Post-Nonprofalyptic

BHQF Blast Back

2011-04-26T23:33:00.004-04:00

The Bruce High Quality Foundation have responded to my post critiquing their Teach 4 Amerika stop in Philadelphia. Please read the full text here:

http://teach4amerika.org/uncategorized/if-funding-art-is-wrong-we-don't-want-to-be-right

I was thrilled with their response, even though I still think they are off base. Below is my reply, also posted in the comment section of their blog post:

First of all, thank you for engaging with this topic and taking the time to respond to my critique. I am also glad to hear that I am not the only one who voiced a concern of a similar nature. I could not agree with you more that to be an artist and to present art for the right reasons is a moral imperative. But what I was reacting to in my original post was the impression that I got from your presentation that even mentioning money or economic value is to denigrate the arts in some way, which I thought was either naïve utopianism, to lift one of your descriptors, or textbook contrarianism. You seemed to be more interested in subverting the existing systems that you felt had done wrong by you, rather than trying to improve or repair them, in your advocating for the type of antiestablishment model that BHQFU represents. I found this attitude unhelpful to a larger public and ultimately self-serving.

Now it seems that you acknowledge the importance of public funding for the arts, even though chasing after and distributing public funds for the arts is a labor-intensive process fraught with agonizing bureaucracy, and the recent federal budget battles mean the outlook for the NEA and NEH is hopeless. Are you asking: why even bother? It is not necessary for me to debate with any of the Tea Party/Conservative devil’s advocate playing here, because I know that this is not what you believe. In my own idealist fantasy, public funding the arts would never be looked at as a political issue or a superfluous luxury; it would be universally accepted as providing access to a basic human right.

However, I fully embrace that our free market system means that corporations and individuals can contribute to the arts at the highest level they choose, make stipulations for the use of the money, and demand to be acknowledged in a certain way. I concede that I am a Development person, so something like Target Free Nights (we have these in Philadelphia at the Franklin Institute, too) does not bother me in the way it may rankle you. It is an outward signifier that the leadership of the Target Corporation, or any company that sponsors an event or series, sees the value of the arts and makes a commitment to culturally enriching the lives of people in places where it maintains a business presence. I am not naïve enough to think they are doing it for nothing. They have a right to want people to be aware of their contribution, just as a person who gives money to endow a curator position or pay for a new museum wing wants his or her name in the title. I do not have a problem with this; I do have a problem with an institution accepting money that may have ridiculous reporting guidelines, strings attached that hobble the fulfillment of mission or lead to “mission creep,” or specifically support a program that inordinately benefits the gifting entity. I also disagree with accepting money from a company that has a poor public image or reprehensible corporate values (e.g. BP).

It is not wrong to lead the fight for the arts with the economic argument. You astutely mentioned that in the halls of Congress, the economy has taken precedence over all other debates. Citing the model of the arts as an economic stimulator gets a foot in the door with officials who want to know what good this will do to helping their constituents and to getting themselves reelected. It does not stain the nobler elements of the arts to report on well-researched data that demonstrates the substantial financial impact that the arts generate in a community. The economic imperative is the tactic that works today; the “Great Nation” claim that inspired the NEA’s creation, though still credible, is no longer compelling to those in a public arena. You do not have to soil your hands with championing the economic effects of the arts if you do not want to do so; leave that to arts administrators and arts advocates. But do not reject us outright, because we share motives and goals that have everything in common. If I did not think that the arts are the most fundamentally important thing in life besides physiological human needs, there is no reason that I would be in this profession.

The Lives of Charles M. Schulz

2011-04-11T00:18:00.004-04:00

This is a Love Letter: Personal Correspondences from Charles M. Schulz, which spans art, artifact, and ephemera, is unlike any other show I have seen at Space 1026. The title explains the basic premise, but more on that later. It also brought out a more age-diverse crowd than any Space 1026 opening I have witnessed, no doubt due to the interest in Schulz and his Peanuts gang. It was an affirming feeling to see young and old enthralled by these letters. At a moment when omnipresent media force-feeds us predigested junk at a hysterical rate, a character like Charlie Brown can still be a reliable and satisfying staple. There is something incredibly centering about taking delight in these classic characters; for me, it elicits memories of my grandmother, and her love of Snoopy in the funny papers.

At face value, the letters tell the rise and fall of Schulz’s (or “Sparky,” as he was known to all) love for a young woman named Tracey Claudius in the early 1970s, who was a Philadelphia resident. His prose is romantic to the core, unabashed in letting emotion overflow as he writes repeatedly about his unquenchable and constant desire to see, speak, and be with her. Superlatives abound: his love for her is the strongest and she is by far the greatest. Doodles of Charlie Brown and Snoopy, as well as other one-off characters not among the Peanuts, punctuate some of the letters. Any woman would feel elated to be on the receiving end of such tenderness and constant attention.

But hidden in plain sight, the letters offer a far twistier story. The collection is effectively presented as is, without much curatorial guidance. A crucial detail goes unspoken: that Schulz carried on his affair with Claudius while he was still married to his first wife (source.) In a telling passage, he writes of “following Gatsby’s green light.” The connotation, taken in context with the rest of that particular letter, would seem to be that Schulz is simply a hopeless romantic; however, comparing himself to the doomed Gatsby, with his unrequited love for Daisy, does not foretell good things to come. If anything, Schulz was something like shades of Jay Gatsby (to his lover and as a cartoonist) and Tom Buchanan (to his wife and others) rolled into one.

Where Charlie Brown and Snoopy pop up in the letters, they act as stand-ins for Schulz’s fragmented psyche, the different parts of an outward persona that he had cultivated. Charlie Brown still plays the loveable loser, blissfully living in the moment and unbothered by worries of a love affair that can have no future. Snoopy, on the other hand, is roguish and consciously detached; the iconic Snoopy alter ego “Joe Cool” appears in a sketch placed near a photo of a smiling Schulz talking on the phone. Who was the real “Sparky”? Both elements, the starry-eyed lover and the smooth playboy, persist in the letters.

Does Schulz’s flawed personal life besmirch Peanuts? Of course not. Attempting to understand him adds depth to his already staggering oeuvre. In coming up with ideas for a daily strip that ran for fifty years, correlation between the man and his art was inevitable, for we write (and draw) what we know. If Peanuts ever seemed uncomplicated, there was so much more bubbling beneath the surface than we ever perceived.

The Bruce High Quality Foundation’s Teach 4 Amerika – An Arts Administrator’s Perspective

2011-04-04T21:49:00.004-04:00

Last week I saw the Bruce High Quality Foundation’s Teach 4 Amerika at Tyler School, and their presentation has unsettled me since. Philadelphia was only the second stop on their breakneck, month-long tour of art schools across the United States in a repurposed limousine/school bus. The tour is aimed squarely at people with BFAs or MFAs (or those who are currently pursuing them) and art school faculty. As an Arts Administration graduate student, I was undoubtedly in the minority of those present. But the BHQF presenter called out arts administrators, particularly those who run art schools, and I feel a response is appropriate.

I first became aware of the Bruce High Quality Foundation last year when their piece We Like America and America Likes Us was included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial. The work consisted of a Joseph Beuys-referencing (or was it Ghostbusters-referencing?) Cadillac Miller-Meteor ambulance, with a video rear-projected onto the windows. The video stitches together iconic film footage, viral online clips, and snippets of news and popular culture, over which a narrator speaks. The piece nails the melancholy and longing of Millennials whose contemporary reality is that we live in an America which was forged through hardship by the Greatest Generation and then laid to waste by the Boomers.

The Teach 4 Amerika presentation is really no different in its tone. The crew at BHQF are very clever, almost too clever, in their manipulation of appropriated media and pairing image with message. A recurring motif is the use of clips from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest to illustrate the absurdity of the present art school ecosystem. The narrative is built around the story of an archetypal girl who is pursuing her BFA at MICA. You see, BHQF have a bone to pick with the business and economics of art and art schools. It is hard to begrudge them that the commercial art world has its unseemly practices. It is also fact that almost no one who graduates with a fine arts degree will achieve gallery representation, let alone sales robust enough to support a living. But for they would have it, it’s ars gratia artis or nothing. Art is a vocation, a higher calling—a point that I can agree upon—but one which is sullied once money becomes involved; art and business are at polar ends of the spectrum.

BHQF takes exception with the National Endowment for the Arts, picking on its leader Rocco Landesman (an easy target), and its current tagline “Art Works,” i.e. the concept that art can be a generator for local economies. In this city, such a claim is tantamount to blasphemy. Alas, there was no one from the Office of Arts, Culture, and the Creative Economy, the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance, or the Arts & Business Council to go toe to toe with them. At the least, their bone of contention with the economic argument for the value of the arts is appallingly naïve. It is the most formidable tool that those in the arts have against naysayers, particularly elected officials who fundamentally disagree that public money should be used in support of the arts. It is but one part of an arsenal that encompasses and can work hand in hand with arguing for the intrinsic value of the arts, not its mortal enemy.

The tour amounts to little more than preaching to the converted, pandering to manifest frustration about feeling saddled with debilitating student loans to earn an art diploma that will not lead to a sustainable job that can employ the skills learned while obtaining said diploma. BHQF poses many questions but offers no solutions, other than that they have founded BHQFU, a do-it-yourself “university” for people who want to take part in a creative community (they also reject the accreditation system for art schools as another micro-economy that only looks out for its own monetary interest).

Teach 4 Amerika is hipster venting, styled as earnest exploration of critical issues. If it is all a put on, a grand work of performance, BHQF is bamboozling susceptible minds. If they are for real, and represent a truism about the future leaders of our arts communities, all of us are in trouble.

Soil Kitchen

2011-04-02T14:20:00.004-04:00

Yesterday evening I attended the opening reception for Soil Kitchen, a temporary public art project organized by the City of Philadelphia Office of Arts, Culture, and the Creative Economy. The collective Futurefarmers—unanimously selected by a panel including Carlos Basualdo, Joshua Mosley, and Winifred Lutz—provided the artistic vision, drawing upon Don Quixote, whose statue stands across the street from its location at 2nd Street and Girard Avenue. They appropriated the windmill, but as a positive model for sustainability and clean energy, rather than the imaginary enemy of a knight-errant. It is tempting to invoke the namesake quixotic moniker, but the project provides a model for community engagement necessary for transforming a dream and an ideal of sustainable living into a practicable reality.

The concept is simple and anyone can participate: bring in a soil sample for analysis and receive a bowl of soup in return, made from fresh, local, and organic ingredients. Empowered with the knowledge about the health and quality of their soil, participants can then take the leap to growing their own vegetables, which can become the ingredients for their own sustainable food.

Visit Soil Kitchen before it closes on April 6!

Looking for Brazil in Chelsea

2011-03-28T20:53:00.006-04:00

This month, Chelsea is ripe with Brazilian art!

At Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Ricardo Basbaum, Carlos Contente, Laura Lima, Maria Nepomuceno, and Thiago Rocha Pitta, five artists from A Gentil Carioca gallery in Rio de Janeiro (which I had the pleasure to visit and wrote about here) are part of a terrific group show.

Also at Tanya Bonakdar, gallery-represented Sandra Cinto is showing new works and a site-specific installation.

Since last August, P.S. 11 has been home to a public mural by Os Gêmeos.

And 1500 Gallery, a relative newcomer to the neighborhood, specializes in Brazilian photography. Vale a visita!

Unpacking the art of Rubens Ghenov

2011-03-08T23:32:00.009-05:00

By chance, scrolling through the March First Friday listings, I cheerfully spied a rare sight: a Brazilian artist showing in a Philadelphia gallery. Rubens Ghenov was to be exhibiting at Artspace Liberti, housed in 2424 Studios. I was unfamiliar with Ghenov and his work, so the night before the opening I read up on him as much as possible with internet research. Born in São Paulo, Ghenov has lived in the United States for over twenty years. This is significant because it is enough time to have become fully assimilated as an American, though his work retains a primarily Brazilian identity.

The exhibition, ie: Brazilein Chaekkorias, rotted one note, on view through April 24, comprises nine paintings and an audio component. The elaborate (and entirely mythological) historical narrative that informs the selected works, providing the conceptual backbone of the show, begs explanation. Ghenov relies on a triangle of cleverly contrived characters who are vaguely reminiscent of actual people: Ignácio Bira Puera, Norah Lheo, and Milton Jaula (Gaiolinha). Ignácio Bira Puera was the author of a forgotten volume called O Centimetro Fantasma (The Ghostly Centimeter), a chapter of which Ghenov cites as a direct influence on the paintings. Norah Lheo translated the text to English, providing both the artist and Milton Jaula with a copy of the book. Jaula, whose sample-heavy music was looped at the opening (the track can be streamed here), was also influenced by Bira Puera’s writing.

What does all of this mean? Ignácio Bira Puera seems to be a nod to Ibirapuera Park in São Paulo and a reference to Ghenov’s Paulistano childhood. The name Ibirapuera has been preserved from the Amerindian Tupi-Guarani language word for “rotten wood” (more on the significance of trees and timber later). He resembles some of the Modernist thinkers in Brazil during the first half of the twentieth century. Norah Lheo undoubtedly refers to Nara Leão, Bossa Nova turned Tropicália chanteuse. Milton Jaula is a play on the name of composer John Cage (full name: John Milton Cage, Jr.; “Jaula” translates to “cage” and the nickname Gaiolinha is a diminutive form for the word “seagull”). Jaula appears in one way to be an alter ego for Ghenov. And, although I’m speculating, he also bears some resemblance to Rogério Duprat, the man who pioneered the sound of the Tropicália movement’s most iconic songs. Taken altogether, this fascinating mélange of Brazilian cultural allusions sets up the parameters of a parallel universe which become Genov’s playground.

The title of the exhibition cites chaekkori, a Korean term for the depiction of items like books, brushes, or artwork, which denote erudition. Ghenov’s paintings contain similar elements, albeit ones he has extrapolated from Brazilian culture and then tweaked in some way. All but one of the works contains a deep crimson woodgrain motif of Pau-Brasil (known in English as “Brazilwood”), an emblematic tree that today is ripe with national connotation, and the history of which as an export product was essential to the colonial development of Brazil. Ghenov spoke to me about the wood acting like shelves within the picture plane, on which he propped other things.

Within the paintings, he turns popular culture on its head, remixing it in a way similar to the accompanying sound collage that plucks from Bossa Nova, Tropicália, and MPB. Adding to the complexity, Ghenov overlays references to “high culture”. In Brazil, as well as much of Latin America, there has traditionally been less of a preoccupation with distinctly segregating high art from popular art. Nineteenth century Emperor Dom Pedro I is styled as Chico Buarque de Hollanda on the cover of his third album. A grid that calls to mind Hélio Oiticica’s Constructivist-period Metaesquema paintings maps the face of Gal Costa—both of them key players in Tropicália.

And in the remarkable Astronauta da Saudade, the final painting of the installation, he ties together five hundred years of Brazilian history. The astronaut is held aloft on pillars of Brazilian chaekkori and shelves of Pau-Brasil, while simultaneously being removed them as though they are on Earth, far below his space orbit. Saudade, the memory and the longing, is what remains for him.

Street Art in Rio

2011-01-23T17:53:00.008-05:00

São Paulo may be the undisputed capitol of street art in Brazil—if not the world—but Rio de Janeiro is no slouch by comparison. Graffiti is ubiquitous, whether in the poshest or most marginal areas of the city, like a visual leitmotif with give-and-take relationship to urban life in Rio. Before my most recent visit, I attempted to educate myself as much as possible about the local scene. The book Graffiti Brasil by Tristan Manco, Lost Art, and Caleb Neelon, became my bible thanks to its information about the history, terminology, styles, and key players in the vast world of Brazilian graffiti (though understandably its focus is on the Paulistano variety). As a reference it is peerless, because there are few published works in English on the subject. In my own writing I realize that I may mangle some of the nuanced distinctions between things such as throw-ups, bombings, and pieces (or murals), while altogether ignoring the confounding debate over street art versus graffiti art.

Graffiti is as integral to the landscape of Rio as the mountains and the sea, and it is everywhere, from locations where it is officially sanctioned by the municipal prefecture, to places where it is an illegal act of transgression. I spent most of my time in Zona Sul, more specifically areas like Lagoa, Jardim Botânico, Gávea, Botafogo, and Ipanema. The more graffiti that I saw, the easier it became to discern the different styles of certain prolific artists. Some works are signed, either by the individual artist or the graffiti crew, but often they are unattributed. It was only after I returned home to do research, especially in the graffiti groups on Flickr, that I identified the artists whose work I had photographed.

Fleshbeck Crew (usually shortened to FBC) is one of the more prevalent groups. I continuously noticed the work of crew member Toz for his cartoony, cat-like creatures. Road, another member, had also laid claim to many areas with his DJ1 character. In addition to their recognizable characters, I think that the color sensibility of this crew sets it apart, by bringing together blocks of bold, contrasting shades.

Infrastructure provides the best canvas for graffiti art, and the wall enclosing Joquei Clube along Rua Jardim Botânico is a nearly kilometer-long bonanza of countless artists. It is work that has been done legally, disregarding the tags written over some of them (a sign of disrespect), hence the scale and level of detail in these pieces.

The overpass at the northeastern corner of the lagoon is another excellent place to see a great assortment of pieces.

Avenida República do Chile in Centro also has an impressive concentration of work.

I did not see many paste-ups, except for this recurring silhouette cut-out of the Cristo Redentor statue, typically stuck over already graffitied walls.

Pixação (also spelled pichação) is another strain of graffiti, akin to tagging but with very specific criterion. The pichador writes his name, the name of his crew, or the name of his grife (a larger amalgamation of crews). The authors of Graffiti Brasil explain, “There are some visual rules—for example, the letters of the tags should be uniformly tall and wide, meeting an invisible and straight guideline at the top and bottom of the name. The letters should usually be separate from one another. In addition, the breaks and bends of the tag’s letters should (again, normally) be at a consistent elevation (e.g. two-thirds of the way to the top of the letter).” But pixação never stops at a solitary tag; it is a uniform repetition of the same tag at regular intervals. It is most commonly associated with São Paulo, but “in Rio de Janeiro, these spray-painted tags are small, with tight, looping and often symmetrical forms.” Depending on the thickness of the letters, spray cans or rollers can be used. This video produced by Coolhunting is a first-rate primer on pixação.

Pixação is aggressive and nihilistic. It is loathed my most people as the lowest form of vandalism, and its practitioners do not think of it as art. If anything, it is more of a political act, an in your face assertion of personal existentiality by people otherwise invisible to the ruling class. When an entire building has been scrawled with pixação, society cannot ignore it. Most of the pixação I saw in Rio falls into the category of agenda, where street-level walls become filled top-to-bottom with different tags. In the hierarchy of pixação, agenda tags are not well-respected. It is the heaven-spots, e.g. the tops of buildings or precipices where the pichador must actually risk his life to access (watch this trailer for the documentary PIXO to see hair-raising footage of climbing pichadores), that are of high status. Also impressive is when a crew can bomb an entire building. The only such example I saw was in Niterói, but the internet is littered with photos of buildings that have been fully hit.

I found pixação fascinating, rather than odious—perhaps I would feel another way if someone had bombed my building. It takes the dedication of an artist, even though it exists in a no man’s land at the periphery of art. In this regard, I have a sense of respect and awe for the pichadores. I suppose that, strictly speaking, they do not care whether you love or hate what they do, as long as it provokes a passionate reaction.

2010 In Review

2010-12-31T01:04:00.013-05:00

Rivane Neuenschwander's Eu Desejo Seu Desejo ("I Wish Your Wish") at New Museum in August, 2010.

I began my blog Post-Nonprofalyptic in February of 2010. It has been a year of experimentation and growth. I never find enough time to write about everything, even when I limit myself to only the events and exhibitions that I see in person. Looking in retrospect at the year, I am taking the opportunity share a few thoughts about things that I never commented on during the first go around.

Bruce Nauman’s Giorni at Philadelphia Museum of Art truly beguiled me. Days, his English-language version, was distinctly inferior. The raw ingredients of each were essentially the same, but the sounds of the words being spoken held all the power.

Live and Die Like A Lion?, the Drawing Center’s exhibition of Leon Golub’s late career work, was the most marvelous and affecting show that I saw all year. Here was a man in his eighties, already a titan of contemporary painting, stripping back to intense focus on the basics using nothing more than oil stick and paper.

Shepard Fairey’s Mayday at Deitch Projects, the gallerist’s last hurrah before flipping coasts to head MOCA, was the absolute depths of banality. Obey Giant has become part of contemporary iconography; its place as a modern classic is assured. Beyond that, Fairey is not doing or showing us anything new. Even worse, ripped from the environment of the streets, his potency is absolutely neutered.

The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts was the perfect show for the summer in which Bravo birthed Work of Art. My self-loathing was intense for sensing a professional obligation to watch something that felt so cynical towards not only artists, but also their methods, materials, and motivations (even though Abdi, the good guy, was anointed winner). Seeing the collection the Vogels amassed, feeling their passion through the art they acquired on a modest budget, inspired a restoration of faith. These are two people who have lived their lives for the art they love.

I took the guided tour of Big Bambú by Doug and Mike Starn at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The feeling of standing some forty feet above the roof of the Met on a structure of lashed bamboo? Exhilarating.

I was thrilled about Rivane Neuenschwander’s A Day Like Any Other at New Museum, a rare solo retrospective for a Brazilian artist in an American museum. I took a ribbon and made my wish. Before seeing the show, I did not realize how much popular culture has influenced her art; almost every piece had something to do with song or film. Antropofagia is alive and well.

This air handler by the Dufala Brothers at Haverford College is fresh, exactly as advertised and without a doubt. It feels like the self-assured throwing down of a gauntlet before the feet of other artists.

Underground Philadelphia, one of the multitude of projects for DesignPhiladelphia, actually succeeded in making Dilworth Plaza come alive as a place where people wanted to be, rather than a place where the down-and-out find themselves by default. Meejin Yoon did the same for the banks of the Schuylkill with Light Drift.

If asked which art project or initiative had the greatest impact this year, my nomination would be the Phanatic Around Town series. Were they “real” art or just shameless commercialism? Technically, were they very "good"? Do questions such as these even matter? Nothing connected people with their love for Philadelphia (and the Phillies) like these statues did.

Yarn bombing had its moment in 2010. I noticed it all over the city. It became so ubiquitous that the mainstream press ran stories on it. As part of DesignPhiladelphia, the furniture gallery Minima had a yarn-bomber knit a sleeve for the tree in front of its showroom on 3rd Street. Now that this guerrilla art form has become institutionalized, I find it tiresome. How many more times do we want to see a bike-rack covered by crochet?

Gallery Hopping in Rio - Centro

2010-12-26T18:19:00.006-05:00

Largo de São Francisco de Paula in the heart of Centro.

Centro, the other neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro where I visited galleries, is distinct in almost every way imaginable from Zona Sul (including the tourist-heavy areas of Copacabana, Ipanema, and Leblon). Many visitors may never leave the confines of Zona Sul during their time in Rio. I speak from experience: this was my third time in Rio, but only my first time exploring Centro. Zona Sul has a laid-back atmosphere, influenced by beach culture, while Centro buzzes with the activity of pedestrians, vendors, and people otherwise seeming to be malandros, who pack its narrow streets.

Centro is Rio’s downtown, a combination of 20th century high-rise buildings functioning as the heart of domestic and international business, mixed with historic edifices, churches, and public squares, which host micro-economies of shops and open-air markets. The galleries in Centro have assimilated to the character of the neighborhood, a complete departure from the sleekness I noticed in Gávea. The prevalent feeling in Centro is one of old-world urban grit transposed by jeitinho Brasileiro.

First up, the gallery A Gentil Carioca (Rua Gonçalves Ledo, 17), founded by the artists Ernesto Neto, Franklin Cassaro, Laura Lima, and Márcio Botner. Its entrance is so completely unassuming that I missed it on my first pass. Upon entering, you proceed up the stairs to the second floor, which has an office with a small collection of works in it. Going up one more level, you reach the gallery space, which has two separate rooms, and a little depressed area that they call the piscina (“swimming pool”), into which you can descend via pool ladder. The exhibition on view was Zum Zum Zum by Cao Guimarães e José Bento, comprising a video of instrumentalists talking about the color of sound, and an installation of music stands in the “swimming pool,” which was somewhat treacherous because the room was pitch black.

I attempted to visit Centro Municipal de Arte Hélio Oiticica (Rua Luís de Camões, 68), but it was closed for installation. The center is operated by the city and mounts rotating exhibitions. It used to hold Oiticica’s archive of works, until a dispute with his heirs resulted in the transference of the collection back to their private stewardship. In 2009, a significant portion of the collection was destroyed or damaged due to a fire in the home of his brother César Oiticica, where the work was stored. (For further reading, visit Artinfo, The Art Newspaper, or Globo)

I also attempted to visit the gallery Durex Arte Contemporânea (Praça Tiradentes, 85). After ringing the bell multiple times and many minutes of waiting, I left.

Largo das Artes (Rua Luís de Camões, 2) occupies an airy and spacious loft that looks out over Largo de São Francisco de Paula. The exhibition paired two artists: Osmar Barros’ Me Mostre a Pintura (“Show Me The Painting”) and Ronaldo Grossman’s Homem de Areia (“Sandman”). I enjoyed Barros’ work the most out of any that I saw in a Rio gallery. He reveals hidden colors, such as eggs that when cracked open release two pigments instead of white and yolk. A video documents him chipping away at the drywall to reveal brightly-painted bricks beneath it, an interesting way to play upon the history ingrained in the nineteenth century building that houses the gallery.

Along the same street as Largo das Artes and Centro Municipal de Arte Hélio Oiticica is Real Gabinete Português de Leitura (Rua Luís de Camões, 30), a singular attraction not to be missed. It is not a gallery or museum, but an historic library dedicated to Portuguese literature and culture. The Neo-Gothic interior is absolutely stunning, as is the volume of rare and antique books it contains. There was also a temporary exhibition drawn from its collection, Imagens da República Portuguesa no Brasil 1910-22 (“Images of the Portuguese Republic in Brazil”). Many of the works on display were caricatures from the popular press, which gave insight to how Brazilians viewed their former colonial master, then struggling with how to exist as a republic (Brazil had been independent of Portugal since 1822, and a republic from 1889).

Gallery Hopping in Rio - Gávea

2010-12-19T22:39:00.007-05:00

The Jockey Club in Rio. Gávea lies just behind it.

Earlier this month I spent ten days in Rio de Janeiro. Regular readers of this blog will know that I have a particular interest in Brazilian art. More than in any previous trip I have made to Rio, I set aside as much time as possible to explore museums and galleries. Over the next few posts, I will write about my recent trip. I have two goals: to offer tips whenever possible for travelers who will seek out visual art while in Rio; and, to talk briefly about what I saw during my own visit.

After you arrive in Rio, obtain a copy of Mapa Das Artes Rio De Janeiro (“Map of the Arts”), the local gallery guide. The pamphlet is free and available at bookstores and cultural destinations. It is written in Portuguese only, but regardless of your linguistic skill level it becomes an indispensable tool for art trekking. Destinations are grouped by category: Museums and Public Spaces; Galleries and Art Offices; Institutional Spaces; and Ateliers, Services, and Other. The city and neighborhood maps are the most valuable feature of the guide. The reverse side has event and exhibition listings. A map in a travel guide may show you locations of large museums, but will not pinpoint the galleries and ateliers. There is a web version at http://www.mapadasartes.com.br/ which is clumsier to use, though it links to Google maps. Rio & Cultura is another online option (again, some knowledge of Portuguese required).

I used the Mapa Das Artes to plan my itinerary by looking for clusters of destinations where I could focus my limited time most efficiently. My gallery hopping centered in two neighborhoods: Gávea and Centro. In this post I will concentrate on Gávea.

Using Praça Santos Dumont as a starting point, I first visited Anita Schwartz Galeria de Arte (Rua José Roberto Macedo Soares 30). Housed in its own building, there are two floors of gallery space inside. The ground level has a large “white cube” gallery, and upper level has smaller gallery with an open air patio and a shipping container that was set up as a theater on the interior. The ambience here was slick and corporate. The primary exhibition was Otavio Schipper’s and Sergio Krakowski’s Inconsciente Mecânico ("Mechanical Unconscious"), a collaboration between an artist and musician. Their installation of antique telegraph machines had a strong auditory component, as they clicked and responded to recorded telephone ringers and synthesized sounds in a low-light setting.

Silvia Cintra + Box 4 (Rua das Acácias 104) is a similar gallery, also occupying its own building on a quiet street set in the shadow of Atlantic rainforest that branches from the bordering Jardim Botânico. The minimalist design of both Anita Schwartz Galeria de Arte and Silvia Cintra + Box 4 integrate surprisingly well amongst the older architecture of the neighborhood. The featured exhibition was Rodrigo Matheus’ Hollywood.

Galeria Anna Maria Niemeyer has two sites, one of which is situated directly on Praça Santos Dumont. The other is a little more of a challenge to find. It is on the second floor of Shopping da Gávea (Rua Marquês de São Vicente, 52). In Brazil, the word “shopping” is used for what we would simply term a “mall”. Be aware that the two locations have different days and hours of operation. On view at the Shopping da Gávea gallery was Pinturas (“Paintings”) by João Magalhães.

Finally, I visited Contorno Artes (Rua Marquês de São Vicente, 142), located in Gávea Trade Center, an office building with an arcade of shops on its first two floors. Conotorno Artes does not mount temporary exhibitions; it displays works from its holdings of Brazilian artists, which are available for purchase.

If the idea of an art gallery in a shopping mall conjures thoughts of the stores that sell over-reproduced posters and prints of questionable taste, as well cheap framing, put those thoughts out of your head. These are honest-to-god galleries. While not all malls are created equally, in Brazil they are viewed as chic places for high-end shopping and lack the stigma that hovers around the mall culture in America.

If you are in the area, it would be a shame to miss out on Jardim Botânico, which is within short walking distance from all of the galleries mentioned above. It is easy to spend many hours walking Jardim Botânico’s vast acreage, so my plan of attack was to budget the morning for galleries and the afternoon for the gardens.

USS Olympia update

2010-11-25T16:45:00.006-05:00

Last Thursday the USS Olympia received a lifeline, the same day on which I published my story about the impending closure of the ship. But the vessel is not yet saved: this is merely a stay of execution. The Olympia will remain open, albeit with limited days and hours of visitation, while Independence Seaport Museum explores options for the future of the historic landmark. According to the ISM website and the Inquirer article, funds were released to cover case-by-case repair costs. I was curious about the source of these funds, so after making initial contact with someone there, I posed this and a few other questions which went unanswered. Here’s what I think: the publicized closing date of November 22 was an arbitrary one, with a calculated purpose of motivating an influential donor to step forward and pledge support. His or her backing would have been used to rally others and generate momentum for a fundraising campaign. In no way am I implying that the Olympia is not in dire shape, because I believe that it is. But most people will not rush to save something in peril without an absolute deadline, which even in this case was unsuccessful.

I want to propose a theory to explain why it may be very tricky to find high-level donors willing to commit support to the Olympia. Could it be that the Philadelphia-area philanthropic community is suffering from ship-saving fatigue? Already this year, the SS United States has been rescued from a similar scrap yard fate, though it is not entirely out of danger yet. A $5.8 million gift by Gerry Lenfest to the SS United States Conservancy will allow the not-for-profit organization to purchase the ship, giving them time to devise plans and a strategy for its restoration. Given the rhetoric of superlatives used to describe the historic and engineering significance of the SS United States, the Olympia can only wither by comparison (click here to watch Mayor Michael Nutter and Lenfest praise the ship).

There exists an analogous group in the Friends of the Cruiser Olympia, itself a 501(c)(3) with a stated mission of reviving the Olympia (I also did not receive a response to my questions for them). The organization is new as of this year and it has not yet made a convincing case that it could be a legitimate steward for the Olympia. On the other hand, the SS United States Conservancy has existed in some form since 1992 (originally as the SS United States Preservation Society)*, has successfully lobbied congressional support in the past, and now carries the Lenfest seal of approval, making it substantially easier for them to leverage contributions from other donors, foundations, and public sources.

If anything, what the USS Olympia needs is a champion, which may prove difficult to find if it remains in Philadelphia and under the tutelage of Independence Seaport Museum.

*Note: I took this information from the SS United States Conservancy website. The organization was founded in 2009, and no financial records are yet available. According to Guidestar, the SS United States Preservation Society was founded in 2005, the only year for which they have a 990 available (this 2005 return contains no useful information about the financial position or health of the organization at that time).

Saying goodbye to the USS Olympia

2010-11-17T23:37:00.007-05:00

My first visit to the USS Olympia at Independence Seaport Museum will also be my last. On November 22, the ship is to be closed the public, awaiting one of two fates: it will either be scrapped or scuttled to become an artificial reef off the coast of New Jersey. I put together a video of my tour and one of the questions I pondered was, what is the life cycle of a historic landmark such as the Olympia? Nothing, especially not a century-old steel vessel subjected continuously to the corrosive effects of water, is meant to last forever. During our lifetimes, we might have to deal with the deterioration or destruction of monuments that carry great historical or cultural significance. People make plans and arrangements regarding their own deaths, so do we not need to consider the course of action to be taken when a landmark is close to its expiration?

Lest I be misconstrued, I think that the loss of the Olympia is premature and a damn shame: it is both shameful for those charged with its care and it is a shame that the citizens of Philadelphia will now be deprived of its existence. If $20 million could be raised in an instant to save the Olympia, it would be worth every cent. But it would merely be an extension on life, not an avoidance of an inevitable end that some future generation would have to face.

Michelangelo Pistoletto - Takin' It To The Streets

2010-10-31T22:58:00.012-04:00

One striking thing I have learned since I began graduate school last year is how many people are averse to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and other institutions of comparable size and scope. There are as many reasons as there are individuals, not limited to: the price of admission makes the museum inaccessible; the museum is neither representative of nor welcoming to people of color; the leadership of the museum does not prioritize serving the locals of its community, catering disproportionately to out-of-towners; or that the museum, its largest donors, and heaviest users are just plain elitist. Learning about these points of view so different from my own was an eye-opening experience. Even though I continue to be a lover of PMA and its programming, I have come to understand how the museum sits atop its hill, letting people come to it, rather than reaching out to the community to engage people where they are in an open and unimposing manner.

I state all of this to emphasize how important it is for the PMA to run programs like the recent reenactment of Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Walking Sculpture (Scultura da Passeggio). We departed from the museum with an already sizable crowd, operating under the idea that, as we rolled the giant newspaper ball through the city, more folks would join our group. While there is no empirical way of measuring whether or not this actually happened, I do think that it worked. Based on my observation, the size of our group stayed consistent; though I know that some who started out from the museum did not complete the journey, I also witnessed new participants enter the fold along the way.

The planned itinerary took us down the Schuylkill River Trail, up to Chestnut Street, over to Rittenhouse Square, then down Locust Street and up South Broad Street to City Hall, before finally cutting through JFK Plaza to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, with a small detour at the Rodin Museum, and ending back at PMA. Here lies a problem: the journey was more of a touristic flyby of fashionable and picturesque spots, not a truly inclusive route through residential areas. Did we reach anyone not already sympathetic to the museum and its modus operandi? Would it have been truer to the spirit of Pistoletto’s original work to hijack the ball and roll it through anywhere but Center City?

If it appears that I am being overly critical, I will conclude with this thought: what we all experienced that day was sheer, unadulterated fun. For the greater part of the trek, children were happily pushing the ball through the streets and you can hear their joyous laughter throughout the video. The artist himself was light and airy, dancing to music and playfully interacting with the children. Even the PMA senior staff members who made the trip seemed less than their usual austere selves. And when else would you see Gerry Lenfest out and about, rubbing shoulders with the man on the street?

The need for programs such as this one is great; institutions of gravitas and artists of renown have a mandate to provide them.

First Friday, October 2010

2010-10-14T23:12:00.006-04:00

Life? It’s a little crazy right now. But I had to make time for First Friday, especially after missing out on September. I concentrated around Chinatown, stopping first at Jolie Laide Gallery, which I had wanted to visit since it opened over the summer. The location is slightly hidden in an isolated pocket of North Juniper Street, which is fenced in by the new convention center extension to the south and Vine Street to the North. Their current show features three artists: Mike Andrews, Easton Miller, and Andrew Holmquist. Taken as a whole, I was most interested in the varying textures that each of them created. Miller’s collages of repurposed items, such as woven strips of basketball, rabbit’s foot key chains, pieces of shag carpeting, and plaid paper, are like rebuses to unlock some dramatic narrative. The droopy clumps of yarn in Andrew’s tapestries hang as though they are melting off the weft, somehow calling to mind Mike Kelley’s stitched-together stuffed animals. Holmquist’s semi-transparent layers of paint make for an illusion of physical depth.

Marginal Utility had a show of Justin Matherly, featuring the mouthful of a title Would that You were the last of the filth which You had to remove / why does your flesh shit? The most striking work is his degenerated reimagining of the Vatican Museum’s Belvedere Torso, a Classical marble sculpture that served as a font of inspiration for numerous High Renaissance artists. The cement Matherly used for the piece looks like liquefied clay poured into bulging plastic trash bags, which were then left to harden in the sun. Whereas the Belvedere Torso is effortlessly vigorous and virile, Matherly offers a leaden, crippled, and impotent sub-human being. Is it a critique of Classicism’s legacy in figurative art? I do not know, and would perhaps rather it remain ambiguous. But I say all this as an admirer of the work. I did ask Matherly about his technique for making the prints that were also part of the show. He divides the image into sections that are inkjet printed on the glossy side of a transparency, which he then transfers while wet on to the paper surface. The result is a fuzzy and off-register composition that resembles the degradation of an image when it has been re-photographed multiple times.

At Grizzly Grizzly, Christopher Carroll’s The Pilot’s Dilemma pitted man against nature in several short videos. There is a brief loop played in forward and then reverse of a Canada Goose flopping back and forth over a decoy: is it balletic or bellicose? Boston’s Prudential Tower stands in the background, letting us know that we are not in the wild. In a video diptych, a man in waders ventures with trepidation into an arched tunnel, lighting a flare that briefly illuminates the dark interior, but that quickly burns out. Another pair of videos show deer being hit by bullets; the footage is grainy and slowed down, a Zapruder film of hunting, allowing the blood spray and shockwaves that ripple the animals’ flesh to be visible.

Vox Populi was showing four artists. The first you encounter is Kate Stewart’s Götterdämmerung, where plants and sod have been installed in the gallery. The cold, raking light sets an eerie tone. You feel like an unwelcome interloper in the room, as though this is a snapshot of a post-human dimension. Next, there is Kara Crombie’s animated film Mother’s Birthday, a silly, mixed-up anachronism of life on a southern plantation during the Civil War. Think of a nothing-sacred, animated sitcom variation on Gone With The Wind: the lady of the house takes a female slave as lesbian consort; tragicomic mishaps and gags ensue. Leah Bailis’ Magical Thinking is also cinematic in its vision, embellished with sparkling tesserae of a disco ball and a tapestry of sequins. In the back, there is Bill Thelen’s Connect Up To Me. Have you ever said to yourself, I would love to see that notorious paparazzi photo of Frédéric Prinz von Anhalt, naked and tied to his steering wheel, but blown-up on a sandwich board, and contextualized by some other stuff? Well, here you go.

Upstairs at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, I found queasy intrigue in Matthew Sepielli’s paintings of built-up impasto embedded with found object. They are glazed to an almost sticky, sickeningly-sweet finish.

Space 1026’s exhibition featured photography shot on old-school cameras with 35mm film (imagine that!). Sandy Kim’s style is more spontaneous, like the slice of grungy life work by Larry Clark or Nan Goldin, where the artist’s real-life friends, acquaintances, hook-ups, drug-buddies, or whomever else, become the cast of characters. Logan White’s photographs are more elaborately staged, but still feel like they are coated in a layer of bohemian grime.

My night ended on a low-note with a visit to the Fabric Workshop and Museum for Joan Jonas’ Reading Dante III. When I walked into the gallery, I had an immediate sense of déjà vu. I was nagged for a while by the sense that I had seen this before; then I remembered William Kentridge’s 7 Fragments for Georges Melies at MoMA this spring.

Alright, they are not the same thing, but they feel remarkably similar. I went into this knowing nothing about Jonas. If sources are to be believed, she is an influential but somewhat unsung pioneer of video art. However, I saw nothing in content or presentation of Reading Dante III that felt fresh, original, or demanding of my attention. It is hard to believe that brain behind FWM, who last year, in a very forward-thinking mode decided to partially-fund and exhibit Ryan Trecartin’s most recent film trilogy, is the same person who decided it would be good to reach backward for Jonas. Hold up the twitchy, youthful energy of Trecartin’s films next to Jonas, and she seems not mature, but rather geriatric. Also, it appears that the whole show has been lifted and reinstalled wholesale from the 2009 Venice Biennale (even then subsequently shown in identical form at her gallery Yvon Lambert), an unpardonable act of laziness. Why does an organization with a stated mission of collaborating with artists on new work that pushes the boundaries of materials and media resort to being a showcase for New York gallery hand-me-downs? I know the answer, but will let you draw your own conclusions.

Hidden Realizations at Vincent Michael Gallery

2010-09-17T23:35:00.003-04:00

I went out of town on Labor Day weekend, and as a result, I was unable to attend any First Friday openings. Regrettably, I have been to nary an event all month, save for a preview at Vincent Michael Gallery of the current show Hidden Realizations. The two artists, Tom French and Chloe Faith Urban, were present and I was glad to have the opportunity to chat with them. The works selected have layering as a common thread: the layers of construction or of different media help to build their levels of meaning.

Tom French, who hails from Newcastle upon Tyne in North East England, is enjoying his first United States show. Immediately, I was struck by his stunning touch with charcoal. He manages a tricky balance of detailed realism and gestural looseness in many of the works. Some drawings have taken a more stylized direction, and he has overlaid them with color gels upon which he sprayed or dripped paint. The resulting graffiti effect is playful, such as one might mischievously scribble devil horns or a curly moustache over a portrait, both enhancing and defacing aspects of the underlying work. French also has several memento mori drawings evocative of the skull optical illusion in Charles Allan Gilbert’s famous All Is Vanity. He has substituted sexual desire for the self-love of Gilbert’s mirror gazer.

Chloe Faith Urban was still in the process of installing her work when I saw it, but I came away with a good idea of how the final product would look. To produce the small, mixed-media series she was hanging, she begins with gelatin print monotypes made by inking the random folds of scrunched fabric. She then applies further print color passes, adding scraps of gauzy fabric to some or cutting away portions to create patterns on others. My favorite thing about this series was how it was suspended slightly away from the wall, allowing the lacelike shadows of the heavily cut-up pieces to be visible. Urban is also a dancer, and she explained that her method on the larger works involves dancing on paper with charcoal on her feet. She then goes back into the drawing to pull out specific markings made by her movement.

Hidden Realizations is on view at Vincent Michael Gallery through September 25.

Some thoughts inspired by Virtual Public Art Project

2010-09-13T00:14:00.008-04:00

Virtual Public Art Project (VPAP), in collaboration with Breadboard, is on its way to Philadelphia, debuting in a limited capacity as part of Design Philadelphia 2010 and then going citywide in the spring of 2011. On September 1, I attended a talk and demonstration at NextFab Studio by Chris Manzione, the founder of VPAP. To say my mind was blown would be an understatement. I was already peripherally aware of VPAP since last year, without knowing much of what is was or how it actually functioned. Learning about the project and the technology that makes it possible opened my eyes to a world of promise for its use in arts and culture.

Manzione spoke of the author William Gibson’s influence, as well as the emergence of locative media, on his desire to place public art into virtual space. In Gibson’s novel Spook Country, artists place geo-tagged, three-dimensional virtual models of celebrities at their death sites, such as River Phoenix’s slumped body outside of the Viper Room; the models are viewable through head-mounted displays attached to GPS devices. The rapid technological advancement of smartphones, paired with their mass proliferation on the open market, has propelled the concept of locative art out of speculative fiction and into the realm of possibility.

VPAP relies on Layar, an Augmented Reality (AR) browser available to iPhones and Droids (which makes this Blackberry user very dejected). Using the live camera feed on these phones, Layar software pulls information based on a user’s exact location via GPS positioning, and overlays geo-tagged information about the things in that immediate environment. Let’s say you hold your phone up to a city block and search for a coffee shop: the software will pinpoint matching locations. You are not looking at a grid or a map; you are looking at the real time street view through the phone’s display screen. It can also link to related information like menus, customer reviews, or the café’s Twitter feed. Eventually (and alarmingly), software like Layar could have the ability to pull up information about other people in the immediate vicinity, if data stored on their personal electronic devices is not properly protected. Imagine looking at a stranger on the bus and a text bubble pops up over his or her head which instantly displays phone number, email, and Facebook profile.

It was with the mission of placing site-specific, three-dimensional art into virtual space, that Manzione founded VPAP. The art can be based upon a real world object that has been scanned into a digital model, or it can be designed entirely on the computer. He began by digitizing small sculptures, scaling them up in size, and placing them in virtual spaces that corresponded to actual geographic coordinates. When looking at the virtual art through a smartphone, its presence behaves much like that of a physical object might, becoming larger or smaller based on the distance one stands from it. In the case of Veiled Presence—a giant, perforated dome placed on an open field in New Jersey—one can walk into and through the dome, looking up through the holes towards the sky (see above photo).

Video via VPAP on Youtube

The newness of the technology makes virtual space something of a wild west. Presently, there is no restriction or rule of law and every inch of space in our real world remains a stake to be claimed in the parallel virtual world. Anyone can place anything into virtual space that corresponds with a real world location, remaining invisible to the naked eye until viewed with the appropriate technology interface. Herein exists the exciting and transgressive potential of virtual public art. Forget about zoning, permits, material, and labor. Forget about commissioning the artist; you can be the artist! Simply proceed to create and place your art into virtual space at will. It is only natural to foresee a future in which programs will exist with out of the box capability for users to easily design, install, or curate their own collections of virtual art. On Foursquare, any user can already add an object or location, no matter how insubstantial. Want to be the mayor of a street sign? You simply add it and check-in repeatedly. Does virtual mayoralty acquired through heavy or repeated usage of a place (i.e. being a “regular” there) constitute some kind of ownership?

Manzione himself is interested in ownership of virtual space and using AR to put objects into restricted areas. Artist Christian Meinhart has explored the concept for VPAP with his project Cargo, designing virtual totems out of digitized freight containers, inspired by tribal “cargo cults”. He positioned the sculptures on inhospitable industrial wasteland settings inaccessible to the average person, such as Chernobyl. Among other aspects of the work, Meinhart is reclaiming for the virtual world areas that have been made desolate and toxic in the physical world.

It was at about this point in the presentation that Dan Schimmel, the director of Breadboard and Esther Klein Gallery, astutely remarked that there is no restriction preventing a company like Verizon from plastering a massive logo on top of the rival Comcast building in virtual space. Marketing messages are thrust upon us everywhere we go; virtual space is the next frontier and it is an eventuality we all should dread. What is to stop a corporation from littering your home and personal space with its advertising? Marketing is already being used to limited effect in AR and its prevalence will surely grow.

Those concerns aside, the arts and culture applications for Augmented Reality are incredibly exciting, only constrained by the imagination and the capacity of the software. Audio and virtual tour applications already developed by some museums will look old and obsolete compared with what AR could provide given a few more years. You could hold your phone up in a gallery and instantly access voluminous information about the art and artist, time period in which it was made, the style or movement, and suggestions of similar artwork that you might like. Now go beyond what we think is already possible in a museum experience. Imagine overlaying sketches or studies the artist did for the work, or even videos of the artist’s process. How about comparing one work against the artist’s virtual catalogue raisonné, instantly accessing hundreds or thousands of items scattered amongst collections all over the world? Curators and experts could pop up as talking heads to give even more context.

Historic sites are prime candidates for making the most of the technology. Rather than using it to fabricate something new, AR can be used to overlay virtual recreations of structures no longer in existence. The Classicist in me immediately thinks of ancient civilizations: as tourists stroll through the Roman Forum or the Athenian Acropolis, they could see the ruins restored to their glory days. Objects from our not so distant past are already being resurrected, such as this virtual model of the Berlin Wall. The September 11 Memorial just released an AR-enhanced app in time for the ninth anniversary of the national tragedy.

As long as it remains an open platform, virtual public art has the makings of a democratizing force, if not in the physical world, then in a cyber realm where we spend increasing increments of our time. But at this point, its accessibility is limited to populations who own the two specific types of smartphones mentioned previously. As of the first quarter of 2010, smartphone penetration comprised only 23% of the mobile phone market, but its share is rising steadily. (source: Nielsen) The audience for AR-enhanced arts and culture experiences, such as VPAP, is primed and will continue to grow. I hope that for inclusivity developers will consider all phone operating systems when developing software that delivers AR experiences.

Husband vs. Wife redux at Grizzly Grizzly

2010-08-30T00:16:00.006-04:00

On Friday I checked in at Grizzly Grizzly to see Tim Eads’ and Tiernan Alexander’s Husband vs. Wife in its final state before the show closed. The premise was simple: each took one half of the gallery for an independent installation; after the opening reception, they would meddle with the other’s work (see the first post here). The end product is even more of a bonanza than the original installation. There’s frosting on the walls and furniture dangling up in the air. The relative orderliness of the installation’s first state has been upended.

Being in a relationship, we come to know our partners intimately, which begs the question: did the couple instinctively do things that they knew would get the other’s goat? I would have to estimate that they played nicely, because nothing too destructive took place. As Tim pointed out during my first visit, the idea was to improve upon or make “better” the other’s work. He said this tongue-in-cheek, but revealed a truth about the process. If anything, the second phase of the project is more like curation than it is creation.

Road Trip - Storm King Art Center

2010-08-17T23:57:00.007-04:00

This summer I had the opportunity to visit Storm King Art Center, a destination that I had wanted to go to see for many years. It is a place that I had passed by dozens of times when driving back and forth to Connecticut. Adding to my yearning, one can catch a glimpse of the sculpture-laden South Fields of Storm King from the New York Thruway. They beckoned to me just as the Sirens sang to Odysseus; each time I would ask myself when I would make the time to pause for a stopover. I wonder how many others ponder the same question. And so, I carved out a few hours for a visit, but really an entire day would have been better to traverse the vast acreage and take in all of the art.

Storm King Art Center as a whole feels like sacred ground where particular types of sculpture from the mid-twentieth century have been enshrined for eternity. It simultaneously has the air of an alternate dimension that exists out of time and place. When I crept along the gravel path in the car up to the guard post to purchase a ticket, seeing the giant steel structures dead ahead, I knew that I was about to enter into another world. The specter of artists like Alexander Calder, Alexander Liberman, Isamu Noguchi and Mark Di Suvero loom large over the landscape, literally and in spirit. Like the remains of titans or giants from a lost epoch, their hulking art still commands the rolling topography. But the art has been continually refreshed with new additions.

Initially, I did not give much thought to the specific placement of sculptures: I was caught up in exploration of the site, filled with anticipation that the summiting of each hill revealed new discoveries in the distance. Bit by bit, I became more attentive to the installation of the art and the interplay of specific pieces. In the immediate presence of a massive construction, one can easily be oblivious of other things that might exist in the periphery. For the best long view of what Storm King is all about, one must gaze out in all directions from the vantage point of Museum Hill, where the main building is located. It was here, looking over the same South Fields visible from the freeway, that I appreciated how the angularity of Mark di Suvero’s work punctuated the open land, contrasting with the trees and framed by the horizon line. I was also attuned to perspective and vanishing point in the way I might consciously think about them only when faced with a very intentionally rendered Renaissance painting. There is something extraordinary about having the opportunity to look first from extremely far away, then advancing to close inspection.

Quite unlike installations by the same artists in an urban setting, where the art is hemmed in and often dominated by surrounding architecture, the undeveloped land offers a context in which the artist’s creation is the undisputed focal point. In the precious and few open areas throughout a city, public sculpture is most successful when it manipulates and makes people aware of the way they use said spaces. But they are too often invisible to a desensitized populace: fading into the background can be a real danger. To illustrate, I think of works by Alexander Calder and Alexander Liberman that I regularly walk past on Penn campus, and the drastic difference in the way I experienced work by the same artists at Storm King.

Am I spending a disproportionate amount of time discussing the behemoths? Equally excellent works of mid- to smaller scale are clustered in and around the museum building. A favorite of mine was Ursula Von Rydingsvard’s LUBA. So new was the piece that its intoxicating perfume of charred cedar added a deeper level sensory enjoyment. It would have been perfectly appropriate to offer one of Louise Bourgeois’ giant spiders on the park grounds; instead visitors get the unexpected treat of a stone-cylinder miniature landscape reminiscent of the basalt columns at Giant’s Causeway.

There was the brainy comparison of having a Louise Nevelson at the front of the museum, matched at the building’s direct opposite end by a more recent work from Chakaia Booker, arguably a descendant of the same assemblage values. I delighted in the wonderful trickery of Alyson Shotz’s Mirror Fence, was perplexed by the rambling and twisty bamboo space-frame construction by Stephen Talasnik, and felt oddly entranced by John Bisbee’s squiggly spheroids.

Unfortunately, I ran out of time on my visit, just barely scratching the surface. But I will return.

First Friday, August 2010

2010-08-08T10:44:00.004-04:00

The strange allure of Jell-O, a food that I do not remember having eaten for some years, drew me to The Chemical Heritage Foundation to kick off First Friday. Among other things, Jell-O calls to mind strong personal association with childhood and memories of Bill Cosby commercials from the 1980s. Jell-O is hospital food, served to the elderly and infirm. It will never shake the whiff of kitsch trailing back to its heyday as a staple dessert in the Post-war American kitchen. And, of course, it would be best not to think about its animal byproduct origin. Nevertheless, Jell-O wields power over the psyche because of the way it connects to our shared experiences as a populace.

Forgotten classic recipes, if they can be called such, were revived for degustation at CHF’s Mid-century Cooking from the Jell-O Cookbook. Gigi Naglak and Jennifer Dionisio, looking smart in their throwback aprons, gave a talk about the history and the chemical properties of Jell-O, and then provided samples from each of four varieties that they had prepared: Macaroni Salad, typical of once-popular savory gelatin dishes; Long Weekend, a layered dish made with cream and sugar; Peach Bavarian, whipped until fluffy; and a traditional canned fruit jelly mold. I tested the Long Weekend, which was not only quite tasty, but brought on nostalgia of days passed.

While there, I took a quick peek at Marvels and Ciphers: A Look Inside The Flask. Art and objects drawn from the permanent collection depicted chemistry in action throughout the ages, tempered with a healthy dose of humor.

A quick jaunt through the rest of Old City proved forgettable, except for my first contact of the evening with performance. In the window of Bodega, Matt Savitsky was playing a character named Minty. Paint-mottled and gender-ambiguous, one moment s/he was acting as though asleep and unconcerned with the presence of a spectator, while the next moment enthusiastically vamping for my camera. Nestled in a bed of shredded newspapers, Minty was like a kitten in a pet store display window begging to be taken home.

At Grizzly Grizzly I caught up with Tim Eads (a former colleague from The Fabric Workshop) and Tiernan Alexander. Lovingly entitled Husband vs. Wife, the show has started off peaceably enough, but promises to unfold with the drama of a title fight. The two, who are married, have split the gallery 50/50, doing two separate installations. Tim’s is an interactive work with tubing twined around wood joinery that snakes down from the ceiling; the tubes connect bicycle pumps to Gatorade bottles that bubble and perfume the air with a fruity scent. Tiernan’s is a domestic scene where things seem to be amiss: a plant grows from a card catalogue, a mass of braided hair looks about to spring to life and crawl out of a baby crib. But it is after the opening night that the fun truly begins, when husband and wife each get to muck about with the other’s work, or as Tim put it, make the other’s “better”. Revisions and manipulations will be ongoing throughout the month, until the final product is revealed at the closing on August 27.

Glowing bricks lit the way into the disorienting dark of Marginal Utility for Abigail D. DeVille’s Gold Mountain (apologies in advance, as it was impossible to photograph well). Black lights illuminated the front of the gallery; an infernal red shone in the back. According to what I have read on their website, DeVille’s work explores race as an issue in contemporary America. Funny, because I did not observe anything in the least that would suggest this theme. If anything, the installation started off about as groovy as cosmic bowling, but then, in following the brick path, led towards a circle painted on the back wall reminiscent of a hell-mouth. Road to perdition via rave?

Vox Populi was all about performance for the night. Going Out, enacted by Bobby Gonzales and Jean Suivan, was concerned with the rituals of its namesake. When I first came in, the two were situated in opposing corners of the gallery set up as though separate apartments, fiddling on their laptops whilst talking on the phone to one another. A bit later, they were getting ready in earnest to “go out”. I did not stay for the next step, which apparently involved dancing and other aspects that relate to clubbing. Moving on to the next gallery, Beth Heinly lounged in her underwear as she read aloud from Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking, a book by David Bayles and Ted Orland.

At the back gallery, I was completely delighted with Puppetyranny. By way of description, I will not say much, other than to direct you to the two videos below. Zachary Palladino acted as master of ceremonies, with Leslie Rogers offering her face as a proscenium, for a Mouth Puppet Show. A larger troupe of performers materialized to interpret Mystic Powers, the fantastical journey of two heroes who are literally joined at the hip, written by Palladino at the age of five.

Upstairs at Tiger Strikes Asteroid I chatted with Tom Vance about his Plan. There was a certain air of sereneness to the installation. The way in which the sculpture divided the gallery, channeling the flow of traffic, called to mind both Eastern and Western sensibilities, perhaps feng shui as well as the carefully manicured topiaries of a palatial European estate. Even the simple title of the work suggests landscape design. The partitioned fields within his paintings, like orderly compartments of a bento box, mimicked the feeling of human rationality as applied to nature.

Putting-Out at Leonard Pearlstein Gallery

2010-08-01T22:25:00.005-04:00

On Friday, I stopped by Leonard Pearlstein Gallery at Drexel University to meet with Candy Depew. She and her apprentices were finishing up the installation of Putting-Out! Practices in Cottage Industry and Urban Guilding, organized for the gallery by Filiz O’Brien, a friend and Arts Administration classmate of mine. A brief history lesson was in order, as Candy recounted to me the genesis of cottage industry and the “putting-out” system, an early form of entrepreneurship run by women and children from the home, that was influential laying groundwork for the Industrial Revolution. Although industry assimilated and overtook many types of cottage industry, it has never really gone away. Candy astutely pointed to Etsy as all the evidence one needs to see how robust “putting-out” remains today. She is heavily invested in screen printing, both as personal practice and as a teacher, and she sees screen printing as one of the main avenues of today’s cottage industry. In this way, she passes on a skill, whereby others can initiate and sustain their own creative commerce.

The focal point of the installation is a loosely-rendered wall painting of an actual cottage; when I arrived, apprentice Emilie Fosnocht was giving it a final touch up. Examples of Candy’s work, primarily screen printed items, radiate outward from the cottage, around the entire gallery. She calls her method of applying a decorative veneer to all possible surfaces “candy-coating”—also the title of her website. In the current show, the collected imagery represents something of a kitchen-sink approach, a tableau of the various iconographies that recur in her work. She explained to me the meaning behind some of the symbols: diamonds, because of their elemental composition, correlate to humans and all other forms of carbon-based life; koi fish, when appearing in clusters of seven, bring luck; and the ghoulish faces date to her time in New Orleans, when Anne Rice’s Interview With The Vampire was being filmed on location and she would see costumed actors roving the streets at 2 a.m.

Putting-Out! Practices in Cottage Industry and Urban Guilding opens today, August 2, and runs through September 10. Candy will be running a screen printing demonstration at the opening reception on Wednesday, August 4 at 6:30 p.m.

Road Trip - The Aldrich Museum

2010-07-31T00:28:00.007-04:00

I drove up to New England to see my parents over the long Independence Day weekend. Whenever I go, I try to hit as many museums as possible, but inevitably I must narrow my focus to a select few that I particularly want to see on that trip. This time, The Aldrich Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut was at the top of my list. One of the things I love about The Aldrich is that it is exactly the right size. The museum presents exhibitions which are consistently manageable in scale and always of high artistic value. You could spend two to three hours at The Aldrich, experiencing each exhibition very thoroughly, and you would leave not feeling overwhelmed. I have found it to be a rather refreshing place to visit.

Currently, the atrium is perforated by Gina Ruggeri’s cavern-like wormholes, which belch sinister clouds of gas—painted Mylar decals adhered to the walls.

The eponymously-titled KAWS was the main draw for my visit. KAWS (real name: Brian Donnelly) is based in Brooklyn, though apparently he is of much better renown in Japan than in the United States. You will have seen at least one of his designs; he created the cover for Kanye West’s 808s and Heartbreak.

Should I try to classify the work? Is it street art? Design? Pop art? Appropriation art? Wholesale rip-off? The only proper way to describe it is as a buffet of assimilation and subversion. The artist is obsessed with popular cartoon culture, altering iconic characters in such a way as to unsettle the firmly-set image in the mind’s eye of the viewer. For example, he starts with the Simpsons, “X-es out” their eyes, adds goofy skull teeth and grotesque ear-like growths, and calls them the Kimpsons. But these mutations do not feel like cruel potshots at images that the inner child fondly treasures. When KAWS looks at these cartoons, he must see something entirely different than most of us see. Could he simply be aligning what he perceives, to match what the outside audience will see? I do not consider these works to be incisive commentary on cultural touchstones like Mickey Mouse or the Michelin Man. I believe this to be KAWS’s way of cherishing these same characters we all love. Through repetition of the same characters, with slight variances each successive time, he has built his artistic lexicon.

I enjoyed his advertising-based works the most, where he paints directly onto the ad. The sight of a slithery creature winding around Kate Moss was both disquieting and delightful. The inherent dichotomy is that he has taken something so overtly commercial and, with a few judicious strokes, inverted it into something equally commercial in a market which began underground, but is now mainstream. His early bus shelter posters, typified at The Aldrich by Calvin Klein perfume ads, became highly sought after commodities, with collectors snatching them right off the streets. His figurines and statues are prized and expensive collectibles. And he has extended his brand by providing designs to the purveyors of shoes, snowboards, and other merchandise. I am guessing his original intention as a guerrilla artist was a bit more radical, but KAWS was shrewd to embrace saleablity when market demand, instead of running from it, when interest in his work exploded.

On the second floor, the exhibition Gary Lichtenstein: 35 Years of Screenprinting was a feast of gorgeous artist edition prints. Lichtenstein ran a studio in San Francisco, and then later in Connecticut, where for decades he has made prints for widely-known artists. The designs on display are not his own, but the art and practice that has brought them to life are solely to his credit. Through his use of color, Lichtenstein puts a direct stamp on the prints he produces. Some pieces use dozens of colors, a labor-intensive process, each requiring a discrete pass of pigment. Shelves had been built into one gallery wall to house a collection of used ink cans. I was completely taken with the signature touches in the way the show had been designed and installed. The introductory text panel was actually exposed onto the emulsion of a silkscreen, which was then made legible by squeegeeing dark ink through the mesh. The banal formality of the introductory text in a museum exhibition is a given, even when it communicates interesting information; to see it presented in such a innovative and sensitively subject-specific fashion jolted my expectations in the best way possible. The exhibition had the true feeling of a print studio, from the screens, to the drying rack loaded with artist proofs, to the wall of pigments. As a means of bringing the audience closer to the artist and his work, the exhibition succeeded in every way possible.

I cannot neglect to mention Beryl Korot: Text/Weave/Line—Video, also on the second floor. In her recent works of video, Korot weaves together word and image into a kind of multimedia textile. These represent a natural evolution from her work Text and Commentary from 1977, also on display, where she stages a row of televisions broadcasting extreme close-ups of textiles, the zigzagging patterns of which she has mirrored with graphite on paper grids, all divided by a screen of hanging fabric bolts. Korot was an early adapter of portable video technology and a pioneer in video art.

Vox VI

2010-07-26T01:35:00.004-04:00

Vox VI is the sixth edition of Vox’s summer exhibition of emerging artists. William Powhida and Jennifer Dalton served as the jurors, selecting a high concentration of artists from the Philadelphia region as well as New York and New Jersey. The event can be viewed as something of an annual barometer to the emerging or dominant trends and tastes that cycle through local creative communities. In the curation and installation of the show, each of the galleries at Vox has been used to a distinct effect, creating five separate clusters of work that synergize around a leitmotif. These are not stated or outward themes, but the ones that I have perceived.

The lobby gallery had a cheekiness to it. Clint Baclawski’s large, floor-bound lightboxes are either making fun of the subject of the photographs—an inflatable Titanic/iceberg playground in a gym and corporate logo emblazoned promo tents at the foot of a ski slope—or the boxes themselves are meant as a gag. On the wall just above them, Joshua Weibley’s Untitled (You Make Kitty Scared), takes on LOLcats and other viral internet memes, using an impressive ink on paper technique to imitate by hand the printout of a grainy photocopy or an inkjet printer on the fritz. Nothing Could Drag Me Away from the Soft Glow of Electric Sex in the Window by Sanford Mirling, alludes to Jean Shepherd’s A Christmas Story, which for me inspired dread at the Turner television networks’ nonstop marathons of the film during the winter holidays. Then there were Deyra Atlan’s gaudily decorated box traps: she is hunting a monster, apparently a chain-smoker with a weakness for whiskey (the bait used). As for Amber DuBois's Pop Off, just the title is funny, mostly for this reason (thank you to Joel McHale and The Soup!).

Gallery one evoked a science fiction tinged, 1950s vision of things to come. In another piece, Joshua Weibley creates a Flintstones version of a desktop computer, with a stone for a mouse. Megan Hays Selever Rex uses bright orange extension cord as totem to electronics. Manuel Pena’s photograph with Rock Hudson’s face pasted over a modern day sitter reminded me of his underappreciated paranoid, plastic surgery thriller Seconds. Aidan Rumack built fluorescent tube prison cells to enshrine a taxidermy bird and a spacecraft fashioned from an ostrich eggshell. Sheila Whitsett contributed a mirrored monolith, and a Superman ice “Fortress of Solitude” reminiscent pile of crystals and instant snow. There is also Matt Kalasky’s video of a helmeted space commander, Katelyn Greth’s genetic mutant hybrids Sheep Boy and Dog Boy, and Nora Salzman’s android-like replicas (or replicants?).

Gallery two was pop fun. The entire tone of the room is punctuated by Piper Brett’s Large Bow, imparting a celebratory jubilance. I also thought a bit about her Phone Number—is it an exultation of the numbers, phones or telecommunications in general, or is it some kind of longing portrait of the person on the other end of the phone line? Joshua Bienko provides entertainment in the form of his art raps, which are clever and insidery, harnessing the supersaturated braggadocio of hip-hop videos, but almost bordering on a too-cool-for-school act that’s more self-serious than it is ironic. I preferred his Ever So Much More pieces, where he painted iconic works of Jeff Koons and Anish Kapoor on the rouge soles of Louboutins, a more definitive comment on the current state of pop art. Rounding out the feel of the gallery: Dustin Metz’s Warhol-appropriating paintings; Diedra Krieger’s woozy infomercial shorts; and Kelli Miller’s dizzying computer wallpapers of animated gifs.

Gallery Three looked into the past. Lacuna Shadows by Lauren Dombrowiak dominates the space. The stacked china set against a patch of richly patterned wallpaper and carpeting, feels positively Victorian for its choice of found object. Sarah Knouse’s drippy, melted lawn flamingos suggest a burning effigy to icons of suburban kitsch. The small porcelain figurines of Janet Macpherson are presented as if medieval artifacts coming from an off-kilter fairytale land. And Susan Marie Brundage’s works on paper offer a weird, mystical take on life in rural America. I will lump Constanze Pirch’s hallway installation into this lot, because she has other smaller paintings in the gallery.

Finally, gallery four in the back gives off the whiff of depression and decay. Jordan Griska’s deflated accordion of a vintage gas pump deconstructs king oil and pairs appropriately with Samantha Simmons’ charcoal treatments of the undercarriages of cars. Catelynn Booth examines the underside of a bridge with what looks like a construction tarp tearing away. Lindsay Foster’s video Father Lover Friend is road trip that meanders an ambiguous path through emotionally wrenching territory. Dustin Metz paints the abandoned interior of the restaurant Que Chula Es Puebla, with an odd pigment-splattered table set for dinner, but not a human in sight (save for a floating hand).

I would be remiss if I did not mention Jennifer Campbell’s work in the video lounge, not technically part of Vox VI. In Eruption, she creates the illusion of Mt. Rainier as a reawakened volcano, holding a smoke-spewing tube in the foreground. Precipitate shows two figures suspended from trees who perform acrobatics while hoses attached to their faces spurt jets of water.

Second Friday, July 2010

2010-07-19T00:20:00.008-04:00

On the second Friday of July I scoped another full slate of openings, encompassing Locks Gallery, Bridgette Mayer Gallery, and just about everything at 319 North 11th. I’ll attempt to touch on everything that I saw, excluding Vox Populi’s Vox VI, which because of its size will get its own subsequent post.

The first floor gallery of Locks, housing Thomas Chimes’ On Alfred Jarry, was vacant of people. His white-washed canvases gave the impression of peering through a bayside fog, or reaching back through the hazy filter of memory. I could not resist the meticulous surface texture of the paint, his almost perfectly regular and parallel brushstrokes stretching unbroken from end to end, which inspired an agreeable hypnosis.

But the second floor was the center of action, for the opening of Whiteout by Nadia Hironaka and Matt Suib. Consisting of both a single- and a two-channel video installation, the black and white visuals are flipped to negative, splashing the walls with an ethereal pallor that is made more vaporous by the fact that they are meant to be exhibited in a lit gallery. White ants scurry against a dark surface, shifting sands cascade down from a dune then reverse back into place again, and a horse rolls on its back in a grove of white birch with color inverted to black. There is also a wall installation of cut vinyl hiding in plain sight, which imitates the ripples of wind- or water-worn sand. The cinematic evocations of the video imagery are intentionally strong: the visuals feel familiar enough to bring to mind certain film classics, while leaving some ambiguity as to their direct allusion.

At Bridgette Mayer Gallery, Mark Brosseau’s Wondrous Spaces lived up to its title. I found the paintings to be enigmatic, playful, and ultimately pleasurable. The media of these works was primarily water-based paints and ink. He paints shapes, serpentine bands, and irregular squiggles of color on top one another, creating bleeds and unevenly applied patches of pigment. These imperfections held my attention the most. I sensed a definite Josef Albers influence, but it was almost as though Brosseau had painted abstract, impossible landscapes where the mind game is to figure out how you could traverse or inhabit them.

Lovetown, PA at Tiger Strikes Asteroid is part of Gene Schmidt’s project of the same name, a multidisciplinary work that defies strict categorization, incorporating performance, video, sculpture, text, and social activism. Schmidt wound a path from North to West Philadelphia placing individually lettered blocks to spell out Paul’s appraisal of love from 1 Corinthians 13. Robert Indiana-imposed Philly “Love” this is not: that iconic piece is a destination, in the sense that one must go to it. With Lovetown, PA, Schmidt finds people where they already are. He integrates the individual characters and neighborhoods on his route, creating an organic narrative that teases out true reflection of inhabitants and places. The work is uplifting and a marvel of execution. My only problem with the gallery installation was that it felt more like presentation of artifacts and relics from the artwork, rather than an integral contribution to its composition, as I believe it was intended to be. The video, photographs, and arrangement of the letter squares, while giving a good overview of the project, came off as strict documentation. Nevertheless, Lovetown, PA is worth a visit as a reminder that love and beauty are all around; sometimes you just need someone to point it out to you.

Rachel Mason’s The Deaths of Hamilton Fish at Marginal Utility, which had opened the month prior, held my interest for a particular reason. The name Hamilton Fish was one I have known for many years, due specifically to the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge (also known as the Hamilton Fish Bridge), where Interstate 84 crosses the Hudson River. I have driven on the bridge innumerable times, most recently this past Fourth of July weekend, but never knew the significance of its namesake. Spurred by Mason’s project, which includes original music, video, and installation, I learned that Hamilton Fish was a nineteenth century governor of New York and a United States Senator. Mason fashioned a narrative centering on Hamilton Fish II, the Governor’s son and a politician in his own right, and Albert Hamilton Fish, a serial killer. She begins with the historical coincidence that both men died on the same day—the former presumably of old age and the latter by state execution—and from there weaves a fictional ballad about how their separate lives terminate at a fateful intersection.

Right next door, Grizzly Grizzly offered another historically tinged show with Matthew Craven’s Future Myths. Craven used found images from old book pages, collaged and painted over, such as portraits of uniformed cavalry from the Union army and other assorted military scenes. He either removes or replaces the individuals’ faces, then superimposes geometric patterns painted only in primary colors. The commentary seems to lie with American history, perhaps conquest of the West or Manifest Destiny, but I remain mystified as to what Craven was trying to say.

First Friday, July 2010

2010-07-10T09:00:00.001-04:00

I took advantage of an early dismissal from work on the Friday before this Independence Day weekend to visit PAFA and PMA, which whetted my appetite for this month’s First Friday. Then I remembered that we are now in the dead of summer, the art world’s wasteland off-season. My fears were to be both confirmed and refuted, as I took consolation in some quality amid spotty offerings.

I first tried my luck in Old City, walking in and then quickly out of Pentimenti Gallery’s Three Weeks Only! without much regard for its contents. Shifting next door to Dalet Gallery, I found an exhibition with the focused quality worthy of a spring or fall showing, not one meant to be buried amongst summer’s scrap pile. Featuring six contributors with The Center For Emerging Visual Artists and curated by Amie Potsic, the work felt evocative of crisper weather, limited in color palette to black, white, and some red. I was enthralled with Gregory Brelloch’s sublime celestial scenes and his command of graphite on paper. I immediately thought of two points of comparison, having just seen both of them at PMA: an almost photorealistically detailed Vija Celmins seascape (also graphite on paper) in the exhibition Water Work, and a Giovanni Battista Tiepolo etching in Visions of Venice employing his signature perspective of gazing upward toward the heavens. Among the other artists included, Danielle Bursk’s paintings of finely crosshatched white lines against black—and vice-versa—wove nests of intrigue.

I quickly peered into The Clay Studio which was opening its Seventh Annual Marge Brown Kalodner Graduate Student Exhibition. After I left, I found it hard to shake this little grotesquerie, Clayton Keyes’ The Collector, though not necessarily for positive reasons. Browsing through his website reveals a coterie of other malformed misfits. But his work was memorable, which many of the other selections were not. One other standout oddity, Undine Brod’s trio of mounted trophy heads that look like bandage-wrapped Frankenstein animals pieced together with spare parts.

The Bambi Biennial, now in its second edition, was next. My expectations were high: the ArtBlog ladies talk a big game; could they back it up? In case you had not heard—which, if you keep an ear to the local scene, it would be impossible to remain unawares—Roberta Fallon and Libby Rosof were the jurors.

The immediate feeling I got walking into the gallery was entirely chaotic. Bambi Gallery is a fine space for some shows, but scale is key, because it did absolute disservice to their Biennial. The installation was salon style hell, the true depiction of which my photos cannot convey, aggravated by the number of people squeezed into the limited area. Perhaps, salon style is an inaccurate label; in some way, it felt more like an art gallery version of entering inside a home on the morbidly riveting show Hoarders. Hyperbole? Yes, but the work had no room to breathe, which was of issue because I was not convinced of how well it all coalesced. It is hard for me to say what I liked, since I felt distracted the whole time. I do not fault the artists selected, because independent of their individual merits, they are the victims of circumstance: the gallery and the two jurors should have known better than to stack artwork everywhere.

Crossing to the The Piazza’s opposite wing, the brand new Vincent Michael Gallery revealed a scene of marked contrast. With a crowd that appeared larger than the one I had just left, but more open space to hold them, the atmosphere was one of free-flowing energy and interaction (at Bambi, people were huddling around in impenetrable cliques). I think that pride was a differentiating factor for the VM Gallery crew, excited to share the long-delayed opening with any and all. The straightforward central narrative of the inaugural exhibition, PaperMonster Ate That Little Boy, also helped. The artist PaperMonster had a palpable exuberance. Being present when he was putting final touches on the wall stencil (see my previous post), I could see how pleased he was with it. Unequivocally the pièce de résistance, all of the smaller pieces orbit around its gravitational pull, which was not at all a bad thing. The work is impermanent, and naturally burns brighter in its short lifespan.

Oh, and that nasty little piece of agitprop, The Art Of The Steal, was screening at the Piazza that evening. Been there, seen it, and don’t get me started on its insidiousness wrapped in white knight crudsaderism!

Exclusive Preview: PaperMonster at the new Vincent Michael Galley

2010-06-28T01:00:00.003-04:00

Yesterday I was treated to a preview of the new Vincent Michael Gallery at The Piazza at Schmidt’s, as it prepares to open to the public this Friday. I had been corresponding with Chris Clark, one of the gallery’s founders, about the bureaucratic troubles they had encountered in gaining permission to open for business. He had been searching for pop-up gallery options so as not to delay the launch of Vincent Michael Gallery any further—having already been barred from opening their June exhibition at the last minute—while they would wait for their permanent home to be cleared for use. Luckily, it did not come to desperate measures: the city released the facility from a seemingly arbitrary cease work order with just enough time for them to prep before July’s First Friday.

PaperMonster Ate That Little Boy is the inaugural show and when I arrived, the artist PaperMonster was putting some final touches on a large-scale stencil, graffiti and collage wall-installation. The work is impressive, a confident visual imprint for a new gallery that looks like it will succeed by differentiating itself from the cluster of other galleries in the immediate area. I spent some time speaking with Elizabeth Gault, a local independent curator who has been working with Vincent Michael Gallery. It is clear that these are not some crazy kids throwing whatever works up on a wall; real vision is guiding their choices.

Vincent Michael Gallery and PaperMonster Ate That Little Boy open on Friday, July 2 at 6 p.m.

Personal Renaissance at Dilworth Plaza

2010-06-27T11:17:00.008-04:00

What can one say about Dilworth Plaza? That it is a hobo hangout? A gaping pit in front of City Hall? A place that is only really loved, or at least used, by people who are marginalized in our society? It is a bizarre and liminal space filled with neglected crannies, where one passes from an underground labyrinth of SEPTA tunnels, to the surface of the city. In the two and a half years that I worked in Center City I walked through and around City Hall often, so it was with great interest that I investigated Mustafa Abdulaziz’s Personal Renaissance, a project that aims to make something more out of the space. The title has resonance with the plaza, and the architectural revival project which has been proposed for it by the Center City District. But, does the placement of the photography do it proper service?

Personal Renaissance is a convergence of several programs, headed by the Mural Arts Program under the subsidiary banner of the Porch Light Initiative, which is a partnership between MAP and the City of Philadelphia Department of Behavioral Health. The portrait sitters are recovering addicts at the Act II Center of the JEVS Human Services facility in Kensington. Photographs are paired with poetry they have written as an exercise in personal growth as part of their recovery process. Abdulaziz has documented them as they participate in the creation of a new mural for MAP, also to be named Personal Renaissance. They are confident, affecting, and beautiful portraits (the triptych is particularly dynamic) which demand pause and the viewer’s undivided attention—attention which I believe will not be paid properly by most of those who pass through the plaza.

Chugging ahead without regard for surroundings is part of an everyday commute mindset. One could go so far as to say that it is a survival technique, an emotional shield, for getting through daily life. How often do we ignore or not even register what is directly in front of us? It’s always easiest to get past someone panhandling for money if you avoid eye-contact in the first place, avoiding that trigger of guilt. For this reason, I wonder whether the installation of Abdulaziz’s photographs is successful, though the intention is honorable. The portraits contain a natural luminosity, which is probably why I kept thinking of what they would look like mounted on lightboxes. Could they gain more attention if this was the case? But even then, just like backlit advertising in public transit corridors, we train ourselves to filter out extraneous messages that we see so repeatedly. I was the odd man out in looking at these photos; for everyone else, they seemed to be background noise.

Opening of The Art Gallery At City Hall

2010-06-19T10:21:00.006-04:00

One of the many pleasures of having a week break from school is that I get to attend openings and events after work. This week it was the opening of the new gallery at city hall—rather unambiguously christened, The Art Gallery At City Hall. I was totally unaware that this was in the works, the only promotion of it that I saw posted the day prior to its opening. Apparently, others must have known, because there was a solid crowd assembled when I got there. The ribbon cutting ceremony and official opening were on hold until the mayor arrived, as we waited in a rather hot and steamy hallway. Isn’t that the traditional story of waiting for municipal services?

The gallery is in a prime spot just off of the east Market Street entrance of city hall, in a room that used to house the Mayor’s Action Center. Accessibility is the key, as well as confirmation of the arts as a priority for the Mayor; but good intentions alone will not be enough to divert the everyday pedestrian traffic that cuts through City Hall into the gallery. I did not notice any signage posted, except immediately outside of the gallery door. Also, the presence of a guard outside the glass doors leading into the corridor, though understandable in terms of security, was not the most welcoming sight. In order for the gallery to be true to the vision behind it, the office must find a way to draw in visitors regardless of the reason they are at City Hall. Paying your water bill? Marriage License? Legal trouble? Come to see the art.

Once the event began, Chief Cultural Officer Gary Steuer was the first to speak, making the requisite thank yous to those who helped to support the gallery. He highlighted the ways in which the space had been made as “green” as possible, from the choice of paint to the flooring. Next up was Jean Canfield of PNC Bank, whose Arts Alive program had provided significant funding.

Finally, Mayor Nutter took the podium. He praised the work of The Office of Arts, Culture, and the Creative Economy, referring to Philadelphia’s ever-increasing profile as a globally-known arts destination. Like any good politician, he would not let a good chance go to waste of reminding a captive audience how the lethargic state of the economy is not his fault; but he tempered these comments with an unequivocal affirmation that in the face of the city’s belt-tightening measures, the arts always have a seat at the table.

With that, the Mayor cut the ribbon to allow guests into the new gallery. The setup of the space has the individual offices each branching off directly from the central gallery. There is a true air of openness about the room, projecting the sense that Philadelphia’s cultural officers are accessible to those who visit the gallery, not hidden in some restricted upper-level floor.

The exhibition’s title, On The Rise (a bit of a half-groaner), feels like it has more to do with the opening of the gallery than any of the art in it, though focused on local emerging artists. I would suppose then, that both parties are on the rise, so to speak. Partnering organizations—The Center For Emerging Visual Artists, InLiquid, and Philadelphia Sculptors—provided artwork for this first show. It does not make sense to do an appraisal of any individual work, other than to say that Darla Jackson’s Surprise Party series was the most appropriately festive for a spanking new art gallery. (P.S. – Check the Inquirer’s endearingly goofy photo of Mayor Nutter pretending to blow out the candles on the cake that is part of Jackson’s work. Mr. Mayor, you know that you are not supposed to handle artwork without white gloves, right?) On The Rise remains open through August 6, go see it and the new Art Gallery At City Hall!

Art In The Open, or Philadelphia in 2010 ≠ 19th Century Paris

2010-06-14T23:51:00.004-04:00

On my lunch break this past Friday I booked down to the river to see Art In The Open (AiO). The short timeframe limited my viewing to the stretch between Walnut Street and JFK Boulevard (the full span of AiO extended along the Schuylkill from the Water Works to Bartram’s Gardens). At 1:00 pm on beautiful day, traffic was sparse and the feeling was relaxed. Some people were lunching al fresco, and there were only a scattered few runners and bikers, as well as some strolling pensioners. It was nothing like the rush the river path sees on a weekend or after work hours have ended. I got the impression that Art In The Open is better experienced set against the energy generated by throngs of visitors, rather than the calm of a lazy day. There were also numerous participatory classes and events planned for Saturday, which I inevitably missed.

Citing inspiration from the artist practice of working en plein air, one might think that the participating artists are limited to those of an Impressionist-inspired landscape painting persuasion. Indeed, I did encounter some painters out with their easels; with no disrespect their art or methods, watching a painter of this breed in action does not make for a terribly eventful or invigorating spectator sport. Integral to AiO’s concept is to interact freely with the artists and I did observe artists chatting with passersby. The atmosphere is meant to foster free exchange of ideas.

However, the scope is more encompassing of other media. Take the work of Swiss artist Roy Andres Hofer as an example, who interpreted the idea of “open air” artwork via a picnic. Alluding to Édouard Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l'herbe, he instead offered a picnic spread of processed junk food. The packaged goodies sat sweating in the sun and encircled ritualistically with paper plates, devoid of partakers, like a Día de los Muertos grave offering. In another picnic referencing work, I came across Harry Bower’s Earth Blanket, which was woven from the plastic belts used in classic-style folding lawn chairs.

The most intriguing project I viewed was Polygon Blooms, a collaboration of Benjamin Volta with Jerry Jackson and students from Grover Washington, Jr. Middle School. Ensconced beneath the umbrage of the Market Street bridge, it consisted of a sculptural work mirrored by geometric shapes on the opposing wall. What I liked most about Polygon Blooms was the use of environment. Undersides of bridges, forgotten spaces in plain sight, conjure all kinds of pithy imagery—society’s marginalized people, graffiti encrusted walls.

Okay, so this is not nearly the first art project to take place under a bridge. But it was a pronounced contrast going from the conventionality of artist painting in the manicured park-like landscape along the river path, to the minimalistic delights of geometric forms traced over the raw and slightly shabby industrial understructure of the bridge. The polygons were absolutely transformative to the space, drawing beauty out of—or at least on top of—a concrete wall. The ephemerality of medium, simple masking tape, made their existence all the more precious.

Art In The Open should continue as an annual event, growing with passing years in breadth and ambition. What I hope will cease is an apparent trend of mining ideas from Nineteenth Century Paris. Without question, it was one of many cultural pinnacles for western art. But I do not think that my eyes could roll back further into my head if once more I hear anyone say that we strive for the Benjamin Franklin Parkway to become like the Champs-Élysées. And now arrives AiO, with the idea of art en plein air as its thematic crux. I have always regarded the notion of American Impressionism to be misplaced; Impressionism was French to the core, expressing a concept of modernity for that particular environment and era. This is Philadelphia—nowhere else—and it is one decade into the Twenty-first Century. If anything, we should look to American models for inspiration and reinterpretation. We have a youthful population and a wellspring of limitless ideas on our side. Our ideas for the future, while not being ignorant of the past, must push ahead, deriving identity from our own character, surroundings, and place in time.

First Friday, June 2010

2010-06-06T08:50:00.009-04:00

This month I was presented with a reason to venture further North into Fishtown than I have ever been before. I am grateful for this nudge. Bridgette Bussey, a classmate and friend of mine from Drexel University was having an opening at Rocket Cat Café. Walking over from the Berks El station, I encountered a tank painted with pink camouflage and tagged with graffiti. I crossed through the grassy area where it sat, past a giant twelve-sided die, over to the café.

The coffee shop as an exhibition space is a firmly established cliché. But the eclectic character of Rocket Cat Café fosters a different experience. Make no mistake: this is the stuff of hipster fantasyland. The cluttered décor has the second-hand uniqueness of being assembled piecemeal from flea markets, thrift stores, and granny’s attic. There is a certain sense of intentional stylistic dilapidation, though everything is fully operational. Every corner of the place is idiosyncratic, making for interesting installation of the art. If the traditional coffee shop art show is the equivalent of an institutional gallery hanging, then this is closer to being haphazard salon style: artworks are fit in like puzzle pieces wherever there is room.

Outside of Rocket Cat Café is a Shepard Fairey mural, pasted up in April while the artist was in the region working on his show for Deitch Projects. There is nothing guerilla about the work, which was mounted with full permission. As much as I disliked Fairey’s offerings at Dietch Projects, for context and iconographic tedium, I happen to like the mural here. It meshes with the outward visual character of the neighborhood.

Up the block I visited three artist-run spaces. Most notably, Ryan V. Brennan’s collages at Part Time Studios burst out of the picture plane with irrepressible energy, rupturing the frames that house them like self-activated pop-up books which do not know their own strength. I enjoyed his “Cinemallage” pieces, which construct miniature worlds to house videos of stop-motion animation.

The vibe at VWVOFFKA gallery felt limited on ideas, not necessarily the fault of any individual artwork shown. I mostly avoided Highwire Gallery after a cursory breeze-through told me everything I would need to know about the current exhibition. If you can count on anything from artist-run spaces, it is the fact that they will be unpredictably hit-or-miss from show to show, and from artist to artist in group shows (not that I have any prior perspective specific to the three locations described here). What is important above all is that they exist.

I then hopped a bus down to Girard, from which I headed towards The Piazza. Does anyone out there know who does these street art tags of a submarine floating in a pint glass?

Kim Alsbrooks’ White Trash at Bambi Gallery took my breath away. Repurposing dirty trash, such as crumpled food containers or flattened beer cans, she adorns them with lovingly rendered cameos copied from late-Eighteenth and early-Nineteenth Century portraits. There are a number of currents playing upon the series, not limited to: turning trash into treasure; objects of mass consumption transformed into unique keepsakes; the juxtaposition of the dignified sitters versus the vulgarity of the marketing messages. For me, the pure pleasure of looking closely at each work was what clinched it. The miniature scale invites careful inspection, which allows one to see that these are not entirely polished portraits or exacting copies. The hand of the artist is very much present, imbuing a certain casualness that gives the impression of an intimate familiarity with the sitter.

Andrés Alvarez, also a recycler, shared the gallery with her, fashioning collaged cereal boxes into his canvas. His paintings are larger-in-scale landscapes that allow much of the underlying layer of found material to shine through. For the evening, Bambi Gallery felt positively Neoclassical Academic by way of the Twenty-first Century.

I ended my First Friday crawl at Projects Gallery for It’s Who You Know. The premise is that five local artists, who have previously shown there, were chosen to invite five other artists to contribute one work. Is the concept terribly original? What professional community does not operate within the network of “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”? The description on their website elaborates, “With no prevailing theme, the work will represent the taste and artistic expressions of the initial five. It will be illustrative of overlapping styles within social groups while highlighting the schisms that exist between the groups themselves.” Based on what I saw, I would agree with the first statement (which is simply factual), but not so much on the second point (which is a bunch of hooey).

That said, I had few arguments with the five artists’ curating choices. I adored Mia Rosenthal’s hand drawing of every piece of cereal in a General Mills 8 Pack, which would transfer beautifully to a silkscreen repeat pattern. I also liked Brooke Holloway’s contribution, which cuts to the heart of the gender politics at play in all of her work that I’ve seen, minus the obviousness of the blatantly sexual imagery she often uses. One final notable, among many other solid pieces not to be listed, was Aubrie Costello’s cigarette pack proscenia for exotic dancers (another recycled trash artwork!).

Seeing the one Susan Howard painting in the back gallery, I am really kicking myself for missing Tipping Point at Projects last month.

Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables

2010-05-30T12:48:00.008-04:00

I finally made my way to SoHo to view the Jeff Koons curated Skin Fruit. Now that I can say that I have seen it, I have leave to air my own grievances. The provenance of the exhibition leaves me with an icky feeling too, just as all those who have decried the New Museum since the show was announced. If you are unfamiliar with the ethical controversy on how the entire exhibition was culled from the personal collection of New Museum Trustee and Greek-Cypriot contemporary art-accumulating billionaire Dakis Joannou, there is a good primer at Art Fag City. Koons could have shut up all of his critics if Skin Fruit was a grand slam; alas, it is quite the opposite. Joannou’s collection is vast, and Koons selections from it make both he and his ur-patron appear to lack any discretion in taste whatsoever.

Photographs cannot do justice to just how chaotic it feels inside of the galleries (see Vernissage TV’s video tour for a better idea). I can only imagine that this is an unfiltered peek at what the inside of Koons' head must look like: dozens of giant, clashing ideas clawing their way out, wreaking monkey business along the way. Remembering what it looks like in his studio (from the TateShots clip below), I cannot say that I am surprised. To be upfront, I am an admirer of the man in various ways; however, this is not his finest moment.

Briefly, the fourth floor is a catastrophe, the third floor is poor, the second floor is kind of okay, and the small gallery on the first floor is all but unremarkable. There were some bright spots for me, such as the Robert Gober room. Overall, I believe that the problem is that any excellent artwork is drowned out by the big, bad, bombastic artwork; the exhibition becomes only as good as its weakest, most crass links. By way of example, the inclusion of two Paul McCarthy sculptures, when really one would have been more than enough. How about the bullying dominance of Roberto Cuoghi’s Pazuzu over the entire fourth floor gallery?

The other day I found myself silently judging someone who was raving positively about Skin Fruit. This individual singled out Tino Sehgal’s security-guard-singing piece This Is Propaganda as an example of its greatness. Am I wrong to feel this way? I resolve to sleep comfortably.

But the expedition to Bowery was not all bad. At about 11:45, while I was standing outside, waiting for the doors to open, who did I see but Matthew Barney and Björk also waiting to be admitted? They get special treatment at MoMA in order to be able to sit with Marina Abramović, but not at New Museum: they have to wait along with the unwashed masses! It happened that there was a weekend-long symposium going on, of which I was lucky enough to catch about an hour. I saw Gabe Bartalos speak, makeup and special effects artist artist for the Cremaster cycle and Drawing Restraint 9, as well as numerous B-grade horror flicks as Leprechaun and Frankenhooker. The subject of that day was creating images of death. He showed clips of his work and gave insight into his behind-the-scenes process. In speaking about the sculptural nature of his art (i.e. things like the cast latex or synthetic pieces used to simulate wounds), Bartalos described how excessive use of fake blood can be a way that makeup artists hide imperfections in their work; to him, “Blood or goo are the curtains on a really nice house, which sits on a really great foundation.” How cool is that?

Ni Una Mas at Leonard Pearlstein Gallery

2010-05-24T19:40:00.010-04:00

If you have visited Leonard Pearlstein Gallery at Drexel University in the past, forget all previous knowledge. No longer ensconced in the limiting compartment off of Nesbitt Hall’s lobby, Ni Una Mas inaugurates a new and expansive gallery space, used effectively in the current offering and brimming with potential for future exhibitions. It is a somber yet worthy debut for the building, located on Filbert Street between 36th and 34th Streets, considering the emotional and thematic heft of Ni Una Mas (Not One More), which draws upon the holocaust of young women in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.

Some of the artwork deals directly with the murders, while other pieces are more nuanced in approach or were even created years before the current crisis began. Taken as a whole, the exhibition is ambitious in size, gathering a combination of twenty artists, a number of whom are bona fide blue chip titans of the international art world, and placing them alongside artists of emerging and lesser-known mid-career status. The mixing of these artists could have been a terrible albatross, where the celebrities suck all the air out of the room. But the combination is seamless, with all the pieces working in concert to amplify the cause that Ni Una Mas underlines.

The contributions of Frank Bender are a fascinating example of the exhibition’s thematic power. He is a self-taught forensic facial reconstruction expert who has worked on numerous high-profile cases and has bootstrapped himself into something of an outsider artist slash social crusader. Bridging a crossroads between art, science, and crime scene investigation, his work, already imbued with a healthy dose of altruism, is elevated here by context and proximity.

Ticking off the big names, there is a Kiki Smith lithograph as well as several Nancy Spero works on the torture of women (the two, kindred spirits in a way). They are decent, if unremarkable examples from two eminent artists with formidable bodies of work. Nevertheless, their presence helps if for nothing else than to lend credibility and a roundness to the exhibition.

Then there is Yoko Ono’s Heal, a new work contributed especially for Ni Una Mas. Consisting of a slashed sheet of canvas, viewers are invited to mend the cuts with provided needles, thread, and fabric for patches. She allows for participants’ creativity to flow freely in the stitching, depending on their interaction for the ongoing completion of the work. In this way, it also becomes a performance piece. The silhouette from the back, as many hands work upon it, is elegiacally poetic.

I am most definitely a fan of Margarita Cabrera, who is represented here by four of her soft vinyl sculptures, all objects of domestic servitude, the role that employs so many female Mexican immigrants in the United States. Is she the inheritor to Claes Oldenburg? Scale, social context, and era have everything to do with how she is different.

Emerging artist Andrea Marshall had to be my favorite, offering a series of photo works and a painting. Yes, this is another female artist who uses identity-skewing role play in self-portraits to comment on the way women are perceived and treated by men. But there is a certain energy which makes her work different. Though the influences are obvious (Kahlo, Dali, Man Ray, Warhol, Cindy Sherman, et al.) she uses them judiciously, blending with tact and extrapolating something that feels new-ish. This is not a backhanded compliment; she exemplifies Millennials, and our penchant for mash-up and remix, done right.

Lise Bjørne Linnert, who performed at the beginning of ARTMARCH for Juárez (clip here), has created something akin to a war memorial for the femicide victims. Thousands of names, all uniquely hand-embroidered onto strips of cloth tape, are mounted across a pink wall. Their spacing holds a hidden meaning, using Morse code spelling to write out the American and Mexican national anthems. The title Desconocida, Unknown, Ukjent seems at least partly a misnomer, as it enshrines the names of the victims unless their identities are truly unknown. Regrettably, the work is ongoing due to the ever rising total of dead; it is staggering to be confronted with the sheer range of casualties.

Away from the main gallery, down a corridor, and past the restrooms is Teresa Serrano’s gripping, though profoundly unsettling video La Piñata, wherein a man demolishes a girl-shaped piñata with exponentially increasing aggression. He begins by pacing around the effigy with menacing intent, first caressing her with his staff. Then he begins to swing, sometimes making contact and breaking off a limb, sometimes swinging so violently that he misses. He continues until her head is all that dangles from the wire, before finally bashing it to the ground. The installation of the work is a stroke of genius: viewers stand in a darkened room and look through a large pane of glass into the adjacent room where the video is projected onto a wall. Whether this setup was intentional or a happy accident of necessity is a mystery, but I will give the benefit of the doubt. Its effect is like that of looking through a two-way mirror, evoking the atmosphere of a police station interrogation room or, more appropriately with this work, an execution chamber.

I kept looking at these Brian Maguire paintings; I’m not sure of what they are beyond a Jenny Saville rip-off.

There is far too much art for me to continue to dissect individually, and the greater part of it is excellent; further examples are posted below and at my Flickr photoset of the exhibition.

Ni Una Mas is a powerfully poignant journey; I noted one viewer standing outside the gallery overcome with emotion. It dares to shock, enthrall, evoke outrage, promote healing, and argue the case for why it all matters, never once turning preachy. There is also beauty nestled among the depictions of moral decay. It demands nothing less than one’s undivided attention and commands that the viewer be not only made aware of the Juárez murders, but also want to advocate for their end.

ARTMARCH for Juárez

2010-05-16T17:11:00.007-04:00

On Saturday, ARTMARCH for Juárez marked the opening of the ambitious new exhibition Ni Una Mas at Drexel University’s Leonard Pearlstein Gallery. Envisioned as a mass demonstration and collaborative work of performance art that will serve as a vehicle for social change, both the march and the exhibition respond to the epidemic of femicides that has taken place in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico (El Paso’s border-hugging twin city), since the early 1990s. The murders continue today, largely with impunity. The tally of victims is nothing short of catastrophic: there are differing official totals which report anywhere from 400-700 killed or missing women in the last decade, but with unreported and undiscovered victims, the actual number could be in the thousands.

The rally began at the 33rd Street Armory, where hundreds of participants assembled, some coming from Drexel, with many contingents representing their fraternity or sorority, but others hailing from Philadelphia at large. Each was provided with a Ni Una Mas t-shirt and a Yoko Ono designed button emblazoned with the word “Heal”, the title of the artwork she contributed to the exhibition. Women wore pink shirts, the color of the memorial crosses stuck into dusty desert soil for victims in Juárez, and men wore black shirts. At 3:00 p.m. the event began with instructions and rehearsal for the call and response chants by Joe Gregory, Head of Drexel’s Art and Art History Department.

Introductory comments followed, including speeches by Abbie Dean, a Drexel Trustee and Curator at Leonard Pearlstein Gallery; Gary Steuer, Chief Cultural Officer for the City of Philadelphia; Diana Washington Valdez, Pulitzer Prize nominated journalist of the El Paso Times; and Marisela Ortiz, founder of Mothers of Juárez and the mother of a victim. Of particular note was Larry Cox, Executive Director of Amnesty International USA, who proved himself an incredibly rousing and motivational orator. Finally, Norwegian artist Lise Bjørne Linnert gave a short but powerfully cathartic performance piece.

ARTMARCH was then off to the streets with its police escort, leaving the Armory and processing down Market Street, before turning North on 36th and then East on Filbert to arrive at the new site of Leonard Pearlstein Gallery. Women marchers formed a central column of pink, flanked on either side by files of the black-shirted men. When prompted by Joe Gregory through a bullhorn, participants chanted the slogans “Ni Una Mas,” and “Save the Girls: Not One More” to an accompanying drumbeat .There was also an instrumental cue by a brass band: when they played a dissonant note, the women participants would each shout the name of a different Juárez murder victim.

Arriving at the gallery, the women threaded carnations bearing the name of a victim or the designation “Unidentified” into a chain-link fence. An iconic pink cross, which has become the painful visual symbol associated with Juárez, was also planted at the site.

Please check back for the continuation of my Ni Una Mas coverage, when I will review the exhibition.

Eulogy for the Fatou & Fama Lion Mural

2010-05-13T23:51:00.004-04:00

Fatou & Fama Mural, April 24, 2010

Philadelphia is renowned as a city for public art, in particular for its murals. I am saddened by the recent loss of one such mural: the painted façade of the former Fatou & Fama restaurant at 40th and Chestnut streets in University City. I confess that I had never eaten at the restaurant before it shuttered sometime in late 2008 or early 2009. Its specialty was Senegalese cuisine. But I passed by the block frequently, both by car and on foot, and I always felt a soft spot for this locale.

Fatou & Fama site, May 13, 2010

Allow me to explain about the mural: it was not a work by the Mural Arts Program, but obviously a commission by the owners of the restaurant. Therefore, it had no protection after they closed their doors. So the site sat vacant for over a year, but recently I saw construction activity going on inside, followed by two men surveying the exterior. I knew then that the clock was on, and it would only be a matter of time before the mural would disappear. Sure enough, this Tuesday morning on the commute into the city, I saw a worker chiseling the plaster off the front of the building, stripping away the painted image with it.

Was the mural an especially exceptional work of art? Well, no. But it possessed a certain quality absent from all of the municipally-authorized murals which dot Philadelphia. It is almost as if this was outsider art to the more institutionalized status of works produced by the Mural Arts Program. This is not a knock on the Mural Arts Program, whose mission and accomplishments I admire very much. Whereas these city-sanctioned murals make a point of representing the neighborhoods where they are painted, as well as engaging the collaborative efforts from the residents a community, the Fatou & Fama mural projected a unique sense of dignified individualism about the restaurant and its owners. I would ask, is there a more apt embodiment of the American spirit? It takes guts to adorn the face of one’s business with a painting as bold as this. Every aspect, from the noble lions, to the craggy baobab tree, to the technicolor sunset, exuded pride for their work and their heritage. University City will be a bit dimmer without this wonderful mural.

First Friday, May 2010

2010-05-08T18:19:00.007-04:00

On a gorgeous May afternoon, I began my First Friday trek at The Mütter Museum for the reopening of the Benjamin Rush Medicinal Plant Garden. The garden has been in existence for over seventy years, but it has been newly re-curated with text panels, a cell phone audio tour, and an educational brochure, thanks to a recent grant. Dr. Robert Hicks, the Director of the museum, was on hand to welcome guests and speak to the history of the garden, from its envisioning by Benjamin Rush (a founder of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia and a signer of the Declaration of Independence), through its realization in 1937 and up to its current state. He called the garden an outdoor collection, an extension of what can be seen within the walls of the museum.

Having just missed the opening reception for Anthony Campuzano’s Alright, Still and Jennifer Levonian’s Her Slip Is Showing, I stopped in at Fleisher/Ollman Gallery to view their work. The pairing of the two artists is compelling, as are the individual pieces; touching on them only in this post would be to shortchange them, so I think I will return to the topic in a subsequent entry. Suffice to say, Levonian’s animations are visually beautiful and have depth, and Campuzano’s pieces show intriguing hints of new ideas.

Vox Populi was up next. There were some uninspiring offerings, like Gabriel Boyce’s insubstantial—correction—minimal, Owning Cats, and Brian Graf’s photography-based The Sun Room.

In case you didn’t have enough places to see Ryan Trecartin’s films, The Research (Re’Search WaitS) is screening in the video lounge corner of Vox. This is the same film, with possibly a slightly different edit, that has already been shown at FWM last summer and Tyler Gallery in the fall for the Wolgin Prize; two films from this same cycle are also showing at ICA as part of the exhibition Queer Voice. Additionally, it is devoid of the helpful context in previous installations, when framed with props and detritus left over from the making of the films.

Juliana Foster and Lori Spencer’s Fair Ophelia takes on the classic dramatic character, long a favorite of artists (particularly those of the painfully sensitive Pre-Raphaelite persuasion), but they offer a nice blend of different media to examine her path of doom in a less direct way.

I spent the most time with Nike Desis’ Collect Call which examines the history and lifecycles of artist-run spaces in Philadelphia. I am young and relatively new to Philadelphia, so the project was eye-opening. There is a small reading area where one can browse defunct local art publications, which were once plentiful and each as unique as the wide spectrum of local creativity which they represented; I commented to Nike that I suppose today we have blogs, but we agreed that they will never be the same as a physical printed edition that one can hold in the hand. There were three survey questions writ large in the gallery that one could vote on with a paper ballot (see images). Each question had three possible responses, all including the Facebook-friendly option of “It’s complicated”.

Finally, there were seven people “on call” for different periods during the evening, available to discuss their expertise on artist-run initiatives in Philadelphia. They were not present in the gallery, but cell phones were provided to call them. I spoke with Sid Sachs of UArts. As a point of departure I asked him about his recent Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists 1958-68 exhibition. The narrative took various turns, in which I learned, among many other things, that the second ever Pop Art show took place in Philadelphia in 1961 at the Gershman Y, featuring most of the future heavy-hitters of Pop. He was gracious, encyclopedically well-informed, and passionate about visual art in Philadelphia and preserving its heritage, as well as saving it from being a footnote to that of New York. The phone conversations between the on-call experts and gallery participants, effectively oral histories, will be transcribed, becoming part of the larger project.

I then descended one floor to Grizzly Grizzly to find The Honeymooners, a performance/happening. The small room was decorated like a kitchen out of Pee Wee’s Playhouse, with cartoonishly proportioned and angular appliances and furnishings of a decidedly mid-1950s design aesthetic. Performers Jennifer Catron and Paul Outlaw invited free interaction, she energetically whipping up frosting for free-for-the-taking cupcakes and he sitting in his undershirt, swigging beer and grumpily poring over the classifieds in the paper. The fridge was loaded to the brim with nothing but Miller High Life, which he freely offered to visitors. He also claimed to be looking for jobs, of which he had only identified three.

The Fabric Workshop and Museum came next, with its two offerings Paula Wilson: First Story and Duo-Chrome/Duotone: Ink To Light. Paula Wilson’s installation features a mixture of recent work, as well as brand new pieces made in collaboration with FWM. Slightly hidden away on the eighth floor of the building, it is perhaps the best use of this gallery space since the opening of the new building in 2008. The work is unabashedly gorgeous, seemingly a celebration of urban life, and contains humorous flourishes, such as the silkscreen printed pigeons scattered throughout the gallery. The centerpiece, First Story, appropriates the form of the building’s arched windows, besetting them with a faux-stained glass pane of stitched translucent fabrics.

Meanwhile, Duo-Chrome/Duotone, guest-curated by Ruth Fine of the National Gallery, takes over both the first and second floor galleries. It is yet another exhibition drawing from the FWM permanent collection—WAIT, don’t run away! Yes, there have probably been as many “collection shows” at FWM in the past decade as there have been years, running the gamut of excellent, to adequate, to creatively bankrupt. This is partly due to a top-down lack of exhibition planning and foresight; these shows were often used as a stopgap measure when no new artist-residencies were close to bearing fruit and shows on display would expire without planning as to what would come next. But with this exhibition, Kippy Stroud, the Founder and Artistic Director, has finally allowed an outsider (and one without the complication of any close or extended family relation, at that) to plumb and reconsider the rich permanent collection, permitting her to work unperturbed and with relative budgetary liberty. Fantastic works which have not seen the light of day since they were made, perhaps twenty to thirty years ago, reemerge victorious and as vital as when they first came into being, holding their own against pieces made in the Nineties and Aughts. Add to this the gravitas, vision, and scholarship that Ruth Fine brings, and you have a formidable exhibition worthy of the institution’s august back catalogue of artist collaborations.

I ended my evening at Space 1026, where Étincelles features a clutch of three artists from Montreal. I considered Emi Honda’s found object dioramas to be charming and nostalgic microcosms, perhaps miniature sets where a Lilliputian vignette might play out. I also enjoyed Nadia Moss’s ink and watercolor compositions, which betrayed a fixation on ducks and geese. As for Leyla Majeri’s portion, first I wrote it off, but then came back to it because I thought there was more going on that meets the eye, but ultimately I was not sure what.

The agony and the ecstasy of waiting for Marina Abramović

2010-05-01T17:18:00.007-04:00

Marina Abramović - The Artist Is Present

A few weekends ago I made a trip up to New York, having laid out vague plans of my museum itinerary for the day. I scrapped all of it when I got in line for my turn to sit with Marina Abramović at the Museum of Modern Art. Once I got into that queue, I knew I would not leave without my turn to sit with the artist. This meant that I did not have the opportunity to see anything else in the museum that day. But waiting in line had its share of benefits and frustrations, ultimately rewarded by the greatest pay-off possible.

Sitting in the cavernous MoMA atrium, you begin to notice many things. You overhear the incredulous comments, like, “Do you just sit and stare at each other?” You see the ebbing and flowing waves of visitor traffic throughout the day. You notice how just about everyone takes pictures of what they are instructed not to photograph. And a certain camaraderie begins to develop with those whom are also waiting in line.

To return to the skepticism that some possess regarding the performance, there are probably two camps: those who know something of her work and those wholly ignorant of it (or performance art in general). For those to whom her work is a novelty, I would suggest active participation in the performance as a remedy for disbelief. However, a cynical person cognizant of her career might consider this latest performance to be spectacle which exploits some artistic hokum derived from the cult of personality surrounding Abramović. Again, I would suggest looking into her eyes for any extended period as proof that this is an experience as true and as real as any that can be had in the creation and enjoyment of art. Indeed, celebrity and spectacle are in play. If this were not Abramović performing, would it constitute such a draw? Insofar as you and the artist are on display when sitting at the table, none of it had bearing on my experience at the time (I will come back to this point).

Like many of Abramović’s performances, her latest abdicates an extraordinary amount of power over to the participant. You can monopolize her and her gaze for as long as you please, even for the full seven hours of operation per day that the museum is open (which some have done). But there is an extra layer, because you are also granted complete control over the experience that others want to have with the artist. Unless you are the first person to arrive in the morning, waiting in line while others take their turns is part of the process. Fairness has no bearing. Then you yourself sit with her and nothing external matters; the hordes of people around, whether waiting their chance or just looking on, fade from mind.

After a wait of a little over five hours, and by the grace of several people ahead of me in line getting frustrated and leaving, I was one of the last that day to sit with the artist. Between sitters, she lowers her head into her hands and hunches forward, taking a nano- break from the exhausting task of constantly engaging in direct eye contact and sitting motionless all day long. As I approached the chair my heart was beating out of my chest; I did not think I would be able to take much more than a minute or two of participation. Then she raised her head and locked with my gaze.

It became hard to see much more than her eyes. Giant flood lamps at all corners of the atrium blare at you. Her face went out of focus as I concentrated on maintaining eye contact. Occasionally I would notice small facial ticks—relaxing of the jaw or involuntary swallowing—and also notice that I was doing the same. Sometimes I was aware of the motion and shuffling of other people in my peripheral vision, but mostly not.

Emotion as an aspect of the performance is exceptionally strong as a participant, though as a passive viewer it is not. I understand why many have been moved to tears in their experience with the artist, because I was overwhelmed by such an effusion of feelings with each minute that passed. I think the reason for this, as far as my experience was concerned, is because the act of participating became deeply self-reflective. Staring constantly at someone whom you do not know without the interceding act of speech or communication is uncomfortable and awkward. Therefore, it is natural to retreat inward. In those moments, I thought more profoundly about myself than about Abramović or anyone else around us.

I sat with the artist until I felt moved to get up and walk away. At that time it was 5:20, just ten minutes before MoMA would close. According to the Flickr page where portraits of all participants are uploaded, I sat with her for 26 minutes. It did not seem so long; in fact, the moment felt suspended in time, without duration at all. Afterward, both in the museum and at the subway station, some people approached me to ask about the experience. But I faltered, still affected and totally withdrawn into my own thoughts, and nearly unable to speak. How does one describe an occurrence which is so intensely personal? It needs to be felt for oneself, rather than be explained. It was at that moment that I became acutely aware of having been on display and watched by countless individuals. And there is the paradigm: once you participate, you fully understand the blurred concurrence of personal and public from which Abramović has fashioned a life’s work.

Looking At Animals

2010-04-25T00:07:00.002-04:00

Giant Pacific Octopus specimen and Henry Horenstein's Giant Pacific Octopus portrait

Currently on display at The Academy of Natural Sciences is Looking At Animals, which pairs specimens from the museum’s collection with photography from Henry Horenstein’s extensive series of animal portraits. I was fascinated by the hybrid character of the exhibition, a mash-up of visual art and natural history. The gallery design itself hews closer to a fine art setting, in which the creatures in jars and behind glass become almost like interlopers. Well-travelled examples of Horenstein’s photographs have been selected and the print quality is strictly utilitarian. But the photos themselves are beautiful in their unconventional portrayals of the wildlife selected.

Horenstein frames the animals with an aesthetic usually reserved for human portraiture, especially in his use of image cropping, allowing an individual personality to emerge, rather than simply displaying them as generic representatives of their species, as the taxidermied or preserved examples in a natural history museum are wont to do. The images should be equally intriguing to the sensibilities of both adults and children, each for different reasons: for the adults, it might be because of this identification of the animals possessing a temperament with humanlike qualities or it might be an appreciation of Horenstein’s photographic eye; for the children, it will likely be the newness of looking at an (often exotic) animal in an entirely novel way.

There is something further at work in the hybridity of the exhibition. Children have an inherent attraction to natural history museums, whether it be for the dinosaurs, animals, plants, minerals, or any number of other items. However, while they may love to draw, paint, or create their own art, they may not yet have an inclination to appreciate the art of others, particularly in an institutionalized setting. With an exhibition such as this, a seamless integration of the two is forged, building a cognitive bridge toward personal valuation of the visual arts.

More examples from his body of work are here.