PuppeTyrany at Vox Populi, Leslie Rogers and Zack Paladino performing the sexy-weird Mouth Theatre piece

Vox was the first big surprise. We skimmed the top of the press release for the one-night event Sound/Stages and assumed it was going to be an evening of djs, music and bands. Guess we needed to read down to the bottom.  Turns out, it was performance and puppet shows too! Performances by Beth Heinly and Bobby Gonzales and puppetry by PuppeTyranny.  The Mouth Theatre puppeteering by Leslie Rogers and Zachary Palladino was part flea circus part gender discussion. Very unexpected content for a tiny puppet show–all performed in Leslie’s mouth, with Zachary inserting a variety of instruments of torture and food. It was part yucky and part laugh out loud funny, and very suggestive of bondage and control–without being either of those. Some videos by Jeffrey Bussman here.

Beth Heinly, reading from Fear & Art

Meanwhile, our own beloved Beth Heinly, artblog’s ad coordinator and gal friday, saturday and sunday, gave a deadpan reading of Art & Fear, dressed in all white and exuding Greta Garbo I vant to be alone-ness in a white box space–Olympia on a white chaise in white bicycle shorts and white socks. The artist as art object! The self-help text was a little bit ridiculous and the subtext was ironic and the comedy was subtle. No fear here and lots of art!

We ran into Diedra Krieger whose reading-Baudrillard video was on tap for the open-call video room. We couldn’t stay, but we had curated it into the ID show at Projects Gallery a couple of years ago. It was a perfect pairing with Beth’s performance! Theory and practice.

We also ran into Austin Lee and Katrina Mortorff, who gave us a postcard for the upcoming Thanks. Frank show they organized to honor recently retired Tyler painting guru Frank Bramblett.http://www.thanksfrank.info/ The show will be Aug. 27 to Sept. 21. Reception on the 27th. See you there. We co-taught with Frank one semester so we know we’re a little partial, but really, the guy is amazing. And he’s left a huge mark on many many artists, including, besides the organizers, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Anthony Campuzano  and Rebecca Saylor Sack.

Thomas Vance -- Plan, at Tiger Strikes Asteroid. In addition to the 3D wonderworld the walls are filled with drawings collaged together showing similar potato shapes set amongst passages of wood grain

Thomas Vance, one of the contributors to Thanks.Frank is at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, with his charming cartoon Zen topiary, trees as the planets. It’s nature without the natural, and the large planet/potatoes are a break-out new direction in his work. Vance told us he and his wife artist Nami Yamamoto were leaving for real nature in Maine soon at the Acadia Summer Arts Program, aka Kamp Kippy, as in Kippy Stroud, Fabric Workshop founder and patron of the arts.

Abigail DeVille, installation Gold Mountain, at Marginal Utility. Charred sticks from fire at Trestle Inn.

At Marginal Utility, Yale grad student Abigail DeVille has installed Gold Mountain, a black-lit black hole with references to discrimination against Chinese gold miners and all other discrimination-affected classes. The piece was made from scavenged material found in Chinatown and vicinity, including burnt timbers from the newly incinerated Trestle Inn.

Abigail De Ville, floor bricks, painted and lit with black light

The floor “bricks” gave the piece a Yellow Brick Road jauntiness that was jarring. The stars and stripes allusions, plus a real flag, situated the piece in a land of dripping irony. DeVille said she hadn’t used black light paint before, but the effect was pretty great. The installation took her a week with help from David Dempewolf, and lots of hard labor.

Abigail De Ville, looking swanky

Abigail had never been to Philadelphia before. We had a conversation about Chinese American history and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and America’s long history of serial racial intolerance. DeVille looked glamorous, even in the heat.

MU has been one amazing installation after another, each one transforming it so its real shape has become increasingly mysterious. We think there’s some competition between MU and GG (Grizzly Grizzly) next door, which also has been running fabulous installations in its shoebox space.

Tiernan Alexander's side of the Grizzly Grizzly installation is all goth Victorian homebody. Tim Eads' side (sorry no photo) is sci-guy hard-edged, with a wood armature zig-zaging through the space and Gatorade bottles connected to surgical tubing, everything suspended, mid-air.

This month, we saw new work by Tim Eads and our gal (contributing writer) Tiernan Alexander, whose installation is a husband-wife death match, in which they will invade one another’s portion of the installation and revise each other. We hope they are still talking in the end. As Tiernan said to us, “At the closing there will be blood or snacks!”  Eads and Alexander really are husband and wife, btw.

And speaking of GG and couples, artists Paul Outlaw and Jennifer Catron, known to us as the Honeymooners from their installation at GG, will soon be trolling around Brooklyn and Chelsea serving up Midwest fishfry, which we can’t define–batter-dipped mystery fish? We got this news from Art Fag City.

We also ran into Gerard Brown and his two little boys. He was glad the summer semester was over.

Minty/Matt Savitsky playing puppy in the window at Bodega

Then we skedaddled over to North 3rd Street to Bodega. The highlight was in the window–Minty, the puppy in the window, was sticking up his butt and wagging it at us, making googly eyes at anyone who passed and paused. Two thumbs up for one weird performance. By the way, Minty was Matt Savitsky, we think, and he’d been in that window all day long, except for a change of costume to dress swanky for the evening. That’s the version we saw. This was pretty edgy–a mix of endearing and kitsch and strange. It captured our mixed feelings about real puppies in the window. Then of course there’s that whole level about sex trafficking and Amsterdam hookers in windows.

The final touch–we walked through old city and there was a harpist in a white gown on the sidewalk playing celestial music. Old City sure shines up pretty these days. A lot of the galleries were shut, but the street scene was glamorous and chock-a-block.

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.

Nicole De Brabandere's sexy clay objects. Background is Clint Baclawski's light boxes

Vox VI is organized, by rooms, into more or less related groups of work: There’s a chamber of figures and masks, a Jeff Koons/pop-culture room, a memento mori room and a noir road-movie room. Only the lobby space approaches the usual juried-show hodgepodge, but even here there’s a unifying out-of-control party feel.

Piper Brett, Phone Number, one of several light pieces in the show

The show’s humanist focus, fractured narratives and “damn the torpedoes” ambiance aren’t new. What is novel is the embrace of craftsmanship—well-painted paintings, beautifully made sculpture, great clay pieces and accomplished video and photography.

There’s a surprising amount of clay in the show, and the artists handle it like clay has always belonged in the big leagues—the content here is not the usual kitsch, but conceptual, unexpected and beautiful.

Katelyn Greth, Dog Boy

Nicole De Brabandere’s small objects in a glass vitrine are nonfunctional, but look like Baroque sex toys. Katelyn Greth’s soulful “Dog Boy” and “Sheep Boy” ride a sad “Animals R Us” edge. Janet Macpherson’s altered cast clay figurines play with our love of collectibles. Lauren Dombrowiak’s Brancusi-esque cityscape of stacked plates and cups is perfect domestic machismo—I wonder why I haven’t seen anything like it before.

Lauren Dombrowiak's towering dinner sets in Brancusi-like endless column cityscape. Constanze Pirch four paintings on the walls.

Video, computers and media are a big presence—no surprise. Lindsay Foster’s “Father Lover Friend” feels like a reality-TV road movie in which a young woman talks with a grizzled, old homeless man. The man is intransigent; the girl cries. It’s poignant and, as a metaphor for the run-down world and the youth who will inherit it, father’s self-destruction is terrifying.

Lindsay Foster's roadtrip movie with a homeless man and a young girl

Joshua Bienko’s colorful and insistent rap/rant videos “Lewitt, Sol” and “TehChing Hsieh” spit out references to contemporary art stars, culture and commerce, capturing the anger many artists feel toward the art-industrial complex. Kelli Miller’s “The True Believer” video, about self-help gurus, needs a larger dose of anger.

Diedra Krieger, from her short video, made in Costa Rica, promoting the Spastic Plantastic project

Diedra Krieger’s faux-commercials in her “Plastic Fantastic” video series are just about perfect, short and seductive in a quirky, passive-aggressive way.

Nora Salzman, Replica Reuben, oil paint on papier mache, eyelashes

Nora Salzman, Replica Reuben staring at a picture of Replica Reuben Masking as Nora

There are some outstanding 3-D pieces in the show. Nora Salzman’s painted papier-mache bust “Replica Reuben” for example, is a chilling lost soul. Sanford Mirling’s “Nothing Could Drag Me Away From…” a set of Marilyn-esque legs, skirt billowing, is another miracle of craft. The woodworked oak legs balance on tiptoe with great drama and engineering, and the content feels Lohan-perfect.

Sanford Mirling's Marilyn-like sculpture in front, Clint Baclawski's lightbox, rear

Piper Brett, Large Bow; Joshua Bienko's video and painted shoes, Diedra Krieger videos and Brett's Phone Number on walls

Piper Brett’s “Large Bow,” a nod to Koons’ many million-dollar bow sculptures, is clunky and scary, yet it, too, is perfect corporate lobby décor, a steal at $10,000. As for home décor, Aidan Rumack’s inset shadow boxes behind a row of fluorescent tubes suggest new home uses for the old tubes. Jordan Griska’s “Gas Pump” (a real gas pump shortened to kids’ playroom size) is a perfect degraded object.

Sally Dennison, Hannah

Finally, while the entire show is full of deadpan works, Sally Dennison’s portrait photos of gender-ambiguous youth, Dustin Metz’s oil paintings “Still Life” and “self(seeing) portrait” and Erin Murray’s oil paintings from the “Ugly and Ordinary” series take the prize for smoldering without smirking, giving nothing away.

Dustin Metz, Still Life and self(seeing)

Through Aug. 1 
Vox Populi 
319 N. 11th St. 
215.238.1236 voxpopuligallery.org

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

Aidan Rumack, Living isn't Worth Dying for (Diptych), 2010, detail, fluorescent tubes, taxidermy bird shown here

This show has often been a moment of clarity, and this year’s exhibit, juried by ultra-hot New York artists William Powhida and Jennifer Dalton, is among the best of them. In this one, a lot of the pieces relate to a yearning for what is unattainable, and that seems to be pretty close to what everyone is thinking about in these dark days of the gulf oil spill, financial meltdown and continuing war.

My personal favorite is a diptych of fluorescent lights arrayed like jail bars in front of a pair of egg-shaped cells embedded in the wall. Inside one cell stands a flustered white taxidermy bird wearing shades; inside the other, a sleek, gold-trimmed moon landing module that suggests Cinderella’s coach (it’s made of an ostrich egg!). Downstairs in Marginal Utility Gallery, the artist, Aidan Rumack, introduced himself to me and told me his intent was religious. But the RayBans on the holy bird don’t fly as gear for the Trinity. Maybe, just maybe, the spacecraft cries out sci-fi beatification. But fluorescents are so humdrum. And in art historical terms, I’m channeling Dan Flavin optics and Minimalist grids of a man-made version of perfection, not Barnett Newman zips or Mark Rothko orgasms of color-soaked enlightenment. Rumack is a PAFA MFA.

Deidra Krieger, Spastic Plantastic, video

Deidra Krieger sets up a transgressive relationship with the camera and the viewer, while mocking the worlds of advertising and consumerist waste in both of her videos. She’s in your face and beyond your reach all at once. A constant crowd of gallery goers Friday stopped for a while in front of Krieger’s videos and Texas artist Joshua Bienko’s rap videos about art. Lindsay Foster (the one international artist, with a Norway address) transgresses class and propriety in her video, Father Lover Friend, of a California road trip stripped of glamour as she searches with a boy friend for her father, the guide of her quest an old bum. At least that’s what I think is going on. The ambiguity pushes this all into a dangerous zone.

Piper Brett, Large Bow, 2009, sheet steel, fluorescent red powder coating

Piper Brett‘s neon phone number is a poignant advertisement of  the promise of a relationship or a phone connection. Her giant, Koonsian metal bow also feels personal in a way that Koons doesn’t. The bow promises something that probably can’t measure up to the packaging; it’s installed next to Bienko’s trompe l’oeil paintings of Koons sculptures painted on the soles of a pair of kick-ass shoes. Crushes and desire also get a workout in Constanze Pirch‘s typography-inspired and hunk-inspired Yes, Yes…26 Times Yes! At first I thought the names–from Orlando to Viggo–might all belong to movie stars, but now I realize they are random objects of desire.

Sanford Mirling, Nothing Could Drag Me Away from the Soft Glow of Electric Sex in the Window, 2010, oak, vinyl, fabric, mirrored turntable, purse, iPod

And speaking of desire, Venus de Milo lost her arms, but Sanford Mirling’s sculpture takes it a step farther and loses the top half of his carved female. He crowns her at the waist with a white tutu that looks like a quilted lounge banquette emitting suggestive plumes at its center. Poised atop a mirror, this fantasy requires Dr. Freud. But mama mia, what an object!

Jordan Griska, Gas Pump, 1960s gas pump

A sad sack gas pump by Jordan Griska is from the good old days, when oil wasn’t all over the gulf and a man was still a man, a car was still a sex symbol. Griska has been busy this year, with a great show at EKG. He’s also in Montana’s post yesterday on a pop-up art show in the Rittenhouse Square area.

Joshua Weibley, Untitled (Personal Desktop Environment), ink on Denril, rock

Vox VI also has a couple of pieces about computers (coincidentally perhaps both by Brooklyn-based artists), which are surely desirable. Joshua Weibley‘s conceptual Untitled (Personal Desktop Environment), is a computer for Barney Rubble–the mouse is a rock, and the screen is an ink on paper rendering of a color-separated computer screen image would make George Seurat proud.

Kelli Miller, Gifts, 2009, animated gifs

In contrast, Kelli Miller filled a computer screen with animated a series of gif assemblages that make a mockery of us as we stare at the gifs in motion. My personal favorite image is the more than 50 download progress bars that worm across the screen all at once.

Clint Baclawski, The Titanic, powder coated steel, archival inkjet backlit prints

Massachusetts artist Clint Baclawski‘s giant backlit inkjet prints mounted on sleek lightboxes captures real events of improbably scaled razzle-dazzle and excess. Jeff Wall’s staged photos look almost real. Baclawski’s real photos look almost staged. But what is also notable here is the sleek presentation; the lightboxes are high-tech-looking things of beauty in and of themselves.

Dustin Metz, Que Chula Es Puebla, oil on canvas

And last but not least, I have to mention Dustin Metz‘s idyllic painting Que Chula Es Puebla. At least someone has found the good life! But there’s no one there, except a disembodied hand.

We’re still living in a time of diminishing prospects where fulfillment remains a wish, and that’s what this show communicates, by in large.

By the way three of the artists in this show are also in the show we juried into the Bambi Biennial–video artist Matt Kalasky, landscape artist Susan Marie Brundage, and Sarah Knouse. Others in the exhibit are Derya Altan, Sally Dennison, Lauren Dombrowiak, Amber DuBois, Katelyn Greth, Megan Hays, Jim Jeffers, Janet Macpherson, Erin Murray, Nightmare City, Manuel Pena, E. Elizabeth Peters, Nora Salzman, Libby Saylor, Samantha Simmons, and Sheila Whitsett. Most of the people who I didn’t mention were equally deserving of some notice.

The exhibit will remain up through Aug. 1, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vox Populi's installation at No Soul for Sale

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

Post Museum's installation, detail

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

Black Dogs in their hangout space

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

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

Kling and Bang's installation

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

Oregon Painting Society

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

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

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

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

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

Rhizome's packages of nothing

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

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

The Royal Standard

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

Postscript

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

The future of our planet depends on it.

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

artblog, the Philadelphia region’s oldest and most complete source of online reviews, discussion and opinion on the visual arts, has been awarded a grant by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

A recent photo of libby (left) and roberta (center) participating in a reading of Maira Kalman's childrens books at the ICA. Also pictured, event organizer and ICA Senior Curator Ingrid Schaffner (right).

“Philadelphia is now one of the hip visual arts towns in America. You have Los Angeles and New York and Miami, where I live, but Philly is one of those towns, too,” said Dennis Scholl, program director for the Knight Foundation, which is based in Miami.

“artblog makes sure that anybody anywhere anytime can find out what’s happening in Philadelphia. Blogs are easy to do, but the question is which ones are special, which are more than just one person’s meditation. artblog is special.”

artblog was begun in 2003 by two collaborating artists, Roberta Fallon and Libby Rosof.

“This money will give us a chance to reach a broader audience for Philadelphia’s fabulous art scene,” said Fallon and Rosof. “We will be using new technologies on artblog to help art lovers navigate to galleries and art events around town. We also will create a new series of podcasts modeled on our favorite radio talk show,‘Fresh Air.’”

Fallon and Rosof also share English literature and writing backgrounds. They met in the mid-1980s and began working together as painters and sculptors. Despite grants, commissions and accolades, Fallon and Rosof were frustrated with how few people their art was reaching. So they took the art out onto the street where they gave it away. One of these giveaways is documented in Academy-award nominee Wendy Weinberg’s film “Art of Activism” (excerpt here):

That same activism spurred them to create artblog to fill a growing gap between the burgeoning art scene and the shrinking art coverage in the print media.

The Knight Foundation also recently gave grants in Philadelphia to the Galleries at Moore College of Art and Design, the Institute of Contemporary Art and Vox Populi Gallery.

The Philadelphia Foundation participated in the issuing of the Knight grant.

Seripop, the Montreal screenprinting duo, blows into Space 1026 with a load of 400 rock band posters, books and zines to show and sell. Seripop, founded in 2002 by Chloe Lun and Yannick Desranleau, is the Space 1026 of Canada—an alternative print studio whose products have a funky, psychedelic vibe. The duo has won awards for their “gigposters” for underground music phenoms including Wolf Parade, Chinese Stars and their own band, AIDS wolf.

Seripop poster. Space 1026

Seripop’s bold graphic style and use of monsters, skulls and cartoon characters channel high school sketchbook art. The colors are a surprise—’50s-era pastels with weirdly non-complementary shades of orange, ochre, brown and lots of black. The text is almost unreadable in letters that seem to be melting, burning or twisting themselves into knots. But like rock posters from the 1960s, these contemporary works are less about the information than they are about commemorating the moment.

Nick Paparone. Vox Populi

There’s lots of great stuff at Vox Populi this month but Nick Paparone’s swansong installation is funnier, edgier and odder than anything else you’ll see. The Vox Pop member and co-founder of Black Floor, Copy and Print Liberation is headed to graduate school. Known for being secretive, Paparone doesn’t share what his installations look like before they’re hung but he’s known for his iconic representations of the human condition—usually made with common materials and gag props and sometimes involving performers. Previous works used black trash bags, rubber fried eggs and Mountain Dew in nauseating excess.

Two Together: Craig Kane and TImon Meyer at Mt. Airy Contemporary

Queens artists Craig Kane and Timon Meyers mine pop culture, mythology and personal history at Mount Airy Contemporary. Kane’s tiny, delicate sculptural installations in boxes, on the floor or on the wall use found materials—such as photos and tree branches—with hand-carved words to whisper about the ephemeral nature of life and human vulnerability. Meyers’ easel-sized digital photos merge appropriated television images from daytime tv with appropriated online images of mythological creatures like centaurs, the minotaur and elves. Television’s garish colors and harsh lighting make a great backdrop for beast-on-beast fighting scenes and close-ups of elfin-eared ladies.

Robert Scobey. Projects Gallery

Twenty-six young artists debut in Projects Gallery’s “Fresh,” a roundup that continues the gallery’s annual exploration of work by recent graduates who are relative unknowns. Gallery director Helen Meyrick says this year’s group is less focused on the body than in the past. Notable in a show that spans a wide range of materials, subjects and styles is David Solan’s futuristic installation in the gallery’s front window with spaceships suspended from the ceiling, exploding animals, pods and other sci-fi trappings all from recycled materials and metal. And watch out for Robert Scobey’s First Aid, a carved book that turns a first aid manual into a sexy collage of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and hands touching skin.

Seripop IBU400 x 2”: Through Sept. 15. Reception: Fri., Sept. 4, 7-10pm. Space 1026, 1026 Arch St., second fl. space1026.com
“Two Together”: Through Oct. 16. Reception: Fri., Sept. 4, 6-9pm. Mount Airy Contemporary Artists Space, 25 W. Mount Airy Ave. 215.764.5621. mountairycontemporary.com
“30 Days in the Hole”: Through Sept. 27. Reception: Fri., Sept. 4, 6-11 pm. Vox Populi, 319 N. 11th St., third fl. 215.238.1236. voxpopuligallery.org
“Fresh, 2009”: Through Oct. 31. Reception: Sun., Sept. 6, 6-9pm. Projects Gallery, 629 N. Second St. 267.303.9652.projectsgallery.com

Meiro Koizumi's video Craftnight, 2008

Given the greed and militarism that is dominating the news these days, I found myself especially interested in the videos about cruelty and detachment and invisible forces in control. Videos by Meiro Koizumi, Sung Hwan Kim, and Anna Molska include performance, stark interiorscapes, and psychological tension. Harold Pinter’s Dumbwaiter or Beckett’s Waiting for Godot both come to mind.

Koizumi’s Craftnight is a 15-minute video focused on a man made up in Goth whiteface, black eye makeup and a red drip of “blood.” He is trying to copy a sculpture out of a wad of clay as a voice-over asks probing questions about his relationship with his father. The agitation of the unhappy, inept craftsman increases as the questions probe and repeat. The clay is hopelessly lumpy, yet Freudian in its forms. (I also liked Koizumi’s Snow White images, with acrylic on magazine pages highlighting overwrought draperies. The printing peeks through what is essentially an acrylic mask (some of it looked kind of like it might be collaged, but I wasn’t sure), and the results are disjunctive and surreal and uncomfortable–yet beautiful).

Sung Hwan Kim, Dog Video, 2006

Sung Hwan Kim’s Dog Video includes a performance of two men in masks playing a man and a dog. The domination/subjugation in this video too is unhappy and weird, isolated in a virtually empty space.

Anna Molska, Tanagram, 2006/07, video

And Molska’s Tanagrama shows a couple of buff guys in padded g-strings and padded helments pushing around furniture-size tangram-like foam blocks. When they are done arranging the tangrams into shapes, they take a self-congratulatory rest, lying down on the floor in classic sunning style. The outfits (or lack thereof) veers between video game gladiators and homosexual domination games. We are put into a governmental control environment–a cross between military discipline and educational methods gone wrong. Even without the context of the source material, the film stands up as an indictment of the totalitarian state.

These three videos of people in bizarre costumes performing required but nonesensical tasks make a nice grouping, and the human theatrical presence in them makes for good watching.

The show also includes more literal work by Alex Hubbard, Sara VanDerBeek, Steve Roden and Lucy Raven.

Jay Rhee, clip of her series of videos Swan, Polar Bear, Niagara

Rhee’s video looks like it’s about nature, but it’s really about how people imagine nature.

The videos are set in a bathhouse with kitschy murals of hackneyed and romanticized natural scenes. In front of each mural, live people are added as if they are in the mural.

The preposterousness of the insertions are charming and Quixotic. A woman wearing a polar-bear-like helmet swims back and forth in the bath/pool in front of the Arctic landscape. A woman wearing a swan-like headdress does the same action in front of a scene of swans in a lake. A tourist group in plastic raincoats shuffles in and gazes at a mural as if it’s the real thing–a scenic overlook of Niagara Falls.

I don’t know the location of the bathhouse, but it and the people in it look Asian. The landscapes are arguably a mix of Western and Eastern. And the tone of the video mixes poignant longing for natural beauty with deadpan hipster. Rhee, born and raised in Korea, has a BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago, and that dual-nation background comes across.

Vox Members Shows

Julianna Foster’s From Morning On

Julianna Foster‘s From Morning On continues the artist’s exploration of narrative through serial photography. This group of photographs shows gorgeous misty landscapes, decrepit mystery interiors that are also misty; claustrophobic backyard mists and more. It’s like the misty moors of Wuthering Heights come to the American Northeast farmland. The actor is a woman who performs ambiguous and rather static actions (listening through a wall; blowing dust off a box; staring out a window). And, maybe it’s because he just died, I’m thinking about Andrew Wyeth‘s dreamy, romantic and nostalgic Americana. Of course, Eileen Neff‘s tres post-modern photos of anthropomorphized clouds who dance with trees and have a lovely existence in the woods and inside houses also come to mind. Foster’s work intrigues by remaining ambiguous at its core, but its lyricism and beauty draw you in. This series is open enough to let all minds wander around and claim the territory for their own.  And let’s not forget we’re in Oscar season.  What kind of movie would this be?

Juliana Foster From Morning On

Several of the photos are framed but not under glass and those pieces become more palpably real — like objects — in a way the glass-framed pieces aren’t. It’s the same non-glass framing Zoe Strauss used for her recent show at Silvertstein and the strategy gives the photos immediacy and plays up their sensuality.

James Johnson, Break, view through the glass door.

James Johnson‘s Break is a breakout piece. The artist used to work in small boxes, putting dollhouse-sized photos in spaces accessible through a peephole or other voyeuristic device. Break is a life-size box (a whole room in the gallery) separated from the viewer by a locked, glass-panel door (the artist selected the door, he says, for its resemblance to Maurizio Catalan’s The Wrong Gallery door.)  Outfitted like it’s a small office this big box has a desk, easy chair, books and slippers. At the opening and at other times during the show’s run it will also have the artist, in residence, sitting, reading, writing and cogitating in the space. Johnson says it’s not a performance piece, but when the artist puts his body in the picture I read it that way. The theatrical aspect pushes into rich territory and I am excited to see where the artist goes next. Artist trapped in a box? I can see that going far.

Eva Wylie, A Continuous Shuffle of Earthturf

Eva Wylie‘s A Continuous Shuffle of Earthturf is a continuous shuffle of imagery in the artist’s virtuoso silkscreen-on-wall method.  From afar the piece looks like an asymmetrical array of candy-colored floating toys or balloons. Up close, the images come into focus as a profusion of women’s hair pieces:  long plaits — thick, double-braidings and solitary ropes — mostly upside down.  Something about the shape of the plaits and their relation to the crown of the head gives them a topsy-turvy jellyfish look, which I quite like. I have no idea what the work is about–whether it’s celebratory or wry — but the image, screened right onto the pristine wall, is dazzling.

Eva Wylie, A Continuous Shuffle of Earthturf (detail)

Vox Alumni show

It’s great that the alternative space continues to showcase its alumni members which allows you to catch up with the artists, or in some cases, meet them for the first time.

Merilee Challiss

Merrilee Challiss‘ delicate white on black works on paper with pinking sheer edges and what appear to be embroidery hoop frames are Edward Gorey-delightful. The work nods to arts and crafts and book illustration and is a nice mix of old, new, high and low.

John T. Lange

John T. Lange‘s mini landscape projection via two clattery old film projectors has a hobby shop charm.

Anne Schaefer.  Photo by Libby.

Anne Schaefer‘s little tower of patterned boxes is elegant and seems like it walked in from the AiA Bookstore — meta-architectural blocks for kids to play with.

Video Lounge

In the video lounge, David Tinapple‘s Scatter Square translates a seascape into a series of digital rows and columns of tiles which it then flips around reconfiguring the landscape like one of those old-fashioned tile games that you can now get for your keychain. There’s a solitary soul on the beach and it’s funny to think of the person being shuffled around willy nilly not even knowing what’s happening. But I guess that’s life for you.