artblog

Saturday, June 26, 2004

Let me in, let me out

 


The mystery of a closed box, the thrill of a child's adventure, the cheap fear of a funhouse ride mix together in an installation called "Current" by Paul Coors, James Dillon and Nick Paparone at the Project Room.

The three have built a room within a room, and all you see when you first walk in is the exterior of the interior room (i.e. what's normally unseen inside is on the outside), with its studs and ridiculous loads of yellow wiring. How to get in?

I'm not sure how much to give away without ruining the thrill in case this piece gets shown again somewhere--but there's a chute with padded walls (shown, with Paparone ready to slide). I presume the padding is both for safety literally and figuratively.

Inside, "Current" is mildly claustrophobic, a room with a locked door, an unlit green light above the door, and lots of ordinary light switches high and low on the four walls.

Roberta and I, consistent with our public persona as the same person, both love interactive art and are mildly claustrobobic. She got there before me, so I missed her reactions and didn't know what to expect when I made my way in with the help of Paparone, who was there with Dillon to take the piece down. (Coors is in Cincinnati where he runs Publico Gallery, and the three met at the Art Academy of Cincinnati). Vis a vis the collaboration, Paparone said, "We all have different powers."

All I know is once in, a mix of fear and delight drove me to switch my heart out. I finally had to plead for help. The exit switch changes regularly to preserve the secret of how to get out.

But the exit switch is not the only hot switch. As the person inside "Current" switches away, people outside the box get to witness electrically controlled environmental systems outside the box responding--a heater and air turn on and off; originally, lights switched (but technical difficulties interfered--fuses blew), etc. They have no control, and the people inside don't know how they're affecting things.


The guys (Dillon shown) said the piece was about Iraq, the hole that we can't find a way out of. But I also thought about Saddam Hussein's spider hole. At the opening, the artists said, each person was assigned a number to get a turn in the box--it made me think of the draft. But I think the piece is about any situation you're ever stuck in, and trial and error, the unpredictability of consequences, and the sense of life (and our government) being beyond our control.

I also thought it was pretty funny that the box was hard to get into in the first place, and even harder to get into was the gallery, which has hours dictated by serendipity. (Which won't make a difference if you want to see this piece, because it's coming down as I type). So it's hard to get into in more ways than one, and even if you outBush Bush and try to lie your way in, it won't do you any good.



D&P are now Philly locals--and already wired to the art world here. Paparone (shown under the chute) works for Gyro (a hip, arty publicity firm) and Dillon is helping Project Room owner Kait Midgett with a project for artist-who-we-love Pepon Osorio (see Roberta's post on Osorio's "Casita," a permanent installation at Congreso de Latinos Unidos in North Philadelphia). They also helped Virgil Marti with his Whitney installation (see three posts starting with this one).

At my next stop today, I went to the Italian Market, where some cheese at Claudio's caught my eye and reminded me of the whole in-and-out issue. It's a sheet of mozzarella wrapped around a ball of a mozzarella spread, in the center of which a cherry tomato nestled. So beautiful. It made me think of Japanese wrapping.
permanent link  libby 1:15 PM
Comments? Let us know. 

Moore art

 
Here's a peek at the Moore College exhibit "Philadelphia Selections 5" curated by Director of Exhibitions, Brian Wallace. For more Moore, see my piece in PW coming this Wednesday.

One reason to go see an exhibit when it's being installed (if you get clearance for such) is to talk a little with the artists or curators and get behind the scenes information that often helps elucidate the work. It's also fun to see the mess created by artists installing. This is especially reassuring if you happen to be a little messy yourself. Ahem.


But you must always go back and see the show again once it's installed because sometimes things change.

For example, the top image, Ephraim Russell's "Dimensionator," (at least I think that's its name) sits in the show on a turntable that spins slowly. The piece provides digital readouts of something or other just waiting to be of use to someone...for something.

It's a great piece. But it's not what I saw spinning around when I stopped by the day before the show opened. Image right above was the sleek module I saw spinning on the turntable. Curator Wallace had made a last minute substitution.



This is a very good exhibit. All the Philadelphia artists represented make you proud to be a Philadelphia artist. As with many group shows, there's something for all tastes. My taste drew me immediately to Nadia Hironaka's new video "Home," an elegant, lovely, meditative piece that proceeds at a slow pace for half of its nine minutes then hold on, starts to split apart into horizontal bands of imagery and sound which keeps you glued to your seat as if watching an indoor aurora borealis. (right above is detail) More, I wanted more. Wallace told me Hironaka was experimenting. She's on to something great. "Home" is a must see piece.



I told you about the many stealth works in "Open" at Arcadia. (see posts one and two) I had just come from that show when I saw this one for the second time. Guess I was not expecting stealth. But I found it in spades. In fact, I found it late, after studying my photos. Daniel Heyman's "Untitled (from War Series)" a four-panel acrylic and gouache on vellum work made me scratch my head. The work is so lovely and lyrical I wondered why it was from a war series. In fact, the artist has inserted into the swirling world of figures, fish, kimono wearing geishas and such, repeat imagery from the Iraq war. Specifically, those Abu Graib photographs of torture. You must look hard to see them. This piece, while completely different in affect, shakes hands with M. Ho's prettied up newspapers in Mixmaster Universe. See my previous post for more on that.



Arden Bendler Browning, Steven Baris, James Johnson, Rain Harris, Elizabeth Rywelsi and Bekhyon Yim also make good strong statements here. I'll hit them later in the week. For now, I'll leave you with Joy Feasley and Aaron Igler's "The Rayleigh Scatterers," a piece of audio and visual happiness. Igler, a sound guy, has wired up some audibles which play a haunting, romantic piano piece heard throughout the gallery. It called me like a siren's song to the piece's spot in the window well. Once there, you see Feasley's large green plexiglas crystals hanging and sitting in splendor. They look great. And you see a stand up xylophone just waiting to be played. Do not hesitate. I picked up those mallets and plunked away. Even with no musical talent, you can make pretty music with that xylophone. Highly recommended.

The mess of electrical cable on the floor is kind of distracting but I walked into the space and am glad I did. In one corner on the floor of this crystal-crazy installation are a group of cast glass paper weights (found objects says the checklist). Entrapped in the small glass objects are things from nature -- a flower for example or -- a scorpion. I looked closely and found the scorpion sitting atop a logo from Allis Chalmers.



Now that won't mean anything to you. But it was midwest voodoo again for me.

Allis Chalmers is was the biggest employer in the Milwaukee suburb called West Allis (because it's west of Allis Chalmers -- midwesterners are literal). Scorpions are not indigenous to West Allis but maybe they're the mascot of Allis Chalmers. I don't know. AC, which doesn't exist anymore, due to rustbelt/sunbelt dynamics) made big heavy machinery -- tractors and such. My encounter in the gallery with the odd scorpion/AC found object -- which must belong to Feasley or Igler -- made me think about how small the world is and about how objects -- and people -- make serendipitous connections.

If you're getting sick of midwest voodoo just let me know and I'll try to contain myself.
permanent link  roberta 6:20 AM
Comments? Let us know. 

Friday, June 25, 2004

New York Times writes more than nothing

 
Just in case you were napping this morning, a nice, even-handed review of the Institute of Contemporary Art's "Big Nothing" show, by Michael Kimmelman, ran in the New York Times today .

.
permanent link  libby 4:42 PM
Comments? Let us know. 

The white show, the works

 
"Open" at Arcadia is a show of stealth works. (See my previous post for preamble.) Some of the art looks suspiciously like real world objects. And some of the real world objects, like the telephone on the utility shelf near the door, are shape-shifters -- doing time in the real world then switching to the world of art when some action occurs.

I like the idea of multi-tasking objects -- cars that people use as "offices," rocks that become doorstops. Like people, the objects don't lose their identity when they switch gears.

This separates them in my mind from Duchamp's readymades which for all practical purposes have stopped being multi-tasking objects and are subsumed under their new identity as art objects.

Getting back to the phone, (pictured above).

By virtue of artist George Brecht's conceptual conceit, the real phone is a real piece, "Three Telephone Events," 1961. There's a recipe by which the phone becomes transformed and I won't bore you with details just mention that you can turn your own phone into a Brechtian art object if you follow the instructions.



Here's one object that maintains its real world roots but becomes a symbol to boot -- the box of dog bones. It can't be art here in this show -- it has too much color.

But it's a symbolic pointer to the high frequency audio piece by Dave Allen, "For the Dogs: Satie..." Allen, you may remember, is the artist whose intervention with birds and piano music was at Arcadia last year. See my post and Libby's post.) The piece here was made specifically to be heard by dogs, who came out at the opening in a little pack with their owners. I was told by the gallery's Jessica Bakula that one dog, a pug if memory serves, enjoyed the music so much it pulled its owner away from the food table and back to hear more of the high frequency music!

Now there's an art critic for you.

In front of the box is a piece by James Mills. The small, round, yellow and black stickers, which announce themselves as "Official Souvenir Sticker" are there for the taking. It's another example of silly art in this show.



By the time I found Randall Sellers' "Untitled Wall Drawing" I was ready for some real art. Here it was, all two square inches of it. I am most sorry that my hand shook when I took the picture of the rather high-placed drawing because I failed to capture the crispness of the work put on a nubbly wall by an artist who took four days to complete the thing using .0000 pencils. This is an outstanding work. It's not stealth. It's not nothing. It's an amazing Sellers piece and if you're still on the fence about this show, this is the work that will make the trip a delight.

Next to Sellers' piece is more art. Faint to be sure. It's Sol LeWitt's "Wall drawing No. 62," 1971. (detail below)



The piece is a large pencilled grid (applied to the wall by local artist Tristin Lowe, Bakule told me). The work is so subtle it disappears when you're more than two feet away from it. Nice.

There are lots more works in this show but this post is getting way too long so I'll tell you about a few more then let it go.


Roxana Perez-Mendez's rusting steel wool piece "Hongo," (I'm giving this away, sorry) is under the utility table. (right is detail)

The dogs-eye level piece wins the sexy art award in a show of otherwise non-body referencing stuff.



Angela Bulloch's "Chewed Gum," 1998, (left is detail) eight pieces scattered around the room, each one nailed to the wall like a kind of medieval indulgence gone wrong -- an anti-trophy -- could be considered body-byproduct art. I consider it pretty silly.





On the other hand, Bill Walton's "Bright Sill" 2004, is heart-stoppingly beautiful (right).

Perhaps it's the humbleness of the piece which looks like a work cloth folded carefully by a worker proud of the job just finished. Or perhaps its the fact of it's being washed by the Vermeerish light coming in that window. Either way, the piece is a love.


The peephole piece, "Lure" by Ivan Jurakic (left) is a danger. I scalded my eyeballs trying to peek at what's behind (not recommended). I suppose it could be heaven behind that wall but since I don't care about that, the work left me cold.

I'll let Jeremiah Misfeldt have the last word. It seems appropriate for his curse piece, "unearthly pronouncement and celestial means," 2004, which, the checklist says, gets reactivated daily at noon.



What that means is unclear. Whether Misfeldt stops his business at noon and pronounces the curse or whether you can set a curse on an automatic timer to go off again and again I don't know. But in case you're worried, there's an antidote in the gallery office's closet -- special rocks that haven't seen the light of day for four years. (right) Touch the big rock and you're out from under. (The little triangle-shaped rocks are for gallery staff to carry with them when they enter the gallery.)

The idea of serious curse art (there's also prayer art, but you'll have to go see for yourself) is laugh out loud funny. But in the context of this show, I buy it.

permanent link  roberta 8:00 AM
Comments? Let us know. 

Thursday, June 24, 2004

Only human

 

I stopped in at the Manayunk Art Center (for my first time ever) to see Nancy Bea Miller's show "Only Human," 33 oil paintings done over the past year, during the course of an Independence Foundation grant to paint all kinds of people, including those with disabilities (shown, "Waiting for the Specialist").

The interest grew out of her experience with one of her own children, who has a severe form of autism that includes mental retardation.


But what makes these paintings interesting goes beyond including the disabled in the lexicon of subjects we paint (shown, "Adjustment"). As in Miller's still lifes (see Libby's post), what seems most interesting is the way that people become objects that share physical space but do not necessarily share mental space. It's the human condition of aloneness, not just for the disabled with their unique problems, but for all of us that give these paintings their power.



In "Three Boys," Miller equates the chasms of emotional detachment with symbolic trees behind the children. Two are lollipop trees, and three and triangle trees. One boy stands totally separately, and one reaches out to another on the ground who doesn't return much interest. In "Henry in the Kitchen," the mug becomes a symbol for daily life as well as another person. Henry seems to be on his own there.

Miller also had a series of portraits (shown, "Michael and Lisa"), which seemed more conventional, although beautifully painted with nice light and monotone icon-like backgrounds. These seemed less interesting to me, more ordinary, narrower in their ambition--to unite all humans as suitable subjects for painting.

permanent link  libby 5:42 PM
Comments? Let us know. 

Hot water bottles

 

Rachel Whiteread's pink torso hot water bottle (see Roberta's post) reminded me that in the gift shop at Vancouver's aquarium hung a collection of froggy-influenced (green, big eyes and mouth, etc.) hot water bottles. I can't imagine an American aquarium having such a thing, or an American child wanting such a thing, but Canada has got that British influence.

Then when I was in Juneau, a young man who drove us down a mountain side in the rain forest (I swear, if I had known what was ahead of me, I would have hiked) said he had a hot water bottle tucked inside his fleece to keep him warm. But I can't remember if Caleb was from Vancouver or Seattle. oh, well.
permanent link  libby 10:45 AM
Comments? Let us know. 

Color me excited, again

 
Each summer I look forward to Roland Becerra's show of new paintings at Rodger Lapelle Gallery. Here's the postcard image for this summer's exhibit, opening July 2 and running to Aug. 29. (Check Lapelle's site for more images)

I suppose I'll confess here that I like the Cure's music, too.

I'm not sure that explains why I'm wild about Becerra but it frames it a bit.

Here's me at PW on last summer's show, and me at artnet on the 2002 show, an article reprinted from PW with the addition of lots of color images.

Here's Libby's artblog post.

permanent link  roberta 8:47 AM
Comments? Let us know. 

Wednesday, June 23, 2004

Art for travelers

 


I had six hours to spend looking at art at the little Anchorage airport, while waiting for my plane. Alas, that was more than five hours too many.

To be fair, Anchorage is a small place, and the percent for art from a fairly small building budget is not so much. I'm not saying what showed there didn't have it's rewards--a seal-filled snow-and-ice scape drawn on a skin (seal skin?), and once past security, a nice array of baskets and traditional clothing.

I like learning, and there was enough here to get some info out of what I was seeing.

The art there followed Mark Barry's (see post) local-color rule, but it was too small in scale, except for some paintings which were suitably large but not so nice.

San Francisco, on the other hand, did well with local color. The corridor where I was hanging out between planes had one of Wayne Thibaud's paintings of a vertical San Francisco street.

And in one of the major corridors past security was a museum-like show, "California Tiles," with commentary and explanation. The tiles were displayed in vitrines and reproduced on 48" posters--two different scales good for people walking and good for people taking the people-movers. (The two tiles shown above were suspended above an image of what the tiles would look like if there were lots of them).

A sign said the show was produced with technical assistance for the Corporation of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. The display met the local color and appropriate scale tests. It also met my need for learning something new.

At last, I made it to Philadelphia about 21 hours after I began my day.

But I brake for art, no matter how exhausted. There in my terminal corridor was a display by Allan Wexler, whose work I admire. His little houses at the airport rethink how we build what we build (shown, houses with walls that open); He packs his paper chairs into cardboard, chair-shaped boxes with faux wood finishes.

It's work to contemplate, because it's filled with thoughts about why we do things the way we do them and how we might start to take another approach. There's also a respect for the Zen of materials here. But this is tough work to absorb in the bustling airport setting.

And the local color was missing. We could have been anywhere in the world that chairs and houses are used.

permanent link  libby 8:45 PM
Comments? Let us know. 

Film alert

 


I just got an email from our friend, photographer Judy Gelles, who has been involved with making a video about Jewish veterans from World War II. It's about to air on WYBE public television channel 35 on Tuesday, June 29, at 9:00pm.

The film is the first in the series titled "Philadelphia Stories 4." If you're not familiar with this series, check it out. They run some interesting stuff about Philadelphia in videos made by local filmmakers.

What will air will not be the final version, Judy wrote. "We plan to re-edit the video and sound in the fall...after we raise some more money. We had to keep it at 28 minutes for TV, but would like to add sections we had to eliminate due to time constraints....and work on the music and sound again.

Veterans must be in the air, what with Yvonne Latty's book, "We Were There" (photos by Ron Tarver), on African-American World War II veterans.

permanent link  libby 6:57 PM
Comments? Let us know. 

The Borofsky-Baltimore experience

 
Post from artblog contributor Mark Barry

Your comment about airport art (see Libby's post) in Alaska coincided with a discussion I had last night, at yoga. Namaste.

I was asked if I liked the new [Jonathan] Borofsky piece in front of Penn Station here in Baltimore. I do like it but I wish it we're a commission for a local artist (me) and your airport experience is just the reason why. A sense of place.


"Male/Female" though grand and shiny and bold, doesn't have a Baltimore connection. It says nothing about the city or region to travelers coming and going from the train station.

I think that should be a requirement for a place of destination, such as a train station or an airport. Where am I? What's this place about?

--Mark Barry's is a Baltimore-area artist.
permanent link  libby 6:37 PM
Comments? Let us know. 

The white show, the room

 
Libby and I once fulminated against Robert Ryman's white on white paintings after being snowballed by his retrospective at MOMA. We're still fulminating. What we mind is the optical forlorn-ness of the un-color work and the artist's grandstanding. In a world of roygbiv how could you penalize your rods and cones (to say nothing of the viewers') by making white-only work?

Arcadia University's Big Nothing show,"Open," is a white on white show. And while I found the hour I spent in the gallery difficult on the eyes, nevertheless, there's pleasures to be found -- in the white gallery whose space sings with light playing off its walls, and in the pleasing, child-like treasure hunt atmosphere which requires you to hunt for the art and rewards you when you find it. I'm still not keen on white work, but in the "Open" atmosphere I didn't mind it as much as I thought I would.

If you think the theme is extreme, you're right. But this show, curated by Arcadia Gallery Director Richard Torchia and Sandra Firmin, University of Buffalo Associate Curator (and former Arcadia staff) is a show of extremes. All the works take the art to the limit -- sometimes the limit is conceptual, sometimes it's visual. Some work is extremely tiny, some is extremely subtle, some is extremely silly. The show is like an hallucination. Now you see it now you don't. (top image is gallery door with EXIT sign which is a piece, "Word Event," 1961 by George Brecht)



What you do notice is the gallery -- a splendid old space with high rafters, glorious open duct work and light that flows in through big windows creating atmosphere that's Vermeer for the 21st century.

Tyrone Sinclair, the Arcadia senior (finance) who's the gallery attendant was reading when I took this shot of him under the windows and in front of the faux wainscoting (which is a piece, "Wainscot III by Francis Cape). I didn't know it at the time but Sinclair's part of the show. Not only is he keeping track of attendance as dictated by Micah Lexier's untitled piece but he's wearing a Lawrence Weiner temporary tattoo as required by Weiner for his piece "Enough of This enough of that"


As for the hunt and gather aspect of the show, the checklist and a gallery map (shown is detail) give you clues about the 58 works (name of artist, location of work, materials) but apart from that you're on your own to discover what's art -- and what's gallery infrastructure.

I forsook the checklist, preferring to guess at which was which. While I was right in some cases, I misjudged in others. It's amusing and made me realize the limits of my thinking about architecture and about art.



For instance, in one corner there are hinges running up the wall where two walls abut. (not shown) I thought it was a piece having to do with the wall being a door. Wrong. Whatever it is, it's not part of the show and it's not art, according to gallery staff Jessica Bakule who kindly showed me round.

On the other hand, I wondered about this circle in the square cut in the wall (shown above) and dismissed it as infrastructure. Wrong. It's part of a complicated work, "Concealed Cavity" by David Blamey.



Here's more open room. You can't tell but on the left past the shelves and past the cut in the wall is Siobhan Liddell's "Daily Life Daily Death" made of yellow thread which casts grey shadows. The cut in the wall demarcates where the partition wall used to join the outer wall. That absence is Yane Calovski's "Wall Space."



Here's an example of silly. It's the sign in the entrance door. (image) That's Michael MacFeat's "Sorry We're Closed."



Finally, up high near the door is the world's most ancient smoke detector.

Because of its lovely antique nature, I knew right away it was art. It is. Say hello to "Detector" 1996, a turned wood piece by Phil Grauer.

In another post I'll focus on more of the discrete (less architectural) pieces in the show.
permanent link  roberta 8:38 AM
Comments? Let us know. 

Tuesday, June 22, 2004

Northwest passenger

 

As soon as I stepped off the plane in Vancouver, I knew this was a different kind of city than Philadelphia. The airport had a sense of place, and some of what created the sense of place was the artwork. A giant wooden sculpture of a thunderbird, by Connie Watts, an artist with First Nations ancestry--First Nations being the Canadian p.c. term for the tribes living on the continent when the Europeans arrived--hung overhead (above). Watts named the piece after her grandmother, Hetux.

The bird also hovered over a grouping of wooden sculptures arranged around a rocky water installation, which included a carved canoe, plus carvings of a number of water-related creatures like crabs and birds, and this seal by Stephen Bruce.

Elsewhere in the airport, boldly colored weavings also let you know you were in the Northwest. And the building itself, with its glass and poles of metal suggesting icicles or shards of ice also gave a sense of place.

With such an auspicious beginning, I didn't even bat an eye when we saw our friends Jane and George, who hail from California, while we were standing in one of the let-me-into-Canada lines at the airport.

When we got to the hotel, we spotted sculptures outside along with our friends Susan and Steve, fellow Philadelphians (shown, Boaz Vaadia's "Ginnetoy" on loan from a local gallery). Sculptures and wall art adorned the inside, too. The rooms also had art, my own having some beautifully colored lithographs by Bernard Cathelin--sweet still lifes of flowers--all on loan from the gallery.

Art was a presence in any number of ways. There was beautiful craft glass used as architectural elements in a number of places we stopped, including casual restaurants and shops.

And in Granville, a warehouse district transformed into an arty area with galleries, studios, performance spaces, and of course shops and restaurants, I was filled with envy.

Why can't Philadelphia pull off something like this? I wondered. (Shown, "Eastern Divide" and "Dusk in the Atacama Desert" by Tania Gleave in the Peter Kiss Gallery).

Signage

So here's an important difference between Vancouver and Philadelphia. In Philadelphia we have terrible signage and we constantly beat up on the city for its failure to do better (although it has improved somewhat). In Vancouver they have terrible signage, but they don't seem to notice (shown, us lost in Stanley Park). They kept telling us how to get where we were going and assured us we couldn't miss it. But miss it we did, over and over--the sidewalk, the aquarium, the bathrooms. They're unrepentent about their bad signage.

I won't trouble you with a picture of the sidewalk or the bathrooms, but here's a shot of a beluga whale at the aquarium.

Alas, Vancouver had an "Orcas in the City" program, fiberglas orcas painted by local artists--an orca version of the mad cow disease that started in Chicago and became the mad dog disease of the Main Line.



Here's a sample from in front of the terminal where we caught our cruise ship, the Island Princess. This one was better than some of the others I saw, but this one, like the city, suffered from signage problems. I don't know the artist or the name of the piece.

All on board

All of this was prelude to the object of the trip--Alaska aboard the Island Princess (shown near Ketchikan, Alaska), a 16-deck behomoth with 2,900 passengers and a crew of nearly 1,000.

The first thing that greeted us as we headed toward our ship was a letter from the cruise line telling us that on the previous journey, a number of passengers were stricken with norovirus, the scourge of cruiseboats everywhere.

The crew maintained a frenzy of of disinfection, swabbing every inch of the boat throughout the cruise over and over. We also were required to swab our hands with disinfectant lotion (a la Purell) every time we entered the dining room. I'm happy to report our cruise was norovirus-free.

Even on that enormous ship, we felt like we were sailing up unexplored waters into the wilderness (shown, a view as we headed north toward Juneau).

In the small city of Ketchikan, we had a share of nature--a sighting of about 60 to 80 bald eages, some soaring, some roosting, some hovering over the water and on the jetty at the mouth of the creek, probably in response to salmon collecting to begin their run upstream.

In no way can you forget that Alaska is all about salmon. The imagery in the art, the imagery in the signs, everywhere the stores selling the stuff, smoked and prepared in several ways. Here's a sign from a Ketchikan radio station. I hope you can make out the salmon imagery. Must be Alaska.

The totem poles also have salmon on them, not to mention ravens and whales and eagles and frogs, etc., etc.

How about having a totem in your front yard? A Ketchikan resident commissioned this one and put it up in front of his house to honor his wife and her dead parents! Here's some stuff I didn't know about totem poles: they are not about religion, but rather tell stories about a clan, or a grudge, or sources of pride; they also serve as memorials; totems are fairly modern, going back to only the 19th century (that was a shock).


Return to nature

The highlights of the trip were the views of mountains and glaciers, so I'm writing this part of the post only so I can post a few pictures.

This one (above left) is the Marjorie Glacier in Glacier Bay (which is really not a bay but a fjord). The ice at the bottom cracked off the glacier, which calves chunks every 10 or 15 minutes.

I thought I'd include this view on top of some rough, high terrain. The picture was taken from a little old gold-rush era train that took us through White Pass above Skagway.

And I also wanted to mention that we saw humpback whales (or rather their flukes and signs of their presence like disturbed water and water blowing up from their blow holes), sea otters, stellar sea lions and porpoises.

Here's a view taken of retreating fog that disappeared more slowly than it appeared. One minute I looked up and there were mountains and glaciers. The next minute I looked up and there was nothing but fog--or mist as they prefered to say on board. We were on our way to College Fjord.

As for sunset, it was at 10 p.m. the last night on board. I'm not sure it ever got dark. Oh, and the weather was pretty warm--above 60, even 70. That was a suprise, too.

permanent link  libby 4:25 PM
Comments? Let us know. 

Ride on the wild side

 
Libby and I told you about how we met Mark Price, new Space 1026er, last first friday as he was selling his uniformly-priced $5 art.

The young artist is quite the screen printer. When I was at Space 1026 looking at the Change Agent exhibit I picked up a new Price poster promoting a good cause -- the monthly Critical Mass Bike Ride which takes place the last Friday of every month in Philadelphia.

(I'm behind the times. I didn't know about this organization but apparently, according to their website, they're a global anti-car activist organization. Check out the Philadelphia chapter's site for more on the local ride.



While we're at it, here's a detail from a green-themed poster of Price's. The words on the poster read "Fake Glamor! live it up...you are empty." The stylized mod bod is like a parody of the big-eyed, shaggy-haired Keane kids, and the army of green martinis is like alcoholic hell raining down. The anti-advertisement for booze and glam is appealing and in keeping with the history of politically active postering here and elsewhere.


permanent link  roberta 10:25 AM
Comments? Let us know. 

British export in Brazil

 


While nosing around in the land of tea and crumpets, I checked out the British Arts Council's webpage. Apparently, one thing they're famous for is exporting British art and artists to venues across the globe. (Arts colonialism?)

I especially like the page on Rachel Whiteread's art going to Brazil.

I wonder how that sickly pink hot water bottle (image, "Untitled, Pink Torso, 1991),a necessity 30 years ago for heating a cold British bed) was received in Brazil.

Without the cold weather context the object seems a stylized tumor, sick and not a little creepy (which I guess it is).
permanent link  roberta 8:34 AM
Comments? Let us know. 

More British go to arts events than to football games

 
Friday's Guardian had a pro-arts editorial in the face of looming arts budget cuts. Read.

Among the amazing factoids in the article (emphasis mine):

Funding for the contemporary arts (as distinct from museums and galleries) has more than doubled since 1998: next year, Arts Council England will get £411m.

...the number of people going regularly to arts events has risen by more than 800,000 over the past three years, while dropping entrance charges at museums and galleries has led to 11 million extra visitors since 2001.

Indeed, people are now more likely to drop in on a museum than go to a football game.

At the bottom of the page, there are more links to other budget stories. Hope they do small surgery and save the patient.

Here's something that might explain why people like to go to British Museums, or at least to the new Tate Modern. How about that Olafur Eliasson sun piece we've all read about. Blockbuster turnout for atmospheric art. Sounds like a winning formula.

TM by the way is hosting a show of works by hot, Belgian painter Luc Tuymans. Show opens tomorrow and runs through Sept. 26. (image is "Diagnostische Blick IV, 1992) More at Tate Modern.
permanent link  roberta 8:13 AM
Comments? Let us know. 

Some arts funding restored

 
This morning's Inky tells us City Council passed the budget and that the Mayor has ten days to act on it (to veto or not to veto). This time, Council has the votes in line to override a veto, says the paper. Read Council Passes budget for 05 by Angela Couloumbis and Marcia Gelbert. (rfallon@philadelphiaweekly.com, password artblog)

The news for art lovers is that some arts funding is restored in this budget. Quoting:

The budget Council passed yesterday restores $2 million in funding for the Art Museum; $1 million for the Free Library; $3 million for recreation centers; $264,000 for the Atwater Kent Museum; and $30,000 for the African American Museum.

This does NOT sound like the Office of Arts and Culture got restored.. or money to non-profit arts groups like Vox Populi, Klein Gallery and others...

Anyone have any clarifying information on the latter points, contact artblog.

permanent link  roberta 7:58 AM
Comments? Let us know.