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Saturday, January 17, 2004

See it on your computer

 

Last year, Fleisher-Ollman Gallery moved to one of Philadelphia's most New York-like gallery spaces, a second-floor aerie with big windows overlooking Walnut St. (Think 57th St., New York, not Chelsea). It probably doesn't have anything to do with the move but right now the gallery has a young, hip, New York-ish group show that includes an internet-only component.

I recommend visiting the show, "The New Acropolis," in person, especially to see the work of Tomita Takatomo, Kate Abercrombie and Jina Valentine. But stop by the website first, to see the web art.

Online, Robert Botto's short, choppy film, "A Rarefied Battle Wages" is laugh out loud funny. Especially notably for its exceedingly-low production values, the piece, in which mythic titans duel in the clouds with cardboard-and-duct tape swords is seconds long but rumbles around in your memory afterwards. Be sure to have your audio turned on, but not too loud. The other internet piece, "Seaworthy," by Claire Ittis, is pleasant enough but feels incomplete and sketchy.

"The New Acropolis" was organized by three gallery assistants and the show's named after their favorite Fishtown diner. The show's got some tortured conceptual art, some things that are a little embarrassing (work derivative of self-taught art by an artist who isn't). But Tomita Takatomo makes the trip worth it. (You may remember his cast resin cartoon creatures from shows at Spector Gallery. They're like Teletubbies in warpaint. Sometimes he shrink wraps them like Toys-R-Us products.) (image, top)

Also memorable are Jina Valentine's photographs taken at night of people standing in front of their homes. Shot at a low angle and looking up, the black and white shots have a Bates Motel ambiance that's nicely weird. Valentine's other work, a player piano roll of Roberta Flack's "Do What You Gotta Do" made from the Philadelphia White Pages was like some quirky, community anthem for an Eagles pep rally. I loved it. (image, above left)

It was a surprise to see this hip group show in a gallery I mainly know for showcasing work of self-taught artist Bill Traylor, and occasionally, contemporary local artists like Bruce Pollock. Let's hope they do more.
permanent link  roberta 10:10 AM
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Friday, January 16, 2004

Article alert

 
I thought I'd alert you to an article by Michael Kimmelman in the New York Times about Chuck Close and his printmaking process (vis a vis Close's show at the Met).

The article is also accompanied by one of those cool, narrated New York Times art slide shows. Check it out quick (before it becomes inaccessible).

The article's well worth the read if you're interested in how printmakers work and in collaboration (shown, Close's "Emma," a 113-color Japanese woodcut print made with master printer Yasu Shibata).


permanent link  libby 4:59 PM
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A few more favorite things

 

She's not well known here although she's got a following in her home state of Texas. Trudy Kraft, whose works are on view now at Show of Hands Gallery, makes lovely, intricate works on paper with layers and layers of ink and paint -- and masking fluid that she puts on and takes off and puts on again to create veils and interwoven layers of pattern.

Influenced by all things non-western -- Persian rugs, Ashanti weavings, Maori altars -- the works are dot-crazy, wiggly-line-ful and sumptuous. The exhibition space in the rear of the crafts boutique is a nice quiet alcove for small, 2-D work. The show will be up to Feb. 22. (image above is detail from "Flora and Fauna 2")

Show of Hands Director Paul Harris, an Episcopal priest (non-parochial), started the gallery 10 years ago as a venue for one-of-a-kind crafts. Nowadays, Harris says, with the high art/craft art distinction melting away, galleries like his are exhibiting 2-D works along with their other fare. Next up, Harris will showcase potter, Sebastian Hussbeck, who calls himself a potter but whose work is sculptural.

What I saw looked like a tiny, fossilized boat. It was Lilliputian but abject. Harris told me the artist fires his pieces ten times in order to get the clay to look like rock.


Speaking of alternative venues, the group show "Repetition and Transformation" in Philadelphia Cathedral is worth a look-see. In fact, the Cathedral itself is worth the trip. Art in a church seems a natural for a certain type of contemplative, intimate art. Art of a more extroverted nature need not apply.

I remember seeing a Bill Viola piece at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, and while you might think video is too extroverted for a church, that piece, which was pieta-like and elegaic, was perfect. (I think it was a silent piece, which is probably a requirement, come to think of it.)


Anyway, back at Philadelphia Cathedral, Mel Fisher's sculptural relief "Kaibob Dawn" is a beauty. Made of jig-sawed wood cut into zig-zag shapes then fitted back together (not a piece was left over according to the curator), the work glows like the sun. Artblog's own Douglas Witmer's "Refrain, " echoes the church's pipe organ and stately columns with a rhythmic, up-down array of skinny, black rectangles in procession. (image above right is Fisher's "Kaibob Dawn;" image above left is Witmer's "Refrain")



Speaking of the curator, Elizabeth Doering's permanent installation over the baptismal font, dedicated to the lives lost in Pennsylvania on 911 and to the babies born in Philadelphia on that same day, is a piece made by performing a ritual (dropping molten pewter into water). The congealed peter pieces -- 110 of them -- hang over another ritual basin of water. It's lovely and evocative. And the ambient sound of trickling water circulating in the basin is nicely soothing. (image is Doering's piece)



permanent link  roberta 8:10 AM
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Thursday, January 15, 2004

Landscapes of the mind

 
James Brantley's show at Sande Webster's new digs at 2006 Walnut is a good choice to inaugurate the space.

The paintings look great in the elegant old townhouse space that's, alas, not quite in business, although ready for showing.

So here's the story I got from Webster gallerista Ian Jarvis. The new landlord didn't realize that the space wasn't correctly zoned for the gallery and frame shop. So Webster cannot sell from that spot yet, and must use the old Locust Street space to handle the business side of things until the zoning is straightened out.

Webster does have staff manning the new space; so to get in, just call ahead.

Brantley's paintings come in three basic varieties--iconic portraits, dark cityscapes and invented landscapes.

He's best known for the landscapes, with their lush colors and vibrating horizon lines (literally shaky straight lines that transsect the canvas). They are visions of hope, romance, even allegory, with tiny, tiny figures occasionally in the vast spaces depicted. How a thoroughly urban artist incorporated the colors of the tropics in his work will just have to be one of life's mysteries(shown, the panoramic "Flying High").

The gorgeous tropical tones contrast with the gray urban spaces like the existential "The Sylvania," (shown at the top) and the desolate "Earl Gray Skies" (shown left), with its four small figures plus four structures, two with windows, two blank. The painting offers up its intense shots of color sparingly--on the shirts of the figures and the lit-up sides of the otherwise gloomy buildings. The painting suggests an identity between the figures and the buildings while the horizon shimmers beneath a grim gray sky.

The horizon serves as a friendlier version of Barnett Newman's zips, which offer narrow glimpses into the spiritual infinite.

Landscapes, no matter how realistic, are really landscapes of the artist's mind, ideosyncratic to the artist's vision and decisions. But in Brantley's case, the land is often a figment of his imagination, places he has never even been or places he has reinvented. I was especially delighted by the brevity of his artist's statement: "A painter's journey...the unconscious made clear." That's it in toto.

"Some Sunday Morning," another cityscape, offers the yellow glow of sky and gray buildings with pink lit-up sides. Again, the horizon line shimmers across the canvas, and the surprise, again, is in what's lit up.

Also outstanding were four small, icon-like portraits (shown right, "Craig"), painted with intense, flat blue or blue-green backgrounds, the faces simply delined and thoroughly individual.



Besides the Brantley paintings (shown, "K.S. in Cuba"), photos by Ron Tarver lined a hallway, and the front room of the gallery was filled with work from a number of artists Webster shows regularly.

I somehow think everyone knows this but maybe not, so I want to add that Webster is the go-to gallery for excellent work from a relatively large number of established African-American artists, Tarver and Brantley included. For the gallery's list of artists, go to the web site.
permanent link  libby 5:20 PM
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A few of my favorite things

 
Libby and I saw the ethnographic show "Latino Philadelphia" at Taller Puertorriqueno last week, and apart from the fact that it jams too much information into too small a gallery space, it's a good-hearted effort that attempts to document the various waves of Latino immigrants to the city, through oral history and photographs.

Organized by the Balch Institute and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, which doesn't have an exhibition space, the show will tour around the region and wind up in an archive at the HSP.


I liked best the fact that Tony Rocco was the photographer hired to document the face of contemporary Latino Philadelphia. Rocco, who normally uses black and white film, switched to digital for this project. He still managed to be true to his aesthetic, catching people at ease and with dignity. (images are a couple of Rocco's mostly anonymous subjects -- he told me he was too busy shooting film to get the names)

permanent link  roberta 3:29 PM
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Wednesday, January 14, 2004

Another "Land" heard from

 

[Got this letter--heavily edited--from Germany about the Jan. 7 post on the artists' books show at the Print Center.]

Dear Libby Rosof - and everybody else who wants to know more about books under glass and in a foreign language ...

It was a great adventure for all of us to have our books in Philadelphia, and we think all of us wished the Atlantic to be less wide so that we simply could have come over for the show and answered all your questions!...

We are Uta Schneider and Ulrike Stoltz. Both of us were members of the women's artists group "Unica T", together [with] Ines v. Ketelhodt and Anja Harms.

We founded the group in 1986 and split up (friendly) in 2001. So for 15 years, Unica T was "a fictitious person making real books".

"Stadt Land Fluss" [City, State, River(shown)] was our last collective work.

Stadt Land Fluss is actually a children's game: A letter of the alphabet is chosen by chance, and then everybody has to write down as fast as possible: a city starting with this letter, a country, starting with this letter, a river, an animal, a name, and a profession, all starting with the same letter.

So much for the children's game, which we used as a kind of basic rule of
the game for our collaboration. ...

We completely agree that books should be handled--and hope that this description helps to cross the barrier of glass cases and language at least a little.

With kind regards,
also on behalf of all the artists of "13 x",
: Ulrike Stoltz + Uta Schneider
permanent link  libby 6:30 PM
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Let there be wind

 

Brian Doyle's video "Current" of tickertape floating through noisy, unpopulated urban canyons--shot during the 2000 Yankees ticker-tape parade--is the second reason to visit Vox Populi Gallery this month, the other being the Screwball exhibit (see Jan. 12 post).

This video is about more than the lyricism of the floating debris wafted on air currents. Without a soul on the streets, the paper becomes a stand-in for people, buffeted by the wind, aimless, yet a spiritual presence even amongst the giant buildings.

The paper piles up on the street in trashy gusts and decoratively wraps around a tree until its limbs are obliterated. The streamers break up the impersonal geometry of glassy skyscraper facades and float like birds across the distant blue skies peered up to from street level.

And in the deep urban dark spaces, the paper shot against the sky and against the buildings becomes the smallness of a day and of human existence vis a vis the big city and vis a vis the big sky.

It made me think of Jeff Wall's enormous light-box-illuminated photo, "A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai)," that hung in the 1995 Whitney Biennial. But Wall's piece includes the people, who are also buffeted by the wind.

The installation, two side-by-side television screens and a bench on a platform were meant to evoke the experience of being in a remote-TV satellite truck, peering out the two back windows.

This is video as landscape in which the sky represents remote nature, but nature's air currents live amongst us and enliven the scene. By the way, the World Trade Towers appear in this video, which was taken before 9/11 but has an apocalyptic tone.
permanent link  libby 5:51 PM
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Reading the numbers

 

Yesterday’s Inquirer told us that the Elsa Schiaparelli show at the PMA was a good success but a modest blockbuster. (We're talking gate, here.) In 14 weeks, 84,605 people saw the exhibit. (The show closed Jan. 4.) In museum terms, that's a paltry number, especially compared to the 125,000 who saw the last fashion show at the PMA, 1997's “Best Dressed."

Here's a number I liked. 14,076 people, 17 percent of the total viewers for Schiaparelli, saw it in the last week. Procrastination wins the day! The show travels to Paris where it opens in March at the Musee de la Mode. (image is 19th Century costume from Musee de la Mode. See here for more pix.)

Where do YOU live?

Speaking of numbers, Carnegie Mellon professor Richard Florida’s article “Creative Class War” in the Washington Monthly is compelling reading. (Print it out, it's very long.)

According to Florida, America’s “creative class” is moving overseas to places a little more amenable to their kind than our shores at the moment. (Creative class refers broadly to workers in the arts, technology and the sciences.)

As for those cc'ers who stay here, we all seem to be coming together in cities like New York and San Francisco (he doesn't mention Philadelphia but we're coming together here, too), places already invested in cultural institutions where like-minded souls can huddle and do like-minded things.

Not only that, but visa restrictions and America's current unfriendliness to foreigners is a big turnoff to foreign cc workers who are coming here in far fewer numbers.

Florida calls former President Bill Clinton, a cc member, helpful in making America's climate one that encouraged and lauded creativity. Under current President George W. Bush, not a cc member, well, enough said.

NEA piles it on in Pennsylvania

Finally, here's some numbers about three Philadelphia institutions who got 2004 NEA grants for upcoming exhibits and programs. (Thanks artnet for the tip) Read the complete list of Pennsylvania recipients here:

-- Arcadia University -- $25,000 for site-specific installation by Olafur Eliasson
-- Fabric Workshop and Museum -- $50,000 for artists in residency program
-- ICA -- $20,000 for the upcoming Pepon Osorio exhibit.




permanent link  roberta 9:33 AM
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Tuesday, January 13, 2004

Harmonica convergence upstairs at Nexus

 

Japanese-born artist Keiko Miyamori falls into the category of tree hugger. Surprisingly, she's also an archivist. The Philadelphia artist hugged a tree stump, root and all, in a piece at Project Room a few years back. The project, called "Imagina," showed the big stump and huge root system and archived the junk the artist found trapped in the tree's roots (everything from a mound of bricks to coke bottles to shards of metal, glass, wood and plastic).

The entire project was Paul Bunyanesque with a twist of Charles Wilson Peale's natural history museum thrown in.

Miyamori's new piece in the Nexus Community Gallery (upstairs behind Highwire) is still about trees (no roots this time) but it continues the artist's ongoing themes of harmony in the world, here merged with some musical underpinnings -- the music of the spheres in the peaceable kingdom. (image top is "Memoria" at Nexus)

The centerpiece of the museum-like installation is a large, glass prism sitting on a table and casting little rainbows here and there around the room. On the walls are gilt-framed drawings labelled "Chestnut Hill, West Philadelphia," etc. Small shelves hold altered and numbered harmonicas; and two piano keyboards stick out from two walls. The drawings, beautiful and abstract, are charcoal rubbings of tree bark in the various neighborhoods.

The harmonicas, their tops and bottoms adorned with paper-and-ink drawings that fit like new skin, are elegant whatizits sitting on black velvet perches on top of what looks like hand-made boxes. There's a kind of innocence and modesty here that makes the whole thing rise above the seemingly corny prism and rainbows. (detail of rainbow and harmonica, left)

Photo-realism downstairs
Downstairs at Nexus the new members' show is a mixed bag. Of the five debutantes, photographers Jenny Drumgoole and James Wasserman had the most nuanced and affecting work.


Drumgoole's gelatin silver prints present her family and friends, warts and all, in shots rich with rural or small-town America weirdness. There is mom, curlers in her hair showing off her anniversary gift, a gun. There is dad, posing in the basement in front of his home brewery. (image, above is mom with her gun)

The work has a kind and gentle edge. These works don't mock, but they do have an ohmygosh lookatthiswillya attitude that feels about right for the subject.

James Wasserman's black and white photographs of decaying shacks in Wonder Valley California reminded me of some of Lewis Baltz's photographs I saw last year at Princeton University Art Museum. The portraits of decaying shacks in the middle of wide open, desolate spaces were organized into poignant triptychs. The shots were full of crisp detail and the whole thing was loneliness personified.

Even better were Wasserman's portraits of the inhabitants of Wonder Valley which reminded me of Mary Ellen Mark in their intimacy and subtlety. (image above is one of the shacks; image, right is "Darlene and Bill")

Others in the show include Susan Abrams, Anne Cecil and Virginia Batson.
permanent link  roberta 8:54 AM
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Monday, January 12, 2004

Screwball art

 
The Eagles vs. Green Bay were coming up in an hour, so to avoid the suspense of waiting, I headed to Vox Populi. An hour and a half later, behind schedule, I left the gallery, having had a quick love affair with the exhibit, “Screwball.”

I’m not really giving this a rave--just a big thumb up. After all, it was rather uneven and sometimes the humor was as low as you can go.

But I’ve always liked lighthearted art, and “Screwball's” cast of both local and out-of-town artists laugh at everything, from themselves to romance and sex to poop to the self-important art world.

That last category belongs to artist Konstantin Kakanias, who takes pokes at who’s who in the art world. Worse for wearing fashion on their sleeves are Matthew Barney (shown above), Robert Smithson, Jeff Koons and la Cicciolina, Janine Antoni, Gilbert and George, Ana Mendieta and Chris Ofili, for example. As you can see from the list, Kakanias is an equal opportunity poker.

His drawings, covered with scribbles, all show his own alterego, one Mrs. Tependris, posing as each of his victims. One of my faves was Kakanias as Mrs. Tependris as Yasumasa Morimura as Vivien Leigh (as Scarlett O’Hara).

The only work that took up as much of my attention as Kakanias’ were the videos—four of them, all compelling to look at, although some of the humor made me a little queasy or just plain irritated.

Not Jim Torok’s “Lo-Tech Animation” video, which was an anti-video , with each rough cartoon action frame flashed as a slide (shown, image from “Running Man” segment). In the “Shootout Segment,” the gun slingers bleed a sea of blood as they continue standing and shooting, Blam, blam, one frame at a time. Animation and slick technology and classic story arcs all took sweet little lobs from Torok.

Matthew Suib’s “Hound’s on Fire (Abstract Aggressionism),” based on collages of Tex Avery cartoon hounds, punches the action up with a mandala-like approach to the imagery (shown left). Zen pit bull puppy imitates Jackie Chan.

John Goras’ “Chirpy” cartoon was anything but puppy love. It was love at first sight between a bird (shown right) and a (hung) horse, the atmosphere of romance supplanted eventually by twisted, heaving sex between the two. And then the dripping physicality is followed by the mismatched lovers walking off into the sunset. The two characters and the drawing were sweet and charming, but never has romantic love and its conventions taken such a beating. I had to watch the whole thing.

Apparently, this film is notorious, but its Web site has been disabled. Web rumor has it banned in London. I should say so. Hurry and see it.

Not only the boys would be boys. In Tricia McLaughlin’s “Homesteading (derive style)” DVD, a charming cartoon-man and -woman build a cartoon home in a real, ultra-closeup food landscape that turns out to be on a body part that, fortunately, perhaps, is barely recognizable, but which serves as the punch line. The sound of sawing gives one pause, and the juicy food close-ups were sexy in and of themselves. The body part in that context didn’t measure up.

Type A (Adam Ames and Adam Bordwin, two very competitive guys) offered a series of five photos that showed one guy getting another to laugh with his mouth full of milk, hence the title “Spittakes #5” (shown). He got me to laugh, too, and I haven't a clue what he was saying.

Christopher Chiappa used a similar strategy of serial photos that indicate a course of action--head monumental against the sky, mouth painfully stuffed with firecrackers, turning from facing left to facing right (shown right, “Firecrackers”). This one puzzled me. Did I miss some reference here to Mt. Rushmore or something?

As for Chiappa’s “Wiener,” a hotdog sticking out of the wall, poop and penises just don’t seem all that funny to me unless there’s something else cooking, such as when the giant horse dong in Goras’ “Chirpy” swats Chirpy over and over, thereby ringing her bell.

I was glad to see that Charley Friedman was kind to his mother (we moms have to stick together), who was gracious enough to pose for his C-Print, “Mom” (shown left).

Ketta Ioannidou’s oil on canvas portraits of Greek goddesses (shown, “Bombshell”) as skinny runway models were pretty amusing, and it was nice to be reminded that women have senses of humor, too (yup, the show had only two women out of 10 contributors).



Show curator Chris Bors offered some scary misogyny of his own in his “Pinned Down”(shown left), quoting old cartoon characters. I was informed Bors created this painting just days after his marriage! I don't know if he's still married.

So go and have some laughs.






permanent link  libby 5:11 PM
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Sunday, January 11, 2004

Take that, word art!

 
Post from Jack Regalado

[Editor's note: This is a comment on Libby's Jan. 8 post on Jenny Holzer's piece at Penn.]
The Holzer-Penn deal doesn't bother me. That may be because I have never taken Holzer for an artist, nor her work for art. (Editors: Shown, a piece typical of Holzer's work.) What she does may be valid, meaningful, interesting, intriguing and any number of respectable things; she obviously has every right to do it and sell it, and those who like it have every right to admire and buy it. It may qualify as literary or philosophical expression and/or as provocative manipulation of words, but I find it entirely lacking in visual value and completely language-dependent. --Jack Regalado is a regular artblog reader.


permanent link  libby and roberta 6:22 PM
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