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Saturday, January 08, 2005

Triple crown of bee hives

 
What does an installation about beehives and archives have to do with tsunami? I'll let you know at the end, but that's just one of the many reasons to see that installation by my favorite philosopher/curator/artist Aaron Levy, in the Annenberg Rare Book & Manuscript Library at the University of Pennsylvania (34th and Walnut, 6th floor) until March 7.

The installation, "The Revolt of the Bees, Wherein the Future of the Paper-Hive is Declared," is part philosophical harangue--a series of 11 propositions or "lessons," part art, part archive and 100 percent metaphor. Even though the piece is academic and loaded with more words than honey, I found it worth all the time it required me to spend, looking, reading, imagining, exploring its byways, and thinking. In short, it fits Levy's definition of a hive.

Archive art has become more and more of a presence, and if you want to compare one archival installation to another, you might want to make a trip to the David Bunn/Madena Asbell installation over at Temple University's gallery in Old City (see Roberta's post). Bunn's archive is more about the past, however. Levy's archive is about the future and survival.

"Revolt of the Hive," of the two, resonates in more directions--and not just temporal directions.

Here's what it has to offer:

A swell video installation showing the archives of Stephen Girard, in its complete disarray in Founder's Hall at Girard College. It's a metaphor for archival failure--saving without applying the intelligence of a curator or arhivist. The film is beautiful, the lighting passing over the mess quite poetic (left, part of the video installation, in which tiny high-tech monitors can be viewed through old-fashioned giant lenses) .

The Stephen Girard angle is not the only piece of Philadelphiana included. Two commonplace books from Francis Daniel Pastorius (1651-1719), the namesake for Pastorius Park on Germantown Avenue teach the first lesson: "The hive is a living organism." The hive, which is a metaphor for the archive, is what Pastorius' books are--compilations of commonplace knowledge and miscellany that perpetually changes as information and observations are added to them, day-book fashion (top image in post, Pastorius' "The Bee-Hive" commonplace book).

A (somewhat clunky) reliquary with beekeeping references in its shape and details holds crushed pages of a 17th century edition of the King James Bible (image, right, with Bible in box in front of vitrine showing shaman-artist Joseph Beuys pouring honey). Surprise. The Bible is in disarray, and therefore its preservation is pointless. (A sign next to the reliquary attests that the Bible did not come from Penn's Rare Books library (I could hear audible sighs of relief) and that it was destroyed by water before Levy got his hands on it. Now you know for sure that Levy is a nice guy who would never destroy a historic King James Bible.

Library display vitrines contain professional beautiful blow-ups of prints--mostly from some of the books in the exhibit. The vitrines also display quotes from old books about bee keeping and bee hives and their relevance to society and archiving, the lesson each quote represents, and the old books themselves. (Also included is a philospher/fantasist architect's plan for the "Living Body Musemeum," never realized, by Arakawa + Gins).

The embodiment of this piece with its archival references in a real archive was perfect.

What I loved about this piece, knowing that Levy is a curator and an artist and a philosopher (who amongst you can walk by Slought Foundation and not stop in for a chat with him?) is that he is putting forth an argument that the artist and the curator and thinker are the keepers and selectors and therefore the implementers of societal wisdom. In other words, Levy posits that thanks to him and guys like him, we will survive as a culture (left, one of the vitrines). He's the king of the bee hive archivists and it's a triple crown he sports.

The culture's survival is tantamount to our own survival--and of course, by leaving his personal mark on the archive, the culture's survival is tantamount to Levy's survival. Our obsessive fear of death is misplaced.

The magic here is what a personal expression this is from Levy. (My personal philosophy is that all decent artists make pieces about themselves and all decent curators create shows that reflect themselves, and this show is pure Levy).

I don't think everyone will love this piece. It's like almost everything at Slought, cocooned in layers of intellectualization and philosophical positioning. But I did love it. If you're looking for a juicy painting, however, fuggedaboutit.

Here's where tsunami comes in. Did you read about the tribe that survived tsunami last week because of superior archiving? The tribe's oral history and learning stated that when the waters in the ocean recede dramatically, run like hell to higher ground. They did. They survived. A honey of an archive.

The more "modern" people did not save that critical bit of information in their archive, or if they did, it's not well archived, lost amidst all the other info. Many died as a result.

In the time of the computer, the ultimate archive of retrievable as well as disordered information, this piece seems so appropriate. I took its thoughts home with me, and am thinking of lots of ways and places begging for hive-thinking (my desktop disarray? my family's ideal little subsociety/hive). Buzzzz.

permanent link  libby 11:20 AM
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Words, words, words

 
Here's a shout out to text artists, i.e., those whose obsessions run to the verbal, wordy, bibio and lexi. Art in City Hall wants you for its upcoming juried exhibit "Art Full Text" running Mar 16-June 24.

The information says all media eligible (but text must dominate) and the size, due to the restrictions of those glass exhibition cases, can't exceed 86" x 84" x 24."

Deadline is: Postmarked by January 28, 2005 For more information call 215-683-2078 or
email: artincityhall@phila.gov.

(image is Mark Stafford's Window on Broad installation -- up now -- a typewriter and text piece featuring the phrase, "the quick brown fox jumped over the fence," almost enough times to compete with "The Shining's" "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.")
permanent link  roberta 10:18 AM
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Friday, January 07, 2005

Lewis, Clark, Levy and Perelman

 
I've complained about it before, the so-called gallery in the PMA's high-volume utility corridor on the ground floor and I do mean the Julien Levy Gallery. But here's some good news.
Soon, although not tomorrow, the gallery will be given its own dedicated space -- in the new Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building the PMA is rehabbing across the Parkway at 25th St. (PMA's Frank Luzzi tells me that'll be in a year ... or two.).



Meanwhile, there's a very nice exhibit of photographs by Greg MacGregor in the Levy ramp that represents modern-day re-tracing of the steps of the explorers Lewis and Clark. (As everyone in Philadelphia probably knows-- because there's tons of related programming in town at the moment -- it's the 200th anniversary of the expedition which launched from here in 1804 on a mission to find a navigable water route to the West Coast.) (image is a man holding a sturgeon at Bonneville Dam, Oregon.)



The show, organized by Smith Kramer Fine Art Services and curated by PMA's Photography Curator Kate Ware, is accompanied by a book of MacGregor's photographer and excerpts from the L&C journals (housed by the way in the American Philosophical Society archives in Old City). The photographer, who traversed the trail twice and had 2,000 negatives to work from, focussed on the infrastructure that exists now in places once pristine and untouched. In works that praise the land and question the building, he has delivered a thoughtful essay about conquering and living with your actions. (image left is an example of a river seen by L&C now almost completely drowned in a sea of concrete, steel and brick.)

The people shots stand out for their empathy. The picture of the kids on the dirt road, Sioux Indians descended from the tribe of Sitting Bull, is loaded with thoughts about our country's expansion westward and its impact on the Native Americans. (top image is Hunkpapa Sioux boys, Fort Yates, N.D.)



While I saw the large exhibit, which in addition to the photographs includes excerpts from the L&C journals and some maps tracing the explorers' route, the hall was full of people looking at the works. I didn't clock it but I'd guess the viewers were spending around 15 minutes on average absorbing the whole. This may be more time than an average viewer takes with a show at the museum and I have to think it was because the combination of the strong photographs and the subject -- exploration, America, and history -- made looking at the work less a cerebral exercise than a kind of beautiful History Channel outcropping, comfortable as flannel and slippers. (image is the Julien Levy Gallery ramp)



When I left the museum, I noticed the scale model of the Perelman Building sitting in a vitrine in the west entrance lobby. (shown) Whether it's been there for years (they've been talking about this project since 2002) I couldn't say. But this pic makes it look kind of grand. A nice place to house the Prints, Drawings and Photography Department, the Textile and Costume collection, the Libraries, Archives, Education Resource Center....and the Julien Levy gallery.
permanent link  roberta 8:43 AM
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Canaletto-Spotting and other LA activities

 
Post by James Rosenthal

Though I wasn't in LA on art business over X-mas break, I certainly had the opportunity to catch some of the main attractions, particularly the Getty Museum and the Huntington Library, neither of which I'd visited before. After a visit to Venice beach where you can still buy a Jim Morrison t-shirt and a hash pipe, and Graumans Chinese Threatre which was surrounded by superheros and movie star look-alikes, I was ready for a little classical painting.

Initial impressions are usually correct and the Getty, although a fabulous destination on a bluff, seemed to be geared for a very generic appreciation of the collection. I took the nearly sophomoric interpretative blurbs accompanying the art as an indicator. As if to save the day, I left with a cool 3D post card of Eadweard Muybridge photos. The image moves when you angle it just like a flip book. Upon leaving, the only painting sticking in my mind was a magnificent Lucas Cranach. (shown below is Cranach's "A Faun and His Family with a Slain Lion" (1526)a new acquisition at the Getty Museum)



On the other hand, the Huntington which had some of the most beautiful gardens I had ever seen, used a rather more understated delivery of their American and European collections showing them along side decorative arts which did nothing but improve the experience. While everyone else was checking out the Blue Boy, I found a small Gainsborough painting book-ended between two Hogarths (they are called conversation pieces because of the size) in the upstairs gallery. “Lady with a Spaniel” is a real gem. I also discovered a neat Stubbs in the “sports” rooms. Though the place was jammed with very nice portraiture by Reynolds, Romney and Gainsborough, it was the incidental things like the odd Constable that took it out of the ordinary. And I was also pleased to note I can still spot a Canaletto at twenty yards. (top image is Canaletto's "Piazza San Marco - Looking Southeast" (1735 - 1740) in the collection of the National Gallery of Art.)


--James Rosenthal is a Philadelphia artist and writer.
permanent link  roberta 6:57 AM
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Thursday, January 06, 2005

Big grants for great artists

 
Artist and contributor Mark Barry wrote alerting us to the news that Philadelphia artist Sarah McEneaney was among the recipients of the $25,000 grants from the Anonymous was a Woman foundation. Thanks Mark, and way to go, Sarah! See Sarah's webpage at MissionCreep for more. Also see her work in the MissionCreep real world exhibit at Nexus opening February 4. And check artblog's copious outpourings about her 2004 ICA solo show indexed under her name in the left bar.

Other Philadelphia-linked artists on the list are Janet Biggs whose videos just came down at Moore College (she is an alum) and J. Morgan Puett whose project at the FWM last year, with husband Mark Dion, brought together an archive of nursing-related material and thoughts about nurses' suits in the future. Read the news here. Congrats to all!
permanent link  roberta 4:52 PM
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Both start with g. The same; not the same

 
Since yesterday I've been mulling over the way that we've been using goth and grotesque almost interchangeably (see posts here and here. I didn't include Roberta's previous post because I don't think she does confuse them there, but that post, which is also on grotesque, is here). So I feel the need to mention what I think are fundamental differences.

They both confront death and horror, and they both have room for spiritual agendas.


But goth romanticizes it and gives it a style. I'm thinking here of Banks Violette and his unicorns and other medieval symbols made sappy and glowing(above right by Violette). I'm also thinking of my nephew Shawn Dubin's drawings (I admit I'm a doting aunt). He's the artist for the "Dreary and Naughty" series of illustrated books (with a cult following among high school-aged kids), and as is typical in gothic, he transforms the scary patrimony of his main characters, descended from the Devil and the Angel of Death into ordinary outsider high school kids who really know how to dress. (Here's a picture from another old, noirish comic that he illustrated--dark, stylish, beautiful i.e. goth.)



Grotesque on the other hand defangs death and horror by taking the opposite tack--it exaggerates to achieve revulsion and pleasure simultaneously, as in this image from Alex Rubio that was included in the ""Visiones from Postmodern Aztlan"" show at Taller Puertorriqueno in the summer (see my post here and Roberta's post here) ("El Diablito," 1998, screenprint).


Which is not to say that art can't include both approaches in one piece. But the words aren't really interchangeable.
permanent link  libby 10:18 AM
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The children of Arnold Bocklin

 

He was Swiss-born but nevermind. Arnold Bocklin, a painter who trained in Germany was an outsider in that country until age 50 when he began painting mythology-based works of a dark and odd nature that captivated the general art-going public but confused and dismayed the critics. Called an anti-impressionist by curator Pamela Kort, who begins her "Comic Grotesque" exhibit at Neue Gallery with a suite of the painter's late 19th Century works, Bocklin, juxtaposed mythological and literary characters, twisted their torsos, exaggerated their scale, painted with a palette of discordant colors and made unusual compositions that were considered "too original," according to Kort. One of Bocklin's long-time collectors in fact, presumably influenced by the critics, returned one of the paintings to the artist. (top image, Bocklin's "Island of the Dead" (1880), not in the exhibit)



According to Kort, many things written about Bocklin's paintings referred to their nature as "baroque, bizarre and burlesque," damning adjectives at that time. Humor was a problem, too, mentioned in the same breath with thoughts about the decline of art. Tsk. tsk. (image is Max Klinger's "Pissing Death" (@1880))



Anyway, Kort's exhibit takes off from Bocklin and rounds up a large number of works (some 70 paintings, prints, archival film footage, sculpture, collage and documents) to demonstrate a stream of German comic subversion she sees flowing from Bocklin's aesthetic. Early Emil Nolde and Paul Klee (yes, this was a revelation!) show those masters in a broader Bocklin context that's most interesting. Klee's several small etchings of deformed figures like the human/bird hybrid called "The hero with the wing" (1905) and a later more typical Klee that was called "Classical Grotesque" (1923) are high points of the exhibit.

Later practitioners like Thomas Theodor Heine up to the Dadaists and Surrealists are shown to be in sync with the comic, absurdist sensibility of Bocklin's grotesques. Here are a few highlights from a show I highly recommend, especially if you carry with you thoughts about what's going on in the world and in the world of art today when grotesque art, far from pooh pooh'd is being brought in to the mainstream. (Remember Robert Storr's 2004 Biennial, Site Santa Fe which focussed exclusively on the subject. And here, as an aside, I'll remind you that Storr and Kort, who are seemingly on the same wavelengh, co-curated the wonderful Jorg Immendorff exhibit at Moore College in 2004. See Immendorff in our artist's list for more on that.) We're at a time now when moral tsk-tsking seems to be out the window and all is fair in love and art. That's not a bad thing, I just mention it for context.

Notable works

Heine, represented by a series of works featuring the devil, called Simplicissimus, have a cultish "Night on Bald Mountain" appeal. His small, bronze statue of the devil-- whose Simpsons-like head and hair provides a new interpretation for that cast of characters! -- is just plain great. (shown, above left) A kind of anti-Lipschitz work, it's oddness is endearing.



Several works by George Grosz, like "Christ with a gas mask" (1927) bring politics in (it seems to be there under the skin of many of the works). Raul Hausmann's collages, Hannah Hoch's really great collages (she makes it look so easy) and Georg Scholz's "Industrial Farmers" (1920) are ones to linger over. (image is Hoch's "The eternal folk dancers" (1933))



Georg Scholz's farmers are "American Gothic" meets "Animal Farm" and I wouldn't want to meet any of them in a dark field, full moon or not. (right is Scholz's "Industry Farmers" (1920) and left below is Grant Wood's "American Gothic" (1930))

Kort includes the cabaret burlesque as a kind of pop culture approximation of grotesque. Her inclusion of performance artist Karl Valentin's silent films -- there's a selection of shorts running in a curtained-off room with some benches for seating -- gives a "you are there" moment to the show. The works flow quickly and are moving pictures as odd and dark as many of the paintings and prints.




The Museum

Just a word about the Neue Gallery itself. Opened in 2001, the museum, on 86th and 5th, which used to be Mrs. Vanderbilt's abode, has an intimate atmosphere that complements the permanent collection of German and Austrian art by Gustav Klimt, Max Beckmann, Adolf Loos, Egon Schiele and others. My sister, Cate, who visited the museum with me and who is a long-time New York resident, wondered about how a museum devoted to German art could survive in the big town, but when we were there, on a Sunday afternoon in January, it was crowded. (right is Schiele's "Self Portrait with arm twisted above head" (1910) which had the same energy as Pontormo's twisted torso self portrait in the current PMA exhibit focussed on the Renaissance master)



The museum's location up the street from the Met has to serve it well and in fact I read recently that Neue catches some of the Met's spillover crowds. (something Barnes will be privy to when it moves near to the PMA).

The collection's got some great Klimt paintings, a room of Schiele and Alfred Kubin drawings, the latter, new to me, a German Goya making fantastical brooding figures.

Outsiders and a final thought


Art by self-taught artists fits the grotesque category and belongs in the discussion. The popularity of these artists today at a time when grotesque in general is not only accepted but lauded should be no surprise. (left is Sam Doyle's "Dr. Boles" on view at the Rosenbach Museum in the "Passionate Eye" exhibit.)

Kort's exhibit spans the years 1870-1940. Not only does that time frame bridge two centuries but it includes two world wars. While she doesn't, I beleive, discuss it per se, I have to think that those three major events (century-turning, World War 1 and World War 2) did much to propel artists' and audience's thoughts toward the darker recesses of their brains where pessimism and fear play. In that respect, our times --which include not only century-turning but millenium-turning; two wars in Iraq; several wars in Afghanistan; the seemingly unstoppable rise of terrorism; and eco-disasters of human making (Exxon Valdez and its spawn) ally the art of our times with the art of Bocklin and his children.



permanent link  roberta 9:21 AM
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Wednesday, January 05, 2005

Goth addendum

 
It's not only in antique times that the funny, oddball stuff on the edge of titillating and disturbing was just another side of life (see Roberta's post). Today we see gore and death daily, granted somewhat distanced by the media in which we see it, but none-the-less we see it. The small-world super-communication capabilities that keep us glued to the tube and the blogs give us the particular (the house fire three blocks away, across the city, in the 'burbs, in Pittsburgh, even in Santa Monica) and the global all at once (you can't escape fire, tsunami, gunshots wherever you live) (image, Paul Swenbeck installation from 2004 "Scarab" show at Project Room.).

In a way, being in touch with the dark side of what's happening all around the globe helps keep us in balance, penetrates our bourgeois cocoons and reminds us that we cannot control life and death, acts of nature (or God or whatever you want to call it), and ultimately our fellow humans.

If grotesque and goth art helps us work out those issues, well I suppose it's going to be around forever.


permanent link  libby 10:49 AM
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Wit from India

 
You've got to love a culture that knows how to laugh at itself and do so with beauty. That's what I got out of the tiny jewel of an exhibit of 20 Indian miniatures culled from the Alvin O. Bellak Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (image, "The Poet Bihari Offers Homage to Radha and Krishna," c. 1760-65, artist/maker unknown, opaque watercolor, gold, and silver-colored paint on paper 9 7/8" x 13").

I had seen all of these pieces when the collection first came to the museum and received a full, celebratory exhibit. But these pieces in "Masterpieces of Indian Painting from the Alvin O. Bellak Collection, A Tribute" are amongst the most memorable ones from the larger collection, the creme de la creme.

A series of three pieces, including a pair--"Baba Bharath Singh, Dressed and Undressed"--plus the excellent explanatory notes put you in the center of court intrigue. The three pieces provide human foibles, smashing drawing, satiric social observations, vignettes of court life, and swell colors. What else is there?

Another favorite on display was of Krishna lifting a highly decorative mountain to protect him and his buddies and their flocks from a downpour. Once again, the humor was terrific, with a picture of a blue god with superpowers as one of the boys and nature as a pre-Raj umbrella.

One of the pieces, with its myriad naked sufis, I think may have been the inspiration for a piece by Shahzia Sikander that Roberta and I saw on one of our New York trolls. Vis a vis the borrowings from Indian miniature paintings that we've also been seeing around Philadelphia, from artists as diverse as Max Lawrence, Samantha Simpson, Ben Woodward and Sabeen Raja, I think this show is particularly pertinent. It's up until mid-April.


permanent link  libby 10:45 AM
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Grotesque is how we roll along

 
Apparently it's always been with us, the grotesque. But our attitudes towards the macabre,funny, decorative, exaggerated, erotic, death in your face imagery go up and down depending on the prevailing religious winds and how cold and moralizing they're blowing. (image is from Matthew Barney's Cremaster series. His is the first image that comes up in Google image search for the word "grotesque"...Marilyn Manson is second.)

Here's the history of grotesque through the ages, per Robert Storr's essay in the catalog to "Comic Grotesque," Pamela Kort's great exhibit at the Neue Museum which I'll tell you about in another post.

(I'm paraphrasing Storr):

In antique times, the funny, oddball stuff on the edge of titillating and disturbing was just another side of life.



In Roman times,the imagery went underground into caverns and grottos which is where we get the word grotesque from.

In the medieval period, it was pushed from the mainstream but popped up in the margins (literally in illuminated manuscripts) and figuratively, as the fierce and weird gargoyles on buildings. (shown is gargoyle from Sainte-Chapelle, Paris)





The Rennaisance re-discovered it with gusto (think Caravaggio, Michelangelo) (shown is Caravaggio's "Medusa.")

The Baroque and Rococco wove it into the very fabric of its being (swoops,swirls, a riot of excess).





Modernism supressed all things grotesque as unhealthy, and some, like Afolf Loos, architect and designer, dismissed it as primitive fetishizing. (image is the Bauhaus in Desau Germany)







The Dadaists and Surrealists brought it back, with a dose of politics and intellectualism. (image is Max Ernst, "Napoleon in the Desert")

Which brings us just about up to date.

Nowadays, we live in a sea of grotesquerie--from reality tv and funk-faced musical performers to high brow art (or is it?) of Barney, Currin, Yuskavage, Sherman and the goth brigade -- Violette, Altmejd, and our local fave, Takeda. There's comic grotesque in some of pop culture (Mad Magazine, Saturday Night Live, Tim Burton's movies) but most of it is relentlessly humorless. But we're in a world I like to call Post OK. And in a Post OK world, with eco-tragedies like the tsunami disaster and with the climate of fear lowering hoizons and dimming the blue skies, what's to laugh at?

It's ironic that today's seemingly open embrace of the grotesque coincides with the rise of religiosity in the world. Red state church going doesn't rule out red state purchases of Marilyn Manson records or red state reality tv watching.



Perhaps it's the emasculation of the church in a world driven by pop culture. Preachers nowadays try to look and sound like Oprah. The more they do, the better the congregants congregate. I can't see how religions can chart a future course unless they merge even more with the culture. Gothic cathedrals may one days be filled with real goths if everybody plays their cards right. (image is t-shirt for Marilyn Manson called "The Golden Age of Grotesque")

As someone who grew up looking at holy cards of religious martyrs and their flayed anatomies, I am comfortable with grotesque and see it as somehow cleansing. For underneath it all, grotesque is about flesh and blood and the human being alone in the world. It's the frisson of recognition that there but for...go I. And without the personal recognition and identification, there's no compassion.

That said, a little dose'll do ya.


permanent link  roberta 10:43 AM
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Tuesday, January 04, 2005

The work of art, the work of curating

 
[ed. Note: James Rosenthal is responding to a post by Sid Sachs that was responding to an earlier Rosenthal post.]

Post by James Rosenthal


I’m sorry Sid Sachs misconstrued my comments as whining and felt compelled to post his rather authoritarian “been there, done that” response on artblog. It is disappointing to think how many in administrative positions in Philadelphia don’t really appreciate the art world constructs that define the devising, marketing and distribution of art. Much has changed since the days when cavalier artists and critics seemingly reshaped everything.

The studio is no longer the only place where art is made and there is now room for all sorts of collaboration between curators, artists, critics and the public. In this sense, artists resemble film makers and musicians and this goes well beyond that tired “Van Gogh/Pollock” paradigm.

I’ve noticed that artists come in all sizes and persuasions but, for some reason, curatorial process remains much the same and often validates itself and art in traditional ways. At some level, it is the suppression of new ideas and attitudes by the status quo that slow new art’s momentum and it is the lack of new types of initiatives in our fair city that very much holds Philadelphia back regardless of what many think about how hard it is to change things. It is certainly not as simple as Mr Sachs suggests. Artists cannot afford to wait for recognition- they have to define their own context with or without the crucial currency created by exhibitions and often without any mentoring. Some do this by writing! It’s an absurd notion in this day and age to ask people to work in silence. I suspect curators of the old school are perhaps happier to wait for so-called geniuses (ie established artists) to die so they don’t have to interact with them in person which is far too much work. It would take diplomacy and a broad curatorial palette.



When Mr Sachs suggests that yours truly, “do the work” we know he is simply saying that I should do something he likes. So, who is the lazy one? As for his jaded attitude towards creating a new arts publication, merely an idea at the moment but a good one, we don’t need that kind of help, though his suggested title of Deadwood would be an excellent name for such a worthy enterprise. (images are from Rosenthal's solo exhibit at SPECTOR.)

-James Rosenthal is a Philadelphia artist and writer.

permanent link  roberta 1:27 PM
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Monday, January 03, 2005

More parking-lot art

 
Post from Matt Sepielli

[editor's note: Matt is responding to this post about Peter Rose's video "Odysseus in Ithaca" at the Philadelphia Art Museum.]

I was always fond of this work of parking lot
art, myself, "Ghost Parking Lot", by James Wines, the founder of SITE Environmental Design.

Artist Matt Sepielli is one of the directors of the online gallery The Vacuum
permanent link  libby 5:14 PM
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Neue and new

 

We snuck up to New York yesterday, Stella, Steve, my sister Cate and I. We all had our wants and needs. Cate, who had been visiting Philadelphia, needed and wanted to get back to her apartment to make sure the cats had not destroyed too much in her absence. Steve was meeting a former student for lunch; Stella needed a shot of Bloomingdales and I of course was there for the art. As usual I got to pick one thing and chose the Neue Museum, home to German and Vienese art and artifacts of the 20th Century (Beckmann, Klimt, furniture by Adolf Loos). The small but elegant spot just up from the Met on 5th Ave. opened in 2001 and I'd never been. (image is the door to the museum, a building that was once the home of Mrs. Vanderbilt.) I'll get back to you with more later—especially about the Pamela Kort-curated exhibit,"Comic Grotesque: Wit and Mockery in Germany, 1870-1940," which I was very curious about in light of our own turgid and grotesque times.

Meanwhile, from the inbox, this news about great-sounding shows in February:

Abington Art Center hosts "Trouble in Paradise," a group exhibit focussed on the landscape in our eco-disaster-ridden world. The show originated at Van Brunt Gallery in New York and includes work by sixteen artists including Brian Alfred, Brandon Ballengeé, Edward Burtynsky, David Chow, Dan Ford, Adam Fuss, Joy Garnett, Fariba Hajamadi, Julie Heffernan, Joanne Howard, Thomas Huber, Alison Moritsugu, Kirsten Mosher, Steve Mumford, Alexis Rockman and Chrysanne Stathacos. Show runs February 3 - May 28, 2005.

MissionCREEP at Nexus. Also in February, the online website, missionCREEP which hosts home pages for some super local artists (including artblog faves Judith Schaechter and Sarah McEneaney) comes into the real world with an exhibit at the local coop gallery. MissionCREEP also features the work of artists Susan Hagen, James G. Mundie, Tina Newberry, Bill Amundson and Carol Nowak and the writing of Jim Knipfel , Mike Walsh, and many others. (Walsh is the founder of the CREEP.) Show opens Feb. 3.

permanent link  roberta 9:01 AM
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Sunday, January 02, 2005

Parking lots

 
Parking lots have become the icons in our modern world for the empty, dehumanized plazas, the mazes, the oppressive architecture, the video surveillance approach to safety, and the isolation and tyranny of the automobile culture.

This is the space that video artist Peter Rose has filmed in his new video, "Odysseus in Ithaca" (still images top right and below right) showing at the Philadelphia Art Museum until Feb. 9 (read museum's excellent info here).

As Roberta pointed out to me the other day, Rose is in good company in using the parking lot (in this case a lot in Conshohocken, filmed over the weekend when no one uses it). She was thinking about Mark Shetabi's juicy parking lot paintings (left, Shetabi's "The Desert: Parking Garage") and Thomas Demand's "Tunnel," an animated video of his reconstruction of the place where Lady Diana died (see post) .

These are familiar spaces, which we enter almost daily. Alas, they are not places for people. They are places for cars, machines. They are ominous spaces of hard concrete and low ceilings and pitched floors in which we never feel at home and where we often feel lost. I want to add Nadia Hironaka's video wanderings through abandoned structures to this list of uncomfortable places.

What I liked about Rose's piece, besides its classical references was its formal visual poetry, in which the concrete beams twirl, sometimes interlocking like cogs between the three panels, sometimes leaping from panel to panel, as the slightly tilted floor gets sucked into the past. We haven't come far, architecturally, from the post-and-lintel Parthenon. Lots of columns. Heavy overheads.

I was looking at "Odysseus" with my friend Bay, who works at the museum, and she admired the beautiful pinks and yellows of the lit-up concrete, which created a kind of Minimalist landscape (and here I don't think Doug Witmer can fault me for misuse of the M word).

But ultimately, it's not the beauty of the structure that impresses but the beauty of the intercutting, the use of the structure's features to structure a visual rhythm with light and dark and a spiraling search for safety and escape into the light.

This piece has none of the theatrical wizardry of Rose's last piece, "Pneumenonal," at the Fabric Workshop (see post), with its confusion of real scrims and video scrims and its how-does-he-do-it/what's-really-real punch.

"Odysseus" is far more buttoned down and painterly and art-historical and properly two-dimensional.

But its rich references to life as we know it and our cultural history and architecture made it hold my interest and my eye. It's worth a visit.

permanent link  libby 3:15 PM
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