artblog

Saturday, February 14, 2004

Post office rules

 
[Ed. note-- see Eric's post about shipping art for more]

Eric, Libby and I discovered recently that the U.S. Postal Service had manufactured a cardboard box just for us. The little Priority Mail box was a complete and perfect match for the book we just made. (It also works for a small batch of homemade cookies, I found out the other day when I shipped some off to my valentines.) $3.95 and 2-day delivery.

Of course the niche market for this box is rather restricted. Apart from cookies and a small book, you probably can send a video (bubble wrapped for security) or maybe some baby booties. I mention this knowing some day you -- and others -- will have a need for this box.
permanent link  roberta 12:27 PM
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Why do people buy art?

 
Post by Rodger LaPelle

[Ed. Note -- We invited LaPelle to share his list, previously published in Art Matters, with us. We've edited for length and clarity.]

One day, sitting in my gallery, I made this list of the reasons why people buy art.

1. Artist-Purchasers. First we must recognize that the artist, by purchasing materials and expending time to produce the work, is the first purchaser of the art. Picasso had 42,000 pieces of art left in his estate when he died -- work he hadn't sold. There was an estate tax on it and the French government took payment in art in lieu of cash. (image is Picasso's "Three Musicians")

2. Artist-Collectors. This art, then, can be traded to another artist (a like- kind, non-taxable event) for their work. A lot of collections are built this way. I traded a watercolor for an etching with a third year art student in 1961 in London. His name is David Hockney.

3. Home Decoration. People look at their walls and decide to decorate their living quarters with an eye to color arrangements or soothing or exciting subjects. They are buying art basically as an add-on piece of furniture. (image is painting commissioned for space above the couch)

4. Body Decoration. Art is bought to wear -- painted ties, sculptured hats, jewelry.

5. Philanthropy. Helping an artist financially either as a young one starting out or an older one down on his luck. The artwork is selected to preserve the dignity of the artist/recipient. The main reason is not the art per-se but to aid a struggling art worker.

6. Federal Government as Purchaser. The government buys art (from staff artists) and actually makes money out of it. Take a look a the pretty scene of the White House on a twenty dollar bill. Sculpture is used for the coins and people are actually working each day for this ART. They want it. I include in this category postage stamps which are like money. (image is Phillipine postage stamp)

7. City Government. The City of Philadelphia commissions murals to fight graffiti and prevent urban decay.

8. Government Propaganda. Governments all over use art to agitate and propagandize (Agit-Prop), and depending on which way the wind blows the artist portrays an idea to bend the viewer's mind in the desired direction to unify the masses to the policy of the moment.

9. U.S. Army as Purchaser. In the First World War, artists were commissioned to paint camouflage for ships and tanks. The Pennsylvania Academy held classes in camouflage at that time. A little paint could save expensive military assets. (image is World War II-era camouflage-painted battleship)

10. British Government. The British Railway in the 1970’s and 1980’s purchased art for the railway workers retirement fund and sold the art twenty years later for a good return to be paid to support retired workers in their old age. Art was allowed in retirement funds here in the U.S. until Congress forbade it in 1979. That could have been quite a stimulus to the art market.

11. Art for ET. The Federal government used art on the Voyager space mission to communicate with other intelligent life -- to show what we look like to other creatures somewhere out there.

12. Commemoration. Some commission portraits of their family members, pets, houses, boats, all to to record their reality and to have a memento of endearment or achievement.

13. Gift-giving. The gift of art is tricky, like when Richard Nixon went to China and bestowed on them porcelain swans by Boehm of Trenton. Temple University gave Christine McGinnis’s owl engravings (150 of them) to the Japanese officials in Tokyo when the school established its campus there. The first art I collected was a "Silly Philly" cartoon original drawing when I was six years old done by "The Family's" Bill Keene. Watching him do it got me interested in being an artist.

14. Art for Commerce. Art is used to sell products such as in the Absolut Vodka ads. And previously the DeBeers diamond ads used the paintings of Salvador Dali and others to get people to buy diamonds. (image is detail of "Corona Borealis" painting by Leona Wood for De Beers)

15. Art for Profit. Individuals will buy and sell art for the profit gained. Profit is not guaranteed however. I held a work for fifteen years years and sold it for ninety times what I paid for it -- from $50 to $4,500. Luck helps and patience pays, but you have to play to win. This is the investment aspect of buying. You don't even have to like the work.

16. Art for Status. Believe it or not people buy art for status and recognition in society. Enough said. I am a big shot because I own a big shot artist -- Picasso, for example.

17. Art as Portable Wealth Transfer Device. Once, when Italians were hampered by currency exchange controls (meaning they could not leave the country with very much cash) what they did was buy small, expensive masterworks and sell them at auctions or to dealers, just to have spending money on their travels. It’s art as portable wealth transfer device.

18. Entertainment Value. People buy pictures or pay to see them for entertainment (comics, for example) -- especially if the pictures move (the cinema).

19. Teaching Aid. Art is purchased and published for didactic purposes -- to educate , instruct and edify. Art is a universal language and fills in where words fail. Teaching art is essential to teach perception to students.

20. Behavior Control and Spiritual Uplift. Religious use of art not only for guiding the illiterate but to capture the imagination generally on a spiritual level has been a long tradition, especially at the Vatican where focussing people on Heaven and Hell is meant to enforce a moral behavior through the visualizing reward and punishment.

21. Preservation. Some buy things that they do not necessarily want but that are valuable historic artifacts that should be preserved for posterity in museums.

22. Memorials. Art memorials honoring the dead, like Tom Hanks asking for money for a bronze sculpture to memorialize those who died in World War II.

23. Territoriality. Sculptures at the entrance gate of an estate, or Watts Towers in Los Angeles. The work says here I am, behold me. (image is detail from Simon Rodia's Watts Towers)

24. Because they have to. Percent for art laws mandate new construction in cities to spend one percent of the budget for art in the building to give a more humane feel. Philadelphia was the first in the U.S. to have such a law. The Clothespin sculpture in Center City by Claes Oldenberg is a prime example. (see image above) Hitler in 1933 made art purchases for buildings at three percent of the total cost but that plan stopped abruptly in 1945.

25. Symbolic Identification. People will buy some art because they like the idea of the subject of the art and want it as part of their surroundings, such as a stock broker with a picture of a bull in his office.

26. Magic. Magical forces are believed the be affected by the judicial use of art. Particularly noteworthy is the use of the Voodoo doll and hex signs.

27. To Destroy It. Art is purchased, sometimes with bullets as payment, in order to destroy it.

28. To Eat it. Eating ceremonies are enhanced by art in the food -- jello in the shape of a face, cast figures in the silverware, paintings on the plates etc. One can include several reasons together for a particular acquisition.

29. For Love. Finally, people collect for the LOVE of art. (image, Richard Indiana's "Love")

permanent link  roberta 10:37 AM
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Friday, February 13, 2004

Childhood in a box

 

Tableaus in shoe boxes come straight out of elementary school. But Roselle Park Sagall's 36 wooden boxes, most of them about half the depth of a shoe box, on display at Widener University in Chester, come from feelings and memories, not history assignments. They come from childhood with it's weird feelings of displacement, secrets, discomfort and fear (shown, Child Enthroned).

Sagall uses vintage images of herself--old photos her father had taken of her--and vintage images she herself had taken of the world around her to build her boxes of memories and fantasy.

The scale leaps and shrinks, people growing too large or small for the landscape. The trees shine with tinselly leaves or bark, their shape nearly childlike--but not quite. Dangerous shark fins of broken mirror spike under the floor. The furniture and spaces squeeze in the inhabitants (shown, "Growing up in the Magic House").

Some of the boxes are faced with glass, which in some cases is etched with words that cast shadows, in some cases scratched, forming a scrim to peer beyond. Some are open.

Although the work is carefully done, including beautiful painting and thought-through perspective, there's an outsider naivete that connects these pieces to the past and to the weirdness that haunts every family.

Not every piece packs the same punch, but those that hit the mark strike feelings that carry the show and evoke the wonder of a child who is full of her own needs and dreams, in a world filled with adults and other threats. We've all been there (shown, "The Little Vacation").
permanent link  libby 6:00 PM
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Thursday, February 12, 2004

ICA talk: Artschwager on his art

 

Artist Richard Artschwager, now 80, and former ICA Director Suzanne Delehanty (now director of the Miami Art Museum) walked down memory lane yesterday, sharing their memories of their experiences at the ICA in the 1970s (shown, Artschwager talking with ICA Senior Curator Ingrid Schaffner before the program).

Their public conversation was in celebration of the ICA's 40 years of defying Philadelphia stodginess by exhibiting art on the cutting edge when just which way the knife would cut was often less than clear.

The 1979 Artschwager show here was his first solo museum exhibition, and the beginning of a series of important exhibitions for him at places like the Whitney in New York, the Foundation Cartier in Paris, and the Serpentine Gallery in London, said ICA Senior Curator Ingrid Schaffner, who introduced the talk.

The oner
Schaffner said Artschwager's art was related to a number of trends in art of the period but didn't quite fit any one of them. His work was sort of Pop, but did not celebrate pop culture. It was about seeing, but not about what the camera saw. She noted his industrial materials, like formica and celotex, and his barely sublimated love of craft (shown, "Corner Exclamation").

Basically, the work is not like anyone else's and tough to pigeonhole.

Delehanty set the scene in the '70s of an America in upheaval, the political backdrop including the war in Vietnam, Watergate, Earth Day and the women's movement. Artists were working in lots of different ways, including Artschwager.

Artschwager later said to Delehanty, "Being original is the job...how to distinguish yourself from the other 1 billion 9 million 900 thousand 999." He was including all the people who ever had lived and who ever would live. "We arrive here for four-score but then you're going to be absent for a zillion years." He's thinking big, here, as well as funny, an approach that marked the rest of his comments as well (shown, "Chaise Eclatee 1").

And then he explained his use of perspective and framing devices and small images in just those terms--"Nobody's doing perspective, so do it with a vengeance," he said (shown, "Door").

Blps
Artschwager's blps, conceptual blots that could be applied anywhere, were based on an idea to make a period (as in a punctuation mark), and to make it big enough to have a presence that felt like it was covering something, like a felt-tip eradicated pair of eyes in a photograph, he said.

Vertically, he said, the blps ("Blps" shown, left) were anthropomorphic. Horizontally, they were landscape. Rounder, and they suggested a time element, a clock, and how long it took to make that mark.

"I labored with this thing two or three years and drove it into the ground and had to think of something else to do," he quipped.

Unique generics
Delehanty wanted to know why he chose to make a sculpture of a piano that was clunky.

"This came about because a Martian came to earth and took a lot of notes," said Artschwager. But the notes were incomplete. So the piano is sort of a generic piano. Artschwager was thinking about generic as a way to make art.

Delehanty asked, "How about the formica? I think you might have a new answer, today."

Armstrong did have a new answer. "I'm a sucker for auctions," he said. So for $100, he got a pile of formica with a walnut grain in black and white, "as if a piece of walnut had passed through the formica and left a residue," he said (shown, "Ladder"). He liked the formica as a 2-D collage material with colors and patters you can buy by the yard.

Asked by Delehanty if people were right in saying his art was distant and cool, his answer was, "Yes. [pause] It minds its own business. ...If you want to visit it, OK."

He delivered a defense of Matisse, whose work, he said, was written about simperingly as pure expressions of color and form, at which point Artschwager pretended to stick his finger down his throat for the universal barf symbol. Matisse's spaces are more convincing than reality, Artschwager said (shown, Artschwager's "Destruction 6").

Personal history
Delehanty asked why Artschwager, who was supposed to study science like his father before him, chose art. For one thing his father confessed to being a charlatan, in a conversation that clearly shocked the younger Artschwager. But then Artschwager added, "It was a remark by my first wife. You really don't have the temperament of a scientist. You should be an artist. And I said, OK."

Delehanty's last question: If you had to make a Faustian bargain, what would you want and what would the price be?

Artschwager's answer: I did it a long time ago. Margarite is the originality. You make a pact with the devil because you really want to get in her pants."

After the discussion broke up, Artschwager distanced himself from analysis, saying art was about looking.

"We look all day." It's important not to drown out the art with analysis. Historians and critics are ok, but they make their own kind of poetry."

The conversation was part deux of the ICA's 40th Anniversary Celebration. The next part will feature a conversation between artist Laurie Anderson and former ICA Director Janet Kardon March 24. Others on the docket include Ann Hamilton, Judith Tannenbaum, and Lisa Yuskavage.


permanent link  libby 4:51 PM
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Glass menagerie

 
When I met Elizabeth Nickles at the University of the Arts G2 Gallery to see her new work, she was excited to tell me about how instrumental her residency at Pilchuck Glass School was for her thinking and for her practice.

Pilchuck, in Washington State, was started by Dale Chihuly.

As sometimes happens when an artist tries a new material, Nickles, who uses cast bronze in her practice, felt that her experience working with glass was liberating. It freed her to be more experimental.


The colorful glass pieces, some hollow, some solid, are sprinkled around the large basement gallery. They sit on crudely-wonderful wooden shelves or on new-fashioned metal armatures and because many are fragments (horses -- torso only; a bird -- head only) they appear to be a collection from ritual uses in ancient times.

Nickles' themes -- which suggest longing for simplicity and reverence for nature -- work beautifully in glass. The work has some of the lumpty, ur-vessel charm you see in Roman glass.

What's new to her practice post-glass? The artist says she's especially interested in merging her birds, deer and horses with shapes and objects that are dreamier and less rooted in the real world. Indeed, some of the supports (like the one pictured with the purple bird) suggest improbable sights Alice might see on the other side of the looking glass.

The two shelves of creatures that appear to be from the sea or the forest floor also suggest parallel, though not quite real experiences of life.

If you miss this exhibit, up until the end of February, you can catch Nickles glass pieces at Schmidt-Dean Gallery in May. (all three images are from the G2 Gallery installation)
permanent link  roberta 7:47 AM
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Wednesday, February 11, 2004

A Brief Note on Shipping Your Wares

 
Post by Eric McDade

I just thought maybe this would be a good forum to give and get practical information regarding the more headache-y end of exhibiting. Hope no one minds. I'll start.

Never use Airborne Express / DHL to ship your artwork anywhere, no matter how alluring the price may seem. They are unprofessional hacks, artwork or not. Thanks for your time. Anyone else have a tip like this?

permanent link  eric 4:09 PM
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Concrete memories: Zeke

 

Back when Roberta and I were making enormous, multi-ton sculptures out of concrete and were trying to learn enough about our material to make it do what we wanted, someone referred us to Zeke at Action Concrete in Delaware County.

Zeke gave his wisdom and free samples of concrete additives--

--and plenty to eat. His concrete yard had an enormous kitchen and a table, always filled with freshly prepared food, from ziti to hoagies to roasted peppers, that he served up to the truckers and to anyone who came by, including us. Not to eat would have been an insult.

He was delighted to show off his operation to a pair of women. When we went to the lumber yard or the hardware store or the building supply warehouse, we never knew which treatment we'd get--respect or snarls of contempt. At Action, it was always respect and delight.

What Zeke liked was we gave him an opportunity to share his knowledge and his life's work. He was an inventor of machinery, even designing beautiful toy concrete trucks with moving parts--replicas of the real things in his cement yard.

An Action Concrete truck passed me by, a couple of days ago. Painted on its side was "Zeke, 1923-2003." He had died a year ago, January; I didn't even know.

So this is my personal tribute to Zeke Forlini. Kristin Holmes' nice obituary from the Philadelphia Inquirer is also at the link above, if you scroll down the page a bit, past the death notice.
permanent link  libby 11:43 AM
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Old City paper trail-II

 

After seeing all those nicely-crafted paper works at Snyderman, I ran over to Gallery Joe for the three-person drawing show and Dino Pelliccia’s alabaster carvings.

But before I got inside, I noticed there’s a new piece in Bird Park, the pocket park around the corner that’s maintained by Joe but has been empty over the last few months. There’s no card outside telling you who made the piece and once I got inside I forgot to get the particulars (I’ll get them for you). But check it out -- it’s a throne made of painted wood and lattice and a cheery addition to a dark corner. (image above)

Inside, the drawing show, called “Accrescere” (the Latin word for accretion or growth) has three artists, Teo Gonzalez (New York), John Morris (New York) and Laurie Reid (California). All three are mining something manic but in three quite different ways.

Gonzalez is a grid artist working in breath-taking micro-scale. His small works build up loose grids of teeny, tiny dots within other,more squared-off dots which sit on rectangles of color. Bright and shiny, the top-most dots of alkyd look like drips of nail polish -- they have 3-D presence. (image above right is detail from an untitled work)

The technique, which you must go nose-to-nose with to see, reminds me a bit of Chuck Close’s daubs within daubs, although it also reminds me of braille, the tiny dots like some coded story you could read with your fingers.

According to Gallerist Becky Kerlin, Gonzalez’s work with color is new, and clearly, the artist is enjoying the optical charge from putting red on blue -- or green.

Also, about the white paper support he uses... Gonzalez paints the entire sheet of paper white before he begins his detail work, something that helps him control the paint he puts on the surface.

If Gonzalez is a dot-dot maximalist, Laurie Reid is a drip-drip minimalist. Not that her work is minimalism but her spare lines that pucker the paper or Wonder-Breat dots of watercolor on big sheets of paper are like the great Western prairies next to Gonzalez’s jam-packed cities. (image left is a detail from Reid's watercolor on paper, "Elucidation/Tangle")

Reid’s playfulness, which evokes childhood experimentation, is breezy yet controlled, a nice combination.



John Morris’s studies on what looked like sketchbook pages seem to be doodles. Yet their delicate build-ups of lines (in ink, ballpoint pen and graphite), all interconnected loosely, stand alone as complete thoughts. Biomorphic and lacey; intimate and lovely, they suggest everything from paper clips to vaginas to bacteria swimming in a dish. (sorry about the fuzzy image, above -- it's a detail from one of Morris's untitled drawings)


In the Vault, Pelliccia’s carvings, which look like stylized torso-chunks, refer to the female body. The artist, who carves alabaster and has a couple bass wood pieces, depicts the body's “ins” and “outs” lovingly -- and subtlely. (image above and below)


Two words characterize this Gallery Joe experience -- control and subtlety. These are artists playing with process but who are completely in control of it, so much so that the viewing experience is never hijacked by questions of "how."




permanent link  roberta 9:03 AM
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Tuesday, February 10, 2004

Watt's up this weekend

 

Chris Vecchio, Philadelphia artist and electronics whiz sent us this bulletin about the debut performance this weekend of Miriam Seidel’s opera "Violet Fire," a multi-media piece about Nikola Tesla, the Yugoslav-born inventor with more than 700 patents to his name. The press material says he should have been as famous as Edison, but he died in obscurity in 1943. Sounds like an opera to me.

Seidel, a local artist, writer and critic is the librettist. You've seen her byline in Art in America and in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Seidel asked Vecchio in as a technical consultant on the project and he says he’s made a few “electrified props” for the show’s set. (I do believe the mesmerizing gizmo above one of them in action.) In addition to Vecchio's props, the opera includes live music by Relache, and video pieces by Sarah Drury and Jen Simmons, including voice-activated video projections with a stream of imagery relating to Tesla's life.

The opera's music is by minimalist composer Jon Gibson, a senior member of the Philip Glass Ensemble.

Performance is this Friday and Saturday only, February 13 and14, at 8 p.m. at Temple's Tomlinson Theater, 1301 W. Norris Street.

Tickets are $20 ($10 for students). For tickets call the Temple University Box Office: 215-204-1122 or for more info violet fire opera.
permanent link  roberta 4:50 PM
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First Saturday Symbols and Paper

 
Jung at Vox
The work by Justin Witte, Isaac Resnikoff and Joseph Hu at Vox Populi couldn't be more circumspect. I wanted a Jungian psychoanalyst with me to decode all the dreamy imagery.

Take Resnikoff's sculptural objects and drawings, collectively called "Gravitas," for example. Clearly there's something going on behind the disparate collection of heavily-symbolic stuff (a globe, a book, the ten commandments, a polar bear and a penguin and a sandwich board).

The best I could figure was Shackleton, Victorian gentemen and the Great Depression (sandwich boards?). Resnikoff's objects are swell, with lumpty, tactile surfaces and nice painted detail. I liked each one individually, although I don't know how or if they work together. (image top and right above)

I'm someone who likes a little gravitas in my art and in my life. I found gravitas in the individual pieces here but couldn't piece it together for the larger whole.

Speaking of objects, Joseph Hu, known for his photographs, has fashioned a remarkable object on a shelf in his offering, "Lieben in der Schweiz."

Hu's trompe l'oeil object, a white coffee cup on a saucer, with creamer and sugar pack, is made of cardboard, house paint, tracing paper and glue. It's a total mirage. And with its clean lines, pristine affect and shall we say the lie at its core, I wondered if it was a symbol of the country or the symbol of an airplane ride. At any rate, ceci n'est pas un coffee cup.

Hu's other works are photographs -- of snow, of hothouse flowers, and of what appears to be a shot of mountains taken from an airplane. This latter, one image printed on 528 color postcards, is mounted on the wall like wallpaper in a kind of fly's-eye installation. (image above)

The artist's color photo of a twig in snow has the sexiest snow I've ever seen. (image below) But in the end, I could not make the body of work resolve into a whole with satisfying meaning for me, the viewer.


As for Justin Witte, his wall of pencil drawings on scraps of paper includes something I found poignant -- a hand-scrawled notation about "Arcadia, Wednesday" which reminded me that many artists who draw their hearts out and deserve to be in the Arcadia show don't make it in...for reasons having to do with curators and jurors -- and not with their work.


Scrap-drawings are clearly a trend, by the way, not only Nara at ICA, but elsewhere, like Andrew Jeffrey Wright, Marcel Dzama and Michael Dumontier's "Oddfellows" at PAFA's Morris Gallery last year.

Witte's subject, too, seems coded in some dream reality I couldn't make out. (image above) In their patterned backgrounds and boy-scout-in-the-wilderness subject matter the works remind you of work by Joy Feasley and Paul Swenback, two local artists from the Vox stable. There's nothing new under the sun, of course, but the similarities make the work feel perhaps a little too familiar.

All in all, it's a show whose individual works reverberate but whose larger themes elude.

Paper Trail in Old City-I

Snyderman Gallery's works on paper show (their first) has some outstanding paper pieces.

As you would expect in a gallery whose hallmark is exquisite craftsmanship, the work is beautiful and beautifully done.

Painter Larry Spaid, who'll be having a solo show there in May, has two works with wonderfully-worked surfaces and Malevich-like simple shapes in off-kilter relationships that are great on the eyes and great to puzzle over. (image left is Spaid's "PV 4-5")


The sculptural glass artists Einar and Jamex de la Torre turn up with two riotous screenprints on a food theme ("Boneless Chicken" and "Pepto Bismal").

The brothers' delicately drawn wackiness works very well in two dimensions. (image right is "Boneless Chicken")

Mitch Gillette's ballpoint pen drawing, "Avatar," a tour de force that's all about gender and drama, is a jewel.

I want to know how the artist gets such divine results with such a lowly drawing tool. (image, left)

There's lots more great stuff in the show, from Jason Spivak's nicely fuzzy, Stonehenge-evoking graphite drawings to a pair of hand-made paper works with dyes by Japanese artist Tsuguo Yanai (shown below).



Yanai's 3-D work will be at the Philadelphia airport soon, according to staff at the gallery.

I love that Snyderman chose to do a works on paper exhibit right now. It's great to add this highly crafted and elegant work into the discussion of what's going on with paper these days. Different strokes, as they say.

permanent link  roberta 3:52 PM
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Monday, February 09, 2004

Saturday's First Friday postscript

 

After such a successful First Friday adventure the night before, I headed to Old City Saturday afternoon with thoughts of paint and pixels filling my head.

I started at Temple Gallery's "analog click click" group show, curated by Tyler School of Art Assistant Professor of Digital Imaging Sam Fritch.

Once again, the breadth of practice, this time within computer-generated work, nearly crashed my mental computer. Leah Cook's "Presence/Absence: Gather" (shown above) breaks down the digitized image even further by weaving it into fabric. I liked the way the draped cloth repeated the folds of the worried cloth in the image.

Matt Haffner's film-noirish meditations (shown right)--computer collages of found and self-portrait photos and hand drawing--seem to parody celebrity and self-absorption.

And Cindy Poorbaugh magnifies a tiny pencil mark until the image breaks down the pixels, which she then retranslates into a drawing on the wall, using her own motif--small rectangles (shown, "Blotch".)



The focus on process permeated all the artists' work, for better or worse. Carl Fudge plays with the design from an 18th-century Japanese print, using the computer to turn it into pattern then hand painted with intense color (shown right); and Mark Leuders extrudes and turns conceptual blobs of clay on the computer as a prelude to making them in clay (shown below left).

Even the cartoony images of Douglas Boehm seems all process; he scans his drawings and then adds textures from his digital library of patterns (shown below, "Incognito Inmate I.")





Other artists in the show were E.J. Herczyk, making images from micro bits of film blown up beyond readability and Margo Margolis' paintings about mark-making, based on borrowings from comic books.

Alas, I'm sad to report that, while the show was quite interesting as a whole, some of the final products didn't measure up to the computer explorations that created them.

From pixels to painting

From there I stopped in little Spartaco Gallery, which turns out to be a family operation, in any number of ways. Artist Terrence Laragione, whose show "The Plastic Menagerie" exhibits iconic oils of dramatically lit baby toys viewed from a low perspective (shown, "I Yam What I Yam,") showed up along with his wife and tiny baby, the toys' owner, as I was looking around and chatting with his stepmother and keeping my eye on the dog.

Turns out Laragione and his father own the gallery, which is up the stairs and around the corner from 2nd Street on an alley a little ways north of the Arden Theater. Laragione's friend Jonathan Collins, a watercolor painter of portraits and landscapes also turned up. The place still smelled like spilled wine from the night before, and it felt warm and friendly (shown, "Before the Fall.")

Collages, real and cyber
I also stopped at Richard Watson's show at ArtJaz Gallery, a reminder of what the surface of real-world collages look like.

And then I went on to Nexus, which had another new-members show, two of the six doing guess what? Yup, computer collages.

Best of show, however, was real world work from Gwendolyn Fryer, altar-like sculptural collages of rescued building materials, Arabic calligraphy and painting. (shown left above and right).

The work was instantly recognizable as coming from an artist whose work I'd seen four years earlier at the University City Science Center. Turns out Fryer had spent some of her childhood growing up in Libya as the daughter of a petroleum geophysicist. The pieces suggest layers of civilization, layers of geography, with cool interiors behind peeling walls--the architecture of North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and the Dome of the Rock.

Elizabeth New, who showed a small selection of her large-size digital photocollages--images plus words--on the wall, had a nice display of postcard-size versions in standup binders (see image). The small scale seemed just right for their one-liner messages.

Other photocollages came from Catherine Passante. Between the hard-to-parse words on the wall and the confusion of images, I was, well, confused. But I was not confused by super-saturated iconic soft-drink bottles from Matthew Brownell--too much like the advertising they seemed to be mocking. Jodie Sweitzer offered a mousehole-embedded pair of videos of feet in the men's and women's rooms (shown). And Tom McCloskey offered steel blades embedded in beeswax and a very Catholic altar buzzing with bees.
permanent link  libby 9:44 PM
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El Greco and alchemy

 

Post by Robert Asman
[Ed. note--Asman's post responds to Roberta's post of Feb 8.]
Roberta, FYI, I had just seen the El Greco/ Guston show at the Met (two of my favorite artists because they took intelligent risks) and when I saw the atmospere in the sky with the autumn clouds and the despairing headlines of destruction in the Mideast, I challenged myself that weekend to alter the silver in the silver photographic process (black and white) to inhabit the dark mystery overhanging us now, just like it did to El Greco in the late 16th Century. (image is detail from "View of Toledo," 1597)

As another explanatory note, I remember as a young English major at Catholic University being priviledged to see Morris Louis visit Ken Noland at the schools art department and explain and demonstrate how he was exploring the nature of paint on a surface and then went on to drip house paint, diluted tube paints, etc., to show his point.


I am really, to a great degree, exploring the nature of silver, a very precious commodity that no one seems to understand except Bill Gates and Warren Buffett who own warehouses of it. It is a very mystical and spiritual metal with true alchemical qualities which I do try to illustrate with these photographs.

With so much lens-based reality content around, I find the exploration of the materials (and not the content) of my medium a more rewarding endeavor than a slice of hyped up reality. I feel very akin philosophically to painters who were not needed for reality (because of the camera) and could start exploring the nature of their medium.
-- Bob Asman
permanent link  roberta 6:18 PM
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Friday drips and Saturday drops

 


Friday was hardly a night to trip the light fantastic. After 24 hours of rain, I had a flood in the basement. In addition, I had houseguests and it was still raining cats and dogs. But, hard-hearted art maniac that I am, I headed out with my friend Iris, her son Alex, and the intrepid Stella. We met up with Philadelphia's other art maniac, Libby, and, as you heard below, we saw and conquered three galleries outside Old City.

First Saturday, sunny and bright, I hit the trail alone and saw:

1. robotics and Freud at Vox Pop
2. works on paper at Snyderman and Gallery Joe
3. poured paint in the new CSA gallery on Callowhill

Robo Art
It doesn't take much to create drama in a darkened room. A little bit of light, some unexpected motion and you've got a haunted house.

Or...step behind the black curtain into the dark, fourth room at Vox Populi and see fairyland. Wee, blue and pink lights flash and pulse and move up and down casting colored shadows at unexpected intervals. It's an indoor aurora borealis -- sweet, lovely and playful.


In addition to the motion and light show, collaborators Shih Chieh Huang and Megumi Akiyoshi installed the room with two video monitors playing clips from some of their individual previous projects. The videos, interestingly, become just more light and motion in the dark space. But of course they tell stories, so you zone in on them and watch. It's indoor drive-in movies under the colored stars.

Huang is the robotics person (you may remember a small, bug-like robot of his at the Asian Arts Initiative last year -- a water bottle with pink liquid and lots of ratchet ties).
His videos document the making of large installations in various public or gallery spaces in Japan and elsewhere. There's a great range of work done with a narrow range of materials--tangled surgical tubing, 20 oz. water bottles, lights (of course) and those clear plastic ratchet ties. The videos were mesmerizing. They reminded me of Fischli and Weiss or maybe Dan Flavin if he were into robotics -- and had a sense of humor. (image top is the light and motion installation; image above right is from Huang's video. check out the plastic tubing, ties, and water bottles)

Akiyoshi is a performance artist. Her video documents her performance "On Gallery," in which she dons a wig (either pink or Shirley Temple) and wears a sandwich board with small paintings attached and becomes a human art gallery. See her walking through public spaces like a subway or visiting the Statue of Liberty. See people ignore her or ask to have their picture taken with her. Nobody seems to buy any paintings (they cost $30.)

One clip shot in Japan speeds up the tempo and shows a group of children following the artist. It's Chaplin-esque and charming. My daughter Oona has a book, "Fruits," that shows Japanese teens and young adults dressed in wild and wonderful getups walking around Tokyo. Akiyoshi's piece, which has little to do with fashion, nonetheless reminds me of "Fruits." (image above, left is Akiyoshi)

As for Freud, the paper trail in Old City and poured paint, to be continued...
permanent link  roberta 8:35 AM
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Sunday, February 08, 2004

First Friday: No two alike

 
It really was a dark and stormy night (okay, all nights are dark; but this one was super dark and miserable), so Roberta and I, along with buddy Iris and a couple of teens decided that the usual Old City gallery hop wasn't in the cards--at least not until Saturday.

Our first FF choice proved we were the only people daunted by the weather. The stop was sentimental--but the work we found needed no sentimental ties to support it. Blog contributor (he might have been our first!) Tim McFarlane, whom we knew only electronically, was opening at Bridgette Mayer Gallery. We grabbed the opportunity to meet him face-to-face.

I know we've been raging about dead-end minimalism and abstraction, but here was minimalism that talked to both Roberta and me, so the moral is, theory will bite you if it's blanket philosophizing. (Or does it really mean, if you like somebody and the art requires some contemplation, you'll take the time to fall in love?)

McFarlane's work--acrylic (sometimes juiced up with gel) on canvas or board--offers tenderly impinged-on borderlines peeking out from behind larger blocks and stripes, some thin and layered, some juicy. Those borderlines vibrate with visual tension, the place where sky and building meet, or where stripes and blocks meet.

McFarlane's attention to material, surface, color, grid, never seems trapped or limited by those issues, and the choices he made seem open to a variety of meanings--viewer's choice--this viewer choosing land and sky, body and world for starters.

I suppose you could compare his work to any number of minimalists exploring spiritual issues, from Mark Rothko to Agnes Martin, but I'd go to Barnett Newman, who implies both this world and that spiritual space beyond and stretched-thin bodies in his zip paintings.

But McFarlane adds both a sense of play with the materials, shapes and colors, and sense of vulnerability.

Check this off as one to see.

McPicasso

On our way to our next stop, we passed by a McDonald's (the one at 10th and Market) with art prints hanging on the walls. Here's a picture.

The gamut

Our next stop was "The New Money O.S." by Josh O.S. at Space 1026, where as usual, we were among the few people over 30 and perhaps the only ones over 40 (the teens helped to give us some credibility in the mostly 20s crowd).

We were wondering what O.S. stands for; fortunately Josh was there to tell us it's Operating System, as in MacOS. So he's a techie. And his work takes the technology and creates collages of stolen images (aren't we all doing this? my walk around Old City Saturday shows that the answer is, yes we are) that he prints on big canvases. (Shown, detail from one of the three panels from "Inauguration," about Dubya's policies.)

But this work was incredibly ambitious--a critique of our media-image loaded and consumerist society. The pieces were like puzzles, loaded with imagery to be discovered and decoded.

We got to look, at first, without a clue; On our way out, O.S. handed us schematics identifying the imagery. Either way, the images kept my attention.

Somehow, O.S. keeps this baroque excess of imagery in compositional control along with the lurid colors of the media and advertising. I loved them visually, and I loved the ones most that I was able to decode somewhat on my own.

Not all of the work was baroque and huge. Borrowed Renaissance portraits were reworked with the faces of media devils like Margaret Thatcher and Slobodan Milosevich, the backgrounds transformed into golf courses and McMansions (shown, a portrait of Nancy Reagan). Oh, yeah, and sheet cakes were frosted with printouts of the same images. We left before temptation forced us to partake.

To see such a range of work in one evening was a treat and a reminder that art can be anything and still be good.

Roberta and I divided up the rest of FF possibilities, so she'll weigh in on those, and tomorrow I'll add something about what I saw Saturday.
permanent link  libby 11:02 PM
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Genre cross-dressing

 

Susan Sontag in her book "On Photography" talks at length about the interplay between painting and photography. At one point she dubs photography a "voracious enterprise," meaning something so all-encompassing it pretty much sucked the figures, landscapes, impressionistic atmosphere, even abstraction out of painting, leaving only the brushstrokes behind.

Well now it seems that photography is gobbling up the brushstrokes, too.

Through the magic of computers and genuine fractals software, photography is capable of actually translating itself into ur-paintings on canvas -- prints that appear to have brush strokes and look for all the world like tromp l'oeil paintings.


I'm value-neutral here at the moment. But I raise this as a kind of genre-globalizing that's going on that may result, some day, in category melt-downs. "Other genres" may wind up the biggest category of them all.

Two photography exhibits are worth noting here for their painting-usurpation tendencies.

Underexposed

"Underexposed" at Temple's Tyler Gallery, a show of emerging, photo-based, New York and New Jersey artists, has photographs that look like paintings, photographs that look like Vija Celmins drawings, and digital hybrids that weave new outcomes altogether. It's a show that's worth the trip to Elkins Park.

The most interesting pieces in this respect are those of Natalja Kent and the installation by the collaborative team Guldsveinen (aka Monika Broz and A.R. Wilkinson).

Guldsveinen, who use found images from e-bay's taxidermy pages, installed what feels like a basement rec room with faux notty pine panelling and portraits of mom and sis proudly holding up the antlers from dad's last hunting expedition. The work is so "big" it successfully takes over the gallery, imposing its atmosphere on every other print in the room.


But what's truly new here is that the artists, instead of simply printing their found photographic icons as photographs, have tweaked them with the fractals software and printed them large on canvas, which gives them touches and daubs of color that are for all the world like delicate brushstrokes. Turning these photographs into paintings, or ur-paintings, Guldsveinen is doing for the hunting class what Alex Katz did for the New York town and country set -- elevating them to mythic status. (two images are of their installation)


Kent dips in and out of the real world like a media shape-shifter. She hand draws images on some of her photographs. But she likes to doodle in cyberspace. And it's these layered sandwiches of photo-doodle-photo-doodle that feel like something new. (image above)


Finally, the snappy video piece, Electricity, by Bryan Zanisnik, is worth a pat on the nose. While it's not a genre-crossing work, the quick-paced ditty, an eco-consciousness montage of light switches being turned on, click, click, click, has great production values and a cute audio, and some group like the Sierra Club should snatch it up quick and run it as an issues spot on prime time as a reminder of our friends at Enron. (image above is from the video)
50% Gray at ADM


Across town the auction-gallery ADM has a large, 18-artist photography show that includes a lot of great stuff in a traditional vein and a couple of works that, while not digitally worked, are like photo-paintings. Robert Asman, an artblog contributor, has some new work -- cloud photographs -- that remind me of El Greco more than Vik Muniz. Playing with chemicals in the darkroom, Asman has achieved colors, surface texture and painterly atmosphere.



David LaLeike, who works with Polaroid transfers, also makes work with painterly affect. In a process that involves lifting the photo emulsion and transferring it -- in one piece, like a kind of painted skin or leaf -- from the original surface to another paper, Laleike has made abstract, patterned works that are pop abstractions and quite painty.

Of course Thomas Kinkade, painter of light, discovered fractals software a while ago. And, in his own way, he constitutes a second front in the painting-photography skirmish.

You can buy prints of his paintings online or in the shopping malls of America -- and through the magic of computers, he can print them for you with genuine brushstrokes if you like.

permanent link  roberta 11:59 AM
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