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Posted by libby

I just put together the cancellation of two similar granting programs--SOS grants from the Pennsylvania Council for the Arts and the WOO grants from Leeway. Both of these grants were quick shots in the arm to help artists meet the expenses of opportunities like exhibits. The small grants helped a large number of artists and served as first steps for some in climbing the ladder to larger grants. I don't know if this is a coincidence but it strikes me as a mini trend in the Philadelphia art world.

permanent link   libby 9:46 AM
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Posted by roberta

There's a great post on Dali at Ron Silliman's blog. Among other things, the poet wonders if Dali would have been a Photoshop guy had he lived and painted now...hmmm. Good question. Dali was such a head case that I rather think the speed of decision making on Photoshop would not have matched his slow, simmering obsessing. On the other hand, the ability to stretch an image and distort it ...that would be mighty appealing to a surrealist.

permanent link   roberta 9:25 AM
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Posted by roberta

Artblog favorite, Daniel Heyman has a solo show opening tomorrow, Mar. 5, at his long-time New York gallery, 55 Mercer.

heyman, daniel

We've told you about the painter and printmaker's works here and here. Heyman's labor-intensive woodblock prints stand out in any crowd. Some of the artist's new work, based on the Iraq war prisoner torture scandal, was featured in the "Philadelphia Selections 5" exhibit at the galleries at Moore last fall. Heyman's 55 Mercer exhibit continues the (anti) war theme. Heyman, by the way, has a Fleisher Challenge exhibit opening April 22. Also in FC 4 are Norm Paris and Lindsay Feuer. (image is wood block print from Heyman's War Series, 2005)

permanent link   roberta 7:52 AM
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Posted by roberta

Get ready for some purple prose. Not mine, Union 237's, about its new show opening tonight, Mar. 4. I enjoyed reading this almost as much as I enjoyed reading the Dali autobiography. In both cases, the ideas come wrapped in such whimsy I just had to laugh. Union continues to be a place that marches to its own hip hop, grafitti, alt-cult drumbeat, godblessem. I'm glad they're on the scene.
yacht-owners, young


Quoting from the release by l. delsol:

Modern day Marco Polos sail into Philadelphia’s harbor.

They call themselves freedom-fighting artists who believe in “Yachtism”. Yachtism is described as a new political and social consciousness that uses the yacht as a vessel to transcend above the troubles of the world that in their view, is under assault by the present regime. In adjusting to a global environment replete with scandalous politics, poisoned apple pie, and sadness seeping through the pores of our everyday cosmos, the members of the Y.Y.O.A have begun a vóyage that extends past the flatness of the earths’ horizon of ignorant anchors. They are modern day Marco Polos; explorers of paint and desire, satirical sailors of the RGB spectrum. However, all are captains of their own ships.



Upon entering the gallery space the viewer will be met with an overwhelming seven foot long collaborative painting entitled “Young Yacht Owners of America, that is intentionally made to seem as though at any moment it can break apart like a sinking ship and become five individual panels. Also laid about the first floor; a bounty of over a hundred works; traditional paint, digitally manipulated images, melted tin tiles, round canvases, and various discarded objects from the sea all will come together to capture the spirit of travel and freedom and toy with the myth of the upper-class leisure and “gentlemen”. As one finds their way to the lower level they will be submerged into the deep sea of paint, as all the walls will be covered by an installation mural, an underwater refugee void of any description.

This exhibition, larger than any one previously attempted by this group, will lay bare an uncompromising honestly for a new generation of sophisticated pirates and robin hoods everywhere.

(I love the ornate pink white and blue logo and announcement card from the gallery's website)

permanent link   roberta 6:31 AM
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Posted by libby

Foreign art video, like foreign films, are just plain different from what Americans produce--it's a nice reminder of how our perspectives are formed by our time and place (left, nostalgic still from "Killed by Lightening").

yufit, yevgeniy

Russian artist Yevgeniy Yufit and his "necrorealist" films at Pageant: Soloveev were the highlight, although I suffered from the chill in the gallery and my ineptitude with the remote control. But gallerist Daniel Dalseth had blankets at the ready, folded up neatly on each of the pews arranged in front of the video screen. He also took pity on me and brought me hot tea (made in a beautiful, painted Russian tea set, a wedding present from friends of his Russian wife).

Dalseth explained the Yufit was part of the first generation that hadn't experienced the patriotism of the Soviet glories of World War II. Necrorealism is an underground, illegal film movement of the 1980's characterized by movies in which packs of crazed zombies in a surreal Russian landscape commit acts of violence and murder.

The brisk indoor weather there was a nice match for all the Punch 'n Judy manic chases, fisticuffs and head-bashing in the snowy woods. There was a silly, horror-movie dark humor at play here (right, still from "Werewolf Orderlies").

nitsch, hermann

Anyway, I'm adding my thumbs-up to Roberta's for this work (see post). The shorts, with their grainy black-and-white jumpiness, made me think of Harold Lloyd and the Three Stooges.

The surreal situations where all hell breaks loose are political commentary on bureaucracy gone wild and the disintegration of social norms as the Soviet Union began breaking up. It's "The Office" with the veneer of any sort of system, let alone a sane one, completely removed.

A nice touch in all the films is the way Yufit adds titles--writing on blackboards or with a magic marker or typing on a computer screen--using whatever simple means works with what's going on (left, using a magic marker on an old photograph to indicate how memory is unrealiable and changes the past, "Killed by Lightening").

Yufit is a big name in the European art video world. He was this year's Filmmaker in Focus last month at the 2005 34th Rotterdam International Film Festival and was in Manifest 5 European Biennial of Contemporary Art. Dalseth, who spent time in St. Petersburg researching Russian art, met Yufit there, and they became friends. Look for more quirky, interesting shows from Dalseth, who clearly marches to a different drummer.

The only one of the four full-length movies from Yufit that I saw was "Killed by Lightening." Part of what struck me in this sepia-colored film, with its mix of archival and original footage, was how similar in tone it was to Janet Cardiff's walks, a haunted mix of past and present, personal and political, flickering back and forth.

The movie frames the elusive memories with computer-generated "scientific" certainty. The pace of the movie is slow and elegiac, the light-and-shadow images ravishingly beautiful. The mix of digging through personal memories and digging through the history of man's evolution leads to the conclusion that we're no more advanced than Stone Age men. (I made a random choice on which movie to see. Alas, I picked the same one Roberta had reported on).

These films could not have been made in this country at this point in time. They have an angst delivered with bitter irony that's pure Russian.

In my own little self-curated foreign-film festival, I also went to the Hermann Nitsch videos at Slought, "Hermann Nitsch / Die Aktionen: 1962-2003."

I'm pretty tough (and I was prepared), and all the animal blood and guts and ritualized victimization didn't upset my stomach at all. The work, however, is unethical, and to argue it away by saying it's not as unethical as war or the Holocaust or that it's a healing religious ritual is to ignore that the work is debasing to humans and to animals (right, Hermann Nitsch).

Kneading animal guts, smearing and pouring animal blood, immobilizing people with blinders on crosses and pouring blood and other concoctions into their mouths, over their bodies, onto their displayed sexual organs, with someone else choreographing the moves and being in control is both pornographic and disrespectful to the people and the animals.

I like the Chinese thinking about wasting no part of an animal that you slaughter. The waste here is an unspeakable excess (images left and right, Hermann Nitsch, 6-Tage-Spiel, Prinzendorf, 1998). It is the product of a culture that can convince itself to have no respect for life.

While watching the 6-day play at Prinzendorf, Nitsch's estate, I spent time trying to put myself back in that time in the '60s when middle class people were able to convince themselves that it was OK to kill "the pigs," that love (i.e. sex) was free, that bombing buildings and rioting were the right thing to do. At some point, I remember sitting in a meeting with people--academic intellectuals all--who were seriously considering a bombing. It was the end of my career as a radical. Sometimes bourgeois values get it right.

My other train of thought was about "Fear Factor," "The Exorcist" and "The Passion of the Christ." Well, I am nothing if not consistent. I don't really care to watch any of these things.

If you like "Fear Factor" (left), which I also think is debasing, perhaps you won't be offended by this work. Or you may be offended. This work is even more grotesque. If the gore in "The Passion..." doesn't undercut the religious ritual for you, this might be work you'd like. Nitsch borrowed shamelessly from religious as well as rain king and morality play rituals. The 6-day play, for example, had crosses, Gregorian chants, even church bells and processions. But the statues usually carried in religious processions have been replaced by naked, live people on crosses. This is not progress. It's a regression to primitivism.

"The Exorcist" on the other hand seems to me to have a camp quality that infuses most horror movies and makes them pure entertainment. There's no real blood from man or beast, no real abuse or pornography. The orgies, on the other hand, are humorless and literal. Not much of a parallel, here.

The triumph of the Old Testament is that Isaac isn't sacrificed to God. The Greeks, when they invented tragedy, no longer needed to spill blood in a ritual sacrifice because they figured out a way to pretend to spill blood--in Greek tragedy--and thereby right the wrongs in the social fabric. That, not the Bacchanalian orgy, is the glory that was Greece.

[For another take on Nitsch, read Roberta's article in the Philadelphia Weekly and Colette Copeland's post below.]

permanent link   libby 8:17 PM
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Posted by libby

Roberta and I got a little preview of Eamon Ore-Giron's show that will open tomorrow (Friday) night at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. We had just sat through a talk of his--one of those swell slide lectures by artists that I've been going to religiously because they've been pretty interesting. Curator Alex Baker invited us into the gallery for a peek (the images are from the slides at the talk and not from the show, and they're blurry enough for me to apologize; this work is hard-edged and intense).
ore-giron, eamon

Unlike Roberta, I had missed Ore-Giron's show at Gallery 222 (here's Roberta's post on it), and so had no sense of scale beyond the little 2" on-line pictures we run and the slides for the talk. The scale shocked me--these are big paintings with enormous presence, spaces that physically pull you in. The new work is beautiful--and totally trippy, with Pop colors and pattern inspirations stolen from all over the place--even mehndi henna decoration, which Baker said was something Ore-Giron did for money for a while.

The show includes a wall installation with vinyl records that have been decorated with stenciled and etched patterns and Roberta said she wondered if Ore-Giron had been a DJ. Poking around the web I found a link to a page with his fave music as well as links to two albums for which he did the covers (image left).

Here's a smattering of more background info: Ore-Giron had a residency at Headlands last year and exhibitions include "Bay Area Now 3" Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, "Widely Unknown" at Deitch Projects in New York, and a show at White Box also in New York.

This is a guy who is into popular culture--and its limits.

His name is sort of a clue to some of what he's about. His mom is from a long-time Arizona family of Irish descent, hence the first name. His dad is Peruvian, hence the last name, and Ore spent many summers visiting family in Peru. And the land he paints, he has named Arizonia.

That crossing of borders both at home and abroad and then living just north of the Mexican border all became fodder for his visions (speaking of visions, he did mention Carlos Castaneda, and Alex Baker mentioned peyote-inspired Huichol art). He's also been looking at advertising and publications and whatever is part of the culture at this point in time).

Listening to Ore-Giron is a reminder that he's from the Four Corners area, the real Arizona. His ideas live somewhere in the spaces between his words. Unlike us East Coast intellectuals, he has a level on which he communicates that belongs in the land of dreams, where words neither delimit nor create the concepts. Sound bites are not part of the delivery. And big skies, intensely blue, are only rarely not a part of the imagery (right, the pickup here picks up the sky and the pink earth).

Like his ideas, his experience bridges spaces. He spent six months in Peru teaching English. While down there, he worked with an artist who was into "in-depth patterning. ...Each little spill of paint fitted with the characters." The bright colors have affected Ore's recent use of color. Ore said on his return to American culture he saw things differently (left, his aunt and cousin making tamales; the sky has dipped down, clouds punctuating the workers; the paintings, which used to have cartoony outlines, are now more painterly).

Earlier influences include San Francisco Bay area conceptualists. He mentioned Paul McCarthy a couple of times. Ore-Giron, who went to the San Francisco Art Institute, is now studying at UCLA and felt he had to defend his return to school, which gives him a lifestyle in which he can really focus on his art.

Ore-Giron started his talk by showing a series of paintings of an all-you-can-eat cafeteria in Flagstaff, which he said was full of animals watching while you ate (I'm presuming game trophies on the wall, but I'm not really sure). He ratcheted up the weirdness when he added a golf course to represent disrespect of local natural terrain. The golf course has become a repeating metaphor in his work for any number of things about the culture, including a game--again not real life and real life all at once (right, one of the all-you-can-eat cafeteria paintings).

Ore-Giron said he took a four-year hiatus from the art he was doing as an undergraduate. Painting, he said, was narcissistic, and he needed to get away. "I came back with a new sensibility from not being involved [in painting] for a while and not fixating."

When he started painting wood-grain patterns, the grain "became a section [in each painting] that I could let my inner tripper out," he said. "It kind of became skin. The wood was alive." The pattern-making was also a way of marking time (left, a wood-patterned VW; it's alive).




Talking about the paintings he did of dancers, which have a de Chirico empty plaza with long-shadows ambiance, he said he was interested in the crossing of cultures. The Peruvian dancers on masks to resemble and mock white people. "There's something really creepy about it as well as with masks." Underneath the white masks are native people and native culture. He was interested in what it is to wear a mask--again thinking about the spaces between realities (right, one of the Peruvian-dancer paintings).

But he's also thinking about archetypal meanings: "I love how the physicalness of dancing combines with the music. It's like those patterns have always existed."

Since the empty spaces of the dance paintings, he said his work has gotten more elaborate with more patterning and minutiae.

The golf course and the cafeteria animals have popped up again in his more recent miniature golf paintings, with their pychedelic surroundings and colors. And the animals from the cafeteria paintings have a satirical new life as obstacles and decorations (left, Ore-Giron's wife playing miniature golf).



He's also interested in the way we transform the past, turning it into an ideal environment. The example he showed was of a replica of the Old West, a shooting gallery in Tucson with theatrical shootouts, a sort of dreamland of "history" (right). He contrasted that idealization with the chaotic image of the Western past in "Blood Meridian" by Cormac McCarthy.

He said he's looking at things with a sense of humor and a graphic, illustrative quality, as in "Bro' Mountain," for which I am using the record album version of the image. He's interested in the attention paid to monument-like natural objects. He said the simplicity of the design and placement of the mountain was similar to Japanese Shintoism and the significance of where an object is placed. The transformational bodies emerging remind me of how people see an image of the Virgin Mary in shape of a french fry and then worship it.


"It's important to me to feel contemporary, to tread on ground that hasn't been tread it. And it's important it speaks from somewhere inside."

At the same time, he edits his ideas and asks himself of each painting: "This is important to me, but why would it be important to anyone?" That self-editing results in a body of work that's relatively easy to access, with its Pop vocabulary and representational Surrealism and humor. Nonetheless, there's plenty there to chew on.

permanent link   libby 10:45 AM
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Posted by roberta

From Brian Wallace, via Tyler Green via the NY Times, quoting:

Agnes Gund, president emerita of the Museum of Modern Art and a renowned patron of the arts, has been named a trustee of the Barnes Foundation in Lower Merion, Pa. The appointment is part of the planned expansion of the board after the recent decision to allow the foundation to relocate its collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art to Philadelphia. ...

Now that's some good news.

permanent link   roberta 2:54 PM
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Posted by roberta

There's no art page in the Weekly (PW) today (they've been alternating the two "high arts," theater and visual art, of late, when the paper has to be small. But you'll find me in the listings.
judge, mary



In the "Editors Picks" section -- online here -- is my quick review of Mary Judge and Stephen Robin at Gallery Joe. Judge's drawings are beautiful and have a new edge to them that I don't remember from previous shows of her works. (The top image is Judge's spolvero wall drawing, a ten-and-a-half ft.-tall production she did on site in the gallery.)
robin, stephen

Robin's suite of cast aluminum works somehow manage to be langorous and urgent at the same time. Excellent natural world referents that drew my thoughts into larger orbits of a more otherworldly nature. Both exhibits are up until Mar. 12 and both are high points this winter season. (Second image is Robin's "Below the Surface Number 7.")

permanent link   roberta 10:08 AM
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Posted by roberta

Thanks to From the Floor's always newsy Todd Gibson I read a story in NY Magazine about ten artists picked to be in PS 1's Greater NY 2005 exhibit opening Mar 13. The rest of the list, apparently, is a kind-of-sort-of big secret that's leaking out by the minute although you won't find any list at PS 1's website, which is cleverly undergoing massive overhaul and will not be back in business til March 13. Do we suspect there's a Greater NY artist re-doing the website as part of his or her art for the show? (image is video still from "Moby Dick" by Guy Ben-Ner, one of the chosen artists, courtesy of Postmasters Gallery)

ben-ner, guy



Anyway, several artblog favorites, like the above-mentioned Ben-Ner -- and Paul Chan and Wangechi Mutu -- made the cut for the show and are featured in the magazine story. Read here. We've seen their work in Philadelphia or in the case of Chan in Pittsburgh. Just to refresh you: Ben-Ner was featured in the Vox video lounge (post); Wangechi Mutu was in the travelling, Alex Baker-co-curated Altoids show at PAFA's Morris Gallery and Libby saw her work at the Studio Museum (post).
(image is detail of Mutu's "Hanging In (2004-5), courtesy of John Berns and Brent Sikkema Gallery, NYC)

mutu, wangechi


Chan has two videos in the Carnegie International. We told you about one (post) but not the other, which was even more spectacular: "Happiness (finally) after 35,000 Years of Civilization—after Henry Darger and Charles Fourier" (above is a video still from "Happiness").



The piece is a trippy Darger-esque police-state paranoia animated, and NY Mag says MOMA bought a copy. (Chan, an activist, is seen here in handcuffs in a photo I pulled from the Carnegie website.)

chan, paul

Finally, in more Philly-NY breaking news, Moore Galleries' curator Brian Wallace emailed me last night to say that Peter Rostovsky, an artist in the current Lewis and Clark-themed exhibit in his galleries is also in Greater NY 2005.


Rostovsky will give a gallery talk tonight at 6:30 pm at Moore. His piece, "Epiphany Model 3," (shown) a sculpture of a small guy gazing out at a vast, fog of a painting, sits in the gallery's window. It's a honey and reminded me of our own town's sculptor of guys, Gil Kerlin, who draws and sculpts small representations of Joe Publics in existential awakenings.

rostovsky, peter

permanent link   roberta 8:50 AM
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Posted by roberta

Was it me or was there an unusual amount of energy in the air in February, a time normally devoted to burrowing and dreaming about beaches. I'm not only talking about The Gates and Dali, the two blockbuster high energy events. But in the local galleries, too, there was much going on. Libby told you about the shows at the Gallery Xes here and here and I want to do a quickie on them before moving into the March landscape because they were both so good.
hu, joseph
Vox Populi
Joseph Hu's grisaille paintings of an apartment sans occupants seemed, because of their horizontal striations, to be floating sideways. The works were like visions from a dream state. Everything seemed underwater, or like a trance-induced vision. Desire and hurt lie on these works which are not about happy memories but about the ones that, like toothaches, are painful and demand constant attention.


richter, gerhard
The clear reference to Gerhard Richter's grisaille paintings (shown, "Der Kongress") and to Hiroshi Sugimoto's blurry black and white photographs of iconic buildings like the Empire State Building made these works reverberate with -- if not politics, then the sociology of people and the times and places that shape them. The title, "It takes a Candle when it goes to the Cellar" (top image) for the painting that seemed to me the most beautiful and eerie, had echoes to the movie "Silence of the Lambs" in which a serial killer dehumanizes his female victims by calling them "it."

"Silence of the Lambs" probably has nothing at all to do with the work but my flashing on that cinematic reference had the effect of turning the entire installation into a kind of painted crime scene.


witte, justin
Around the corner from Hu were Justin Witte's blindingly white puff paint works which scored on the hurt the eye scale as well as the break the camera scale.

These works, which I loved, demanded so much of a viewer that they seemed to go beyond anything I've experienced in the realm of paint in Philadelphia. (image is my feeble attempt to catch a snap of one. I caught the window reflection pretty well but not the the Witte.)


o'neil, robyn
Witte's imagery, what you can see of it, is loveable. What I thought I saw resembled a combination of Paul Noble's fantasy architecture of decay with Robyn O'Neil's mystery guys tramping around in the snow and performing rituals. The package is fanciful and endearing. (image is O'Neil's drawing "The Pre-Conference with an Unfair Fight in the Back." O'Neil, who was in the 2004 Whitney Biennial also showed with Gallery Joe in the "Figure Out" exhibit. See post.)

I understand why Witte uses white on white but, after wrangling with the works for what seemed like quite a while (it probably was in the neighborhood of 15-20 minutes) I felt a little defeated. I love Witte's paintings when viewed through my mind's eye in memory. But face to face the works made my eyes hurt and all in all I'd rather see an image than know it's there and not see it. I look forward to Witte's next phase, may he bring back a little color, please.


abrams, stefan
A word about Stefan Abrams' project "stefan.jpg." (image is detail of the array of pictures that came up in the artist's image search for stefan.jpg) I love that artists are playing with Google and other search engines and creating art that reflects what is going on in cyber space. It's important for artists to consider the web just another tool in the box. I'm going to consider Abrams' piece first generation image search art and look forward to what comes next. Like the work of Kenneth Jones, recently at the Print Center, who made color prints of his computer screen that look like they were from the "Grabber"program, the work needs to be less in thrall to the technology.

Nexus

mccloskey, tom
In the front space, the wonderful Missioncreep exhibit crackled with good spirits, cameraderie and great art. It was wonderful to see this cyber-venue come into the real world for a celebration of its art and writing.

And in the back space, Tom McCloskey's sculpture/video installation was smart and memorable. I talked with the artist at Nexus last week.

I'd seen McCloskey's pieces (a drawing and a video sculpture) in the "Discontent" exhibit and thought they were standouts (see post). I wanted to know more about where the work, which has politics and social commentary in it, came from -- and where it might be going. (image is of the sleeping shooters who wake every ten minutes when a gunshot sounds)

The artist, who's from Philadelphia, graduated from PAFA and that is a shock since the work is, in my opinion, un-PAFA like. McCloskey told me that PAFA faculty Jody Pinto and Robert Roesch, both sculptors and both freely non-Academy in their own work, were instrumental in helping him produce in the Academy but not in the Academy style. So he's a sculpture guy. As for the video, McCloskey told me that he is a self-taught video artist. He got his hands on a video camera his in-laws bought when they thought they'd videotape their daughter's wedding. The in-laws never did figure out how to use the camera and the wedding went untaped but McCloskey wound up with the equipment and was hooked.

The artist had a video piece in the travelling "Illegal Art" exhibit which ran at Nexus some time back. (See post). When he heard they were seeking members he applied. In his day job, the artist is a house painter, a job that allows him flexibility to take off when he needs to to put an exhibit together.

McCloskey said he is interested in the theater. He loves the lights, the sets, the over-the-top dramatic moments. He was thinking theater when he put his Nexus installation together. And indeed the three pieces feel like three stages or three acts of an absurdist comedy. With no words but lots of sound (a gun shot and growling voices which proceed at what seem like random intervals) the works convey the circus of life absent the ring master. It's a jungle.



The artist, who said he spends a lot of creative time at Best Buy eyeballing monitors of this size and that, learned to sew on a machine recently. He stitched all the soft sculptural elements himself. And when I asked what was next, the artist told me that he wanted to spend time drawing, something he likes to do daily. "It all starts with drawing...that's where the ideas come," he said. McCloskey made comic books as a child. Even today his favorite drawing materials are a "Uniball pen from Staples, a pencil and cheap watercolors." (image is detail of "Lost Worm")

McCloskey's thoughts are on society always. He spends time each week with a friend, Andrew Schwalm, who's an anthropologist (Schwalm is one of the growling faces in McCloskey's chair piece). They talk about the world, about culture, and about life's big picture. I can't wait to see what comes next.

Finally, it's interesting to me how particular young artists make their way to the city's two main alternative co-op galleries, the Gallery Xes -- Vox and Nexus. I always wondered who went with which gallery and why. I imagine the reasons have to do with friendship networks or more ephemeral things (like the jurying in process which would trigger the "birds of a feather" effect). Whatever the reason, the art coming out of the two Gallery Xes, which is similar -- but not the same -- is in a nice, strong forward-looking 21st Century orbit.

permanent link   roberta 8:33 AM
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Posted by libby

We happened upon some swell papier mache sculptures by Beth Nixon, Michelle Posadas and Chip Malloy of Spiral Q Puppet Theater in the Liberty Place atrium on our way to giving out art.
nixon, beth
Entitled "Dalidelphia," the installation is supposed Surrealism-inspired, with its buggy rowers on the Schuylkill and Rocky as a bulldog on a pedestal and a Liberty Bell dog. The pieces were a little tough to see against the bright sell-sell-sell surfaces there, not to mention against the giant pinky red Dali poster with the bug eyes and the aerodynamic mustache.
malloy, chip
Here's a picture of the boxer (top image) doing all he can to punch his way through the visual static of the Dali backdrop and the Liberty Place razzle-dazzle. In any other kind of space, he coulda been a contender.
posadas, michelle
The pieces are charming and goofy, sort of a Muppets meets Antz. Loved the little no-head girl walking the giant turtle-dog Liberty Bell (dog, left). I also loved the real shoes on the Olive Oyl legs of this one and that one. Other scenes included "people" waiting at a bus stop and someone munching on a giant soft pretzel.

Anyway, I'm glad to see terrific, populist art in a public space like this, with a kazillion people passing it by.

We saw Posadas' work before (see posts here and here) and liked it then, too. The other two names are new to us, but not Spiral Q, which is pretty much a Philadelphia institution.

permanent link   libby 6:15 PM
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Posted by libby and roberta

We have so many motives for giving away art on the street. One of the big ones is that we are not the gallery types. We tried that. We prefer the hurly burly of the street corner. In our Friday hurly burly, who should come along but the ultimate art insider, ICA Curator Ingrid Schaffner. Libby approached her and said "It's a gift. It's free art." Ingrid looked straight ahead, thoughts elsewhere, and walked by. Libby ran over to Roberta in shock and said "Can you believe it...Ingrid Schaffner just rejected me!" Roberta ran after Ingrid, called out to her and said "Ingrid! You have to take our art!" Dazed, Ingrid politely took it, apologized for being in a fog and stopped for a quick chat, during which time she said that Roberta Smith (the other Roberta) reviewed the ICA's Barry Le Va exhibit in the NY Times Friday edition. (Read here and to read Libby's and Roberta's posts on Le Va, see the left-hand column links) (top image is Libby before she was rejected; image left is Roberta before she got chilled by the weather).
fallon, roberta and libby rosof
By the way, we had the company of Philadelphia Inquirer reporter, Eils Lotozo, who was assigned to do a story on us, for what seemed like more than an hour during our Friday giveaway. Inky photographer Ron Tarver also came by and actually took our pictures. We've told you about Tarver before. He shows black-and-white landscape photographs at Sande Webster gallery. And his people photos accompany Yvonne Latty's stories in the book "We Were There." (Read)
rosof, libby and roberta fallon
Lotozo said to look for the story in Thursday's paper.

permanent link   libby and roberta 10:34 AM
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Posted by roberta

In case you haven't noticed, artblog is now an associate of amazon. If you click the amazon link in the left-hand column and then buy something at amazon we get a little percentage. We know you buy at amazon. We do. Buying through our link will help us out so we can continue writing out hearts out about art. And we thank you. Love from us.

permanent link   roberta 9:39 AM
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Posted by libby

I can't believe I went all the way to Ursinus College and saw only one of the two shows there. How dumb is that?
azechi, umetaro
I was up near Norristown wrestling with my kitchen transformation, so I used the opportunity to catch "Modern Impressions: Japanese Prints from the Berman and Corazza Collections, 1950-1980" at the college's Berman Museum.
watanabe, sadao
The show had caught my eye for two reasons: Number one, the image on the card, Azechi Umetaro's "Awe of the Mountain" woodblock print (right top) ; number two, now that I was paying attention, I noticed that my fellow townwatcher Frank L. Chance, associate director of the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, was one of the curators (the other is Matthew Mizenko, from Ursinus). My need to go was clear.

Not all the images were as wonderful as Azechi's (which combines Asian austerity and economy of means with a sharp sense of humor about traditional Japanese subjects) but there were a number worth the trek.

The subject matter and style of the 72 post-World War II prints ran the gamut, some more squarely in the Japanese tradition, some showing more Western influence (left, Watanabe Sadao's "Noah's Ark," one of three wonderful Watanabe prints on biblical themes, this a stencil on mulberry paper, 1978, 21" x 18"; right, Oda Mayumi's "Goddess is Coming to You, Can You Come to Her," showing Indian pictorial influences with humorous, feminist content, silkscreen, 1976 ).
oda, mayumi
Plus there was lots of Japanese print-making history--including the information that traditionally Japanese prints were a collaborative process, but the auteur approach, with one artist controlling all aspects of the process, is increasingly used.

Anyway, there's a curator's talk Tuesday, noon to 1, as well as another curator's talk and other events listed on the web page. If you're mad for prints or Japanese art or if Ursinus is not all that far from you, it's worth a visit.

permanent link   libby 6:35 PM
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Posted by libby

Every once in a while, one of us throws a question out there and it actually gets answered. So when I wrote a post with an image of a wheat-pasted dog that I came across on and near the Penn campus, I attributed the work to one of my favorite artists, Anonymous (left, "Dawg," by Jason Hsu, photo by his friend May).
hsu, jason
Then two days ago in an email from a friend of the artist, whose name turns out to be Jason Hsu, not anonymous after all (right, "Dawg," by Hsu, photo by his friend May).

Here's some of what Hsu's friend May wrote (I confess I added all the capital letters for the blog):

(My friend Jason is too shy to reply). His full name is Jason Hsu, just moved [here] from Boston; ...he's truly [an] amazing individual. I have attached the dawg that was
pasted on bowling boards [i.e. the boarded windows from when the bowling alley, Strikes, was still under construction]. The colour is a bit funny; we took it
three in the morning by the street light.

Here were the places we hit: the Upenn Museum entrance, Drexel campus, Upenn campus, Worst House [sic.]/Best House back entrance, Osage Ave. and 43rd, the Walnut and Chestnut Street bridges. We didn't really do that much; the wheat-paste pouch got punctured as we were booking it from the Upenn sticklers. J. Hsu's working on more and when spring comes, he'll be out again I'm sure. The one at Best House is still up although beginning to disintegrate.

Then I got a nice note from Hsu himself, who overcame his shyness. Here's an excerpt from his email:

I moved down to Philly from Boston in August to check out the art scene here. I feel a little bowled over with so much going on, but it feels great to be here.

The work I do is pretty much on a whim, mostly illustrative, but lately I've been making a few robot figures out of club flyers. You can see them on the website.

I'm not really trying to do anything overtly political with what I do, just trying to make life work for me. I believe in making something out of nothing, and trying to live in the moment of creation. I guess my concepts could go deeper, but I don't really try to be instructionary; I've always tried to concentrate more on practicing what I've concluded rather than preach it.

If you like what I do and know of any group shows with empty spots, please let me know. I'm trying to get over hermitude.

Anyway, I liked the website (I'm a sucker for interactivity, and there it was with just a pass of the mouse) and liked the robots and liked hearing from the great beyond. As for hermitude (great word; thanks Jason), Hsu did donate to the Tsunami relief auction at the Asian Arts Initiative, so he's figuring out the network all on his own.

permanent link   libby 5:33 PM
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Posted by libby

Post by Colette Copeland

nitsch, hermann
I took my visual studies class to see the Hermann Nitsch retrospective at Slought Gallery this week, "Hermann Nitsch / Die Aktionen: 1962-2003" (right, Hermann Nitsch, "Das Orgien Mysterien Theater / Theater of Orgies and Mysteries," Salzburg, 1990) .

These are bright, well-read, open-minded students. Two of them refused to even enter the gallery. Quite a few were repulsed and shocked. Director Aaron Levy graciously turned off all the video monitors, so that the class could engage in a conversation.

We spoke at length about the work in terms of its historical, political, geographical, psychological and social context. We spoke about Nitsch’s legacy and influence on contemporary performance artists. Despite all attempts, the class was unable to get beyond the immediate visceral reaction to the subject matter. Levy told me that everyone has that experience at first, and after awhile, I would get over it. Well, my feeling of nausea only intensified after an hour of viewing the work.

My epiphany came on Tuesday night, when Spiegel fellow Paul Chan lectured at Penn. He stated that he wants art that ‘breaks’ him. In his own work, he strives to dismantle ideas and recontextualize meaning, so that his art can breathe, live, exist, confuse and provoke.

Those ideas are the conduit to Nitsch’s work. I don’t buy that Nitsch’s work is apolitical or that it is about releasing the ego. The ritualized sacrificial acts involving animal slaughter, crucifixion and lots of blood reverberate on many levels, which is why they are so disturbing. My feminist nature is horrified at witnessing the naked, seemingly vulnerable women blindfolded and splayed on the cross. However, it is important to note that all performers are willing participants and the performances do not contain any violence towards humans.

In keeping with Chan’s motto of art that ‘breaks’ him, Nitsch’s work succeeds on that level. Nitsch’s performances rupture the status quo. They are mythic, referencing Greek theater, early Roman Christian executions and Mayan games. The performances are Wagnerian in scale and duration. The spectacle, with its complicated relationship to audience and participants, undermines traditional notions of what constitutes a ‘civilized’ society. Because Nitsch is such an extremist, he paved the way for artists like Chris Burden, Andres Serrano, Damien Hirst and Joel Peter Witkin (That is not to say that he directly influenced them--but their work does not seem so extreme in comparison to Nitsch). Bravo for Slought for having the courage to exhibit such controversial work.

[For another take on Nitsch, read Roberta's article in the Weekly. Also, Ed Sozanski in today's Inky wrote about him (you can try using artblog's ids--name, lrrf; email, libby@rosof.org; password, lrrfartblog).]

--Video artist Colette Copeland is a regular artblog contributor

permanent link   libby 4:30 PM
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