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Saturday, January 15, 2005

Why you should see Barry Le Va, even if you hate him

 
The Barry Le Va retrospective at the ICA is a rugged experience requiring intellectual sleuthing and an open mind. But it's an experience worth experiencing (image, Le Va explaining his work).

Le Va (rhymes with ICA) was there, of course, dressed in severe gray silk jacket and slacks, for the opening of this major show. Like his art, he's not such an easy guy to be around, by turns challenging, gracious, explanatory and gnomic during the member walk-around. I got the sense that he wasn't too crazy about explaining--he'd explain and then become evasive, uttering something obfuscatory.

Nonetheless, show Curator Ingrid Schaffner retained her enthusiasm in the face of a steady stream of corrections from Le Va--though it occurred to me that some of her slightly off comments, like daring to mention "scatter art" in the context of his hallmark "distributions," were meant as deliberate opportunities to encourage Le Va to step in and talk (right, "Continuous and Related Activities Discontinued by the Act of Dropping," felt and glass).

All this is by way of my trying to give a sense of this work, which is tremendously influential and has a bad-boy undercurrent, a desire to change the terms of sculpture.

First of all, Le Va's work keeps pushing the boundaries (figurative and literal) of what a piece of art can be or where its edges can lie. He came up against the boundaries early, in the 1967, when the professors who wanted work on a pedestal for the graduate show from the Otis Art Institute (Los Angeles).

This pushing of boundaries reaches its apogee in the ICA show in "Accumulated Vision," an arrangement of wooden lines and dots on the floor that he projects onto the walls from an imaginary perspective below the floor. He has pushed the art object and the artist himself outside the limits of the room, and he invites us, as the viewer, to figure it out--figure out what he did from where, figure out the relationships (left, "Accumulated Vision").

But though I got the concept--thanks to his explanation--I couldn't quite get the points of view, imagine though I might. I think he left some facts out here, but I couldn't figure out what those facts were, at least not on opening night.

And this is part of what makes the work daring (am I arguing for the emperor's new clothes?), because all along, even before he left the borders of the room, even from the first moment he distributed canvas on the floor and rolled ball bearings on a surface, Le Va's work has suggested a rationale, a pattern, a plan, and yet it has suggested chaos at the same time. He dares the viewer to make sense of what he has done, to get a sense of how the physical represents some thought, some process that the artist himself experienced (right foreground, glass line detail of "Shots From the End of a Glass Line" and "Cleaved Wall" in background).

His pieces are puzzles. They may be artifacts of something that has happened, been thought, been experienced, but to describe them as mere artifacts, as merely residue, is inaccurate because this residue is planned for and exhibited as if it were a thing, an art object.

Le Va used the term archaeology last night at the ICA to describe the art-goer's process, making sense of the artifacts by projecting back in time to their facture and projecting further back in time to their moment of intellectual conception.

There's a crankiness here, a desire to confound, an unwillingness to totally please, a willingness to create a puzzle too hard to solve. He distributes voluptuous felt on the floor and then ends the process by dropping glass on top. Crash. The glass was "a period," he said at the walk-through, referring to a mark of punctuation (see three images above, on the right, "Continuous and Related...").

For all that, when someone stepped on one of his glass pieces (the noise stopped people in their tracks), he seemed undisturbed, even pleased--by the reactions, by his answer to the question of the inviolability of the art object (it's not inviolable, and while he doesn't want you to trash his work, he also doesn't mind a random accidental disturbance).

If you see the five bullet holes in the wall, you can imagine that the bullets were shot (the deed was done by a University of Pennsylvania Security sharpshooter, after bulletproofing had been inserted behind the sheetrock). The title of the piece left, "Shots From the End of a Glass Line," explains that they were shot from behind the sinuos line of broken glass. For those of us who watch the nightly news and think that bullets and shattered glass have a real-world presence, this piece suggests how random even fine aim can destroy the pattern of daily life, the order of commerce and its plate-glass windows. I don't for a minute think this was what the artist had in mind, and even if he did, I suspect he would deny it, because this is not what Le Va's brand of art is about. As for the broken glass, it was a beautiful shade of bluegreen when arranged on the floor. I would imagine this is something the artist did have in mind, as well as the sinuous arrangement of the glass, the straight shots across the length of the glass line, the pipe target, the noise of the firearm, the noise of breaking glass.

As for the row of cleavers sunk into the wall about a foot above the floor, handles up, Le Va gave a demonstration of his process of standing, back- to-the-wall, raising up the cleaver, showing the arc that his arm followed to impel the tip of the blade into the wall, and then his repetition of the action a couple of feet further along the wall, over and over. Again, there's a sound, an action, an idea--and a tactile and kinetic response to these and the materials and implications of the cleavers and the wall.

I liked learning that Le Va did not know about Joseph Beuys' felt obsession when he started using it in his work. He credited a fellow student who was making banners out of felt. She suggested the fabric to him for both its drape and its edges that do not unravel.

I liked learning that Le Va placed the wonderful "Shatterscatter" layered glass piece on the stair landing both because of its proximity to the windows and because it's in the way when gallery visitors want to cross the space. I also liked the description of how a single swing from a 10-lb. mallet shattered each of the six layers of glass successively.

It's this physical relationship that Le Va's work offers--not just the imagining of how it was done, how it made noise as it cracked, how the accumulated pieces impinge on one another--but how the viewer is in a space with things that surround and impede and how the viewer becomes not only a speculator about past causality, but a participant in a new cause-and-effect sequence in the course of moving around and through the work of art.

These ideas may be givens in parts of the art world today, but it wasn't a given when Le Va first began raising these issues with his work. In fact, it wasn't even considered a possibility, then.

Also on my list of favorites was Le Va's use of the ramp--the best ramp piece yet. This space in the ICA has daunted some of the best and the brightest in creating art that fits there. But Le Va's sound piece is just right, with its tape defining a running track, and the speakers spewing the sound of his running back and forth with 30-second pauses, taking longer and longer to cover the distance. Again, I'm grateful for the explanation, and I do not know that I could have decoded this with the clues given. But it's a perfect fit.

Le Va said that he liked the sound spilling over into the galleries, reminding everyone of his physical presence performing his task.

I ought to add that part of Le Va's pleasure in all of this cause-and-effect is focused on how causality can still result in random results--hence each time the 10-lb. mallet hits the glass, the glass shatters differently. Every length run is not exactly the same. All the sculptures, with all their component pieces, follow a plan but have different outcomes as he distributes them. (Right, a photo of "Bunker Coagulation--pushed from the right" from a 1995 installation. A very different version with some similarities, some differences, three photos below, left, at the ICA.)

This idea of chance and randomness and following a plan brings to mind John Cage. I suppose then that it's no surprise that Le Va is also a music lover, from jazz to Schoenberg to Wagner.

The show also includes notebooks (that seem more like drawings mounted in portfolios) and drawings. The drawings are critical for Le Va's thinking process and in many ways resemble the pieces themselves, with process a consideration in how they are made (left clockwise from top left, "Part of One/Part of the Other," 1983, "Plan View for Double-Tiered Sculpture," and "Plan View for Double-Tiered Sculpture, C").

Some of them are beautiful with an energy that presses to burst out of the edges and change shape. All of them seem to be exploratory, and many of them explanatory. They have a plan quality (Le Va was trained as an architect), and are worth some time (right, "Match Tricks," 1984).

There's also some more recent work consisting of black objects of varied size and shape and their relationships to eachother. This work seems to me less risky, less pushing at the edges. But the contrariness and contradictory contrasts of the early work is still there, pushing internally in the pieces, and not only externally (left, "Bunkers Coagulation").

If this show sounds prickly, well it is, but it's the record of a mind grappling with the changes that have swept through the art world since the 1960s, and creating a few of those changes himself.

After I'd made up my mind that I was awfully glad I didn't have to work with or live with Le Va, he gave a gracious thank you to the preparators and the rest of the crew at the ICA who helped build the puzzle-like piece on the back wall on the first floor, saying they were the best he'd ever worked with. That's as close as I care to get (right, "9g-Wagner," 2005, polyester resin and rubber-coated MDF, the piece the ICA crew helped build).

However, for all its difficulty, it also has an accessibility, a tactile visual quality that offers another path in.

I'd also like to pass on a final word from my favorite art guard at the ICA. She said that the minute she saw Le Va's floor distributions, she thought of Polly Apfelbaum's work. The guard, by now quite knowledgable about the art she lives with daily, said she liked the Le Va show, and she said she double-checked on her theory about Apfelbaum, looking through the ICA show's literature. She'd hit the jackpot. Apfelbaum's work, Karen Kilimnik's work, although they have very different intentions, probably wouldn't exist without Barry Le Va.









permanent link  libby 7:29 PM
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Friday, January 14, 2005

Look who's coming to talk here

 
The ICA has a pretty swell group of talks coming up under the rubric of the Spiegel Symposium. Here are a few of the big names who will participate on Mar. 18 discussing the whole concept of art (and the Barry Le Va exhibit) in the context of political and cultural and aesthetic resistance:

Chrissie Iles
Klaus Kertess
Beverly Semmes
Robert Storr

That's just a little snack. For all the info and every other event at the ICA, listed chronologically with no sense of what's hot and what's not, go here.
permanent link  libby 4:12 PM
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Snow and swimming pools on 3rd St.

 
Justin Snow's expressionist paintings at 3rd St. Gallery are engaged in a dialog with the news of the world. He figures it's his turn to talk after being a good listener for so long.

Snow's large, energized paintings, which evoke architecture in the midst of explosions of color, lines and words, are beautiful and agitated at the same time. And the artist told me when I spoke with him in the gallery yesterday that they were generated in the cauldron of his rage against things like war and other wrongs in today's world. (top image is an unstretched oil on canvas, title, I think, is "Meanwhile in another part of town.")

Three of the works, all oils on canvas or linen, some stretched, some not, were made before the artist slipped away to Ireland for a residency at the Ballinglen Foundation in Ballycastle, County Mayo. While living in the 300-person village in Ireland, the artist made another -- quite different -- body of work, and that goes on view next month at Pagus Gallery in Norristown. Those works, Snow said, are calmer and reflect a life without the day-to-day intrusion of disturbing headlines. The postard image for the Pagus show, interestingly, shows a work that's dark and brooding but also romantic.



Snow's rage against and engagement with the world -- and the colors he chose to illustrate them (beautiful pinks, yellows and oranges as foils against black marks) -- remind me of Philip Guston with Red Grooms'muscularity. (image is "My Brother's Keeper")

I didn't ask him which body of work he felt closest to, the calm Ireland works or the fiercely engaged works from home but I'd guess now that now that he's home and the news intrudes the way it always does in lives so hooked up, plugged in and "on" all the time, that those atmospheric Ireland paintings might seem like a dream from another life on another planet. See Snow's website for more images.

Swimming Pools and Donuts



I'm fighting an impulse here to talk about the male impulse to art-making versus the female and while I know people will be people and that those guys, Giorgio Morandi and Chardin, made the world's best still life paintings and Susan Rothenberg, Lee Krasner,Elaine DeKooning and other women have made some of the boldest abstract or almost abstract works. And, of course Vermeer painted nothing but domestic interiors. I know all that, but still, when I ran into Artist's House to check out Nancy Bea Miller's new works after coming from seeing Justin Snow's across the street, I was struck by the Mars/Venus argument that a woman's focus is different than a man's -- not better, nor worse, just different. (image is one of Bea Miller's still life paintings)

Bea Miller is a painter of her domus: figures and still lifes, captured in a kind of loving, luminous atmosphere that conveys time spent thinking about relationships. Her new works set up table top chess matches with donuts and and apples, peppermints and caramels. The works are small and lovely and imbued with a kind of restraint. Her objects keep their distance from each other. They are individuals and powerful yet alone in a way that makes them poignant. Those apples and candies may be parts of a family but they are also personalities in their own right.



A couple of works are figure paintings, big and colorful, of a child standing alone beside an outdoor swimming pool. The child, awkward and a little odd, is nonetheless monumental and the entire work, a kind of Hockney by Constable by Eakins, is sad and wondrous. Will the child jump in? Will he be able to swim? Will he live in that beautiful land? Or is this all a figment and a wish? "Henry at Smith's Pool" (shown) might be a kind of allegory painting about Eden and innocence but it's also, just like the still life paintings, about being alone in the world -- and the hope of making it.

Bea Miller is a blogger, by the way, and I recommend her blog, genre cookshop, for a great weaving together of life and art. Lots of pictures, too.

permanent link  roberta 8:52 AM
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Thursday, January 13, 2005

You thought February was a sad month?

 
Of course Christo and Jeanne-Claude's "The Gates" opens on Feb. 12 in Central Park. We'll be there with the hoi poloi snapping away and getting the "woman on the street (or in the park)" interviews about the experience of the flapping saffron curtains. (anyone know a good high vantage point (not helicopter) to look down and see the bigger sweep of the thing, please advise.) I'm excited about this. I've never seen a real Christo/Jeanne-Claude in person. (image is Christo's rendering of what the piece will look like. The Gates will be up for 16 days so book your trip now.)

As if that weren't enough, Apex Art is having a great-sounding five-week event in February/March that includes two of our favorite Philadelphia artists, Liz Rywelski and Matthew Suib. More of a performance and documentation extravaganza than an exhibit, the thing is called "Mauritzio couldn't be here." (Love the title)

The Feb. 12 installment, in which Rywelski is participating, is organized by Harrell Fletcher, West Coast artist whose newspaper giveaway from the last Whitney Biennial was a high point. (The guy's about free art!) Here's Fletcher's description of his project:

... an all day lecture program composed of 28 people who will each lecture for ten minutes apiece. The entire event will be video taped and shown as a projection in the gallery the following week. The only requirements I have for the people doing the ten minute lectures are that they don't ordinarily go to Apex Art and that the topic that they lecture on is not directly related to contemporary visual art. Because the event is going to be very long I'm hoping that among the lecturers there will be some people whose topics will be related to yoga, massage, dance, meditation, etc, and will lead the audience in short demonstrations to periodically reenergize everyone.

See his website for more on a similar project he did in Denmark.



Rywelski, a Space 1026er whose K-Mart self-portraiture (left) is brilliant (we've covered it heavily here, see left, (and I've covered at PW)) is participating in Fletcher's day-long lecture series on Feb. 12.

That is to say, she will be represented by her good friend and sometime collaborator, Josh OS, who will be lecturing on her behalf talking about The New Orthodox Kemetic Church....hmm, ok. Liz is profiled this month at the new, online, dork magazine, a blog-like affair with posted musings and some back pages for interviews, etc. Definitely urban youth vibe. read.



And on Feb. 26 at 8 p.m., video artist Suib, a Vox Populi member, whose political and social critiques we also love and have covered beaucoup (here, see list at left, and see my PW writings) is participating in a video/band event. Suib is collaborating with New Humans (also that night, VOY + Kirby Conn). I've been following Suib for years and he's a great video artist -- and a musician. (image is Suib's "Make No Mistake," a parody of the 2002 State of the Union address)

Now, all we have to do is get through January.

permanent link  roberta 8:30 AM
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Wednesday, January 12, 2005

Hot-ticket artist talks

 
Look out for Sarah McEneaney tomorrow, talking at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts at 11:30 a.m (shown, "Alpha Dog").

Others coming to PAFA, all at 11:30 a.m. in the next three months:

Jan. 20 Quentin Morris recent posts here and here
Jan. 27 Matthew Ronay
Feb. 10 Tom Sachs
Feb. 17 Alyson Shotz post here
Feb. 18 Lorand Hegyi (also speaking at Slought Foundation Feb. 19)
Feb. 24 Eamon Ore-Giron
March 10 Mark Shetabi most recent post here
March 17 Sue Johnson
March 31 Yvonne Jacquette
permanent link  libby 7:55 PM
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The rest of the groups

 
The computer and Photoshop and Illustrator are so seductive. The result is an oversupply of mandalas--and other "art" products.

The biggest show within Highwire's group show of digital art is an array of beautiful mandalas from Joseph Wentland. Made from flower petals, the kaleidoscope mirror effect is mesmerizing, and easy to love. I especially loved this one for its 3-D element amidst the flat pattern. But I've seen far too many mandalas. (Didn't Burnell Yow! also use natural materials for his mandalas--see post here? And there was a whole show in New York of mandalas--post here--so it's quite the trend. ). Photoshop makes mandala-making too easy and they becomes a cheap shot after awhile, the decisions losing sight of the reasons behind them. Enough already.

Anthony Ciambella had quite a display of body-based imagery in the show, video and mostly small 2-D pieces. Some of them were interesting and surprising, like the patterned intensity of "Vaginaland" (shown, left; sorry for window reflections.) This particular piece brought to mind marbled flyleafs of old books. I also thought Ciambella's "Samson and Delilah" was intriguing. But once again, less would have been more. Some of the work creeped me out, and not in a good way.

Barbara Spadaro's three little digi-collages were a high point of the show, uniting fairytale- and old book-print aesthetics with her own weird little untold stories. I saw some other work of hers the same day in Muse Gallery, and liked those too, but preferred the restraint of the ones at Highwire (an example right).

George Shinn also provided one of his digital drawings, goofy and sociable--they have a directness that the Photoshop crowd loses.

Others in the show were Lisa Spero, Jeff Thomas, Ken B. Miller and Stephen Iwanczuk. Most of the show, was an enthusiastic profusion of digital processes. But with such a large quantity of work that's based more on enthusiasm than on outcomes, the work that takes the next step gets lost in the shuffle. Too bad.

At Union 237, three artists showed three very different bodies of work. Self-taught artist Dean Rosenzweig showed jittery, intense paintings filled with words and lines and ADHD; Sheila M. Brown, the only one of the three with a fine arts education--BFA cum laude from Moore College--put up a suite of bold, empowered nudes; and Kristin Brandt had a series of what I'd call ancestor paintings.

Brown's nudes, if you like studies of nudes, were juicy, tough and beautiful. I know there's a market for this genre, and these were a good example of it. While I don't really think Brown pushed beyond the genre, she does what she does well, with Roualt-y outlines, earthy tones including lots of red, burlap swatches for texture, ultra-close-up cropped figures and sometimes tile-like backgrounds (a Bonnard reference?) ("Awake," left).



Rosenzweig had me poring over his words and incantations, his sketchy outlines, his surprising divisions of the canvas into swatches of color. He used some of his incantatory phrases in more than one painting. And he has copyright symbols all over the place. He acknowledges Basquiat, Warhol and Clemente as inspirations, although it's the Basquiat that comes through in what I saw (right, "Mad Cow").

If the work looks familiar to you, he did the interiors of Bar Noir.

I don't really know what I think of this work, yet, but I'm looking and thinking, and that already is a plus. If I walk out without thinking, the work has bored me. I'm going to try to keep him in my sights.

Brandt's paintings seemed expected, the fuzzy imagery suggesting hordes of ghosts from the past and some spiritual connection. However the paintings offered few visual rewards via space or color or contrast.

I also stopped by Nexus' "discontent" (see Roberta's post on this show), a show including 24 Nexus artist members. Here are a couple of observations about people taking some new tacks there:

First, there's Elizabeth New, whose beaded relief sculpture of a car embroidered on the back of a shirt was over-the-top bold and snappy. Previously, New had shown clever Photoshopped images with words that worked better in the small postcard size than the overblown poster size. But this car was a strong departure (left).

Photographer Chris Macan, who previously revealed only other peoples' vulnerabilities with his peep-hole art, actually revealed a little of himself with Polaroid emulsion transfers on four blocks--four confessions about unrealized projects (right). This is a good direction.

For a couple of artists, the explanatory story was great, the art not quite as strong, but still worth noting. Yukie Kobayashi's "Window II, Outside of Window," quoted a terrific poem about yearning and then offered a string of pink, hanging, lumpy giant pearls in front of a pearlescent square (left). The voluptuous finishes remind me of some Japanese work I had seen in New York, all about the glitz and glitter of the commercial world. But ultimately it was the poem that moved me most.

Nick Cassway's story about "Chris and Slava" was more interesting than the charming illustration in Plexiglas and vinyl of the two men in front of a lipstick-red background. Was it red for political reasons? I don't know, but Cassway is moving in a new direction from his poetic meditations on the fragility of life and he needs time to get where he's going.

That's it. Jeez, I hate writing about group shows.
permanent link  libby 6:01 PM
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Oldenburg and Golden in LA

 
[Ed. note: this is Part 2 of artblog contributor James Rosenthal's musings on his trip to Los Angeles over the holidays. You can read the Part 1 here.]

Post from James Rosenthal



LA is so familiar from myriad filmic and television images and this adds to the sense of unending discovery and comparison. I knew I was staying near a Claus Oldenburg in Santa Monica, aren’t you envious, so I located it. Forming a great Egyptian-like portal to a Frank Gehry building, the sculpture nods to the local Hollywood constructions of a similar nature and to seaside attractions. It is only two blocks from the ocean so the metaphor of looking out to sea is clear. This was in Venice actually, which, unbeknownst to me, is named so because there are canals there! I had no idea, but you have to admit, it makes sense. (image is the Oldenburg/van Bruggen Binoculars at the Gehry-designed Chiat/Day building in Venice.)

The day before I was walking along Main Street, Santa Monica when I stumbled upon a nice mural. Upon investigation, I noticed the artist’s name: our very own Jane Golden. Holy Cow! So this is where they all come from! [ed. Note Jane Golden is the head of the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program. She used to be a mural artist in LA and was co-founder and director of something called the Los Angeles Public Art Foundation.]

I gotta say the murals I saw in LA seem quite at home. It must be the weather and the Spanish architecture or the spread out nature of the place. In Hollywood, there was one wonderfully faded image depicting movie actors from different eras all seated in a theater looking up at us! This was in a seedier burg off Sunset Boulevard near the Hotel Mark Twain which had also seen better days. Unfortunately, I didn’t have my camera. I also ran across a cool alternative space called Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions which had a show somehow related to the High Desert Test Sites. They were obviously determined to be open on Xmas Eve.



Over the week I observed a great gap in wealth in LA which was sort of unexpected. The surprising thing was the nature of the homeless situation all in the shadow of the Oldenburg and the size of the problem. Obviously the nice weather makes it possible to sleep rough but there certainly was an undeniable air of threat as inebriated biker types, often in groups, roamed the beach and primped in the public restrooms. This is of course in stark contrast to the film stars seen near by and the fancy cars. One day I saw a bag lady sitting on a bench talking into a cell phone. Are these people actually destitute or merely homeless? Another guy was living out of his car. Can you be homeless and own a car? He was lying there bare chested, on his back with his feet propped up on his bumper, yelling down his cell phone, “Merry Christmas, California.” (image is a Los Angeles mural done by Earth Crew at 360 Hampton Dr. on the side of Gold's gym. The website said it was done with aerosol paint.)

permanent link  roberta 5:43 PM
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Tuesday, January 11, 2005

Road movies and other sights

 
Saturday I hit my First Friday haunts, less exhausted and frantic than usual. I'm going to do FF (or should I say post-FF?) this way again.

I plethora of groups shows are all around town, some of it having to do with the economics of the January shopping dip, no doubt. I stopped at Vox Populi, Highwire and Nexus. I also poked my nose into Union 237 which had a 3-artist show.

I'll start with Vox, which has guest artists filling its galleries (the other shows in later posts). The show out front, "passerby," gave me a lot to think about. The artists--all respond to the mostly unnoticed urban visual overload. Each of them has a very different, very personal tactic for doing this, and those tactics give the show its punch.

In The 4th Room the show "No end by addition" has works by four other guest artists.

"Passerby," because it is about selecting and collecting what the artists see, has the touch of the archive in it. This is most true of the work by Charles LaBelle's "Exterior Song-Hollywod (Cracked Actor)," a series of photographs of an intervention on the streets of Hollywood, where he scrawled the words of David Bowie's song "Cracked Actor," one line at a time, on discarded mattresses (image right). He photographed the inscribed mattresses in situ and mapped the location of each one.

The photos, by their distance from the curb, suggest the view from a passing car window, and the sleaziness of the mattresses gives the lie to Hollywood glamor. Thus displayed, the mattresses also reveal the witlessness of the song lyrics. I mean, "Suck, baby, suck" is just a pitiful line. But grouped, LaBelle's mattresses tell a sad story of romance and hopes and lives destroyed. The seriality creates a sort of anti-movie--a road movie--showing the truth about what Hollywood is, a seedy city past its prime.

Grady Gerbracht's DVD slide show of his commute on New Jersey Transit is also a kind of road movie, in which he makes quick drawings on the windows of the bus of what he sees outside (image, top of post). But by time he's done with each sketch, the subject is long gone and another cityscape takes its place, one that no longer fits inside the sketch outlines. There's something poignant and boyish in this futile endeavor to save that which flies by as we march forward through time. The concept's silliness got a laugh out of me and I too wanted the outlines to match the world outside. According to the gallery notes, Gerbracht began the project in an attempt to visually orient and locate himself in relation to a NJ transit bus route map, which is included in the installation. Although the ephemeral outlines fail to preserve the ephemeral experience of what's out the window, at the same time they do stabilize the passing scene. Similarly, the slides, in their literalness and semi-permanence (they loop over and over), make an archive of what's out there--a sort of home movie of travel.

"Blue" by Kyungmi Shin is a photocollage pinned to the wall from her archive of photographs of things blue that she sees as she walks down the street. Some of the photos are banal, like the one of the sky. Some of the photos are shocking, like the one of a dead body covered by a blue police blanket, the blood pouring over the cobblestones into a pothole. Some of them are puzzling, like what I took to be a closeup detail of a very sexy motorcycle reflecting the buildings all around (left, image in upper left corner). The juxtapositions and varied sizes of the photos have a haphazard quality similar to the experience of walking down the street, and by spreading the photos out over several walls it also gives the sense of a road movie with blue a critical piece of the production values.

Although the work from Ruben Ochoa also calls up the road experience because the subject matter is freeway walls, his point has less to do with car travel and more to do with imagery, absence, presence and values. Ochoa is showing in "Greyscale, Freeway Wall Extractions" photos of sections of L.A. freeway walls on which graffiti has been painted over (image right). The paint doesn't quite match the concrete. And Ochoa digitally inserts these blotchy concrete sections in unexpected urban settings where they stand like sculptures, intruding and overbearing. This work has a political edge, a suggestion that graffiti artists have been silenced. It also questions the visual quality of that which is politically approved--the brute ugliness of a freeway wall and how badly it fits in human-scale spaces. Whose taste is this anyway, he seems to ponder, and who gets to dominate and why is their view better?

From Courtney Booker, pieces of found furniture and other street debris become painted images of retro furniture and people. Then the chunks with the people and the chunks with the furniture are placed together on the floor, more like the original discards than art (left).




Dennis Lozen created piles of silk-screened, impersonal-looking cityscapes on small pieces of paper, offered brushes and little containers of wheat paste (the size your take-out salad dressing comes in) and suggested that gallery goers become urban art guerillas, pasting up their take-out art. He himself decorates the town with these. I'm planning to help him with my own take-home sample (Lozen's posters, wheat past containers and brushes, right).

"No end but addition" in the back features works by artists Seongmin Ahn, Jin Lee, Linda Pelaez and Katarina Wong.

The pieces that interested me most were thumb prints with trompe l'oeil shadows by Katarina Wong, which she describes as migratory patterns (left). They're more like one or two bugs or distant birds, crossing a vast space. Is she talking about human migratory patterns?

Wong makes molds of her friends' fingertips, pins them up, and then paints them and their multi-light-source shadows with sumi ink on paper. The results have a weird, floaty quality that made me unsure at first if the prints were on the glass, casting the shadows or not. The answer is not. It's all painted. And the choice of fingerprints brings up issues of uniqueness of human beings, and how pitiful to reduce someone's uniqueness to a fingerprint and fingerprints becoming a substitute for making a mark. Anyway, I liked this. It was elegiac.

I also liked the intricate patterns of Jin Lee's wall collage of canvases, which start with a single dot, lyrical and austere at the same time, although the work felt a little familiar (detail right). Without more context, I was unable to follow the thread of thought behind Linda Pelaez's embroidery-thread wall stitches. Seongmin Ahn's obsessively folded and speckled ricepaper, nicely situated in a corner, was a product of suffering, at once tough-minded and delicate, but not my cup of tea.



permanent link  libby 7:14 PM
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What's new at PAFA and corrections galore

 
Just got these corrections from contempary art Curator Alex Baker at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts re my post:

Just wanted to let you know that it was [PAFA President] Derek Gillman, not I, who brought
both Golubs into the collection. I brought in the H.C. Westermann sculpture
currently on view.

The Do Ho Suh show is a collaboration with the Fabric Workshop and not an Academy product.

I will let you know what else we purchase. In a few months time, at least
three new works will enter the collection.

In the past year we have purchased the following:

Elizabeth Murray [image above, plus chairs from gala]
Betye Saar
Leon Golub (2)
Bruce Pollock
Charles Burns
Virgil Marti
Jane Irish
The latest PPC portfolio [Philadelphia Print Collaborative]
H.C. Westermann
-among others

More excitement to come!

[Libby: I'm about to fix the other post, too, so it doesn't remain wrong in cyberspace forever]


permanent link  libby 3:54 PM
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Paper circles and body curls

 
Whirly-gigs and circles, all on paper, make the theme at Gallery Joe's three-day exhibit this month. I ran in to see the short show last weekend and while there's but one more day to see it, Jan. 22, I recommend a stroll among these circles, which, unlike crop circles, you can do indoors and without the mysical hocus pocus. The reason the show's up so short a time is that the gallery is travelling west to San Francisco for the international art fair, something they've done for six years.

When Libby and I were talking about the rationale for a 3-day exhibit, (all that work! for three days?) I was reminded of conversations I've had in the past with Gallery Joe's owner/director, Becky Kerlin. Kerlin told me she is never happier than when she's unwrapping and installing art in her space. It's the process of thinking about the work, looking at this in juxtaposition to that, basically curating a show, that stokes her fires. So, if you love it that much a 3-day exhibit makes as much sense as a 30-day exhibit.

Anyway, run in to see the Kate Moran photographs, like the great spiral (shown) and the forest of twigs looking like ribbon candy. Moran makes lovely, small objects, sometimes photographing them and showing the photographs. (Sometimes she shows the objects themselves.) She likes to photograph the things when they're moving, which results in a disturbing kind of Victorian ghostliness--the underworld of fairy tales and childhood's darker moments.

And while we're in a PAFA stream of consciousness, Moran, by the way,is a PAFA grad and PAFA faculty member. The Academy should be lauding her as an example of an artist trained in the tradition but unafraid of breaking out.



Other artists in the show, all of whose work evidences circular logic, are Astrid Bowlby (artblog fave and, by the way, PAFA grad (MFA, 1995)), Wes Mills, Bruce Conner, Mark Lombardi, Winifred Lutz, Lynne Woods Turner, Emily Brown and Linn Meyers.

Mills's piece, (shown) looks like a lowest of low tech kid's toy. It's a splayed envelope with some paper engineering in the form of paper strips glued on and a paper circle dangling from a string. There are also a few smudges and dots of ink. I don't know what its title is or exactly what it's getting at but in its (most likely not intended) James Castle forlorn isolationism, it evokes childhood's lonely moments when even the slightest objects, stared at long enough, can take you away to somewhere, anywhere, other than where you are.

Meanwhile in Brooklyn


Not circles but bodies, curled, buffed, and a little bit odd, are on the menu this month at Jack the Pelican Presents which features, among others, Philadelphia-area artist Norm Paris.

"The Hedonistic Imperative," which opens Jan. 15, looks, from the images I got, to be a feisty round-up of can there be life after Currin and Yuskavage art. Bodies, bodies, bodies and a few landscapes and other things that are false or cartoony. Paris, one of three artists (the other two are Daniel Heyman, and Lindsay Feuer) in the upcoming Fleisher Challenge 4 exhibit opening April 22, was in last year's Arcadia Works on Paper exhibit. He showed a drawing that compared his arm with that of Arnold Schwartzenegger's. Paris's work in Pelican's show (shown) is in a similar vein, no pun intended, comparing the Governator's torso with that of two other men.

Others in the show include James Adams, Matt Borruso, Carl D'Alvia, Michael Joaquin Grey, Paul Jacobsen, Jerry Kearns, Kim Keever, Ted Mineo, Michael Rees, Robert Yarber and Suzanne Walters.

Now there was a James Adams who graduated from PAFA and whose work I've seen at Vox Populi (in 2001). I don't know if that's him but Adams's image for the Pelican show was a beyond-Currin figure similar to what I remember from Vox so I'm guessing it might be.

And I've seen Kim Keever's invented photographs -- they look like Hudson-River sublime landscapes but are totally invented in terrariums -- and was struck by their beauty and oddness. They're part of the West Collection at SEI.

Should be a good show.



permanent link  roberta 9:46 AM
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Monday, January 10, 2005

Signs of hope for change

 
The speechifiers at the press preview for the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts 200th birthday celebration and new facilities kick-off practically killed my native optimism. Roberta and I (see Roberta's post) went to see the new building and hear what the new mission was going to be (left, interior, grand staircase, historic PAFA building, with new paint job).

Alas, the new mission sounded like the old mission. But I found some signs of hope that this institution can dig itself out of the past and become the destination for art that it ought to be.

I think I'll start with what interests me most--Alex Baker's plans. Baker, the curator for contemporary art, whose hip-hot shows in the Morris Gallery have been the high points of PAFA's exhibition schedule in the past two years, is cooking. Besides Eamon Ore-Giron's and Nadia Hironaka, who Roberta previously posted were coming, look for work from Do-Ho Suh, the South Korean military vet whose work on loss of identity in groups includes the wallpaper of tiny heads that was part of the Fabric Workshop and Museum's wallpaper show in 2003 (right, Suh's "Some/One" made of dog tags). [CORRECTION: This is Baker working in collaboration with the Fabric Workshop and Museum, and not an Academy production].

Brazil-born artist Vik Muniz, whose photos are confounding lies, is also on the schedule for September. Photographer Nan Goldin, whose photos tell more of the truth than you ever might care to know is coming up in December. And intervention artist/painter Ellen Harvey, whose New York Beautification Project of 40 oval landscapes, 7 inches wide, dotting the eyesores of New York, will be creating a site-specific installation in the center hallway of the upstairs galleries. The project "Mirror," which has Harvey expanding into video and will include mirrors and faux-finishing techniques, is funded by Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative. Scheduled for Oct. 15 to Jan. 8, it responds the the building's High Victorian Gothic architecture. Also, look for video art from Beth Leister in the summer of 2006.

While Art Critic Ed Sozanski at the Philadelphia Inquirer is correctly worried about whether there will be curators to use the new spaces to good effect, Baker will continue holding the fort for contemporary art (see Sozanski's piece here, using artblog's ids--name, lrrf; email, libby@rosof.org; password,lrrfartblog).

As for the new exhibition spaces in the new Samuel M.V. Hamilton Building across Cherry Street from the original red-bricked confection, they're huge (see image).

The downstairs space, which looked like it would take up about 1/4 of a football field, was filled with tables and chairs for the next day's gala, so it was tough to imagine if the art would look good once the tables and chairs were gone. We couldn't back up from the art. We couldn't move close to the art. Roberta nailed it I think when she said it was kind of like looking at slides of the art. But the tables and chairs are only temporary.

That aside, the room appeared to swallow the work--not all that different a problem from the way MoMA's huge new contemporary galleries swallow the work, and similar to the way that the Institute of Contemporary Art, in its first couple of years in its current building, was unable to get a grip on how to make its large spaces not swallow the art whole. So I'm hoping that PAFA will eventually figure out how to make the cavernous spaces work, too (left image from left to right, Katz's "Night," Neil G. Welliver's "Cedar Breaks," and Philip Guston's "Ominous Land," viewed across tables and chairs).

Among the pieces on display in the downstairs Fisher Brooks Gallery were the newly purchased "Seated "Boxer II" (1960) from Leon Golub. Another newly purchased Golub, "Threnody II," was in the hall (image). (Baker gets credit for the Golub purchases). [CORRECTION: PAFA President Derek Gillman gets credit for this. The good news here is there's a budget that's being spent for Contemporary work. See an impressive list of new purchases here.]




In the upstairs gallery, which seemed pretty much the same amazing size, PAFA unveiled "The Chemistry of Color," a show of African-American art, most of it given to PAFA this year by Harold A. and Ann R. Sorgenti. Like downstairs, the space, cluttered with the tables and chairs, seemed to devour the work, some of which was pretty lively and would have looked great in other circumstances. (Center three pieces from left to right, "New Depths," 1989, by Charles Searles; "Tar Beach #2," 1990, by Faith Ringgold, and "Water Series #30" by Yvonne Pickering Carter). The exhibit also includes works by Syd Carpenter, John Dowell, Betye Saar, Jacob Lawrence, Willie Birch and scads of other notable artists, local and not local, with noteworthy work.

The entryway to the new building is a bit disappointing. I presume by its central stairway with faux skylight overhead that we're supposed to be reminded of the grand stairs next door in the historic building, but alas, the modern stairway is so puny relative to its surroundings that it doesn't meet the challenge. But that's just nit-picking and architecture.

By the way the new gift shop, Portfoloio, also in the new building, is a lot perkier and hipper than the previous incarnation. I liked the green purses in sculptured shapes and some of the jewelry. Portfolio still doesn't get kitsch, I'm unhappy to report. Others will be thrilled with that fact.

Speaking of architecture, the earlier eras of the collection did look great in the fabulous redo of the historic Frank Furness-George Hewitt building's galleries. The paint job alone is worth the price of admission, inspired by the building's original colors.

The hanging technique borrowed something from the Barnes Collection, grouping paintings within each period and genre by visual cues. The portraits and the landscapes looked spectacular, for starters. The lighting was perfect, illuminating familiar paintings in a way that invited a second look.

While PAFA's definitely worth a visit again, it's what the institution does with its new spaces that's key to whether people will come back over and over. The old spaces will remain pretty stagnant. So to fill the galleries with visitors, PAFA needs good curators (no more bland faculty-curated shows pulled from the collection, puleez) who can bring in work that's fresh and points of view that are fresh--and relevant to what's happening in the contemporary art world. I think Aaron Levy, in his piece about bee hives and curating and archiving (see post), had it right. The hive (read art collection at PAFA) needs to change or it will not survive as a system.
permanent link  libby 6:04 PM
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Friday comes on Saturday this month

 
Seeing art on the first Saturday of the month is something I highly recommend. Often you run into an artist tweaking something in her exhibit or showing a collector around. There are no crowds, it goes without saying, so no obstructed views, noise and distractions.



I'm covering the Vox Populi and Nexus exhibits for PW so will be brief here, mentioning only that the guest-curated exhibit at Vox had soul-satisfying, project-based documentary work by Charles LaBelle, Grady Gerbracht and Kyungmi Shin that were great poetic responses to the urban environment.

"Discontent, Part 2," at Nexus rounds up more works by the 23 gallery members on the theme of, well you know, discontent. Most of the work is new and triggered in response to the theme. Yet it seems to remain true to the spirit of the artists' previous works.

Most notable in a very large exhibit are Nic Coviello's "work in progress," a layered abstract mural in shades of green, gold, cream and black that I just adored. Coming so soon after Coviello's solo exhibit at the gallery, it is a surprise and pleasure to see the artist working in a new scale and attempting to break through to a new way of working. (image above is Coviello's mural, sorry the shot is a little dark)




Unfortunately, next to Coviello's piece is Jody Sweitzer's noisy "Pushy Merkin," (shown left) which is a space invader, aggressively coloring the psychic space in the gallery with its insistent soundtrack. Sweitzer's multi-media piece resembles a bad wig enthroned on a Victorian end table -- and sounds like a horror flick without the music and cathartic blood bath. It's melange of heavy breathing, cat screeches, more heavy breathing, thumps and bumps looped without appreciable buildup, climax and release and made me edgy enough to abbreviate my stay in the gallery.



Noise is the age old problem with multi-media works. It's not fair to require them to be silent and accessed solely via headphones. Some works, and this is undoubtedly true of "Pushy Merkin," exist for the sake of provoking --and get an extra charge from their intrusive natures.

But the siting of these pieces is crucial and here, in the open gallery, it didn't make much sense. This piece, which has a kind of Norman Bates aesthetic, would have benefitted from being sited in the gallery's storage closet or in some other clandestine space. Not only would that have enhanced its ugh-y charms but it would not have leaked over onto the nearby neighbors.



Speaking of space invaders, I took SEPTA home from Old City and was brought up short at 30th St. Station by the profusion of Salvador Dali advertisements for the upcoming PMA blockbuster exhibit. They're here, there and everywhere--banners, lightboxes, floor cloths, billboards along the tracks.



When I got on my train, I happened to sit in front of an Italian-speaking mother and her young bilingual son. My Italian is pretty rusty but I was focussed completely on deconstructing mom's chatter in Italian (responded to mostly in English by the boy).

As the train pulled out, the boy's words turned away from mom and focussed on what was passing by outside the window and I heard him say "Salvador Dali, Salvador Dali, Salvador Dali, Salvador Dali."



How odd I thought until I realized that he wasn't trying to hypnotize anyone as much as he was reading words he was seeing on the billboards as we passed each one. How clever they are, those PMA advertisers, to install the Dali message de trop which lets the musical words of the artist's name sink in to a level of subconscious recognition and desire.

Surreal, mesmerizing and who knows, maybe even effective in pulling folks in to the show.


permanent link  roberta 8:41 AM
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Sunday, January 09, 2005

PAFA, old and new

 
Libby and I ventured over to Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Friday for the press preview of the museum's new Hamilton Building and to check out the re-installation of the all-American permanent collection. PAFA, a museum and school established by Charles Wilson Peale, is celebrating its 200th birthday in 2005 and hoping to re-connect with the American populace via a series of exhibits, family workshops, kid friendly activities, symposia, artist's talks and, my favorite, a re-enactment at Independence Hall on Dec. 26, 2005 of the signing of the PAFA charter by Peale and "70 prominent Philadelphians." (I love re-enactments and have always wanted to be a re-enactor, but not of butter churning or marching off to battle. This seems like a good event and I'm keeping my calendar open just in case the casting call comes.)



I'll be writing more about all this for PW (issue of Jan. 19) but here's a peek at the good old PAFA and some thoughts about the new.

For starters the Furness galleries on the 2nd floor have been buffed up with paint colors that complement the spirit of the Frank Furness-designed Victorian Gothic building. (top images show blue room and yellow room) If you've never been, the building -- with amazing natural light due to the glass ceilings -- is a destination of itself, full of gingerbread details on the outside and sweet touches like gold stars in the ceiling, idiosyncratic lighting designed by the architect and tiles and wainscoting on the inside. Furness predates Frank Lloyd Wright and prefigures that architect's elegantly decorated structures. (shown below are some of those lights, and the ornate (are they Moroccan-influenced?) arches framing the 2nd floor front galleries.)



The collection re-installed in Furness is grouped chronologically and makes a nice art and history lesson for the viewer strolling through the spaces. The history lesson stops around 1940 however and must be picked up across the street in the Hamilton Building in several painting and sculpture galleries.



PAFA President Derek Gillman, in his remarks, compared the Academy to the National Gallery in London, saying the collections were roughly the same size but what PAFA lacked -- until now -- was wall space. Gillman, a Brit who's been with PAFA since 1999, said one especially nice aspect to the expansion is that they won't have to take down the permanent collection when they have special exhibits since those exhibits will now be housed in the Hamilton Building. Most obvious case in point -- the annual student shows in the Spring which in the past had the run of Furness. Now the student shows will be in Hamilton.)

PAFA's Kim Sajet, a perky Australian (whose down under accent, coupled with Derek Gillman's British intonations, made for particularly non-American one two punch during the introductory remarks) was responsible for the permanent collection's new look. And as she said, more than once, in what sounds like the 2005 marketing theme, "We no longer want to be a hidden treasure. We want to be part of your lives."



Jeffrey Carr, Dean of the Academy, gave a rousing speech unapologetic in its praise of traditionalism. "We're traditional but not old fashioned," he said at one point, pointing to a list of artists whose works are on view in the Hamilton Building's 2nd floor: Bo Bartlett, Sidney Goodman, Vincent Desiderio, Renee Foulks, Scott Noel, Jan Baltzell, and others. With the exception of Baltzell the list was a hair or two short of exciting. (image is Desiderio's "Pantocrater" a new acquisition, installed here in a space with luminous, recessed lighting that looks like it may have been the portal through which that space ship landed at PAFA.)



The Academy will continue to teach by its Academy methods (drawing and painting from the model; drawing from the plaster casts, etc.), said Carr. There will be no photography, no video, no graphic design taught. The idea is that students at PAFA will get the tools they need to begin their exploration of the world. What they do later is up to them.

Rogues Gallery




Here I'll leave off droning and offer a few more photos. Alex Baker, PAFA Curator of Contemporary Art was around showing off a few of the museum's new acquisitions (a couple Leon Golubs, an H. C. Westerman, (shown above) an Elizabeth Murray).

Baker (right) is an artblog fave known for his affinity for edgy art (he brought Phil Frost and Royal Canadian Arts Lodge to the Morris Gallery and has, both at PAFA and previously at the ICA been very supportive of Philadelphia's young up and coming artists.) Here Baker posed for me next to the new Murray painting which I cropped out deciding to show Baker instead of the Murray. (You'll have to imagine it -- "Breaking" (1980), a large, split-canvas affair all blues and greens and hard-edged angles notable as being her first split canvas. (And not her best, they got much better later).)



Elsewhere, Assistant Curator Robert Cozzolino, (shown left) a transplant from Madison, WI, (watch out...we're everywhere) told me about his upcoming works on paper exhibit, "Light, Line and Color" which will show the Academy's strength in prints and drawings ( 12,000 works in the collection). Cozzolino said he was excited about Philadelphia's thriving music scene and mentioned the events at Slought in particular.



Finally, I ran into Dean Carr when strolling through the Hamilton building. He kindly posed for me next to one of his own works, "Self Portrait," (right) a striking expressionist work that reminded me of the work of Robert Arneson. Written at the bottom of the piece are the words "Joshu Dog," which Carr said was a Buddhist koan but was Greek to me.

Libby will have much more to tell you. Stay tuned.






permanent link  roberta 5:50 PM
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Report from Tamil Nadu

 
Post by Madelon Galland

[I received this email, forwarded to me via a chain of mutual friends. --Libby]

I was in Auroville when the Tsunami hit and the buildings where my friends were staying were all destroyed, but no one was hurt and there were no deaths in the Auroville area. We were blessed.

Auroville has set up a refugee camp and is providing relief for many homeless villagers whose houses were destroyed. [Go here for more info about Auroville and tsunami].

This part of India (Tamil Nadu) was hit hard but not so bad as Sri Lanka and Indonesia of course. I still haven't seen the tv but the newspaper images have been horrifying. Somehow making an art piece seemed the only thing I could do in the moment.

Madelon Galland is an intervention artist and printmaker in New York.
permanent link  libby 4:47 PM
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First Friday changes for artblog

 
We're changing our approach to First Friday. What we know at this point is we no longer guarantee First Friday reviews by the Monday after. We did go out and look on the weekend, and we do have a number of shows to write about. My guess is it will take us several days to get through the backlog.

This is our first outing in the new system. If we like it we'll stick with it. If not, we'll change some more.

--Libby and Roberta


permanent link  libby 4:33 PM
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