My life turns up art everywhere I go, it seems.
This past week I took my first sally on Craig’s List, the perfect online counterculture want-ad column, and got immediate results. I sold a file cabinet and a range hood in two days flat! And the bonus (this is where I was really going) was that the person who bought my range hood had an email address that indicated a business name, Phillips Metal. I asked (knowing full well that it couldn’t be) if this was John Phillips, and the answer was no, it was Robert Phillips. I gave the site a look. Turns out he’s the metal artist who made the wonderful fish frieze over the door of the “Striped Bass” (restaurant). Anyway, the range of work and the beauty of it knocked my socks off, so if you’re looking for some architectural metal art, check this work out.
In the real world, I was at the corner of 13th and Market, charging off the curb as the light turned green, amidst a throng of Center City pedestrians, when I looked down and saw that I was about to step down on a very small version of the Toynbee artist’s message–“Toynbee idea/movie 2001/raise dead/planet Jupiter” (see Roberta’s post and see Toynbee website). This one was about the size of a 3 x 5″ index card, and it was clearly affixed with a little mound of asphalt. This location was not listed on the Web site. Is this guy crazy, obsessed, an artist, a fundamentalist, a cult member (image top, the Toynbee message at 13th & Market)?
And while I was crossing the Locust Street bridge over 38th Street, I saw this wheatpasted wonder–a puppy-like critter that merges innocence and bad science. I had seen it also on the boarded up windows of the new Strikes Bowling Alley at 40th and Locust, while the place was undergoing construction, but the window boards are gone and I missed my opportunity to take a photo there (image by anonymous. Correction 2/26/05:image by Jason Hsu).
And last but not least, I got a phone call from sometime Artblog contributor Ditta Baron Hoeber,who just came back from Los Angeles, where her son Julian Hoeber had an opening at Blum and Poe Gallery in Los Angeles. She reported that about 400 people came, half from the art world, half from the movies kingdom, and the opening included two screenings of Julian’s new feature-length movie. If you go to the web page, you can see a clip of the movie (for sure I couldn’t have watched the whole thing), the cartoons, the whole installation. As for Ditta, no slouch herself, besides a solo exhibit that just went up in the downstairs front room in the Philadelphia Art Alliance, she will be showing some new work in a photography show in March at Freeform at MBN Studios in Northern Liberties.
