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Friday, February 04, 2005

Jeff vs the worker bees

 
Post by Doug Witmer

[Ed note: Witmer is responding to Roberta's post about Jeff Koons's 50th birthday party.]

Hello Artblog:
Roberta, you write:
"...Big artist with big ego makes big noise and big money. It's not a lesson I like but it seems to be the one that works today."

I'm curious about your definition in this case of what "works today." Are you talking about the "lesson" you learned or the nature of the (earthly) "success" Koons has had or your opinion of the aesthetic value of Koons' work? I won't argue with you on his aesthetic terms. What he's about aesthetically is anathema to me, but his work is out there and presents/reflects compelling issues/problems that I think are important to consider. I would agree on this front that it "succeeds."

The New Yorker story...yeah, entertaining hijinks...only in NYC. But I caution (anyone) getting sucked into that perpetuated myth of the New York Uber Artist Hero. I'm finding myself continuously surprised that in this day and age it still exists. Shouldn't that story be played-out by now?

I believe there is another buzz: It's collectively louder and it comes from all of us other artist-worker-bees. Each day in the USA the mere act of working in the realm of the human aesthetic makes each one of us more and more radical. Cheers, Douglas (image is Witmer's painting, "Refrain," which appeared in an exhibition in Philadelphia Cathedral last year.)

Douglas Witmer is a regular artblog contributor and busy bee. See his website and read his blog for more.

permanent link  roberta 8:03 AM
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Thursday, February 03, 2005

Landscapes from far, near and now

 
A show in which two of the participating six artists create landscapes with wax may not sound too promising at first blush, but the show, "Introduction'02" at Pentimenti Gallery is swell and would make a good First Friday stop.



Brooklyn and New York artist Gloria Houng's small landscapes, layered in layers of wax on small boards, exploit silhouettes and icon-like bits of our billboarded and communications-tower littered landscapes to create a thoroughly up-to-date take on the techno world around us. Houng focuses more on the sky and the treetops, not the land, to show the contrast between voluptuous nature and intrustive, rectilinear man-made structures. She also adds a tiny, tiny cow in each painting, a reference to nature unsullied and tended. Gestures and patterned swoops suggest the invisible communications that fly through the atmosphere (image, right, with cow on telephone pole crossbeam).

Houng's modernity and her wary look at the world we have built stands in sharp contrast to Thea Schrack's beautiful, encaustic-paint-coated color photographs.

I'm not sure why I didn't reject these out of hand as just more landscapes, but they seemed to be about memory and the transformation of fact into a kind of dreamscape. And speaking of the transformation of fact, although the image beneath is a photograph, Schrack often paints over and transforms what's beneath to the point where the original photo is obscured and what's shows is something entirely new. Most of these paintings use a river as the traditional landscape pathway that draws you in to the wilderness, in this case the Cosumnes River in California that Schrack had canoed, a place that appears to be unmarred by civilization. The breathtaking reflections on the water, the water's merger into the landscape around it are not a new subject. But the work looked fresh, the edges declarations of materiality, the markmaking and brushwork on the images barely visible most of the time, melted into the encaustic method. A painting from a trip Schrack took to France, with the striped shadows cast by a row of cedars on a country path calling Van Gogh and Cezanne to mind, reveals a substratum of handwriting in the layers (image left, from Schrack's Cosumnes River series).

And speaking of layers and text, Mary Bennett, another left coaster, makes swell sculptures from old books by cutting and folding and sometimes stitching or tying the pages. The mappy inside covers speak to journeys of the mind, and the intensive folding speak to time traversed. In her artist's statement, Bennett, a former corporate sort, wrote, "I am nost interested in using media that has a prior history where I can rework, reimagine, recontextualize or just make up a story" (image right, "The Winemakers," mixed media & book, 8.25 x 12.25 x 6.5 inches).

Aurora Robson's paintings are at once cartoony and rich with paint. Some of the paintings, monochrome enamel with white figures on them, also have layers, some of the white figures painted over, the raised outlines from underneath revealed on the super-slick enamel surface (image left). The blobby shapes reminded me of Caspar the Friendly Ghost racing around and bumping into other blobs in the crowded atmosphere. The shapes also had floral allusions and suggestions of a repeat pattern that never quite materializes, but stays loose, uncommitted and verging on chaos. Another series of paintings by Robson suggested landscapes or sea scapes, with lots of compressed motion in the squiggly, loaded brush strokes. Robson, who grew up in Hawaii, works in New York, and will have her first solo show at Richard Levy Gallery in Albuquerque.

The only local artist in the group, Veleta Vancza, brings snappy color density to vitreous enamel over copper mesh to create small sculptural wall pieces that have a jewel-like intensity. These are not your refrigerator's vitreous enamel; how nice if your refrigerator got a color infusion like this. Vancza, who last year had a Fleisher Challenge show (see post), has taken the imagery from the Josef Albers square to something more freeform--although still in a painterly rectangle, the visible bits of wire mesh suggesting a woven canvas (whereas all the paintings in this show are on board, not canvas!). This newer work, with its peek-a-boo voids and its ragged edges like torn fabric, are lovely. At the same time, their blobby popcorn-meets-bauble looks talk nicely to Robson's comic white blob paintings (images right and at top of post).

The sixth artist in the group is David Collins, another New Yorker, whose 10" x 10" squares on wood seem to offer portholes into space or somewhere else beyond the wall. Collins' favorite strategy is contrast, and by layering less-juicy monotypes with the density of brushed-on marks and swatches, Collins creates a visual suprise. He also juxtaposes architectural and industrial and pop imagery with gesture. At the same time, there's something restrained and Japanese about this work. A rakishly angled metal-looking pipe reminded me of James Rosenquist's "F-111," but the difference in scale and the focus on a labor-intensive method suggested these are anti-billboards, and something quite different is going on here--a process of charting space--outer space, geographic space, architectural space and maybe also inner space. I like the marks and the space and chart qualities, but in some of them, the exuberance is quenched by the restraint (image left, "Horimono 4").
permanent link  libby 6:02 PM
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Beware the almost Ides of March

 
Libby and I are contemplating a trip to the Armory show and the Scope art fair in New York in early March. (Both fairs are on the second weekend in March.) That's plenty of art for one weekend I figure. Artblog pal Rob Matthews wrote to tell us that Gallery Joe will be at Scope, with the awesome Astrid Bowlby the featured artist. Matthews will have his (also awesome) work there with Joe as well. (image is detail from Bowlby's installation in Gallery Joe's vault in 2003. For more Bowlby images check out Joe's page on the Scope site.)

But hold on, there's even more going on that pre-Ides-ian weekend. Today's Carol Vogel article in the NY Times says that the PS 1 "Greater New York 2005" exhibit opens Mar 13...! Carrumba! 175 artists in that show. (user: lrrfartblog; password: artblog)

I'm still hoping we'll have a "Greater Philadelphia" exhibit. Hello, anybody? How about renting out the Armory (speaking of Armories) and whumping it up there...no? C'mon curators and teachers. You can do it.

permanent link  roberta 5:57 PM
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Groundhog emerges here a day late

 
Just in case you're thinking that your tax dollars are totally wasted, a friend sent me this link that proves to me they are not. Ahem, you may not agree.

But this is apparently a state supported website promoting Groundhog Day. My favorite video was the men's room chase. If you're looking for your own shadow, and feel like you can't quite catch up, well then this will seem like a cut above advertising to you, too.
permanent link  libby 3:01 PM
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Photos in flux

 
I am on a campaign to look at more photography. A couple of things set me off (image, "Anticipation #2," C-print by Christine McMonagle).

First were the landscape photos at the Lewis and Clark show at Moore College (see post), and my wondering what might make a landscape photo meaningful if it looks just like a landscape and nothing more.

Then there was a conversation I had with photographer Ditta Baron Hoeber a couple of days ago. She was bemoaning the closing of her favorite photo processor and printer, Pro Color. It's a tough time to be in the photo processing business considering everyone is now printing their own photos on their desktops.

Being an analog photographer in these times of changing technology has its problems, and Ditta, being a perfectionist, now has to come up with another m.o. for achieving the look she wants. If she can't come up with a processor who can do the job and can see what she sees, will she quit working in film? Will she get what she wants out of digital?

All of this made me dash off to see "Viewpoint," InLiquid's small group show of four artists--Anita Allyn, Julianna Foster, Christine McMonagle and Matthew Hollerbush--in the Painted Bride Art Center's cafe. Ooops. It doesn't open until Friday. The walls were still being spackled (image, Matthew Hollerbush's "Stairway," color photograph behind serri opaque material).

But the photos were laid out on flat surfaces, and I got a chance to look a little (not enough), and what I saw intrigued me. I don't know who did what of the photos I saw, but surprising angles, subjects and colors seemed provocative. I also don't know if everything here was analog, but it looked like much of the work was. The McMonagle print at the top is a C-print. I don't know about the Hollerbush (I'm guessing film).

So I didn't accomplish what I set out for. But I plan to go back to this show when I can actually see it. Plus there's Anita Allyn's video that I didn't see at all.
permanent link  libby 10:00 AM
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Wednesday, February 02, 2005

Truth stranger than fiction

 

My friend Ann gave me a book recently, "The Matisse Stories," by A.S. Byatt. It's not a new book (1993) but the slim volume has three great art stories that I wolfed right down. ($8.80 at Amazon... and free at the library!) Byatt, of course, is all about obsession and people whose sensibilities are almost too finely attuned for our world ("Possession," e.g.). Here, the stories are true to form but sneak their way into the business of art as well. Best for me was "Art Work" in which a married couple, Debbie and Robin (he's a painter, she's a magazine editor) and their housekeeper, Mrs Brown play out a cathartic moment in all their lives.

Debbie uses her connection with the magazine to arrange a visit by a gallery owner to her husband's studio (in the hope of getting him an exhibit). The gallery owner, Shona, comes by and quickly gets this about Robin's work: that she won't be able to sell much of it because it all looks like the same picture painted again and again. She's oblique in her comments to the artist and says the works might look to an untrained person like they were all pretty much the same work (one sunset after another; one still life set-up painted many times). (image below is Matisse's "Red Studio" 1911. I wonder what Shona would think of Matisse's works, many of which seem repetitive.)



She asks Robin whether he ever thought of taking it in a new direction. He doesn't get it and talks about light and shape and form and about painting more sunsets and still lifes and that's the end of the meeting. On the way out Mrs. Brown runs after the gallery owner and talks with her briefly. And don't you know, Mrs. Brown winds up getting the exhibit at the gallery! Turns out she's a secret fabric installation artist and makes quirky, (needless to say, obsessive) patchwork environments full of embroidered detail -- spider webs full of bejewelled objects. The gallery owner sees potential in the work (and marketability although how is never explained, but there you are it's fiction). The show's a hit and Mrs. Brown quits her cleaning job to become an artist full time. Robin and Debbie get a new housekeeper and ultimately Robin turns his bottled-up rage at being passed over in favor of his cleaning lady into something new, loose and fierce. And the new cleaning lady, who gets the last word, says about the new painting, "I do think he's got something."

The story is of course allegorical and full of wish fulfillment (who wouldn't want to be discovered and rescued from cleaning houses and delivered into the world of making art full time and selling it to an audience that appreciates it...who doesn't long for that moment of cathartic change no matter how painful). However, while the lesson about catharsis seems true, the lesson about the honest, hardworking but overlooked artist getting her reward, on the other hand, is great fiction -- Hollywood fiction almost -- but factually inaccurate.

Fact or fiction

More factual, indeed all facts, is the New Yorker Talk of the Town piece this week by Calvin Tompkins about Jeff Koons's 50th birthday party. Read it here. The piece has a kind of frog-prince in Neverland charm that almost strains credulity, but it's all true.

Koons, described as one whose ego is so big, and whose projects are so vast and money-sucking that they require more than one gallery to achieve fruition, seems, notwithstanding a trail of bad dealings and art world shenanigans... everybody's favorite. The golden boy. The art world power players came from all over to fete the boy at mid-century and treat him to his favorite meal -- tuna burgers! Happiness was all around and even those previously feuding artists David Salle and Julian Schnabel were talking convivially again. How could you make this up?

Koons, whose work seems to get better with time, may wind up being our Michelangelo. Although instead of dancing to the tune of the piper (or patron) as the Rennaisance artist had to, Koons seems to be calling the shots and patrons are dancing in line waiting to buy. (image is "Michael and Bubbles" which, experienced live in a museum, is just too good, with all its allusions to Louis XIV gilt and Hummel figurines and wax museum figures and circus sideshows -- it has thrilling contemporary and historical weirdness going for it like no other object.)

Big artist with big ego makes big noise and big money. It's not a lesson I like but it seems to be the one that works today.

permanent link  roberta 8:21 AM
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Tuesday, February 01, 2005

Art is everywhere

 
My life turns up art everywhere I go, it seems.

This past week I took my first sally on Craig's List, the perfect online counterculture want-ad column, and got immediate results. I sold a file cabinet and a range hood in two days flat! And the bonus (this is where I was really going) was that the person who bought my range hood had an email address that indicated a business name, Phillips Metal. I asked (knowing full well that it couldn't be) if this was John Phillips, and the answer was no, it was Robert Phillips. I gave the site a look. Turns out he's the metal artist who made the wonderful fish frieze over the door of the "Striped Bass" (restaurant). Anyway, the range of work and the beauty of it knocked my socks off, so if you're looking for some architectural metal art, check this work out.

In the real world, I was at the corner of 13th and Market, charging off the curb as the light turned green, amidst a throng of Center City pedestrians, when I looked down and saw that I was about to step down on a very small version of the Toynbee artist's message--"Toynbee idea/movie 2001/raise dead/planet Jupiter" (see Roberta's post and see Toynbee website). This one was about the size of a 3 x 5" index card, and it was clearly affixed with a little mound of asphalt. This location was not listed on the Web site. Is this guy crazy, obsessed, an artist, a fundamentalist, a cult member (image top, the Toynbee message at 13th & Market)?

And while I was crossing the Locust Street bridge over 38th Street, I saw this wheatpasted wonder--a puppy-like critter that merges innocence and bad science. I had seen it also on the boarded up windows of the new Strikes Bowling Alley at 40th and Locust, while the place was undergoing construction, but the window boards are gone and I missed my opportunity to take a photo there (image by anonymous. Correction 2/26/05:image by Jason Hsu).

And last but not least, I got a phone call from sometime artblog contributor Ditta Baron Hoeber,who just came back from Los Angeles, where her son Julian Hoeber had an opening at Blum and Poe Gallery in Los Angeles. She reported that about 400 people came, half from the art world, half from the movies kingdom, and the opening included two screenings of Julian's new feature-length movie. If you go to the web page, you can see a clip of the movie (for sure I couldn't have watched the whole thing), the cartoons, the whole installation. As for Ditta, no slouch herself, besides a solo exhibit that just went up in the downstairs front room in the Philadelphia Art Alliance, she will be showing some new work in a photography show in March at Freeform at MBN Studios in Northern Liberties.
permanent link  libby 4:15 PM
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Mission creeps to Nexus

 
I'm excited about this one. Missioncreep.com, writer Mike Walsh's funny, funky website, is coming to the real world this month in an exhibit, "Missioncreep.com Live!" at Nexus (front space). I interviewed Walsh for a piece for the Weekly. Read here. The guy's smart and energetic with a great sense of humor. And his site, which has been up for eight years, has art by some of our neighborhood's best -- and most darkly humorous -- artists. (Mitch Gillette, James Mundie, Judith Schaechter, Sarah McEneaney, Tina Newberry, Susan Hagen, Bill Amundson, Ted Adams and Carol Nowak.)

(top image is Mitch Gillette's hot off the easel "Treat," 2004, a large oil on canvas which will be in the show at Nexus. If you remember Gillette's previous paintings with mannikins and bufoons cavorting in post-apocalyptic landscapes, this looks NEW AND DIFFERENT!)



Many live activities are scheduled for the month-long show, including an evening slide show/travelogue by Bill Amundson, a Wisconsin-born, Denver-based artist and humorist who's a friend of Walsh's. (all the artists on the site are F.O.M. (friends of Mike). That's on Saturday, February 5, 7:30 pm. Amundson, by the way, also has a solo exhibit of his works this month at PII Gallery, around the corner from Nexus on Race, between 2nd and 3rd. (image is Amundson's "Home with Billboard," pencil, 1998)



Another of the many don't miss live events is Judith Schaechter's lecture,"Surviving your creativity" on Saturday, Feb. 19 at 3 pm. Schaechter, sometime artblog contributor and full-time stained glass artist (featured in the 2002 Whitney Biennial) is a rousing speaker whose intelligence and sass make her talks memorable performances. (image is Schaechter's stained glass piece, "Child Bride")



Wood carving artist and writer Susan Hagen will precede Schaechter with a 30-minute tour of the exhibit which, in addition to the art will have archival material from Walsh's "Expresso Tilt" underground literary magazine from the late 1980's and early 1990s.

One more thing, Newberry, who paints metaphorical self-portraits, some of which will be at Nexus, has a show now at Schmidt-Dean Gallery. Libby told you about it in her post here. (image is detail of Hagen's "Tree Sculpture: Hanging Man," 1998, 20" tall, limewood, oils)

This is representational art but it's not academy-style art. With its dark twists and turns, the Missioncreep crew provides inner-fueled storytelling about the world and its foibles. See you at the opening.
permanent link  roberta 9:01 AM
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Cross town Dali interchange

 
Around Christmas time I wrote a preview of New York artist and designer Jonathan Adler's exhibit "Reform" at Temple Rodeph Shalom for PW. Read here. I was also madly shopping online for presents for in-laws and decided to buy something from the PMA online store (highly recommended). While I was deciding what to put in my shopping cart I happened upon what I considered a serendipitous cross-fertilization between Rodoph Shalom's show and the PMA -- to wit, a mustachioed, Salvador Dali vase by Adler, for sale at the PMA. ($100)

Nothing in the world of commerce is really serendipitous. I assume the PMA commissioned the vase for the Dali show. And the Adler show at Rodeph Shalom, well that's a nice instance of cross-town programming, organized, by the way, by Rodeph's curator, Matt Singer, who works at the PMA! Adler's pots are influenced by his immersion in reform synagogues as a kid and in the pop sensibility of the 1970s. I've held one in my hands, a little pot-bellied, striped vase with a capacity to hold one single flower, and it's a curvy, sexy, understated love of a pot. And if you're in New York -- or Miami Beach or Los Angeles, you can check out Adler's empire. He's got stores. Check out the empire online at his website. Don't miss the manifesto page in which he says he believes celebrities should pay full price.

permanent link  roberta 8:05 AM
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Monday, January 31, 2005

Monday morning funnie

 

I've been meaning to tell you about Scott Bateman for a while. He's a left coast artist, designer and syndicated editorial cartoonist who publishes a new round of sketchbook material regularly. The sketches are minimalist (bodies floating, some up, some down) but they go nicely with the words which can be very funny, smart and politically punchy. He's got a pretty deep website with an online journal, some editorial cartoons and other material. Nicely laid out, it's an ambitious site and an ambitious body of work.

I scrolled down quickly in Scott's latest sketchbook and smiled here and chuckled there, said "ah" and "ah hah" several times and stopped at this one (shown) which made me laugh. Its stoner affect is somehow perfect.

The text (if you can't read it) says "Dude, whoever wrote that part of "Sympathy for the Devil" where they go "Woo Hoo" for like, forty minutes straight is a fucking genius."



permanent link  roberta 7:50 AM
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Neil Jenney

 

Cynthia King of Fresh Paint wrote to say the name of the "Atmosphere" painter I was looking for was Neil Jenney. (We knew that of course) Cynthia has a nice post praising the installation of contemporary art at MAM and narrating the interactions between the pieces. Thanks, too to the other smart kid, Chris Ashley, who also wrote to us about Jenney. Chris, by the way, is a Berkeley-based web-savvy artist, blogger, educator and helpful person who once upon a time, when our artblog was green, gave Libby and me crucial HTML advice to make our blog more beautiful. We are forever in Chris's debt. Hi Chris. And thanks to both of you!! (image is Jenney's "North America Divided")
permanent link  roberta 7:12 AM
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Sunday, January 30, 2005

Geographic destiny

 
Why, I asked myself, was I so enjoying the show inspired by the Lewis and Clark expedition at the galleries atMoore College? After all, it had a lot of realistic landscapes, which I'm always griping about.

Actually, it took me a little bit of time to get into the landscapes in the show.

But this show, which was curated by Curator of Contemporary Art Rock Hushka at the Tacoma Art Museum, is a show of ideas, and the landscapes are so much more than just pretty scenes. In the context of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, it's a show about nation building, nation destroying, philosophy, racial assumptions, cultural values, change, politics, ecological transformation and place.

Hushka, before the reception last night, delivered a slide lecture right next door to Moore, at the Academy of Natural Sciences, which has its own Lewis and Clark Expedition exhibit of artifacts. The small crowd in the auditorium hovered at about 30 or 40, and the temperature in the auditorium hovered at what seemed like 60, but we who had braved the cold to get there were happy to hear the talk.

The art exhibit, "Lewis & Clark Territory: Contemporary Artists Revisit Place, Race, and Memory," three years in the making, drew work from artists who live along the route of Lewis and Clark.

I don't mean to give the impression that this show is all landscape. It includes sculpture, photos, and conceptual work, and its themes, as the title proclaims, are place, race and memory. It includes work from Native Americans as well as mostly Western artists and even an artist from Pennsylvania. After all, "Philadelphia was the logistical and philosophical home of the expedition," said Hushka.

The painted and photographed landscapes in the show reflect some expected modern concerns like nuclear pollution at Hanford, Wash. ("The Hanford Reach" series of photos by Mark Rewedel), or clear-cut foresting in Michael Brophy's "January," a fierce, denuded landscape under lowering skies (right).

I know that people all over the United States are painting works about destruction of our planet, so in a sense, this isn't so unusual. But it's an angry painting of impressive scale, and the landscape is huge, the deep space suggesting that the destruction that's visible up close goes on to the horizon and beyond. The orange tree trunk sliced open is a raw body part, and the black land and skies remind me of the landscape of "Mad Max." This takes the convention of the grandeur of the West and uses it to show the grand scale of destruction.

Nearby is Leo Saul Berk's "Ribbon," a sculpture made from a single tree trunk, milled to become a single, long piece of veneer that Burke rolls up and then unrolls into a spiral shape in the gallery (image, left below).

The subject matter of "Ribbon" is similar to Brophy's, but the method and allusions are contemporary, like Richard Serra's steel "Torqued Ellipses" and also Louise Bourgeois' "She Lost It" nautilus-shaped maze that was at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in 1992-1993.

The knots in the wood provide natural peepholes and patterns of light in the 101-inch high walls, but even with those outlooks, the barely one-person wide interior passages press on anyone who enters. And the remarkableness of its fabrication brings up issues of commerce and the plywood industry (Berk got a plywood factory to stop production and shave the veneer for him, Hushka said) as well as the welfare of trees and their remarkable physical qualities.

Even work that glorifies the landscape contains questions and worries, unlike the glorified images of Western landscape art from 200 years ago by Albert Bierstadt. I think here of Susan Seubert's "Ten Most Popular Places to Dump a Body," a series of 10 photos taken in the Columbia Gorge of unsurpassed natural beauty -- and menace. The locales are based on law-enforcement records showing where bodies were found (right, one of Seubert's series--the lights right are reflections on the glass, sorry).

The imagery of these photos remind me of European landscape painting. But the multiple ironies in the title place these works in contemporary times.

Even Kent Moylan's painting, "Mt. Moran and Thor Peak," which grabs the nature's grandeur theme and runs with it, is the antithesis of Manifest Destiny and expansionism, with its trompe l'oeil, angled frame of tourist-hotel architecture expressing disillusion and limits and perspective (image, left).

Maps as an expression of landscape also have a presence in this show--speaking to politics, nationhood, the division between conceptual space and the land itself.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith's map, "Indian Country Today," alludes to Jasper Johns' map paintings and prints in red, yellow and blue. It also alludes to Indian prior ownership of the land, to the newspaper "Indian Country Today," the most popular Indian publication across the nation. Smith layers her states over headlines and articles from the paper, rich with political content.


Robert Yoder created a different sort of chart made from Seattle's old plywood road signs, the directions chopped up so you don't know where you are going. The rectangle is painting and map shaped, and the chunks of signage make their own physical topography from objects that used to interrupt the landscape and certainly didn't improve upon it.

Corwin Clairmont's take on landscape is more emphatically sculptural. A member of the Confederated Salem and Kootenai Tribal Nation, his "Asphalt Storm Clouds Over the Reservation," made of teepee poles, maps, pictures and chunks of floating asphalt show the impact a contested road plan would have on reservation land. The photos of the landscape, pre-road, are strewn over the impersonal roadway maps. Without the title, this piece would lose its bitter humor, its visual charms not quite able to carry the concept on their own.

I also enjoyed Clairmont's conceptual take on the "1855 Treaty of Hell Gate," a copy of a treaty between the western Montana and Idaho tribes and the U.S. government. He printed the treaty on cards the size of picture postcards and showed a stack of them, a demonstration of how worthless the U.S. government's promises turned out to be--not just in this treaty but in all the treaties with the native tribes. As instructed, I pocketed one.

Native American work runs the gamut from work like Smith's and Clairmont's, which come out of international contemporary art traditions, to the extraordinary traditional bead work on Lakota tribesman Thomas Haukaas' "Special Boy Shirt," created as an act of mourning for a young child who was killed by gang violence (right). The imagery shows the creation myth of buffalo spirits pussing up a man through the black hills.

Striding the two cultures is Marvin Oliver's "Orca," a sort of totem made of glass. The fabrication method, which makes use of laser technology, is Oliver's invention (left below, detail of "Orca," a blade of glass emerging from waves of glassy water).

Background information about each piece is on the wall labels, and I enjoyed almost every piece in this show.

Others in the show in show are: Victoria Adams, Anne Appleby, Jackie Larsen Bread, Ron Carraher, Corwin Clairmont, Sally Cleveland, Chris Faust, Joe Feddersen, Juanita Growing Thunder Fogarty, Pat Courtney Gold, Linda Oyatewaste Haukaas, Maynard White Owl Lavadour, Rachel Maxi, Dorothy Morgan, Megan Murphy, Martin Red Bear, Peter Rostovsky, Bently Spang, Terry Toedtemeier, and Alice Wheeler.

Check out the upcoming programs relating to the show at the Moore College gallery website.

Also, on your way into the show, check out Moore College of Art Adjunct Professor Robert Byrd's illustrations for a Ranger Rick article on Lewis and Clark. I found the information about the illustration process pretty interesting, and was amazed by the detailed visual information about the expedition, its equipment, the animals and the landscape included in the illustrations. I spoke to Byrd at the reception Friday, and he said that he spent a lot of time researching the facts before he started work on the illustrations.

And while I'm urging you to check out stuff, the whole Lewis and Clark series of museum and institutional programs around Philadelphia for this year's 200th anniversary celebration include not just the photo show at the Art Museum (see Roberta's post), but also an exhibit of artifacts from the expedition at the Academy of Natural Sciences, and a display this summer of some of the original journals at the American Philosophical Society, which commissioned the expedition and therefore owns the journals. (I learned this last bit of information from Roy Goodman, the society's assistant librarian and curator of printed materials, who was also at the reception Friday.)
permanent link  libby 6:00 PM
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Museum mission impossible

 

Why is it the MAM has such a great contemporary art collection in spacious galleries and the PMA's seems puny -- and crammed into two comparatively tiny rooms and a hallway or two? I've been stewing about this for days since my trip. If you've been to the PMA contemporary galleries, you know what's there, a small sampling of the big boys -- Robert Gober, Jeff Wall, Gabriel Orozco, Gerhard Richter, Peter Doig, Sol LeWitt, Warhol, Sigmar Polke. And I know that's the tip of the PMA collection iceberg and it's not fair to compare but somehow I feel a museum mission comparison coming on.

Maybe it's like the realtor's song: location, location, location. When a museum is as far away from Chelsea and 53rd St. as MAM is, perhaps its mission includes bringing contemporary New York to the countryside. That's what fueled Andrew Carnegie when he established the Carnegie International -- he wanted to bring the best in contemporary art to Pittsburgh and then buy some things for his collection while he was at it.

On the other hand, when a museum like the PMA is so close to Chelsea and 53rd St., perhaps it doesn't feel the need to educate its audience in this way (assuming its audience can and does go to NY on a regular basis). It's more complicated of course and has to do with a museum's mission and I'll have a few more thoughts at the bottom but first a Sunday picture show of the MAM contemporary art collection and then we'll talk a little more about museums. Ladies and gentlemen, start your scroll bars. (top image is MAM Calatrava lobby on a cloudy, snowy day)


From the MAM Contemporary Art Collection

Jackie Winsor's "Painted Piece," 1979-80. The piece has 50 coats of paint and was dragged along the sidewalk in front of the artist's studio to give it that "shabby chic" ambiance. (Was she ahead of her time or what.) My introduction to Winsor's process-heavy work came in 1992 at the MAM in a travelling retrospective they organized. It's a show I still remember.


This Eva Hesse piece, "Right After," (1969) shares the gallery with Winsor...



and with a Donald Judd stack -- like the one at MOMA only MAM's is blue -- and with an Agnes Martin painting (not shown) and "Atmosphere" by an artist whose name escapes me and I can't describe it to Google's satisfaction so I will have to fill in that blank later (Maybe somebody can help me...I think the PMA owns a piece also). [note: thanks to readers Cynthia King and Chris Ashley who reminded me that the Atmosphere painting is by Neil Jenney.]


Magdalena Abakanovic's piece, "Two figures on a beam" (1992) (foreground) which faces Lake Michigan is near a Gerhardt Richter scraped painting, "Breath" (1989).


Robert Gober's "Untitled," 1997, is an old-fashioned suitcase opened and empty. When you look into it, as these students and teacher are doing, you see (and hear) a bubbling, watery subteranean grotto with coral and seaweed, and if you look closely, you see the bare legs of a man dangling a baby in front of him. Whether he's going to put the baby leg-first down in the water or what is going on is not clear, but the surprise of the legs is, well, it's worth the price of admission. This piece is both weird, beautiful and dark. Life and death in a box -- it draws me to it and shocks me each time I see it.


I didn't remember that MAM owned a Komar and Melamid, but there it is, a painting from their Socialist Realist period (that is Stalin on the bottom and a girl with her pants down; and death with a clock -- that works -- on the top.). I'd like to hear the story of how this piece made its way into the collection.


It's smaller than the one in MOMA but this Josiah McElheny glass and mirror infinity box, "Modernity circa 1952" (2004), is a wonderful combination of craft, design and high art. Like a warped descendant of Roman glass (all beauty, form and function), its machine perfection and promise of infinity is all about image. Use and functionality be damned.


Speaking of functionality, Andrea Zittel's "A-Z Living Unit" (1993) sits opposite McIlheney's box, and it's a compact, survivalist warrior. It's as full of life, hope, whimsy and humor as McIlheney's is full of death, illusion and vinegar. I vote for Andrea.






Philadelphia has a Martin Puryear piece outside in Fairmount Park. (I've never seen it but I hear it's great....Resolution: Will see Puryear in Park this year.) Here's MAM's Puryear, "Maroon" (1987-88). It's made of steel, wire mesh, wood and tar. Both bulbous and truncated, it reminds me of a hot water bottle, or of an internal organ, maybe the lungs, maybe of a giant smoker. It's pretty great.


Laura Owens triptych "Untitled" (2003) is a surprise. I don't remember an Owens piece having so much life and accessibility. Puppy in the snow, a tree with fruit, the land is wintry and snowy but the piece is downright vibrant in comparison with what I've seen which seems low energy and withholding of affect.


Peter Cain's "Miata" (1991) is around the corner from Owens in a kind of painting room that also included a nice Peter Saul (not shown). Cate reminded me that we (and Libby) had seen a show of Cain's in Chelsea last year. The auto eroticism is just excellent. The piece reminded me that Patricia Piccinini is doing a similar car-love chunk-thing in her sculptures -- which we also saw in Chelsea. See post and post for more on Piccinini.


Next door to Gober's suitcase is a room with a Christoper Wool, "Untitled" (1990) (background) and an infinite stack by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, "Untitled (Veterns Day Sale)" (1989) (foreground). I'm sorry my notes don't say whose work is in the middle. I was too focussed on picking up my Veterans Day Sale piece I guess. Being a give-away artist myself, I feel compelled to collect Gonzalez-Torres's work. Hardly a chore since I love his work anyway.


In the video area, near the Oursler piece (see previous post for more on that) is a Bill Viola installation in a dark room. You hear it before you enter. "Science of the Heart" (1983) includes a bed and a large projection of what looks to be a beating human heart. (Sorry about the fuzzy, crooked shot). The heartbeats speed up and slow down and, while I can't say it's my favorite Viola piece, it's a lyrical work...



and so completely different from the Oursler and the Nam June Paik piece "Literature is not a book" (1988) (above) which is right nearby, that together they give you a hint of the range of what's been done in video over the past 20 years. The Paik is two airport bucket seats with those televisions attached to them. There are some books skewered and unreadable on top of the tvs and the whole thing has a low tech space voyager ambiance.

Travelling Mark Lombardi exhibit


Tucked away in an upper level of the contemporary galleries we found the Mark Lombardi exhibit. A large, comprehensive travelling exhibit organized by Independent Curators International (ICI), the show had several senior-aged couples enthralled as they studied the works in depth. They were audibly awestruck by the artist's reconstructions of the scandals of our times. Lombardi is a favorite of mine. He had several exhibits at Gallery Joe and the work is truly unique.


In addition to 25 works on paper, the exhibit includes a sample of Lombardi's color-coded index cards with hand-written notes on them. There were 1,300 cards on view out of the total 14,500.


A 15-minute video based on an interview with the artist done by Andy Mann in 1997 offered some insights into Lombardi's working method and his orientation to his material. The interview was shot in the artist's studio in Houston (before his move to New York) and includes Lombardi, sounding rather perplexed, saying he worked with newspapers and other printed sources and that he found the Internet "a vexing challenge" because of the information explosion it would bring him.

Final thoughts or the beginning of final thoughts

Museums have missions and those missions come from somewhere (a founder's dying wishes or will, etc.). We just had a big fight in this town about an institution (let's not call it a museum -- the Barnes) and its mission. People will continue to fight about defining that mission for years to come. Sometimes donations of collections steer a museum in a direction and wind up tweaking the mission in one way or another. The Arensberg collection of Duchamp and other works certainly influences the PMA. If you're strong in an area, you want to be stronger, collect more and claim that territory as yours. The size and age of a building will influence a museum's mission. The PMA's building is a done deal and has been complete for years. The only expansion possible is expanding into another building, which, of course, they're doing with the Perelman Building.

Finally, whether an art museum is the only show in town or is one of several museums influences its mission. It's clear that the Metropolitan Museum in NY doesn't see its mission as collecting a lot of modern contemporary art. With MOMA in town, why would it? It does show contemporary art, but not so much. In Philadelphia, the ICA brings in blockbuster contemporary shows and even though it's not a collecting institution, perhaps the PMA is influenced in its mission by having the ICA so close.

Museums depend on people to steer them, and people have preferences and those preferences will steer a museum also. It's complicated. Maybe a museum's mission is an impossibility at base -- to be a living encyclopedia of art and serve all the people all the time. No institution can do that.

A Little PMA History


The PMA's website says that the museum's Department of 20th Century Art was established in 1971 but that they've always had a commitment to contemporary art. When Libby and I were talking about this the other day, she mentioned that even if the contemporary galleries were limited the PMA had the opportunity to show contemporary art in its special exhibitions galleries (site of the Manet and the Sea, the upcoming Dali exhibit and all other blockbusters at the museum.) She's right. And the last time they've done a show by a contemporary living artist in those galleries, I believe, was the Francesco Clemente exhibit. Before that, there was an Anselm Kiefer exhibit, but that was years ago.

Apart from that, they've shown commitment to contemporary art recently through the Museum Studies series, wonderful but spotty, which brought in Rikrit Tiravanija (1998), Gabriel Orosco (1999) Richard Hamilton (2002) and Christian Marclay (2003) and three others. There was a Zoe Leonard installation in 1998 and a Fischli and Weiss video that appeared a few years ago. Right now, they've got Bill Viola's "The Greeting," which supplements the Pontormo, Bronzino exhibit. Meanwhile the Photography, Prints and Drawings Department seems pretty consistently oriented to the present with shows of Mary Ellen Mark, Raymond Pettibon and contemporary prints.

Brief History of MAM



So here, just to compare, is a quick history of MAM. (Read more here.) Begun as two institutions, Layton Art Gallery and Milwaukee Art Institute, in the late 1880s/early 1900s. Merged into Milwaukee Art Center in 1957 and installed in the Eero Saarinan-designed building on the shore of Lake Michigan. (image is the Saarinen building. I had my prom there!) In the 1960s Peg Bradley, philanthropist and art collector gave money and her collection of 600 modern art works to the museum with the caveat that they had to build suitable galleries to house the work. In 1975, the new addition opened (they sunk it under the Saarinen building so as not to mess with the architectural masterwork.)

In the 1990s, with attendance up to 200,000 visitors a year, the museum wanted to build anew -- especially a space with a big auditorium and big gift shop. They chose Santiago Calatrava in 1994 with the clear understanding and desire to build a Milwaukee landmark that would be an architectural ground-breaker and a leader in the new millenium. Building was begun in 1997 and opened in 2001. By the way, that $25 M debt has been whittled away at. There are now $21 M pledged and they're not stopping until they get the full $25 M pledged. The board has been enriched with the addition of some big money players who are helping with the money issues.

Finally... and then I'll let you go
I don't think it's unreasonable to want your museum to be the best it can be. I love the PMA and just wish there was a way to showcase more contemporary art there. Since the gallery space is constrained and seems destined to remain so, I have to hope they'll throw some blockbuster contemporary art exhibits into the programming mix. Who's to say that it wouldn't bring in visitors and revenue? I know there's an audience hungry for curated contemporary art exhibits and I think a show of works by...any of a number of contemporary artists would be a draw. (and I'm not thinking Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, David Hockney or any of the grey eminences.) Bring Orosco back or Pettibon...or how about some local artists, like Judith Schaechter or Eileen Neff or Terry Adkins. Even a group show of Philadelphia artists and not just those sanctioned by the Fleisher Challenge series. Something a little bold and unexpected. That's what I want.

permanent link  roberta 10:45 AM
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