artblog

Friday, November 05, 2004

Sarcophagi for life

 
Antony Gormley's obsession with the body as a sculptural object--and the "uncertainty about where that body fits in the world," and where the male body in sculpture fits in a post-heroic situation was at the center of his talk at Moore College Monday to an audience of about 150 people taking a break from thinking about the next day's election (top, "Capacitor").

Gormley, an English sculptor known for his figures, was making "body cases," when I first came upon his work. He was wrapping himself in a skin of lead and then using that empty lead skin as a sculpture. Needless to say, he did come down with lead poisoning and had to suspend the practice.

He had been using lead, he said, to take the real object out of time, trasnforming the raw material of life. "A real moment of lived time is captured," he said. It's the place in the art world "where the body [that] was left out by Modernism can fit in."

He did not discuss the "body case" as a sarcophagus, a kind of all-body death mask. He did not really elucidate his choice of a deadly material like lead (image right, "Word Made Fresh"), .

If you read Roberta and my previous post on how Antony Gormley unwittingly turned us into sculptors, you already know that these were concerns on both our parts.

When Gormley switched from lead, he said, he could no longer use the kind of revealed interior that the body cases had allowed him. But he's still making sculptures that imply there's an interior, he's still making a sort of every-man figure with few distinguishing characteristics, and he's using them architecturally, to define exterior space instead of the interior space (left, "Bodies in Space").

The body and architecture or framing space are the two topics of sculpture, he said. He's got a point, but pardon my skepticism, because the definition fits his practice a little too conveniently.

Gormley's more recent work is quite architectural, some with bodies, some without. I like the way he bracketed the corners of a room with bodies (right, "Drawn 2). And I liked the way he created an expanded body that looked almost like a ball, enormous, heavy, imposing.

Random comment: Gormley expressed admiration for the work of Tom Friedman, who by using styrofoam as a material, is linking the material to the subject matter--both nothingness.

My favorite confession: Even though Gormley's work has stepped away from the body in his sculpture, he still feels compelled to make casts of his body a couple of times a week. He said of the body casts, "They are me and not me," and then he added, "The body is the touchstone for the unlocking of experience."


permanent link  libby 4:45 PM
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Thursday, November 04, 2004

NY Times slams the Carnegie International

 


Ken Johnson was in a pissy mood when he saw the show, and he gives it a good slap upside the head this morning. (Read here. lrrfartblog, artblog)

He labels the show as one full of "designer art" (graphic design, illustration, fabrication by fabricators) -- and dismisses the lot, artist by artist. First off, his point's debatable -- graphic design, illustration and fabrication are there, surely, but it's not the first thing that comes to mind when I think of what I saw. And secondly, so what? Is not the entire art world awash in art that's design and design that's art. Johnson's complaint is so 20th Century!



Just one example: As "low points" in the show, he picks Isa Genzken's mini-Apocalypses created from Partyland toys, plastic champagne cups and other bric-a-brac (shown); and Katarzyna Kozyra's "Rite of Spring" multi-channel video projection (top).

Libby and I told you about them previously. While Genzken's was not my favorite in the show, Kozyra's was. In both cases, the art contained a little humor, was thoughtful and in Kozyra's case, compelling.

Johnson, who I usually admire as a reviewer, here, reaches for the low bar and whacks away. It's a shame.
permanent link  roberta 6:33 AM
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Wednesday, November 03, 2004

Pour out your heart

 


Looking for a way to respond to today's news? Here's a good creative option:

Philadelphia Independent, the quirky arts and commentary zine that looks like a 19th Century newspaper and reads like a Woody Allen dream, is soliciting art and writing for its free, natonal "post-election solidarity issue" to be published in paper and online, Nov. 12, 2004.

The open call for submissions stipulates only that they want your responses to the election -- anything from impassioned essays; speculation on life in the next four years; election day anecdotes; eulogies... to "sequencess of stunned expletives."

There are two deadlines for submissions and both are asap:
The preferred deadline is Friday, Nov. 5, 11:59 p.m.
and the final deadline is Sat., Nov. 6, noon.

Quoting:

Your thoughts needn't be polished so long as they are immediate, honest and address the situation at hand. Our purpose is to get a collective sense of how the city and the country are feeling and reacting, and transmit that to as many as possible as soon as possible. The big questions that we want answers to are: What went wrong? What happens now? What should we take away from this? But you needn't limit yourself to those.

SUBMIT WRITING: From 20 to 1,000 words. Send them to editors@philadelphiaindependent.net.

SUBMIT ARTWORK: Send as a TIFF or JPEG file to editors@philadelphiaindependent.net.
Or stop by with a ZIP disk or CD at 1026 Arch Street, 2nd Floor, Philadelphia, PA 19107. Black and white only, please, 300 dpi or greater.

(image is a detail of a knit piece, "Influence of Ad Reinhardt," by Linda J. Metrick)



permanent link  roberta 3:56 PM
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I don't know if you remember my last post on Ida Weygandt's gorgeous photos of the horsey set in Chester County at SchmidtDean Gallery, but this work combines an eye for beauty and sharp social observations that's rare (top, "Todd and Trevor McKenna").

These are nothing like traditional fawning portraits of the wealthy as they'd like to see themselves.

Weygandt tips the scales of gravitas with claustrophobic spaces, telling multiple details of shabbiness mixed with spare-no-expense riding and hunting gear, and implied comparisons of the animal vitality of hunting dogs, horses and riders.

The victims of hunting are represented with matter-of-factness by a few mementos of kills past--trophy antlers, animal skins, a dead pheasant (image left, "Tackroom With Pheasant").

The portraits and portraits-by-proxy show the absolute confidence and certainty about their entitlement of people who haven't faced a challenge to their inheritance or their values. The photos, on the other hand, imply a suggestion of a society that is resting on its laurels and is due for a challenge. There's a whiff of mustiness and decay beneath the veneer here.

The bits of straw, the cracks in the barn floor, the gnawed old wooden planks of a barn evoke the fuggy horse odors and filth of animal tending at the same time as they show care and order. A room filled with a man's things, a bedroom overflowing with a girl's things, a boy with a horse--these are personal, filled with the telling choices made by a specific human being from a particular milieu (right, "Dr. Jenny's Barn").

I noticed in the gallery guest book the signature of one of Weygandt's subjects. In spite of the implication of the photos, even baronets must occasionally leave the estate, but it makes a better story to imagine them forever in horse country, riding the ridges, offing the foxes and collecting horse-show tickets and trophies (left, "Field at Check").

Each photo, approximately 30" x 40" archival inkjet prints, is a world of its own; pay a visit.

Also at Schmidt/Dean, Robert Straight's 17 small gouaches (8" x 10" -ish)offer fluid backdrops that seem inspired by curtains, maps, quilts, wood, and buildings on top of which skitter spirograph flowers, lyrically triangulated architectural motifs, bursts of fur or hair, zygotes, bubbles and grids.

There's a loose kind of doodle quality to these layered pieces, an almost outsider intentness that opposes the formal intentness of his previous work. Straight's control of the gouache gives him power over the foregrounds and backgrounds and provides zingy form- and color-based contrast. They work is nice to look at and think about, and I found the names reminiscent of the numbers my computer gives my photo files. There's "D275" (left) and "D298" (right above), for example. D-lovely.

Fulvio Testa's 23 watercolor landscapes (here's one on the right) and 2 oils fill the walls of the main gallery, but the four notebooks in the vitrine interested me most--for the straightforward simplicity of the paintings, the writing that gives the books a diary flavor, and of course the mystery of what is on the pages that were hidden.


permanent link  libby 1:25 PM
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Tuesday, November 02, 2004

Pollyana goes to the polls

 
I'm optimistic. You be, too.

Like Libby, I'm poll watching today in my neighborhood. I thought a little shot of optimistic kid's art might be good this morning. (image is postcard made by kids at Heritage Middle School, Livingston N.J.)



And for a dose of something a little more sour, try Tom Tomorrow. Here, the penguin is dressed for Halloween as something really scary -- a (Diebold) voting machine. Read the whole cartoon here courtesy of somebody's personal list of comics and humor at MIT.
permanent link  roberta 6:32 AM
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Monday, November 01, 2004

Map to the election

 
Tomorrow is a day without art for me. I'm going to be a good citizen and try to help Kerry and the Democratic slate--if only I could figure out how to get a hold of my poll-watcher's certificate (image, Jasper Johns' "Map," 1978, from Museum of Modern Art poster).

I thought I should point out that this image was made long before the whole red-state blue-state riff about a divided country. Every time I look at that bipolar map, I keep thinking that maybe what we all need is a little lithium, or a little helium, or better yet, a new president.

Back Wednesday.
permanent link  libby 4:32 PM
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More on us

 

While we were talking to Brian Wallace at the Galleries at Moore about the Antony Gormley lecture tonight (see previous post), he asked why he couldn't see on our Website the piece Gormley inspired.

Not to disappoint a clamoring public of one, here it is, our second work of art ever (image, "Obelisk," 1991, 100 " x 48" x 36" for central element, plaster, net and metal).
permanent link  libby and roberta 11:25 AM
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Talk worth noting

 
British sculptor Antony Gormley, the man who unwittingly launched the art career of Roberta Fallon and Libby Rosof, will deliver a slide lecture at Moore College today at 6 p.m. in the auditorium. He is best known for his monumental sculpture, “Angel of the North,” which he did for the city of Gateshead, England (image, Gormley's "Field for the Art Gallery of New South Wales," 1989, terracotta, 23 X 1140 X 1050 cm, similar to one of the pieces we saw in New York).

Back in 20th century, we saw an installation of his in a glitzy New York gallery. The exhibition revolted us in its militarism, shallowness, death-orientation and macho posturing. We questioned the use of lead as a material for some of the pieces, especially human forms made of lead. We also questioned the war-games aspect of the work. It seemed to celebrate war and killing and follow-the-leader straight into death, rather than to question it.

We were especially disturbed by the death imagery because we were young moms at the time. We knew we could do better. So we went straight home and started casting and building this huge, room-size piece. Maybe we didn't do better and maybe we're a little more ready to revisit his work.
permanent link  libby and roberta 10:03 AM
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I'll second that

 
Let me add my voice here to what Libby said about Zoe Strauss. Here is a young artist of talent with an amazing, mature eye who gets pictures of shocking intimacy from people on society's fringes. Her photographs of America's underbelly (both human and built) are epic in scope and quietly riveting.

Strauss is a generous artist without gallery affiliation. Sharing her art, which she does like a kind of out of era hippie -- she practically gives it away at $5 a print -- seems a labor of love.

With her old fashioned magic lantern show the other night (which was another giveaway), she turned her art into a shared community experience which is kind of where it belongs. When the audience clapped and hooted at the end of each of the six mini slide shows, we were clapping for the sweet, young artist, for her great images and for the theatrical tour de force she staged that brought us together. How many times can you clap for art? It was great.

Libby called the work democratic and indeed it is.
permanent link  roberta 6:47 AM
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Sunday, October 31, 2004

Poet of visual static

 
Just like the WPA photographers taking pictures of Dust Bowl lives, Zoe Strauss takes pictures of the stuff from which we avert our eyes in Philadelphia and its environs--the crack pipers, the shabby commercial and personal signage, the detritus of lives badly lived, the people bearing the scratchmarks of life on their sleeves.

Strauss brought her images to a new venue and a new format yesterday (top image, at far left that's Strauss working the Power Point presentation). She sent out invitations to attend a couple of showings of six brief slide shows at a former settlement house on Front Street near Washington. In years past, she had set up her computer-print-out photos on the columns holding up I-95 around 15 blocks further south (see post on her previous show).

What they are adds up to a documentary of what we avert our eyes to, what we see but filter out.

Telling the forest from the trees

Which reminds of Oliver Sacks's point (he spoke at Arcadia this week; I didn't hear him but I've read much of his popular writing) about sight and how the brain sorts out what you see. People who gain sight after a lifetime of blindness find the new experience daunting--their brains were unprepared for all the sensory input from their eyes, and can't tell the forest from the trees. So there's a sense in which Strauss is photographing the individual trees and the individual leaves that our brains have learned to filter out so we can focus on making sense of the big picture and organize what we see.

At the picture show

At Strauss's picture show, there were Roberta and I and an assemblage of other people, some of whom we know--like photographer Ditta Baron Hoeber and her husband Frank, installation artist Kevin Reay, photographer Eileen Neff, artist Randall Sellers, curator Richard Torchia--and many (maybe 60 or so) whom we didn't know, sitting on little folding chairs, while mistress of ceremonies Strauss, with a humorous take on a school marm, told people to hush up or else. In between she danced to the music while operating Power Point like a dj. At the end she raised her hands in victory (miserable blurry image right) as we all madly applauded.

The music ranged from Tom Petty's "American Girl" to Goodie Mob's "Black Ice" to Billie Holiday's "You're My Thrill," and the images with the music were just right. The photos (color computer print-outs) sell for $5. each, and even if you missed the show, you can order from Strauss' Web site.

Strauss served up free refreshments, too, that are worth mentioning--including home-made baked goods with her logo "PAP" dusted on with powdered sugar and Canfield's diet chocolate-cherry soda. Now that's class. (No one's ever going to believe a word I say from here on out because of that endorsement, but as I tried to explain to a scornful Roberta, I often get chocolate and cherry water ice together in a cup at John's).

Roberta said she felt like we were at a drive-in movie. Good call.

The medium is the message

I couldn't help but think of the contrast between Strauss' democratic approach to art-making and display and the new Terry Adkins show up at the swank new gallery at 6th and Bainbridge. This comparison is not a judgment but praise for both, because I love both bodies of work, and the medium is the message in both cases (which is what modern art is all about anyway).


permanent link  libby 9:39 AM
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