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Friday, November 21, 2003

Looking up and down and finding art

 
About two years ago I noticed an anonymous street beatification project at the corner of 17th and South. Somebody had put up a landscape painting on the 1 hr parking signpost. The scene of mountains and valley is painted on a thin sheet of metal cut to the dimensions of the official city signs above it. It's a nice, brushy painting and it's weathered well outdoors. I like to think of it as a kind of anti-mural-- a gift of art that's not sanctioned, not photoshopped and just humbly hanging out.


Anyway, I consider this painting on a post a found object even though I can't put it in my pocket and bring it home.

Speaking of found objects, my editor at the Weekly, Liz Spikol, is organizing a writing/exhibition project called Philly Phound based on found objects in Philadelphia. Apparently there's an entire universe of finders out there (see foundmagazine)weaving stories around objects they've found in their neighborhoods. (If Joseph Cornell were alive I think he'd approve. His mystery boxes have found object appeal.) By the way, any writers out there interested in participating in Liz's project, email her at lspikol@philadelphiaweekly.com.


There's something about the intersection of South and 17th that brings out the street art. I was walking up 17th St. with Stella the other day and she stopped abruptly at Kater and 17th and pointed down to a mystery piece of stencil art on the sidewalk. I can't make out the star depicted (Val Kilmer, maybe? or some other slick frat boy type). But it's a nice, two-color stencil, right there at your feet.

Crossing Kater, the sidewalk on the north side of the intersection has another -- equally mysterious -- piece of stencil art, this one of a madonna and child, all stylized and curvy-roundy. Is this a group stencil show? Could these two images be the work of two people responding to each other? They're stylistically very different and yet that blue ink/paint's pretty consistent.


Speaking of blue, here's a small sticker I found around the corner on South St. between 16th and 15th (on a favorite postering and stickering wall on the south side of the street). It's notable mostly for the relationship between the curling edge and the image which seems to relate. It's a nice small moment on the street.


I don't often brake for art but I pulled over for this Philadelphia Independent honor box on 22nd and Lombard. The Independent commissioned a couple of artists to paint their boxes a while back. I hadn't seen this one before and its pop art, bubblegum pink and drippy yellow design appealed.


Painted by alt-illustrator Hawk Krall, the box has a nice, edgy, R. Crumb-iness going on that fits the corner and fits the publication to a t.

Any other Philadelphia found art stories, anybody? Or found art elsewhere in the universe? I'd love to hear them.
permanent link  roberta 8:42 AM
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Thursday, November 20, 2003

The digital express

 
On days when I seem tethered to cyberspace and think I'm never going to make it to the real world, I deem myself lucky to get an email or two that shows me something I want to know more about.

So it was a few days ago, when an email came in from local artist Nancy Bea Miller, who sweetly wondered if we could run a link to her blog. I'll get to that later, because first I'd like to run a link to her website.

Here's a sampling of what she had to show there, a world mostly of still lifes--some with toys, some with children, plus a somewhat sugary take on traditional foods and vessels.

There's a casualness to the way the objects are set up across her canvases, a sense of household clutter caught on the sly, rolling off the edges, bumping into one another like unruly kids continually on the verge of disaster.

I get the sense she's looked at a lot of Morandis (shown right), but then decided that dark compression of desolate, peculiar objects was not her cup of tea.

Instead, she's chosen the quotidian, and then brought to it an intensity--a mix of carefully chosen colors and children's-world objects on the run, on the verge of growing up. The toys in that still life context have a weirdness that pushes them into the world of metaphor, little people with their odd ways and tender feelings.

This past year, she's received a number of awards according to her resume, including an Independence Foundation Fellowship in the Arts and the Valerie Lamb Smith Residency (a Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts alumni award).

I pass on her blog link, but it's not her best work--a little undigested and haphazard, and, as she wrote in her email, full of "the unrelenting domesticity (I have 3
young boys) which fuels my art." But it serves as a reminder that while her still life arrangements may suggest the haphazard, they are anything but.


permanent link  libby 4:50 PM
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Art history and memory, or death by Photoshop

 
Art is a form of fiction, with the past or even the present seen through the prism of the artist’s eyes.

A mural, an exhibit and some web-transmitted art have brought me to these thoughts. I guess I’ll start with the mural, because that’s where I started looking.

I pass the mural “Thank you, Mr. Blackwell,” at 42nd and Haverford the side of the Terry Funeral Home (how apt, given that the mural is a memorial), at least twice a week. It’s by mural program regular Peter Pagast with Delia King and Larissa Danowitz.

The late Lucien Blackwell, a former city councilman, U.S. congressman and union leader whose councilmanic seat is now occupied by his wife, Jannie, was a big presence in a local way, a guy whose motto to his district was service.

The mural pretends toward history, with its photographic quality and its Photoshop collaged imagery. The cursive inscription “Thank you, Mr. Blackwell” on the bottom is straight out of a sentimental photo album.

But is it art? I don’t think so. It’s a mural that fits the preconceptions of the non-artists —Jannie? The Terrys? whoever--who wanted a mural dedicated to Lucien. The piece is smarmy. All I see is the perspective of Photoshop and the patrons, not the point of view of the artist.

Certainly, memorializing history is traditionally public art’s domain (shown, Randolph Rogers' Abraham Lincoln, in Fairmount Park), and the powers that be get to write that history, commission it, control it. But ultimately, it’s the artist who must make the art decisions for it to pass as art.

So now we have Lucien Blackwell handsomely painted into our memories in the most prosaic of ways. Mistake.

I want to protest the Photoshop collages, lacking a spatial context, that seem to be going up all around the city in a surfeit of pop culture blandness.

Personal history
In contrast, Brian Wallace, gallery director at Moore College of Art, sent along a couple of links to something called "Baghdad Journal" by Steve Mumford, an illustrated – by ink and paper – memoir that ran in a couple of issues of Artnet.com.

Accustomed as we are to photos, the travel art shocks with its personal and poetic views—a little Victorian and British, and the antithesis of photography.

I’m left wondering why someone is making this art at this time. But the images' emotional and romantic sense of unfamiliar places and unfamiliar garb jump at me and slow my eye down. I understand that it's unfair to compare these drawings to ordinary travel snapshots and photojournalism. But that's what they seem to be competing with, and in that competition, they're winners.

Are the inked memories more accurate or less accurate? Beats me.

Photo-processing for truth?

But on the subject of accuracy and photos, I was in Quaker photo Tuesday, and got into a conversation about veracity and photo developing.

Now, as we all know, the world has gone digital, and the Quaker lady was complaining that what comes in is totally changeable (shown, Andy Warhol's Che, and Libby's antiqued version, thanks to Photoshop), which is of course the great advantage and disadvantage of Photoshop.

So in the process of trying to correct things, there’s not much way for the Quakers to know if what they’re doing is correcting or remaking altogether. What’s reality? At least a negative was a negative. At least it gave the illusion of reality.



If this is memory, please give me fiction.

Which brings me to the third show. I, and the rest of my neighborhood, remember poet and local historian Ruth Molloy with great fondness and admiration. So when the University City Arts League put up an exhibit called “The Art of Ruth Molloy,” I trucked on over.

To call this an art show was deceptive. It was an estate sale--and a depressing one at that, because Molloy was a collector of street debris and trash, some of which she organized in groups (shown, tea pot lids which are memories of the broken teapots, no doubt), some of which she used as a jumping off point for poems or observations (shown, a crushed soda can and the thought it inspired), and some of which she just left hanging around, waiting for their moment of inspiration.

The show included some digital prints on watercolor paper of her photos. So the photos weren’t even authentic. They were copies. As for their staying power, the label said the paper was archival, but it didn’t say if the ink was.

Anyway, I prefer to remember Molloy for her spark of life, not for the remnants of her creative process.

This makes me sad, especially because with my parents’ deaths in the past two years, I realize more than ever how special each of us is, and how ephemeral we are, lasting in three dimensions only in the memories of those who loved us.

Photoshop cannot adequately capture us.





permanent link  libby 3:46 PM
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The cow's night watch

 
Curator Doug Paschall clarifies a few things about my cow


[Ed. --see post of Nov. 19 for image of a cow painting I found discarded in my neighborhood.]
Just a quick note this time to let you know, if you haven't heard already, that your sidewalk-salvaged painting of cows is a copy of the Dutch Baroque master Paulus Potter's "The Young Bull", 1647, Mauritshuis, The Hague. One book I have states that "during the nineteenth century, this work by the young Potter ranked close in fame to the 'Night Watch' [by Rembrandt]." The Potter work has since found a more realistic level of appreciation -- admired, certainly, and reproduced in just about any history of Dutch art, but seldom swooned over. --Doug Pascall curated the First Woodmere Photography Triennial at Woodmere Art Museum.
permanent link  roberta 8:10 AM
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Wednesday, November 19, 2003

Moore stuff

 
So if you've been out in the world these days you know that art auction fundraisers are de rigeur in the non-profit world. I assume they make money for the venue and that is why they keep on coming. Here's news of one to benefit the galleries at Moore College of Art and Design. I've always loved what Moore was up to and I'm crossing my fingers that under the school's new leadership the galleries will continue to bring in provocative work from outside Philadelphia and organize strong local shows.

Moore's auction theme is "Out of the Box." All the work is new and made by artists who've exhibited at or have a connection with Moore -- a list with plenty of big names, including artblog's own Astrid Bowlby, Ditta Baron Hoeber and Anne Seidman. Other artists include recent Van der Zee award-winner (and Moore faculty) Moe Brooker as well as...Ron Klein, James Mills, Eileen Neff, Marta Sanchez, Kocot and Hatton, Nadia Hironaka, Bill Walton, Mary Ehrin and Emily Brown.

The theme is white box -- cardboard box, that is -- and all the work is made from or uses a particular white cardboard box as its muse. (image top is Brooker's piece; image right is Ehrin's)

The silent auction gala is tomorrow night, Thursday, Nov. 20 in the Moore Atrium. Tickets, $50 at the door.

permanent link  roberta 10:13 AM
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Pause for cows

 

The other night we got an email from Canadian painter Karl Skaret, whose website includes images of a large body of work focussed on the Alberta prairie land. Skaret's bio says he raises cattle with his brother which keeps him closely tied to the land, sky and animals. The front page, alone, made we want to take the web tour. (image, top, is Skaret's "The weight of the world is on your shoulders," 1998)


Skaret's paintings are about as friendly as they come. (image right is "Riding the Fence," 1996) There's whimsy, some spirituality (those skies) and a lot of animal -- cows, hogs, horses -- all imbued with a kind of lonesome cowboy blues. As you scroll through the years, the work gets more lyrical and the skies more filled with wonder. (image below is "I raised a lot of Cain when I was able," 2003)


Which reminds me that I meant to tell about my own cow picture, (below) scavenged from the streets of my neighborhood last summer. My cow is obviously a Pennsylvania cow. She seems to live in a Hicks-ian Peaceable Kingdom...sort of. There is an ominous black bird circling in the -- actually kind of ominous -- cloudy sky. And what's that grey-bearded farmer doing leaning on that tree?

Garrison Keilor might be able to make a nice story out of this painting. I couldn't believe somebody would throw it away. It's a real painting, not a print, and somebody loved it for many years -- it has holes that have been fixed and it's been re-framed several times.

(OK it is also in bad shape -- lots of dings and a couple of tears, but it's a work of art signed in curlicue letters in black paint by "AW.") I love this discarded work of art. And even though I don't really have room for it on my walls, I'm keeping it. It makes me think about the history of its making and the path it took ultimately winding up discarded along with a pile of trash.


...On a more upbeat note, and getting back to the subject of landscape paintings, Philadelphia is of course a great place to see them in the flesh. Right now, you can catch Max Mason's paintings of the hills, valleys, roads --and cloudy skies of the region at Gross McCleaf. But the big news is that Mason's got a suite of paintings of the construction of the new Phillies stadium, Citizens Bank Park. With their Mack-truck, girder and C-clamp veracity, the works (image, above, is "Ballpark Construction, Philadelphia") are about the dignity of work in the bigger scheme of things.




permanent link  roberta 9:04 AM
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Tuesday, November 18, 2003

The ugliness of Paris, II

 

Sid, not to get too tetchy about it but didn't you ever spend time in the plaster pit during your art school days...don't you have a visceral reaction to what I call ugly plaster (rough, chunky, like REALLY large curd cottage cheese)? Plaster, of course, “is” just the way a human body “is.” It has a few sides, not all beautiful.

Art is nothing if not a bunch of materials to which you react. Segal’s plaster, the same utilitarian stuff used in medicine to shore up broken limbs, is an abject material to begin with. His choice, not mine. I’m just reacting.

As for seeking humor...I don't know. I agree that one doesn't normally go to the down side for humor. That said, I’ll take Kathe Kollwitz and Hopper and Hesse and all the rest you mention over Segal who I believe gives you less to think about and certainly pleases the eye far less. My opinion, my taste.

I will say I think Segal has been an influence on succeeding generations of artists. You could almost argue that Kara Walker's faceless, black silhouettes may have some relation to Segal's anonymous white 3-D silhouettes. (And speaking of influence, whose art do we think influenced the new iPod/iTunes commercials?)

As for deep criteria I'm all for it. But I’m also here to rile things up, get discussion going, spark debate, cause trouble. I will be injudicious...so that you can be judicious...steer the boat into deep waters.

Finally, I can’t speak for Libby, who wrote about Takeda on Nov. 1, but I find all that kick-ass, parody/fantasy grossness likeable, digestible and full of forward momentum.
It’s most likely a taste thing.
permanent link  roberta 10:10 AM
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The ugliness of Paris

 
Post from Sid Sachs

[Ed. --Sid is responding to my post of Nov. 4 on George Segal.]

OK Roberta, Tell me how in the world plaster is ugly? It just is. You may think the sculptures are ugly. You may not like how the work surface is built up or the environments composed. But ugly?

Are walls ugly because they are made of plaster? Is paper ugly? You then complain about the lack of color. That is not what Segal was about. Does bronze have a color? The white is the intrinsic color of Segal's signature material and when he used color it often didn't work well and seemed arbitrary.

Then you complain about his "lack of humor(!!!)" sic. I hope that was a joke.

You don't go to Segal for humor -- it isn't there. Does everything have to be light, colorful, humorous?

Would you go to Gorky for a laugh? Cornell? Kline? Rothko? Dostoevski? Hopper? And Hopper is the artist that most connects to Segal. (image above is Hopper's "Western Motel," image left is Segal's "The Diner" (1964-66)) And the fact that Segal used plaster most of his career is just a fact.

If (Eva) Hesse had lived she probably would be using fiberglass, latex, and rope. Plaster was Segal's signature as much as welded steel was Smith's. Have you asked Sarah McEneaney to stop using tempera?

You are applying value judgments without deep criteria.

And previously on November 1 you write [Ed.--actually it was Libby who wrote] of Clint Takeda "a poignant earnestness to a lot of these images...Takeda's sculptures...have human boy souls peering out from their deformities". I like Takeda's work but it is "ugly" and that is positive here. (bottom image is a Takeda ink on paper drawing)

So when is the abject, ugly, deformed, gross, colorless, good? And when is it "plug-ugliness" (your words). --Sid
permanent link  roberta 8:41 AM
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Monday, November 17, 2003

What's the use?

 
Walking in places where traces of the natural land remain, like Pennypack Park (in Northeast Philadelphia) or John Heinz Wildlife Refuge near the airport, reminds us that human constructs like cities are not our natural habitat. But the city is never that far from the urban schmoozer who, when finding the vestiges of human presence from the past--an old chimney left standing, an ancient log cabin, an arrowhead--experiences a delight, a sense of discovery.

Ed Levine's three pieces installed in Pennypack Park as part of the Fairmount Park Art Association's New-Land-Marks program to install art in public spaces give a little of that thrill of ancient civilization rediscovered.

The three pieces--"Birdblind," "Benches," and "Thoreau's Hut"--"Embodying Thoreau: dwelling, sitting, watching"--clearly suffer from too many names, but the work itself is plain and Shaker-like. In fact, the birdblind is as unprepossessing as you can get from the human side--a flat little shed (see above), right near the offices of the park.

The birds have the better view from outside, because they can see the semi-circular wall. But go inside and the semicircular wall with its slot peering out affords a panoramic view of where the birds are supposed to be. The blind's benches, also curved, are beautifully made.

I had trouble thinking this was sculpture. It was, ultimately, just a beautifully made birdblind.

I got lucky following directions to get to the chairs and didn't go down to the path closest to the river. That would have been a mistake. The chairs are about a half mile along the middle path. Three paths, three chairs--the poppa chair, the momma chair, and the little itty bitty baby chair. Like Goldilocks, I sat on all three and tested the view. Very nice. These, like the birdblind, scored high on the function meter.

There's a brutish, clunky quality about these hemispheres with chunks bitten out. I liked the copper rind along the curved edge. I liked the suggestion of cross-sections of giant trees. So these succeeded at taking me beyond chairness and reminding me of my human scale against the majesty of nature, but if couldn't quite stop questioning their awkward appearance. Which is not to say I wasn't overjoyed in discovering them or sitting in them or thinking about their shape and scale.

Like the other two pieces, they blend in, just the right degree of obtrusiveness and unobtrusiveness in the woody setting.

Another half a mile along the same path, Thoreau's Hut pops into view. It too was just visible enough to be spotted in the woods. In the form of a shelter that gives virtually no shelter--the roof and sides are open--it provides an austere, two-sided chair for contemplation of nature (contemplating nature is the theme in all of these pieces).


I found this the most poetic of all. The view of the sky and the woods, the platform/floor, the treetrunk frame, the back-to-back seating clearly are not artifacts from the past, but they hark to it and improve on it. The house is a little world both in and out of and part of nature.

All three score high on the public art need to create a sense of place. If we're hiking on the same day, I can say, Meet me at the birdblind; or Meet me at the three chairs or Thoreau's Hut. They feel friendly and usable and they respond to the environment around them. I imagine people who use the park will enjoy using the pieces.

My initial response was that they succeeded as architecture and are an asset to the park. To call them sculpture (especially the birdblind) seems a stretch.
permanent link  libby 9:40 AM
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Sunday, November 16, 2003

Tall stories

 
While looking for images of the Emily Brown show at Gallery Joe, I came upon a link to Brown's new website. I later told her I wasn't sure what I liked better, her art show or her Web site. No kidding. It was fun, with camera pans giving a virtual tour of Arch Street and of each of the rooms inside the gallery. Last time I visited, when I clicked on each picture, I got a blowup. Great. But just now I tried again and that feature wasn't working. Boo.

The image I was looking for was a relatively modest-size etching (I can't tell you the exact size because the page isn't working now, but it's in the 20" square range) called "Fallen" (shown above). Here, Brown seemed to be getting at something other than the transcendence of nature and man's place in it. A turbulent nature menaces the white, fallen limbs, which seemed to me like human limbs, caught in the web of writhing tree parts.

I bumped into Brown at a Leeway Foundation event last week and told her that I loved this image and why. She said she had made it in the fall of 2001--following 9/11--and like so many artists I know, she had struggled through a lot of feelings and an inability to continue business as usual. So it was work she wasn't sure of as she created it. That struggle and lack of complacency comes through and gives it strength.

Coming back to the image with that information in mind, I see that those two limbs were the twin towers as well as the victims, the tangle of leaves and branches the mound of debris that we saw every day in the news.

The large pieces at Gallery Joe set a record in scale for Brown, with "Elegy," the triptych in the vault, exceeding 8 feet in height. Only one panel of another triptych (the left panel shown left) fit in the gallery. These pieces are more typical of Brown's work and beautifully done, but the large scale in a small space like the vault seems like a mistake to me. I'm reminded of a Ugo Rondinone piece I saw many years ago in which he papered a wall with a gigantic, black-and-white wooded scene. I'm also reminded of Adam Cvijanovic's scenic wallpaper at the Fabric Workshop.

I would prefer to see these pieces in a far larger space. Gallery owner Becky Kirlin said "Elegy" was created with the vault space in mind. How about a museum wall, instead?

Of the large pieces, the argument for size seemed strongest for "Fond Farewell" (shown right), it's view of the treetops at once peaceful and vertiginous, the size fundamental to that dizzy feeling.

No longer referring to Brown's relatively modest large pieces, I'd like to say that in general, there's a lot of unjustified large art out there, work that seems to me to be undermined by its own ego and ambition.

I suppose you could argue that Alex Katz's humongous canvases are milking the billboard motif, or that Anselm Kiefer's got his entire country's guilt on his mind (image, Kiefer's "Nuremberg" is more than 8 feet high, 14 wide).

But I think that art needs to be something for daily life, and museums the recorders of the best or the quintessential of how we live (i.e. what art people buy and hang). To create a piece that could fit only in a museum seems not right.
permanent link  libby 6:46 PM
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Painting your life at the ICA and elsewhere

 


I ran into Sarah McEneaney at the Print Center auction the other night and while the PEW fellow and painter of autobiographical, egg tempera paintings was in-between making bids on a couple things (an Emlen Etting drawing which she got and a Shelley Spector piece, which she also got at the last minute), she told me about her upcoming ICA solo show, something I’m very excited about. (all images are McEneaney paintings in egg tempera)

Here’s a quick preview.

--the show will be in the ICA’s big upstairs gallery. There will be 40 paintings and 16 works on paper;

--the retrospective will have a few older pieces dating back to 1987 but the emphasis is on more recent work;

--Sarah wanted a catalog for the show and parlayed the ICA’s budget for a color brochure into what sounds like a great 80-page book through fund-raising she undertook with the ICA’s support and blessing. (In addition to the ICA funds, money came from the Independence Foundation, Leeway, PA Council on the Arts and from collectors).

--the catalog has a major essay by ICA Curator Ingrid Schaffner who curated the show and eleven short commentaries about individual paintings from poets, curators, and writers like the PMA’s Darielle Mason (an expert on Indian painting); Natalie Anderson and Lisa Sewell; former PMA assistant curator Susan Rosenberg; ICA’s Elyse Gonzales; Janine Mileaf of Swarthmore; Eileen Neff, Sheila Pepe and Rob Nixon. ICA’s Bennet Simpson did a Q&A with a PAFA conservator about egg tempera technique and Sarah wrote something, too, she says.

--everybody’s hoping the show will travel.

--McEneaney, just back from a residency in Virginia will be showing work from that residency at Reynolds Gallery in Richmond.

--and this just in... (also autobiographical) artist Rob Matthew writes to say McEneaney, Spector and he will be in a group show at New York’s Gallery Schlesinger from mid-December to late-January. (Schlesinger is McEneaney's NY Gallery.) It’s a self-portrait show and the face of Philadelphia will be well represented!
permanent link  roberta 11:40 AM
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