The art scene in Philadelphia is marked by an expanding community of artists, artists’ collectives and artist-run organizations, galleries, publications and events. Word gets out, but proper documentation is important for an accurate picture and for the future. In a publication recording its 21-year history, Vox Populi Gallery has provided a record of its own history as well as that of the other artists’ organizations established in Philadelphia since the founding of Painted Bride in 1969.

Visitor at Vox Populi Gallery, photo courtesy Jonathan Monaghan

Vox Populi; We’re working on it is fully-illustrated in color, with two pages devoted to each of the current members, double-page spreads of exhibitions of Vox alumni and others in curated and juried selections, a review of video lounge presentations and a variety of historical photographs.  Andrew Suggs, Vox director, has done an enormous job in gathering a wealth of information, essays, and illustrations from a large number of contributors.

Amy Adams (former Vox director) has written a very clear history of the organization which makes an excellent case study in artist-run organizations. She describes Vox’s growing pains and successes as members adjusted to a changing mission (moving from open membership to peer-review), financial needs, group decision-making, urban gentrification, incorporation and changes in the art world in Philadelphia and beyond.

Opening at Vox Populi, photo courtesy Jonathan Monaghan

Art historian and critic, Paul Galvez, discusses a history of 20th century artists’ collectives, from OBMOKhU in the early Soviet Union to Warhol’s Factory with its model of art as business. He also discusses Philadelphia’s self image and its uneasy relationship with New York and New York publications of record, with their national audience (hence the real concern with what is written in the New York Times, despite the stature of the stringer who likely wrote any particular article).

An essay by Richard Torchia, artist and gallery director, covers a history of artist-run spaces in Philadelphia followed by a time-line with a paragraph-long description of each organization, extant and defunct. Torchia includes a series of serious and provocative questions including Do artist-run spaces, by definition, need to be non-profit?, Given the pre-condition that selling art is not a viable goal in a city without a sufficient collecting population, what are the criteria for measuring success in a community with so few platforms for criticism and discourse? and Are we approaching a point at which there are more individuals on stage than in the audience? Torchia’s contribution is generous to his readers and to anyone who wants to catch up on an otherwise unavailable history of the past 50 years of grass-roots art activities in Philadelphia.

By choosing to present its own history as thoroughly embedded in a longer and broader story, Vox Populi represents the artist-run organization at its best: inclusive, community-oriented, mentoring the next generation and a crucial resource for the larger community that wants to follow the area’s art from its points of origin.  Thanks to all involved!

Anri Sala ‘Dammi i Colori’ (2003). View of Tirana as pictured on the cover of “Communities of Sense”

Communities of Sense; Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics, Beth Hinderlitter et al, eds. (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009). ISBN 978-0822345138

This volume of a dozen essays and one interview grew out of a conference of the same name held in 2003 at Columbia University. It takes up the ideas of political philosopher Jacques Rancière as a means of theorizing the relationship between aesthetics and politics in the global world. For those writing about art who have followed a largely-Francophone sequence of theorists (Althusser, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Barthes, Kristeva, Baudrillard, Irigaray, Bourriaud…), Rancière appears to be the current favorite.

Several contributors, including Rancière himself, discuss the relationship of aesthetics and politics from the Enlightenment to the present. Rancière suggests that art offers a space for disagreement and the expression of minority opinion within a non-hierarchical and collectivist politics.  Alexander Potts, whose writing has a clarity that is exceptional in this compilation, looks at the Romantic artists’ rejection of the reigning aesthetic as a background for recent anti-aesthetic impulses. He uses the work of Hegel to examine Delacroix and Turner’s rejection of the totalizing aesthetics of Classicism; Potts uses specific works as examples of paintings that are de-centered, violate unity of time, depend upon the accompaniment of texts and involve ironic humor.

Louise Lawler ‘ Pollock and Tureen, Arranged by Mr. and Mrs. Burton Tremaine, Connecticut’ (1984)

A number of contributions look at specific examples of art as political dissent on the one hand, and artists as participants in community-formation directed at social change on the other.  T. J. Demos writes about Dada events as political antagonism via transgressive acts which inherently re-configure the relationship between art and politics. Toni Ross attempts to understand the aspect of Louise Lawler’s photographs that exceeds their function as institutional critique. Carlos Basualdo and Reinaldo Laddaga examine Marjetica Potrc’s work with a community group in an outlying area of Caracas as an example of an artist’s involvement in what they term an experimental community; her participation addressed problems in the world at large and at the same time generated work that circulates within the traditional spaces of the art world.

These essays will be useful for readers who want to follow current theoretical approaches to art, but I must admit to a fair degree of skepticism about the whole project. The authors are largely senior faculty at universities, surely as hierarchical as any current institutions; they write about a politics of the left, which is inherently populist and anti-hierarchical, in a dense and exclusionary language. I am also prejudiced in being an adjunct faculty member, the proletariat of higher education; yet I don’t see such senior faculty at the barricades on behalf of just compensation or communally-shared  resources and decision-making within higher education, a sphere where they enjoy real power.

Vox Populi’s December members’ show is a conceptual outing that—with the exception of Amy Adams’ sparse but evocative “Our Boat That Is Made of Flowers”—is totally puzzling.

The newly married Adams is the former executive director of Vox and now works as the director of Fleisher-Ollman Gallery. Her installation is about power, love, war and peace, triggered by her recent honeymoon to Europe where she saw many old paintings of battle scenes and power brokers. Adams’ installation has two parts: a video animation of ocean waves abstracted from a maritime battle painting, and two portraits comprised of words from emails between the artist and her then-fiance.

The animation extracts the ships, smoke, guns and combatants from the original scanned painting and leaves only the waves that she set in motion. Because her source material is a scanned book plate of a painted sea and lacks color, the waves feel unreal – more like a sea of oatmeal than water. But the undulations still invoke seasickness. The idea of a woman editing the Old Masters, grabbing power from the powerful, is irresistible.

Amy Adams, Our Boat That Is Made Of Flowers pair of portraits of the bride and groom. Photo by Libby.

Adams’ two word portraits, framed and leaning against the wall, are clearly the products of laborious attention to detail. The task of cutting and pasting the words from each email into a “his” and “hers” Word document then sorting the words alphabetically seems an almost crazy thing to do. You can’t boil down a conversation between two people in love to the sum of its parts and have it make sense, can you? Shockingly, the portraits do seem to work that way. The bubbly Adams’ portrait is twice as long as her husband’s and who’s to say that’s not capturing some kernel of truth.

While Adams’ pieces are very straightforward in their meaning, the rest of the show provides a challenge for casual viewers.

Corey Antis, Herman Street, 2008
Arylic, flashe on paper
18 x 24 inches

Corey Antis’ small works on paper circle the first room. The pieces look similar to sketches, plans or architectural drawings. Washy and with surprising colors—salmon and black in one piece—the series suggests ongoing research. Ultimately, the works are puzzles too personal to be compelling.

Anna Neighbor, Hold Me Like You Mean It, 2008
Archival inkjet print
33 x 50 inches

Anna Neighbor’s large photo-based works also allude to something more. One photo is almost entirely black. Former Voxers Justin Witte and Olivia Schreiner’s collaboration in the guest gallery is a disappointment compared to their past outings, and Rebekah Tolley’s slow-motion videos projected on objects are reminiscent of lava lamps. Meanwhile, Mark Lewis’ video North Circular in Screening has cinematic chops that create a sense of mystery, beauty, suspense and denouement. (View it at his website).

“Vox Populi December Members Show.”
Through Dec. 28.
Vox Populi, 319 N. 11th St., third fl.
215.238.1236.

Amy Adams, Our Boat That Is Made Of Flowers pair of portraits of the bride and groom

You may have missed the news of Amy Adams recent marriage, but she’s letting the world know in her exhibit Our Boat That Is Made Of Flowers, at Vox Populi Gallery. The exhibit may include only two pieces, but they capture a lot.

Amy Adams, Our Boat That Is Made Of Flowers, detail

One piece is two large portraits of Amy and her new husband. They are side-by-side print-outs of the last year’s personal emails between them, with all the words placed in alphabetical order. The pronouns (I, you, we, me) have a powerful visual presence as some of the most used words, which create stripes across the printout. Love is another biggy. I am reminded of the buzzy stripes of tv interference screens. Adams herself expressed sadness at the limited vocabulary of daily language, and laughed at her own verbosity (her printout is almost twice as long).

Amy Adams, Our Boat that is Made of Flowers, sea video projection, 11 second detail

The labor of hand alphabetizing, looking for meaning, reminds me of computer data mining, as if we only had a big enough picture, we can find the hidden message!

The other piece is a video project of waves taken from maritime paintings of Dutch maritime painters, Willem Van de Velde, the younger and the elder, whose work the couple had seen in Holland, while on their honeymoon. Adams loved the paintings but was provoked to remove the battleships and the nationalism and war and greed that they represented. Left with just waves, she pieced and animated them. The result is a storybook idyll of love.

Also at Vox are Corey Antis’ show of works on paper, Anna Neighbors’ installation, and Rebekah Tolley in the Video Lounge. Also, still hanging on from last month, a collaboration between Vox alums Justin Witte and Olivia Schreiner.

This was one of the kazillion pieces for the live auction tomorrow at Space 1026. I don’t know anything about it, but I loved it!!! [the piece is by James Ulmer. Thanks for letting me know, James!--Libby]

At Space 1026 was the preview for tomorrow night’s auction. There was plenty of great stuff, including, ahem, a donation from Libby and Roberta. The prices were reasonable, with merch selling in the $25 range, some of it really great, and with auction items asking $100 range. Plus there’s the ebay auction for prints. Donors include Shepard Fairey and Jason Hsu and more.

Tomorrow we’re off to New York, so Roberta and I won’t be posting.

It’s all I got! I’ll have to get back later on with some of what we saw during the day Friday.

If you’re like me you’ve been back to ICA once or twice since the opening of Locally Localized Gravity, the show that keeps on giving, on a daily basis, as events and workshops and parties take place scheduled by the various collectives. OK, so you’re not like me. Maybe you haven’t even been to see LLG (and the other worthy ICA shows). Well this weekend you can correct all that by attending several events that sound just great. But watch out for Sunday because inLiquid’s got a Winterfest that competes and you may have to make a heavy decision about where to spend your time.

SATURDAY, MARCH 17
Amy Adams exhibit on the Black Floor stage, 11 am-5 pm. Here’s the cute release about the show.

According to the National Weather Service, a snow warning is in effect in Philadelphia for Saturday, March 17. The heaviest snowfall is forecast at the Institute of Contemporary Art with between 1 and 4 inches of accumulation. Snow is expected to begin at 2 pm and end around 5 pm. Refreshments will be served. Amy Adams is a local artist and the director of Vox Populi, an “alternative” not-for-profit and artist-run institution for the showing and support of the arts.

The release is a little too cute for its own good and doesn’t say what the show really is so I emailed Amy:

ROBERTA: are you doing a wall drawing like at your last Vox show? or do you not want to spill the beans…er, snow ahead of time? r

AMY: well…anticipation is desired…but it is a movie. I made it with Keith Wilkins. a

So there you have it. A movie made by Amy and Keith. I’m in.

SUNDAY, MARCH 18

The problem with Sunday is that you can’t be in two places at once.

Place one
Inliquid’s Winterfest IV at the Crane Arts Building
1400 N. American Street
1 – 6 pm.
Free admission! (food and drink available for $) Indoor/outdoor celebration featuring live bands, DJs, ice carving contest, “Cold Sake Chill Out,” food, libations, performance, and more! A benefit for InLiquid.

Place two
Slow Sunday at Black Floor at ICA

–Track Stand competition at 2 pm. Bicycle messengers rock back and forth on their bikes trying to maintain balance and not fall off and not move forwards or backwards (too much) in space. Competitors with a bike get in free.

–Sue Spaid’s “The Gold Fish Test” 11 am-5 pm. Research has it that animals lure museum visitors more than art does. Like they need research for that? Well, Sue Spaid, brainy art writer, curator, FOBF (friend of Black Floor) and teacher at Tyler, will carry out an experiment to further research in this important area. The pr blurb says Spaid will perform a survivor-like, 6-hour Powerpoint lecture!! For the sake of research I hope she brings along a live goldfish. Then again, you might consider the bicycle messengers on their bikes (performing while the lecture/experiment is going on) the goldfish/animal distraction. If so, she can skip the live goldfish. Although I will still be disappointed if there’s no fish in evidence. Promise a fish…deliver a fish is what I’m saying. : )

detail, undead, by Amy Adams

Libby: The other day, I heard Frank Bramblett talk about how his paintings are things with an existence of their own, things that reference that real world but aren’t pretending to be other than what they are. When I saw your piece undead, I immediately thought of what Frank was saying.

Amy: I was thinking this morning, I can never make something that’s supposed to be something else. My litmus test for success is that the line I make has to have a real presence. I don’t strive for [making work that is] an analogy [to the real world]. Painting the circles is not just creating a two-dimensional thing but making something that has a real world presence.

Accumulation–you can make one thing and it does not necessarily have the capacity to assert itself. But with many and layering until you create a density, then it happens.

everythingORANGE, by Amy Adams

Libby: What would you say your subject is?

Amy: I think about being an individual situated in a landscape–of history and culture. I also think the world is chaotic.

I like other people’s work and totally admire graphic representation, narrative components, etc., but I could not distill what was important to me from all the choices.

Libby: What about the music?

Amy: I began collecting tape after my show last year. I’ve always been attracted to pieces of tape on the street. I always love line–and tape balled up on the ground is line. I picked up the tape mostly walking to the el.

I got a tape splicer, and without knowing what’s on the tape, I spliced. I lot of this show is about surprise, working within methodical, narrow constraints. I did not know what the piece [undead] would be before I got here.

everythingGREEN, by Amy Adams

Libby: Whose art work do you admire?

Amy: David Reed. I was [recently] visiting Merrilee Challiss and we went to the Birmingham Museum, and I saw my first David Reed in person!

I don’t look at art like mine, but I’m always looking, collecting, reading, hearing, having all your senses open, feeling overwhelming life, culture, knowledge, information–endless life.

(This is the end of a two-part interview with Amy Adams).

P.S. When I spoke to Adams, she mentioned that the parking lot across from Vox’s space in the Gilbert Building had closed, and that she was expecting to receive the letter from the Redevelopment Authority this week that evicts the gallery to make way for the Convention Center expansion. This means the gallery is running out of time to find a new space.

I’ve seen three solo shows by Amy Adams at Vox Populi. The first show of hers and the current one blew me away.

Adams, 33, is the executive director at Vox, a woman who appears to have unlimited energy. That energy comes out in her work—an accumulation of marks or images that suggest plenitude and limitlessness as well as overload and vacancy. They’re works about a culture tailor-made for avid consumers, where everything amounts to nothing, and nothing amounts to everything.

I called her to ask some questions.


detail, undead

Libby: Silver appears often in your work. Why silver?

Amy: Whenever I’ve used silver in a painting, it has a smooth, perfect surface. It was silver that led me to the title [of the piece at Vox], undead. Silver is used to ward off vampires, zombies, the undead. I’m warding off the death of my art career.

a previous Adams piece that used silver

Libby: Are you thinking of abandoning art?

Amy: No. I’m trying to find a way to work. I’m so busy now [working at] Vox, Esther Klein Gallery and freelance.

Painting is time consuming. It’s all about the materials. I’ve never shown or made drawings before. These are sort of my doodles writ large. I could come home at 7, I could sit with my dog and my boyfriend, and I didn’t have to ignore the rest of my life [while drawing].

Getting back to silver, there’s something precious about it. It adds gravity to those marks, which are not very special marks.

Libby: You are making landscapes. Not just in this large piece on the wall, but also your circle paintings are never-ending terrain. Can you talk about that?

everythingBLUE, which touches on themes of consumerism and emptiness

Amy: The themes in all my work are accumulation, making something out of nothing, using simple shapes and materials. In the process of accumulation, a sort of terrain emerges from the individual decisions. The marks are stand-ins for all activity, and they add up to something greater. The accumulation of these actions is really what defines a life story. You go through life and make individual decisions that add up to who you are.

I also like the macrocosm/microcosm perspective. I sort of think about that as a parallel to current issues, for example, communication distance on the internet–it’s both really close and really far, a place where you can explore larger issues and also read what someone had for breakfast on their blog. Landscape is a perfect analogy.

(This is part 1 of a two-part interview. Here’s part 2)

Paul Chan and the Fabric Workshop

Paul Chan’s 1st Light (I don’t know how to make the word Light look crossed out; sorry) silenced the usually chatty gallery goers.

The excitement at the Fabric Workshop and Museum is Paul Chan. He’s showing 1st Light, a projected piece he had at the Whitney Biennial.

Unlike last time I saw it in the rush of the Whitney, this time I took it in. It’s the WTC apocalypse played out against the sky, with silhouettes of flying people diving to earth as objects like bicycles and pieces of the building float up and as birds fly across the transcendent sky. The pace is elegaic. The crowd of gallery goers stood silently watching. Me too.

A second piece, 4th Light, views the same event through the crossed mullions of a large window that wraps around the corner of the room. The idea is similar to the other piece, but not the same. And the sense of being a spectator behind the window reflects the reality so many office workers and residents faced on 9/11.

The use of silhouettes and light and floating turns the specific event into any disaster in any place, the interruption to daily life familiar and unfamiliar all at once.

The exhibit also includes drawings for the pieces as well as a couple of drawings of trash remaining after the Republican Convention of 2004.

Jean Shin’s TEXTile, created at the Fabric Workshop, allowed people to type letters onto a screen at the far end of the unrolling “paper”.

Jean Shin’s piece upstairs, TEXTile, is an interactive meditation on computers. Sit and type. Enough sitting and typing already. I watch people sitting and typing on TV detective shows. I watch them in the movies. Stop. The installation also included a couple of videos of keyboards in action, the rapid depression of letters too quick for a viewer to keep up. The words stayed inaccessible and indecipherable, just beyond reach, and reminded me a little of Ann Hamilton’s disappearing letters. This was my favorite part of Shin’s installation. I also liked the clicking noise of the computer keys on the soundtrack.

At Vox, Adams, Suib, and Wylie with Vicars

Amy Adams’ undead was a walk-into mountain range, black against a glowing sky.

Downstairs at Vox Populi Gallery, Amy Adams’installation, an imaginary landscape is built up of silver marks on black paper. Called “undead,” it’s the mural in the Chinese Restaurant, not to mention the silhouetted witch against the moon, reimagined. The large paper sheets, layered with a touch of 3-D, create a mountainous silhouette against a glowing white-wall sky. Adams creates a dramatic example of repetitive mark making that leads to a sense of land folding and heaving as well as a sense of time spent making the marks. She has created something from nothing, thereby suggesting both at once.

Matthew Suib’s fire mandala made me think of Tony Oursler’s couch potato at the Met.

Music continues to be a concern of visual artists these days. Adams played some music–a tape she spliced from discarded audio tapes she picks up from the streets of Philadelphia. And in the next room Matthew Suib has included some exotic stoner music to go with his installation Purified by Fire, which includes a churning mandala of fire projected onto the wall. It’s mesmerizing, and the highlight of his installation. I missed his special screening, also fire related. Maybe that was the highlight, but I can’t really say. Sorreee. Anyone see it who wants to report in the comments below?

Wylie and Vicars collaborated on the larger installation. this table-top landscape uses label imagery.

The physical presence of Eva Wylie with Rebecca Vicars’ installation Flourescapes and Mirth was removed from the oven before the cake had risen. I did love the idea of using and redrawing the imagery from water bottles (Deer Park and Poland Springs), and I loved including the price code in the landscape on the table top. But all in all, the installation lacked coherence.

Music carried over into the video lounge, where David Dyment’s video posts a series of questions drawn from the artist’s pop-music CD-and-record collection. It didn’t rise above the banality of its sources. The motion medium of video doesn’t match the message–static words.

The Black Boy George at 1026

Everyone stopped and read and read and read Musson’s latest installation of Too Black for BET.

Words however at Space 1026 were over the top wonderful in Jayson Scott Musson’s exhibit, Too Black for BET “Episode 2: The Black Boy George” of posters and downloads of text messages on his cell phone(it’s episode 2 because there was an Too Black for BET episode 1 and he’s hoping to finish episode 3 by 2010).

The posters are take-no-prisoners rants that lance the soft underbellies of everyone and everything, posturers all, from vegetarians to bias in post-Katrina restoration efforts to loft-living yuppies to feminists and rappers. (Musson himself is known as PackofRats with the musical rap group Plastic Little, so there’s a big music connection here too). Alex Da Corte, who filled me in since I couldn’t find the artist, assured me that Musson is the sweetest, gentlest of people. Well, here’s one of his bad-boy outlets. The text messages, interspersed with the posters, hint at the ordinary person and his daily life, hidden behind the performing persona. And the persona sure makes all of our posturing, his own included, look damned stupid. I loved this. It’s a book.

Yurt, sweet yurt at Black Floor

One Wall is an Edge, by Luren Jenison at Black Floor Gallery

Finally, Luren Jenison’s yurt and mural installation, One Wall is an Edge, at Black Floor offers a lot to look at during the first glance–a visual treat, the mural influenced by Mongolian and other Asian landscape traditions. I loved lots of the details, like the holes in the walls and the chance to enter the space. Ultimately, however, considering the themes of home and crossing borders, the imagery didn’t travel quite far enough.

All in all, as First Friday’s go, I have to sing this one’s praises.

For lots more images of all of these artists’ work, go to my First Friday Flickr set.