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Thursday, September 16, 2004

The excellence of Olafur

 

Libby told you about Olafur Eliasson's "Your Colour Memory" in her post.



I'd like to add a few thoughts and pictures from the opening at Arcadia the other night. First off, there was a huge crowd and you had to stand in line to access the piece. Crowd control assistants (guy in cowboy hat) kept people from crowding in to what was a rather small, and warm, space.



People look funny in some colors and not quite as funny in others. The more intense the color, the funnier everyone looks. Speaking of color intensity, at one intense red point I put my hand on the wall -- you're advised not to do this but I didn't know that at the time, not that it would have stopped me -- and my hand seemed to flatten out and melt into the wall. It gets that psychedelic.

And the piece is a wonderful people watching experience. As I tried to hold conversations with people, colors swinging wildly from lime green to laser red, I found it hard to concentrate and just began grinning. My mind -- usually caught up in words -- was occupied elsewhere. The lower order brain where colors stimulate response (red=fear, flight; blue=peaceful, stay) took over. I don't think I drooled but if I did nobody mentioned it.



Then there were the auras. In one particularly intense moment of pinkness, people had subtle but noticeable green auras.



Once inside, nobody wanted to leave. It was a cross between not wanting to miss something and being completely happy in the moment. It was infantile, really, but I saw nobody who was having a miserable time. Also, people didn't stay long in the black room provided to cool down your eyeballs. This was a crowd of artists...who wanted to cool down?



Crowd behavior kicked in. At one point a person turned towards the inside wall and stared, quietly, for long enough to be observed by another person who then did the same thing. Pretty soon, a line of 10 people was turned in to the piece looking into the color void (and away from the people).



It was when I myself turned and became part of the line looking into the... I think it was pink at the time...color field that I felt the piece's spiritual leanings. The experience then became a solitary voyage into space.

I loved "Your Colour Memory" because it contained both a social, human aspect and because it allowed the other -- more solitary -- experience as well. It's great, and be sure to go with a buddy.
permanent link  roberta 7:57 AM
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Dancing, clicking, twirling in the moonlight

 

I'd like to add my two cents about Carolyn Healy and John Phillips' "Limbic Pentameter." (See Colette's post for more.)

It's fantastic.

I haven't always been kind to their work in what I've written elsewhere, but I am completely enthralled by "Limbic." It's a piece that weds flashy materials to content both cosmic and humane. And along the way it keeps a kind of humbleness that's endearing. (Image is photo of the piece by Catherine Wert.)

All this in a 17-minute video-audio-sculptural piece that must change 17,000 times during its quarter hour loop. Phillips told me that a viewer got lost in the experience and didn't realize she had spent over an hour with the piece. She thought she'd been in there only a few minutes.

The artists wrote to tell me that they got permission to keep the piece -- which was the only visual art sponsored by the Live Arts Festival -- open for an extra weekend in September beyond its Live Arts run which ends this Saturday. That's good news. Run don't walk to see it.

This is the piece's debut in Philadelphia, although it was shown last year in Harrisburg. It's a big production -- indoor fireworks, even -- and who knows when it'll be shown again. Personally, I think it would be great in PAFA's Morris Gallery -- or in the PMA Video Gallery and I'd love to see it in either or both.

By the way, here are the corrected hours for this week: Tuesday through Friday 6 p.m. - 10 p.m. and Sat. Sept. 18, 2 p.m.-10 p.m. The piece will NOT be open Sunday, Sept. 19.

Hours for the additional weekend, Saturday, Sept. 25, and Sunday, Sept. 26, are from 11 a.m.-7 p.m. both days.

For a warm-up, you can catch the piece's flavor in a little Quick-time video on the artists' website.

And catch my a-list in next week's Weekly (PW) for more.
permanent link  roberta 7:08 AM
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Wednesday, September 15, 2004

Real vs. surreal--Pepon Osorio at the ICA

 

Pepon Osorio's "Trials and Turbulence", which opened at the ICA Friday, brings into the open a place where private lives are affected by public policy.

He takes over the first floor of the ICA with an installation that piles up realistic details, revealing the everyday lives of people. By putting the lives in the gallery space at a scale and level of detail that's overwhelming, he is granting the issues in those lives a gravitas that makes a viewer pay attention.

The world he builds is a re-creation of the beaurocracy that handles foster children.

Every inch of the social workers' cubicles (top) are decorated with photos and cheap gewgaws. An enormous cage is piled high with a family's possessions--their tv, their furniture, their lamps, their clothes, their lives torn apart (right). The details are wrenching. The size of the pile is overwhelming. The bureaucracy and its cage is domineering.

In contrast to these personal revelations, a reconstructed interview room stands in its institutional barrenness as the voice of a client answers a probing caseworker's questions (left). The re-creation of a courtroom, in all its institutional splendor, includes a bathroom in a curio cabinet, the client stripped bare in front of her accusers (below left).

And then there's a chance to consider the alternative. A dark, walled-off room of the gallery offers a space that's outside the governmental system altogether. Constructed of wood salvaged from the streets of North Philadelphia, the wall allows a peek into a dark room and a video of a boy running away through the darkened streets (right).

I asked one of the guards, a woman I often chat with when I stop at the ICA, what she thought of the exhibit. She loved it and she recognized it. "Let's put it this way," she said. "I've been here before."

But what Osorio does with the space is not just re-create. He creates an intersection, where the different actors whose lives are touched by the System can see each other's point of view, can walk into each other's spaces and feel safe.

Anyone can sit on the judge's bench in Osorio's courtroom and view the video, or look into the glass-enclosed bathroom (left) that telegraphs dignity of the individual with its lacy decorations and its fine-furniture enclosure.

Anyone can see in Osorio's System the cubicles where the social workers do their paper work, and how their lives are separated from their clients'. The social workers retreat to a space that the clients never see. And anyone can see how the clients are marginalized with their possessions displaced into the cage, their complex stories of lives in crisis boxed into one institutional format or another. Osorio's installation tears down the walls that blind people involved in the system as clients, judges, social workers or administrators to one another's humanity.

What Osorio takes, he also gives back. He may strip the judge and the social workers of their mystery, but he also restores to them humanity. And he restores to the clients their humanity. Therein lies the magic of his work.

Because Osorio is in part grappling with the irrational rules of bureaucracies and how they affect the individual in this piece, I was thinking this morning about how different his work was from that of installation artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov.

But Osorio's installation at the ICA stands in vivid contrast to Ilya and Emilia Kabakov's equally ambitious installations for so many reasons, yet they all are poking at the place in life where irrational bureaucracies wreak havoc.

The Kabakovs take a situation that feels unsafe and recreate it, make it more dreamlike and surreal, and therefore exaggerate the unsafety and the insanity. The bureaucracy remains an invisible power behind the daily lives of people.

Osorio, on the other hand, demystifies the bureaucracy and makes its spaces ordinary. He piles it high with the details of daily life, the small choices of affection and taste. The system may be insane, but the people who are part of it are doing the best they can to hold on to sanity. The flurry of personal items in the cubicles are one of the ways people hold on.

The Kabakovs' subject is really the individual versus the government.

Osorio's subject is the individual and the community. The government here is not so much the enemy as a victim, a community system that's hampered by its own rules and regulations from working properly. It's a human system.

Ultimately, Osorio is empathetic, like Forest Whitaker's empath character in "Species." But Osorio's work is not only about walking in someone else's shoes. It's about using that connection and understanding to build community (image, Osorio at opening, listening to a boy).

The installation is an outgrowth of Osorio's 3-year artist's residency at Philadelphia's Department of Human Services. I want to give props here to Wendy Weinberg's video contributions to the installation.

(Top three photos, Osorio's "Face to Face," 2002, a predecessor of the current installation. Mixed Media including: 5 computer monitors with video, 2 large projected DVDs, TV with home video, Photo: Becket Logan, Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York)

permanent link  libby 11:27 AM
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Tuesday, September 14, 2004

Shadows and reflections

 
Post by Colette Copeland



Carolyn Healy and John Phillips' new collaborative work, Limbic Pentameter transports you into another world.

Their multi-media installation integrates sculpture, sound and video projections. The musty-smelling dark room, off the loading dock of the National Building, immediately envelops the viewer. Healy transformed a pile of debris into intricately woven and crafted meshed wire and metal sculptures. Phillips interspersed speakers and lights within the sculptures, which when activated, create the illusion of animated life forms. The video projections produce additional movement within the structure, casting reflections upon the wall and adding to the otherworldly environment. It remains impossible for the viewer to participate as a sole spectator. The viewer's shadows synthesize with the reflections of the sculptures, implicating the viewer within the space.

As the sounds and lights rhythmically reverberate throughout the room, I notice pairs of opposing concepts in the installation . A sense of both weightiness and weightlessness permeates from the sculptures, as absorption and reflection simultaneously occur. The video projections elicit a vision of the microscopic (think inner workings of a brain or computer) as well as macroscopic (think futuristic space travel).

The sound's synchronized tempo mimics the poetry structure of the pentameter (cleverly referencing the iambic pentameter). When I asked the artist about "limbic," he responded that it was the lower brain stem or what is known as the frog brain.

Healy and Phillips successfully create a playful, experiential environment, conjuring limbic or reflexive responses. (Perhaps we have more in common with frogs than we care to admit). Limbic Pentameter is on display at 119 Arch St., in Old City through Sept. 18. Hours are Tuesday through Friday 6-10 p.m., Saturday and Sunday 2-10 p.m.

--Colette Copeland curated "Death Bizarre," an exhibit in Hoboken.

permanent link  libby 4:20 PM
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Travels with my brother

 
My brother Barry is the master of the long, lonely car trip. His most recent one took him up through the Yukon Territory into the Arctic Circle.

Here he is at the sign that told him he'd arrived in the Arctic. My husband Murray thought the signmakers missed an opportunity in making so rectangular a sign to depict a circle. I have to agree. They should have taken that arc and pushed it all the way around.

I suppose this other shot is a hotel, motel or guest-house room up north. The chair is made of moose antlers. If Alice in Wonderland had lived in Alaska, this is what her wing chair would have looked like.

permanent link  libby 3:51 PM
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Monday, September 13, 2004

Who's Scott Kahn and why's he noticed?

 
The quirky art of Scott Kahn at the Arthur Ross Gallery (see Roberta's post) carried me along with such enthusiasm that I went to a talk about it Thursday by David Cohen, an art critic from New York and editor of artcritical.com.

I was under the mistaken impression that Cohen was going to talk about sleep and dreams in relation to Kahn's surrealistic work. My mistake was understandable. After all, the title of the talk was "Hyperattention: Fantasy Realism, Trance-like Technique, and 'Critical-Paranoid' Tendencies" (critical-paranoid is a Salvador Dali coinage, according to Cohen). And the talk was part of this year's Penn Humanities Forum series, "Sleep and Dreams."


Instead, Kahn talked about Kahn's work in relation to the Modernist art historical record (the title of the talk summarizes where Kahn's work veers away from Modernist orthodoxy).

Essentially, he mounted a slide show (I'm always happy to look at visual aids) of what's hot in art these days that somehow relates to Kahn's work. He added on some ancestors of that work, and some relatives of the ancestors and cousins of the current practitioners.

Kahn, whose work is sui generis, has earned recognition, said Cohen, because of these relations.





Here's a barely edited list of the relatives:



Frida Kahlo
Henri Rousseau
Grandma Moses
a fusion of Magritte and Grandma Moses (Cohen credited the exhibit notes on the gallery wall for this one)
Joshua Johnson
Andrew Wyeth "for a sense of interiority and a willingness to paint every blade of grass"
Nicole Eisenman for "personalist fantasy and allegory" which is being embraced by the New York scene these days
Hillary Harkness for "cartoon narratives" and awkwardness
Mark Greenwold
Chuck Close
James Sienna for "imagery through repetition" and tantric qualities
Lucas Samaras
Zenobia Bailey
Jane Fine (image right above)
David Brody
Daniel Zeller (recognize his work, right, from the Altoids show?)
Damian Loeb for sci-fi sensibility, but more illustrational
Salvador Dali
Surrealists--and unconscious drawing and its impact on Pollock and deKooning
Charles LeDray






Julie Heffernan--bewildering and exhillerating (right, "Study Self-Portrait")
Bruce Pearson
Fred Tomaselli for the labor of making the work, which becomes an experience

Whew! Some of these seemed a stretch, some not.





But notably missing from this list is the one artist whom his work most strongly calls up--Philadelphia artist Sarah McEneaney (image, "Morning"). She and Kahn paint every blade of grass, paint about their lives, show architecture and nature in their works, use a non-standard perspective, and paint their private worlds with affection and non-ironic tenderness.

permanent link  libby 4:43 PM
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Anti-corporate art, part II

 
I loved Space 1026 the first time I set foot in the place. Now if you've been there you know I'm not talking about how beautiful the actual space is.

What's beautiful about Space 1026 is the energy and the spirit of community that keeps the place moving, pushing and chugging along in spite of occasional plumbing disasters and run-ins with the police at opening night parties (happily a thing of the past I believe).



Back in 1999 Ben Woodward was the first person I met when I walked up the stairs, unannounced and not really knowing what to expect. Woodward showed me around, talking non-stop about everything in his smart, funny way. He showed me the dorm-like artists' cubbyholes and the silkscreen table, and along the way, he shoveled a bunch of his "lost" animal prints (top image) into my hands saying here, have some. Back then, the "lost" posters were all over town, on bridges, some boarded up buildings and places you'd never expect to see beautiful four-color silkscreens. They were a gift to the city by someone who clearly liked to give things away. (image right is another Woodward give-away)

Over the years Space 1026 has continued to chug along, seemingly oblivious to the dictates of buying and selling and what people normally think of as commerce in art. They set up an online store a while back and while that sounds commercial, you look at the prices, which seem to max out at $30, and know that this, too, is meta-commerce and not real, full-blown, McCommerce as we know it elsewhere.

The gallery, which now seems to be in the capable hands of the distaff side of the organization, Liz Rywelski and Courtney Dailey, brings in interesting shows from out of town --mostly work imbued with the same kind of generous spirit that defines the Space.



"Trois Pipis dans la Neige" the current show, is a good example. The art show by the three French Canadian artists, Julie Doucet, Genievieve Castree and Dominique Petrin, consists of mostly small works, some of them delicate and lovely, and all of them rooted in the alternative culture of zines, teen sketch book art and the craft movement. (image left and right are Doucet's works)



Doucet's wall of saleable merchandise, including dolls, a zine, posters and miscellaneous boxes, seems almost a parody of capitalistic enterprise. Doucet's merch comes for the most part in plastic bags with nicely done graphics on the labels. Her dolls, anti-Barbies, are colorful and have stocky, everyday bodies that evoke you, me and everyone else.



Petrin's work swings between painted posters of ambi-gendered figures like "Hermaphropops" (shown left) and magazine photo-collages of things called "love" that juxtapoze chunks of pink ham with grisaille de-populated office space. It took me a while to get into them but they have staying power and complex ideas at their core and are handled (the paintings in particular) in such a kind of angry, anti-art way (rough brush work, rough, non-standard painting surfaces) that I found compelling.



Castree's gouache paintings on what looks like pink stationary are perhaps the loveliest works in the show. Castree's hand is delicate and her stylized works have a forlorn, fairyland charm. (image right and left are Castree's works)



Taking a trip to Space 1026 is itself like journeying into a land that runs parallel to ours. By all means go, and consider spending a few bucks on a work of art.

In addition to the work available in this show, the Space has a gift shop loaded with zines, postcards, t-shirts and other great merch, all affordably-priced and guaranteed not available in shopping malls anywhere on the planet.
permanent link  roberta 8:56 AM
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Sunday, September 12, 2004

I say it's art.

 
If you haven't seen the story in today's Philadelphia Inquirer about "Stonefridge," a replica of Stonehenge made with old refrigerators, check it out (signin name lrrfartblog, password artblog). Here's where you can see a photo.

In another instance of the more things change, the more they remain the same, Ant Farm, in "Cadillac Ranch," stuck junked Caddies into the desert floor back in the '60s (see image); similar theme, similar method.

You can view "Cadillac Ranch" right now in Philadelphia at the ICA, which has a survey show about their groundbreaking (heh, heh) work. It's upstairs from a not-to-be-missed installation by Pepon Osorio. More later.

permanent link  libby 1:04 PM
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Towers of light 2004

 


I got a note and some photos from my sister Cate this morning.
Cate lives in Manhattan, south of Houston St, and she witnessed the Sept. 11, 2001, disaster from the roof of her apartment building.





Cate has always been a Manhattan documentarian but with a twist.

Over the years, she's focussed her camera on the night sky catching glimpses of the moon peering between towering buildings.





Here's what she snapped last night, Sept. 11, 2004 -- the Towers of Light beaming up from where the twin towers used to be.




Cate said she was walking along the river when she took the photos. (Being a Philadelphian, I don't know if that would be the Hudson or the East River). The last two images focus down and capture reflections in the water.




Looking at the photos slowed me down this morning and made me a little sad.

I guess a little sadness is appropriate before moving on to wrestle with the day's chores so I'm sharing them with you. It's sunny in Philadelphia this morning and I'm going out on a walk. More later.
permanent link  roberta 11:54 AM
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Squint again

 

Artblog pal, Rob Matthews, whose reports from London kept us longing for ale and late night BBC programming last month, wrote to say that in addition to Mark Shetabi there's another Philadelphia artist in the Jack the Pelican show, "Squint." See my post for more on that. (image is the e-postcard for the show. If you squint you can kind of make out a Jackson Pollock painting in the background.)

Norm Paris, recent Yale MFA now teaching at his alma mater, is also in the JTP show. Paris had a memorable piece in the most recent Arcadia Works on Paper show -- a drawing that compared the size of his own arm with that of Arnold Schwarzenegger's arm.

Matthews says:

Norm hasn't shown much around here because he commutes back and forth between here and his job at Yale (where he got his MFA). He will be in, I think, the 3rd round of the Fleisher this year. [ed note: actually he will be in the 4th Fleisher Challenge, along with Daniel Heyman and Lindsay Feuer.]

I don't know what he's putting in the Pelican show, but his Fleisher stuff is supposed to be sculptures of Michael Jordan or something like that."

permanent link  roberta 9:31 AM
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Here's whazzup--the "Artboard"

 

Post from Sarah McEneaney

The billboard you noticed (post here) has on it an image by the photographer Ruth Thorne-Thomsen. The building is the home and work places of John Struble, woodworker, and Michelle Liao, Liao Collection, Asian antiques.

The billboard used to say Clinton, for Clinton Envelope, the former business in the building. Ruth's image is the first one for what John and Michelle call the artboard.

[Editor's note: Struble and Liao emailed that they plan to put more art on the Artboard, "changing the image with the seasons or when ever we feel like it." So keep looking up.]

--Sarah McEneaney's next show is at Gallery Schlesinger in New York, Nov. 4- Dec. 11.

permanent link  libby and roberta 8:40 AM
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