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Saturday, July 10, 2004

Blog silence

 



Blog silence echoing through cyberspace is what you'll hear from us tomorrow. I'll be back on Monday.

But let me just get in that I saw the Altoids Collection show at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and I thought it was chock-full of goodies--including the free tins of Altoids at the opening--traditional peppermint, ginger and sour apple. More on Monday.
permanent link  libby 9:12 AM
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Set in stone

 


Post from Colette Copeland

Michal Rovner's new video work at PaceWildenstein Chelsea challenges the syntax of video, embracing elements of history, archeology and language. Her retrospective at the Whitney last year included large multi-channeled projections and prints. In her current work, video comes off the wall and evolves into a sculptural realm. The first room contains internally illuminated glass cases, which at first glance appear to display open books. Upon closer examination, I discovered that the 'supposed' text was a video projection of tiny figures, devoid of any identity, reduced to moving silhouettes. The figures perform repetitive gestures, giving the appearance that the text is moving on the page (top, "Notebook").

In previous work, Rovner dealt with archetypes and universalities and the current work is no exception. This work is anti-identity or anti-individual. It is about any/every culture, any/every person and any/every time period throughout history. Immediately I am struck by the idea that the text continues to transform kinetically, referencing multiple perspectives of history. The title, "In Stone" plays upon the saying, "Set in Stone," meaning permanence or stasis. Rovner's work contradicts this idea. The subtle shifting of movement suggests that the passage of time manipulates how history is recorded, perceived, taught and learned. On a less intellectual note, I am also reminded of Harry Potter and how the people in the photographs are constantly moving.

The next room is also filled with glass cases. In lieu of books, the videos are projected onto stones. The objects resemble carved stone tablets, etched with hieroglyphics and symbols from ancient languages. In one piece, the figures are attached, moving in unison to a slow march. My eleven year-old daughter says they look like slaves. On another rock, the figures are wearing pointed hoods and cloaks, eerily simulating the KKK. The videos are silent, leaving the interpretation to the visual reading of the text.

A large stone basin/well sits in the center of a third darkened room. Projected onto sand in the bottom of the well are red swirling figures. The pace and rhythm of the video is more frenetic than in the other works. The shapes could be plague or bacteria disseminating into the air. It is as if a ritualized secret ceremony is occurring within the space.

The last room contains large stone tablets half-buried in a room filled with sand. Images of the Ancient Egyptians or Moses and the stone tablets engraved with the Ten Commandments come to mind. The symbols are in flux between stasis and movement, performing prayer rituals. The sound emanates from every corner of the room, creating a sense of reverence and honor (right, "Afar").

Rovner states that her work is not about a specific political situation, but the work seems to speak about human struggles and the momentum with which humanity continues to persevere. She seamlessly blends her craft with conceptually complex ideas, leaving the viewer with enough room to imagine many interpretations (left, "Data Zone" shown at Venice Bienale). At PaceWildenstein, 534 West 25th St., NYC, until July 16th.

--artblog contributor Colette Copeland is a multi-media artist who teaches at University of Pennyslvania and University of the Arts in Philadelphia

permanent link  libby 8:10 AM
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Friday, July 09, 2004

Anti-whine factor--city budget follow-up

 


It seems to me that the last time you heard from us about the city's arts budget cuts, we were doing nothing but complaining, whining, moaning, even crying.

So I feel we were remiss in not posting some of this info from a press release last week from John McInerney at the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance:

Eighty-six percent of the initial arts cuts have been restored, or, to put it another way, $3.5 million of the 4.5 million in cultural funding cuts were restored to the final budget.

The city's Office of Arts & Culture is still gone. This inside-City Hall voice for the arts dissolves although the Percent for Art and Art in City Hall programs will continue. I can't imagine they won't be hampered, however, by the loss of support and leadersihp, given the current administration's apparent lack of interest in the arts.

Other reductions include funding for the city’s Cultural Fund and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Cultural Fund was cut 17 percent, from $2.4 million to $2 million. This fund provides general operating support to more than 200 local organizations, many of whom use the funding to deliver arts education to the city’s school children.

The PMA will now get $2 million, which is $250,000 less than last year, and represents only about one-third of what the city is obligated to contribute to the museum for security and maintenance of the city-owned building.




permanent link  libby 2:53 PM
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Where's the art?

 



I came upon this paragraph in Holland Carter's Ana Mendieta review in today's New York Times, and somehow it brought me back to my previous post on the show at Vox Populi (Try New York Times username lrrfartblog, password artblog):

"Theoretically, by eliminating original objects and replacing them with documentation, Conceptualism undermined conventional values attached to art and the institutions that exist to embalm it. In the process, it redefined art as multiple and fluid, not singular and monumental. And by allowing art its commonplace mortality, Conceptualism actually liberated it from time, permitting it to circulate in new forms endlessly into the future. (The art industry, meanwhile, in a counterrevolutionary move, turned documents into valuable objects.)"

(Shown, untitled documentation from Mendieta's "Body Tracks").

permanent link  libby 9:25 AM
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Value from nothing and nothing from nothing

 

The assumption about art is it's worth something, hence the pedestals, vitrines, museums, auctions and galleries. But thanks to my touchstones for all things subversive--Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp--the true value of what we call art is constantly open to question.

"Erasures," the show now up at Vox Populi, a part of the Institute of Contemporary Art-organized Big Nothing, seems to raise issues of preciousness at least as effectively as it raises issues about nothingness and erasure (see a slew of Big Nothing-related posts during the month of May if you have the energy to browse through a month of our archives). I don't want to give the impression that I think this is a great show, but I do want to give the impression that you might find the highlights here are worth the trip.

M.Ho, who previously blotted out chunks of newspaper pages with rectangles of pretty pastel colors, shown previously at Vox, in her new piece "Half Life" (right) cuts out sections of the page, leaving a lacy doily of newspaper hanging off the wall, the ads half obliterated, and the news even more partial and selected than when it started out. As a newspaper page, it's worthless now. (Was it worthless before? Tomorrow, today's news is worthless anyway.) As art, I'd guess it's worth a bit more even though there's less of it.

With fragility and thoughtfulness being a hallmark of preciousness, and this being fragile and thoughtful in spades, I guess it's worth more than shredded paper, even though it is shredded paper. At last we have a silk purse made from a sow's ear.

The act of cutting half the news implies that half was worthless in the first place--or perhaps it implies that the half that really matters never gets reported, or perhaps it implies that the half that really matters never gets read by an indifferent, know-nothing public, or perhaps it implies that half the news is a big nothing (I'm afraid I can go on and on about what cutting out those holes suggests, but that's enough). All I know for sure is Ho has transformed something of little lasting value and quotidien into something more precious and persistent--by making it disappear, in part.

At this point I want to say I also loved Tristin Lowe's "Disfunctional" [sic.], a chair that looks whole but collapses into charming uselessness and danger. Its worthlessness, its human qualities, and its silly awkwardness make this piece worth its weight in gold (Lowe's piece shown at top). I (try to)think; therefore I am a chair.

Visually, in its many collapsed states, it reminds me of Richard Artschwager's "Chaise Eclatee" (left).

Natch, I'm crazy about anything that I can play with, and Lowe's chair fits the bill.

So does Mauro Zamora's "Ode to the Lot," (right) a wall painting meant to be sprayed into oblivion. A handy spray bottle of water rests on a shelf next to the painting so any viewer can participate in the erasure process. While I liked squirting the water and I liked the piece's drips and varied blues, this thing will disappear shortly and leave nothing of value.

I digress here

I appreciated Zamora's "And then..." for its subject matter--trees taking over a derelict building, because nature always wins in the end. I suppose nature always winning is a commentary about art as well. It may be precious--for now--but the elements and time will ultimately destroy everything. This brings to mind a story I read long ago in the New Yorker about an artist who worked in radioactive material because the half-life of radioactivity persists longer than almost any substance known to man. I wonder if he's still alive.

Genuine decorations

Simon Cuthbert's photos about people's choice of simulated landscapes to decorate interiors hit another level in "Zebra Flip," a photo of zebras applied to a wall of storage lockers in a Japanese subway station. The doors opening and closing promise constant disruption to the image which is damned silly in the first place.

Cuthbert offered his travelog of a variety of silly vistas applied to walls (left, "Greasey Joes"), but I'm not sure why his pictures should be taken as any less silly a construct. Why should I look at his pictures of zebras on the locker when I can go look at the lockers themselves?

The issue here seems to me to be mediocrity or bad taste. I'm not so sure it's about purity of nature and purity of walls or any other kind of genuineness, that position being subverted by the presence of Cuthbert's photos.



John Lorenzini's "Awaiting Subject #1," "... #2," and "... #3" (right) was a visual "Waiting for Godot," lightjet prints of photo backdrop paper with no subject (until #3, when an umbrella and a photo light appear).

John Stoney like Ho is taking something useless and somehow making it precious. His pieces of cast cow dung are encased, like jewels, in a vitrine. "The Problem with Airplanes" is a little brown airplane emitting a solid turd of puffy smoke (left). I confess I could barely look at this work for its aggressive brownness and sheer ugliness. However, the thought of the airplane as us is rather winning.

The 16-mm film loop of Nadia Hironaka's "Camoflage" [sic.] includes footage of famous special-effects explosions from movies (eg. from "Independence Day") being degraded by sandpaper as it loops around the projector. This is another piece about a process, not a product. So in the end, what you got is nothing.(For a great piece of hers that's up right now, go to Moore College's Philadelphia Selections Five -- and see what Roberta had to say in her post about the show.)




permanent link  libby 9:00 AM
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Thursday, July 08, 2004

A kick out of a kick

 


Two films at the Fabric Workshop and Museum are both supposed to be about nothing (oh, yes, guess what! they're part of the Big Nothing exhibitions organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art). One of the films seems to hit on the something of nothingness with some success. The other is soooooooo slooooooow, I'm not sure if success is the right word for it, although from the point of view of garnering bucks and exhibitions, it may be the more successful of the two.

I saw David Hammons' "Phat Free" at the Carnegie International a number of years ago, but all I remembered about it was the noise and the main idea, not the actual imagery. So I was surprised that the film was so blurry and hard to read. (And my picture of the film was even blurrier, so I don't have one worth posting).

The piece is brief, showing a man kicking a bucket down the street, sometimes doggedly, sometimes with soccer-athlete flair. The work offers no reason, no plot, just the sound of the bucket, the sound of the traffic, the look of the city.

Although the action is apparently pointless, it has the charm of the simple pleasure of doing something for the hell of it. I suppose if I tried hard, I could find something to say about the fact that the kicker, who appears to be dark-skinned but may not be because the movie is dark and barely readable, is wearing a baseball cap, with his shorts hanging low to near-ankle height. I prefer to ascribe the outfit to youth (although I couldn't tell from the darkness whether he was young or not; I could tell that he was probably a male), and I prefer to ascribe the kicking to youthful exuberance and pleasure in using his body.

But I also cannot forget that this is made by David Hammons, whose wit on racial issues can slice your nose right off your face. Why a bucket? Why an empty bucket? Although the kicker reminds me of Tantalus pushing a rock up a hill for eternity, this kicker gets to finish by kicking the bucket up to his hands. That's good news and that's the climax, the denouement and the end.

As energetic as the Hammons piece was, the Sharon Lockhart piece, "NO," was not (top still is from "NO"). Some of you may have seen this film at this year's Whitney Biennial. The story line is a Japanese husband and wife pile hay, moving it by hand, bale by bale, and then rake the hay to cover an empty field on their farm, thereby transforming the field's texture and color. The camera is static and the film seems to be in real time; watching the process is slower than watching paint dry.

While the Hammons piece offers a vicarious sense of an action in which you can almost feel the joy of giving the bucket a kick, not so "NO." The two people performing the work get the satisfaction of labor and progress and completion of a big job, but the viewer gets none of that. It's stone boring repetitive labor.

I was confounded by the wife carrying hay to the pile closest to her husband and vice versa. It seemed inefficient, something I cannot believe real farm laborers would be. Is there a ritual rule being followed here? a cultural directive? Or, were they having a little joke on the filmmaker?

I also don't buy the whole argument about it being a real-life landscape painting on film being constructed in real time. The whole point of a landscape painting has something to do with timelessness.

Furthermore, rarely does a work of art that is primarily about another art form have much juice.

That I came to these thoughts as I watched was not a good sign. But you can see for yourself, if you can bear to sit through it. Clearly there are people who disagree with me.

I'll take David Hammons any day.

The movies are up until Aug. 14.

permanent link  libby 4:41 PM
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Rail viaduct makeover

 


[Editor's note: Oops. I thought I had posted this post a week ago, right after the event. Sorreee. Here it is.--Libby]

The Reading Viaduct is a now unused portion of track that brought trains into Reading Terminal. It's a y-shaped, rusty nail in the streetscape that cuts from Chinatown to Fairmount, from 9th to 13th Street.(The large road cutting across the bottom of this map is Vine Street, and the tail of the y starts at Vine about 1/3 of the way from the left, going north until it splits.)

Behind the surge of proposals for remediating the Reading Viaduct is none other than our buddy, artist Sarah McEneaney, and her neighbor, furniture artistJohn Struble.

As activists in the Callowhill Neighborhood Association (Broad to 8th Street, Vine to Spring Garden), first they fought the baseball stadium, which was proposed for their turf, and now, they are worrying about zoning, greening and a variety of development issues, including the viaduct.

Coincidentally, both Drexel's and Penn's architecture and planning faculty decided to ask their students to work up ways to to remediate the viaduct. And, naturally, they talked to CNA. (Shown, the crowd at the opening.)

Some of the resulting plans are on display at Cafe Lift, just a few feet north of the viaduct branch that hovers over North 13th Street. The number of participants guaranteed a large crowd, plus the e-vite list looked extensive when I rsvp-ed.

Brian Phillips, an adjunct professor of architecture at Drexel, was interested in the problems the viaduct presented. The six Drexel students who were showing their plans at Cafe Lift were his class. He said their task for the 10-week term was "to reimagine the viaduct as a neighborhood asset." One of the Drexel plans, by Kelly Dapra, imagined the viaduct as an above-ground pedestrian walkway that connected the second stories of the surrounding buildings--mostly affordable, modular artists lofts. That yellow structure is a skateboard ramp imagined on the viaduct, and the buildings on the right are modular.

It was a grad student at Penn who suggested the viaduct might make a good charette. The student, who had participated in the Penn's Landing charette, approached Harris Steinberg, executive director of Penn Praxis, the clinical consulting arm of the School of Design, with the idea. Steinberg said he got the go-ahead, and arranged for a four-day charette (or planning blitz) for 11 or 12 teams of four or five students each. Four of the groups' plans were on display at Cafe Lift, including "Campus of the City," a proposal by Michelle Cheng et al. for an above-ground campus that linked together buildings that might include classrooms in them (shown).

Another interested party at the busy opening was urban planner Jody Holton, who turned out to be the daughter of some people I knew. She was part of a firm that is finishing up a city-sponsored plan for Chinatown. "We talked about the viaduct a lot," she said, "not that we came up with a definite plan for the viaduct, but we did think about taking parts down for affordable housing and leaving parts up for recreation and green space." (That's Holton on the right with McEneaney and Struble.)

I wondered how these student plans were going to lead to concrete changes. McEneaney said this was a preliminary step. She was hoping that the railroad would pay for remediation, something, she said, that the city was behind. At some point she thought CNA would hold a national architecture competition. Nice beginning.

permanent link  libby 4:23 PM
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Supporting Vox

 



Here's still another business venture from the creative Vox Populi folks, who need more money (don't we all?).

A bunch of artists have collaborated to create limited edition backpacks to celebrate JanSport's 25th anniversary. The bags are to be auctioned off between July 1 and Aug. 31 on the Web, all proceeds going to Vox. Here's a picture of my fave, a ham bag(ho, ho, ho) by one Pam Paparone. It's up for auction for another three hours as I write this. Looks like each day different ones get bid on.

permanent link  libby 10:55 AM
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Wednesday, July 07, 2004

Flying west

 
Hey, I'm off tomorrow with family to plop on the California central coast for a week. Pacific Grove, to be specific. I'll get a day in San Francisco and thanks to artblog reader, blogger and artist Anna Conti, I'm hoping to take a walking tour of some of the SF galleries. Have camera will travel. Be well. Back next week. You're in good hands with Libby.
permanent link  roberta 7:09 PM
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Scrolling down 6th avenue

 



I suppose it comes as no surprise that modern Chinese artists are using old Chinese art forms--not to mention quite recent ones, but those were usually parodies. So the scroll was a constant visual presence in the International Center of Photography's piece of the "Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China" show. (For some comments on the Asia Society piece of the exhibit, see my post from last week.)

But these are not your father's scrolls. Chen Lingyang's scroll-length nighttime cityscape, "25:00, No.2," stuns with an Olympian-sized naked woman lying on a rooftop, her hair hanging down. The naked woman by no means fulfills a Western concept of titillation; after all, we don't see much of her. But the pale undulation of skin and fall of hair are such a contrast to the hard materials of the rectilinear modern buildings that her sensuality, humanity and vulnerability are unmistakable. The piece pulls off a hip, Western modernity while it nods to the scroll (top and detail, left).

It also bespeaks the presence of these artists living in downtown cityscapes, a repeat motif in the two shows.


Hu Jieming hung flat, transparent, shower curtain-like pieces of plastic from wooden dowels, creating walls for a maze. The images are television screens and computer images from a year, in this case "1995-1996," which is the name of the piece. Inside the maze, the black-and-white images--a mix of Western and Eastern programing--become irritations that prevent a clear view of the world around you. I presume that's his point. I found an image on the Web that looked pretty much the same, a Hu piece called "The Fiction Between 1999 and 2000" (right).

Trying to find his place in the brave new world of modern day China, Li Tianyuan took a triptych of scroll-like pictures, one showing a satellite view of him circled, one a street view of him, and one a microscopic image of his fingernail, which had the qualities of a layered landscape(left, "Space Station 12 Dec. 2000").




And on Hong Hao's 35-foot facsimile scroll, "Spring Festival on the River," based on a 12th century representation of Beijing, he cut and pasted tiny pictures of some of the current inhabitants. (Right, another Web image that looked like a detail of the same thing, but I was unable to tell if it really was the same from the labeling; anyway, you get the picture).

But the scroll that sets the tone for the show is at the entrance, a huge silk-screen print of the artist's face on an enormous canvas hung from a dowel, knots punctuating the face. Behind the scroll, the strings that begin at the knots are pulled back to form an enormous braid that serpentines across the floor. Part of what's so striking about Lin Tianmiao's installation is the sheer bravado with which she declares her individuality, the ultimate People's Republic of China no-no. She dares a bombastic Western-style art scale and Western-style canvas material, but she preserves the scroll format and the ancient Chinese hairstyle.



Grids

I also was taken aback by the prevalence of grids. But these were not the grids of Minimalism. Rather, they were sort of scroll-like, using the grid boxes like movie frames to express time passing.

Zhang Huan's "Family Tree" (right) shows his head being covered character by character with Chinese words until, ultimately, his head is completely covered with black ink. The title suggests his family ties and ancestry are overwhelming his individuality. I don't know what the characters say, whether they are names or other words, but before I read the title, I at first read the piece as China, its language, its government propaganda obliterating individuality.

The contact sheet by Zheng Guogu of his friends partying, "Life and Dreams of the Youth of Yanjiang" was both a very long scroll in grid form and a quilt. Again, I was in the never-never-land of the Web, and I found this image (left), which has a similar name, "Youth Life and Dream." I suspect it's the same image with a slightly different translation for the name.

Who are you?

I have to mention one other piece, which has nothing to do with grids or scrolls. It's by Hong Hao, the same artist who added little cutout photos of modern people to a facsimile of an ancient scroll. His "I Know Mr. Gnoh," a large chromagenic print (there were an awful lot of large Chromagenic prints in both shows, especially at the Asia Society) of himself dressed up as a skinny Chinese version of a fat-cat Westerner, his slightly worried eyes Photoshopped blue, his hair, blond. This was straightforward in content and full of laugh-out-loud details, like his too widely knotted tie. As funny as this piece was, it was dead serious--a search for himself behind the invading Western imagery.









permanent link  libby 10:18 AM
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Speaking of prisons

 
Fairmount Park Art Association head Penny Balkin Bach forwarded me this call for artists.

It's an opportunity to make work for the lovely, crumbling Eastern State Penitentiary for its 2005 season. Excuse the redundancy if you know about this already. It was news to me. For more shots of the prison, see my Cellblock 7 post.

Here's the info:

Each year, Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site puts out a call to artists interested in submitting applications to exhibit at the site.



The deadline for this yearˆs application is Friday, October 15, 2004. Artists will be notified by Monday, November 15, 2004.

The full guidelines and other important dates, including a list of Art Orientation tours, can be found on our website. Read them here.

To learn more about the application process or to schedule an orientation tour, please contact Program Coordinator, Brett Bertolino, at (215) 236-5111 ex. 12 or email him at bb@EasternState.org

(images are details from "Cellblock 9," by Tyler graduate fellow Ianthe Jackson. The piece is one of six installations for 2004. See Libby's post for her thoughts on that show and my upcoming sketch July 14 in the Weekly (PW) for mine.)
permanent link  roberta 6:39 AM
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Tuesday, July 06, 2004

In New York and on the Web

 



Judy Gelles' photos of beach boxes will be showing at
lyonswiergallery in Chelsea (NYC) until Aug. 14. The opening is July 8, 6 to 8 p.m.






I also received an email from Leonie Guyer, whose delicate drawings of poignant blobs show at Gallery Joe (she's got a couple in the current show). Guyer has a piece that's a whole lot less minimal, with multiple images and a poem. It's at Marjorie Wood Gallery, which apparently exists only in cyberspace. I thought you might like to visit.
permanent link  libby 4:18 PM
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Allure of L.U.R.E. at Moore and more

 

Save the evening of Saturday, July 17 for one of L.U.R.E.'s video projects, to take place in the courtyard at Moore College. I learned this from Director of Exhibitions Brian Wallace, when I stopped in this morning to see "Philadelphia Selections Five" (see Roberta's thumbs-up post on the show and the top two images here*). Wallace said the upcoming event was a combination of music and video presented by L.U.R.E. and the New Humans (from New York).

Other future plans at Moore include something with Barnaby Furnas (a hit at this year's Whitney Biennial) and a show of work by Brazilian artist Artur Barrio, both in the 2005-2006 season. For 2004-05, Wallace said he has on tap a show of recent videos from Janet Biggs, whose work has a lot of athleticism and sports imagery; he's also expecting a show on the Lewis and Clark Expedition, organized by the Tacoma Art Museum.

Explosions


Wallace also curated a show of digital images he received via e-mail from Dilovan Amin, an Iraqi artist from Dukok, Kurdistan.

The explosions seem clinical, a trick of quick-trigger photography, somehow distilling fear and thunder into a visual ballet of falling walls and dust. The photos make the terror of war manageable.

While I thought many of them beautiful, they didn't bring me to feelings of vulnerability or any other such sympathetic reaction--just wonder--so that's how walls fly apart when they are detonated. Part of this may be explained by choosing walls that looked isolated, without connection to home or office or other daily space.

Even so, I was happy to get away from the images and return to Logan Circle and my peaceful Philadelphia (right).

Wallace said that before America invaded, he had contacted a number of artists in Iraq, and since then they have been sending him emails with artwork.

*Top image is from chronicler of American taste Elizabeth Rywelski, who has pushed a step further her K-Mart photo portraits of herself, dressed for the shoot by K-Mart employees; this time, in her search for how to fit in to the American scene, she hung the portraits on wall treatments selected by Home Depot shoppers with whom she stood in line.

The next image is from James Johnson, whose peepholes through mirrors allow you to peer into behind-the-wall spaces. (Yes, I'm afraid that's me again, caught in the mirror, but I couldn't figure out how to take this photo any other way). Johnson said the mirrors followed some earlier work using black glass, and that he was influenced by David Hockney's book "Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters." But the tricks in Johnson's installation, which he kindly reveals if you go around to the back of it, are anything but Old Masters-ish. Neither are the little interiors he has chosen. Take a peek.




permanent link  libby 2:37 PM
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Richter gives to Dresden

 

Speaking of Gerhard Richter, as we were a couple of posts ago, this morning's Guardian relates this story:

Richter, born in east Germany in 1932, has donated 41 works, including some of his most important works from the 1960s, to the state gallery of Dresden. It's an important charitable act that will secure the museum's future.

This is not Richter's first donation to help the museum. Last year when the Elbe River flooded and the museum was seriously damaged, Richter donated a painting which sold at auction for 1.6 million pounds.

The estimated value of the new donation of works is 66 million pounds. Read the story.
permanent link  roberta 5:59 AM
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Monday, July 05, 2004

First Friday fireworks

 


I have to put it right out there, on top of anything else I say, that if you're going to see one show this month, based on the First Friday offerings we saw in Old City, I'd pick Gallery Joe's "Small Drawings."

It's a group show with many of the usual suspects, but there was some new work too, and I loved almost every single piece.

Of new work, what I loved were the three Sharon Horvaths from the "Mother Baseball" series and Samantha Simpson's animals.



The Simpsons had an easy readability, with their figuration and open-ended narratives. The creatures reminded me of the sweet badgers in the Frances children stories, and the relationships between the creatures was touching. A sense of humor cut any chance of the work dipping into cloying, and the drawing was tender (right, "Bonk").




The Sharon Horvath work, inspired by baseball diamonds and parks offered up an unexpected sexiness and thrill in both the juicy line-making and the subject matter. The suggestions of thrill rides and mandalas brought baseball diamonds beyond their mere geometry and architecture.



Their scale and decorative qualities made me think of tiles, and the way the colors take over the paper's space turns these drawings into paintings.





Other work that was unfamiliar and interesting included Sid Garrison's squares (left), this one reminding me of Japanese gestural paintings of nature, and Renato's restrained portrait of a paper bag.

I've also included Astrid Bowlby's "Velvet Lace" for its sense of concentration and just because I think everything she's been doing is great. We write about Bowlby a lot, so I'll stick to the picture (top).


I've included a Rob Matthews drawing (right, "Sleepwalk: Roanoke 4") for its sense of mystery and just because I think everything he's been doing is great, and because I like the way he places everything in some city or another, a la on the dark road of life with the Matthewses and Sam Spade.

The work, pulled from the gallery's flat files, includes a lot of stuff I've seen before, but I was happy to take another look.

Gallery Joe pretty much rescued us at a point when we felt dispirited and beaten down. The humidity was a killer, and a lot of the work we saw looked like work we had seen before.

Harry Anderson lights Snyderman

Even Harry Anderson at Snyderman ,whose lamps have always seemed like perennial punctuation marks of wit and light, somehow seemed a little short on humor. The most anthropomorphic of them seemed a little literal, the others not so juicy (left, (Jax").

I thought that the work would stand out in the intimacy of a livingroom, where the ideosyncrasy of the work would pop, better than in the gallery space, where the linearity and expectation of the unfamiliar worked against the lamps. I also don't remember him using this much custom glass, which lent a seriousness and Victorian look that took away from the sheer joy of rethinking something old (right, "Tractor").

More on Becerra

I know Roberta mentioned Roland Becerra at Rodger LaPelle in her First Friday post, but I thought I'd add that in the flurry of everyday images that he used to fill out the show, the ones that seemed interesting were the ones that suggested there was some scary supernatural force or warped narrative, represented by either the green light Roberta had mentioned or other surprising changes like the goop covered, Klingon skin (left, "Covered in Goop in Backyard"). I didn't necessarily think that capturing his own face at odd angles with odd expressions necessarily brought a painting from mere representation to some kind of commentary on reality.

And Yoder, too

I thought I'd also add to Roberta's comment about Yoder (same post as Becerra), the strongest work at Nexus.

What interested me was that I thought it was unusual to see self-portraits of a handsome man completely without dignity, grimacing like he's trying to examine a filling in his wisdom tooth. I don't think these unembarrassed self-examinations bear comparison to Lucas Samaras, who was performing and transforming himself.

In a way, the grimaces form a commentary on the minute self-examination of painting a self-portrait. But I have to agree with Roberta that I want something more, something that puts the artist in modern time. The sepia tone suggests a past time that's inconsistent with the faces.

The rest of Nexus

Also at Nexus were works by Delia King, who is a mural artist and who we had seen selling her back-of-glass paintings on the Second Street fence about a year earlier. Her exhibit, "Un/Married Woman" was a little uneven. The highlights were some tiny pieces, "A Couple," "Arm" (left) and "Face," and a larger painting, "Untitled." The come-hither of the arm in "Arm" was captured by the simplest of means. And the sense of dowery and waiting was captured in the rich environment of the figure in "Untitled."

In the back room photographer Chris Macan, whose work we had also spotted along the fence about a year earlier, showed "The ID Project," portraits of people without their shirts, four shots apiece a la cheap photo booths. He used polaroid technology and had a booth set up in the back for any volunteers (Shown, "Rick, ID Series #7) .

Macan's show statement talked about surveillance with proto ID photos and that people often found ways of revealing their identities, even when deprived of the clothes and jewelry they use to make a statement. But the finished products seemed not so much about governmental surveillance and stolen identity or even revealed identity but rather about old-fashioned peephole voyeurism.

Macan, who has some energy and ideas about working with others, when we last met him was trying to start a photographers collective. He said it didn't work out but he hasn't quite given up.

Another new spot

Roberta had mentioned that Carbon 14 looks like it's about to make a comeback. We also found "Collective 114," which is really the apartment of Kyle Robinson. He had so many artist friends (and an artist mom)and they were tired of losing half their price to the galleries, so he offered up his walls and put a sandwich board outside. He said he hoped to do it again for future First Fridays.

I especially enjoyed a triptych of photos by Jennifer J. Jones with its pieta imagery (left).

And speaking of triptychs, Terrence LaRangione used triptych thinking while arranging his portraits of toys at Spartaco Gallery and I started the evening with a bang with this triptych of socks, including the hot pick ones with Warhol's Jackie O. We also ended with a bang, oohing and aahing with the rest of Philadelphia over the fireworks along the river.
permanent link  libby 3:55 PM
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First Friday girl art

 

Now for the all-girl art show, "Birds of Prey" at Space 1026, wherein art about identity, sexuality and relationships comes in shades of flesh and pink.

The five-person exhibit includes

--an embroidery installation by Lia Brennan; (top image is detail)

--ceramic flower-hybrids by Sarah Christoph;

--jewelry by Adriane Dalton;

--seventeen photo-collages on glass by Sienna Freeman; and

--a sculptural soap installation by Erinn Hart.



Stella and I ran into Space 1026er Thom Lessner on Saturday when we were in the gallery. He told us the opening, which we missed, sadly, was great, although steamy with heat.



Lots of folks turned out, and DJ Julia Factorial provided the ambiance.

The show's pleasant although conventional. What made it a Space show was the show's title in a pink heart painted on the wall along with red arrows and black and gold birds stencilled here and there. (image right above of Stella, in pink, in front of the show's logo)

That uncredited decor (I'm guessing it was a group effort, with Brennan doing the arrows -- her embroidery installation included girl archers shooting bows and arrows -- and someone else doing the birds) deserves an A. Christoph's vessels, pictured above with arrows behind it on the wall reminded me of early Rain Harris -- beautiful, carnivorous female plants.



Adriane Dalton's jewelry, pictured right (so sad about that blurry photo, sorry), depicted birds on tree branches and women with bird beaks on tree branches in miniature paintings that reminded me of Victoriana.

If they had gone a little farther -- more threatening imagery perhaps -- they would have been more reverberant. As it is they're a little too literal.

Hart's "The weight of decorations," (left) with cast soap in the form of dead animals on the floor encircling the baby dress, reminded me of Kiki Smith and a host of work by woman artists who paint, sculpt and have affinity with dead animals.



Sienna Freeman's seventeen photo-collages had some zip and surreal charm.

Here (below) for example is a nice update of Manet's Olympia.

What I loved best and I'm sorry you can't quite see it here is that Olympia's knees are red, like she's been crawling around -- animal-like -- on all fours. Why she's been doing this is left for you to decide.



Be sure to catch this show soon because the closing day is July 22, 2004.
permanent link  roberta 7:13 AM
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Sunday, July 04, 2004

First friday boy art

 

Roland Becerra's art has always portrayed families. It's his family of course, even though they're portrayed at times as scaly green aliens. That's one reason I've always loved the young painter's narrative works, which turn up each summer at Lapelle Gallery. For who among us doesn't occasionally feel their family comes from Mars?

This is Becerra's sixth solo show with Lapelle and like in past years, the artist has installed a large body of work, some new, some from previous shows. He lays it out with a kind of cinematic rhythm. Small works that depict empty interiors bathed in spooky green light are followed by people shots. This year, the humans for the most part are pasty-faced and caught looking over their shoulders -- imagine Girl with a Pearl Earring with a tummy ache.




Other years there's been intimations of violence in the works, with blood making a big splash a few years back. This year, there's no new blood although a few works from that memorable show appear as reminders.

This year, instead, there's a sense of expectation hanging over the works -- lots of empty interiors, hallways, kitchens, bathrooms -- all seem like Hitchcock rooms before the crime.

There are two new alien anthemic pieces, "Rider," and "Father" which are like anchors for the show grounding the narrative in weirdness and family. Both depict Becerra's trademark king of aliens creature, a reptilian hybrid with human head. In "Rider," the king is mounted on his steed (a masked dinosaur, image right) and looking serene and happy. Echoes of David's Napoleon on horseback are all over the sci-fi piece set on a red planet. Even the dinosaur, with its white ruffled chest hair and long lacey cuffs, echoes French frou frou dressing of yore.

"Father," which depicts two no-neck monsters playing beside dad's throne, also echoes scenes of courtly painting. (top image)

For my money, Becerra still is the best example of how to breathe life into narrative painting. I'll write more of all this in PW on July 21.

Yoder at Nexus


Karl Yoder's ten, grimacing self-portraits at Nexus reminded me first of the Disney cartoon character Gaston in "Beauty and the Beast," an animated I watched a lot with my kids when it first came out. Gaston, a lug and a bufoon does a lot of facial emoting and doesn't get the girl.

Yoder's not making cartoon cells, of course. (image left is one of the ten works) This is a serious body of work by an artist (PAFA MFA 2001) who is also a Philadelphia mural painter. This exhibit whets my appetite for more Yoder. I'd like to see what the artist could do with narrative and I hope he takes a long hard look at Roland Becerra's show. Becerra, too, occasionally paints himself grimacing.

Next post, I'll tell you about some girl art, Birds of Prey, at Space 1026.
permanent link  roberta 8:03 PM
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New Orleans redux on First friday

 
First off let me say the soupy weather Friday night reminded me of New Orleans and so when I saw the performer in gold with her face painted gold, enacting the part of a statue right there on 2nd St. I didn't bat an eye. I knew just what to do. Take a picture and put a little money in the performer's box. (see my New Orleans post for more)

When I put a dollar in her box, Gold One broke her pose long enough to do an exaggerated bow which turned a few heads on the busy street. (top image is performer)

Space 1026er Mark Price, who we told you about in our last First Friday posts, was there on 2nd st. again with new work and a few familiar prints. All wonderful. Stella, my constant companion now that school is out, couldn't live without one.



Price was there with his sister Hilary who was showing some nice home-stitched shoulder bags and wallets.

Artist Dan Clites (pronounced Cl-EYE-tes) was walking around looking to trade his art for other artist's work. When we happened upon him he and Price were down on their hands and knees transacting business.

Clites' art is lovely abstract drip and swirl paintings on scrap metal. (image left) He told us he works in an auto body shop and that the paint and metal were leftovers from the job site. The ingenuity of his art-making and art-trading -- and his guilelessness in just making something that recycled materials and made him happy -- was humbling.



Finally, we were tickled to see the green grass outside Carbon 14 on 3rd St. Libby and I remember Carbon 14 from a number of years ago as an art and coffee spot run by a couple of art school grads. A note on the window said Carbon 14 is coming back as an art venue in the fall.

That wraps up my report of the extra-gallery scene. Libby may have more to come. I'll get to some inside art in another post.


permanent link  roberta 2:15 PM
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Happy July 4

 

Instead of launching into First Friday, I thought I'd pause for our national holiday.

This flag, by Philadelphia mural painter Meg Saligman (it has everyone's name but hers on it!), went up shortly after 9/11 when patriotism was the universal antidote to the depression of having been hit. It was glorious.

But then the jingoism of the Bushies' rhetoric began to cloy with its phony war-on-terror footing, its blatant insincerity and its insistence on out-patrioting everyone else. The news media were equally full of America-is-tops fervor. By time the Patriot Act passed and the war on Iraq came and the silly Homeland Security color chart caromed up and down from yellow to orange and back again, patriotism seemed an embarrassment. (See Roberta's post on Rittenhouse Review)for putting the silly color chart in perspective.)

Saligman's flag became something I just didn't want to look at anymore.

But today, I have some optimism about getting Bush out of the White House.

Gil Kirlin from Gallery Joe said on First Friday that he'd gone to one of those teas or get-together fundraisers at someone's house and Kerry at the end gave a talk via speaker phone. Gil said Kerry was great and seemed to be speaking directly to him.

If Kerry can make himself look good to a wider audience and if Bush keeps looking increasingly unacceptable to middle America, thanks to his own incompetence and Michael Moore's film, there's hope.

So here's the American flag mural. And here's a row of American flags on the 300 block of Wolf Street in South Philadelphia, taken from 4th and Wolf.

Wave on and let's get our young men home again.
permanent link  libby 8:59 AM
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Scarabs and War Cuts

 
Scarab Saturday
Even before I got the press release, I was excited about this one. Scarab, an art exhibit about heavy metal, opens July 10 at Project Room. Opening party is 7-11 pm and includes (drumroll) dry ice. And the artists taking turns dj'ing metal music. Show runs to Aug 13, and concludes with a metal panel discussion moderated by artist and metal afficionado, Jeremiah Misfeldt.

Kait Midgett, Project Room den mother, told me the artists, Chris Bors, Scott Cassidy, Robert Chaney, Drew Eliott, A. Ho, Thom Lessner, Justin Matherly, Paul Swenbeck and Clint Takeda, had been meeting on a regular basis to plan the show and to talk about the literary, social and artistic underpinnings of the metal movement, which apparently gripped them all as teens. Or something. Chaney's the curator here and Ho contributed an essay defining heaviness.

There's something oddly satisfying about the idea of a heavy metal discussion group and all this scholarly framing.

Besides, these artists, several of them natural collaborators whose group efforts helped produce Grubstake at Basekamp (see post), have a track record for delivering interesting, albeit sometimes complicatedly creepy work.

As you might expect in a show paying homage to metal bands, there are no women on board. I mention this only because I've noticed this sizable hole in the rock-art category before.

Anyway, Saturday when Stella and I stopped by Space 1026 for Birds of Prey (more on that later), we ran into this nice poster for Scarab. I assume it's a Space 1026 production. Love the green and purple.

Richter's War Cuts


Today's NY Times has a slide show and Q&A with Gerhard Richter that's worth a few minutes of your time. (username lrrfartblog, password artblog)

Richter's debuting a new book, War Cuts, a conceptual collage of extreme close-up photos taken by the artist of his abstract painting `No. 648-2,'1987, streamed with newspaper text from The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung from March 20 and 21, 2003, the beginning days of the war in Iraq.

If I understood, there are 216 images from the painting in the book, which was laid out by the artist as a kind of absurdist link between art(beauty) and life.

It reminded me of James Hillman's book "A Terrible Love of War," in which Hillman talks about humankind's eternal attraction to war. (link has some interesting thoughts on Hillman)



The interview's long and I pulled out these two quotes by the German painter which I thought were the most interesting pieces.

Asked why he chose this particular painting to link to the theme of war, Richter, whose work is the most deadpan in existence today -- if ever -- said "It was close to being uncommunicative, which I don't mean negatively." In other words, the painting had a kind of ambiguity and neutrality he wanted to pair with the words.

And, in response to the suggestion by some that the book was a hodgepodge and at base merely a simulation of sympathetic interest in the subject, the artist said,

"How could one be in this world without feeling dismayed by it? Even if one paints flowers and gingerbread."
permanent link  roberta 8:43 AM
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Cellblock 7

 
Julie Courtney, curator bringing Janet Cardiff to Eastern State Penitentiary for a new piece in 2005, told me Cardiff selected ESP's Cellblock 7 as the site for her work. (See my post and Libby's post for more on Cardiff)

Courtney characterized the site as "ravishingly beautiful," and because I was there the other day and took a picture, (shown) this will give you some idea of what she meant. (notice the trees growing through the walls and the missing roof for starters)

Right now, most of Cellblock 7 is off limits to visitors due to issues of safety. Courtney said there was fundraising underway to get money for infrastructure repairs.

What you can see, if you climb up the stairs to a guard lookout mezannine, (where the pictures were taken) is the space's potential and why Cardiff, whose work has a spooky Edgar Allen Poe quality, would be drawn to it.



Whatever the artist produces for the prison will perfectly complement the site's gothic excellence.

Look hard and you'll see a couple of Linda Brenner's Ghost Cats. See Libby's post for more on that installation of 39 white kitty sculptures around the prison.
permanent link  roberta 8:02 AM
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