Leslie Friedman, Tasty installation detail

Friedman has hit a feminist note in her installation, in which three panels repeat a soda can’s thick emission dripping down to the open mouth of a conventionally beautiful woman. The pouring hand is manicured–the ladies are doing it to themselves.

Leslie Friedman, Tasty, 2012 installation shot at Napoleon

Friedman’s little exhibit is proof positive that UArts Curator Sid Sachs’ Seductive Subversion show of the year in 2010 came at the right time, when those ideas and strategies are bubbling up again in our communal consciousness–I’m thinking especially of Pop feminist artists Marjorie Strider and Evelyne Axelle from Sid’s show.

Leslie Friedman, Tasty, detail of installation

In Napoleon, the panels are augmented with a floor installation, two-gallon replicas of Coke Zero cans in seductive colors tumble across the unfinished old wood, making Andy’s Campbell’s Soup Cans austere and Platonic. Pink pearly paint–is it nail polish, I wonder–serves as the soda can ejaculate. It’s the same substance pouring down in the painted panels. And sprinkled among all this are giant facsimiles of packets of Splenda, Truvia, et al. Although bigger can be better, the packets lack the material delights and metaphoric possibilities of the other details of the installation.

Marjorie Strider Marjorie Strider Woman with Parted Lips, 1964 acrylic on board Collection Michael T. Chutko

In a world where James Rosenquist painted a deadpan F-111 with a mixture of adoration and dread, so Friedman creates her salvation and her nemesis with equal ambivalence. It’s here, in this ambivalence, combined with sexual messages about desire, and cultural messages about women, their roles and their value, that this seemingly simple installation finds its not-so-simple content.

Leslie Friedman, Tasty, installation detail

Friedman, a 2011 Tyler MFA, is part of the Napoleon team. The exhibit is up until Feb. 24.

In Talk to Me, Joao Enxuto and Erica Love read to each other text messages supplied by the audience.

The high point–using text messages–was an interactive performance by Brooklyn-based artists Joao Enxuto and Erica Love, who collaborate under the name the original copy. In their performance Talk to Me, they play a couple reading text messages to each other, the texts supplied by the audience.

It was a dark and rainy weeknight, however, and the audience in AUX was small, less than 20 when I counted. But the audience was greater than the people in the room, thanks to another layer of technology streaming in and out of the UK. Alas, the audience was a little reluctant to interact, raising the level of tension as well as the discussion about lack of meaningful communication between Enxuto’s and Love’s characters.

What made Talk to Me so successful were the theatrics, the fourth wall broken not just via technology but via the actors…and the irony that communications technology had created a fourth wall of sorts between the two lovers in much the way that we have our noses in our cell phones when we ought to be talking to the person right in front of us. This work was thoughtful and engaging, making successful use of the technology but putting it in a human context with a will-they-won’t-they-? plot driving the action forward in time.

Bonnie Jones, a Maryland-based artist who uses text and music in her improvised and composed performances, projected a poem on a screen in rhythmic bursts of typing and “copied/pasted” text. The words and their presentation were a cosmic meditation on the desire to communicate and how technology mediates. I found myself thinking of the percussive, aggressive word art of Heavy Industries, but the mellow jazziness of Jones’ poem was quite different–more like a haiku than a Howl.

Matt Kalasky performing his short story about love in the internet age. Two Diet Cokes were his main prop.

The ecstasy was palpable in Matt Kalasky‘s performance/reading of a tale of two early Match.com web developers who find each other via their own tech-savvy device in what amounts to an e-epistolatory short story. Why, I wondered, did Kalasky’s persona down two cans of Diet Coke? Why was one of the lovers his mom? With ironic nostalgia for early internet culture, the story builds to its predictable climax after actual bits of computer code (fictional I presume) become part of the mating dance. Highly entertaining and a nice addition to the discussion of the role of technology in communication. Kalasky is a Philadelphia artist and writer, chief editor of The Nicola Midnight St. Claire.

Also worthwhile and layered with ideas was a political film by New York-based Rainer Ganahl featuring a copy of Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England… being kicked down the streets of a deserted English mill town fallen victim to economic and technological changes. Ganahl represented Austria in the Venice Biennale in 1999.

Skyping with London-based KIOSK after 2am, Greenwich Mean Time

The framework of the evening, however, was pure agony–an intercontinental, interactive Twitter feed at #nightwatch2012–arty and infertile. An equally arty performance by the Bristol (Engand)-based group the Collect, with a trite visual metaphor of a man untangling wires, also fell flat.

KIOSK’s trio of sleepy curators in England (it was past 2am GMT) participated with the AUX crowd in a post-performance discussion on Skype. One of them suggested the word agony to describe much of the evening’s experience. That helped break the ice.

The Twitter feed for #nightwatch2012 ran in the background throughout the performances.

For all the agony, though, I found the evening fruitful. It brought to mind tedious early art videos, and how the process of learning to take advantage of a new technology takes experimentation and time until a vocabulary of useful strategies and precedents get built.

Since AUX opened over the summer, there’s been a steady stream of performances and screenings there–a space for taking risks. In that light, the agony was to be expected and was not for everyone. The ecstasy–I’d return for more (although there’s not much continuity in what gets shown at AUX; every performance is an adventure).

Anna Neighbor (left) moderates discussion with artists Matt Giel (center) and Alanna Lawley (right) at Grizzly Grizzly

For some of us squeezed into the gallery a week ago Sunday for a talk, the experience was similar to sitting in the “view obstructed” seats at the Academy of Music. (Not me; I sat in the one and only chair).

We were there for Grizzly Grizzly’s first ever artists’ talk for a show in their space.

The show, Duett, includes work by two artists, both of whom use photography. Matt Giel (hard G) is a Philadelphian, and Alanna Lawley (second a in Alanna is long), a Brit stationed in Berlin, and they both need pronunciation guides for their names.

Matt Giel's endless seascape, plus a pin-up version with real t-pins and unexposed t-pin shapes on the print.

Giel first came to our attention in last spring’s University of Delaware MFA show. with a life-sized self-portrait photo draped over a chair, for one thing. And show curator Becky Hunter, on seeing Giel’s work in that same show, thought it would make a good pairing with work by her old school friend Lawley. Hunter, having moved here from England, was a bit homesick and disconnected. So inviting her friend Alanna to show here with Giel seemed like a good personal solution, she confessed in her introductory comments to the talk.

Vox artist  Anna Neighbor, who moderated the discussion, wanted to know what frustration with the limits of the 2-D photographic surface led the artists to explore beyond the flat, framed piece of paper. (Pause for a moment with me to add these four presenters to the count of people squeezed into the gallery space).

Giel’s main piece is a rolled-up, 305-foot long horizontal scroll of a seemingly endless seascape photograph, the end taped around the room like a chair rail. The image was made from a commonplace shot of the ocean from the Atlantic City boardwalk, he said. He dragged the exposure process across the length of the scroll in a darkroom during a 7-hour process in an effort to transcend the usual 2D image. He defined the work as a performance piece–starting in the darkroom and ending in the gallery installation.

Alanna Lawley's installation of faux domestic spaces was like a stage-set.

Alanna’s scrolls hang vertically, using design and architecture magazines as her source material for domestic spaces. But the spaces are anything but domestic. They are chilly yet meant to seduce. Of her blowups, she said that they too are seductive at the same time that they repel the eye with their commercial intent and their confusing, broken up spaces. The images are further broken up by the dot printing process of the original printed pages.

“Where do you put the toothpaste,” Neighbor said, summing up how inhuman Lawley’s “spaces” are. Lawley went on to describe the spaces as “aspirational and ultimately unlivable,” an idea of an ideal home that’s fractured and so slick the images can be dismissed at first glance. There was some discussion about the aspiration qualities of both artists works and how they were the same–perfect home, perfect seascape.

Neighbor then moved on to how they were different.  While Lawley’s spaces and scrolls have an untouched quality, emphasized by the high-tech metal bars from which they hang, Giel’s have a strong sense of the artists’ hand manipulating the installation by taping and pinning. Giel’s work, he agreed, was very much about the body and the physical relationship of the work to him and to the audience.

“Some photos don’t exist in the physical world,” said Lawley.

Giel agreed–or not: “You have to experience them.”

I asked Lawley how she got her work here from Berlin and she said her fabulous printer did it all–made the prints, rolled them all up in one package and mailed them here.

This may have been Grizzly’s first talk, but it won’t be it’s last. Another is on tap for Sunday Jan. 22, 3pm, also at the gallery, let by web pro and curator Kelani Nichole. Giel and Hunter will be in attendance and Alanna Lawley, who has returned home to Berlin, will be there via Skype–as part of the preparation and thinking that went into this show, the artists Skyped back and forth. (Kelani used to be artblog’s web guru).

The Mormons and the Dubins

Back in April, my son Alex had a birthday, but we came up short on a gift. Alex loves musicals, so Murray tracked down tickets to the Book of Mormon for Alex, Lindsey and us. The wait has been long, but worth it. As musicals go, The Book of Mormon raises anti-PC humor to an astonishing level; it’s a musical that dares to suggest that belief in fucking a virgin to cure AIDS is no more outrageous than belief in the angel Moroni or in the virgin birth (yikes, two virgins, three religions, one sentence). Suited-up “Mormons” doing Busby Berkeley numbers are a highlight. So is relentless bad language delivered with exuberance. Can you snag a ticket to this? Eventually. Is it worth the wait? No doubt at all.

Cattelan and Renaissance Portraits

Sorry, Met, but we had a better time at the Maurizio Cattelan exhibit at the Guggenheim and at the tour at the Tenement Museum.

Maurizio Cattelan, All installation, with Stone Dead taxidermied dog above and Untitled resin sculpture of woman crucified in a box below., 2008

The impudent Cattelan’s 3-ring circus of an installation, All, is at once ebullient and melancholy. He hangs all his oeuvre, or close to it, in the atrium.

The experience has a Where’s Waldo quality, offering an opportunity to search and rummage through the artist’s past. Because the objects are often massive, are often mounted on floating plinths, and are numerous, they obscure one another, so the march up or down the ramp offers new perspectives and new revelations all along the way. The aerial act is both delightful and a constant revelation, filled with competing focal points–yes, a circus.

Maurizio Cattelan, All installation from below, with several taxidermied animals

But as circus’ aerial acts get their power from the frisson of imminent danger, this installation gets some of its power from the frisson of imminent death. Cattelan has been a consistent explorer of the limits of the body and of happenstance and powerlessness. Even the Pope takes a licking and doesn’t keep on ticking in Cattelan’s world. John F. Kennedy, in his coffin, wears no shoes. A photo of hands reaching from the ground suggest a man buried in the sand still praying for succor to a God who doesn’t answer.

Maurizio Cattelan, All installation detail with the Pope hit by a meteor, center

Taxidermied animals are stand-ins for humans. The powerful horse is reduced to a dead body. The tiny squirrel dies at the kitchen table. Cattelan ‘s use of Mme. Toussaud-like fleshtones parallels the taxidermied animals. The themes of death and powerlessness bring to mind the themes of another wax-works-style sculptor, Ron Mueck.

Maurizio Cattelan, All installation detail

The exhibit is about the inevitability of failure and death. And speaking of final endings, the show ends Jan. 22.

The Renaissance Portrait From Donatello to Bellini, at the Met is marvelous, but the exhibition notes wore me down. I could barely take in what they were saying, and when I could, I found they raised more questions than they answered. For instance, on what basis do the curators assert that one man’s hair color is probably dyed. How do they know that?

The exhibit shows how portraiture began with strict, flat profiles and progressed to full-face and three-quarter face images. Equally wonderful and perversely obverse the continuity of portraiture. The 15th-century faces look contemporary and completely individual. They are the snapshots of their day–opportunities to commemorate events, relations and lovers, preserving them as keepsakes and aides memoires. Drawings, paintings and other works in this exhibit are astounding in their beauty and detail.
The show is huge–about 160 works (it must have cost a bundle to assemble). With such a wealth of material, it seems like an opportunity was lost in discussing more of the ethnographic, social and political issues suggested by the art–the 14-year-old brides (all blondes!); the arrival of dark hair with the Medicis. Oh, I know, it’s probably all in the catalog. In all truth, once I got done with the improvements in portraiture techniques, the social issues were what really interested me–that and all those beautiful portrayals of people who look so real they could be us.

The portrait show at the Met goes to March 18.

The Tenement Museum

Slide of life on the Lower East Side from www.tenement.org/

Speaking of people who could be us, the other highlight of our trip was a visit to the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side. We got to visit a 19th century structure, which over the course of its use housed about 7,000 people. We visited two apartments in the building, recreations that told the story of the people who lived there (during two separate eras). I was able to imagine myself in both eras and both kinds of lives, thanks to the wonderful presentation by our docent. Best of all, we got to see pictures of the descendants of those two families. Total feel-good melting pot American Dream experience!

And these days, the Lower East Side is chock-a-block with contemporary art galleries and little cafes. It has a West Philly vibe.

I should note that I have piles of old New Yorkers floating around the house–who can keep up? So the article I am enamored of at this moment, Browbeaten: Dwight Macdonald’s war on Midcult, was published Sept. 5, 2011.

It’s an appreciation of critic and author Dwight Macdonald, who had lots to say about how foolish people are when they suffer pretentious art gladly because someone told them it was good. This idea represented a turning point. It suggested that popular culture with ideas was a valid intellectual pursuit. This idea also reflected the explosion of intellectually rich pop culture being made at that time. Menand lists some examples, including Bonnie and Clyde, Blonde on Blonde, and Andy Warhol.

Among Macdonald’s victims, his antagonist Clement Greenberg (Menand quoting Macdonald here): “He had something that was very important: a moralistic approach to everything. He made people feel guilty if they didn’t like Jackson Pollock.” Menand backpedals on endorsing this idea, but I’m really not convinced that Macdonald is wrong or unfair here.

Going to town on Saturday afternoon. Greene County, Georgia, May 1941. Reproduction from color slide. Photo by Jack Delano. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

After enjoying the long array, I found at the bottom of the page a list of links to more early color photos on other subjects. Heaven. The links are all to the Denver Post’s photo blogs.

Twins Seven-Seven, The Woman Carrying Water, 2007, oil, acrylic, ink and pastel on plywood

Indigo, which mostly eschews the vast U.S. commercial art industry by focusing on art from third world, folk and outsider artists, has been the late, great Twins Seven-Seven’s go-to gallery in Philadelphia since his first show there in 1996. And in a way I suppose we can think of Seven-Seven’s work as crossover–not so much Nigeria crossing to Philly but outsider crossing over to insider. The artist’s work after a brief dip in popularity the ’90s–has returned as a force as African art has grown in popularity.

Twins Seven-Seven, The Woman Carrying Water, 2007, detail, oil, acrylic, ink and pastel on plywood

Seven-Seven was a character. Born into the Yoruba tribe in Nigeria, he was the last of seven successive sets of twins in a family of royal lineage, so the artist dubbed himself Prince Twins Seven-Seven, say the gallery notes. He did not start out as an artist, but as a musician, a contemporary of Fela, said Gallery owner Tony Fisher the day I was there. However, once Twins  discovered his inner artist, he quickly became an art star.

Eventually, he made Philadelphia his home.

Prince Twins Seven-Seven, Priest and Priestess in Festivity Mood of Ibeji Ceremony, 2007, acrylic & ink on fabric

The artist, who created heavily patterned scenes of gods and traditional African life, marched to his own drummer.  The images–on panel, paper, and fabric–shimmer with activity. The show, Twins Seven-Seven Legacy of the Oshogbo Master, was in the planning when the artist died in 2011.

I found especially interesting a painting that could be considered virtually a failure–created once the artist’s powers of concentration and control had succumbed to his final illness. Galley owner Tony Fisher said the artist’s family here brought the work into the gallery after the artist died. Under normal circumstances, such a piece might have been hidden to maintain the myth of the artist’s great powers.

Prince Twins Seven-Seven, Priest and Priestess in Festivity Mood of Ibeji Ceremony, 2007, acrylic & ink on fabric

But not only did the piece (not shown in post)–made on layers of wood–do no harm. It served as a reminder of just how complicated and fine the rest of Twins’ work is, although it hardly requires a reminder. I for one found it poignant, assuming it is genuine–an expression of great power lost, no matter what the circumstances of its facture.

The artist, who is in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Smithsonian, has an extensive, powerhouse record of exhibiting. The work at Indigo will remain up to Jan. 28, along with work from other artists–Yinka Adeyemi, Ademola Oyelami, Rahmon Olugunna, Aremu Jimoh,Phillip Olufemi Babarinlo, Tunde Odunlade, Toyin Folorunso, Yekini Folorunso– who also studied at the Oshogbo School and were influenced by Twins’ work. The gallery put up a lot of the show’s images.

Red and blue totems-in-business-suits battle for the nation's soul in Bunk News Arts Collective's installation, including Tao Twin Blue, Tao Twin Red, and Mandala, 2011, acrylic and india ink on wood, Tao Twins each 141" x 72" x .5", Mandala 90" x 90" x .5"

The show here. at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts is full of lively art that reimagines the nation’s old myths in terms of current realities. And the resulting show is a festival of Americana that dares to dream in big new ways that recreate and revitalize the nation’s creation myths and self-images. So the important here-ness of the show is not so much about particular regions of the country, although there’s some of that. It’s about who we are as Americans. Here’s some of what I admired:

Sue Chenoweth, Wouldn't He Remember his First Home? What Passed for Wisdom There?, 2011 Gouache, acrylic, ink, graphite, Letraset and Flocked paper on paper 80” x 80”

Sue Chenoweth’s map-like renderings recall Native American maps on deerskin and the trek across the Candyland gameboard! The central, non-Western orientation in these landscapes turns each of these works into a creation myth. Each piece suggests that what you are seeing is the entire world.

Scott Hocking, Hephaestus and the Garden of the Gods, Snow from the series: Garden of the Gods, 2009 – 2010, 2010; Archival pigment print / Mixed media installation Print: 33” x 49.5” Courtesy the artist and Susanne Hilberry Gallery

Another artist creating his own mythic tale of the place where he lives is Scott Hocking. His Garden of the Gods series of devastated landscapes plus landscape interventions are like archaeological digs into he glories of the past.

Chido Johnson, my pink caddi, 2009, Video installation

Chido Johnson’s video of a man (the artist I presume) walking the outline of a car on a leash is a poignant testament to imagination, yearning and the American Dream reduced to a pet car. This reminds me of South African video artist Robin Rhodes interacting with his chalk drawings as if they were the real thing.

Abigail Anne Newbold, Homemaker series, 2010 – 2011 A collection of found and custom fabricated objects. Linen, cotton, hickory, sheepskin, and leather were used to fabricate with. Dimensions variable

Abigail Anne Newbold’s Homemaker series summons visions of Westward, Ho! all tidied up with Shaker tastes and green values. Newbold finds transcendent glory in her tidied homestead on wheels at the same time that she inserts neediness and making do into the romance of the camping home on the range that’s no longer limitless.

Postcommodity, Gallup Motel Butchering, 2011, Four channel video installation with sound, Dimensions variable

A video of a Native American ritual lamb slaughter in a motel bathtub, by Postcommodity, is a jolting displacement. In a way, this gory ritual elevates the seedy motel and its anonymity into a sacred place. At the same time the artists confront our (and PETA’s ? ) squeamish and romanticized misinterpretation of native peoples and their relationship to the earth and our fellow beasts.

Aaron Storck, Poetry and Music in Kansas Bush, 2011, Video, Running time: Approx. 12 minutes

I did not stand for the full 12 minutes in front of Aaron Storck’s loopy video Poetry and Music in Kansas Bush. Another video, nameless, also by Storck (I don’t know the title), was hilarious and riveting. In both the artist stars, bringing a stoner-movie affect to his mix of magician and medicine show huckster. He rants and chants, combining hippie spaciness with talk TV and reality TV. I’m sure there’s more to say and more to see, but I gotta tell you, I loved my little glimpse of his paradise.

Erika Nelson, “SCOUT” Daily Driver Art Car, 2003 – Present Mixed media on 1995 Toyota Pickup

Whether it’s Erika Nelson’s romance with road trips and the kitsch of roadside attractions, or Jennifer Levonian’s battle between lower class and middle class taste, or Guy Michael Davis and Katie Parker’s kitsch descendants of discredited values, the show excavates the the things we treasure as a nation and rewrites newer, truer stories for the 21st century. Here are some more pix:

Guy Michael Davis and Katie Parker, Hy-que Monkey in Captivity, 2011, Porcelain, china paint, hand printed wallpaper, detail from 5 monkeys on sconces, Each 48” x 24” x 7”

Stacy Lynn Waddell, Aarkaydea , 2011, detail, Mixed media installation consisting of framed works, photo-lithographic, wall-sized paper panels, and miscellaneous items like string and fabric. 100” x 498”

Jennifer Levonian, The Oven Sky, 2011 Cut-out animation using watercolor and collage, with music by Rachel Mason, Video, Running time: 4 min. 45 sec.; one of the new residents gentrifying the neighborhood

Tim Portlock, Sundown, 2011, Ink jet print 54” x 72”; Tim is the Ansel Adams of the rubble, glorifying Philadelphia as an imagined dystopia

Others in the show are: Megawords, Paul Coors, Terence Hammonds, Liz Cohen, Lewis Colburn, elsewhere, Harrison Haynes, Michael Krueger, Aaron Rothman, Gregory Sale; Glenda Wharton and Whoop Dee Doo (all that was left of Whoop Dee Doo’s performance was a plastic tent).

In some sense this is the perfect PAFA show, contemporary reimaginings of history paintings–mythic, grandiose, and wonderfully dreamy. I’m sorry the show ends the 31st. I’d like to see it again and give it more time.

PAFA Curator of Contemporary Art Julien Robson and five guest curators–Christopher Cook, Director and Curator at the Salina Art Center, Salina, Kansas; Mark Harris, Director of the School of Art at the University of Cincinnati; Rebecca Hart, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Detroit Institute of Arts; Claire Schneider, Independent Curator; and Teka Selman, Assistant Director of the MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts at Duke University–each selected work from their regions.  With them, plus 24 artists or presenting groups, the show is huge, and its catalog is a welcome addition.