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Saturday, August 30, 2003

Art 21 redux

 

If you saw the great, PBS series on visual art, "Art 21," you'll be as happy as I am to know that a second season (four hours of programming on visual art!!) is coming up in early September. (Thank you, chatty and informative Modern Art Notes for the heads up.)

This year's categories for discussion include humor, time, loss and desire and stories. The 16 artists included are Charles Atlas, Collier Schor, Gabriel Orozco, janine Antoni, Kara Walker, Kiki Smith, Do-Ho Suh, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Martin Puryear, Paul Pfeiffer, Vija Celmins, Tim Hawkinson, Eleanor Antin, Raymond Pettibon, Elizabeth Murray [image is from video clip of Murray in the studio] and Walton Ford. I'll leave it to you to figure out who belongs in what category.

According to the PBS weblistings, WHYY in Philadelphia is a "confirmed" broadcaster for the show which will run Tuesday, Sept. 9, 9 pm-11 pm and Wednesday, Sept. 10, 9 pm-11 pm.
permanent link  roberta 10:13 AM
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Slightly satisfying

 

I picked up the phone the other day and had a nice chat with Brian Wallace, the new curator at Moore College of Art and Design. (see Libby’s post of 5/23/03 for more about Wallace) I was curious about Sarah Beck’s project "ODE," coming in next week and needed a reality check. What was with Beck’s commercial-looking website which seems to be selling modular, do it yourself weapons in a pretty photo spread right out of a J Crew catalog.

“There’s definitely some irony at play...but seriousness of intent,” said Wallace, 42, newly-arrived from the Seattle area and raring to go.

Wallace, who exhibited a nice sense of humor, kept referring to Beck’s white tank as The Object, which I found kind of amusing. When he showed Beck’s work previously, Wallace parked The Object in a driveway in Belleville, a suburban neighborhood of Seattle and people streamed out to see it at the opening. The driveway belonged to friends of his parents.

Maybe she’s spoofing what we used to call the “military-industrial complex” I asked. More like the “military-info-tainment” network, he said, a phrase coined by someone in the late 90s he thought...OK so it’s like the GI Joe Style Channel. Got it.

“Some of it is deft....while seeming to be slight in a way,” he said. “That seems to be a thing in art now. There seems to be pleasure in the slightness....” Wallace said.

We’ve been wallowing in slight for some time. How about Richard Tuttle and, just to beat a dead horse, Matthew Barney, who, for all his portentiousness, seems to do little more than mirror the pop culture.

Dave Allen and the starlings at Arcadia also seems slight (see Libby's post below).

I’m wondering about slightness in Philadelphia and having trouble coming up with names. Are we too earnest to be slight? I like to think we’re ahead of the trends and that the world will catch up eventually.

I wondered about getting The Object into the gallery...”That huge thing will be easier to bring in than Jorg Immendorff’s paintings...we’re going to have to take out windows [to get them in since they won't fit through doorways]. Immendorff’s retrospective, including works from the 1977-78 series “Cafe Deutchland” [see image] opens Jan. 23 at Moore in a show co-curated by Robert Storr and Pamela Kort. The "Cafe" paintings have minimum heights of eleven feet, says Wallace.

Speaking of Immendorf, what about that sex and drugs escapade I read about in artnet? Wallace had heard about what he called the “fact-based rumor" and called up the artnet page as we talked. I heard the concern in his voice as he read the story.


permanent link  roberta 8:37 AM
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Friday, August 29, 2003

Basic black birds

 
The art world, like the natural world, has seasons, and summer is a little too hot for all black.

But heat notwithstanding in the last week of August, about 150 intrepid, lightly attired art lovers--most of them students no doubt assigned to attend--showed up yesterday evening for Arcadia University Art Gallery's early foray into the fall season, a show of David Allen's "The Mirrored Catalogue d'Oiseaux" (installation shot above).

Before the show opening, Allen delivered an artist's talk in a nice Scottish brogue, assisted by slides, recordings and videos.

One slide after another showed nothing but audio equipment setups. The videos had the madcap, meandering touch of an amateur making family videos, with a muddled sound track. My favorite recording was of silence. "You hear air particles rushing around the room," Allen explained. We all strained to listen, but alas, the acoustics weren't up to translating the silence into sound.

Allen, an earnest fellow dressed in a rumpled shirt and jeans, finally showed a couple of slides that weren't of sound equipment. One was a slide of records in the air. "I'm not going to say anything about this slide, but I think it's a really nice slide," he said. The line won him an audible laugh.

After the talk, the crowd strolled across the campus to the gallery, partook in wine, beer, sandwiches and cookies, and took a gander at Allen's installation, the oiseaux--in this case starlings--in a cage, listening to Olivier Messiaen's "Catalogue d'Oiseaux."

In his defense, he had planned the installation for mockingbirds (one shown right), but regulatory statutes decreed no mockingbirds, so starlings it is. The plan is for the birds, on listening to the "Catalogue," a musical piece based on bird song, to pick up the melodies and repeat them by the end of the installation.

But I liked taking a moment to look at the birds, caged with some plants and lots of dirt at the far end of the gallery. These birds look a bit happier, I thought, than Matthew Barney's Jacobin pigeons (Jacobin pigeon left) cooped up in the Guggenheim.

I can't help but wonder about the ethics and the aesthetics of caging up birds as art. And don't get me started on music as a visual art.

Either way, it seems that right now in the art world, live birds are hot and in season, and willing to sport basic black feathers, even in August.
permanent link  libby 9:58 PM
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Thursday, August 28, 2003

Adjust your comfort level

 

Post by Ditta Baron Hoeber

I agree that video can sometimes feel uncomfortably slow but when it’s good, video slows you down to show you something and to surprise you.

Sometimes the surprise of seeing may not feel like a reward. Sometimes it's uncomfortable even repugnant. I think the point of art is provocation. That can be pleasurable but sometimes the pleasure is just in recognizing that your mind has been disturbed and pushed into seeing something unfamiliar. [image is from master of the disturbing video, Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley's 1992 "Heidi."]

That's a pretty traditionally accepted purpose of art. I think it applies to video art as well. When video doesn’t have a payoff, that’s not because its video -- that’s because its bad video and bad art.

--Ditta Baron Hoeber is a Philadelphia artist and writer whose poetry and photographs appear in the Drexel online journal.

permanent link  roberta 9:53 PM
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Wednesday, August 27, 2003

Poetry in motion works some of the time

 

All this talk about video sent me off to the newest video exhibition in town--"Surface Tension," now showing at the Fabric Workshop and Museum.

Nadia Hironaka's "My Stars," two videos transformed by two star-shaped kaleidoscopic mirrors inset in the walls (shown left). The two videos ("National" and "International") took me on two futuristic journeys into either deep space or cyberspace--or maybe into a mirror-image of what's cooking in Hironaka's mind. The soundtrack included walkie-talkie-ish communications: "Base one to Unit 1" gets the scary reply, "We have some activity here; silence is advised."

I was brought down by the program notes that told me the footage was shot in vacant architectural spaces. Oooh, that killed the poetry of the inhospitable spaces. Fortunately, I didn't read the program notes until after I had gone on her pleasant journey. Another quibble. One of the stars was just the right height for a child to view, but not for a middle-aged lady whose back isn't up to bending for long periods of time.

Peter Rose's "Pneumenonal" (image right) seemed like a meditation on the poetic and its underpinnings. The screen was a loose scrim, at times animated by a fan. But the image itself was of a blowing cloth. And the layers of images and their relationship to the cameras and the cloth took a while to puzzle out. But I sure did enjoy going through the process. The jet-plane whooshing noise was pretty funny--although it leaked into the other room, interfering with the experience of the other videos.

The show, curated by Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative Curatorial Fellow Cassandra Coblentz, is about video projected in ways that challenge the traditional screen and depictions of depth.

Some of the pieces fit the paradigm better than others, but the three that hit the nail on the head are the two above and Tony Oursler's "Wavefront," (shown left) which projects through a tv-antenna-like armature and then onto the wall behind it. I admired it for the antenna and the emotion in the eyes of the talking head, both evocative of the televised world we live in.

The program notes added that the piece is part of a body of work in which Oursler studied a group of people who believed they could use technology to commune with the dead. I could have lived without the info and still gotten plenty out of the piece.

Look for the opening Friday, Sept. 5, starting at 6:30 p.m., with its highlight of the outdoor projection across a rooftop onto a building of a series of screen savers designed by artists (from Not in Service, a.k.a. Aaron Igler plus collaborators--Igler also gets the photo credits on the publicity shots here) . The screen savers can be downloaded if you follow the link to LURE from the "Surface Tension" web-based catalog that will go on line at the FWM's website as of Sept. 5.

Others in the show include Camille Utterback's interactive piece with its pixillated rain animated by motion, Nicole Cohen's "Jet Lag," which seems to raise some questions about space (not outer space, although the space depicted is in an airplane) and Jim Campbell's "Ambiguous Icon (Running, Falling)," which uses technology to reduce realistic imagery to but a shadow of itself.

permanent link  libby 6:16 PM
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Punchy haiku-like
Video hits fast and runs
What the future holds

 

Post by Rick Visser

Being a video artist, I think the points being raised in the discussion over the last couple of days ask important questions about the present situation in the field. Most people are not patient with video art even though they will stare blankly for long periods of time at any T.V. screen in any public space no matter what the programming. I'd dare say most of us no longer read long poems either, when and if they appear in journals or magazines. We turn the page and simply will not go back to them, knowing there is much work to be done if we do go back. Video art is most often more like a poem than a novel or short story (I call some of my work 'cinepoetics') but we tend to look at it as if it were the visual equivalent of a short story or novel. Video art often subverts the narrative flow and speed of our minds. We don't always like that. We would like the art video to fit in with the flow of our minds as they have been conditioned.

It is only human to look for motion, action, and drama. I have a friend who has a high-rise office with a spectacular view of the Rocky Mountains and he admits that the action on the intersection down below grabs almost all of his attention when he looks out the window. In both TV and the cinema, we have been conditioned to the 1-4 second cut. Or less. Perhaps the most avant-garde video in the future will be done in only one shot, one cut. This would subvert its cinematic foundation which takes its strength from the change of planes (the cut).

A haiku-like video art may be the most successful in these initial stages of video art flourishing, stopping people in their tracks, striking them very hard across the hearthead and then releasing them very quickly. [See image above of "TV Interruptions," David Hall's 1971 stealth videos which appeared -- unnanounced and without title -- on Scottish television.] I think, too, that more specificity might be helpful in distinguishing varieties of video art: video sculpture, cinepoetics, etc., and more attention paid to presenting video art in various ways to find how people best relate to it. I don’t think the art gallery as we now know it is necessarily the best way to view video art. I just completed a 9 minute video that I refer to as 'video sculpture'. Whenever I tell people I do video sculpture, a big hole appears in the space between us as they grasp for some inkling of what that might be. Franklin is right: video will probably dwell in the grey areas, perhaps for a very long time, but some of us really like that space.

--Rick Visser, video artist, produces the blog artrift from Lyons, Colorado

permanent link  roberta 11:53 AM
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Monday, August 25, 2003

Retrenching at Art Alliance

 
If you saw yesterday's comprehensiveEd Sozanski article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, you know that Curator Amy Schlegel is out and there's a bunch of other changes at the Philadelphia Art Alliance as well.
We're sorry to hear of these changes. Schlegel brought a curatorial vision to what has often been a dreary and vision-free institution. She showed immigrant and displacement work (see image by Polish-emigre artist Wlodzimierz Ksiazek featured in two Schlegel-curated exhibits), feminist work, AIDS related work, and she showed local artists off the beaten track as well. She seemed like a new curatorial voice in the community, and we hope someone else local snaps her up fast.
We wonder, what's the point of having just another neighborhood art center, where the programming seems to be dictated by the rush for grant money for children's programs? (We have nothing against children's programs. However, there seem to be plenty of excellent ones out there that meet the needs of the area the Art Alliance serves--try Fleisher or Moore College, UArts, or the Art Museum, to name just a few.)

--Posted by Roberta and Libby

permanent link  roberta 10:06 AM
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