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Local artist, teacher and activist, Jennie Shanker sent out a digital all points bulletin yesterday about a change we all knew was coming -- the passing of slide technology. Yikes.

Shanker’s information-- obtained from the National Conference of State Historic Preservation Officers -- says that Eastman Kodak Co. will discontinue production of slide projectors and accessories in June, 2004. That would be the CAROUSEL, ETKAGRAPHIC, EKTALITE AND EKTAPRO slide projectors and all accessories. Small quantities of these items will be available through the end of 2004 and the company says it will service and support slide projectors until 2011.

Shanker checked this information with Kodak’s Glenn Prince, Account Manager, Government Markets, who confirmed it.

You’ve heard of the digital divide, well now we’ll have the slide divide. The haves will pony up the dough, point and click on their digital cameras, burn images on cds and project them via computer. The have nots will rely on cameras, slides and machines that’ll be throw-aways in a few years.

No more slide sheets with those grant applications? No more jurying shows by slides? How about a Kodak Foundation grant to support everybody’s transition to the new technology?

And just in case you need more about the future coming fast and furiously, see today’s Philadelphia Inquirer story by Markus Verbeet chronicling how digital camera sales at deep discounters like Best Buy are beating up on small mom and pop camera shops in Philadelphia. Abbey Camera is no more (they closed a year ago) and Quaker Photo, which Verbeet compares to a 5-story museum, has several dozen obsolete darkrooms now empty or used for storage and a staff of 30 (down from 120 working in three shifts in their halcyon days).

permanent link   roberta 8:49 AM
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A peek through the window at Slought Foundation offered some undefinable black blobby shapes that made me walk in.

Michael Gitlin's black pieces, sort of spandex-covered enormous shapes--that suggest a variety of things from body parts to those mushroomy growths out of trees to modern furniture--have a bouncy affect that invite touching and peering around and under. Tres sexy. And very much taking up space and molding the space around themselves.

In the next room, Michael Zansky created an array of lights, spinning balls and giant lenses supported by gizmos and looping flexible pipes to make a slightly goofy, mad-scientist-in-Hollywood version of the planets and the universe. The work was earnest and funny and made me laugh aloud.

This was Slought's best show to date, and perhaps thanks to the inviting window as well as the quality of this show, foot traffic is up, reported Aaron Levy, one of Slought's directors and founders.

Definitely worth a visit to University City.

permanent link   libby 9:59 PM
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On my way to see Jack Pierson’s work at Rosenwald Wolf Gallery I trotted up the newly rehabbed South St. west of Broad. Capitalism in bloom, there’s a new shop selling knick knacks, a veggie take out place and lots more -- the street is a stroll worth taking instead of a stretch of blight. Which is not to say there aren’t still boarded up buildings. Like the old Royal Theater whose wooden window covers are popular venues for wheat pasters.

I halted in front of Royal. Wasn’t that a spread of silkscreen posters for Monique van Genderen’s upcoming show at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts PAFA? The blue, orange and white graphic was ok but greater was the idea that someone must have commissioned street art advertising a local museum show. (see image) Several years ago, PAFA commissioned several artists at Space 1026 to poster and sticker the town advertising a big Andy Warhol retrospective. It was a good idea then (although official Philadelphia didn’t think so) and it’s a good idea now. More renegade than a mural, the official/unofficial-ness of this street art is buzzy. I hope we see more of it.

The Pierson exhibit – truly a category bender as Colette mentions in her post of Sept. 12 -- has an excellent whattizit monster wall drawing, ("untitled," right) some paintings on the plaster ("untitled," below), found object word pieces (top image, "Johnnie Ray" and "Come ye back"), a found-photo-collage and the artist’s own color photographs. The show's a nice combination of the conceptual and the hand made with a touch of the street. All a little forlorn. It feels like a 3-D zine and reminded me of Raymond Pettibon and Dave Schrigley, whose zine, "Grip," I bought at Arcadia's Printed Matter show a while back.

Curator Sid Sachs told me he’d been trying to get a show of Pierson’s work for some time. He first saw some work in the Whitney Biennial in 1993. (An installation of a table and chairs, an ashtray full of cigarette butts, a stack of records, it evoked a corner of the artist’s studio, said Sachs.) That biennial also included work by Raymond Pettibon and the curators placed Pettibon and Pierson in the same space.

Half-way through my looking, Uarts had a fire drill in the R-W building and students flooded out of the building. Sid and I were stuck in the Hamilton Hall lobby (which houses a portion of the show.) Looking back across the street I saw a vision in pink emanating from the Window on Broad, the gallery's window installation space. There was a chandelier, too. Was it another Virgil Marti piece?

No, it's Adam Wallacavage, said Sid. The Space 1026er, a photographer who works routinely with found objects, especially old fashioned toys like kewpie dolls, rubber duckies and the like, made the chandelier whose central motif is white elephant trunks. Though probably not intended, the piece is a great trumpeting salute to the cross-town work at the ICA.

permanent link   roberta 8:26 AM
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Mark Shetabi's mysterious paintings and peephole installations made me want to hear what he had to say about them. So I joined a crowd of about 40 art lovers (mostly students) at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts last week.

Shetabi's family is from Iran, but he was born in New York. The family moved to Iran in 1974, and came back to the United States just before the revolution. Shetabi said his work explored "ideas of my own (Irani) culture, looking through a Western lens."

Happily, Shetabi's talk did not demystify the work. Even after I learned that his "Wet Interior" (shown) showed a real sink with real water--"I get most of my art materials at Home Depot these days," Shetabi said--the work lost none of its suggestive and atmospheric qualities. The knowledge of the nuts-and-bolts of construction didn't undermine what Shetabi called the "slippery relationship scale has to the viewer" -- or the slippery relationship to reality.

The pieces, their Edward Hopperesque light suggesting a world longed for beyond the darkened forespace, invite the viewer to make up stories about the sets.

Shetabi's paintings are--like the sink in "Wet Interior"--icons of the modern world. A portrait of his car, a Plymouth Voyager (shown), seems to be a self-portrait of someone who travels between two cultures and who can admire, in all sincerity, the "contemplative quality of parking garage construction."

Shetabi's love affair with cars shows up in a number of other pieces. In the "Bedroom," which showed earlier this year at Locks Gallery and White Columns (in New York), the lights and sounds of cars zooming by on I-95 create part of the romance of the unpopulated room. And the peephole view of his childhood home in Iran has a driveway foreground. Shetabi said he liked the meditative time of his commute in the car to New Jersey--a time when the technology of the West opens up the East of the mind .

Shetabi's talk was the first in an almost weekly series of art-at-lunch talks at PAFA.

permanent link   libby 9:30 PM
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We thought we'd stick our two cents in here. Whatever category you want to put video in, it is still a moving picture, and humans are conditioned to passively view things that move, Winky Dink screen games and jazzersize tapes notwithstanding.

Video is part of the cultural vernacular. It's not as intimidating as a painting by Gerhard Richter, for example, or an installation by Ann Hamilton. Sometimes the vernacular experience (watching tv or movies) works in video art's favor and sometimes it doesn't.

We think video art is the most exciting art form being explored now. There are few rules of story-telling, rules of space and design, rules of pacing, rules of content and manufacture. (See image from Joshua Mosley's "Commute" video -- using clay, charcoal, and electronic techniques -- opening tomorrow at the Philadelphia Museum of Art Video Gallery.)

And all of that lawlessness is good for the medium and good for art which in its traditional forms often seems timid and hidebound.

permanent link   libby and roberta 2:15 PM
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Regarding Copeland's post of Sept. 12: my point here is that video has no particular syntax. Its syntax is borrowed from other forms: sculpture, if it's object-oriented; film or television, if there's moving, recorded imagery (image from Pipilotti Rist's video, "You called me Jacky," 1990); animation, if it has that look to it; installation, if it's set up just so, and so on.

And while postmodernism may have broken down the boundaries between the media, it didn't dissolve their centers. Pierson may work at the fringes of painting, but I understand where the center of painting is - a bit of colored adhesive paste on a flat surface, more or less. Film also has a strong center - so much so that when filmmakers switch to digital video, they're still called filmmakers, and people watch their "films" without cognitive dissonance despite the fact that no film was used to make the object they're looking at. What is video's center? To say that it has none would be an observation, not an insult. Some artists find that ambiguity exciting, and the rest take up other media.

--Franklin Einspruch publishes artblog.net

permanent link   libby and roberta 1:49 PM
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Speaking of minimalism and art going back to square one for a bit of soul searching (see Libby’s post below) I wonder if the current boomlet in labor-intensive art likewise is collective soul searching -- and maybe a reaction against found object conceptualism that, for whatever its strengths, is lacking in the craftsmanship department and seems a dead end on the art family tree.

“Fiber Friends” at Spector and “Labor” at Abington display art’s return-to-crafts movement. What’s new is that the crafts adopted aren’t necessarily what you think of as high craft. In fact, there’s a lot of A. C. Moore hobbyism here in the sewing, hook rugs and origami on display.

Also breaking with some of art’s recent coolness, these works have a kind of personal mania to them that runs hot. These are works that wear their sentiments clearly. They don’t beat around the bush.

Lauren Ashley’s red work quilts (traditional white quilts that use only red thread) at Spector are beautiful subversion of a traditional craft form. Note the non-traditional imagery – rain clouds, a bonfire -- which differs from the normal nursery rhyme kitties and bunnies (detail, above of Ashley's quilt "20 blocks). Eric Steinberg’s linen weavings, also heavy with red, seem like anti-establishment posters, only much more beautiful and poetic. And outsider artist Brian Bazemore’s soft fetish dolls – stuffed “like time capsules” (the artist told me) with things like the gas bill and other daily memorabilia – represent people Bazemore is bringing into his life – or expelling out of it. (Steinberg's "Swell" is above, right.)

Whitney Lee’s “Soft Porn,” a latch hook rug and the clear show-stopper, took 350 hours to make and includes 64,000 knots. Lee, a Columbus, OH artist who got her BFA from Ohio State University and once was a Spector gallery assistant (as were Ashley and Steinberg) told me she downloads images from Playboy’s website then plots the colors and designs the rug on the computer and goes to work. (Speaking of work, see the image of Lee standing on "Soft Porn" and vacuuming it.)

Additional images are from Abington -- Amy Kaufman’s “Hello Kitty” (right below), an origami extravaganza and Susie Brandt’s “Some Assembly,” (left) a red work quilt based on industrial drawings that came with the artist's kitchen and studio tool purchases ( a fan, a cuisinart).

There’s something appealing about repetitious hard work. If nothing else, it frees the mind to roam. Also, it answers the question “what should I do now?” And like Kiki Smith says in her episode in PBS’s "Art 21," she always has something to do -- she can always go in the studio and file down some of the flaws in her cast sculptures.

A final thought. Could this laborious activity be a particularly American phenomenon, coming out of our do it yourself tradition?

permanent link   roberta 8:58 AM
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The minute I stepped off the city's grid and headed into the woods, I lost my way.

I was at the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, looking for Edward Dormer's Fringe Festival installation, "CUT HERE: Instruction, Command, Option."

The map didn't seem to conform to the paths and the land, although I'm sure it really did. I headed out on a path that turned out to be the roadway back to the city. Oh, no.

Retracing my steps, I still couldn't find the path, but did happen upon my dentist's former assistant, sitting right there at a picnic table, ready to help me. Aah, life is stranger than fiction.

It turns out, the path was blocked by a chain intended to block vehicles, but not people, and I couldn't see the path for the chain.

The installation sounded kind of simple-minded in the description, but once I found it, I was enthralled by the mysteries of spatial relationships. Dormer was imposing a straight line in the forest, using fluorescent tape tied around the trees to demark a horizontal plane and to emphasize the shifting topography.

The title of the piece suggests the piece is about cutting down trees and land development.

But what interested me was how my shifting perspective showed the tapes aligned if I stood in some spots, but not aligned when I stood in others.

It reminded me of my confusion away from the city's grid, even with map in hand. And it reminded me that the eye is a trickster, and three-point perspective merely a map for artists to get a grip on natural space.

As for the minimalist grid, I began to think that maybe it represented painting losing its perspective and looking for a roadmap out.

permanent link   libby 12:05 PM
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