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Friday, September 12, 2003

Postmodern category busting--Colette replies

 
I agree with Franklin Einspruch's remark that the viewer needs to be informed about how to approach a piece of art (in this case video). However it is important the viewers understand the particular syntax of the medium they are looking at. If viewers are looking at video and evaluating it in terms of the inherent characteristics and structure of a film, they will be disappointed every time.

As with most contemporary art, the artists, curators and critics serve as a mediator to educate the public, so that they can appreciate the work.


In terms of video having more overlap than other forms, I don't think that is true anymore. Postmodernism did a good job of breaking down those boundaries. A case in point is Jack Pierson's work at the Rosenwald Wolf Gallery. (Opens tonight) Many traditionalists would argue that what he does is not drawing or painting. Yet he is classified in that category. [image is Pierson's "Silence," 2002]

--Colette Copeland

permanent link  roberta 3:20 PM
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Scattergories for video

 

Post by Franklin Einspruch of artblog.net

[Editors' note--Franklin is reponding to Collette Copeland's last post Tuesday, Sept. 9, on whether pigeonholing video as a cousin of film helps or hinders the discussion about video as an artform.]
The impulse for categorization is not simply a taxonomic exercise - it informs the viewer about how to approach the piece and gives the artist a context to work in, or against. All forms are hybridizations to some extent - it's nothing to be ashamed of. But video has a larger overlap with other forms than, well, other forms. I observe that video artists embrace the categorical ambiguity of what they're doing. If they want to feel denigrated by the observation that what they're doing is categorically ambiguous, I suppose that's an option as well. [Image is from Doug Aitken's "Interiors" (2002), which showed at the Fabric Workshop recently.]
permanent link  roberta 9:51 AM
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Cosmology and anthropology

 


I stopped in to see the Fleisher Challenge I exhibit the other day. [The artist’s reception is tonight; the talkabout with Mary Murphy, which I highly recommend, is next Tuesday.]

The surprise was Joy Feasley’s installation. Fleisher’s Warren Angle says he believes it’s the artist’s first installation and he may be right although I know she was co-installationist with husband, Paul Swenback, in a Project Room show a while back.

Anyway, Feasley has adorned the large space with green sculptural star-crystals made out of acrylic which hang from the ceiling or sit on the floor. Not quite stalactites and stalagmites, the pointy stars are like outcroppings from her star and crystal-infused paintings. An aggressive presence, the green stars give the room a kind of otherworldly atmosphere.

Feasley’s trademark fantasy imagery -- crystals, mountain tops, stars, animals, bare-chested girls -- surround the sculptures in 20 paintings made of carved resin or vinyl paint on aluminum panels. Flocking material shows up under the resin and the resulting texture is subtle but interesting. "Golden Dawn," a red skull image should win a prize for turning flocking spooky. [See image.]

Also notable, in a strong, three-person show, are Jennifer Levonian’s wee, whimsical collage drawings, whose mix of surrealism and cartoon irreverence is fresh and well-done. [Image from Levonian's "The Last House."

Sam Belkowitz provides the anthropological rest stop. His documentary photographs, diptychs of street scenes from Asia and elsewhere, are a blast of hot reality into the cool fantasies in the other rooms. [Image is Belkowitz C-print from the series.] Belkowitz is also showing a video piece, "Solea." Screened on a monitor in a corner with what seemed like enormous speakers flanking, the short, looped piece (no more than 6 minutes) had a sad, flamenco soundtrack. The music becomes an insistent presence in the open, three-room gallery, claiming a little too much psychic space for itself.

The show’s strength is in demonstrating the wide range of materials at play and the high level of conceptual sophistication among young Philadelphia artists. This is all so far from art in Philadelphia of 20 years ago it might as well be from the moon.
permanent link  roberta 7:44 AM
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Thursday, September 11, 2003

Art, commerce, or what?

 
Here's a copy of the "pricelist" that Space 1026 gave out at its Gerard Doody show. So is it really a price list? (Only two of the pieces had prices on them; the rest were listed as price on request or not for sale or zippo.) But perhaps it's part of the show? Or is it an in-your-face response to people complaining about the lack of labels and price info? I thought it was kind of funny and took it home as a souvenir. Besides, I love maps.
permanent link  libby 10:05 AM
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Wednesday, September 10, 2003

Bowlby sample

 
In my last post (Sept. 7), I put Astrid Bowlby's work at Gallery Joe at the top of my First Friday picks, but I didn't have an image of any of the drawings to show. Gallery Joe came to the rescue, and here's Bowlby's "Moon Lace (.5 / .25)," 2003, ink on bristol, 11 x 11 inches. Although the work makes me think of Vija Celmins, it doesn't have Celmins' sense of a slice of infinity. Like a black hole, Bowlby's images have a gravity that pulls everything there is into the window that the image provides. What's beyond the edges seems to be beside the point.
permanent link  libby 3:15 PM
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Prints-ipality of Schmidt Dean

 
I stopped by Schmidt-Dean Gallery yesterday to see the print show -- some vintage '60s era works by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Alex Katz in the front rooms and digital prints by Randy Bolton in the back. [image shows two of Bolton's new works]

Pop art superstars seemed a departure for S-D which (in my memory) has focused on contemporary work by artists with a local connection. What’s the story here?

“Some of my artists prefer me to show more of the blue chips,” said gallery owner Chris Schmidt who apparently needed some encouragement to take on the task of showing work whose dollar value is so high he had to double his liability insurance to house it.

“The artists like to be in this company,” he said, pointing to another local gallery, Locks, which also mixes local contemporary art with exhibits by New York artists like Frank Stella. He didn't sound real convinced, but when I asked about sales, he said one of the Warhol's, the "Silver Marilyn," at $36,000 was on hold.

Schmidt said the work came from clients who wanted to de-acquisition but were reluctant to go through the New York auction houses, both tainted by recent scandals of price fixing.

“It’s real rare stuff...the Lichtensteins and Warhols were early and the quality was high.” [see detail shown here of “Real Estate” 1969 by Lichtenstein]

Warhol silkscreens -- two Jackies, a Chairman Mao and a Silver Marilyn were such a draw that staff from the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh came over to see them, Schmidt said.

In fact, it’s wonderful work and feels amazingly contemporary, maybe because we’re still living in irony’s grip (something started with pop). The work’ll be up for the month in the front, then move to the back space after that.

As for Bolton, his new digital prints -- some of which look like penants from a child's bedroom -- have saturated, cyber-zappy colors and the artist’s trademark cautionary tales. My favorite is “Choose your leaders wisely” which shows a pig on a scooter -- oblivious to dangers ahead -- leading two children off a cliff...echoes of current events anyone? Bolton also had several works of a different ilk, Japanese almost in their haiku-like reduction and piercing color. I liked them better. [see diptych "Leaf" pictured here with its improbable aqua background.]

Sometimes things come together across time and space and after talking with Schmidt, I remembered a story I read in the Financial Times last week (sept 6/7) about “the super-rich” and how they’re demanding that their financial advisors help them invest in art these days instead of in the “depressed” stock market.

One anecdote that resonated in Antony Thorncroft’s story was about how JP Morgan Chase recently told an unnamed, big-bucks American entrepreneur to invest in “the art of the 1960s.” Mr. no-name should come to Philadelphia.

(Note, you'll have to pay to read Thorncroft's article on the FT website since it's gone from the "free reads" section.)
permanent link  roberta 8:45 AM
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Tuesday, September 09, 2003

Rewind: more video thoughts

 

Post by Collete Copeland

I disagree with the comment that Video Art (like performance) has an identity problem. Video is still a relatively new medium (30 + years). Early videomakers were responding to the immediacy of the medium and using it as a tool for communication as well as art.

Certainly there have been pioneers such as Bill Viola who have established the structure of the repetitive loop, stationary camera, movement within the frame, (what some people may refer to as boring). This type of work is meant to challenge viewers' perception and experience through the manipulation of time and motion. As video continues to evolve and grow, artists are challenging this syntax and moving away from the 'TV' screen. [image is Viola's 1996 "The Crossing." ]

A perfect example is Doug Aiken (whose work was on display at the Fabric Workshop recently. Aitken's work "Interiors" pressed the boundaries of space, perception and architecture. His work was anything but slow. (For more on Viola & Aitken--see my article in spring issue of Fotophile Magazine)

Surface Tension, currently at the Fabric Workshop continues to stretch the syntax of video. [See Libby's post of 8/25/03] The comment that video is a hybridization--simply a form for other media is denigrating both to the artists and the form.

Filmmakers have been know to say that video is a poor imitation of film. It was never meant to imitate film. It is the need for categorization that is driving this argument. For artists video is a tool just as paint or clay or film for the act of creation.

--Colette Copeland is a multi-media artist who teaches at University of the Arts and University of Pennsylvania. She writes for the quarterly publications, Fotophile and The Photo Review. See her video work in September as part of the Fringe Festival and at the Arthur Ross Gallery.

permanent link  roberta 8:26 PM
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Sunday, September 07, 2003

So much art, so little time--First Friday adventures

 
I want to start with Astrid Bowlby's drawings at Gallery Joe, in Old City, but I don't have an image, so you'll have to go to Gallery Joe's Website to see what she's up to. (By the way, Bowlby's in a show that opened yesterday at the Drawing Center, 35 Wooster St., New York, so she's up to a lot.) I'm thinking topography as I walk out of the show at Gallery Joe--and hairnets and intense energy fields.

And as usual I was in love with the work at the Clay Studio. I have to start by confessing that I never met a teapot I didn't like, and teapots were rife. Above is one of several by Sam Chung in the niche on the first floor. This one reminded me of those traditional Japanese hair-dos. Others had subtle glazes that reminded me of skin and fingerprints.

Upstairs in the "Tea for Two, Table for Two" show, the tea sets stole the show from the table settings. Of course, unlike plates, only the insides of teapots need to be functional, leaving a lot of room on the exterior for creativity. This one is by Heeseung Lee and the next one is by Lisa Orr. Ryan Fitzer had a beautiful set that implied tremendous weight, and Geoffrey Wheeler's pot and cups were peachy toned with belly buttons and shapes suggestive of bodies, without being too literal. Lots more worth seeing there.

West of Old City the usual crazy scene at Space 1026 included hand drawn (campaign pin) buttons for sale, bad-boy cartoons, some quite beautiful, from Canadian cartoonist Gerard Doody, and a three-day stencil show, which was chock-full of political art. The stencil here is by Roger Peat, with an asking price of $8.

And even further West, at Vox Populi (215-568-5513), M. Ho's newsprint pages covered with images of what looked like the war in Iraq and news-like columns of color blocks and collaged flowers caught my daughter's eye.

Well, that includes only stuff I saw. There's lots more out there. It's a big city with a lot of art.
permanent link  libby 9:09 PM
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First Friday on the street

 

I thought perhaps competition from the Fringe Festival might be cause for the empty streets at 4 p.m. When I passed by the fence on 2nd Street, where individual artists hawk their wares, I found nada.

But by 5:30, the fence had morphed into an art enterprise zone.


And although some of the fence hangers I'd seen before, there were a fresh crop with refreshing new work to discover.

Among the highlights are the work of Matthew Green, a graduate of Rowan, whose portraits of the seamy side of the unpopulated, abandoned carcasses of city buildings are poetic and surreal.

Prices ranged from $750 to $1,700, and didn't seem too far out of line although perhaps a bit more than the traffic would bear from a street vendor without the imprimatur of a gallery.

Also on the fence were small reversed glass paintings by Delia King (sorry about the glare on the image) with lushly colored frames, at $50 a pop. My favorite was a dual portrait of Saddam Hussein and George Bush. King studied mathematics and philosophy in school, but then apprenticed herself to a reverse glass painter, and here she was.

I love the get-up-and-go of young artists plugging their wares under the sun and stars. But then I also loved the saga of John, shown here with Roberta in 3-D glasses, selling prints he made of his brother ReK's colored-pencil art. The 3-D discovery was by happenstance, but John figured it was a good thing, so he was selling each print for $20 with its own 3-D glasses. The 3-D effects are pretty wild. Get one for your apartment wall and you've got a great conversation piece.
permanent link  libby 4:22 PM
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Installation art on First Friday, plus

 

The installation art revival that began with the slump in the art market is going strong.

Here's what I found Friday night:

Astrid Bowlby, in addition to her fabulous drawings--not to be missed in the front of Gallery Joe --has also created an installation in the vault there (detail shown), created of layer on layer of tiny cut-out shapes drawn in black on white paper. It's a wow both for the way it looks and the suggestion of incredibly intensive labor in its creation.

In the Community Gallery at Nexus is William Cromar's "halfwayhouse," twin outline structures, one black, one white, interlocked. I liked standing in them and I liked the mind trip the piece suggests, the house shape taking me well beyond the simplistic race cooperation issue.

And down at The Painted Bride, Jeannie Yip created "Art & Lies" a grid of white muslin envelopes (you may pick one up and take it home) surrounding a video of her performance in which she cut up and sewed the room-sized dress she was wearing into the envelopes.

I turned my envelope iniside out to see if I got the word art or lie, written in white tailor's chalk on the iside, but couldn't see a mark, let alone a word.

The project reminded me of a domesticated version of the work of Ann Hamilton, with its repetitive tasks and its disappearing language.

Also at the Bride, Calla Thompson's "Puff," a pasted outline drawing on the wall with the affect of '50s textbook illustrations but the content of some weird science experiment, packed a punch.

And I liked the reflection of Matthew Suib's record on the wall (see upper right hand corner of image), looking much like a smoke ring, or a ring around Saturn--appropriate for a recording of sounds coming in from and going out to space.

The show at the Bride was curated by John Murphy.

And speaking of installations, the day before, at the ICA, I (and much of Philadelphia) saw Virgil Marti's hall of mirrors, transforming the cramped ramp space there with his mylar wallpaper into a disorienting fun-house space. The silkscreen macrame spider web pattern turns into a rorschach image where the wallpaper panels meet and going up that ramp, what a long strange trip it is (Marti's fabulous deer-antler chandeliers above are the cherry on top).
permanent link  libby 9:30 AM
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