The ICA just announced it’s 2003-2004 season lineup and the big local news is that wallpaper wunderkind Virgil Marti will do the ICA ramp in September (which might make it actually worth walking up for a change) and autobiographical painter Sarah McEneaney gets her first solo museum outing in January, 2004 (overdue).
Two interesting, non-local artists also made the cut: British video artist, Gillian Wearing (image is photo by Wearing) in her first East Coast, U. S. museum solo (September) and New York artist Amy Sillman (ramp project in May, 2004–unconfirmed at time of writing) featured recently in Art in America.
As the purveyor of hip, ICA is also orchestrating something called “The Big Nothing,” a multi-venue, “Pan-Philadelphia” extravaganza beginning in May, 2004. A celebration of the Seinfeldian state of art, “Nothing” is still in the planning stages. (In fact, press material says that Philadelphia curators have been cooking “Nothing” since October 2002.)
Artists whose work you may see (at a number of venues) include Martin Creed (finalist for last year’s Turner Prize), Olafur Eliasson (whose work will be at Arcadia courtesy of a 2002 PEI grant), Robert Gober, Jeff Koons, Sherrie Levine and Robert Ryman.
Venues, in addition to ICA, include the Philadelphia Museum of Art (all that Duchamp stuff), the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Pennyslvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Arcadia University, Schuylkill Center, The Print Center and Rosenbach Museum.
One of my favorite kid movies is Wolfgang Peterson’s The Neverending Story, a surreal fairy tale in which “the nothing” is the bad guy, gobbling up all the fairyland characters and making life miserable. I guess that’s another take on the subject.
