artblog

Saturday, November 01, 2003

Not so tough, afterall

 
Popular Asian cultural forms --monster toys like Transformers, anime, kung fu and monster movies--have fast become popular American cultural forms. Almost every American boy who recently came of age covered his notebooks with bionic bodies and mechanical-looking monsters. And the girls scribbled Sailor Moon look-alikes on theirs.

And now art influenced by Asian pop is appearing across America, a lot of it coming from young Asian-Americans. In "Robots vs. Monsters" at the Asian Arts Initiative, a nice sampling of their work is on view from artists from Philadelphia, California and New York.

The surprise of the show was Huang, Shih-Chieh's "ES-GK-0203 (Eternal Struggle)," a crude, shrimp-like creature made of a plastic bottle and wooden chunks bristling with plastic ratchet ties. A video nearby showed the monster in action. Pretty hysterical and definitely sushi grade.

Huang, a New York artist who has shown from Taipei to Manhatta, is interested in the interaction between viewer's movements and his pieces--"the interchaging process between people and space," he wrote in his statement.

There's a poignant earnestness to a lot of these images. Jesse Olanday's "Monster Lab," (shown below left) local artist Clint Takeda's "I Feel Like 18 Gilders" (shown here right), and Wayne Ho's "Sumorobo1" (shown at top)--all have a vulnerable sadness beneath the monster proportions.

Ho, a California graphic and toy designer, has made a sumo wrestler whose shoulders droop with the weight of the world and the heft of his mission, whatever that might be. Besides, he has a puppy dog to love. (I worry that we're raising children who think that if they don't have six-pack abs they don't measure up.)

Olanday's screen printed bogus posters show monsters or robots in moments of defeat or depression. Olanday's a local Space 1026er.

And Takeda's sculptures, which have a horror-movie, cloning-experiment-gone wrong touch, have human boy souls peering out from their deformities. Takeda's a Vox Populi member whose work has shown at the ICA at Penn.


And speaking of the dark side of monster life, Deth Sun's narrative paintings, in somber tones, tell somber stories. I gotta tell you, I almost don't want to know what's going through his head, but what's going through mine is awfully sad. This one says "Oakland" in the banner, and that's where Sun is from. I find it funny that someone named Sun from Sunny California paints the blues.



Amidst all this thwarted testosterone are California graphic artist Grace Chen's slick, mordant fantasies with their ironically cheerful affect. This one is "MIFF (Molecular Imitation Fine Foods)." From the foods we eat to the air we breathe, modern life a la Chen is m-mmm good.





The show also had a display of masks and monsters produced by the kids in the Asian Arts Intitiatives Robots and Monster Masks Workshop. Here's a classic from Chris Mejia.





permanent link  libby 10:26 AM
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New face, last chance

 
This is the last day to catch the accomplished intaglio prints of Cynthia Back at the University City Arts League . The prints, which remark on the changing landscape, hit color, lighting and texture high notes, but it was the gridded pieces, like "Overrun Drive" (shown), and "Eight Moons," that hit the mark. These pieces had tooth, with the panels in the grid illuminating one another technically, visually and intellectually.

"Overrun Drive," with its ticky-tacky little houses--grids within the grid--stand in blue, stolid contrast to the sunlit leaves they are displacing. In the small (ungridded) "Cacti," three varieties of whiskered cactus talk to one another. And the luminous "Eight Moons," offer different phases and offer skies with different colors and weather.

Back, who's a 2003 Puffin Foundation Award recipient and has numerous impressive honors and shows in her background, is new to Philadelphia. The Arts League Show was her first solo show here.
permanent link  libby 8:39 AM
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Friday, October 31, 2003

Pulp fiction fiction

 
This just in from the get it straight already department. Marcellus Wallace was not the character played by Samuel L. Jackson. (yah we knew that). Ving Rhames played Marcellus. (see image). Oh and another thing, the Marcellus Wallace's Bloody Gitch blogger? He's from Canada not Britain. Sorree.
permanent link  roberta 9:03 PM
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Tyler Job Post

 
Temple’s Tyler School of Art has announced its search terms for Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs, vacant since Kevin Melchionne’s resignation.

Application deadline is Dec. 12. The focus of the job is on running a high profile exhibition program -- and fundraising. (image above of future curators?)

Here’s some information from the press release.

"...At this time Tyler is on the verge of significant change. The school expects to move its suburban campus to a new building on Temple’s main, Philadelphia, campus within three to four years. ...The move will also bring all of Tyler’s departments, including exhibitions, together on one campus for the first time ever.

"...Tyler is committed to maintaining and even expanding its Old City presence over time...Tyler envisions a new, much higher, profile for its exhibitions department....

"The new Director, Exhibitions and Public Programs will be... a curator and an executive with strong management skills...

"QUALIFICATIONS • Ten to fifteen years of progressively responsible experience in the visual arts in an art gallery or museum setting. • Curatorial experience in the form of exhibitions developed and implemented (and corresponding catalogs and other written materials). • Experience developing and implementing educational programs within an art setting, and in the larger community • Experience managing a budget and staff. • Fundraising experience with specific examples of success. • Masters degree (preferably in the fine arts or art history, however a Masters in another area may be acceptable with substantial experience in the visual arts field)

"To apply, send a letter of interest, two relevant publications or writing samples, signed copy of C.V., contact information for 3 professional references, SSAE for return of materials. Send to: Doris Izes, Tyler School of Art , 7725 Penrose Avenue, Elkins Park, PA 19027 dizes@temple.edu (215)782-2715"
permanent link  roberta 5:42 PM
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Giving Peter a hand

 
(Here's an image of James Rosenquist that appeared in a New Yorker review by Peter Schjeldahl Oct. 27, 2003. It was photographed by Dennis Hopper, in a billboard factory in Los Angeles in 1964. We like it better upside down. Notice Rosenquist's resemblance to a young Andy Warhol this way.)

We liked what Schjeldahl had to say, but we stopped short at this sentence and had an epiphany. This sentence, written by a poet, is really a haiku in disguise. Here's the original sentence:

"A recent painting in the Guggenheim show, the gigantic "The Stowaway Peers Out at the Speed of Light" (2000), seventeen feet high by forty-six feet long, is a congeries of swirling, crumpled, highlight-bedizened, unindentifiable shapes pulled flat by uniformly fuzzed brushwork."



Here's the haiku:

A recent painting
in the Guggenhim show, the
gigantic "The Stow-

away Peers Out at
the Speed of Light" (2000),
seventeen feet high

by forty-six feet
long, is a congeries of
swirling, crumpled, high-

light-bedizened, un-
indentifiable shapes
pulled flat by uni-

formly fuzzed brush work.
It is beautiful.
permanent link  libby and roberta 2:56 PM
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"Marcellus Wallace" digs artblog

 
Much as you won't believe it we got a bunch of hit s and a rave review from the Brit blog "Marcellus Wallace's Bloody Gitch." It's a blogger's blog and amidst all the "fucks" and other ahem stuff on the site, he said: "Awesome Site. Artblog. I doubt if they will link back but who cares. Beautiful site."

(Shown, Samuel L. Jackson as Marcellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction)
permanent link  libby and roberta 10:38 AM
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Elementary, My Dear Olafur

 

I had seen the image of Olafur Eliasson’s “Weather Project,” a steam and light show (pictured here) in the Tate Modern Turbine Hall at greg.org and so when I talked to Arcadia’s Dick Torchia the other day I asked about what the Danish-born artist had planned for Philadelphia (Eliasson’s PEI-funded project will run at Arcadia from Aug-Dec 2004.)

So what’s the weather man bringing with him?

According to Torchia, the Arcadia project, which is in some flux, is not about climate but about perception, another theme in the artist's work. It involves two small, circular, mylar-coated chambers, one of which will use RGB lamps to reflect all the colors of the rainbow and stimulate the eyes to overload. The other, a kind of eye cleansing station, will somehow deprive the eye of all that color thus forcing the viewer’s retina to create an afterimage. It's internalizing the art taken to another level.

“It’s a feedback system. You go to the ends of color perception and then get cleansed,” said Torchia. “There’s Turrell in it....” Maybe some Dan Flavin, too? I'm remembering some Flavin light chambers at DIA a while back that made my retinas dance.

Eliasson’s piece here will be based on “Room for All Colors” but Torchia says the artist will be adapting the piece to the Arcadia space, so we’ll have to see what we get.

Libby and I saw Eliasson’s steam geyser piece, "Your natural denudation inverted" (see image) at the Carnegie International in 2000. It was pretty underwhelming, looked like nothing more than a fountain with a reflecting pool. But I sure like the idea of eyeball aerobics.
permanent link  roberta 8:25 AM
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Wednesday, October 29, 2003

Whitney and Marti

 
Local retro-decor maestro Virgil Marti was picked for the 2004 Whitney Biennial, according to the announcement on the museum's website. (thanks artnet for the heads up). The Biennial runs March through May 2004.

This year's jurors were three Whitney house staff Chrissie Iles (film and video); Shamim M. Momin, (branch director and curator of the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria); and Debra Singer (contemporary art).

You can always quibble, but the 2004 list (108 artists and collaborative groups) seems to have some outliers -- like David Hockney, Yayoi Kusama and Robert Mangold, for example, amongst the names of the young up and comers. But then you never know til you see the show. It may be great. As with the last Biennial, there will be a few ourdoor site specific works made in conjunction with the Public Art Fund. (image is Marti's mylar wallpaper "Grow Room")
permanent link  roberta 3:22 PM
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Counting up

 

Remember the Millenium and all that frenzy about the year 2000? I never got that. After all, Jan. 1 is just another day.

But I was very excited about one aspect of the hoopla back then -- Jennie Shanker’s motorized, mechanized sculpture, “Count Down,” in Bird Park. Remember it? A big, odometer-like machine that involved letters instead of numbers. It spun on its axis generating an infinite array of letters -- and a serendipitous assortment of words.

Shanker’s piece, loosely related to her thoughts about the Jorge Luis Borges story “The Library of Babel" (read the story here) was brainy and somehow seemed to dispell-- to me at least -- questions of future shock. What could be more stable than the alphabet? The slow procession of letters and words seemed to mirror the way things are in the cosmos. There’s a lot of noise and chaos and you’ll understand some of it...and some you won’t.

Well here it is 2003 and Shanker has made a new alphabet-odometer. This time it’s not motorized, it’s hands-on interactive and it’s installed in an outdoor classroom at William McKinley School, a Philadelphia inner city school.

(The piece is one of several interactive sculptural elements in two new outdoor classrooms created recently by the School District and the City in big, multi-organization project involving the Mural Arts Program, City Play and others. Shanker helped design the outdoor spaces; made the sculptures and worked with a group of teens from the Mural Corps to create welded floral embellishments for new protective fencing. See my sketch today for more.)

I love to think of these mostly bilingual children spinning the alphabet wheels and producing English and Spanish words -- and maybe finding some kind of peace and pleasure in the serendipity of it all. That's my kind of millenial thinking. (all images are from the new McKinley School project, taken the day before its dedication--the odometer, in procees of being installed, is missing a few of its wheels)

permanent link  roberta 8:57 AM
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Tuesday, October 28, 2003

Jacquard be nimble

 
The Philadelphia University show about the stories that textiles tell is chock full of interesting items, but not much by way of art or beauty--other than a Chinese Dragon robe and some Yoruba indigo adire eleko cloths (shown right), tie died with cornstarch.

The big surprises to me, other than an old Swedish storytelling scroll and a tanka, both of which took the subject of the show quite literally, were the intricate silk jacquards (a jacquard Christmas Card shown left) -- jacquard labels, jacquard advertisements, and jacquard portraits and mementos (a bookmark shown just below, and then a jaquard memorial portrait).

The message of the show seemed rather confused, with the entry way devoted to the scrolls and jacquard narrative pictures; the first large room mostly devoted to how clothes reveal identity (think uniforms, clerical garb, local embroidery patterns); the next room mostly devoted to Philadelphia textile manufacturing historical artifacts like tools, samples, jacquard labels, and textile plans; and the last room a hodgepodge of old dresses, a handmade American flag, some handmade quilts and more jacquard items.

I learned some stuff, such as that most Scottish tartans were designed in the Victorian era. And I loved the paper fan with the image of "The Last Supper," an advertisement for a funeral parlor. But why was a paper fan included in this show?

The show was kind of like one of those little museums for which the local townsfolk clear out their attics. But sometimes there are treasures amongst the old sewing machines and hatchets.

The quality certainly exceeded that, but I had trouble getting past the thrift-shop odor.
permanent link  libby 4:35 PM
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Save gas; call first

 
I drove all the way out to Tyler today only to discover the gallery was shut.

So if you want to go see the Randall Sellers show (his "Cherri and John" shown here) out there, I suggest you call (215) 782-2776 or email nancy.lewis@temple.edu first to make sure someone will be around to let you in.
permanent link  libby 2:58 PM
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What a soul looks like

 

Cyber-artist Fernando Velazquez wrote to say his Soul Collectors project was selected as one of 14 online projects for a digital art show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Caracas, Venezuela. (see my post of 6/25/03 for more about Velazquez)

The artist says it's not to late to send in your image and be part of his collection. In fact, he writes that even "if you already took part... you can do it once more!" Double redundancy in souls, wow. There's a lot more souls on his site than when I looked several months ago. Like the "Snapshot" exhibit that parked itself at Arcadia a while back, Velazquez's soul train has dogs and cats, movie stars, dead people, nudes and close-ups of tongues sticking out. It's a vibrant slice of the human pie.
permanent link  roberta 1:37 PM
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Bird poop

 

Scientific method dictates we follow up on Dave Allen’s bird experiment at Arcadia University. As you may recall (see Libby’s post of 8/29/03 and my a-list piece of Sept. 3.) three starling fledglings were installed in a cozy aviary in the gallery and were treated to daily music appreciation lessons in an attempt to see whether they could pick up some new material. (Starlings are copycat birds who mimic ambient sounds in the environment.)

Dick Torchia, Arcadia curator, had just finished giving a gallery talk when we spoke last week, more than a month into the project. “[The birds] were unusually vocal,” he said. “I had to stop talking a couple times.” OK, so the birds are yakking away. That's more than at the beginning of their stay. (image, top is the starlings at Arcadia)

Torchia then sent an email with two anecdotes about bird babble. (Whether or not they are sufficient evidence to say learning occured is anyone’s speculation. But really, since this is art, that's all beside the point anyway.)

Anecdote 1. “...Aaron Igler and I did some professional audio/videotaping. As we set up the mic and mini-disc recorder, one [bird] perched separately on a branch and concertized for a full two minutes...”

Anecdote 2. One visitor wrote in the gallery book on Sept. 23: “We heard little for the first half hour but at about 2:45 there was some intense singing -- one bird at a time -- for about ten minutes, definitely incorporating motifs from a few measures back.”

Diva-like performances. That's got to mean something doesn't it?

Torchia concludes, “I’m not sure there is any objective way to measure how the Messiaen recording has affected the starlings, but I know for sure that there is a discernable “Pavlovian” response. each morning when the music is turned on they definitely perk up and start to sing. They are also very responsive to the sound of people talking in the gallery, but perhaps because they are more social than musical.”

The curator/artist known for his camera obscura work and photo projections has some previous experience working with animals in art. “I worked with fish on my own....and it’s hard. I projected [an image] on the fish.” Not only is it hard, but afterwards you might be left holding the fish, like Torchia was. He told me he wound up keeping one of the fish for seven years.

Well, nothing conclusive in the bird learning experiment. And the three starlings are now gone to the bird sanctuary from whence they'll be transferred to the wild when they're ready. As for me, I went, saw, listened and enjoyed being “that” close to the wild things. It may not have succeeded as science but the piece was an audio-visual aesthetic experience I'll remember. (images middle and bottom are John J. Audubon paintings)



permanent link  roberta 9:29 AM
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Sunday, October 26, 2003

The more things change...

 

Here's a quote from Joseph Sill, a Philadelphia art patron:

"Philadelphia is not the place for an artist's success. Indeed, the taste for the arts seems to be waning away in this city; and with our commerce we shall lose our refinement also."

He observed that he couldn't get people to buy local art, but the good citizens of Philadelphia laid down their dollars for art from Europe. He concluded that Philadelphia was "a sad place for artists."

The quote from Sill, a merchant, is from 1844, and it came from "Philadelphia: A 300-Year History," ed. Russell Weigley.

Sill was chairman of the Board of Managers of the Artists and Managers Association in 1841 and started the Art Union of Philadelphia several years later, only to see it dissolve in 1855 (image shown is the old 40th Street Bridge).

Certainly, what he said could have applied to Philadelphia until fairly recently; just substitute "New York" for "Europe" and you've got modern history. Have things changed much? Anyone dealers out there have an opinion?
permanent link  libby 10:48 AM
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Breathing lessons

 
Csilla Sadloch’s four virtuoso paintings hanging at Schmidt/Dean make a nice pairing with Fritz Dietel’s sculptures in the main gallery space (see yesterday’s post).

They are both about nature, but what a difference a point of view makes!

Sadloch paints pristine images about the profusion of nature. Her densely woven imagery fills the canvas top to bottom, left to right and front to back--and even underneath the painted-on mat--with not a lot of breathing room (shown, "Two Beans").

With their perfection of craft, Sadloch’s paintings seem to be about a human desire to control nature. And with the paint subservient to the imagery, the work is also about the painter’s absolute need to control materials. Even the sides of the paintings, which are on thick wood panels, have been considered and finished with paint.

In contrast, Dietel’s sculptures seem to be about man’s fragility in the natural world. I take his sculptures as living, breathing stand-ins for humans.

In terms of subject matter—Sadloch's take on human dominance of nature seems modern enough, but painter dominance of the medium seems to belong to some century past—a nice fit with the still lifes (shown, Eric L. Conklin's "Tied Up;" Conklin has some similar work on exhibit at More) from the Trompe l’Oeil Society over at More Gallery (presented in association with Rittenhouse Fine Art).
permanent link  libby 10:38 AM
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