Michael Jackson, group dance in Beat It, very reminiscent of the Jets and Sharks in West Side Story

Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History by historian William H. McNeill talks about the physical and emotional underpinnings of dance and drill and other human synchronous movement. We all love to dance and we fall easily into step with each other when walking; even aerobics classes are satisfying whereas doing aerobics by yourself is odious.  Why is that? McNeill says there’s something in the human bones and psyche that compels us to move together — and then rewards us for doing so. We feel good when moving together with others. There’s a spirit of group cohesion and shared emotion that happens, some pack animal body-and-mind-happiness that occurs.

Marching band stepping together.

Our ancestors learned this, and dancing allowed them to bond. Dancing may even have helped foster language development (chanting being a natural partner with dance). Moving together rhythmically helped Homo Sapiens evolve and dominate the landscape over non-dancing and non-marching species. Governments have corraled group movement for use in the army — Hitler of course abused this human love of mass physical movement with his goose-stepping soldiers and Heil Hitlering citizens.

University of Michigan graduation. Football crowds often do the human wave, another way to move together in time.

In very early times, organized religions allowed group dancing as a way to commune with god. (One of the byproducts of the rhythmic dancing for some people is the onset of a trance state, seen as a direct communication with god.) The Quakers and the Shakers got their names from the group movements associated with their religions according to McNeil.

Mardi Gras, Bourbon Street New Orleans, crowd in unison hoping to get some beads. Far from a mystical religious experience...or who knows, maybe for some it is.

Visual representations of dance, drill and other synchronous movement

Image of a battle in the War of 1812. By Oleg Parhaiev, Russia

McNeill’s book got me thinking about visual representations of dance and drill and about visual repetition motifs in general. And here’s what I think: That even if you’re not physically moving but are observing dance or drill — or are looking at a visual representation in 2-D of dance or drill — the visual image triggers a similar pack-response as your eyes move around the image and pick up the the rhythmic movements  and register them on you.

Fra Angelico. Early religious paintings often repeated motifs like halos and body stances to achieve visual harmony

And while there’s less of a physical response when looking at a 2-D image than there is to looking at a video (after all, there’s no music to enhance the effects), there is still something immediately satisfying when you look at a work with a repeat motif of bodies moving together.

Busby Berkeley movies in the 1930s specialized in images of group motion. This is a still from Footlight Parade.

Popular culture and art both love these movement spectacles. Think of Busby Berkeley (watch video) and the Rockettes; the human wave at college football games; and the standing and singing of national anthems everywhere. Think the Olympic parade and church rituals (Catholic ritual when I grew up was all about standing sitting and kneeling en masse triggered by some unseen signal–all while chanting unknowable Latin words in haunting melodies). In choreographed dance for the stage, especially in musical theatre, often it’s the group numbers that bring the house down.

Breughel's Wedding Dance in a Barn shows a whole town dancing it up.

Certainly artists have always loved making images of synchronous bodies in motion. McNeill’s book has pictures of a Minoan Crete harvester vase from 1500 BC that shows people dancing and singing in time: Medievalists painted legions of angels (and legions of praying sinners) in synchronous harmony; Breughel painted peasants dancing at a wedding; and many artists working for governments have drawn, painted and photographed army battalions in formation.

Sandra Scolnik, painting from the New York art fairs in 2007.

In our day Matthew Barney, one of our age’s great visual image-makers, has a scene of a chorus of dancing girls ala Busby Berkeley in one of his Cremaster films.

Matthew Barney, from the Cremaster series.

Visual representations of repeat patterns

Bruce Pollock, a Philadelphia artist, makes mandala-like paintings.

Mandalas and other abstract art designs with intricate repeat patterns have a similar bodily appeal. Mandalas are used for meditation and can produce calm or trance; Op Art is about provoking a bodily/retinal response of a different kind.  Standing in front of a Bridget Riley painting triggers my flight response.  (For more about Op Art check out this website.)

Edna Andrade was a Philadelphia practitioner of op art.

Jackson Pollock’s works are like melted mandalas.

Jackson Pollock, Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist)

One reason that works of abstract repeat patterns like those of Agnes Martin and Brice Marden are popular and have helped spawn an entire universe of artists working in similar fashion is that the works are satisfying to look at and make.

Brice Marden, Marden, Brice, Chinese Dancing, Oil on canvas, 60 x 108 inches, from the UBS collection

I’m not sure why all this fascinates but it seems that there’s a human need for perfection expressed in the desire to move together and make images of repetitive movements.  We know we’re not perfect and maybe this is all a way of saying even though perfection is not possible we can get pretty close with these bodily and emotionally satisfying movements and representations.

Not meaning to slight the various other wonderful work at Gallery Joe, I had to lead with the video! This has to be a first in the history of this jewel of a gallery that usually limits its shows to intense drawings.

The video, by Rachel Perry Welty, is excellent and hilarious–I stood for all 8 minutes, not wanting to miss a word. But you know how it is when you get a message on a phone machine, and some of the words come through a little garbled. Same here. That’s because this video, Friends & Family, uses as a voice over Welty’s phone machine messages, filled with a mix of drama, rambling, emotional shorthand–the daily traffic of life, which Welty herself lip syncs to hilarious effect.

Even while Welty apes her friends and family, the voices still have that disembodied, no-feedback quality that phone machine messages have. It’s hilarious.

Rachel Perry Welty, Spam Series: take a look at your future (Antoine, April 2, 2006 11:02:15 AM EDT), 2008, one piece of aluminum foil, whole piece 5.5 x 90 x .5 inches

Speaking of no-feedback messages from beyond reality, Welty also is showing one of her Spam series pieces–all of the pieces based on text in bits of email spam she has received. The spam is spelled out in a continuous piece of aluminum foil shaped into the words. This one is “take a look at your future” from someone claiming to be Antoine. You can order pieces of other bits and bytes of spam, from “is it me you looking for?” to the evergreen “you may already be a winner.”

Rachel Perry Welty, Brillo, 2008, color laser prints and adhesive, 8.5 x 15 x 8 inches, (200 boxes, each box 1 7/8 x 1 1/4 x 1/2 inches

While the bulk of the work Welty is showing is made from grocery store fruit stickers cut and used like pen marks, my favorite was a new take on the old Warhol gag–a pile of Brillo boxes–but these are updated to the newest Brillo packaging. The labels are shrunk laser prints applied to tiny boxes stacked to look like a (well scrubbed) landscape. I’m also thinking those little lunch-packs of Sunmaid raisins. For all the references to Warhol, this piece is less about the advertising brio of its surfaces and more about the invasion of its subliminal messages into our dirty little homes.

In all of these pieces, there’s a sense of the randomness of what comes pinging into our daily lives, unconsidered and inconsiderate. Welty makes us look.

Samantha Simpson, March, 2008, ballpoint pen on paper, 30 x 22 inches

Also at Gallery Joe are a series of posters by Samantha Simpson. They imagery comes from a wide range of popular culture imagery and lettering from times past. The letters and styles reference everyone from Toulouse Lautrec‘s Folies Bergeres posters, old circus posters, Victoriana and book plates.

detail, March, one of the side commentaries

Each one carries a message, some sort of motto about life. But interwoven or on the side are commentary–the equivilent of political cartoonist Pat Oliphant‘s belying little birdie. The contrariness of these asides lends not just humor, but successfully undercuts the portentiousness of the truisms that holds center stage. This way, Simpson gets to say the big stuff and to laugh at herself all at once!

Sebastian Rug, untitled (ANo. 11), 2008, graphite on paper, 16.5 x 11.5 inches

In the vault, four artists’ obsessive systematic drawings reference things like maps, cityscapes, star charts, fabric and architecture, while being none of those things. My first love there is German artist Sebastian Rug, an obsessive micro-drawer of impossible maps.

Isabel Albrecht, Zeichnungen 7, 2008, ink on paper, 10 x 10 inches

But artist Isabel Albrecht, also from Germany, also swept me away with the variety of her repeated straight lines and the way they seemed to reference the sorts of infinity in patterns that Andreas Gursky sometimes captures.

Bruce Pollock, (I think this one is Break up, 2006, ink and pencil on paper, 8 x 40 inches; if I have it wrong, someone will tell me and I’ll correct. Otherwise, that’s what it must be).

Bruce Pollock‘s wide pentagonal webs, mixed with irregular brick shapes, suggest at once the fragility and magical mystery of the universe. Pollock is the only American-born artist (Ohio) in this crowd and he is, as most of you know, a long-time Philadelphian who shows at Fleisher-Ollman Gallery.

Sharka Hyland, Ideal City 5, 2008, Silver leaf, zinc plate, ink, gesso & acrylic on Briston board, 29 x 36 inches

Sharka Hyland‘s layered faux cityscapes, with their superimposed materials and colors and their intensive workmanship, for all their similarities to the other three, looks like they aren’t at home in this exhibit. Hyland, born in Czechoslovakia, has been teaching at PennDesign (UPenn) for 10 years.

You still have another month to catch this show.

Not long ago Matt Singer, Curator of the Philadelphia Museum of Jewish Art emailed to ask me if I’d write an essay for a show he was putting together at the museum called “A Kiss for the Muzuzah.” The exhibit is all new commissioned works — each a Mezuzah — by a Philadelphia artist. Not all the artists are Jewish and together they represent a power team whose works I’ve long admired: Candy Depew, Jeanne Jaffe, Isaac Lin, Virgil Marti, Stuart Netsky, Norm Paris, Bruce Pollock, Isaac Resnikoff and Shelley Spector. My essay, one of several in a beautiful brochure published in conjunction with the show, deals with the Philadelphia-ness of Philadelphia artists and how right now Philadelphia is full of artist’s groups who gain strength from being together and sharing a group identity with their respective collective.

My brochure essay for the show, focusing on the idea of Philadelphia-ness and how great it is to be a Philadelphia artist. Image is a drawing by Isaac Resnikoff for his hand-carved wood Mezuzah which is based on one he made as a child in summer camp. As with all the images, click to make them bigger so you can read the text.

The show’s up now to Feb. 1 and the Mezuzot — which range from a boyish carved piece by Isaac Resnikoff to a cake icing curlicue special by Candy Depew — are like metaphorical self-portraits and they’re really great to look at. The surprise to me is how the artists — with the exception of Isaac Lin — didn’t stray far from the naturally-ocurring size of the Mezuzah in the real world of a house (ie small). Lin made his piece a monumental 10×9 ft, which somehow fits the psychic power inherent in these small signifiers of kinship and group identity.
Below are some images from the brochure along with some of the essay texts. (In addition to my short essay there are essays by Vivian B. Mann, of the Jewish Museum, New York, Rabbi Michael Holzman of Congregation Rodeph Shalom and Elisabeth R. Agro, of the PMA’s Crafts and Decorative Arts Department.)

A panel discussion at the show’s opening drew a big crowd and the artists each got to tell the story of coming to grips with creating their own version of the religious identifier. One after another artist was thrown back to reminiscences of childhood, a time when identity is forming and consciousness of who you are and what that means is heightened perhaps more than at any other time.

There’s a nice article about the show in Art Matters by Jennifer Zarro. And here’s my flickr set photos.

Jeanne Jaffe’s piece (bottom) and one of Candy Depew’s two pieces (top).

Isaac Lin’s piece, photographed here before it’s in its final state. The piece is 9×10 ft. and in its finished state has multiple layers of lines of color on top of this and a deep black void in the middle.

Bruce Pollock’s piece. Pollock works as a preparator/installer at the Museum but this is the first time he’d made a piece of art for them.

Norm Paris (top) drawing for his mezuzah, Stuart Netsky (right) and Virgil Marti (bottom). Paris’s piece, which looked like a bit of rubble torn from a bomb site, was hand made out of concrete and rebar.

Shelley Spector’s piece reminds me of her installation at Painted Bride a few years back, a show very much about feeling a part of her community and about her identity as a Jew. Spector suggested the theme of Mezuzah for the show.

Never Mind the Pollocks
“Inter_Logic” asks: Where’s Waldo today?

“Inter_Logic” at Drexel’s Pearlstein Gallery is an ambitious group show questioning the meaning of landscape today. Since many of us get our landscape served up photographically and digitally enhanced, “how green is my valley” takes on new meaning.

Lee Arnold Alpinia, a rock-candy mountain-scape that’s more threatening than it looks.

The six artists in this exhibit—three local, two from New York and one from the West Coast—use a variety of materials and approaches. While you won’t see many traditional scenes of mountains or farms, that’s not our world today anyway.

Bruce Conkle Partial Cover. The piece is made from a video game landscape. Look at it in its original size to see how exquisitely fake it is.

Instead these artists serve up micro-universes, specimens and extreme digital environments that take a dark and playful look at those faux realities that come to us via surveillance cameras, maps, microscopes, the Internet and video games. The entire show questions the seductive charms of image-making at a time when our grasp of what’s real seems to be slipping.

Mark Campbell’s clusters of housing stock evoke the urban landscape gone crazy

Mark Campbell‘s sculptural aggregations of tiny housing units are a reminder that most of us live in the urban, suburban or ex-urban landscape. These micro-environments are anxiety-producing works—impossible congestions of unplanned over-building. (Row House) Accretion and Cluster Study seem to be growing like a biological organism-behaving-badly—like a cancer on the land.

Bruce Pollock’s drawings are microscopic universes with order and great disorder. Pollock’s got a solo show at Fleisher-Ollman Gallery up until Dec. 9.

Bruce Pollock‘s intricate and detailed pencil-and-ink drawings also reflect scientific landscapes. Pollock’s honeycombs and cell clusters are like microscopic dissections, and whether they’re of human groups, plants or the cosmos isn’t clear. Even though they too suggest that excess can lead to bad things, Pollock’s works are more of a celebration than Campbell’s.

The candy-colored and beautiful digital animations by New York artist and Drexel faculty Lee Arnold are by turns childlike and surreal. Alpinia—a colorful mountaintop scene that apes the look of mountains drawn by a 4-year-old—has a soundtrack of children’s voices laughing in the hills. But as the piece progresses and the mountains throw dark shadows on each other and begin to feel like beautiful killers instead of candy, the children’s voices, on second thought, might be screams of fear.

Lance Wakeling’s Xbox with new programming visits internet sites and beams back postcards

Lance Wakeling‘s piece deals with the Internet as a space. We call it cyberspace, and it is a landscape of sorts. You can’t go horizontally or vertically in cyberspace, but you can go deep—layers deep, so deep you completely lose your bearings and feel like you’re down Alice’s rabbit hole. Wakeling’s inserted a Linux Wget program into the shell of an XBox, and the program trolls the ‘Net and mines it site by site, projecting every image on the wall. The rabbit hole is impossible to diagram, and yet the images it throws up—postcards from the site “visits”—are as valid as postcards you pick up on vacation.

Julie York’s specimen-like inner spaces

Julie York‘s eerie porcelain specimens and Bruce Conkle‘s faux landscapes made from video games round out the excellent show.

These artists have used very different means from the Hudson River School painters to express their feelings about themselves and the world. That they’ve used the metaphor of landscape to portray hope, fear and questions about humankind shows how potent landscapes can be as messengers, even today.

“Inter_Logic”
Through Dec. 15. Leonard Pearlstein Gallery, Drexel University, Nesbitt Hall, 33rd and Market sts. 215.895.2548.