Alex Paik, Prelude and Fugue, 2011, gouache, marker, color pencil, paper, at Tiger Strikes Asteroid

Inside I saw another rainbow in Alex Paik’s bright-colored paper engineering at Tiger Strikes Asteroid. Paik says he’s not interested in making pop up books but to my eye these works would make fantastic innards to pop out at you from some kind of book — maybe coupled with some poetry or short short stories. They leap off the wall with lots of energy, and are highly playful.

Alex Paik, Prelude and Fugue, 2011, gouache, marker, color pencil, paper, at Tiger Strikes Asteroid

Down the hall, Marginal Utility was closed for Yom Kippur (via artist Hadassah Goldvicht’s wishes); Grizzly Grizzly has a severe little design installation by Patrick Gavin; Napoleon has a member’s show of abstract paintings by Dustin Campbell — all worth a quick look.

Becky Suss, Sumi ink on Paper, at Vox Populi

Meanwhile, Vox Populi has its usual mix of members’ shows and guests.  Member Becky Suss’s Sumi ink drawings of Philadelphia streets and other real world scenes (re-imagined by the artist) are so sincere and un-ironic they seem like visitors from another planet to the space that has almost cornered the market on irony in this town. Beautiful renderings, and so un-experimental that in this space they become experimental, they’re as much over the rainbow as the FLUX poster.

Piper Brett, from her installation at Vox Populi. The photo has been covered with white spray paint.

Member Piper Brett’s two pictures (blow ups of scanned porn magazine images I think) and a chain link sculpture are cyphers, as are Member Emily Rooney’s room of paintings and installations. Rooney’s room is particularly downbeat, a veiled history of something or other.  I like the paintings.

Emily Rooney, detail of her installation at Vox Populi

And the installation by guest artist Kikuko Tanaka, which had nice classical music playing but required you to crawl on hands and knees through the human mouse-hole to get to what is on the other side. I’m sorry but I don’t crawl on my hands and knees for art. I hope it was worth it, and there was a performance, presumably on the other side of the hole. If you saw that, maybe elucidate what I missed in a comment.

Kikuko Tanaka, mouse hole door to crawl through to see what's on the other side

The Rainbow Connection – Kermit sang it best.  This town is full of  lovers and dreamers who have banded together, created new places to be and share. Ten years ago, this kind of let’s make our own Emerald City thinking was just beginning.  Happily ever after is a dream, and yet with some sweat, some friends and some ideas, you can definitely create your own over the rainbow.

One more thing, Vox’s AUX performance space is almost completely done.  I got a quick peek at the black-walled space with a half-black painted floor (Vox is in the old Black Floor and Copy Gallery spaces).  Andrew Suggs says they will be painting the floor black.  There are no risers for audience seats, in case you were wondering.  Just folding chairs on a flat floor.  And the stage is a group of moveable platforms that can be arranged this way and that for performances.  Looking good!

Postcard image for Something Real at FLUXspace. Work by Carl Marin. All photos in this post courtesy of the artist.

Marin, whose late father had a taxidermy business, grew up doing things like spear fishing and hunting.  He’s always had a conflicted relationship with the hunt.  And over time, he’s developed thoughts about wild animals and how “nature” is something we mostly experience in natural history museums, where dioramas of taxidermied animals pretend to give us the real experience of being in the wild.

Carl Marin, Untitled 2010, whitetail deer hide, taxidermy form, plastic, foam, epoxy, paint, black felt, balsa wood, metal, string, super glue. 25x10x18"

Carl Marin, Untitled 2010, detail of boat

If you listened to our podcast interview with Carl (March 21) you might remember that he was reading Moby Dick a while back.  As with many of us who read Moby Dick, he was slogging through it and he didn’t really finish the book.  But the story of the whale hunt stuck with the artist, and if you look closely at this piece, you can see that Marin has created a Magritte-ian conflation of Captain Ahab’s hunt for the white whale and somebody else’s successful deer hunt.  America’s level of obsession with animals and their mythological presence in our lives is part of what this is about.

Carl Marin, photo of deer at Yellow Springs in a diorama-like feeding station the artist set up

Carl doesn’t hunt deer, he told us.  But he does stalk them with his camera.  The project above is from a photo shoot Marin did with deer at Yellow Springs.  The artist set up a deer blind and a specific, diorama-like box with food for the deer.  Then he waited and snapped a bunch of pictures.  At FLUXspace, you can see a time-lapse video the artist made of the sequence of shots taken as the deer came and went over the many days and nights of the project.  Among other animals that came to the feed were squirrels, a fox, many birds, a raccoon.

Carl Marin, deer feeding station and deer blind at Yellow Springs

At the opening, the reception table at FLUX was set up downstairs and included a bottle of Wild Turkey. In front of the table was a bench that looks remarkably like a museum bench (it was made by the artist), and on the walls were a large photo of what looks like a natural history museum diorama of wild turkeys, and a bronze plaque explaining the wild turkey project the artist undertook at Penny Pack Ecological Trust in Huntingdon Valley.

Carl Marin, Turkey Blind, 2010, archival inkjet print, 33x48"

“Its similar to my last project with the deer at Chester Springs, only this one is targeted towards a rafter of turkeys that roam the grounds,” the artist told me. “The hut is acting as a blind that I will be photographing the turkeys from. The park rangers are putting food out 25 feet in front of the hut daily.”

Carl Marin, plan for deer fence, a Percent for Art public art piece at Sturgis Playground in Olney

Marin is going off to graduate school at Virginia Commonwealth University this fall.  Sometime in the near future, he will be creating a public art piece at Sturgis Playground in Olney.  The young artist won the $20,000 commission to build a fence that will “create the illusion of deer grazing on the other side,” he says. The piece is based on an animation technique you can see in action here.

Many of us love animals and nature.  here’s an artist who comes to the subject with a fresh take on things and who’s neither talking down to us from a pulpit nor raising alarms about endangered species.  He’s just asking us to think about the animals and slow down and take a good long look.

My flickr set has more images from the show.

The Tate Modern offered the invited orgs, collectives and etcs absolutely no compensation for setting up shop in Turbine Hall–but neither were the galleries charged to be a part of the proceedings. Many spaces accepted the Tate’s invitation as a great opportunity while at least one group of anonymous British artists and arts professionals called “Making a Living” issued an open letter that stated “The title No Soul For Sale re-enforces deeply reductive stereotypes about the artist and art production. With its romantic connotations of the soulful artist, who makes art from inner necessity without thought of recompense, No Soul For Sale implies that as artists we should expect to work for free and that it is acceptable to forgo the right to be paid for our labour.” Read the entire letter online here. Other groups, like W.A.G.E (Working Artist and the Greater Economy), participated in NSFS at X Initiative but drew the line at having a presence at NSFS at the Tate Modern.

This small protest was of course accepted by curator Cecilia Alemani as welcomed institutional critique (3) and perhaps mostly forgotten about in the nearly six months since NSFS took place. The issues raised by NSFS have a larger art-world relevance and set up an interesting conversation about the price and the value equated to diy arts establishments and what those stakes might mean to the creative economy. In order to explore these issues I have written two articles.

This article takes an against stance, arguing that artist and art organization should have protested NSFS and exhibitions like it, alternative spaces are alternative for the very fact that they operate outside the systems ascribed by the Tate–artists should be paid for the work that they do, especially by major institutions that have the resources to do so. Art is a skill that people are educated for and like all educated persons that render a useful service they should be paid.

The opposite argument–also by me, has been published in print in Machete. You may pick one up at Marginal Utility, located at 319 N 11th street (Philadelphia) on the 2nd floor, absolutely free of charge.

In this article we will explore what it might mean to set up a system in which cultural capital has an exchange rate of zero dollars.

Exhibit A:

An excerpt from a conversation with Nike Desis and Josh Kerner of FLUXspace. FLUXspace was invited to be a part of, and took part in, both incarnations of NSFS.

Annette Monnier: “I get it. No organization or project that I’ve ever been a part of would have ever said ‘no’ to being part of something at the Tate Modern. We would have gone, no matter what the tickets cost and paid the whole way ourselves. . . but when you’re a young artist going to art school you think that by the time you make it to the Tate Modern you are getting paid to be there. . . ”

Nike Desis: “That was my question, if we don’t get paid at the Tate Modern then when do we get paid?”

Josh Kerner: “I think you just answered your own question.”

AM: “That’s a little scary”

ND: “That is a little scary”

JK: “The economic situation that we’ve set up as an alternative art space is not an economic system that functions through monetary transfer. It functions through the transfer of time, generosity, and other things and that’s a system that WE, I believe, are responsible for. It’s one of those situations that if you’re going to point your finger at the Tate you’ve got to point four fingers back at yourself.”

*It is important to note that this is a excerpt from a half hour conversation in which both Nike and Josh expressed various views, both positive and negative, about the NSFS experience.

Exhibit B:

I sell my soul but at the highest rates

Closing Arguments

Those organizations that participated in NSFS should feel used, because they were. By hosting NSFS the Tate was made to look like a friendly and open environment that supported and in fact worked in tangent with alternative models. NSFS was not a conference put together so that fellow independent spaces could network together. Nowhere in the programming did time exist to do so. The Tate instead scheduled an art exhibition in which each alternative space was the art–only they were art that constantly had to work and perform for the public. This is very cheap programming that garners a lot of press. This is cheap programming instead of programming that someone should be getting reimbursed for.

Art is an important service provided to the public by skilled and trained individuals who are indeed special and who require reimbursement for services. Artists who work inside the system  of established art institutions but work for free or very little sabotage an artist’s right to earn a living and create an environment where art is expected to be provided to the public free of charge. It is one thing for an artist to remove themselves entirely from capitalism and create an oeuvre that politically challenges the system of monetary exchange but it is quite another for an artist to work within the system and yet still not receive the benefits of doing so. If artists do not demand payment for their services they will not be paid and art will become a service that is always free.

Artists and artist-run spaces should band together and boycott situations like those set up by the Tate Modern for No Soul for Sale. This is not to say that festivals like No Soul for Sale should not take place, but they should be properly equipped and provided for when they do. Institutions like the Tate, large Institutions with enormous budgets and resources, must be held accountable for being the model of art-world practices.

Referenced in this text:

1. Tate Modern web press

2. “Restoring the ‘Eek’ to Eking Out a Living” written by Holland Cotter and published in the New York Times on June 24, 2009

3. Artnet news May 20, 2010

This article would not have been possible without valuable conversations with Andrew Suggs, Nike Desis, Josh Kerner and Angela Jeradi–all of whom were participants in No Soul for Sale.

Xerxes the cat does an unscheduled performance in the kitty litter box displays at the FLUXspace Cat Kulchur museum

Well the whole show — Cat Kulchur at FLUXspace — is outrageous, so prize giving is beside the point. The artists of FLUXspace have installed The Flux Space Museum of Contemporary Culture, with two named galleries, The Ben Huh Gallery (named for the man who runs the popular icanhascheezburger.com website and The Harold Weir Gallery (named for the Freaks and Geeks character?).

Curious cat video instructs you in sensual petting techniques for your pet

Museum admission is free and you get a round museum button to wear — re-purposed PMA admission buttons. A video lounge in the freight elevator looks like grandma’s living room with a comfy chair, a cat stuffed animal to hold on your lap and a television playing something that looks like it could be on Martha Stewart’s channel if she has one.

Andrea, watching the curious cat video

A middle aged woman instructs you how to hold a cat; how to scratch it behind the ears, on the rump, on the belly. First she uses a stuffed animal to demonstrate, and then she switches to a grey tabby — that’s when it gets weird. The cat is so submissive to all the scratching and holding it seems either lobotomized or drugged. And the way the woman holds the cat, well, let’s just say I’ve never seen anyone stroke cats the way she suggests.

It’s a new frontier of cat-human interactions.  More than one viewer I talked with was weirded out by this.  What’s really funny is that this video is just another DIY enterprise by someone wanting to share and make a little money.  Whatever you do (barring nudity), you can find an audience for it on YouTube.

Real mini fire escape for cats, appropriated from Sarah Sze.

The museum is open to Aug. 15. it’s fun — you should go.  There will be additional programming for the show — schedule not available yet, but soon, on the gallery’s website.

Appropriate snack at the opening -- kitty litter cake. Andrea declared it delicious! Somehow I couldn't partake.

More photos at flickr.

Art Gallery at City Hall, installed with the current show, On the Rise

The gallery is not part of the Art in City Hall program, which will continue in the glass cases on the 2nd and 4th floor.  Rather, it will be run separately with the help of an Advisory Council made up of arts professionals, Steuer said.  Upcoming this summer is a Philadelphia School District exhibit; and in the fall, a Design Philadelphia exhibit.  ”Every effort was made to ensure the space was as “green” as possible,” Steuer told me in an email. “Special non-VOC paint was used, flooring is made from recycled material, ceiling fans installed to reduce heating and cooling needs.” Check out the gallery at the open house tomorrow, June 17, 10 am – 4 pm.  Read more on Gary Steuer’s blog.  More about the show.
Art Gallery at City Hall, Room 116

Vogel Collection @PAFA
Herb and Dorothy Vogel are newsworthy not only for having given away one of the best contemporary art collections in existence but because they are humble characters – he was a postal worker and she a librarian – who lived on one salary and spent the other buying art obsessively.

Jim Hodges (Born 1957), Blanket (Peter Norton Family Christmas Project), 1998 Woven wool textile, 52 x 72 inches, The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States, 2008.31.19

At a certain point their apartment was too full and they gave the art away to the National Gallery – which couldn’t hold it all, so passed some on to museums in each of the 50 states. PAFA is the recipient of 50 Vogel pieces, mostly small works on paper, 31 of which go on view this month.  Visit works at PAFA by Richard Tuttle, Lynda Benglis and other legendary artists, then rent the documentary, Herb & Dorothy, and see the tiny aging collectors tottering around New York going on studio visits and talking with Tuttle.  It’s your guaranteed summer feel-good activity.
June 26-Sept. 12
PAFA
118 N. Broad St.
pafa.org

Summer Studio @ICA
ICA’s Summer Studio with Anthony Campuzano — the free, month-long series of drop-in art activities like film screenings, art-making, exhibits, classroom re-enactments, bull sessions and more — offers art school ambiance without the assignments, grades and guilt.  Organized by the Tyler-trained Campuzano, who showed at ICA in 2009, this summer school-ish experience follows on the heels of Ed Winkleman’s classroom-in-a-gallery in February and March. Bravo, ICA for plunging into this new art-edu-tainment territory.
July 1-31
ICA
36th and Sansom
icaphila.org

Bravo’s Work of Art
OMG these artists are so cute and the art is totally cool and Jerry Saltz is awesome did you see him tell that guy he’s not an artist???!!!  Seriously, if you’re not watching this tv art competition originated by Sex in the City’s Sarah Jessica Parker, what are you watching?
Bravo, Wednesdays at 10 pm

KAT CULCHUR @FLUXspace
Fresh from the three-day celebration No Soul For Sale at Britain’s Tate Modern, FLUXspace will re-create its Cat Culture (however it’s spelled) project, a faux anthropological exploration of how cats died out as a species in 2019.

Kat Kultur at FLUXspace, image from the free broadsheet

See the Cat Moon Bounce and pick up a copy of the broadsheet with theory by Jacques Derrida translated into icanhascheezburger language.  Meow mix hysterical.
June 26-Aug. 15
FLUXspace
3000 N. Hope St.
thefluxspace.org

David Kessler at IHouse
David Kessler’s documentary video portraits, screening on a monitor at International House’s lobby, feel like National Geographic shorts devoted to the citizens of Philadelphia’s outer reaches.  As with Errol Morris’ documentaries, Kessler’s works have no narrative voice-over to help you figure out the back story or orient you to the morality (or lack thereof) of the persons portrayed.  But that’s part of their appeal.  Stop by for a dose of reality after summer school at ICA.
To July 2. International House

Shore reading
Vox Populi’s new book We’re Working On It celebrates the member gallery’s 21st anniversary. Typical of the community-spirited nature of Vox, a large part of the 120 page book – 25 pages — is not even devoted to the member gallery—but to a historical timeline documenting the Philly alternative scene from the 1960s to the present. Vox’s story is a triumph over continued economic adversity.  And the timeline of the Philly alternative scene – compiled by Arcadia Art Gallery Director Richard Torchia – makes you understand that our town is a natural incubator of collectives.  Right now we’re in a particularly fruitful period — with 24 alternative galleries, projects and publications established in the last three years — and that doesn’t include the three or four that opened after the book went to press.  $30, available at the gallery
Vox Populi
319A N. 11th St., 4th floor
voxpopuligallery.org

Read this story at PW.

In his book The Empathic Civilization, economist Jeremy Rifkin, investigates the evolution of empathy. Recent scientific studies suggest that we are wired for collaboration. Our natural impulse is to get along with our native kin; which over time have evolved from our fellow cave men, to our state, country, or religion, to the planet at large. When we are prevented from engaging with others openly the best parts of ourselves are repressed, and this results in narcissism, fear, anger, and violence. However, when we see ourselves in each other, harmony often ensues. 
We have an innate desire to thrive.  Which brings me to the Tate Modern.

Tate Modern's Turbine Hall during No Soul For Sale. Photo courtesy of FLUXspace

The Festival of 80 alternative art spaces from around the world called No Soul For Sale was invited into London’s cavernous Tate Modern Turbine Hall from May 14-16.  The brainchild of Maurizio Cattelan, Cecilia Alemani, and Massimiliano Gioni, “No Soul For Sale” had its first incarnation at the X-Initiative in NYC, where many of these same international, non-commercial spaces gathered to inspire and challenge us to re-imagine new possibilities for contemporary art.

In London the rules were the same as in NYC: free admission, no walls, and nothing for sale, while offering up a free exchange of ideas and discourse with young artists trying to keep art, and perhaps even the planet alive. Groups came from Philadelphia (Vox Populi and FLUXspace), Barcelona, Dublin, Istanbul, Rio de Janiero, Seoul, Vancouver, Prague, Paris, Edinburgh, Hong Kong, Beirut, Los Angeles, Oslo, Tel Aviv, Berlin, New York, Paris, Reykjavik, London, Chicago, Jerusalem, Milan, Kyoto, Portland, Leeds, Seattle, Basel, Liverpool, Tangier, and beyond. (The weekend event was part of Tate Modern’s 10th anniversary celebration.)

Most of these alternative spaces and organizations are formed by young artists. They are not utopian, far from it, but they still manage to make decisions by consensus; members encourage one another’s creativity, build bridges, reaching out into the community and world at large. How do they flourish? Why do they fail? Most will not survive. Many artists will move on. How can we nurture them? Or do they even need nurturing, surviving in part by being renegade?

I visited No Soul for Sale because alternative spaces are close to my heart, having founded one- (untitled) space in New Haven, CT.- a decade ago. Here’s my report.

Reading the No Soul For Sale catalog. Photo by Alberto Zanetti

Friday, May 14th It’s late afternoon when I visit No Soul For Sale with my son Jake, a 23 year old musician, who has just flown into Heathrow from San Diego to join me and is extremely jet-lagged. His eyes look dazed as we survey the chaotic scene. “I don’t get it,” he says, “But maybe it’s just me.”  My response is: This is a Festival, much like a Festival of bands at say, Warp Tour. It’s an overview and we are getting a glimpse into a fresh creative wave that is happening worldwide. I take him back to rest, and he doesn’t return. Jake, however has spent the last six years collaborating, traveling, playing, sharing ideas, (with very few material possessions) writing songs, filming, photographing. Art making in general has become much more interdisciplinary, and interestingly enough some of the best artists I know are also musicians. Their creativity spans mediums; it is fluid and defies boundaries.

Saturday, May 15 I return to the Turbine Hall and stay for eight hours. The Hall has become a free-for-all, a zany romper room, a big party, a youthful United Nations, with artists crammed together in very small spaces outlined on the floor with red tape. The room is humming wildly like a hive of bees inside a juke-box. But now I am ready to focus and excited to take part. First stop is to hug the FLUXspace team.

FLUXspace Cat Culture research team posing with their Cat Moon Bounce at No Soul For Sale

Everyone is there! They had packed their very believable red, blue, and yellow hand-sewn plastic cat bounce and little kitten mittens, T-shirts, tote bags, signage. With everything in their luggage, and barely scraping by, they made their way to claim their fame at the Tate Modern. Turns out they are on the front and back cover of the No Soul For Sale catalogue as well! 

FLUXspace’s installation reminds me of the Pablo Helguera “What in the World” installation during Philagrafika.  Like Helguera, Flux is making a sly nod to the slippery slope of an “objective” study of history , as well as referencing the wildly popular website I Can Has Cheezburger.

According to FLUX, cats die out as a species by 2019, and as intrepid archaeologists of the future, FLUX researchers are trying to make sense of the artifacts left behind. They come to the following conclusions: Kittens wore mittens, jumped on kitten moon bounces, kitty litter had chocolate bars in it.

It is fun watching the crowd interact with FLUX. One young boy turns his face up to them with a sweet little “meow” hoping they might mistake him for a kitten and let him jump inside the bounce. The artwork looks so real I believe most people don’t realize it is hand-fabricated. Another woman quizzically asks them: is this Post-modernism? All the while FLUX staffers keep straight faces as they sadly explain what cats used to do back in the day when they roamed the earth.

Vox Populi's installation at No Soul for Sale

Vox Populi, also representing Philly, creates an enormous collaged sculptural “clump” in the middle of the room packed with images from modern day politics and pop culture, cut out from trashy American magazines. It is daring in its blatant randomness and ugliness, and on closer inspection I find it quite amazing. The longer I look at the pile, the more lost I feel, which I believe is the whole point. I give Vox a lot of credit, they have been around since 1988 and have found a way to consistently show challenging and experimental work.

Post Museum's installation, detail

Post-Museum from Singapore has visitors leaving secrets on post-it-notes. One of the artists invites me to sit down on “a bed of roses (a soft cotton fabric with tiny red roses on it), gives me her Polish mum’s yeast cake recipe, and reads my palm so accurately that I burst into tears. With tears welling in her eyes, she holds my hand for a few minutes and gives me some much needed advice. Their advertising is simple: LONDON REALLY REALLY FREE MARKET (free things and free services; give +take as you like). It sets the tone for the entire afternoon.

Black Dogs in their hangout space

Black Dogs from Leeds, UK seem to have figured out how to make the most out of being stuck in Turbine Hall from 10am-10pm non-stop for three days. Having created their own bar, they are doing what they do back home, drinking lots of beer and playfully engaging with the public in ways “that provide a working alternative to capitalist society.” Café tables invite everyone to sit and chat with one another, and if you want to you could write down on a beer coaster the answer to the Big Question: PLEASE TELL US: HOW NOT TO SELL YOUR SOUL?

Feeling very thirsty, I sidle up to the bar and ask if I can have a beer.  Of course they aren’t allowed to serve me.  I am very disappointed in that, but hey, we are at the Tate Modern, not in Leeds.

Kling and Bang's installation

Streams of unrolled receipt paper, weighted at the bottom by free-falling Icelandic krona coins, cascade from the high Turbine ceilings, brought to us by Kling and Bang.  One of the true standouts, K&B,  like the Festival itself, is slightly melancholy, constantly in flux, changing color in the evening light, billowing as it shelters us inside, giving us permission to come and go as we wish. Inhaling and exhaling, it invokes an essential theme of our times — re-examining and recycling breakdown, to rebuild something new.

Oregon Painting Society

And then there are “the plant people” from Oregon Painting Society whose desire (not mission) is “to discover and sustain a state of highly generative interpersonal communion.” Turns out the buzzing sounds (remember, it sounds like a beehive) are primarily coming from their spot. Three artist-musicians (two men and a woman, who live and work together communally) — all gorgeous and decked out in the most incredible costumes — hook up plants to electronic music so that they vibrate to the touch. I don’t think anyone leaves Turbine Hall the same after transforming into a human conduit between those plants.  It’s perhaps as close to the Garden of Eden as we’ll ever get; hands and leaves holding onto one another for dear life.

98 weeks (Beirut) and L’appartement 22/ R22 radio (Beirut) share a common quality– bravery.  It’s one thing to be an alternative space in a country that supports the arts, quite another to put your life on the line. I love L’appartement’s postcard: A photo of the Tate Modern has Arabic scrolled over it which translates: Know Thy Worth.

Alternative Space (Loop) in Seoul, Korea may well nurture “young defiant Asian artists” but they have somehow also managed to score an entire futuristic building reminiscent of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao back home, where they produce a consistent stream of gorgeously-designed catalogues and posters and have a thriving media center and gallery. I wonder who is footing the bill. This is most unusual in these times.

Arrow Factory located in a former vegetable stand and storefront in Beijing prides itself on their often surprising interactions with the neighborhood, free of “commercial entanglements.” In their storefront, artists take turns inhabiting the space at street-level, jarring people out of their everyday routine. They do not hold openings and subsist on small contributions from friends. They impress me with the starkness of their Turbine Hall installation, a large gleaming, gold plaque on a makeshift wall with a cheesy photo of a sunset over water which reads: My Soul For This. I ask them if they think they have sold their soul to come to the Tate Modern, and their response is: What do you think?

Artis-Contemporary Israeli Art Fund showcases an Israeli artist’s repurposing of cigarette lighters, which have holes drilled into the center reminiscent of Yertzeit candles for the dead. Both Arabic and Hebrew letters are on all of their literature and I ask them if they are commissioning Arab artists as well. The Director’s response: We are trying, but it’s hard. We are doing the best we can.

Rhizome's packages of nothing

Rhizome, the electronic art project of the New Museum, which has been around since 1996, had their friends MAIL NOTHING TO THE TATE MODERN. Hundreds of packages with their tracking numbers made available is part performance, part sculpture and allows one to grasp our vast global infrastructure: “a breathing system of objects in continuous motion.”

The Museum of Everything brought to you by the Isle of Wight and “Everywhere else you can think of” is on the upper floor, and I almost miss it. Dedicated to art by “the unsung creators of this modern world,”  it invites passersby to donate a work, which is voted by a panel inside to be worthy or not. Those works selected are displayed around the Museum’s exterior walls. When I stop by, a child’s drawing has just been selected, and I have to admit, it is very good. To date, I believe their collection includes over 500 works, by children, outsider or visionary artists, circus artists, and artists with disabilities.

The Royal Standard

Along the same lines, The Royal Standard (Liverpool) invites visitors to submit A GOOD IDEA. A long desk is set up. A panel of judges confers and votes on whether they think your idea is a good one or not. If selected, your good idea is uploaded to their website and made public on a computer screen. When I’m there, the panel is very taken with a young lady around age 12. I don’t stick around to find out what her idea is but the judges seem to like it. I notice that the jar of BAD IDEAS is full.

Postscript

I returned to the States, energized and awake. Artists have always been the agents of social change and we need them now more than ever. Cohabitation isn’t easy, it’s full of struggle and pain, but that’s life, isn’t it? As the Black Dog boys from Leeds so aptly put it: “Art is a mode of living to be unearthed and experimented with in the everyday”. 

The future of our planet depends on it.

-Marianne Bernstein has been living in Philadelphia since 2001.  She is on the FLUXspace Exhibitions Advisory Committee.  Her curatorial and artistic work incorporates text, photography, performance and video.

Tim Eads, A Legitimate Waste of Time at FLUXspace. Butter, toast, and exercise all in one!

Part psych experiment and part Rube Goldberg machine, Eads’ “A Legitimate Waste of Time” is both humble and dictatorial. It offers homemade bliss, but you won’t get it without doing the work. At the opening, people happily took turns on the tricked-out exercise bike as cream bounced up and down in the attached glass jar, and within a half hour there was butter—unsalted—and toast to put it on.

I usually object to sitting on my art, but Eads’ work transcends mere public art and offers more: ideas about pioneers, the beauty of simple things, the joy of tinkering and how much fun art can be.

Tim Eads (left) at the opening, watching butter being made.

Elsewhere in the show at FLUXspace, a viewer can crank a lever to activate a series of colored lights embedded in the floor. And while it’s not interactive, Fan Painting is active and fun. The work positions a standing fan in front of a wall below cans of dripping paint. The fan blows paint onto the gallery wall, creating an abstract painting.

Tim Eads, Fan Painting. Up above the fan are cans of paint with slow leaks. Paint drips down the wall and is blown into a mural painting.

Eads, a Cranbrook grad (MFA 2009) who recently moved here with his wife, artist (and artblog intern) Tiernan Alexander, considers his butter-and-toast machine public art. He raised the money for it on the public funding site Kickstarter and his hope is to take the machine outside to make toast and butter with people on the street.

Josh Kerner of FLUXspace and Eads with part of his Fan Painting machine

“A Legitimate Waste of Time” captures the spirit of today’s “Age of Less,” a term coined by Whitney Museum curator Henriette Huldisch in her essay about the 2008 Biennial artists. Far from a macho performance work in which somebody gets shot with a gun (Chris Burden, 1971) or endures 10 weeks of sitting in a museum atrium staring into space (Marina Abramovic, 2010), Eads’ piece is humble and homey.

“Lessness,” a word that comes from Samuel Beckett’s nonsense story of the same name, applies to art bereft of traditional optimism yet full of make-do and can-do spirit. Modest materials, domestic themes and lowered expectations abound. Lessness can be found in art all over Philadelphia, especially in art by young artists exhibiting at alternative spaces.  Read Peter Schjeldahl on lessness.

April’s “Failure to Show” at Extra Extra featured performances about failure. May’s “The Honeymooners” at Grizzly Grizzly presented an endlessly bickering couple. These works share a shrugged-shoulders worldview of carrying on and moving forward. And, as in Eads’ show, the action is at the opening. Miss the opening and you get the stage set alone.

Eads is a give-away artist whose philosophy is full of lessness. Born in a small town in Texas, the artist says he admires tinkerers and inventors and gets bored with the everyday. He doesn’t mind a little failure; he’s just out there trying to make things more interesting or easier for himself.
“A Legitimate Waste of Time”
Through May 15
FLUXspace
3000 N. Hope St
914.806.4889
thefluxspace.org

Read this at Philadelphia Weekly.  More photos at my flickr.

Maggie Van Scoyk, Kitten Mittens; Maggie, who has been living in Portland, is coming to Philly and London to help out, I mean have fun

Travel to London ain’t cheap, and both groups are trying to raise money. Here’s where to contribute to FLUX and here’s where to contribute to Vox. FLUX contributors, if you pledge anywhere from $7 to $39.99, you get a postcard mailed to you from London. For $40 or more, you get a hand-screen-printed tote bag in addition to the post card. Vox is throwing in some lagniappe too–to anyone who contributes more than $50–gets a copy of We’re Working on It, the gallery’s 21st anniversary publication.

The curators for the Tate’s No Soul for Sale are the same crew as for the New York version–Cecilia Alemani and Massimiliano (New Museum) Gioni along with artist Maurizio Cattelan. FLUX and Vox participated there too. The folks at FLUX tell me their original connection came to Alemani via the ICA.

FLUX’s inflatable, cat-sized moon bounce coordinates with a cat-themed show, Cat Culture, at their Philly space in May/June.

Live cats will not be allowed in Turbine Hall at the Tate, alas. But little kitten mittens will be part of the exhibit–for protecting the moon bounce from real kitty claws should a kitty get to claw its way in to the exhibit. There’s more related stuff from FLUX and it’s all catty.

Vox’s project is a “clump.” Don’t ask. Well, since you must, it’s a pile of art made by the members, but I’m not exactly sure what that means.

The show celebrates the Tate Modern’s 10th anniversary, and, like the X-Initiative show, it is a celebration of independent and diverse art organizations. Both versions owe a lot to Philadelphia ICA’s Locally Localized Gravity show of 2007, which was a cross between an exhibition and a series of programs that highlighted the collaborative, DIY artist-producers mixing up art, music, and zines.

Here’s the list of the 70 participating art organizations:
Alternative Space LOOP (Seoul), Arrow Factory (Beijing), Arthub Asia (Shanghai/Bangkok/Beijing), Artis – Contemporary Israeli Art Fund (New York / Tel Aviv), Artspeak (Vancouver), Artists Space (New York), Auto Italia (London), Ballroom (Marfa), Black Dogs (Leeds), Barbur (Jerusalem), Capacete Entertainment (Rio de Janeiro), Casas Tres Patios (Medellín), Centre Cinématèque de Tanger (Tangier), Cinema Project (Portland), cneai= (Paris-Chatou), Collective Parasol (Kyoto), Dispatch (New York), e-flux (Berlin), Elodie Royer and Yoann Gourmel – 220 jours (Paris), Embassy (Edinburgh), Exyzt & Coloco (Paris), Filipa Oliveira + Miguel Amado (Lisbon), FLUXspace (Philadelphia), FormContent (London), Galerie im Regierungsviertel/Forgotten Bar Project (Berlin), Green Papaya Art Projects (Manila), Hell Gallery (Melbourne), Hermes und der Pfau (Stuttgart), i-cabin (London), Intoart (London), K48 Kontinuum (New York), Kling & Bang (Reykjavík), L’appartement 22 (Rabat), Latitudes (Barcelona), Le Commissariat (Paris), Le Dictateur (Milan), Light Industry (New York), Lucie Fontaine (Milan), lugar a dudas (Cali), Machine Project (Los Angeles), Mousse (Milan), Museum of Everything (London), Next Visit (Berlin), New Jerseyy (Basel), Not An Alternative (New York), no.w.here (London), Oregon Painting Society (Portland), Or Gallery (Vancouver), P-10/Post Museum (Singapore), Para/Site Art Space (Hong Kong), Peep-Hole (Milan), PiST (Istanbul), PSL [Project Space Leeds] (Leeds), Rhizome (New York), Salamanca (Jerusalem), San Art (Ho Chi Minh City), Studio 1.1 (Liverpool), Suburban (Chicago), Swiss Institute (New York), The Mountain School of Arts (Los Angeles), The Royal Standard (Liverpool), Thisisnotashop (Dublin), Torpedo – supported by the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (Oslo), Tranzit (Prague), Viafarini DOCVA (Milan), Vox Populi (Philadelphia), Western Bridge (Seattle), Western Front Society (Vancouver), White Columns (New York), Y3K (Melbourne), 2nd Cannons Publications (Los Angeles), and 98 Weeks (Beirut).

Imagine therefore how we jumped at the chance to take a bus ride and see lots of the NCECA clay shows on an enforced schedule. Otherwise we would never get around to them, given our propensity to stop and chat and the shows’ short duration.

The Northern Liberties/Fishtown tour Wednesday was just the ticket. Our tour leader, Casey Porter, is part of the Claymobile posse. He was amazing–energetic, resourceful, and gracious. When Libby ran out of batteries for her camera, he dashed off into the streets and found a pack, selling to whoever in the group had a battery emergency.

Casey McDonough's springy piece, "synaptic plasticity," hints at a futuristic cartoon world

Our first stop was the Amber Street studios. The highlights for us were the Multiples of Five exhibit, featuring multiples-based work by five artists–Frederick Bartolovic, Jim Hake, Casey McDonough, Robin Strangfeld, Blake Jamison Williams.

Jim Hake's Fbriend Project uses crockery-inspired media for a contemporary statement about Facebook and other forms of internet networking.

Jim Hake’s Fbriend Project contemplates the transformation of our relationships via the internet, creating portraits of friends via a simulation of pixillation, using one of the oldest methods possible, clay.

Robin Strangfeld, in Multiples of 5. She dips paper labels in clay slip and fires them. The paper disintegrates and the front and back separate becoming two pieces. It's very delicate. The site-specific piece adjusts to the size of the wall she's working with.

From Casey McDonough’s synaptic plasticity, with its cartoon-like suggestion of futuristic life to Robin Strangfield’s Minimalist grid of tags to Blake Jamison Williams’ maximalist floral floor piece to Frederick A. Bartolovic’s landscape/map of a grid of ceramic pillows, this show captured our attention.

Baltimore Clayworks exhibit at Amber St. Lots of pottery on pedestals and these nice stoneware cats by Trish Kyner.

Our bus companions were more engrossed by another exhibit in the same space–work by the Baltimore Clayworks. The techniques here were what held peoples’ attention.

While Libby admired the array of potters wheels at all price ranges, Roberta wanted to buy one of the chunky little kilns--a bright metal boxe on legs -- just to have it. Kilns are pretty nifty and we admire the idea of a home kiln.

From 3239 N. Amber, we walked over to 3245 N. Amber where we discovered an impressive store for ceramic artists, The Ceramic Shop. Well, we don’t know much about what clay artists need, but we were impressed anyway by the arrays of goods.

Here's our tour guide, Casey Porter, left, in the Ceramic Shop where several people bought supplies, like Sherry, from California, who found the perfect portable sponge.

Mark Lueders, who owns the shop and a large clay studio that offers classes, also organized a group exhibit of ceramic work. Even though The Ceramic Shop had contacted us in the past, we somehow never absorbed what they were up to. Now we know! This place is clearly a supply destination.  By the way, we also ran into Nick Lenker who works for the Ceramic Shop and has a studio there.  Lenker, who has two shows open now, at Bambi and Pageant, said his collaborator on the Bambi show, Paul Swenbeck, also has a studio there, as does Shannon Bowser, who made the concrete countertop in the checkout zone of the shop.

Daniel Forrest Hoffman, a non-functioning "film reel" showing the SS United States going nowhere fast.

At FLUXspace we saw two shows. Constructs, with Dylan Beck, Kate Dowell and Daniel Forrest Hoffman, all alums of Tyler’s ceramics program, includes work from Hoffman that isn’t ceramic at all. His primitive film/flip-book-like machines argue about stasis vs. motion. We met Hoffman while we were there, and he explained that his largest piece was about the world’s fastest ship, the S.S. United States, which is permanently docked going nowhere, in Philadelphia. Hoffman’s elaborate piece suggests film reels and motion–and stasis.

Si-Ying Ho, Hero Series no. 1, porcelain, high fire reduction, hand-painted cobalt images, computer decal transfer, terra sigillata, 15.5 x 11.25 x 8.25 inches

Also at FLUX, Si-ying Ho’s work stands out in the downstairs exhibit A Post Production Moment.  Her anti-vases with cartoon-y shapes incorporate Eastern and Western imagery. Others in the show are Jelena Gazivoda, Kate Doody, Benjamin Schulman, Danielle Richter, and Mat Karas.

Daniel Forrest Hoffman, Self Portrait

Dennis Ritter, Untitled, 2010, sagger fired porcelain, salt oxides, soft brick, at Tyler School of Art

At Tyler, we saw a terrific range of work that bodes well for the future of ceramics as an art form. We loved a video of Hoffman adding clay wrinkles to his face. Among the outstanding work there were Dennis Ritter’s saggy little punctuation mark critters, Eric O’Neill’s Frankstein’s Monster, in which the bust of the monster stares down his own portrait–shades of Dorian Grey–and nearby Jason Kusmak’s Jazor the Destructible, a chunky ruin of a futuristic monster.

Matthew Ziemke, Consumption Rendering No. 1, 2010, wood, ceramic, acrylic, enamel, mixed media

We also were impressed by some installations by Matthew Ziemke, including Consumption Rendering No. 1, suggested farmland swallowed and incinerated by the toxic industrial landscape–a nice union of materials, method and concepts.

At Highwire, work by Puneeta Mittal attracted one of our tour companions to buy a piece.  And at Rocket Cat cafe, where we didn’t have nearly enough time to take a coffee break, we visited an array of mugs by local artists that took over one of the walls there.

Rocket Cat was supposed to be our half-way break, but there wasn’t enough time for everyone to order. And there was no hope of a break until the tour was scheduled to end, after 2 p.m. One starving member of the group let everyone know just how much she wanted that Rocket Cat breakfast burrito.

Look for part 2 of this post soon.

Bookmark/postcard from nowhere to nowhere, that comes with the North Georgia Gazette. Like this bookmark, everything in this bookmark is thoughtful and artful.

Green Lantern Press is the artist-run organization that also publishes the Phonebook, a national directory of artist-run spaces. (The most recent edition, 2008-2009, Philly’s artist-run spaces are severely underrepresented, but then even we can’t keep up.) And of course this show is at an artist-run collective space. There’s a theme here.

The story behind the book goes back to when a British fleet of exploration ships got stuck in the Arctic ice while searching for the Northwest Passage. Trapped for eight months, waiting for the ice to melt, they published a ship’s journal, The North Georgia Gazette, on orders from the fleet’s Captain Parry to keep spirits lifted. No whining allowed.

Amanda Browder, Installation, 2010 and Nike Desis standing there for scale

The original publication included letters to the editor, recipes, poems and reviews of on-board performances. The Gazette’s contents are reprinted here in their entirety, and embellished with an essay by contemporary Arctic explorer John Huston, as well as contemporary art work.

Nick Butcher, Grain Advance, wood glue cast of vinyl record on paper, 7 inches, 2009.

The exhibit, curated by Green Lantern Gallery & Press founding director Caroline Picard, includes fewer than a dozen pieces, which are touring the country to publicize the release of the book. Most of the art included in the exhibit is included in the book, including a limited edition 7″ record–a wood glue on paper print of a vinyl record. It can actually be played, the music of the original distorted by the wobbly backing and the iffy process. The resulting pops and squeaks and musical swoops, if you’re feeling imaginative, are quite evocative. You can hear and see this work, by Nick Butcher, on a small record player in the exhibit. The book, a small edition of 250 with silk-screened covers, is available at Flux for $30, an amazing deal!

Carmen Price, Normal Floe, mixed media on paper, 22x11 3/4 inches.

Other works include a marvelous, delicate seascape by Carmen Price that captures the white-out isolation of 24-hour Arctic days. A hilarious map of the arctic north, part fiction part real, by Rebecca Grady, and a wonderful soft-sculpture iceberg made of patchwork fabric with a fuzzy toupee of fake fur on top. Grady’s other piece, three draped rolls of somewhat crinkled paper in front of the windows has a makeshift, thin feel, making it the only piece in the show that is less than satisfying.

Rebecca Grady, detail of Map of the Polar Regions, pen and ink on paper, 19 x 22 inches

Also in the exhibit are artists Jason Dunda, Devin King and Deb Sokolow. I have images of their work–all pretty interesting–up at my Flickr site.

The show, one of the Philagrafika independent projects, is a lovely evocation of the past and the sense of awe that the sailors must have felt isolated in that barren landscape with no promise of escape.

The bookcase at the Flux reading room--the very beginning of an archive of Philadelphia contemporary art.

I went to the exhibit with Andrea, and while we were there we visited Flux’s temporary reading room, erected in conjunction with Isolated Fictions. It is part of Flux’s new project–an archive of Philadelphia-related art-ifacts. At this point, the reading room has a small collection that includes zines from Machete to old New Art Examiners to various Philadelphia exhibition postcards and printed materials. But, as in everything they do, Flux is ambitious and wants more.

The reading room, a temporary adjunct to the archive.

So help yourself out by helping Flux out. If you have exhibition catalogs, postcards and zines from shows in the city, old copies of Eye Level, this would be a good place to send a couple of copies. This project to preserve and make accessible contemporary Philadelphia art history parallels the Vox book on collectives, by Richard Torchia, and if I were to guess, it may have been inspired by the talk Torchia gave about the necessity of documenting. This is a breakthrough, with Philadelphia taking itself and its art history seriously!

Nearly 125 years of the New York Times, on microfilm at Flux.

There’s one more great feature at the reading room–microfilm of the New York Times, from 1886 to 2008, and a microfilm reader and printer, that Montgomery County Community College gave up when it switched to digital versions. The advantage of microfilm is that the articles are on their pages, with the ads and everything. And they won’t become inaccessible and unusable when the digital programs go through their annual sweeping changes. So, artists, as material-oriented people who are contrarians, seem to me to be saving our culture.