical and spiral extensions, showing how one form is transformed into another. There will also be photographs and architectural plans and models, including an amazing three-foot-high facsimile of Tyng and Kahn’s design for City Tower (1952-6), which was never built.

The Tyng work I’m most excited about, though, is the “Four-Poster House” she designed for a site in Mt. Desert Island, Maine. For this house, the four-poster marital bed becomes the guiding geometry—as well as the metaphoric soul—of the building. The bed is built at the top of the house, and each of its posts becomes a column that supports the structure. The forms of the roof, rooms, dormers, deck, and balconies are all related to the form of the bed. At the same time, Tyng is careful to consider the site and the vernacular architecture of the neighborhood, so that the building, while conceptually radical, does not look out of place.

I love this idea, that the whole house grows—as the family does—from the marital bed. It makes me think of Odysseus and Penelope’s bed, that “pact and pledge” that binds them, though they are separated twenty years; that metaphor and reification of their love.

As Odysseus recounts:

An old trunk of olive
grew like a pillar on the building plot,
and I laid out our bedroom round that tree…
hewed and shaped that stump from the roots up
into a bedpost, drilled it, let it serve
as a model for the rest.2

Let it serve as a model for the rest. Just so with Tyng, though her bed is at the top of the house in the airy trees, and Odysseus and Penelope’s is on the ground. (You see that we are back with the Greeks, who discovered those Platonic solids.)

Thinking of Penelope, one thinks of patience. Anne Tyng, as I said, is ninety. There has never been a museum exhibition dedicated to her work.

ICA’s Anne Tyng show opens in our upstairs gallery on January 13. After a lifetime of patience, there are only six more months to wait.

* * *

1 This and all other Anne Tyng quotations are from her essay, “Architecture Is My Touchstone,” Radcliffe Quarterly 70 (September 1984).

2 From the Robert Fitzgerald translation of Homer’s Odyssey, published by Anchor Press (New York, 1962).

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John Kelly

June 22 2010

post by Rachel Pastan

A few weeks before Queer Voice opened, John Kelly stopped by to see the gallery where the show was being installed—a series of black spaces and rooms that until recently had held Jenelle Porter’s Dance with Camera exhibition. Now the video screens and old-fashioned movie projectors were gone, and the crew was busy moving large scaffoldings around and painting black walls blacker. Kelly, a performance artist, dancer, and vocalist, was getting the tour, and then he and Ingrid Schaffner, Queer Voice’s curator, would discuss the video clips and scripts he’d brought along.

A lot of material got ordered for Queer Voice: records and dolls, a vocoder (the machine Laurie Anderson famously used to alter her voice). Director of Curatorial Affairs Robert Chaney spent a lot of time on the phone ordering things. John Kelly asked for old theater seats and Robert found some on ebay in Youngstown, Ohio. A guy drove them here in a truck that kept breaking down, and Robert had to come in at midnight to help unload. (I happened across them in the dark auditorium when I was looking for a quiet place to write and sat down on them for a while, not knowing they were special.) Ingrid took John Kelly in to see what he thought of the seats, and he liked them. “What year are they from?” he asked, but nobody knew.

“The guy on ebay told me they were historic,” Robert said. “He thought he could make a lot of money selling them to people with home theaters, but they only want big cushy chairs.”

Lucky theater seats! They got loose from their bolts and traveled halfway across the country to become part of this exhibition. Rejected by the wealthy, they have become art.

* * *

Queer Voice will be open at ICA through August 1.

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Index

June 16 2010

post by Rachel Pastan

“Do we have vibrato?” Ingrid asks. “I thought we had vibrato.”

“No,” Lucy says. “We have vibration. We have staccato. We have ululation.”

“Let’s put it in,” Ingrid says. “Page 32.” Ingrid Schaffner, ICA’s Senior Curator, and Lucy Gallun, the museum’s Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow, are working on the index for the catalogue to Queer Voice exhibition, Ingrid’s exhibition of audio recordings and scripts that investigates what it means to “sound strange.” Last month Ingrid sent out an email to a whole bunch of people—artists, curators, scholars, singers—asking them what they thought “queer voice” was, and she got back a whole bunch of responses: 87 poems, reminiscences, stories, photographs, lists, recipes. Some people wrote one sentence; others, many pages. And Ingrid, who has never done an index, decided it would be fun to do one now.

An index, it turns out, is a lot of work. Days from now, checking and rechecking references, everyone involved will be a little tired of it, but right this minute, reading through the compendium of responses and deciding what words will go in, it’s irresistible.

It’s fun to see what names show up over and over again: Kenneth Anger, Roland Barthes, John Cage, Truman Capote, Paul Lynde. By contrast, Boy George and Allen Ginsberg (next to each other) are only referenced once. Some words, too, come up a lot: activism, AIDS, blood, laughter, lisp, throat, truth. I love the words for sounds (and sound’s opposite): cackle, crackle, cry, hiss, sigh, silence.

“Does dyke go in?” someone asks. How to decide? Queer itself is out (it appears too often), as is gay for the same reason (though gay pride celebration is in), but we have fag and faggot. We have lesbian (one entry only). We have multiple drag queens: Lady Bunny, Dirty Martini, Mistress Formika, Dynasty Handbag.

Dyke goes in. So do elephant, erasure, mock-turtlenecks, and ventriloquism, which has four references. We have everything from ACT-UP to Xenobia.

For a while we argue about alphabetizing acronyms, always a tricky business. We argue about whether you include The at the end of titles after a comma, as in Wizard of Oz, The, or whether you just leave it out. I consult The Chicago Manual of Style and am surprised to find it more personal on the subject of indexing than on any other subject for which I’ve ever consulted it: “Whoever the indexer is, he or she should be intelligent, widely read, and well acquainted with publishing practices—also level-headed, patient, scrupulous in handling detail, and analytically minded. This rare bird must…work at top speed to meet an almost impossible deadline.” I look around the room, suddenly doubtful, then read on: “Copyediting a well-prepared index can be a minor pleasure, an ill-prepared one, a major nightmare.”

Neither pleasure nor nightmare appear in our index (though we do have fuck and dream), but both words seem like they should.

What The Chicago Manual of Style doesn’t say is that an index can also be a kind of poetry. Reading through ours is an almost sensual pleasure: Cape, Castratti, Cavett (Dick), Celtic Frost, Chic. Tone, tongue, transcendence, translation. Ukulele, Ululation, Underline. Feel the syllables on your lips. Cackle them, growl them, lisp them, speak them in tongues.

* * *

Queer Voice is open at ICA through August 1. Pick up a copy of the catalogue there or order on line here.

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De-install

June 10 2010

post by Rachel Pastan
Photo: Carina Romano

The Maira Kalman show closed. On Sunday 67 people walked through the gallery, looked at the pictures on the walls and at the ladders and linens and language primers on the floor and tables, and walked back out. The doors locked behind them.

This morning, de-installation has begun, complex and choreographed as a ballet. Crew members, in white archival gloves like mimes, move carefully around the gallery. I ask what they are doing, and this is what I’m told: First the flatwork is taken down and leashed to the D-ring.

Got that?

The “flatwork” is the pictures on the walls. Each picture has been attached to the wall with a thin metal leash to discourage theft (who knew?). Now these leashes are getting tied to fasteners on the back of the frames called “D-rings,” and then the pictures are wrapped for packing. There is a short discussion about what kind of tape to use for this, the regular blue masking tape or the white archival tape. Shannon, the head preparator, decides archival tape is best. Next, each picture will be covered with plastic and placed in a large tray with a few other pictures, foam buffering them on all sides. Illustrated labels are taped in place underneath so that, once the pictures are taken out, the next crew at the next museum (in this case the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco) will know where to put them in again. Then each tray is placed in a crate made specially for the show. The crates are a beautiful green, halfway between grass and avocado. I think Maira Kalman would like to see them lying around the gallery with all her collections. She might well start collecting the crates, which would necessitate bigger crates being built to house these crates, carefully wrapped, for some future show.

On the far side of the room Joy, from the crating company, is making careful bundles of tissue paper to support the Isaac Mizrahi jackets. She buttons the first one carefully around the tissue and lays it in a box while Robert takes a photograph, documenting the procedure. In a corner, Jacob is fitting the children’s table and chairs into a long cardboard box and wrapping them in packing blankets. Extra tape is brought in. The plastic vitrine holding the onion ring collection is taken apart, and the onion rings just lie there out in the open, next to the watches and the Prozac paperweight. I don’t know how they’re going to pack them, but I wonder if any onion rings in the history of the world have ever been handled so elaborately.

It’s getting messy in here, in what was yesterday a pristine, organized exhibition space. People are working hard to keep everything in order, but for the moment it looks like entropy is winning. Screws roll on the floor, screwdrivers lie on tables, crates and trays and cardboard boxes are placed at convenient but messy angles.

This is a transitional season, a kind of museum autumn. The beautiful garden of summer is blowing apart, littering the ground, and busy squirrels hurry about, gathering and hoarding. Soon these walls will be returned to a perfect January whiteness. The gallery will rest a while, until the cycle starts up again.

Photo: Carina Romano

Even though the Kalman show has closed, there is lots going on at ICA this summer. Come see Queer Voice through August 1, and check out our fantastic and original Summer Studio program throughout the month of July with artist Anthony Campuzano.

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Adam Blumberg

June 8 2010

Photo: Robert Chaney

post by
Rachel Pastan

The snake currently in the rotation on ICA’s home page was made by Adam Blumberg out of the foil wrapper of a bottle of sparkling juice. Adam has worked as a part-time preparator for ten years, the past two at ICA.

Like most ICA crew members, Adam is an artist. A graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Bard’s International Center of Photography, he works in photography, video, installation, sculpture, and sometimes he does a little bit of performance too. Right now he’s getting ready for a solo show at Tiger Strikes Asteroid in Philadelphia next September. Adam grew up in St. Louis, and he’s interested in identities issues around Midwesterners, especially Midwestern men. His work tends to involve cars, beer drinking, sometimes Nascar. At the moment, for instance, he’s taking the fender badge from a ’57 Corvette and casting it in bronze to make a 10” x 15” plaque. The ’57 Corvette is notable, apparently, for having been the first car to have fuel injection.

“So, how’s that project going?” I ask.

“Expensive,” he says, and laughs.

He’s also working on a triangular shelf on which will stand a bottle of Moet champagne, a bottle of Patron tequila, and a box of condoms.

Adam made the snake in the photograph as a kind of 3-D doodle when he heard we were looking for images of snakes for this blog. He was doing installation for ICA’s Queer Voice exhibition, and on the last day the curator brought cookies and sparkling juice for the crew. The purple foil from around the juice bottle felt scaly, so he thought he’d take some home to do something two-dimensional and snake-like with it. In the meantime he twirled a bit into a little sculpture, using the plastic pull tab from the bottle as the tongue.

Having lived in Wisconsin for seven years and studied herpetology there (briefly), I think snakes are good subjects for Midwesterners, but I forgot to ask Adam about this. Having made this little foil piece, maybe snakes will seep into his work almost against his will, and when I go see his show next fall I’ll see some blue racers or bullsnakes there among the Corvette badges and liquor bottles. I think that would be nice.

* * *

Adam Blumberg has exhibited in England, Germany, and Japan in addition to the United States. Last summer he had work in Vox V at Vox Populi Gallery, and The South Philadelphia Boat Show at Storage. When he’s not in his studio, you can find him here at ICA figuring out how to pack onion rings into archival foam.

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