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).

Jeffrey Eugenides at the Free Library Tuesday night.

This question followed another about his seemingly high empathy quotient: How could he possibly get inside the female mind and portray it so astutely, completely and naturally, as with the character Madeleine in the Marriage Plot? The author said he creates characters out of bits and pieces of a lot of people and with a lot of his own experience mixed in. He imagines himself in situations and makes up a lot, but he also does his research.

He went on to say that while he wants to (and does) use his own biographical material in his books it’s hard to do that because he gets so involved in the reflections, memories and recounting that it becomes more reportage than storytelling. So while many of his characters actually do things he actually did in his life (Mitchell in The Marriage Plot goes to India to work with Mother Theresa — so did Eugenides) that appears to be framework.  It is harder for him to write his emotional autobiography into the story. First and foremost he’s writing fiction — something he does daily, sitting in his office typing out 800 words a day. Writing is a job and hard work, he said, but he’s happy it’s his job.

Meanwhile, back to the big question. Eugenides told the answer in all dead seriousness: Cal Stephanides is as far away from his biological experience as he could get. To make himself even clearer, he said he did not have an intersex condition. Then this great storyteller, who speaks with the same kind of pithy, funny, observations as he writes in his books, went on to tell the back story of why he wanted to write Middlesex.

He read Michel Foucault’s re-discovered memoirs of the 19th Century hermaphrodite, Herculine Barbin. Barbin grew up female and went to a convent school but was later judged male and lived a miserable life ending in suicide. The story was so dramatic, but the convent schoolgirl’s telling of it was so evasive and lacking in emotional and physical details it left Eugenides frustrated — and interested in writing a story — including all the emotional and physical details – with an intersex narrator.

He wanted a narrator who is completely outside of normal and could be omniscient like Terisius in Ovid’s Metamorphosis, who is wise and has been both man and woman and knows the answer to important questions like who has more fun with sex, men or women.

The perfect narrator is an intersex narrator, he said. And by the way, the name Middlesex, well it conjures many things, but a fact is that Eugenides grew up on Middlesex Blvd. in Grosse Point Park, MI.

Robert Pruitt, Brother From Gleise 581C (Gleise is a planet); The figure, wearing a Dogon mask, is in a B-boy pose. The nice images are from http://www.robert-pruitt.com

Pruitt’s 50-inch-ish conte crayon, charcoal and mixed media drawings on Kraft paper (and more recently paper dyed with tea) pair gorgeous drawing technique with ideas about contemporary culture, especially about fashion and race and identity. He has also made video, animations, sculptures and is part of Otabenga Jones and Associates, a collective of African-American artists with something to say about race in the art world and its institutions.

The first time I saw work by Robert A. Pruitt--A picture I snapped in 2005 at the Studio Museum in Harlem. CEO, conte crayon on Kraft paper

I saw Pruitt’s work in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, in 2005 at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and this year at the Fabric Workshop and Museum (he was in their New American Voices exhibit). His residency at the FWM plus a visiting artist gig at Penn are part of what brought him to the ICA here.

Robert Pruitt to the left. A photo by Edward Curtis of a Navajo dancer on the screen. You can see the Curtis image up close here: http://www.windows2universe.org/mythology/tonenili_rain.html

The audience on the night of his talk was filled with students, and some strays like myself (I’d guess more than 100 attended).
The first slide Pruitt flashed was of an Edward Curtis photo of a Navajo dressed in the costume of the water god. “It’s an alternative way of living and being. I’m interested in how that existed.”

Robert Pruitt, Two Sisters

He said his drawing technique grew out of his love for Marvel Comics and copying them, as a boy.

This internet image Mr. T has animated bling in the original.

His work, mash-ups of exotic cultures, and of historical eras with today,  reflects interests in how fashion expresses ideas about being human, and how those ideas vary in science fiction, pop culture, and other cultures past and present. For inspiration he spends a lot of time scouring the Internet with no set idea of what he’s looking for. That’s how he stumbled on the Native American dancer, and that’s what set him thinking of the oddity of Mr. T ‘s “post-’60s and -’70s bravado” with its relationship to hip-hop bling and African kings’ adornment (check out the original image of Mr. T with his animated bling).

Pruitt asks about rapper T-Pain, How does he walk out of the house?

Some things that set Pruitt wondering include the leopard skirt on a dark-skinned character from an alien planet in Star Trek, and singer-songwriter T-Pain in full regalia. Pruitt, on seeing T-Pain’s look, wondered, “How does he walk out of the house?” In the context of Pruitt’s drawings, these images, which we just accept as part of our culture’s visual landscape, look weird and wonderful, indeed–delivering a National Geographic sort of ethnographic fascination once you take them out of context.

Sun Ra, shareable image from http://www.last.fm/music/Sun+Ra/+images/68802646

Pruitt said he hopes to capture the way Sun Ra and Miriam Makeba each used Egyptian styles to grab their audiences’ imagination. “I’m looking for a place that’s outside to fit in.”

Robert Pruitt, Vasimr1. He said Vasimr, tattooed on the woman's neck, is the name of a rocket ship.

Eventually Pruitt veered away from his discussion of the drawings. “It’s troublesome for me to say too much about them.”

Pruitt photos of Pruitt garments made during a residency at the Fabric Workshop and Museum

During his residency at the Fabric Workshop, he first made some drawings of some objects. “Drawings are the meat and potatoes of my process,” he said. Then he made the ideas into sculptures and photographs. For the photographs, he used different cameras from different eras. The things he made were bankrolled by the FWM. “It’s more fun when someone else in paying for the materials,” he joked, and said, “I’m still trying to see how I feel about these images.”

Garments and ornaments created by Robert Pruitt at the FWM

Lately he’s been making African sculptures covered with aluminum foil. “I really like them.”

Robert Pruitt, Male Figure, tin foil over wood. A comic book alien made by an African tribesman, perhaps.

Then he turned to living in Houston and Otabenga Jones and Associates. “Someone asked me, Why do I stay in Houston? It’s sort of the place I know. If I want to respond [to a culture and place], I need to know it.”

Ota Benga is the name of an African pygmy who was displayed at the Bronx Zoo. Besides Pruitt, the group includes Jamal Cyrus (who has a Penn MFA) as well as Dawolu Jabari Anderson, and Kenya Evans. Among the group’s activities were picketing a Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts show of a collection that was “limited in scope,” i.e. Euro-centric. It was Pruitt’s first ever demonstration, and he carried a sign that said, “My Blackness is Bigger Than Your White Box.” The group also curated an exhibit at the Menil Collection–selecting objects from the collection mixed with the artists’ own objects. “We tried to create an equalization of values.” Saturday teach-ins were a part of the exhibit. They were modeled after historic Black Panther education sessions.

He said he thought that the action at the MFAH and the show at Menil had some degree of impact on how the institutions deal with blackness in their exhibits.

Robert A. Pruitt, All Day I Dream About Senegal; photo I took at the 2006 Whitney Biennial

His animations reflect his attraction to the militancy of Black Power proponents of the past–it’s “the same issues that oppress the black community now,” he said, and added that Obama and other contemporary powerful black men were not discussing those issues now. He was unhappy showing the animation at the scale of the auditorium screen. “My video doesn’t belong on a museum wall,” he said, preferring YouTube and the small screen. The sound track was from a speech by Amiri Baraka. The animation, he said,  “can liberate that speech from the moment it was made.”

Robert Pruitt, South Park (South Park is tattooed on figure's arm)

The Q&A that followed the talk was lively. Someone asked about the link between science fiction and history. Pruitt said he was interested in utopic space and “radical histories contemplating the struggle to get rid of structures like slavery.”

He said comics are a romantic way of seeing the world, and “for me, they are a way of re-imagining the human condition.”

Robert Pruitt, Glass Slippers, at the 2006 Whitney Biennial

Someone wanted to know about who he imagined was his audience. Although his work appeals to an art audience, Pruitt said he also wanted it to reach a black audience, and appeal to people of color in general. “How can I make drawings of great blackness?” he said, parallel to the way that art museums display images of great whiteness.

Then he returned to the subject of whether museums have a broad enough perspective. “Any project a museum brings us (Otabenga Jones), is suspect. The museum just has a different goal.” Then he said,  “I am trying to do a couple of projects in which I give the work away, so people could, if they want a piece, take it away.”

Charline Von Heyl, installation shot of two works at ICA

When I got over my shock that this salon was really a lecture I grabbed my corner of wall and got ready to hear what the speakers had to say.

First up, Claudia Gould, out-going Director of ICA, welcomed everyone and announced that this was her last public program at ICA. Gould then got quiet, for what seemed like more than a 3-count and said, “I’m tearing up, something I never expected.” More silence as time passed and she struggled with her emotions finally giving up and fluttering away from the podium and back to her front row seat. People clapped. And Alex Klein, the Institute’s new Program Director, quickly stepped in, asking for another round of applause for Gould, who has done so much for ICA and would be missed.

Scott Olson, image from "A Conversation with Scott Olson"

The three painters on tap — all makers of abstract or non-representational imagery — were there as an ancillary to the Charline Von Heyl exhibit in ICA’s downstairs gallery, an exhibit of non-representational paintings, prints and drawings, all heavily-worked and imbued with the artist’s love of process.

Chapter 12: iamb, 2008, oil, silkscreen and gesso on wood 32 3/8 x 20" Photo courtesy of Whitney Museum website. Collection of Laura Belgray and Steven Eckler; courtesy Miguel Abreu Gallery, NY. Photo by John Berens.

The first painters then stepped through slides of their works, talking mostly about their process a lot and about the substance of what they’re doing a little. Scott Olson talked about working small and preparing his rabbit skin glue and powdered pigment grounds and then putting his abstract imagery on top of his small works. R.H. Quaytman, (she’s a woman in case you’re wondering) talked about her paintings, which she said also start out with rabbit skin glue and pigments. She calls her paintings chapters and she is also a writer. And she is very much about showing her paintings in book form (literally, if I understood), and sometimes in galleries, with specially-created walls that come at the viewer like pages of an open book.

Dona Nelson, Okie Dokie, front 2008 83x79 inches, cheesecloth and acrylic mediums on canvas. photo from artist's website

Last up was Dona Nelson, who presented herself as a searcher, constantly trying to find her way through paint, water washes, canvas and stretchers, to some place where the canvas and stretchers were the important elements — the support, the infrastructure, the base matter usually considered mundane and useful but not important as content. Nelson talked about abstract art as a murky place where things happen, imagery exists, but it’s all a big and seductive mystery in the end. But before she showed even one slide of her works she played a clip from a John Cassavetes movie about a mobster who runsa strip club. She thought the movie had a lot of allegiance with abstract art. There’s action, confusion, ambiguity and a lot of deep, dark passages that are quite mysterious.

Dona Nelson, Okie Dokie, back, 2008 83x79 inches, cheesecloth and acrylic mediums on canvas. photo from artist's website

Nelson posed such a dramatic contrast to the previous two speakers it was like a tornado came in the room, looking not to do damage but to take charge, shake things up, and lead thoughts in a different direction.

She showed slides of her double-sided works, that are also very much about the process, but about something almost primally-human — the search for the grid; the infrastructure; the amazing architecture of stuff that holds things together. By leap of imagination, these works are about the world and the human search for invisible structures that lie behind what we see, what we use, who we are. They may not look like it but Nelson’s paintings are deeply spiritual and the painter herself is clearly on a journey.

Dona Nelson, double-sided painting, shown at Thomas Erben gallery, 2009. Sometimes she puts the paintings on milk crates to make them free-standing

At this point, about an hour into the program, I had to leave for family obligations so I don’t know whether the night transformed into a salon after all, with open discussion and a quickly-moving stream of words and ideas floating through the participants. I hope it did. Maybe the salon happened when the drinks and snacks rolled out and people had mini-salons with their friends to talk about what they had heard. There are plenty more salons scheduled. They all sound great and I will give them a pass on the slightly sideways program title since the program itself was excellent.

Fritz Haeg, speaking at the APS Museum's Ben Franlin auditorium on Sept. 20

The lecture was co-sponsored by the APS Museum and the Philadelphia Horticulture Society (PHS) perfect sponsors for Haeg’s projects which involve history, animals, plants and remembering the past and to create a better, sustainable future.

You say what does that have to do with art? Well, in the new embrace of action as art and community-building as art, Haeg is a hero and champion, and he does much of his showing and telling in major art institutions, like the Whitney Museum (the 2008 Biennial); the Tate Modern in London, San Francisco MoMA and the ICA right here, where he was a part of 2006′s Locally Localized Gravity, an exhibit that celebrated art and community.  The guy is so busy he’s hardly ever home.  He bemoaned the fact that he can’t really spend time in his own garden because he’s so busy helping people start theirs.  See his Wikidiary for his itinerary.

Haeg says he starts with cities because there’s no real wilderness left. As an architect he’s not interested in building a building. “I’m more interested in looking at what we have and how to occupy the land in creative and revolutionary ways.”

Edible Estates started in 2005

Garden plan, from one of the front yard gardens. He works with graphic designers and others on his projects so this is not his drawing

Edible Estates grew out of his massive obsession with gardening. “When I’m gardening it’s the only time in my life I’m where I am doing what I should be doing. I’m an artist trained as an architect and an amateur gardener. I want to make gardens anyone can make. The goal is to make prototype gardens around the country…so people can “grow food where they live (and do it) publicly (ie on the front lawn, not the back yard).”

Here’s how it works.  Haeg gets invited to do a project; and he seeks out a family to work with and they design a garden for the front yard.  He’s careful in the selection of the family and selects something in a sedate middle class neighborhood with manicured lawns.  He talked about how the neighbors would be skeptical.  And how the children were always the most excited and the first to want to help.  He’s done these projects all over the world, starting in Salinas, KS.  He’s done them in Baltimore, New York, Lakewood, CA, Austin, TX, London, Istanbul and in 2012 will be making a garden in Budapest.

“The idea of the American home is based on old English estates — a house dominating the land around it, isolated from the neighbors. What do people in America eat? We’re isolated from our food. It’s grown in irrigated deserts in the southwest. It’s a monoculture–people live one place; food is grown another.

“It’s not an advocacy project saying everybody has to do this. But we can all learn…It’s easy to think of this project as Romantic, but it’s not.” And he mentions Rome, in 64 AD had a million people to feed and he city couldn’t feed itself and it kept expanding….and, well, we all know what happened to Rome.

Animal Estates started 2008

Fritz Haeg's eagle's nest, at the 2008 Whitney Biennial

Haeg made his first animal houses for the Whitney Biennial in 2008.  The questions for him are: Do we want animals in the city? If so, which ones? He researched the city to see what animals would have been at 75th and Madison (the Whitney’s location) some 400 years ago that aren’t here now.   The answer: brown bat, eagle, bobcat, beaver, purple martin.  He then made model homes for these animals and the hope was the animals would use them and come back.  The hope was also to educate people about our animal and wilderness past, so there were activities and lectures about animals, and performances based on animal behaviors.  Haeg says that the animals are his clients and he’s designing for animals.  He’s continued to do Animal Estates after the Whitney Biennial.  Most recently, with Arup Assoc. in London (architects, who did the Beijing Olympics). In the corporate lobby, he made a reception desk for animals that mirrored the reception desk for humans.

Haeg is a visionary and yes, these projects are Romantic.  But they’re also dead serious, positing a way forward through education and a return to simplicity that’s very appealing.

Adrienne Skye Roberts at the Coral Street Arts House

The story was about Roberts’ search for truth, family and identity. She was tracking down information about her grandfather, who was one of nine members of the American Communist Party arrested and tried under the Smith Act here in Philadelphia for conspiracy to overthrow the United States Government. (Eventually the Smith Act and the convictions were tossed). The talk included a slideshow and a giveaway of a Daily Worker newspaper facsimile into which Roberts inserted her own content. I especially loved the red date stamp, lending the publication a feel of 1950s government bureaucracy, surveillance, and dusty files. The slide show, while it repeated some of the newspaper images, also had a few surprises, and it was those surprises that gave it life. Some additional images would make it even better.

Adrienne Skye Roberts' bogus facsimile of the Daily Worker, with a photo of her grandfather, Joseph Roberts, previously known as Sam Gobeloff. Date stamped in red on left.

Roberts, from San Francisco, came to Philadelphia on a Philadelphia Art Hotel residency, and in the course of her research, she got squired around to her grandfather’s old neighborhood by artist Diane Pieri, who was in the audience the night of the talk. Pieri, told me she herself had been a “red diaper” baby. Roberts met the last surviving of her grandfather’s co-defendants, Sherman Labovitz, and the wife of another–both were in the audience. Labovitz is the author of Being Red in Philadelphia, A Memoir of the McCarthy Act. He looked quite chipper and handsome. The human faces helped authenticate the story.

Roberts is not a typical PAH resident. She’s a writer for one thing, and a former dancer (she’s unusually tall for a dancer!), not to mention a curator, educator and activist interested in issues of queerness and race.

A performance has been cancelled that was scheduled for tomorrow night, but another one is scheduled for Friday, one of several talks organized by the Moles Not Molar Reading and Performance Series:

Friday, Sept. 23, 8 p.m.
Vox Populi Gallery
319 N. 11th St., 3rd Floor

This is meant to be a casual conversation. So come down and share how you feel about this place or any place and its influence on you and your art. See a slide show on the jump page. We made it from photos we took at the press preview.

Steven and Billy Blaise Dufala, detail from wall drawing in Urbanism

Matthew Higgs

“It was the greatest experience of my life,” he said of one of the JD performances he attended. “I knew it was historic.” At the time he was publishing a music fanzine, Photophobia. These days, he himself is the subject of an internet fanzine, The Matthew Higgs Society, based in Philadelphia.

Higgs was speaking to a crowded room at the University of the Arts Wednesday, July 6, the talk a part of a series of summer art talks for the MFA program. Roberta and I were both there to hear Higgs and also to attend the opening of the student show, which we had juried.

The 46-year-old curator, artist, write and publisher spoke so quickly in his English accent that the room was utterly silent with people straining to catch what he was saying. Part of what he said was that he learned was about the importance of community–from how Joy Division shared its royalties among all its members and how they plowed the income back into their club.

Two years later, Higgs became equally passionate about art. At 16, “My interest in art surpassed my interest in music.” His desire to know ever more about whatever he was curious about came through as a fierce intelligence during the talk.

At art school in Newcastle, he had political ideas that seeped into his art practice–when he realized that he could only go so far in art all by himself. “It was clear to me from day one that I wasn’t the most interesting artist in my class.” So he adopted collaboration and community as his way of coping.

Here he dropped a name. New York gallery owner Gavin Brown was in his class. Higgs continued to drop names from his generation in the course of the talk–Jeremy Deller, Elizabeth Peyton. At 22 in London, in an art scene he termed moribund, he saw new artists starting to make things happen for themselves. “For me it was just interesting to be putting art into the world.” So he published about 60 quirky, hand-assembled book/objects he created with artists, including Deller, Peyton and Martin Creed. One he singled out in the talk was Stewart Home’s Cunt Lickers Anonymous, in which Home outed as straight the fey duo artists Gilbert and George.

Jeremy Deller's Valentine's Day message, part of Higgs' project to put art in a public context.

He submitted messages by fellow artists into the Valentine’s Day personals in the newspapers. Deller’s personal (above) was lyrics from a song by the Smiths, offbeat out of the song’s context. Higgs called it an “attempt to make work in the public domain.” Both the books projects and the Valentines personals he paid for out of his own pocket, while working as an administrative assistant in a London ad agency. (He noted at this point in the talk that he has curated a Jeremy Deller show coming up at Hayward Gallery (London) next year.

Higgs made his mark curating shows that demonstrated the YBAs weren’t the only game in town–an almost political sort of thing breaking up the Saatchi cartel-approach to art. (Higgs has curated more than 100 shows all in all).

After the London ICA he moved to San Francisco as curator of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art at California College of Arts and Crafts where among other things he placed art in non-art places like bulletin boards in hallways, and showed work that played with language, both persistent themes in his career. And since moving on to White Columns, he said he has redefined what the space is doing–tons of shows, publishing a fanzine every couple of months (another example of consistent interests through the years), and releasing records on occasion. “The idea is to be idiosyncratic,” he said, now that so many other spaces are serving as incubators for new talent, which was White Columns’ original defining role.

Art Chicago 2011 at the Merchandise Mart

Navy Pier was renovated, the fair was occasionally held at other venues, and twice changed hands. It’s now held at the Merchandise Mart which has elegant, Art Deco detailing in and around its elevators and clean spaces for display. As with all fairs, there’s always ancillary and educational programming, and this year Art Chicago asked the College Art Association to organize one of the panels. It made sense to address a current issue, and I suggested that, in the wake of the removal of David Wojnarowicz’s video excerpt from the Hide/Seek exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in November, we address the question of which institutions are able to exhibit art that deals with edgy subjects, and the problems of censorship.

Protesters in support of David Wojnarowicz on the steps of the NPG, after his video was removed from exhibition (Thursday, Dec. 2, 2010, AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

I invited Patricia Hills, art historian from Boston University who has a long interest in political art and whose books include Modern Art in the USA: Issues and Controversies of the 20th Century (and a recent monograph on Jacob Lawrence, which I reviewed on April 3, 2011); Barry Blinderman, director of University Galleries at Illinois State University, who organized David Wojnarowicz: Tongues of Flame, the artist’s first solo museum exhibition, in 1992; and Lauren Rosati, Assistant Curator at Exit Art, a 29-year old alternative space in New York City devoted to exhibiting art that explores environmental, political and cultural issues as a means of initiating or instigating social change (as it says on their website). The panel drew a standing-room only audience.

Barry Blinderman, Patricia Hills, Lauren Rosati, Andrea Kirsh

Pat presented a list of controversial art exhibitions, beginning in 1969 with Kate Milletts People’s Flag Show at Judson Church; she discussed art that was controversial because it dealt with patriotism, revisionist history, religion, homosexuality and the sources of money. She also thinks that a lot of censorship precedes exhibitions, but that subject would have to wait for another talk. Barry began with a short clip from Wojnarowicz’s film; he said it was important, in considering the 11 seconds of controversial imagery within an already much edited version of David Wojnarowicz’s Fire in My Belly, to consider the artist’s entire career. Wojnarowicz’s work consistently addressed martyrdom, communion, cells, time, St. Sebastion, and money, and lamented the loss of spirituality in American life, something the artist found in Mexico. Barry was proud that the exhibition he organized in Normal, IL was described by one critic as an orgy of degenerate depravity.

David Wojnarowicz still from ‘Fire in My Belly’

Lauren Rosati described Exit Art’s almost three decades’ of challenging exhibitions, such as Illegal America (1982), a group exhibition in which each artist had violated the law in creating the art. One of the works was Chris Burden’s Coals to Newcastle (1978) in which the artist, standing at the at the U.S.border at Calexco, CA, flew a small, rubberband-powered model airplane carrying two marijuana cigarettes across the border into Mexico. Exit Art’s exhibitions have included: Dirty Pictures (1982) dealing with sex; Forbidden Films – an historical survey of censorship in films (1984); and Immigrants and Refugees / Heroes or Villains (1987).

Exit Art’s facade

The audience at the panel was engaged and anxious to ask questions which, unfortunately, we had no time for. They struck me as more interested in than knowledgeable about art, and I think these opportunities to talk to people less familiar with the art world are crucially important. I urge readers who are offered such opportunities to take them up, enlarge our circle, and let people know the real range of ideas involved in making, selling, studying, writing about and exhibiting art. We have interesting stories to tell.

Altered and Adorned: Using Renaissance Prints in Daily Life at the Art Institute of Chicago

Compiled by Placidus Sprenger (German, 1735–1806). Devotional Album of Engravings, Etchings, Woodcuts and Mezzotints, assembled 1798 from prints produced c. 1500–1798

I had enough time to visit this modest but most intriguing exhibition, at the Art Institute (AIC) through July 10, 2011, which takes a material culture approach, reminding us that before they became art, most old master prints were valued for the information they conveyed or the functions they might serve. These included maps, religious souvenirs (such as those collected in the album, above), wallpaper, faces for sundials and other scientific instruments (below), personal adornment (several fan decorations are on view), bookplates and illustrations in all sorts of books, from the Bible to medical texts; the exhibition includes an anatomical illustration with details that can be turned back, revealing different layers of the body – a very early pop-up book. Prints were also the primary way that knowledge of artwork circulated before photography – hence the many reproductive engravings that informed artists about works they might never see.

J. Kleininger (German, late 18th century–19th century). Portable Compass Sundial, c. 1790. Wood and hand-colored etching on paper with string gnomon

While addressing the prints by functional category, Altered and Adorned includes many of the greatest hits of Renaissance printmaking by (or after) the likes of Mantegna, Durer, Titian and Leonardo, and largely in wonderful impressions; the AIC has a splendid print collection, and is the only museum I know that always has prints on view that span the time period of the paintings on permanent display. This exhibition is a valuable reminder of the variety of functions once fulfilled by works assembled under the category of art.

Book Review
In Favour of Public Space; Ten years of the European prize for urban public space (Barcelona: Actar, 2010) ISBN 978-84-92861-3-5.

Office of Architecture in Barcelona (OAB), detail of Paseo Marítimo de la Playa Poniente, Benidorm (2009)

My airplane reading introduced me to a vast range of imaginative and socially-successful urban projects that have been off my radar. Some are so modest, such as the pocket garden/community center in a passageway in north-east Paris designed by Atelier d’architecture autogérée (AAA), that they may elude the architecture journals. Others, such as the esplanade in Benidorm (above), are off my usual travel routes, and/or in places I never had reason to visit (Zadar, Croatia where  Nikola Bašic’ transformed the forlorn seafront on the Adriatic into a sea organ and public gathering space; or Zaanstad, NL where NL Architects created a series of useful, public spaces underneath the elevated highway that cut through the city). Each of the projects has a description of the brief and the process of creating the design, which varied tremendously as to how much the public was a part of the process; all have multiple illustrations and information as to the architects, developers, size and budgets.

The renewed waterfront with Nikola Bašic''s steps down to the sea that include a mechanism which makes sounds from the water’s movement, Zadar, Croatia

So much urban public space in the U.S. is actually private space, such as shopping malls or the parks developers are forced to create in order to get height variances, so it was thrilling to see that a series of European cities, largely neither capitals or cultural centers, value the public and provide first rate architecture for them. The range of the architects’ imagination is also inspiring, and this book will certainly be a welcome source of ideas and information for anyone who loves cities.

KARO* with Architektur + Netzwerk’s Open-Air Library in Magdeburg, Germany

PMA Director and CEO Timothy Rub, in front of the museum's Grand Staircase

Those issues and more were addressed in a chat at the Philadelphia Art Alliance between PMA Director Timothy Rub and artist Diane Burko. The Tuesday night event, which kicks off a series of talks on the Art Alliance’s agenda (the next one features weather guy Adam Joseph–I kid you not), was attended mostly by an older crowd–but a crowd nonetheless considering it was a weekday night and competing with Mia Farrow in town getting honored.

Diane Burko painting

About crossing the dangerous Parkway, Burko wanted to know if the trolleys were the final solution. She yearned for a bridge. Rub nixed that and a tunnel. But he did let on that the Parkway Council was working on a plan to change the street pattern and add new traffic lighting, to aid foot traffic–”in the future.” With the Barnes and Rodin buildings approaching readiness in a year, the issue is greater than access between the PMA and its Perelman Building. The trolleys are here to stay, he said, and added something about working with the Phlash tourist buses.

Embracing the digital world

Then Burko asked, Would the museum create a department to handle multimedia, film, video and other new forms of art.

The answer was a firm, No. Rub said he doesn’t like medium-specific curatorial departments, although he did admit that Photos and Prints weren’t going away.

And would it embrace these new forms in the collection? Yes.

Then Burko asked if the museum would participate in the Google Art Project, which allows the public to make an online visit to the museums’ exhibition spaces. She pointed out that even the Uffizi  and MoMA were on board.

Roberto Capucci, dress with hummingbird-like wings (you can open and close them). Photo by Stella Kimbrough

While Rub didn’t commit, he didn’t say no, either. And he disagreed with naysayers who don’t want to put the collection online. “There’s no distinction between how I can engage someone in the virtual and the real world. …Seeing a picture of the Eiffel Tower never made anyone not want to go to Paris.”

Of the museum’s 230,000 works, 80 percent are digitized–so far. Previously, the museum’s collection was accessible only via the galleries or printed catalogs–the tip of the iceberg. In other words, 225,000 works were inaccessible to nearly everyone on earth.  “High quality images will be online,” Rub said.

Burko mentioned that the Brooklyn Museum was offering free tours to young tweeters in exchange for tweets. “Is someone in your organization trying to deal with a younger audience and social media?”

Yes, the marketing department. The Capucci exhibit Curator Dilys Blum tweeted on the development of the exhibition, and added video clips (you can now see videos here).   She developed a following, Rub said. And going digital with the old comment books has been transformational. “Someone asked, How does Capucci pleat like that? Dilys Blum responded.” Here’s the Capucci discussion board/comment book on the museum’s website.

Public access

Rocky in front of the PMA. Photo from Wickipedia Philadelphia entry, by Bobak Ha'Eri http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Bobak

“How do you bring the Rocky guy up the steps?” Burko asked.

Rub agreed that access for many was a problem. “With pay-what-you-wish only one Sunday a month, now, revenues rose but attendance declined. We have to reduce barriers to entry.”

Rub had eliminated entry fees as director of the Cincinnati museum and inherited a no-fee structure when he moved on to the Cleveland museum, which, he said, had a very large endowment. “This museum [the PMA] is undercapitalized.” And then there’s the question of the museum’s hours. “The hours need to be later to respond to the habits of a changing society,” he said. He added that the museum’s record in making the young and people of color feel more welcome was mixed.

The collection

The questions and answers about collecting Philadelphia art were predicatable. But the conversation about the nature of the PMA’s collection was less so.

Philadelphia’s is “a collection of collections…[that] bear the stamp of their collectors. It’s full of highs and lows and full of extraordinary things.” He contrasted it to Cleveland’s collection, which is encyclopedic [because they could afford to build according to a curator's plan, by acquisitions], but short on masterpieces.

The room that made Rub's jaw drop--Picasso and the Avant Garde in Paris at the PMA, with mother and child on Virgil Marti's Pouffe

A case in point was last year’s exhibit Picasso and the Avant Garde in Paris. Of 215 works shown, 205 were from the collection. “As you walked through, the density was unrivaled elsewhere in the country, especially in the gallery with Virgil Marti’s Pouffe.

“My jaw dropped. There’s not another museum that can rival the depth and texture.”