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Saturday, November 27, 2004

Old City and artblog in USA Today

 
We at artblog are accustomed to receiving random emails asking for help contacting artists or locating art by artists we've written about (thank you Google, Yahoo and other search engines: We love you). We try to help out and see that as part of our mission.

But last month when we were in Pittsburgh covering the Carnegie International, we got something new, a query from a journalist at USA Today looking for advice on Philadelphia's Old City. Gene Sloan, USA Today writer was working on an arts round-up feature for his paper's travel section. He was featuring Old City as well as arts districts in Kansas City, MO and Portland, OR. By the way, Sloan told us he was an artblog reader, bless his soul. We helped him out and asked if he could run a link to us. The story's up today. Read here. We're thrilled to see the great Philadelphia art scene get the credit it deserves and we're thrilled with our link in the nationally-circulated paper. (image is Kathy Butterly clay work seen in 2002 at the Clay Studio in Old City. Butterly is currently knocking their socks off in Pittsburgh at the Carnegie International.)
permanent link  roberta 4:29 PM
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Friday, November 26, 2004

Friday quick reads

 
British sculptor Antony Gormley, who gave a slide lecture in Philadelphia recently (read Libby's post), has a new old work debuting at Tate Modern, according to this morning's Guardian. Gormley's bed, made in 1980 out of 8,000 pieces of white bread (Mothers Pride) each piece chewed out so that the total vacuum approximated the artist's body mass, is a work dear to Tate Director Nicholas Setota who, as a young curator, put it in a show. The work (the bread was dipped into hot wax to preserve it from molding), takes the outline of the artist's body and looks like that other kind of mold. It reminded me of some Ana Mendieta body-impression works which I thought was an apt comparison actually. (image is Gormley standing in front of "Bed")



According to the article, "Bed" was the model for Gormley's 1998 public sculpture "Angel of the North" a 150-ton iron and steel figure with a wingspan longer than that of a 747 jumbo jet. (shown) "Angel," from 1998, is sited next to the A1 motorway in Gateshead, Newcastle upon Tyne.

And on this side of the big water, the NY Times has a great slide show and story about New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast who has her debut gallery solo in Chelsea's Julie Saul gallery opening Dec. 9. Read here. (Username lrrfartblog, password artblog)



Chast will show watercolor drawings of her cartoons from the last several years and some Ukranian eggs she's been working on. (image) The article's a great backgrounder and the slideshow has shots of the artist at work. Most folks (me included) love Chast's cartoons which are funny and right on target about families and modern life. For years, I kept her "Bad Mom" trading cards cartoon on my refrigerator. Their take on the children/mother relationship was perfect. (Mom can do no right.)

And finally, Holland Cotter kisses the PMA's new Pontormo exhibit in a lengthy review that leads off with how the artist was considered a "nut job" in his day. That's today's early morning snort.

permanent link  roberta 7:54 AM
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Thursday, November 25, 2004

Clarification: A big fat Philly flub

 
Post from Sid Sachs

[Sachs is responding to a comment in one of the MoMA reopening posts. -- the editors]

The Ellsworth Kelly "Sculpture for a Large Wall" (sic.) was not RESCUED from the Transportation Building in Philadelphia since the building is still there and in better shape than ever. It was sold by Ronald Rubin for about $100,000 and no one raised an eyebrow and then Matthew Marks turned around and sold it to the Lauder's for about $1,000,000.

"Sculpture for Philadelphia" was commissioned by Vincent Kling. It was Kelly's first sculpture, first commission and one of the first uses of anodized aluminum in fine art in America. The fact that no one complained when this unique masterpiece left Philadelphia while they raised $200,000 to retain Isiah Zagar's kitschery makes Sid a very sad man. And the quality of the work and its importance is attested to by the fact that MOMA used it every chance it could in ads and bus stop kiosks. I guess that's all you can expect in a city that goes gaga over murals and THINKS it is number one in public art. IS ANYONE THERE?

--Sid Sachs is director of the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery at the University of the Arts. He is one of our contributors.

permanent link  libby 8:43 AM
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Heartbeats on Broad Street

 
Post from Sid Sachs

[Sid is responding to a post about come upcoming work at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia.--the editors]


Well the fact that the ICA will have Richard Pettibone sets my heart a ticking and skipping a beat. Is this the show from the Tang? The guy is a quiet genius who has never gotten his due--a member of Ferus gallery in the early 1960s who with Sturtevant (and the unacknowledged Dorothy Grebenak) worked in or around a praxis that in the early 1980s would be called appropriation (left, Pettibone's "Dada," after Warhol).

These paintings are the same size as reproductions of art and are in the same mediums that the originals were made (i.e. if he painted a Warhol Marilyn it was silkscreened on canvas c. 1.5 x 3 inches - and the canvases have stretchers and little tacks!!) A true original and eccentric--Charles LeDray's grandfather. Who else works with Pound, Shaker furniture, Brancusi and Ingres? If the show is really good there might be racing cars (right, "Stella Grand Cairo" by Pettibone).

Only in California.

--Sid Sachs is director of the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery at the University of the Arts. He is one of our contributors.

permanent link  libby 8:30 AM
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A bit of holiday cheer

 

[On a holiday when Americans drive miles and miles to share their love and usually too much food with family and friends, I thought I'd run some travel pictures and a couple of cheery shaggy dog stories sent me by my friend Kitty.



The stories are groaners that involve word play, and the two running here were my favorites out of the ten I read. They both involve familiar American songs. Forgive me if this is redundant with your email inbox. Safe travels and happy day, dears!]

That old chestnut, hum along if you know it

A group of chess enthusiasts checked into a hotel, and met in the lobby where they were discussing their recent victories in chess tournaments.

The hotel manager came out of the office after an hour, and asked them to disperse. He couldn't stand chess nuts boasting in an open foyer.



Also a sing-along...Oh, Super

Mahatma Gandhi, as you know, walked barefoot his whole life, which created an impressive set of calluses on his feet. He also ate very little, which made him frail, and with his odd diet, he suffered from very bad breath. This made him -- a
super-callused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis.

(travel images are photos taken by my sister, Cate Fallon. Skyline is Manhattan. I found the chestnut nutrition facts (who knew?) at Red Fern Farm's website. They're a tree nursery and organic farm out there in Iowa.)
permanent link  roberta 8:21 AM
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Wednesday, November 24, 2004

Our friend the muralist

 
Our friend Ann Northrup has just completed her third mural in Philadelphia working with the senior citizens at Center in the Park, as well as students from Germantown and Lincoln high schools (image, the mural "Growing up in Germantown").
When Roberta and I stopped by while this was a work in progress, people were madly painting by number on huge sheets of parachute cloth that eventually got mounted on the wall. No way could I relate what I saw them painting to what might appear on the side of the church.

But the end result was spectacular, taking on the problem of the architecture's peaked roof and buttresses with grace and wit, and using them as pattern and subject matter. The mural is at 110 West Rittenhouse Street off of Germantown Avenue. Northrup got assistance from her daughter, artist Diana Gruberg, in making this piece, and one of the volunteer painters was Roberta's daughter Stella.

There are a whole bunch of new murals up, suddenly, but I haven't made the rounds yet. Some Tuesday, when every gallery in sight is closed, maybe I'll take a tour.
permanent link  libby 2:09 PM
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Tuesday, November 23, 2004

From the fiction editor

 
Guilty as charged. In a previous post I somehow got the end date wrong for the "Spector Great (re) Masters" show. The show's up through Dec. 10 not Dec. 3 as stated in the post.
permanent link  roberta 5:03 PM
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Cafe art

 
Art that hangs on the walls in cafes and restaurants usually seems mismatched to the venue. Not so Matt Bollinger's ink and graphite drawings at the Green Line Cafe in University City.

Previously, the cafe had had work from other serious artists--some paintings and some photos. The paintings, although they were lovely pieces of work, were the wrong scale and the wrong affect for the tiny cafe. The photos just melted into the walls, failing to catch enough casual attention, perhaps because photos are so much a part of our everyday world.

But Bollinger's drawings seem to have just the right mix of size, of made-by-hand presence, of graphic qualities, and even of subject matter. The subjects include a rakishly angled view of boy who apparently fell asleep while playing outside (top "Under the Shrubs, Beside the Porch"), a group of men-in-suits exerting peer pressure (left, "Be A Good Boy Charlie"--sorry for the miserable picture quality), and a conventional study of the tight space in a neighborhood rowhouse backyard beneath a lit-up, boundless sky.

I also suspect that one of the reasons for this show's success is the mesh of the affect of the work--a little old-fashioned and lovely and slightly off center, just like the cafe.

So although I'm not given to reporting on art in restaurants and such, I felt the desire to let you know about this little show.

Green Line, by the way, is owned in part by one of our contributors, Doug Witmer, who informed me this morning that my last post on who's who at Spector Gallery reminded him of the "exhibitionists" page at the back of Art Matters. Ouch. Say it isn't so, Doug.
permanent link  libby 2:21 PM
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Upcoming

 
I just got some mail that mentioned the ICA will be showing work by appropriation artist Richard Pettibone starting April 30, along with a group show, "Springtide," that will include work from Louise Bourgeois, Troy Brauntuch, Patty Chang, Berline De Bruyckere, and Erick Swenson. It's the second show that sets my heart ticking (image from Patty Chang video, "Contortionist").


permanent link  libby 2:06 PM
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Monday, November 22, 2004

Who's who in "Great"

 


When we stopped by Spector Gallery for its opening of "Great (re)Masters" Friday the place was filled with the artists and their buddies (see Roberta's post on the show).



Two Sarahs

We saw Sarah McEneaney (top) standing in front of gallery owner Shelley Spector's own NFS tribute to the late Rebecca Westcott. The work was based on "Coral #1 and 2." McEneaney was inspired by Vincent Van Gogh's "Rain" to paint her own garden in a downpour.

We also saw Sarah Roche (right), who contributed a full-size copy of Gustave Corbet's "The Wave," 18" x 22". She also contributed a compressed version, 5" x 7". I wonder if this is a commentary on the shrinking of artwork to fit the computer screen (actually, I doubt it, but I did think the thought and had to share it). Roche is standing next to Rob Matthews' black-and-white drawing of Edward Hopper's oil-on-canvas "Office at Night," thereby upping the noir quotient of a painting that was born noir.

Nearby

Matthews was also once part of the Roche picture, but he moved his head, became a blur, and is now cropped out. In this picture (left) I didn't crop out the back of his head on the left. And next to him was Matt Fisher (standing on right), shown here talking to a man taking notes and wearing a nametag that said "Jonathan" (standing in center). Fisher's cheery take on the so-so-serious Peter Doig's "Figure in a Mountain Landscape III" made me laugh and check the price list.

Others spotted in the back room with the Sarahs, Rob and Tracy Matthews and Fisher were David Guinn , who contributed a sort of cubist cardboard relief based on a suit of armor, and his wife Marina Borker and Roche's husband Mark Shetabi, and Randall Sellers, whose take on Manet's "Luncheon on the Grass" mixes up participants and non-participants in a whacky, half-nude picnic.

Making an exit

Near the front door we paused to chat with Frank and Helen Hyder (Frank above right, Helen left), who probably came to cheer on their friend Paul Santoleri, who transformed Rubens' "Prometheus Bound" with interlocking and twisting patterns.



It was then we noticed Matt Pruden, who I had just met the week before. And speaking of meeting people just the week before, directly outside the door was Max Lawrence and his girlfriend. I forgot her name. Sorry. But I remember that his dog, who was there on a leash, is named Tula. She looked just like her portrait over at Vox Populi. Lawrence's piece was Alan Iverson based on Eduard Charlemont's "The Moorish Chief."

Also as we exited, there was Ben Woodward about to enter. Woodward's take on Marcel Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase" reveals the monster under our clothes.

I'm sorry I didn't have pictures of everyone else just so I could say something more about each piece.

This show has escaped a double-curse--1)erratic group-show confusion and 2)low-energy high-concept art where someone assigns a task to a group of artists. Put the two together and you're almost always guaranteed something not too interesting. But this show is darned interesting, energetic and fun. It closes quickly so don't dilly-dally.
permanent link  libby 6:00 PM
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No turkeys here

 
I ran around last week and saw bunches of things. While I'm reviewing much of it for PW (see Dec. 1 paper) I'll give you a little preview here.

Lapelle in Pawprint
First off, I stopped in to see artblog pal and contributor, Rodger Lapelle whose Lapelle Gallery is one of the longest running venues in the city. Lapelle, (right, in front of a painting by Romi Sloboda) is also an artist whose work is shown around town.

His gallery consistently exhibits work I can get excited about. Among the figurative painters in his stable is the edgy, my family as sci-fi monsters painter, Roland Becerra, whom we've told you much about here (and I've written reams about in PW).

Lapelle is a good businessman who adapts to the times and that no doubt is key to his success as a gallery owner. He is one of the first gallery owners I know of in Philadelphia to use e-Bay to sell art. He's internet savvy and he's not even of the internet savvy generation.

He's also a major raconteur and when I started writing for PW in 1999 I began having lengthy conversations about the Philadelphia art scene with him every time I swung by the gallery. His enthusiasm coupled with concern is infectious.

Anyway, one bit of news from Lapelle is that he's been profiled on PAW Print, a Philadelphia writers magazine that's online and has a periodic print presence. Check out the article by Mike DelVecchia. The piece goes on and on, and, just like its subject, it's full of juicy tidbits about the history of art -- as per Rodger -- in Philadelphia.


Hiebert at Gallery Joe


Christine Hiebert's drawing exhibit at Gallery Joe is, I don't want to say, for the initiated, but it's work that's doggedly abstract and almost anti-drawing. And as such, it's difficult for casual viewers. I happen to like it alot. (image is a new tape mural that runs up, down and delicately over the surfaces of the entry wall.)


Here's an example of a response from what I assume was a casual viewer: Random entry in the guestbook -- "garbage." (image is a freehand drawing on view in the vault) That insensitivity to the hyper-sensitive work is probably typical of an art audience that mostly wants easily digestible wall baubles.




This is work most worthy. It's intellectually and visually challenging. But when I was thinking about it last night I came up with this comparison. Hiebert's drawings are like a blog and Hiebert is like a blog-drawer. (image is three tape drawings from the vault installation)

The work represents the outpourings of a fluid mind switching gears and distilling thoughts into edited chunks. Here the chunks are lines, not words, but they come from the same I gotta tell you a story impulse.

Warren Muller and Inliquid at the Bride



I finally figured out what's wrong with those shows at the Painted Bride cafe. The space sucks -- it's like a basement rec room and just about any art gets wounded by the brut aesthetic. This all became clear when I noticed Warren Muller's elegant found object chandelier hanging in the space. (image left) The chandelier was such a brilliant addition it elevated the ambiance to a more normal level. It's still a hard space but thank goodness for the chandelier. Light, the space needs more light. They could also get rid of that red paint in the rafters. Talk about lowering the ceiling.



Anyway, right now, collborators Matthew Curtius and Gina Triplett have painted the room with curlicue decorative murals on which they've placed their many curlicue decorative paintings. The work, which comes from the solid stream of curlicue decorative art that's a gusher these days, is pretty good and definitely well done. ( image) Check it out soon (and see inliquid for more info) while Muller's chandelier (on loan from the PB lobby which is getting a roof job) is still shedding light on the space and picking up the pace.

Spector's miracles



"The Great (re) Masters" is up so short a time (to Dec. 10) at Spector that I have to rush you these images so you'll shoot out of Old City Coffee and go look. The show is a miracle of happy updates. There are many lovely and funny and odd works riffing on the great warhorses of the canon (Leonardo, Michelangelo, Rubens).

It's interesting to see who selected what to remake. Thom's Lessner's "Peaceable Kingdom" seemed a stretch for the rock star-loving artist, until I noticed that he'd transformed William Penn and the Quakers into a rock band in the background. (image is detail)



Late entrant to the show, Kate Moran's piece based on the Piero della Francesca "Duke of Urbino" is a gem -- literally. The hand-made object, with its gold-leaf-adorned frame, is so tiny (approx. 1" by 1") it's a jewel. (image)

Libby told you about Max Lawrence's show at Vox Pop and I'll weigh in Wednesday in PW. Lawrence's hot out of the studio piece, (all the work in this show was made yesterday), The Moorish Chief, is a remarkable remake of the great Charlemont picture in the PMA.



It is a gorgeous update, complete with elegant Eastern patterning and hair defined down to each strand in quiet, precise purple and white lines. (image) Lawrence is an up and coming portraitist and this piece, with its sad and somber face and Philadelphia references, is so good I can't believe it wasn't snatched up at the opening. Some things were -- like Moran's Urbino,Lessner's Kingdom, Pinky Pierce's remake of a Paul Klee that's better than the original.

In fact much of the work here is better than the originals. Blasphemy? Go see for yourself.
permanent link  roberta 8:34 AM
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Sunday, November 21, 2004

Welcome to earth

 
Post by Francisco Cadavid

Rah Crawford's innovative works at Qbix contain a swirl of designs riddled across the faces and other body parts of individuals, which in turn have hidden words and symbols which are key to deciphering the meaning of the paintings.

Crawford deals with very human issues, ranging from sin, to race, to narcissism, capturing what makes us truly human. As a result, the title of the exhibition, "Welcome to Earth; Act 01: Human," is not surprising.

Crawford's vivid use of color accents his inventive method of
hiding the meaning of the work in the relationship between the text and the
image.

--Francisco Cadavid is a student in Colette Copeland's art writing class at the University of Pennsylvania


permanent link  libby 9:39 PM
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Running on empty

 
I finally made it over to Janet Biggs' video installations at Moore College, but it served as a reminder that I'd been running around in circles and not getting too far.

Take that poor horse -- duplicated on two enormous screens -- running on a treadmill. So much effort and no scenery as a reward. It rather reminds me of "The Mile," a Burt Barr video I saw recently in Chelsea, with a runner who runs and runs and runs in scenery that is undifferentiated (see post here).

And behind the horse on a third screen, a group of water joggers go through their paces. The view is from below the water's surface, and all you see are legs working in place. I have to get in here a note of appreciation for legs that belong to real, ordinary human beings. These are no Flo-Jo or Lance Armstrong legs or even Linda Evangelista legs. The piece is called "Ativan," which is an anti-anxiety drug. I don't know why.

That same ordinariness of people in underwater circumstances is part of the fascination of "Apraxia," a small, single-channel video of synchronized swimmers, in slow motion and upside down to boot. All I could think as I watched was, when are they ever going up (or rather down) for a breath of air? These women are exhibiting tremendous physical control to stay in one place under water. And they, too, are neither idealized or youthful. (Apraxia is a medical term indicating the inability to perform synchronized movements; I don't know why this is the title of the video).

The slow-motion pieces bring to mind Muybridge motion studies.

A young girl circles in slow motion on ice skates in "Bright Shiny Objects." She seems to have a weak leg and a strong leg, but her body language is cheerful and relaxed. She too goes nowhere as does another horse, this one intercut with the girl, and running in circles. The camera also shows a figure walking across a frozen river as a voice repeats the first letters of the alphabet. The video ends at a hole through the ice--a nice segue to the underwater swimmers. I'm not sure what the bright shiny objects are. Maybe it's the young girl, untested in life and adored even as she almost stumbles. Maybe it's the windows in the wall behind her.

So far, with all of these pieces, I'm getting a sense of how we keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again, not getting anywhere, or how we work and work and don't get anywhere.

Bodies are always a delight, and the slow motion is just slow enough to allow for digesting and analyzing the movements.

That same technique applies in "Tegretol," which by the way is the name of another nervous-system drug. I don't know why the video has this name. Two large screens, sometimes synchronized with eachother and with the sound, sometimes not, show young men wrestling--not always the same pairs, but always great to look at. The slow motion of the holds and balance between the two bodies engaging for dominance is full of the pleasures of dance and athletics. Ultimately, though, nothing seems to change. It's just the male rams locking horns on the lovely blue mats in the lovely blue, shiny unitards.

For work that is physically big and requires a viewer to stand and pay attention for quite a while, the messages seem underwhelming--single gestures that don't travel, rather like the horse on the treadmill.

Biggs, an alumna of Moore College, has had a number of solo exhibitions, including at RISD and the Kohler Arts Center, and has received a number of awards or grants, including from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Wexner Center Media Arts Program, and Panasonic Corporation.



permanent link  libby 10:30 AM
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Paul's last day and Ben's ongoing

 
Joy Feasley wrote to remind us that today is the last day to see her partner, Paul Swenbeck's witchy, Night on Bald Mountain
installation, "Specter of the Brocken" at PAFA's Morris Gallery. Next up in the Morris, opening Dec. 11, is an exhibit of work by Quentin Morris, known for his black-themed works.

What would Ben do?


That's not the exact question posed by the nice Kip Deeds-organized Ben Franklin theme exhibit at the Lawrenceville School in Lawrenceville, NJ, but the group show has local and non-local artists ruminating on all things Franklin, and the works are serious and some of them, seriously funny.

The show has an online presence and while it's a little too much reading and the images are a little small, there are a few treats. I laughed at first at Elijah Gowin's invention -- a self-baptism machine -- (shown) which the artist conjures as a possible Franklin item had the great inventor been born in the south. It's an interesting idea to regionalize the great inventor and speculate on the way environmental, cultural and other things drove his mind.

When I checked out Gowin's website, I found a wonderful spread of photographs by the artist of works by self-taught Birmingham artist Lonnie Hawley. These are documentary photos of Hawley's fabulous clutter art (some built up over 20 years) before they were bulldozed for an airport expansion. Gowin also had another body of work represented on the website that had a poetic, Victorian affect. I highly recommend a visit.

The Lawrenceville exhibit runs through December 14th with a break over Thanksgiving.

permanent link  roberta 10:28 AM
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A correction for the record

 
[Note: Last summer I wrote about a show at Vox Populi featuring the Boston collective, Oni. Jennifer Schmidt, who was in the show, wrote us yesterday to correct a mis-attribution. Sorry Jennifer.--Roberta]

Post from Jennifer Schmidt

hi libby and roberta,

i just stumbled upon a review that you wrote of the oni gallery (boston, ma) exhibition "a different world" at vox populi last summer. [See post] thank you for taking the time and insight to write about the show. from what i read, it seems that the show was not labeled or organized very well to convey which artists made each piece and what the general premise of the oni gallery/curatorial role was.

my name was mentioned in the review, but was mis-linked with some collage pieces that were not my own. while i appreciate the mentioning of my name, i thought it would be good to contact you and let you know of the misprint.

i was unable to attend the exhibition and have yet to see images of the installation, or even to retrive my work...so i appreciated your notes.

all the best, jennifer schmidt

(image is sound sculpture by David Webber and Timothy Bailey)from that exhibit.
permanent link  roberta 8:07 AM
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