Alex Soth's Misty hanging at last year's Margulies Collection exhibit at Penn

If you were looking at art in 2004, you may have seen Soth in a Whitney Biennial or Sao Paolo Biennial, or last year, you could have seen three of his photos–Daniel, Charles and Misty–at the Margulies Collection exhibit at Penn.

“He’s a total rock star,” said Penn’s Director of Graduate Photography Gabe Martinez in his introduction to Soth’s talk.

Alec Soth posing as a huckster for Monster (the less blurry of two blurry photos)

I may have given the wrong impression in my previous post of what Soth, who shows at Gagosian, is like; here’s my correction: He’s not in the least grumpy. He’s funny. And he loves William Eggleston. He mentioned others, including Robert Frank, but Eggleston was the biggy.

PowerPoint image of the 2 billionth photo uploaded to Flickr

With 4 million photos a day uploaded to Flickr, and with ubiquitous cell phone photos capturing news, he wondered about whether it is possible to make meaningful photographs. “Now so many of the key images are amateur snapshots,” said Soth. “…How can you compete?”

“The only answer, The Narrative Machete,” he intoned, flashing the words up on the screen displaying his Power Point slide show. Soth is interested in making a series of photos tell a story without using words. He suggested that the slide show is a neglected form that might have potential for him (I should mention that the night before he had dinner with slide show queen Zoe Strauss, among others), but the photo book is his chief output and his chief solution to the problem.

Alex Soth, an image from his book Dog Days, Bogota. He was down in Columbia with his wife, adopting his daughter, when these images were taken.

Here are the names of some of his books (here they are on Amazon):

The Last Days of W (really a newspaper)
Fashion Magazine
NIAGARA
Sleeping by the Mississippi
Dog Days, Bogotá

Soth was inspired to take his first photography road trip after hearing photographer Joel Sternfeld lecture at his college. “The idea of the road trip, I could do that, I could drive around and that could be my life.” So on a spring break, he drove from Minneapolis to Memphis. He also has spent a fair amount of time photographing people in bars.

Soth's sheep photos were the hit of an early show.

Being in Minnesota off the beaten art track gave him a big advantage. “I was free to try things, show them, and it doesn’t matter,” he said. From an early show of photos of sheep, police, military, and a sleep clinic, he learned two lessons–accessibility and the need for free association, with one picture leading to the next one. “The works lacked accessibility except for the sheep.”

Soth is a natural teller of stories. Here’s one he told about Bonnie, one of the photo subjects in Sleeping by the Mississippi:

Alec Soth, Bonnie, from Sleeping by the Mississippi

Bonnie is the wife of a Pentecostal minister, whom she drowns out. She had an “Eggleston-ish” picture on her wall that Soth admired. She saw his interest, put the picture on the table, and then kept pushing the picture toward him bit by bit. “I’m trying to get something from her, a picture, and she’s grying to get something from me–my soul,” he said.

It’s the exchange between him and his subjects that interests him. Someone who took a video of Soth approaching and photographing strangers called him a used car salesman of a photographer (gosh, this reminds me of Kehinde Wiley convincing young men to pose for him). Soth mostly uses a large format 8×10 camera, so he’s adjusting while the subject is waiting and waiting, “and they kind of stop thinking about how they look. I don’t claim to know anything about these people. It’s like a bird. I swoop in and grab the fish.”

Alec Soth, Melissa, from his book NIAGARA

Talking about his book NIAGARA, he said, “I wanted to use place again as a metaphor, but for different issues–love and romance.”

He also found despair and destruction. The wall of water’s appeal is partly that it’s destructive he said. “New love is destructive. It’s like a Roy Orbison song, building to a crescendo.”

Alec Soth, Michele and James. This image disturbed some people. The subjects ended up liking it, and Soth describes it as tender, but problematic.

The Niagara photos that he showed, including some nude photos of couples, are not exactly romantic even though they are about love.

“In Mississipi, I never got turned down (by potential subjects); in Niagara I was constantly turned down.”

After taking on assignments and commissions, he joined Magnum Photos. At his first Magnum get together another photographer walked up to him and hissed, “‘You’re using people.’” The comment got to him. He says some of the photos are problematic.

Alec Soth, Fashion Magazine, Sonia. "In Paris, I photographed beautiful older women. In Minnesota, I photographed beautiful awkward young people."

The life of photographing on assignment also taught him something about what’s important to his work:

“I really learned that I’m not interested in photographing celebrities at all. that whole exchange thing I’m looking for doesn’t happen with them.”

He gave some pretty interesting answers during the Q&A–

About sacrificing his family life when he’s on the road:
“I don’t bring them [his wife and daughter] in the car. I don’t like photographing my family. I really feed off the separation.
“I hate photography and I’m ruining my family.”

About his frustration with photography as a medium:
“The reason I do photography is it’s really fun, moving around and in the world–and at this point, I’m really good at it.”

About working with the large format camera:
“It’s not that heavy. When I did that Fashion Magazine work, it was all done with the 8 x 10 camera. I got really fast with it. I’m open to work in different ways. I want to think like a filmmaker. I don’t want to have a look. I don’t want to photograph sheep the rest of my life.”

About the houseboat on ice:
“I was never the bohemian guy living on the road. I had a regular job. I just pretended. Then I met these people who did live that life.”

About text and pictures:
“Text with images doesn’t work. It usually kills the picture.”

About setting up shots and poses:
“It’s like your family pictures. I usually don’t tell people to place your arm here. I have no problem telling people to move. I never claimed being a documentary photographer.”

Alec Soth, the letter in question, from NIAGARA

About the source of a devastating letter he showed from NIAGARA:
“The letter was given to me. …Niagara attracts suicides, too. There’s a job there of pulling bodies out of the falls. None of the letters was fabricated.”

About using people:
“I’m deeply conflicted. I’m in the midst of a bad experience. I’m hoping I won’t get sued. And she’s underage. I’m just not proud of it. As crimes go, it’s not the worst.”

About connecting to and selecting subjects:
“I’m a believer in chemistry.”

Alec Soth‘s second name rhymes with both.

Last week they were both in town to talk about their art work and to listen to their names mangled over and over.

When PAFA Curator Julien Robson introduced Wiley, he bemoaned his habit of turning the final long e of Kehinde into a Germanic ending. Habits being what they are, he then rhymed Kehinde with Linda throughout the intro. Wiley didn’t seem perturbed.

Soth on the other hand is clearly perturbed by the mispronunciation of his name. As people walked into the talk at Penn, they were greeted by Soth’s first slide– “rhymes with both”–big old white letters on a black background. Ahem. And don’t you forget it. Director of Graduate Photography Gabe Martinez quickly forgot. He began with  Soth a la both, but then quickly fell into Soth a la  goth.  Like I said, habits die hard. Fortunately Soth was polite and didn’t comment.

But really, what can you expect from a town that pronounces Schuylkill as Skookill, and the Acme as the Ack-a-me?

Barkley Hendricks at Penn before the talk.

“The city and I have a love-hate relationship. My 2-years younger brother was murdered here,” began the Philadelphia native, who lives and teaches in New London at Connecticut College.

A bit of a charmer, Hendricks is a funny mix of ego and diffidence, discussing his work in terms of its technical challenges and methods–info for students sandwiched between anecdotes about each piece.

Barkley Hendricks, Blood, a reference to Picasso's harlequin paintings

But it’s not the anecdotes or materials that make this work of particular interest. It’s the beautifully painted content–dark-skinned subjects, reflecting their time and their individuality, yet standing timeless and universal–a sort of African American hagiography, iconic against flat fields of color. Hendricks himself, in one of his few art historical references in the talk, mentioned Byzantine icons. He tipped his hat to Picasso in a couple of paintings, including Blood, a red-on-red portrait (his red period?) of a young man whose stance and plaid clothes call to mind the Picasso’s acrobats in harlequin.

Barkley Hendricks, "Sweet Thang"

I particularly liked the information he gave about his choices–choosing a tile pattern for a background in Sweet Thang, adding balloons to “Arriving Soon” (the painting sat incomplete in his studio for a couple of years until the balloons appeared–in the studio and then in the painting), or omitting the word “nihilism” from a subject’s t-shirt. I also like how he told about the sitter in Sweet Thang first pouring out her heart to him until he was moved to tears. “Then she blew that bubble.”

Barkley Hendricks, Arriving Soon

Hendricks, by the way, is a PAFA Certificate holder, where he was one of Louis Sloan’s students; he also has a Yale BFA and MFA,where he studied under Walker Evans.

“Icon for My Man Superman (Superman never saved any black people — Bobby Seale),” 1969.

Hendricks came of age in the ’60s, and that era’s desire for Black empowerment and visibility is reflected in his work. His 1969 painting Icon for My Man Superman has as its subtitle a quote from Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale–”Superman never saved any black people.” Hendricks, who said he grew up loving comics, recalled that there were no black people in there–but “if there were, they were always blue. They never got the color right.”

"Fela: Amen, Amen, Amen, Amen," 2002. Oil and variegated leaf on canvas, wooden frame, armature, 66 3/4 x 46 3/4 inches.

Hendricks is a political painter. His portrait of Nigerian singer Fela Kuti turns him into a saint and icon. Hendricks said the Nigerian government tried to kill the singer. The singer’s mother, died under suspicious circumstances, pushed out of a second-story window. In the frame of the painting is embedded a camera to spy on the gallery. Soon to be installed in the exhibit in Santa Monica, he said he is hoping the camera will be properly hooked up there to stream live video.

But the political content is also subtle. And this is where things get quite interesting.

Barkley L. Hendricks, "Bahsir (Robert Gowens)," 1975. Oil on canvas, 83.5 x 66 inches. Collection the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.

Hendricks’ Byzantine icons are also full-length fashion plates standing against blank photo backdrops. (He has a photography interest and many of his portraits are based on photos, even photos of strangers on the street; he also paints from life).

I am struck by how there’s a conversation that goes on with my old Jimi Hendrix black light poster (it’s not the one that’s all over the internet, but a two-tone purple and green portrait, with the planes of Hendrix’s face running into the background). Hendricks-the-artist plays with white clothing bleeding into white backdrops or black into black backdrops. The clothing-encased body is often flat, but then emerges with luscious dark skinned volume from the collar and cuffs.

He loves people, he loves how they present themselves–their clothes and their attitude. And in those choices of clothing and hairdo, he presents not just character, but also a cultural time capsule that is the figure en costume, each subject sartorially self-exoticized. These are black people not trying to be white people but just being themselves, and everyone’s a character.

Barkley Hendricks, Tequila

I want to say that without Barkley Hendricks, there is no Kehinde Wiley, who also takes academic painting technique and history to express Pop culture. Wiley, like Hendricks, appropriates poses from religious saint paintings, creating often full-length portraits of his street hustlers in hip-hop regalia. Wiley’s settings also are flattened, although Wiley uses wallpaper patterning to domesticate his subjects, the fronds of pattern crossing over their outfits, making street dudes look positively tame and lovable–not to mention gorgeous.

Both artists take subjects with major attitude and humanize the threat their clothing and posture implies. They are inserting African Americans into an European art history with its pale faces and tastes. But Hendricks is about political power and about the individual personality in a way that Wiley is not.

Barkley L. Hendricks’s “Sir Charles, Alias Willie Harris” (1972) is a portrait of a weed dealer as Three Graces.

To say Hendricks is  political, however, oversimplifies. He’s about African American musicians, especially jazz musicians.  He has a strong sense of connection to people. He showed a slide of a self-portrait in which he placed himself in Virginia, where his family has roots, and where he is called Doc and Ruby’s Oldest Boy, which is the name of the painting.  Hendricks’ anecdotes include his ex-wife, his ex-girlfriend, his models, his friends. His personal life is part of what fuels his art, which is a mix of the personal and the impersonal, the private and the public. He uses song lyrics and titles–like (Marvin Gaye’s) What’s Going On– for his paintings and recently completed a print of jazz musician Dexter Gordon, who starred in the movie Round Midnight. He has embraced them all as his people.

There’s also a sense of humor here, a willingness to laugh at himself and to paint work that has the spark of the real world! A portrait of his wife is called Mon Petit Kumquat. She’s a 6-foot tall woman, heroic in platform shoes,  delicately holding a kumquat between her index finger and her thumb.

Barkley Hendricks, Slick

He is able to tell a joke on himself–laugh at some criticism he got from the late Hilton Kramer in the New York Times, who wrote, “Hendricks is brilliantly endowed, but has a tendency toward slickness.” The comment resonates in the titles of two of his paintings. One is a self portrait dressed in all white, “Slick.” The other is a nude self portrait, in athletic socks and a white cap. It is called Brilliantly Endowed. It didn’t come directly out of the Kramer comment, Hendricks suggested. “I took a shower and looked in the mirror. Hey, that’s a painting.” But he grabbed onto the joke, and the picture is richer for it.

It’s that touch that allows Hendricks to deal with touchy subjects and still charm. He knows how to get a lot of mileage out of indirection!

TUESDAY MARCH 17

Gary Hill, Wall Piece, (2000); Single-channel video/sound installation. Video projector, strobe light and strobe controller with steel floor mount, two speakers, one DVD player and one DVD (color; stereo sound). All images courtesy of the artist and Donald Young Gallery, Chicago.

Gary Hill–NOTE:  AS OF 2 PM MONDAY, MAR. 16, THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED.
Hill has been working with video and sound since 1973. His intermedia use of text, speech and image explore the physicality of language and our thought processes. Winner of a MacArthur Foundation Genius award in 1998, and winner of the Leone díOro Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale in 1995, his work has been included in six Whitney Biennials and Documenta IX.

Coinciding with the talk, a show of Hill’s work opens at Slought on Saturday, March 21. 6:30-8:30 pm, with a conversation between Hioll, George Quasha and Charles Stein at 7 pm. The show runs to May 1.

Gary Hill
UPenn Graduate Fine Arts Lecture
Cosponsored by Slought Foundation
5 pm, Meyerson Hall, B1
210 S. 34th St. Philadelphia PA 19104
Open to the public

WEDNESDAY, MAR 18

Barkley Hendricks

Barkley Hendricks
The talk, by this major African American painter who put his own stamp on Pop Art, is the precursor to Hendricks widely acclaimed upcoming exhibit at PAFA (now at the Studio Museum in Harlem). The PAFA show opens Oct. 17, 2009 and runs to Jan. 3, 2010.

Barkley Hendricks
5:00 PM
Upper Meyerson Gallery
Meyerson Hall
210 S. 34th St.
Open to the Public

Lawrence Weschler
Weschler is a former New Yorker writer and culture critic. He’ll be talking about the shift from books to blogs and instances of the world melting into thin air, i.e., the transitory quality of the internet and what it means for the culture.

Lawrence Weschler
All that is Solid
2008-2009 Penn Humanities Forum on Change
5:00 pm
Rainey Auditorium, Penn Museum
To register (required): go here
Event free and open to the public.

Drew Leshko, 2009, Untitled Installation (detail), paper, wire, plaster, basswood, plastic, acrylic, enamel, 40" x 80" x 40"

Seriously, Stupididity
And here’s a new show at a new outpost in North Philly. When you’ve had enough of the words and lectures, you can come up for air and look at some art. Damian Weinkrantz and Adam Wallacavage, both from Space 1026, are in charge here in a new space called Shadow’s Space Gallery above Kung Fu Necktie, a watering hole with one of the best signs on north Front Street.

showing work by
Drew Leshko, David Dunn, Danny Perez, Spencer Wunder, Mary Deevy, Manuel Dominguez Jr., Jessica Roberts, Gloria Joan Haag, Laura Lee and Susan Houwen, Brieann Robyn Tracey, Carrie Collins, Jason Goldberg, Isaac Lin, Kelly Turso, Adam Crawford, Andrew Jeffrey Wright, Ken Sigafoos, Ben Woodward, Judith Schaechter, Amber Lynn Thompson, Crystal Stokowski, Matt Leines, Jim Houser, Jayson Musson, Andrew Clark, Plankton Art Co., Erich Weiss, Dan Tag, Dave Fox, Carolynne McNeel, Nick Paparone, Shelly Spector, Charles Burns, Aryon Hoselton, Paul E.

Seriously, Stupididity
Shadow’s Space Gallery
upstairs at Kung Fu Necktie
Opening Reception
Wednesday March 18, 2009
6:00-10:00
1248 N. Front Street
Philadelphia

THURSDAY, MAR 19

The new Temple Gallery at Tyler School of Art. Image from Temple Gallery.

New Temple Gallery Grand Opening
NEW Temple Gallery at Tyler School of Art on the main campus has its official opening Thurs. Mar. 19, 6-8 PM. It’s the kickoff for the series of student MFA shows as well. Those shows run Mar 18-May 9, with each student getting a 4-day slot in that window. First up and on view for the grand opening are Bassem Mostafa, Charlotte Rodenberg, Fabian Lopez, Tom Gallagher

Temple Gallery
Grand opening reception 6-8 PM
NEW ADDRESS: 2001 North 13th Street, Philadelphia 19122
215.777.9139

FRIDAY AND SATURDAY, MARCH  20 AND 21

George Tooker, Lunch, 1964

George Tooker Symposium
A scholarly array of scholars from around the country and across the pond discuss the art of George Tooker, whose 40-year retrospective is on display at PAFA now through April 5.

George Tooker Symposium
Friday, 9.00 a.m. – 5.00 p.m.
Saturday, 9.00 a.m. – 3.00 p.m.
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
Broad and Cherry Streets
$50 members, $60 non-members, $30 students with ID. For tickets, please contact 215-972-0522 or rsvp@pafa.org.

Also on Saturday night, the reception for Gary Hill at Slought–see top entry.

The ArtsEdge residencies will provide shared living and working space for an “emergent” writer and artist for a year. The goal is to inspire interdisciplinary exploration (and to bring the action close to Penn’s campus in West Philadelphia).

The application is due by Aug. 8, 2008.

Here’s more info from the press release:

Residencies last for one year and include a dedicated studio for each writer/artist, shared living space, and close affiliation with the writing and artistic communities at Penn. During the course of their residencies, writers and artists will be encouraged to develop at least one collaborative project with the Writers House or Fine Arts Department. Qualified applicants may also be considered to teach one course at Penn in the spring semester.

Terms: artist and writer will each pay $500 (+ electric) per month; rent will include shared living space, private work space, and all other utilities. Writers House and Fine Arts Department will subsidize remaining rent.

To apply: send letter of interest, bio or artist statement, and portfolio (10 pages of written work or 20 images minimum (PDFs, PPTs, CDs, DVDs are all acceptable) to residencyproject@writing.upenn.edu . Please include personal contact information and the names and contact information of at least two professional references. If you would like to be considered for a course, please also submit a brief description of your teaching experience or qualifications.

Submissions may be made electronically, or sent to:

ArtsEdge Residency
Kelly Writers House
3805 Locust Walk
Philadelphia, PA 19139

Application deadline: August 8, 2008.
Project start date/move-in: October 1, 2008.

I’m sure the irony wasn’t lost on Vito Acconci, finding himself an honored guest at the University of Pennsylvania, just about nine years after the Penn rejected a radical Acconci Studio proposal for a 1 Percent for Art project on campus.

The Penn powers that be weren’t quite comfortable with Acconci’s proposed little, shrub-covered African-looking huts for seating in front of the stores on 36th Street. (Acconci alluded to the African huts briefly during his talk.) They were shot down for blocking sight lines–thereby discouraging commerce and encouraging lurkers.

Ultimately, nothing got built on 36th Street, and the 1 percent public art commission ultimately went to Andrea Blum–hard-edged anti-tables and anti-chairs on 40th Street. Comparing the two pieces would be pretty instructive, if you ask me.

But back to Vito whose ground-breaking body art and installation work, with their consideration of politics and power, still influence art today. His influence is wide-ranging, also touching on video, audio, site-specific installation, everything that young sculptors are doing today. Just look through the Whitney Biennial catalog and make your own list. Or check out the previous generation, from Matthew Barney to Mike Kelley to Bill Viola to Marina Abramovic and Rikrit Tiravanija.

Vito is currently the subject of a scholarly exhibit at Slought Foundation, up until March 31. The exhibit, Powerfields: Explorations in the Work of Vito Acconci, was co-curated by Meredith Malone and by Christine Poggi, and is an outgrowth of Poggi’s curatorial practices class, which focused entirely on Acconci.

Acconci (in the suit) teaching.

In her introduction of the speaker, Poggi described much of Acconci’s work as utopian.

One of the warm-up images flashed before Acconci’s talk. A number of them had writings and quotes from him. This one says, “There’s a legal term for a problem in public space: something that might draw people to an area–say, across train tracks–where they might be caused harm. It’s called a ‘public nuisance.’ I wouldn’t mind being called that for my life’s work.” –Vito Acconci (Interview with Mark C. Taylor, 2002)

Famous for his edgy art actions/performances from the 1970s, Acconci is no longer that outrageous young man. He’s physically a bit thicker, a lot older. When he speaks, he repeats a phrase until he explodes into the remainder of his sentence–a delivery that suggests poetry, performance and a mental tic. He rocks back and forth. He’s intense and obsessive.

He described a career in which each new step meant rejecting the one before. He portrayed himself as someone whose art developed out of a series of philosophical crises, a series of manifestos that he undermined over and over until he rejected art altogether and switched to architecture (of a sort). Now he’s busy wondering about the architecture.

Here’s some of what he had to say:

Acconci the poet

He started out as a poet: “I wanted the words to be matter, to be material. … I was trying to make something as a fact, as literal as possible. The last piece that I thought of as a piece of writing, a 1969 poem [about a walk], was an attempt to make the reading time the same as the walking time the same as experiential time.”

One of Vito Acconci’s maximally literal poems.

Acconci the artist

Then he said he switched to an art context. “Art was a field you could imprint with anything from other fields.” An example he gave was using walks as an art material. He said he wanted to know “how to connect myself to the world around me, to the space around me.”

An example of work from this period was Street Works. “Every day I followed a person in the street until he went in.” The person’s reason for being on the street Acconci adopted as his own reason for being there. “I could literally be dragged by another person.”

Acconci said once he realized he was no longer writing, then the ground became the replacement for the page, the walk a replacement for the writing. “Why not shift focus from the medium, why not shift focus from the ground I walked on? Why not use myself? …I have to start focusing on me. The pieces in the 1970s, the pieces are turning on myself. I start an action; the action ends in me. The pieces all involve concentration.”

But Acconci then wondered how to prove that the concentration was on himself? His answer: “Apply physical stress on my body.” He made a film in which he used a moving candle to burn the hair off each of his breasts; he made one in which he pulled on his breasts–an exercise in futility. “I wish I could find an easier way to look like a woman,” he said, sounding rather earnest. He got a laugh anyway. The action “put me in the position of the Little Engine That Could. I think I can, I think I can. But no matter how long I pulled on my breast, nothing would happen.

The I and the You in Acconci’s art

Vito Acconci following someone on the street, one of the works in his Street Work series.

“I thought I was opening myself up to viewers. I was probably closing viewers off. The viewer is always a voyeur, looking in on some secret he or she shouldn’t be a part of.

“…I had to find a way to approach a viewer. This started to happen in 1971.” In Claim, the viewer could anticipate the situation he was entering with the help of video. But the situation, which invited the viewer to dare to walk down the stairs to the basement, involved getting past the blidfolded artist swinging a lead pipe. Acconci also talked threatening phrases non stop.

“I talk as a self-hypnotizing device. Whenever I hear someone coming down the stairs, I can swing the lead pipe.

“This was the beginning of architecture for me,” he said, referring to the way he was using and controling the space.

He said this was art as an occasion, and it was an exchange system between the artist and the viewer. “All of these I-you pieces, I set myself up as a still point, and you have to come through.

“It occurred to me that I was confirming an art world hierarchy, confirming all the things I hate about art–art as religion, art as an altar…

“…What if I started to blend in with the space?”

So in 1972, in a conventional gallery space, half way back in the gallery, Acconci made the floor rise to become a ramp that rose to 2 1/2 to 3 feet above the normal floor its highest point in the back of the gallery. Acconci hid beneath the floor for 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Vito Acconci, Seedbed

“The viewer walks across the ramp. I’m trying constantly to masturbate. I can build sexual fantasies going on those footsteps. A viewer might be thinking, thinking, He’s doing this for me. My voice is constantly talking.

“Seedbed, it was a kind of 8-hour job for that period. Its sense had to do with taking a room, walls and floor that you assume are neutral, and trying to fill that space with a person. I had to be part of the floor–before the first person came and after the last person left.”

Suddenly, Acconci started talking about his musical influences–Neil Young, Van Morrison. “The single voice needing a long song to meander around the self. Music has always been a major influence on stuff I’ve done.” By the mid ’70s, his taste in pop during the installation phase included the Ramones and the Sex Pistols. However now, at Acconci Studios (his architectural phase), he listens to musici with no voice. “Architecture and music make an ambience. You can do other things while you’re listening to music.”

In the mid ’70s, he started making installations. “The way I saw installations, a space was given to me for a certain period of time. I didn’t think about what the piece would be until I already had a space. Why was site specific so important to me? Because that art couldn’t be universal; that art only made sense at this specific time.”

Vito Acconci, turning a gallery into a meeting place. The table goes out the window and becomes a diving board. His recorded voice repeats phrases like, “Now that we’re all here together, what do you think, Bob?”

He began to feel that in a gallery, which was a place to which people came, people had to be part of the piece, and he envisioned a space that was like a town square, with his voice calling people together. “I was kidding myself. A gallery will never be a public square.

“I couldn’t do art anymore.”

Vito Acconci, Instant House, with the walls down on the floor, only the American flag showing.

So Acconci became interested in architecture in the mid ’80s. In Instant House, if a visitor sat on a swing, his weight would raise the four walls from the floor, revealing a Soviet flag on the outside surfaces. On the inside was an American flag.

Vito Acconci, Instant House, with the swing weighted by a human being, the walls up, the Soviet flag, revealed

The search for a permanent home

But that wasn’t enough for Acconci. “The house only exists as long as a person [on the swing] keeps the instrument going. I wanted something permanent.”

Vito Acconci, Bad Dream House, his prototype permanent house

So he started making houses, like Bad Dream House. Once he made his prototype house, he decided, “So I needed a prototype landscape.”

The prototype landscape.

“I became convinced that the stuff wasn’t art anymore. …I’m not an architect, so I needed to work with someone who was. …If I wanted to do something public, it had to start as public [i.e. made with others, working as a group].” He formed Acconci Studio eventually.

Spheres in use at Queens College.

In the ’90s, most of what he did were public, 1 Percent for Art public art projects, things designed for a specific building, a specific physical problem. An example he showed was for Queens College’s English Department front entranceway with two spheres, lost in a large empty space. He added more spheres, with cut-outs for sitting, a regular Acconci strategy, cutting away pieces of a geometric form. “The pass-through space has become a gathering space,” he boasted, then adding, “There’s a nagging doubt I have–Can a couple of folding chairs have done the same thing?

“Since I was doing public art, I was trying to give myself a reason for doing public art. Since there’s so much less money spent on the art than on the architecture, only one percent, maybe I’m bringing in something from the margins, bringing in a minority view.

What’s One Percent worth?

“But I’ve become convinced the art is worth only one percent of the architecture. Public art may be a folly.”

After that declaration of self doubt, Acconci kept talking about his other projects–a store front redesign and a hilarious tractor trailer called Mobile Linear City, with several trailer homes nested inside so they could telescope out to stretch the trailer from 15 feet to 75 feet. The walls would fold down to form the furniture, once the trailers were stretched.

“I don’t think I’m any good at details.” So the group process helps him overcome that problem, and he said plans evolve from discussions so it’s hard to say just who generated the scheme.

“I don’t think you can say six people think better than one, but you can say six people think more than one.”

Earlier in the talk, he had complained that his earliest body-based work came about 10 years too late. He says the same thing about architecture. “Architecture takes so long to do that it’s always outdated.”

The Acconci Studio’s World Trade Center design, in which inside is out and outside is in.

He went on to show his group’s plan for the World Trade Center. “Make a world; then poke a hole in the world.” The model he showed looked like a hunk of Swiss cheese. “If a building is going to be exploded anyway, make it full of holes in the first place. “It can act as a kind of urban camouflage. A terrorist looking at it would say, oh, this is already destroyed.”

The Memphis performing arts center addition, which grapples with the concept of turning inside out and vice versa.

He went on to talk about other projects involving push and pull systems of manipulating materials. He showed a bench based on a mobius strip, a space designed to accommodate intermission crowds at a performing art center in Memphis. “I was interested in topological space in the ’00s.

A bench based on the idea of a Mobius strip.

“…The architecture we really want to do couldn’t have been thought of before the 21st century. It needs to be subservient to people. People need to sit.”

Acconci Studio, umbrella which doesn’t require hands and which reflects–a camouflage strategy according to Acconci

Then he started to talk about bending and folding and stretching materials in a “person-made island in Gratz” which was a theater and cafe. From there he began talking about designing clothing, including a different approach to umbrellas, a car that wouldn’t need tires or gas, and a soft car.

Acconci Studio’s person-made island in Gratz

“Blade Runner changed my notion of science fiction,” replacing the Stanley Kubrick all-white notion.

“Is architecture inherently a totalitarian activity? The hope of architecture is there’s always that renovation principal. Architecture is done by a sequence of people together, a series of people as time progresses,” he said, circling back to the problem of how out of date all buildings are by time they are completed.

But at least it’s not art. “There’s always the Do Not Touch signs in a museum–[suggesting] art is more important than people.”

PAFA:
Open Studio Night
Friday Feb. 8 (rain date Feb. 15)
5:30-8 pm
Hamilton Building, 128 N. Broad St. (use Cherry St. student entrance)
More info: Rebecca Blough, 215 972 2199 or rblough@pafa.edu
Sarah Squire, 215 972 2027 or ssquire@pafa.edu

Penn:
MFA Thesis Preview Show
Feb 4-22
Opening reception: Friday Feb 8
Meyerson Hall Gallery
210 S. 34th St.
215 898 8374
student blog

This in from Penn Design: LIVE NUDE ART BENEFIT AUCTION, UPENN

And this in from the Print Center: WARNING: Graphic Content

A contact high (have you walked down the street in Philadelphia, lately?) must have inspired two rather conservative organizations to play with titillating come-ons for their auctions. Not that sex and art is anything new. It’s just the surprise of who’s doing IT that made me take notice.

Here’s the info on each:

UPENN LIVE NUDE ART AUCTION

Friday, November 30th 6-9 p.m.
Meyerson Hall, 210 South 34th Street, University of Pennsylvania
Auction preview: Nov. 28 and 29, 9 a.m.-5 p.m.

Bid on scantily priced works of art by internationally recognized artists, faculty, students, and alumni. Featuring works by: Terry Adkins, Jane Irish, Gabriel Martinez, Sarah McEneaney, Joshua Mosley, John Moore, Eileen Neff, Demetrius Oliver, Robert Pruitt, Zoe Strauss and more. Did that say Robert Pruitt!!!???

Alasdair Nichol, V.P. of Freeman Fine Arts, the oldest auction house in America, will conduct the live auction. Nichol has also been a featured appraiser on PBS’s Antique Road Show.

FREE Admission for all clothed guests, Food, Drink, PLUS the musical stylings of West Philadelphia’s DJ PHSH
For more information:
http://www.design.upenn.edu/new/finar/eventsdetail.php?eid=556
http://www.penndesignmfa.blogspot.com/

WARNING: Graphic Content – The Print Center Annual Auction

Saturday, Dec. 1, 2007 from 6 -8 p.m.
Silent Auction Features Affordable Art and Great Party!
Online bidding starts Nov. 19
Exclusive Champagne Preview: Saturday, Dec. 1 at 5 p.m.

The Print Center has set the goal to raise $35,000 with this year’s auction to support its exhibitions and educational programs.Uninhibited bidding is welcome!

The Print Center Auction includes work by Carl Fudge, Guerrilla Girls, David Graham, Ann Hamilton, Daniel Heyman, Jane Irish, Roy Lichtenstein, Virgil Marti, Bruce Pollock, Stuart Rome, Shelley Spector, Amanda Tinker, Richard Torchia–and many more.

Silent auction items include tickets, gift certificates and products from local favorites.

Tickets are $25 by Nov. 30, $30 on the day of the event, Dec. 1. The Exclusive Champagne Preview begins at 5 p.m. and tickets are $100. Online bidding will begin November 19 at www.printcenter.org. For more information or tickets, call Ashley Peel Pinkham, at 215.735.6090 x2.

Sculptor Richard Serra, whose Brobdingnagian barricades and looming steles still manage to stun–even now that we know what to expect–is speaking Thursday, Oct. 25 at the University of Pennsylvania for the department of Penn Design, Meyerson Hall, B1, 5:30 p.m.