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Dinner Partners: Benefit 2013 Honors Leonard Lauder

May 13 2013

post by Rachel Pastan

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

photo: Sunny Miller

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

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

photo: Sunny Miller

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

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

Matt with his soft box.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

April 29 2013

post by Alina Grabowski

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Installation view of “Unbecoming”

 

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

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

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

April 15 2013

post by Rachel Pastan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How does a painter of canvases come to curtains?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

April 1 2013

post by Rachel Pastan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jennifer’s talk starts with a film clip.

photo: Pamela Yau

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

photo: Pamela Yau

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

photo: Pamela Yau

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A Fixture in the Gallery: Linda Harris Celebrates a Decade at ICA

March 18 2013

post by Rachel Pastan

This morning we are celebrating Linda Harris, who has been a security guard at ICA for a decade. “How many people have been here ten years?” Robert, ICA’s Director of Curatorial Affairs, asks. He raises his hand, and Linda raises hers. The rest of us, comparative newbies, keep our hands at our sides.

Robert says, “At least twice a month someone says to me we have this awesome security guard in the galleries. And I say, ‘Yes we do!’”

I’ve heard that too, from many people—all of us at ICA have. Attentive, caring, quick to smile and to offer advice, Linda is a warm and a lively presence in the galleries. “I always say hello,” she tells me. “And we’ll start a conversation. Someone might ask me, ‘What do you recommend that’s good?’” She makes sure you know which wall labels go with which artworks, and if she thinks you’re missing something, she’s likely to tell you. “Sometimes people don’t have the patience to watch [a video], and I tell them, ‘This is good, you should watch it,’” she says.

Video art is her favorite kind of art. She watches the videos here so much and so carefully that she usually memorizes them. Jeffrey, ICA’s Assistant Director of Development, remembers watching Kalup Linzy’s video with her during 2010’s Queer Voice exhibition: “She recited it word for word.”

This sunny morning there are pastries, orange juice, gifts, speeches. Once Linda dries her eyes, someone asks her what the first ICA show she remembers is.

“The one with the sock monkeys,” she says, referring to 2002’s Pictures, Patents, Monkeys, and More…On Collecting.

“And what was your favorite show?”

There are a lot of favorites. Anyone who watched her talking to visitors in last year’s The Happy Show knows that exhibition was one of them, but also The Puppet Show, Rodney Graham: A Little Thought (the artist gave her a CD), and Ensemble, a group exhibition of works that make sound, guest-curated by Christian Marclay. This exhibition famously contained “Telephone Piece” by Yoko Ono: a telephone in the gallery that the artist would occasionally call. “I spoke to Yoko Ono!” Linda remembers. “I couldn’t believe it was her for real!”

I had heard how noisy Ensemble was, with gongs and chimes and intermittent screeches. “Didn’t that show drive you crazy?” I asked.

“Did it,” Linda agrees. “This one going off, that one going off—the talking trash. The trash would be saying boom boom boom! It was so interactive.”

She also remembers Pepón Osorio’s Trials and Turbulence, a show that dealt with the Department of Human Services. It related to her childhood, she says.

Pepon Osorio, “Trials and Turbulence,” 2004. Mixed media including: 5 computer monitors with video, 2 large projected DVDs, TV with home video.
Photo: Aaron Igler

Having grown up in North Philadelphia, Linda, who has three children and three grandchildren she often cares for, came to security work after an accident cut short her nursing career. It’s easy to imagine how seeing her bustle into a room would cheer a patient. I watched her recently when a group of retired teachers—some with canes and walkers—toured the galleries. Concerned that one woman was losing her balance, Linda went to check if she was okay, then stopped to laugh with another who joked that the spiky hair of a subject in a photograph looked like her own hair when she got up in the morning. No wonder that one family, frequent ICA visitors, sends her a yearly Christmas card, or that former Penn students frequently come back to visit. At our morning reception, ICA’s director Amy Sadao tells Linda, “I’m new here, but you welcomed me the way you welcome everyone.” I felt that way too, my first months at ICA—always happy to see Linda because she always seemed happy to see me.

Later that day, I was in the lobby when a man came in and walked right past the front desk, heading toward the gallery. Larry, who was working the desk, called out to him: “You going in?”

“Nah,” the man said. “I’m just saying hi to Linda.”

Photo by Libby Rosof. Courtesy of theartblog.org.

 

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

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Meaning Something: A Conversation About Brian Weil at ICA

March 4 2013

post by Rachel Pastan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Brian Weil is on view at ICA through March 31.

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

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Something Has Zombiefied: Irena Knezevic in White Petals Surround Your Yellow Heart

February 18 2013

post by Rachel Pastan

“That looks like it fits,” Ika says, as the shoe model tightens her laces.

“They look cool.” The model admires her new footwear, which looks something like a woman’s figure skate with the toe and heel cut out. “I would actually wear these.”

Photo: Constance Mensh

A few volunteer models have come into ICA tonight to rehearse Nine Hour Delay, a fashion show/performance that is part of a new project by artist Irena Knezevic, who invites me to call her Ika. The project centers around a type of shoe—the model is called Borosan—that was commonly worn by women in the former Yugoslavia. They’re not made any more, and Ika spent all summer collecting them—a complete set, every size, in both white and navy. White was for office workers, doctors, and other professional women. Navy was for factory workers and women who cleaned for a living. “No one wanted to have a mother wearing the navy ones,” Ika says.

The models practice drawing the tall pink curtain that will hide them from the ankle up during the fashion show. They practice displaying their shod feet first here, then there.

“It’s not going to be a very fast walk,” Ika tells them. “Just relax.”

Ika loves these shoes. Constructed from rubber, cotton, and canvas, with metal eyelets, they are entirely recyclable. The ergonomic ball in the sole makes them easy on the wearer’s back. In Yugoslavia in the seventies and eighties, when you wore yours out you could exchange them for a new pair at a negligible price. The shoe was designed for nine hours of standing—eight hours of working, plus an hour for lunch.

This project is just one pleasure among many in White Petals Surround Your Yellow Heart, ICA’s major new exhibition of art engaged with clothing, fashion, self-presentation, pose—with how what we wear expresses our relationship to the social sphere. The show’s title refers to Narcissus, the beautiful youth of Greek mythology who fell in love with his own reflection in a pool of water and eventually wasted away and died—or fell in and drowned, according to some versions. Either way, the yellow-hearted flower sprouting from the spot where he gazed upon the unattainable was named for him. Narcissism lurks at the core of this show—though, as its curator, Anthony Elms, consoles in his gallery notes: “Don’t fret, per American writer Wayne Koestenbaum’s pithy reminder: ‘Narcissism isn’t evil: it’s ordinary.’ It is self-evaluations at the work place, profile pictures for your social media, and looking at yourself in the mirror leaving the house.” Donning the courage of his convictions, Anthony has offered his own body as part of the gallery space. He’s wearing one of the works on his wrist for the run of the show: a digital watch by Dexter Sinister engineered so that the time runs—fleetly, fleetingly—across its face.

Ika in the gallery, working.

For Ika, the Borosan shoe is a lovely example of Eastern bloc Constructivism—art and design used for a social purpose. “It took nine years to actually engineer them,” she says. “There were lots of experiments and refinements.” At the same time, however, the shoes clearly denoted the wearer’s place in Yugoslav society—and they were generally despised for that reason, as well as for being required wearing in the public sector for decades. Tonight’s models, though, declare they would pay good money for a pair, underscoring the point that what we wear doesn’t have a fixed valence, an objective value, any more than a reflection in a mirror does.

Nine Hour Delay is an ambitious, long-term project, just starting out on what promises to be an exciting journey. For future iterations, Ika will invite presenting art institutions to pick a color, then place an order with the Boreli factory to manufacture 2,000 pairs of Borosan shoes in that color. The women of the museum will be asked to wear the shoes during their work day—to make them, in fact, the institution’s official footwear. Thus, in Ika’s words, “the art institution is actively excavating and propagating art histories.” Also, the support will help keep Boreli alive. “What’s so incredible about this company,” Ika says, “is that its charter from the 1940s prevents it from splitting up—in perpetuity.” And so it perambulates on, subsidized by the new countries of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Macedonia—a last remnant of a dead regime.

Well, or nearly dead. As Ika says, “Something has zombiefied.” As long as Boreli exists, there is a way in which Yugoslavia does too—gossamer threads, frayed but tough, holding it together. If I close my eyes, I can almost see the spidery garment they weave: a social cloak, woven of our needs, choices, desires, and delights. The fabric of society.

* * *

White Petals Surround Your Yellow Heart is on view at ICA through July 28.

To stay up to date with all ICA’s zombie and shoe-related activities, email miranda@icaphila.org.

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Diamond Dust Ellipses: Field Kallop Installing

February 4 2013

post by Rachel Pastan

“This is my homemade pendulum,” Field Kallop says. “Two bottles pieced together with some epoxy and duct tape.” She measures out lengths, snips, then wraps tape around the middle of the plastic bottles like wide black belts. With a funnel she fills one with finely crushed glass—diamond dust—then attaches it to one of ten long strings dangling from the ceiling. She pulls her pendulum back and lets go. The hard glitter runs from the tip, tracing a sparkling line on the floor. Field catches the bottle, then releases it again, this time with a curved motion instead of straight. The glass inscribes patterns, overlapping ellipses, like the paths of planets moving through the sky. The curves shift slowly, accruing into kite shapes, distended trapezoids. Repeating sweeps of dazzle.

Field stops the pendulum again, detaches it.

She’s using lead fishing weights for heft, taping them to the bottles’ sides. They’re a good shape for her purposes, echoing the length of the bottles, but she’s not sure how many she’ll need. That’s part of why she’s at ICA today, a few weeks before the show her work is in, Glitter and Folds, opens. A heavier pendulum will travel faster and make bigger forms than a lighter one. “I’ve done two iterations of similar projects,” she says, “but they’ve never been this big, and never with a ceiling this high.” She has to experiment with each variable until she gets it right.

Organized by ICA’s Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow Jennifer Burris, Glitter and Folds isn’t the easiest show to describe. The text on the exhibition card begins: “What do we know to be true? That the earth rotates, time moves forward, gravity pulls, and mirrors reflect light.” This is a poetic statement rather than an analytical or descriptive one one, fitting for a show like Glitter and Folds which will present work by four artists, each of whom—like Field—strives to make visible some potent but ghostly force. Subterranean social currents. Gravity. The drift of time.

Field has always been drawn to science, particularly chemistry, physics, and astronomy with their immutable laws. Her installation is titled and upon each stood a siren, borne around in its revolution, which is how Plato described the musicality of the orbiting planets in The Republic. Part of the work’s appeal is in the tension between the immutability of the force it makes visible—gravity—and the ephemeral nature of the forms it creates: patterns of glitter on the floor which entropy (and visitors’ shoes) will quickly wear away.

Many traditions make art of ephemeral dust: sand or pollen or powered bark. Field tells me about the mandala painting of Tibetan Buddhists (whose whole theology is based on the impermanence of the world), the healing sandpainting of the Navajo, and the British tradition of “table decking”—decorating the dining tables of the rich for feasts. She is especially drawn to the bonseki craft of Japan—another Buddhist tradition—in which landscapes are created on black lacquered trays with bird feather brushes.

Field’s own early work was in paint, but one day she bought a toy pendulum for her desk. Its movement appealed to her so much that she attached a pendulum to her studio ceiling and began making drawings with it. “The elliptical forms were so perfect and so simple,” she says. At first she used bleach, running it through the pendulum onto cloth: “Each kind of bleach would reveal a different color in the fabric. I love working with the bleach, but it was really wearing on the system.” Jennifer remembers visiting Field in her studio and finding her basically wearing a hazmat suit. Diamond dust, for all its sharp glitter, is safer.

In the gallery, the strings dangling down through the space are not attached directly to the ceiling. Rather, they are suspended from other strings that run horizontally, thus introducing another force into the system, making what physicists call complex harmonic motion. The horizontal string moves back and forth, and the dangling one moves in a circle, and so the forms sketched on the floor are more elaborate, squarer, and more complexly textured than if only one kind of motion were in play.

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At the opening of the show at ICA on February 6, Field will set her pendulums in motion in an hour-long performance. She will start from the back wall and work forward, the bottles in the rear slowing as the ones at the front still swing fast. The performance will be repeated on February 27, and for a final time on March 13. Thus a work of art about cycles will exist in three cycles of its own. It’s as though a diligent deity were making the universe over thrice, inscribing the clockwork of its mind on the void in bright dust.

* * *

Glitter and Folds opens at ICA on February 6 and will be on view through March 31.

with tomorrow’s sun, A Night of Poetry & Performance, will be held in conjunction with Glitter and Folds on Wednesday, March 13, at 6:30pm

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

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One New Idea: A Visitor Survey

January 21 2013

post by Rachel Pastan

“Words can be visual art.”

Photo: Aaron Igler/Greenhouse Media

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

Photo: Aaron Igler/Greenhouse Media

“I’m inspired to paint my stairs!”

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

“How can I apply the language of design?”

“Be more open minded.”

“Seek discomfort!”

“Museums = awesome.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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My Barbarian at ICA: The Mandate to Participate

December 17 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

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

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

Photo: Tiala Glabau

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

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

“Anyone want to add on?” Malik asks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo: Tiala Glabau

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

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

Photo: Tiala Glabau

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

Peanut butter, or jelly?

People divide, right and left.

Prefer to live in the past or the future?

We divide again.

Photo: Tiala Glabau

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

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

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

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

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