Ron Klein, installation shot from Out of Gravity at Howard Scott Gallery

Like Audubon going into the wilds to discover the species of North America, Klein is intrepid and something of an Enlightenment man with a need to study first-hand those far off territories and peoples.  While he hasn’t shown them yet, Klein has been taking video footage of the tribal elders he encounters on his trips, asking each one questions about their culture and beliefs (e.g. where do you go when you die? what happens when there is a dispute over land or possessions?).

Ron Klein, Out of Gravity, detail

The artist and his family (yes, it’s a family enterprise — and these are not Club Med trips) recently went to Puerto Rico and to the equatorial region of Latin America (Ecuador/Peru) where they spent time with native people and collected the seed pods, vines and other forest floor materials for Ron’s art.

Ron Klein, work in the Out of Gravity show

You can see from the show that the artist makes the unruly ruly, coupling the natural material with scraps of industrial material he scavenges or finds at flea markets. Pinned to the walls,  Klein’s works are controlled explosions of energy and matter.

Ron Klein, work installed in the lobby of the Time Equities Building in lower Manhattan. That's a video on the left of Klein showing him collecting the natural material he uses.

Like a scientist, Klein steps back from his material presenting the coupled porcupine quills and baseballs in ways to be studied as well as appreciated aesthetically.  His art reflects a fascination with what exists within reach and what can only be imagined. Out of Gravity is up until April 3.

Posters at Vox Populi's Dead Flowers

The best work in Dead Flowers earns that appellation by letting the tasteful and the taboo get real cozy.

Alvin Baltrop’s Pier Photographs (1975-86) are sensitively observed – a brief shock of blinding light or the fleeting poise of a half closed hand is honored by the technical comfort and intimate scale of the photographs. But the subjects of these graceful observations—meetings of queer runaways and cruisers in the abandoned post-industrial West Side piers of 1970s and 80s Manhattan—could only happen precisely where normative society failed to look. Baltrop’s photographs of overlooked spaces and covered-up activities fulfill the promise of the underground through their disarming beauty.

Alvin Baltrop's photos of the gay hook-up scene on the piers.

Putting Paul Thek’s Meat Cable (1968-9) nearby is a tidy curatorial move. Thek’s simple conceit—desiccated flesh as capacitor—turns a surprising and conventionally distasteful material into a stunning visual metaphor for stored energy.

Paul Thek's flesh capicators

Paul Thek, detail

Some of the contemporary work fares less well. Between the artworld’s pluralist mood and the Naughties internet-aided desensitization, it’s harder to shock than ever. Better find another way to get condemned.

Brandon Olson’s Untitled (2004), an expressionistic and colorful drawing of an ambiguously gendered heavily made-up face, is as not as transgressive as its casual construction and material choices (glitter and spray paint) together seem to hope for. Nor is its polite gender confusion or declarative glaze really stepping on anyone’s toes – it’s been 7 years since Captain Jack Sparrow hit theaters, decades since Duchamp’s alt-gender alter-ego Rrose Sélavy entered the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and over a century since Olympia stared down some surprised salon-goers. That Olson’s piece features the word “Selavy” scrawled across a cheek does not legitimize it, but rather, only confirms that its bite is borrowed.

Brandon Olson painting

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge’s sleek but polite nude double portrait Red Chair Posed (2008) and materially sensuous but insubstantial Tongue Kiss (2003) share some of the troubles of Olson’s drawing. However, P-Orridge’s most recent piece, Boaz (2010), is a real knockout.

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge

At first, it appears to be three impersonal medical images of patients with decreasing numbers of false teeth. But the unusual quantity and color of the teeth, coupled with a persistent mole, reveal that the photographs are of the same person. That is, the subjects of the triptych are not three people, but three states of one person; the visible change is the number of teeth replaced with gleaming metal. Boaz’s success lies precisely in achieving these kinds of transgressions—confusions of personal and impersonal, singular and plural—through the seemingly matter-of-fact genre of medical photography.

CG Haiti with stage production by Humalode LLC

Suspiciously billed as “CG Haiti live gesamptkunstwerk with stage production by Humalode LLC,” Copy Gallery’s first Friday shenanigans filled the small space. Loud music emanated from an irregular opaque packing-tape (cling wrap?) prism, just barely smaller than the room itself—think DIY Richard Serra with killer bass. The space between the prism’s planes and the walls of the gallery was just wide enough act as an encircling hallway.

CG Haiti etal at Copy Gallery

Walking counter-clockwise around the prism, I was confronted by a series of assertive images. Affixed to the back wall of the gallery, two motorized body-sized prints of a “Predator-mouth” spun like pinwheels, lit by a bare white fluorescent tube on the floor. A projection onto the prism itself alternated between grainy overexposed photos of hard-partiers and incendiary text (“The public sector was outsourced” “WHAT ARE VIABLE MODES OF NON-IDENTIFIED COMMUNAL PRAYER?”).

Despite the prolific and generally overbearing images around the prism, the sound held its own. The strength of the vibration, the assertive but not deafening volume, and irregularity of the music revealed that it was not a recording, but a live performance masked by the prism walls.

The images in Copy managed to be both cacophonous and distant, while the live sound performance, despite the visual block, maintained an intimate human touch. This unexpected harmony made Copy Gallery’s installation memorable and frankly pleasurable. I came back twice before the night was out.

Pat O'Neill's video at Screening

Pat O’Neill’s Horizontal Boundaries (2008), a 35mm film transferred to HD video for Screening starts with a blank screen. In the darkened room, the sounds of city life hum, click, honk, and whir. They’re a suitable overture, as the screen lights up to an image as overlaid as the sounds. A scene of LA beachgoers reposing by, shuffling around, and crashing into the barely discernable ocean mixes with different view of the same scene and a still shot of debris on the sand. A lone figure on a bench sits, disappears, and reappears. California landscapes and crowds merge.

O’Neill masterfully uses optical printing, a technique where a film projector or projectors are synched to a movie camera recording the combined image the projectors produce. Nonetheless, the film’s (and the artist statement’s) conceit—that the laborious overlays yield an image of representation itself, the subject represented, and the hazy “idea” of that subject—is less interesting than the resemblance O’Neill’s analog images have to digitally manipulated video. Particularly intriguing is that O’Neill’s highly crafted film resembles a genre of digital video—let’s call it youtubey—that is easily and quickly made, and critically celebrated for that democratic quality. Spending a half hour with the artisanal but strangely familiar Horizontal Boundaries, I’ll say the jury’s still out on the value of easy.

The logo of Art Month Sydney 2010.

“It is really a simple idea,” Reid commented at the beginning of our meeting. The idea began with the realization that many talented, creative, and often hidden small galleries do not have the PR resources of big museums or auction houses. Why not bring them all together to speak with a strong, unified voice? Started in January 2009, the initiative grew into a veritable mega-event that aimed to share the great diversity of the Sydney art world and make it accessible to all. Michael commented, comparing Art Month to the Arts and Crafts Movement, “Beauty and design and art are everywhere. It is not a rarefied experience.”

The work of Gemma Smith installed at Sarah Cottier Gallery. Image courtesy of Art Month Sydney.

And the art is definitely everywhere. Just two months ago when I arrived, I lamented the lack of a centralized resource for art events. Art Month has exceeded my expectations and is definitely that cohesive force I was seeking, complete with an easily navigable website, a very active Twitter feed and a blog that keeps discussion lively about Sydney’s art. So far, in its second week, Art Month can already be pronounced a roaring success: the launch party attracted over 500 people, talks about collecting contemporary art and the crossover between art and other fields have been overwhelmingly attended and the weekly Thursday night Art Bar has attracted a younger crowd eager to share a drink and art-inspired conversation.

Stills Gallery's co-director Bronwyn Rennex and gallery manager Kate Sheaffe discussing photography. Image courtesy of Art Month Sydney Blog.

Every weekend, Art Month also provides transportation between galleries in different areas of town (a journey called Follow Your Art). Last weekend’s focus on Paddington and Woollahra caused some galleries to enjoy their highest ever attendance on the weekend. On top of everything already mentioned, galleries are hosting talks from artists and curators and the magazine Art & Australia has created a booklet for children (distributed in primary schools across Sydney) to make the experience fun for the whole family. Art Month is succeeding in reaching kids (& their parents), young adults, aspiring collectors, and is also bringing together artists, galleries, dealers, collectors, auction houses and museums. Not only is Art Month spreading the gospel of the accessibility and fun of art, it is also fostering community and relationships within the art world itself.

Gallerist Tim Olsen talking about the work of John Olsen at Tim Olsen Gallery. Image courtesy of Art Month Sydney Blog.

With over two weeks to go, there is still plenty to be seen and experienced: the colourful work of Gemma Smith at Sarah Cottier Gallery, the fluorescent light environments of aboriginal artist Jonathan Jones at Gallery Barry Keldoulis, an artist talk with Imants Tillers at Roslyn Oxley9, a curator talk about Joseph Kosuth at Anna Schwartz, a discussion about collecting Asian Art at White Rabbit Gallery, and so much more (just check out their website to see the palette of exhibits and events on hand).

Jonathan Jones, Under the aegis, 2006. Fluorescent tubes and fittings. Image courtesy of Art Month Sydney.

While I know Art Month is far from over, I couldn’t help but ask Michael about the future of Art Month. Having developed the necessary infrastructure for the event, there is talk of bringing Art Month to different Australian cities. The website, Twitter feed and blog will continue to be a strong unifying voice in the arts community of Sydney. And there is also talk about further exploring the Creative Collaborations events (talks about the intersection of art and design, architecture, fashion, and food respectively) as well as creating Art Pop Ups (less permanent art galleries that could bring art to different parts of town in a sort of prolonged happening). Whatever the future holds, I think that Michael and Vasili along with the Art Month team have created a wonderful model that can (and should) be adopted beyond Australia. Art Month is catalyzing fresh passion for art, taking away the art world’s air of elitism and inapproachability and, instead, making art fun, accessible and a welcome part of the collective imagination.

Potato plus bandaid features in Brad Troemel, Pre-career Retrospective at Extra Extra Gallery. Untitled, 2009

Brad Troemel, Pre-career Retrospective at Extra Extra Gallery. Installation view

The selected works were printed out on plain copy paper with no worries about archival materials—the prints are not meant to last. The works themselves seem to be a tribute to ephemera—documentation of the meaningless, or accidental, or silly. A photo of a tree branch rolled up in a car window is listed as an installation as though any action in life could be a performance and every object, a sculpture. A potato held to a wall with band-aids, a sandwich on a bedpost, a piñata on fire; the images are all roughly the same size and are distributed around three walls of the gallery in a grid with none given precedence and in no particular order. All of life aggregated through technology into an endless series of unnoticed art blobs. The show is captivating and witty, getting funnier the longer you look.

George Shinn, New, Renew & Rerun at Highwire Gallery. Shard of Purple Shadows Fall on Horatio’s Face (detail)

The paintings in George Shinn’s New, Renew & Rerun show at Highwire Gallery took the reverse path. While Troemel starts in reality and moves to the digital; Shinn starts with a digital process in order to create something almost primitive. Shinn draws using Mac Paint and then transfers the designs to canvas and paints the images the old-fashioned way. The resulting pictures of faces and groups have a blocky style that echoes Northwest Coast Native American design. Heavy shadows and outlines on the faces stand out against empty backgrounds with decorative patterning—the faces become reminiscent of cartoons or primitive masks with the pixilation of digital design still visible in some of the figures.

Chad Curtis, Drawing Machine at InLiquid Art + Design

At InLiquid Art + Design Chad Curtis’ Drawing Machine continues the dialogue between technology and art. It is a computer-driven mechanical armature that draws pictures reminiscent of some ornithological paint-by-numbers series. The nature scenes and Audubon-style illustrations of birds appear with perfect regularity as the pen glides on its pre-planned flight path. But the products seem a little soulless, waiting for the weekend painter to come and fill it in with color.

Andree-Anne Dupuis-Bourret, Medium Resistance at The Ice Box. La Debacle, Installation view

The Ice Box’s large group show of print works: Medium Resistance promises a continuation of this inquiry into the possibilities inherent in developing media: “these works reassess the mediums’ expressive, communicative, and material possibilities … strategically exploring each format’s relative autonomy and usefulness, its potential for participation and collaboration, communication and dissemination, aesthetic, social, and technical labor.” But this broad and confusing introduction leads in to a show that is relatively conventional.

While the work is solid, the format is very traditional with many 2-D prints hugging the walls and rarely venturing out into the center of the room. The standout exception is Andree-Anne Dupuis-Bourret’s La Debacle a landscape that spreads across the floor like a mini-mountain range of perfectly regular hills. Standing above the tiny peaks—softly shaded from mostly white to nearly black—it is easy to have a sense of vertigo as if entering upon a science fiction landscape sprung up from the pages of a hand-printed volume.

Piper Shepard, Medium Resistance at The Ice Box. Pattern Pinning

Other enjoyable pieces include Piper Shepard’s Pattern Pinning an 8’ x 8’ installation of corsage pins and printed floral borders that blend visually into a virtual quilt.

Piper Shepard, Medium Resistance at The Ice Box. Pattern Pinning (detail)

Colette Fu’s oversize photography pop-up books are captivating with their odd blend of subject, content and juvenile format. Over all there are many strong pieces and interesting installations, but the show lacks coherence, possibly as a result of its somewhat overwrought mission. Despite the claim to question material possibilities and the new potential for communication the show is particularly lacking in work that addresses the effects of new technologies or crosses any as yet untraversed boundaries.

More about this post’s author, S. Tiernan Alexander

Samuel Evensen’s Wings to Fly at the Artist’s House

The silence is in paintings of tranquil landscapes or people deep in thought.  The sound is literal in several places, like Harold Kimmelmann’s Firecracker, a sculpture of the object at its moment of explosion, but mostly it is below the surface.  The man in Samuel Evensen’s Wyeth-esque Wings to Fly seems wrapped up in thought, but if the painting came to life, we would hear the wind whipping around him.

Amber Lia-Kloppel’s Evanesce at the Artist’s House

And in Amber Lia-Kloppel’s calm interior Evanesce, the girl’s mouth hangs open: is she speaking? about to speak?  Lia-Kloppel’s painting also highlights the historical Dutch undercurrent running throughout Sound and Silence, which features several interiors, portraits and still lifes with roots in the Dutch Baroque.

A First Friday attendee takes in the Island Cuba show at Dalet Gallery

Next up was Island Cuba, the photography show running through March 26 at Dalet Gallery.  Four Cuban photographers, Pedro Abascal, Mario Diaz, Lissette Solorzano, and Enrique de la Uz are showing black and whites shots taken in their native country, and American photographer Charles Anselmo’s large color photographs of abandoned Cuban factories are also on displays.  With the exception of Anselmo’s images, these photographs can be seen as quiet studies of people through four lenses.  Most striking are the different ways in which each photographer interacts with his or her subjects.  In Abascal’s shots, people do not make eye contact with the camera; their heads are often turned away completely.  But Abascal himself is often reflected in the shop windows he photographs, which underscores his presence and reminds us that his subjects don’t always seem to know he is photographing them.  He also photographs mannequins, the ultimate anonymous figures, adding to the dialogue about identity.

Lissette Solorzano’s Hecho en Cuba 3 at Dalet Gallery

Solorzano’s photographs offer a contrast.  She zooms in on people, on their faces, hands, and legs.  Even when they are purposefully avoiding the camera lens, Solorzano’s subjects know she is there.

A packed house at Silicone Gallery on Friday night

I found more photography a few blocks away at Silicone Gallery.  They are hosting the 47th SPE Conference and Silicone Gallery Photography Contest, on through the 27th of March.  Flyers on the table inside told me that of 350 submissions received on Tuesday of last week, they choose 47 images, which were printed in-house on Thursday evening.  That’s a seriously quick turnaround, and the lively jumble of photographs on the walls reflects the sort of crazy energy that must have gone into putting the display together.   The small gallery space is bursting with a funky mixture of shots of all sorts of subject matter, from a covered bridge to a giant McDonald’s billboard surrounded by horses.

One of the 47 contest submissions chosen for display at Silicone Gallery

That almost all of the photographs are in color, and practically dripping with it, is a refreshing change of pace from a lot of photography shows.  And there is something appealing about looking at prints that were made using the printers that line the gallery space.  This show, and those at Dalet and Artist’s House are well worth a look.

Emily Friedman is a 2009 graduate of Bates College in Art History.  Now, she is working as a curatorial intern at The Barnes Foundation and getting back in touch with her Philadelphia roots.

The Head Ache, a print after George Cruikshank by Enrique Chagoya

Chagoya, who was born in Mexico, educated in the US and now teaches at Stanford, was in residence at Rosenbach where he selected from among their vast holdings of Cruickshank’s works to make one piece that reflects his take on the current discussion about health care reform.

The Head Ache by George Cruikshank (detail)

A small exhibit of works by Chagoya and his 19th Century counterpart Cruickshank was on view briefly in February at the Rosenbach where, over one weekend, the public was invited to come in, take a look, hear the artist speak about his work, and participate in a watercolor workshop to hand-color a black and white offset print version of Chagoya’s The Headache.  I picked up the offset print, a great giveaway, and took it home thinking well I may or I may not color it in.  It’s pretty great just as it is.  I gave it to Stella who is also unsure if she will color it in or leave it black and white.

Black and white offset print of Enrique Chagoya's The Headache, available at The Print Center where you can pick one up to bring home and hand color if you wish.

The fragile Cruickshank works are now back in the Rosenbach archives but I’m told if you want you can make an appointment to see them by calling Elizabeth Fuller at the Museum at 215-732-1600, ext 115.  And good news for those of you who like giveaways,  the Print Center has a pile of the black and white Chagoya prints  – available free — in the gift shop.

The Chagoya residency at Rosenbach is another example — like those of Duke Riley at the Historical Society and Pablo Helguera at the Penn Museum — of how Philagrafika has made some great new work happen here that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

Andrew Jeffrey Wright’s print subscription business is laid out in A.D. Amorosi’s story today in the Inky on an artist finding an alternative way to sell. Turns out it has historical precedentsl. Worth reading down to the final quote for Wright’s mordant wit. (For more on prints and making money, Andrea had something about Durer selling prints to support his travels in her latest post–the one about What in the World, directly below this one).

Some clarity on the Barnes

This column by Bernard Watson, The March 7, 2010 Philadelphia Inquirer tells the true story (as opposed to the movie version) of the Barnes Foundation move. Watson is widely respected and his clarity is refreshing.

The Penn Museum’s  recent  invitation to Pablo Helguera (as part of Philagrafika ) was well-rewarded.  Helguera spent time in the museum’s archives and discovered that museum director Froelich Rainey had made use of the quite new medium of television to bring the collections to public attention in the1950s. He hosted What in the World? in which a group of scholars and occasional celebrities were shown a museum object which they tried to identify; it was the first ever educational tv program.  Helguera’s response took three forms: a recreation of the tv show’s format for a live event on Feb. 28th (above), a small gallery installation on view through April 11, 2010 and a book of stories about objects in the collection and the people behind them.

The What in the World? re-creation on Feb.  28th was hosted by current director, Richard Hodges with Helguera, artist Mark Dion and PMA curator, Joe Rischel as contestants.  The objects they were given to identify were hardly from the museum’s best-known collections and a number of them were obscure indeed: Ainu prayer sticks, fetishes from Eastern Siberia, an apron from British Guiana.  The participants were good sports and Dion’s habit of talking through his examination process (this is heavy, which means the wood isn’t completely dry so it’s probably 20th century) was particularly edifying for the audience.

Mark Dion, Joe Rischel and Pablo Helguera attempt to identify a Siberian hat

The gallery and book reveal Helguera’s interest in the history of the museum’s artifacts in the course of excavation and once they left their originating culture (or burial site) and came to the museum; some of them passed through the market first.  While hardly a typical approach of archaeology and anthropology museums the Penn Museum looks at similar issues in its current exhibition about the excavations it sponsored at Ur (which I wrote about here).

The book, What in the World; A Museum’s Subjective Biography (which is available for purchase at the museum, ISBN -10:1-934978-28-0) is filled with stories about some of the obsessives, eccentrics and rogues responsible for five areas of the collection, and the gallery covers the same material with five objects on display, each with an associated video. The installation suffered somewhat from the fact that watching an 8-11 minute video projected on the wall above the objects case is awkward (all are available on Youtube, as are clips from the original television program ), but the videos themselves are great fun.  Helguera has faithfully re-created the style of the original What in the World? complete with dry ice mist and haunting background music; and he has unearthed wonderful stories that include deception, theft, fakes and madness, which make for entertaining viewing and reading. Richard Hodges said he checked with Penn’s lawyer before allowing Helguera to publish the material, and I’m not certain whether he was joking.

There’s been a proliferation of recent interest in the role of the curator, accompanied by criticism that Harald Szeemann set a harmful example in the late 1960s by using the curatorial function as an art form itself.  In that light it’s ironic that Helguera, working as an artist, took no more liberty with standard curatorial approaches than Fro Rainey had done sixty years earlier.

First Annual Print Invitational at Little Berlin

Stella Ebner, Car Lot on HWY 101, Screenprint

This first print invitational was organized by Tim Pannell, the only printmaker in the artists’ collective, Little Berlin,  and I had a chance to talk with him at the opening.  If many of the invited artists’ bios included R.I.S.D. it’s not a coincidence; that’s where Pannell studied. The twelve artists from across the country covered a broad range of what print-makers are doing these days from traditional uses of sreen printing and intaglio processes to mixed media and photographically-generated work.  Both the work and the event were somewhat more sedate than the always lively, sometimes noisy openings at the gallery.  I don’t mean anything negative by sedate; it’s just that most of the work was framed and sat quietly on the walls and none of it was edible.

I like prints, but I’m always asking why an artist did a work in multiples. Is the subject something that many people will want? Is there an audience that can’t afford the artist’s paintings (Durer sold engravings of commonly desirable subjects, such as madonnas, to finance his travels)?  Is the image an effect that can only be done in drypoint, silkscreen, or whatever; or is the subject somehow connected with the medium and/or the multiplicity (one might say that Warhol’s off-register silkscreen was integral both to the visual effect and the subject)?

Vicky Chen’s series on the Port of Oakland employed the unusual technique of silkscreen on translucent gampi paper glued to wood, so the underlying wood grain becomes part of the image. Ports these days are filled with standardized shipping containers, and printmaking seemed an apt way to depict their global uniformity. Chen’s means were not easy to understand at first glance, but the results are subtle and something about her delicacy of line and use of space reminds me of Ben Shahn’s work.

Stella Ebner filled an entire wall with a grid of screen prints of a car lot along a highway strip.  The only variation was the writing on the signage, an apt commentary on our culture of endless, interchangeable commercial appeals.  Amelia Hankin used woodcut to create multi-color prints (variations of grey) of extreme subtlety.  They gave the impression of landscapes, despite the fact that none of the forms was identifiable.  She studied in Japan, and the sensibility comes through.

Serena Perrone exhibited a large, two-sheet mixed-media work that contrasted the boldness of a woodcut ship at sea with the delicacy of gold ink she used to draw in two female figures. Pannell’s own work was an homage to nineteenth-century wood engraving (cut on the end-grain of very hard wood, which enabled very fine lines).  He gives historic tours of Philadelphia and, inspired by some of the mis-information he hears, produced the first in a planned series of fallacious histories: George Washington and Abraham Lincoln seated together, with the Statue of Liberty just visible through the window.

The print invitational, on view through March 27, also includes work by Kabuya P. Bowens, Kate Copeland, Juan Garcia, Morgan Hill, Fleming Jeffries, Alice Thompson and Tanya Ziniewic; it is also associated with Philagrafika.

Dead Flowers at Vox Populi

Work by Marti Domination

Dead Flowers, on view at Vox Populi through May 2 was curated by Lia Gangitano of PARTICIPANT INC, New York, where it will be exhibited May 9 – June 20, 2010.  Inspired by the work of actor/director Timothy Carey, Gangitano assembled a variety of work by contemporary artists and those of the 60s-70s to explore the idea of the artistic underground and the shifting boundaries between underground and mass culture.  The exhibition includes a recent documentary interview with Carey’s brother recounting how the actor made trouble for the nuns at grade school, among other stories.

Genesis Bryer P-Orridge ‘Red Chair Posed’ 2008 C-print

Gangitano’s underground is largely associated with the more flamboyant aspects of gay culture, so the exhibition is filled with false eye-lashes, heavy eye-liner and very high heels.  While all of this was certainly underground in the 60s, who could have anticipated a broadcast television program called Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, much less same-sex marriage?  Alvin Baltrop’s black and white Pier Photographs (1975-86) portray an insider’s view of  gay coupling conducted out-of-doors in a then unfrequented area of New York.  It’s hard to know what Baltrop’s intentions were, but the series records changing real estate as well as sexual values, as the far West Side has entirely succumbed to gentrification.

Charles Atlas, still from video

I’m not sure how Cynthia ‘Plaster Caster’s work fits in either with art or with the underground.  Word circulated in the late 60s that a couple of rock groupies managed to get into the (mainstream) stars’ dressing-rooms with the intent of making plaster casts of their erect penises (and providing the necessary stimulation).  The story was too outlandish to be made up, and now at Vox you can see the results yourself; although who but Cynthia can vouchsafe whether that is, indeed, a cast of Jimi Hendrix?  As I told Andrew Suggs at the opening, penises without men attached hold little interest for me, but chacun à son goût.  As to changing bounderies of the underground, not so long ago I saw photos of a middle-aged Cynthia in her kitchen (with casts) in the pages of some forgettable mainstream magazine.

Pat O’Neill at Screening

Pat O’Neill’s Horizontal Boundaries (2008, film transferred to video) is showing through May 2 at Screening, in Vox’s Space, and I found all 23 minutes mezmerizing.  His collaged images move in changing rhythms that at times resemble a heartbeat, at others a racing train, with elleptical snippets of dialog that echo Beckett. O’neill has worked with the most mainstream of Hollywood filmmakers, but this is rigorous, exciting experimental film by a seventy-year-old who can still out-run his juniors.

One of several Portland, OR artists in the Whitney Biennial. Storm Tharp, Pigeon (After Shunsen), 2009 Ink, gouache, and colored pencil on paper, 58 x 42 (147.3 x 106.7) Collection of the artist; courtesy PDX Contemporary Art, Portland

But why should you have to travel all the way to New York to see such a high-cailber show? Here’s an idea. Let’s have a Philadelphia Biennial—a large curated show of regional contemporary art hosted by all of our major art museums, organized by museum curators and with a catalog. Though staging a biennial in Philadelphia would be expensive, Whitney’s 75-year track record proves that it can be a lasting investment.

Rocco Landesman, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), recently spoke at a panel titled “Can the Arts Revive Our Cities and the Nation’s Economy?” Landesman and the other panelists—practitioners from Austin and New Orleans, an academic from Penn and the head of the National Council for the Traditional Arts—all delivered a resounding “Yes, we can.”  (More on that panel in another post. Meanwhile, read Gary Steuer’s post and the Inquirer’s story on the panel.)

The NEA is offering 15 grants of $250,000 to cities (including Philadelphia) to fund bold arts initiatives. Proposing a Philadelphia Biennial is just the kind of move that could win the city that money. PEI (Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiatives, an arm of Pew Trusts) could match that as an initial priming of the money pump locally. But it’s going to take more.

The Whitney Biennial 2010 is sponsored by Deutsche Bank, Tommy Hilfiger, Sothebys, a couple foundations and the Friends Committee of the Whitney Museum. Philadelphia corporations like Comcast, PNC Bank and others could step forward. Local donors and art museum trustees could create a Friends of the Philadelphia Biennial fund.

The exhibit could be at the Institute of Contemporary Art one year; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts the next; Philadelphia Museum of Art after that. It could be split between the museums and our premier big-box space, the Icebox at Crane Arts Center. There are no rules to break and creative thinking can pull this off.

Biennials, like museum shows in general, are democratic—they are shows for the people. A Philadelphia Biennial would bring the public to contemporary art and educate them about it. In the local art community, people bemoan the lack of educated art consumers in Philadelphia. Buying art is essential to retaining artists here and keeping the arts economy going and growing. Create the Philadelphia Biennial and you will be taking the first step in educating this new group of collectors.

What is needed to make this happen is leadership. Mayor Nutter and art czar Gary Steuer need to get on board and exert political clout. Financial leadership from foundations, the city, universities, corporations and private donors is a necessity.

Who is the audience for the Philadelphia Biennial? It’s the Flower Show attendees—people interested in the city, the arts, beauty and discourse about things that bring joy and meaning to life, that and the thousands of artists, gallerists, collectors, museum professionals and arts lovers in the region.

The Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance’s research shows that people in this region spend twice as much on culture as they do on sporting events—and these same people report more satisfaction from those art events than from sporting events. Give the people what satisfies them—a grand, blockbuster contemporary art show to talk about for months with their friends.

If Whitney can do it, so can we. We have the beginnings of a model for this in Philagrafika 2010, the citywide print festival. It’s risky and it’s going to cost money, but the payback could be huge.

Read this story at Philadelphia Weekly.