The Nicola Midnight St. Claire (temporarily The New, New Masses)

The gloriously quirky art publication The Nicola Midnight St. Claire held an auction in order to change the site’s name for a month. So if you go to the website looking for the St. Claire you will instead find The New, New Masses with a funny–but slippery–video message about the spirit of giving, consumerism, and internet freedom, plus some holiday “gifs” for everyone to enjoy. Macaulay Culkin, anyone?

The Masses (1914), followed by The New Masses, and now The New, New Masses

Madam chairwoman
After nine years in his role as Chair of the Museum’s Board of Trustees, H.F. “Gerry” Lenfest announced the Board’s election of Constance H. Williams as his successor. Williams, a former Democratic state senator who still is a political powerhouse, is an entrepreneur with a background in marketing, publishing, and public service. She was first elected to the Museum’s Board of Trustees in 2006. Lenfest will continue to act as an active trustee, joining Raymond G. Perelman as Emeritus Chair. We’ve got to be honest. This happened back in April. But we woke up to it yesterday.

ONWARD photographers announced

Project Basho once again has made a video to announce this year’s selected photographers for this year’s ONWARD show, ONWARD Compé 2012. Juror Todd Hido narrowed 2,434 submitted photographs down to a final selection of just 57 photographs from 50 photographers. This year was also the widest international participation, with submissions coming in from 25 countries. We recognize a few names like Sarah Moore, and we’re excited to see a load of Japanese names, so the show promises to be great. The opening will be Feb. 11 from 2 -4 PM.

Megawords and Zoe Strauss at PMA
Do you want to dance? We do. Zoe Strauss has the opening dance party for her show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on Jan. 14 from 8 PM – 1 AM. Tickets at $8 and music will be provided by WXPN’s DJ David Dye. There will also be snacks and a cash bar. Also, from Jan. 21 through April zine-peddlers and publishers Megawords will be setting up shop at the PMA. Visitors to the space can write on the walls, converse, draw in sketch books, take photographs, make publications and browse their collection of books and magazines. The Megawords installation space is in the South Auditorium Gallery every Friday between noon and 6pm.

New Observations reawakens after 10-year slumber
After a 10-year dormancy, New Observations is back with the help of Artist Organized Art Inc. (a Massachusetts non-profit). They will provide a forum for self-organized artistic expression. If you’d like to help with their relaunch, check out their support page!

Is Drawing Dead?
Really? This is a question? Yale School of Architecture will be hosting a forum on traditional techniques in the age of the internet. The symposium begins on February 9 from 6:30–8:00 PM in Yale School of Architecture, Hastings Hall, in Paul Rudolph Hall.

Tyler MFA fundraising
The fundraising goals for Tyler School of Art’s MFA program have been met but that doesn’t mean you can’t help them out some more! Check out their Kickstarter to help them out.

Slingluff benefit for Penn Treaty Park

Penn Treaty Park

A group benefit show Jan. 7 from 6 – 9 PM, will raise money for Fishtown’s Penn Treaty Park. Slingluff Gallery is the organizer, and if you like art and public spaces, come out and show your support.

Fabric Workshop breaks attendance record
There has been a surge of record breaking going on these days (see also: Temple Gallery’s attendance quintuples). The Fabric Workshop and Museum has reported that its attendance for Nick Cave’s performance Let’s C pulled in an audience of nearly 800 people. This is surely a testament to the vibrant and dedicated Philly art lovers and community. Congratulations to the Fabric Workshop on its milestone!

OPPORTUNITIES

Art of the State, Pennsylvania’s annual juried art exhibition has opened its call for entries for 2012. You can find the application here but it must be submitted via snail mail. The deadline is Feb. 29.

Professors are called to nominate students or recent grads for an upcoming project in Portugal as part of the Neu New Festival.

Harpo Foundation will review proposals submitted by non-profit institutions and fiscal sponsors who seek support on behalf of under recognized visual artists. You can find more information on their grant page. The deadline is Feb. 1.

Here are a few public art opportunities available:
#1 – Tough Art Artist Residency Program is currently accepting applications for the summer of 2012. This program seeks to connect artists from across the spectrum of all the arts to the resources and visitors at the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh. The deadline is March 16.

#2 – The Bureau of Public Art in Lancaster seeks to commission an artist/team to create an original work of art that will be permanently installed outdoors and integrated in a renovated public park. Send digital portfolios and web links with “NEA/Sprite” in the subject line to jlustig@cityoflancasterpa.com. The deadline is Jan. 30.

#3 – NextFab Two is currently accepting applications for projects. They should have some physical, material component to them but otherwise the project is open-ended. Art, science, invention, or the amazing but inexplicable are all welcome. Visit the submission page to apply by Jan. 6.

ARTIST NEWS

Carol Cole, Steinway Mandala.

Carol Cole has her work featured on Inhabitat’s blog about green design.

A rendering of Peeples' proposed project at Lincoln Financial Field.

Sarah Peoples initially had her project “Bread & Circuses” approved for display at Lincoln Financial Field. The installation included 2,800 white balloons spelling out the words BREAD & CIRCUSES. According to an article in City Paper, the project ruffled some feathers at the Eagles camp, and they revoked her approval. She is currently seeking a new (and potentially better) venue for her artwork; last we heard, maybe Franklin Field.

Photo by Phil Jackson.

We already told you that Phil Jackson was moving to NYC, well here’s what he’s up to now: he was recently interviewed for We Are Wild and he is also part of an upcoming show at Paradigm Gallery in Philadelphia entitled Dirt is Dirt.

That’s all folks! Have a good one.

Photo credit: Carlos Avendaño

During his artist’s talk (video clip here) at The Fabric Workshop and Museum (FWM), we gathered around his pieces to hear about the materials and themes illuminated by his personal attitudes towards technology, immigration, and geopolitical signs and signifiers.  We the People unites us all regardless of identity, and allows us to impose our own subjective experience on the work.

“Glory,” 2004 - oil barrel, fluorescent & ultraviolet tubes, computer parts, plexiglass, fan, camera casing elements, paint cans, cement, towels and rubber roofing membrane - dimensions variable - Photo credit: Will Brown

When introducing his 2006 Whitney Biennial piece, “Glory,” Ward traces back the origins of the American flag tanning pattern inside the bed of recycled oil barrels. Hailing from St Andrews, Jamaica, Ward moved to New York as a teenager. His work challenges beliefs about Jamaican culture as well as post 9/11 American culture.

We approach “Glory” from Ward’s transnational points of view as well as our individual perspectives. Faced with my own set of commercial appropriations and cultural misinterpretations as an immigrant, I ruminated on the UV rays behind stars and stripes encased in oil barrels, while fellow audience members further developed Ward’s ideas on national identity amidst the violence of American foreign policy.

Before moving on, we’re given insight into the video playing in the main room, where much of the reception is held. We walk by “Father and Sons” only to arrive at it after the talk with a richer sense of the themes this piece involves. Upon regrouping upstairs in front of “We the People” – the Constitution preamble script made of hundreds of used shoelaces – Ward reveals the topical fact that he recently passed his citizenship test.

“We the People,” 2011 - In collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia - used and hand-dyed shoelaces - dimensions variable - Courtesy of the artist, Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York, and Galleria Continua, San Gimignano Photo credit: Carlos Avendaño

His own words and story underscore the “new presence” these oft-read words take on through use of the materials and the large span of the piece. Opposite this work, a wall of black TV backs named “Airplane Tears,” also on a similarly grand scale, re-examines the materiality of salvaged objects—in this case, “technology on its way out.” Elsewhere in the show, multiple meanings exist in the repurposed shoes, fences, and pews, as well as newly-created commercial logos. For viewers with media images from Seattle WTO and Iraq War protests seared into their memories, logos like “Third World Bank” perhaps appear dated. However, Ward’s prescient “Charging Bull” on Wall Street reminds us how often his ideas spanning the last couple decades hit the mark.

While artists talks can occasionally over explain works to their detriment, Ward’s words in regards to his recent citizenship helped me return to “Father and Sons” with a deeper resonance in regard to the recorded “incantation.” On screen, teenage sons of an African American police officer recite muffled Miranda rights while sharing a podium with their uniformed father.

”Father and Sons,” 2010 - single channel video projection - 3 min, 52 sec - Image courtesy of Lehmann Maupin, New York

The camera focuses on the sons’ hands moving over the police badge and catches the father advising the sons. Ward intricately layers the anxiety, tension, and paradoxes these figures represent in American society. Along with these uncertain external expectations, the muffled voices express the uncertainty of Miranda rights post-Patriot Act in America. Not only did this piece blur authority of the state with familial dynamics, but for me it also blended with Ward’s personal citizenship experience. Though pre-dating his citizenship test which ends with the Pledge of Allegiance, the recitation of sacred rights invokes all concerns about eroding rights of American citizens. Lastly, the artist talk served to unify the multi-storied FWM space that, like Ward’s work, presents a shared but mutable experience.

Joan Jonas Reading Dante III, 2010 The Fabric Workshop and Museum installation view Courtesy of the artist and The Fabric Workshop and Museum Photographer: Will Brown

Interested in something other than Dante’s words, the acclaimed New York video and performance pioneer takes the words out of the equation, creating instead a dark cave-like underworld with low light, the rumble and tinkle of sound and ambiguous repetitive motions on three video projections.  Vitrines contain the artist’s chalk drawings; light sculptures provide dim light, and benches accommodate the weary.

In the videos, humans recite, sing, play, draw with chalk, climb a wall, walk in circles, drive in circles and parade theatrically behind a scrim that shows them as dark silhouettes.  Filmed in Mexico, Canada, New York and Italy, Dante’s journey – minus the religion or words – is translated into an existential void where everything cycles and re-cycles, no beginning or end.

Joan Jonas Reading Dante III, 2010 The Fabric Workshop and Museum installation view Courtesy of the artist and The Fabric Workshop and Museum Photographer: Will Brown

There is no suspense here or suggestion of gothic grotesques. What’s suggested is ordinary humans performing tasks that have no meaning.  The world is like ours but patched together and layered via double and triple exposure in a way that makes it seem just beyond the doors of perception. This is slow art. And, for all the 21st Century production values, the piece’s aesthetic  suggests the world about 50 years ago, not today.

Like Margaret Meade’s videos of natives of New Guinea, these videos play like scientific transmissions from the great beyond.  The Smithsonian has a moon rock in a vitrine; Jonas’ installation has artifacts from her performances in a vitrine.  Few will experience a trip to the moon first-hand.  And relatively few have seen Jonas’ performances.  But we can imagine both while viewing the documentation in a darkened and dreamy space.

Joan Jonas Reading Dante, 2008 The 2008 Biennale of Sydney: Revolutions – Forms That Turn, Sydney, Australia Reading Dante © Joan Jonas Courtesy of the artist and Yvon Lambert Paris, New York. Photographer: Greg Weight

I struggled to hear Dante’s words, which are read repeatedly in the 45-minute video projection.  The voices echo in the huge gallery space and will not clarify.  I wondered if this was intentional.  A 4-page handout of the words featured from the Divine Comedy gives a sense of Dante’s gruesome and graphic aesthetic – “a gloomy wood…death might well be its confederate… the wasteland…terrible crescendo…where light was not…children crying in their sleep…unhappy flesh…as they lay dead…absolute rock bottom.”

What Jonas offers, instead, is a series of disparate and seemingly hum drum moments that add up to an existential nothingness.  Perhaps for us Post-moderns, contemplating the void on earth is far more terrifying than contemplating Dante’s vision of the afterlife.

Jonas (b. 1936) graduated from Columbia University, where she studied sculpture and art history.  But she discovered a love of performing early on and switched to video and performance in the early 70s.   As she says in a recorded MoMA interview, video was a new art form at the time and, unlike painting and sculpture, the field was not male-dominated so it gave women a voice in the art world.

Influenced by Surrealism and the sculptures of Alberto Giacometti, Jonas is a great image-maker.  Her videos might be long (the 45-minute video could be edited down) and repetitive, but they are punctuated by lovely lyrical passages, including some that translate the film into a negative of itself, a suggestion of death, sickness and the spirit world.

Kara Walker, the artist known for re-imagining the anti-bellum South in cut-paper silhouettes, and William Kentridge, who envisions the evils of apartheid in animated films based on his charcoal drawings, both, like Jonas, use drawings and video to transform historical and literary texts.  Each of these artists uses theatrical methods, too, to parade before your eyes a darker truth about the world.

Jonas will perform live at the FWM Dec. 11.  Don’t miss this chance to see this seminal artist in person.

“Joan Jonas – Reading Dante III” through Jan. 2011.  Live performance of  “Reading Dante II” Sat. Dec. 11, 7pm, reception at 6pm.  Fabric Workshop and Museum, 1214 Arch St., 215 561 8888.  Admission $3 adults

See Jonas talking about feminism in this MoMA video.

Joan Jonas talking about the Dante project at the 2008 Yokahama Triennial.

Read this article at Phiadelphia Weekly.

The Fabric Workshop and Museum often collaborates with big-name artists like Cai Quo-Qiang, the fireworks and gunpowder ace whose show opens next month, but what the FWM does even better—as you can see in their current show, “New American Voices”—is work with lesser-known artists. Often, these collaborations produce the freshest and most unexpected results and help raise the profile of deserving, under-the-radar artists.

Bill Smith Decline of the eastern songbird (Fuel injected flowers with vocal cords), 2008 Mixed-media 48” x 24” Courtesy of the Artist Photo: Will Brown

With works ranging from videos and installations to a felted cave (take your shoes off to enter) and a group of mechanized whirligigs, the sampling from five mid-career artists from around the country doesn’t represent any new art movement. In fact, some of the work is pretty traditional. But the voices raised are people- and earth-centered, and the works are life-affirming without posturing, and that makes them—and the show—endearing.

Among the strongest works in the show are Bill Smith’s mechanized electronic pieces—made of lacy high-tech filaments shaped into galaxy-like starbursts and decorated with low-tech beads, flowers and small animal bones. Five light-weight works hang from the ceiling and undulate to the movement of air in the room. Two works— Decline of the eastern songbird (2008) and Integrated coaxial magnetic orbs with flagellating arms (2007)—perform a song and dance when triggered by hand or by blowing on them.

Decline makes birdsong come alive via valves, balloons and hot propane gas in a delicate and prickly contraption that sounds like a falsetto-calliope. Smith has a technical degree in diesel mechanics and an undergraduate degree in biology. But the works transcend the Franklin Institute with their metaphorical underpinnings about the fragility of nature and wonder of our ecosystem.

Rubén Ortiz-Torres In collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia Hi ‘n’ Lo, 2008 Mixed mechanical media Photo: Patrick Miller

Three artists make work focused on ethnic identity, and of those, Ruben 
Ortiz-Torres’s video performance of Hi ’n’ Lo (2008) is the most unexpected and pleasing. Ortiz-Torres tricked out a standard-issue industrial scissors lift with bling at the bottom and new platform capabilities at the top and then choreographed the machine to do hip-hop dance moves. Drawing inspiration from the Mexican-American car culture in Los Angeles as well as the caliber of infrastructure jobs that employ Latino workers, the piece is wry and knowing.

Marie Watt In collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia Engine, 2009 Wool felt, wood, video 9’ x 20’ x 13.5’ Courtesy of The Fabric Workshop and Museum

Marie Watt’s wool felt cave Engine (2009) honors the artist’s Seneca forefathers. The cave is constructed of felted parts made at FWM and includes a projection on the inside of a Native American telling a traditional story. It’s an expected ode to indigenous peoples.

New American Voices, Tommy Joseph installation shot from left to right, totem pole carving mural, White Raven Helmet, Rockfish Helmet, Raven Helmet, Human Helmet, Eagle Helmet, and Eagle Wolf Suit Photo: Will Brown

So, too, are Tommy Joseph’s carved animal headdresses and Tlingit Suit (2009), a man’s suit imprinted with Tlingit 
patterning. These works—in the tradition of tribal art-making—are great to see in Philadelphia, although the objects themselves are updates on natural history museum arti-
facts.

Robert Chambers' ribbon installation in the window of the FWM

Robert Chambers—who performed a new piece, Silent Film Drop in Color at the opening, unraveling dozens of spools of colored cloth ribbon onto the street outside the museum—is the one artist whose work seems out of place. His sculptural model of two John Deere tractors welded together at the noses doesn’t reverberate with meaning. And while the ribbon performance at the opening was reportedly fun, the ribbons—now piled in the museum’s windows—seem like party leftovers and are unappealing.

“ New American Voices ”: Through Nov. 22. Fabric Workshop and Museum, 1214 Arch St. 215.561.8888.

Bill Smith combo of projections and sculpture and mechanical wizardry

Our first stop (Andrea and me), the Fabric Workshop and Museum was filled with crowd-pleasers from five artists from across the country.

Smith autographing a happy FWM member's exhibition brochure.

Bill Smith, from Illinois, merges an obsession with the natural world with delicate, lacy mechanisms that are next to impossible to photograph, but are easy to delve into in person. Each mechanism works differently, but each piece delights as its m.o. delivers a punch. The combo of hard mechanics with such delicate networks is a total crowd pleaser.

Tommy Joseph's prototype 3-piece suit, hand-painted w/ FWM artists, the imagery based on traditional Tlingit imagery, also on display along with masks that, with the suit, will be used in performance.

And Tlingit Alaskan Tommy Joseph has made a prototype of a performance costume–a three-piece suit hand painted with traditional Tlingit imagery. It’s a terrific merger of cultures. This is not your Mummer’s flash and dash. It has an elegance, a sense of serious intent and shamanistic power.

Robert Chambers, Ribbon Cutting, performance/ephemeral installation on Arch Street. The kids jumped right in.

On the street in front of the FWM annex, Florida artist Robert Chambers let loose 9 rolls of broad ribbons from windows overhead, creating a gorgeous streetscape in his “Ribbon Cutting” installation. I asked for a swatch of the ribbon and an FWM employee cut it for me–the future color of my bedroom, I hope.

Andrea snapped this picture of Joe Rishel and me. The ribbons made everyone feel happy! photo by Andrea Kirsh

Here I am with PMA Curator Joe Rishel and my swatch. Chambers’ other work inside the FWM is also concerned with how things work. There’s a curiosity about the way things are made in the modern manufacturing society and an interest in what these manufactured items represent in our culture.

The exhibit included a video of Ruben Ortiz-Torres’ low-rider inspired artist-modifed scissor fork lift, Hi ‘n’ Lo. Ortiz, like Chambers, is modifying what’s already out there, and talking to cultural values. I loved the pairing of these two. Also there, Seneca nation member Marie Watt’s womb-like, ultra-soft felt structure, called Engine (hope you get a chance to go inside–check out the shaman video, which is one of the features that makes this not just another yurt) .  It’s yummy in there.

A woman tries out a Dennis McNett print/papier mache wolf mask, in front of two fabulous wall-size collaged prints.

At Space 1026 and then at Vox, giant prints stole my heart. Dennis McNett takes over 1026 with Year of the Wolfbat, arguably a Halloween and Day of the Dead themed exhibit that includes two and 3-D work based on prints and collage. The 3 D is outstanding papier mache and sometimes wood–skull masks, birds and “wolfbats” covered with collaged prints. On the wall, enormous prints, smaller prints, and prints collaged to create wall-sized psychedelic explosions are all yummy and mesmerizizizng.

This Dennis McNett wolves-in-wolf print and paint collaged on panel includes carved-into mouth, nose and eyes.

Doing your Xmas shopping or decorating now? Check out the prints, some as low as $5 and $10! The quality of this work is top notch.

Rob Swainston's two-wall print installation suggesting a personal journey as well as a landscape.

A very different double-wall-sized print installation dominates Rob Swainston’s exhibit at Vox–mountain landscapes made of, well, there’s a shaggy dog back story here–that boils down to Swainston going to the Rockies for an artist residency and not having the space to print with the wood he brought along from Philadelphia. He threw the wood into the snow in disgust, where it swelled and warped. He screwed it together to flatten it and headed home, only to have his truck break down. After abandoning the truck and the wood, he was able to recover the wood and get it shipped home.

Rob Swainston is a great storyteller, and I wish I could have recorded his tale of his struggles to make this print and put it up as a podcast.

The prints are of the wood grain itself, raised up by the snow and the rain, creating an abstract landscape, mountainous with winding trails or streams–a symbolic map of the wood’s journeys and the artist’s. The work reminded me of Yan Kai’s digital photomontage landscapes at the InkNotInk exhibit of Chinese art at Drexel last spring.

still from Hiraki Sawa's 8 Minutes, video, 2005, courtesy the artist and James Cohan Gallery, NYC, copied from http://www.screeningvideo.org/

There’s more about landscape at Screening Video, where Hiraki Sawa’s video shorts of animals and a landscape inserted into an ordinary bathroom are delightful meditations on fantasy and quotidian, real and not real, and the schism between modernity and nature. I want to once again give props to Screening for the most comfortable foam cube seating and egg-crate foam sound insulation on their walls.

Luren Jenison and a detail of her cactus installation at Copy.

Still another landscape fills Copy Gallery, where Luren Jenison’s “cactus” installation visits a lot of the same issues. Trash cans bristle with ratchet ties; pool noodles are topped with toothpicks and corn holders. A spot-lit giant white balloon is the moon or the sun, and the whole space manages to create a theatrical tongue-in-cheek faux nature.

The largest of Alexis Granwell's crumbling infrastructures at Tiger Strikes Asteroid Gallery

Landscapes were clearly the dominant theme of the evening. Alexis Granwell’s decomposing structures at Tiger Strikes Asteroid form dark, urban landscapes of our failure to overcome entropy. As in Sarah Sze‘s work, the walls have a precarious infrastructure that tumbles out and threatens immediate collapse.

Arden Bendler Browning's gouaches tumble across the paper, creating a world veering out of control.

At AHN/VHS, Arden Bendler Browning’s abstracts also have a sense of a landscape tumbling out of control, a sense of the precariousness of life, nature, and our own backyards.

I also want to give a shout-out to Caitlin Perkins’ collection of sea monster memorabilia in AHN/VHS’s The Cabinet–another meditation on human vulnerability fictionalized and projected onto a dangerous creature that doesn’t really exist.

At this point Andrea was wild with hunger, while I was worried that if I sat down to eat I’d never get up. Miraculously, we wandered into a real Chinese restaurant, a place with cow viscera, eel soup, and aromatic pig ears on the menu. We ordered the water spinach, and got an enormous plate of garlicky sauteed watercress. Fabulous. I’m not even gonna tell you the name of the place in hopes that it stays this way a while longer!

The amazing Beth, who curated Breaking News and was wise to resist her brother, who must have had groom-itis.

Our last stop? Little Berlin. We wandered in at 10:30 to the delightful show (not about landscape at all!) that Brandon already told you about. Our artblog gal friday Beth Heinly was the curator, too! Here she is at Little Berlin the night before her brother’s wedding, wondering if she was being a beast for refusing to have her hair and makeup done for the occasion. Just look at her! Are you kidding?

Tristin Lowe, Mocha Dick, industrial felt over inflated form

But Lowe’s whale, Mocha Dick, which debuted at the Fabric Workshop and Museum Friday, swims well beyond the limits of body metaphors. Lowe’s bad-boy charm of deliberately frayed construction and abject, self-deprecating forms of macho has been replaced here by a Blake-ian respect. Mocha Dick is like William Blake’s Tyger, at once admired, feared, and wondered at. Yet Mocha doesn’t pretend to be divine in the way it was fashioned, but rather was made by basic fabric and sewing.

Mocha Dick’s scale–based on the real-life scale of today’s sperm whale population (a 52-foot monster, considerably smaller than some of the 85-foot whale skeletons that we have from the past, according to Lowe, who is up on his whale facts as well as his Melville), turns us humans filling the gallery into an army Lilliputians. And like all armies, we have wreaked destruction with our dominance.

Tristin Low, Mocha Dick, view of barnacles, zipped seams and zigzag-stitched wrinkles

Lowe’s white whale is a thick-hided creature of industrial-strength felt. The hide covers an inflatable designed by Lowe. The covering was designed like a dress pattern, with zipper seams providing a means of dressing the balloon as well as delivering a sense of form and style.

Tristin Lowe, detail of barnacles, Mocha Dick

Terraced scars are carved into the felt, and zig-zag in stitches across the body. Beautiful barnacles are appliqued, flowering across the old survivor’s skin in colonies.  In Melville and in Lowe, it is man’s nemesis, man’s alter-ego, and the engine of man’s greatest folly.

He is named in part after Mocha Island, near where the original inspiration for Moby Dick terrorized whalers. I suppose we can also presume, given Lowe’s sense of humor, that the Dick part of the name was retained as a salute to the whale’s maleness. By the way, if you haven’t read the In the Heart of the Sea, by Nathaniel Philbrick, which retells the facts behind Moby Dick as it examines the 19th century whaling industry, check it out. It’s full of shocking details as well as a warty picture of a society’s time of prosperity–and the price it paid.

Tristin Lowe, Mocha Dick, front view showing eye and fin

Another fact from Lowe’s compendium of whale facts (he’s like one of Melville’s cetology chapters once you get him going), which he shared at the opening night artist’s walk-through: The whale has a 20-pound-plus brain. Now there’s a metaphor for you. We and the whale, for all our braininess, are out of our depth!

“The whale is not beached,” said Lowe on opening night, Friday, explaining that he was trying to create an experience of The Other. Me, I can see that, but I can also see that he has created an experience of The Other in ourselves.

So in this Lowe has created with the Sublime of the whale that same sort of self-horror that inhabits the other extreme of his art-making.

Tristin Lowe, Alice, 1998, image from XConnect, ccat.sas.upenn.edu/xconnect/v4/i3/g/lowe2.html

This is the Philadelphia artist’s second FWM collaboration. The other, in 1998, resulted in a giant, fan-inflated naked, blue girl named Alice, with one giant eye for a face.

In addition to the Fabric Workshop creation, Lowe will also be exhibiting other works about the folly of what it means to be human, also in felt, at Fleisher/Ollman in a show with Paul Swenbeck, opening May 14.

As soon as I saw Ed Ruscha’s Industrial Strength Sleep tapestry at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, this piece by Mexican artist Gabriel Kuri popped into my mind. I had seen it last year at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, in an exhibit of work from Mexico (post here).

Kuri’s Trinity is a faithful reproduction of a computer-register receipt with the color copies. And it’s handwoven in Mexico, which of course raises issues of the values of hand work vs. computer-generated stuff. At this moment of financial meltdown, it’s a nice reminder of the need to get back to what’s real, all you high-flying wizards of tricky Enron computations and smoke-and-mirrors financial instruments.

Ruscha’s terrific work is a computer-generated copy of something that was hand-made, an acrylic painting of his from 1989 (Roberta’s post here).

This is just a brief observation about what’s going on that I find interesting–the confluence of the hand-made and the computer and the weaving together of meanings– plus deadpan humor.

There are other people working in tapestry at the juncture where computers and hand-work meet. I’m thinking of Lia Cook, who seems to come from a fiber methodology starting point. ( posts here and here)

I was not thinking about Kehinde Wiley‘s ultra-hip tapestry, from Cerealart, which also was digitally produced (in France), but I happened to stumble on it when I put “tapestry” in artblog’s Google search engine. The computer used in Wiley’s weaving process seems to be outside the discussion in that piece, just an artifact of how it got made. Nor was I thinking about the wonderful hand-woven William Kentridge pieces recently shown at the PMA–no computer involved. Those both seem to me to be something else entirely.

Ed Ruscha at the Fabric Workshop last Friday night

Ed Ruscha was looking like a little leprachaun in front of a packed audience at the Fabric Workshop’s new space last Friday.  The 2nd floor gallery space — which makes a great lecture hall — was certified for only 200 people with a live feed downstairs for the big spillover crowd.  

Ruscha and his slide of the Barnyard Rembrandt

According to Ruscha, who was showing slides of his influences and a few of his own work, Barnyard Rembrandt Chuck Byers (sic–it’s really Clark Byers, see obit) said, “‘I never passed up a good roof.’”

Ruscha went on to say of Byers’ work, “It reminds me of those wraparound videos on buildings today”  (referring to moving billboards and the moving news ticker around Times Square).

We had a great time laughing at Ruscha’s wry humor.  He was full of notable quips including:

Jasper John‘s Flag was my atomic bomb.

Muhammed Ali. My hero, he was outrageous in almost every way.  He’s worth getting choked up about.

Harold Edgerton‘s photos are frozen still lives.

Renato Bertelli‘s endless [Head of] Mussolini.  That’s my Mona Lisa.  It says everything about our time.

I like the ambiguity of monosyllabic words.

Maybe I’ll live in a Standard [gas] station.  Park the car and just go in.

Accidental Ed Ruscha. Outside the FWM on Arch Street.

This light box on Arch St. caught our friend Susan‘s eye.  She immediately dubbed it an “Ed Ruscha.”

Jamie Dillon’s Monomelon at Copy

We heard it moaning like a beached whale before we saw it–Jamie Dillon‘s Monomelon at Copy Gallery.  It’s a sound installation following up his sound installation last month at Vox.   People loved this melon.  They were hanging out trying to hear what the oracle had to say next.

Trevor Reese, installation at Space 1026, has audio and video and plants!

Space 1026 has a terrific show by two artists, Trevor Reese of Brooklyn and Sighn (aka Matthew) of Chicago.  Words, wood, plants and video.  It’s one of the best shows we’ve seen there in a while — unexpected and provocative.  Fun, too.

Sighn at Space 1026. 

Sighn’s “ITSOK” wall.  Hand-cut bass wood.  1,000 pieces, cut with a jigsaw, which explains Sighn’s aching back.  Individual units of ITSOK in bamboo or bass wood available for $20!

Marisa Olson’s video at Vox Populi

We made a video of Marisa Olson’s video at Vox to try to give you a sense of the action in the subtle piece.  Well, YouTube rejected our video as “content inappropriate.”  So here’s a photo. The action is:  this woman is tied with pink strings.  She’s wiggling to get out of her predicament.  Over time you see she’s got a razor in her hands.

Xiang Yang’s installation at Vox Populi.

Xiang Yang was at the opening, showing a new body of work — deconstructed chairs.  He scavenged the chairs from the streets of New York where he lives and lovingly sanded them to new abstract beauty.  Zhang also has an installation opening Oct. 17 at the Liao Collection piece –a room filled with Chinese furniture.  It reminds us of Mari Shaw‘s encounter with some Chinese art in Germany.  

Gossip

William Pym, former gallery director at Fleisher-Ollman Gallery,  is now living at Jersey City with his girlfriend and writing for Village Voice and Artforum. We got this from John Ollman, who told us while juggling a glass of wine and a copy of the PMA’s hot-off-the-presses James Castle catalog. Fleisher-Ollman’s upcoming Castle show is running in conjunction with the upcoming PMA exhibit. Ollman, by the way, is featured in the Castle documentary movie that’s part of the PMA’s exhibit.

Anthony Campuzano is having a solo show at ICA’s project space, opening Jan. 16. We heard this from Ollman and then ran into Anthony at Vox and he confirmed. He seemed calmer than us. We’re very excited about this. He’s working with ICA’s new curatorial assistant Kate Kraczon. Anthony told us another Philly art star, video and clay animation virtuoso Josh Mosley, will be in the large upstairs gallery at the same time.

Pepon Osorio told us he’s in a great-sounding group show opening October 19 at PS I in New York. NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith is co-organized by The Menil Collection Many of the artists in the show we’ve followed for years and love — including Philadelphia artist Terry Adkins. Here’s who else is in the exhibit:

Janine Antoni, Radcliffe Bailey, José Bedia, Rebecca Belmore, Sanford Biggers, Tania Bruguera, James Lee Byars, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, William Cordova, Jimmie Durham, Regina José Galindo, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, David Hammons, Michael Joo, Brian Jungen, Kcho, Marepe, Ana Mendieta, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Adrian Piper, Ernesto Pujol, Dario Robleto, Betye Saar, Gary Simmons, George Smith, Michael Tracy, Nari Ward

Last June the Fabric Workshop and Museum was bounced from its home at 1315 Cherry Street when its building was demolished to make way for the Convention Center expansion. In order to keep showing art, the Museum took up residence at an interim space at 1222 Arch Street while waiting for a new permanent home to be retrofitted.

The new space, a six-story Victorian building located down the block from their temporary home, opened a few weeks ago. The inaugural show—the first solo exhibition in Philadelphia by L.A. artist Ed Ruscha—showcases what the FWM is known for: collaborating with an artist to create work using materials the artist has never used before. In this case, Ruscha and the FWM created a huge, digitally produced tapestry based on his 1989 acrylic painting Industrial Strength Sleep.

Ruscha’s work is challenging. His paintings bear cryptic phrases, often in bold uppercase letters and on backgrounds that evoke the sublime in all its threat and beauty. At the FWM the new tapestry (produced in Belgium at Flanders Tapestries) is surrounded by works by the artist dating from the same time—including the large painting on which the tapestry is based. All the paintings and drawings are darkling works with white letters on black and white backgrounds that depict an ominous film noir sky. Fiber-Optic Suburbs , Something or Other, Amusing Alloys and Ye … are more of the word offerings in works that combine to create a kind of 2-D nocturne.

Ed Ruscha
Hell Heaven, 1988
Acrylic on paper
40 x 60 inches (101.6 x 152.4 cm)
Collection of Jacqueline Burckhardt, Zurich
Photo: Lutz Hartmann

Thomas Crow’s wonderful and insightful essay in the show’s catalog tells of Ruscha’s love of movies and film noir. Raymond Chandler and especially The Big Sleep are context for Ruscha’s Industrial Strength Sleep, which surely doesn’t refer to a baby’s nap but something more like Chandler’s notion of the one big sleep we all take in the end.

Ruscha, though, has tweaked the concept by inserting the pop culture phrase “industrial strength,” often used ironically to refer to something that’s nonindustrial but strong (“industrial strength coffee,” for example). The 9-by-23-foot tapestry, made by use of industrial-strength weaving machines, is itself a great stroke of wordplay.

Made from a low-resolution image of the painting, the tapestry softens the work through sheer material transformation and tames its chilly edge without making it lose its awesome impact. The weaving is both warmer (black threads create deep, seductive velvety passages) and more abstract (on close inspection the work becomes a series of thread lines of various lengths and shades of gray) than the painting. It’s curious to see the two pieces side by side.

Curated by Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art’s Paul Schimmel, the exhibit runs through Oct. 25. Not to be missed: The artist will give a free lecture at FWM on Oct. 3. There’s no reserved seating so get there early.

On the horizon, the museum will install a large show from the collection. Their holiday party, traditionally one of the big art events of the winter season, will be in early December. And look for continued programming in the interim space, which now has a window display by up-and-coming artist Hank Willis Thomas.

With two sparkling new galleries, airy work spaces, state-of-the-art lighting, heating and cooling systems, specially made mahogany-framed windows and new elevators, the gypsy institution is finally in a more secure place.

Ed Ruscha: “Industrial Strength.”
Through Oct. 25.
Fabric Workshop and Museum,
1214 Arch St.
215.561.8888.

If you are wondering just what’s going on with the Fabric Workshop and Museum, as in where are they and where are they going, you’re not alone. But at last they have dropped the coy stance about their plans.

So, as you probably know (or you wouldn’t be asking these questions), no more Gilbert Building. The FWM is now ensconced temporarily in three adjacent store fronts on the 1200 block of Arch Street. It took the three spaces to house their offices, store and gallery, which is rotating in work from their permanent collection.

Kate Stewart’s installation, part of a collaboration with Nadia Hironaka that was at the Art Institute; photo by Roberta

Lest you think the FWM is napping in their temporary home, the store front that’s the farthest west, 1222 Arch, has an installation by art hottie Mark Bradford et al (see picture above). The faux lumber in the windows gives a weird sense of abandonment and a squatter’s spontaneous improvisatory building project all at once. It doesn’t really give the illusion of 3-dimensionality, of a construction project inside. It looks flat, with slats of lumber painted on the window. It reminds me of the Kate Stewart flat contact-paper trees on the doors at the Art Institute’s recent exhibit Disappearance.

My favorite part of Storefront is the upper windows. The roof framing and the sky look real here–but the reality is of a reflection of a sky and a reflection of a construction project of another building altogether. The trope of a vision of construction behind the store front doesn’t really wash.

But, like Bradford’s installation, which goes through Aug. 31, the FWM is in this space temporarily. And like Bradford’s installation, it’s nice and all, but it’s not the real thing.

The real FWM energy can be found at the Morris Gallery at PAFA. Don’t miss the Senga Nengudi video installation there. It’s great. (We hope to have a Look! It’s Libby and Roberta video review on it soon).

Meanwhile, construction continues on the permanent digs just a few buildings east, at 1214 Arch. Here’s a remaining bit of coyness: The FWM refuses to predict when that will happen–like what if they predicted December and they couldn’t get in until January?? Quelle marmalade!