June 3 to July 16 2016
600 Washington Square South (at South 6th Street)
Philadelphia, PA, 215 629 1000

A day in the life of a dying metropolis: At noon, a building collapses under glaring sunlight. At dusk, an orange glow washes over an overgrown rail viaduct. At dawn, banners flutter in from every direction, carrying a cryptic message to the city’s empty streets. Suddenly, flying shards of material adhere to the sides of a crumbling warehouse, resurrecting it as a luxury loft. Such is the transformation that artist Tim Portlock depicts in his video 11th_St_City_Symphony.mp4 (2013), from the exhibition “Ash and Gold,” at Locks Gallery. It is a transformation one sees in cities throughout the United States, in which whole neighborhoods disintegrate and new development takes root at the blink of an eye.

Bookending Portlock’s video are two bodies of prints that blend photography and computer rendering, one based on blighted scenery from the East Coast, the other on similar landscape in the West. The older prints show a city derived from, but not identical to, Philadelphia. Salon (2011) overlooks a dramatic V-corner, denuded of most of its structures and populated by wild dogs. Abandoned factories loom in the background, and behind them a structure that resembles Philadelphia’s massive city hall clock tower — topped not by the statue of founder William Penn, but a hulking figure that might be a staggering corpse from The Walking Dead.

Anyone who has travelled to Philadelphia by rail will find this desolation familiar. Yet Salon is not one site in particular but a distillation of Philadelphia scenes, and by his own admission, the artist has omitted certain objects and inserted others to capture what he considers to be the city’s essence. Portlock has been deliberate about the alignment of details, putting, for example, the sun’s glowing fireball directly behind the menacing clock tower statue in — much the way Thomas Cole cast dramatic sunlight on figures locked in struggle in his 1836 painting Course of Empire: Destruction.

Although his images depict a cycle of decline and gentrification unique to today’s city, Portlock has stated that they are inspired by the 19th-century American landscape art of painters like Cole. Those Hudson River artists also manipulated the scenes they painted in order to embed in the landscape a deeper vision of the American character. They bathed mountains, rivers, and wild animals in a quasi-religious sunlight, identifying nature with broad themes such as sin, redemption, harmony and conflict.

If Portlock’s Philadelphia scenes are like a painted 19th-century jeremiad, his West Coast prints are more like the thin rants of a modern-day religious television show. Many are based on San Bernardino, California, where the washed out colors of the Mojave Desert create a relentlessly even light. Instead of color cast from the sun, the artist uses the artificial colors of signage and advertising to create visual drama. In Yellow Dancer (2015), for example, he inserts a deflated acid-yellow AirDancer in the foreground. Collapsed over a wire, the figure’s deformity, coupled with its artificially happy hue, embodies a void more profound than that of Philadelphia’s decay.

The AirDancer is the closest thing to a human presence in any of Portlock’s work. The artist has said that he omits the figure in order to avoid the tendency, seen in much realist art, to show people as embodiments of their victimhood rather than depicting them as human beings in full. Instead he draws attention to the forces that create such forlorn scenes. Like the fluttering banners in the video 11th_St_City_Symphony.mp4, the Air Dancers also serve as metaphor for the weightless condition of U.S. cities, in which stone, steel and asphalt float on the worthless paper of land deeds and advertisements. The trail of false promises these documents embody enables a landscape of endless freedom, and also of endless emptiness.

The post Death and Resurrection in the City: Tim Portlock at Locks Gallery appeared first on artcritical.

December 22, 2015 to January 30, 2016
600 Washington Square South
Philadelphia, (215) 629-1000

The process of drawing is an excursion through ideas, a means by which an artist can test out theories and apply one surface to another, without the commitment of three-dimensional materials. Joan Tanner, whose large-scale installations are like a chess game played with limitless pieces, experiments in equally compelling ways in her drawings.

In the same way that stories are made of words that we recognize, a sculpture is made of materials that can come with meanings. When those materials are themselves complete objects, the reading of the piece is hemmed in by its components’ known uses in society. An artist can put these parts together in challenging or ironic ways, but she cannot completely ignore prior functions.

A drawing, however, is more slippery. Line can merely suggest meanings and not have to contain them. Like the shadows in Plato’s cave, a line holds whatever meaning the beholder assigns it. One calls it a live creature, another, a finger puppet. Tanner’s drawings make ample use of the medium’s ambiguities, suggesting a wide range of possibilities but never constraining us to a single reading.

Ambiguity of scale is a major tool in Tanner’s box. Donotellmewhereibelong #32 (2014), for example, is an accumulation of fine lines on a smudge of blue chalk in the midst of a white page. The lines coalesce into a central form that could be as large as a rock hollow in the side of a cliff or as small as a side of fleshy tissues under a microscope. Never fully divorced from the flat surface, these marks dissolve into a crisscross pattern on the form’s periphery.

Endofred #3 introduces ambiguity of viewpoint as a modus operandi. Thick red oil stick splotches cover undulating lines that resemble winding rivers viewed from above. Envisioned in profile, this same set of marks is a grotesque rooster hopping on one foot, or a cloud of debris kicked up by a small tornado. These very different readings coexist within a remarkably cohesive composition.

Tanner’s marks often straddle the line between the mimetic and the schematic. She freely mixes lines that suggest form and surface with others that resemble an architect’s plans. Donotellmewhereibelong #19 (2014), for example, contains a thicket of ruled graphite lines that converge in the manner of the orthogonal foci of perspective diagrams. Covered with smudges of turquoise and green, however, these triangular configurations also suggest a bay full of sailboats and waves. Tilting toward the side of an otherwise white page, this entire nautical configuration appears to drift into outer space.

The frequent appearance of a lonely clump of matter in the midst of a void lends a kind of alien spaceship aspect to the work. However, the drawings’ fierce openness keeps them out of the sci-fi illustration territory of, say, Roger Dean’s Yes album cover art. At once flat and pictorial, and seen simultaneously in plan and elevation views, these drawings have too many complications to be illustrative.

The openness of Tanner’s graphic work relates to the working process she uses for her sculptures and installations. An online video of her assembly of the piece On Tenderhooks (2006) shows a flurry of activity, with assistants bringing objects into the gallery, rolling them around, nailing them together, taking them apart, then removing them altogether. Along the way, Tanner traces all possibilities inherent in the form, in the same way that we as viewers run through many alternative readings as we engage with her drawings. The topsy-turvy orientation of this exhibition’s various pieces is equivalent to the drawings’ ambiguous scale and viewpoint, and the choice to omit elements resonates with the drawings’ vast voids. Tanner demonstrates a comparable level of persistence in the making of her three-dimensional work and her drawings, albeit of a different kind. The one involves hitting the same path repeatedly until she arrives at her destination; the other, hitting every path until she finds the right one. It is not surprising, therefore, that her drawings encompass a level of openness impossible in the more resolutely determined works.

The post The Shadows in Plato’s Cave: Drawings by Joan Tanner appeared first on artcritical.

DARREN JONES: What drew you to Fire Island as a subject for this body of work?

GABRIEL MARTINEZ: As a child growing up in Little Havana, Miami, I was first introduced to Fire Island through the Village People’s song of the same name. I was just nine years old when that song came out in 1977. I was instinctively drawn to the image of masculinity on the cover of the album, the song’s rhythmic disco beat and to the lyrics: “Don’t go in the bushes/Someone might grab ya…” I had a subtle sense of what those lines referred to. It took me 36 years to actually step foot upon this mythical location, and I’m still not sure if it actually exists.

For most of my artistic career, I’ve investigated various themes related to masculinity from a Queer perspective. Lately, I’ve been specifically focused on Queer history, with a particular interest in the time period between Stonewall and 1981, including Donna Summer, AIDS, the films of Wakefield Poole, the novels of John Rechy, and now Fire Island. I’m intrigued by the national sites of particular importance to the history of gay culture.

What is Fire Island to you?

It’s a place of intense beauty and sorrow. It’s a living memorial, a sacred space, a state of mind.

Fire Island is rife with personal transformative encounters and shared collective experiences. I want the exhibition to reflect both points of view.

The title of the show is redolent of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder (1945) — a story that while in a different time, deals with a lifestyle and environment hitherto unknown to the narrator. The story touches on homosexuality, desire and nostalgia. It is observed of Brideshead Castle that it had “”the atmosphere of a better age.” How did you come to choose the title?

Any associations with Waugh’s novel are conscious, yet general and loose. I worked closely and collaboratively with John Caperton, the Print Center’s Jensen Bryan Curator, on all aspects of the exhibition, including the title. This show is presented as part of the Center’s Centennial, and so an exploration of history itself, in various dimensions, is an integral aspect of the exhibition. For instance, the beginnings of the island’s Cherry Grove as a safe haven for queer people can be traced back to the mid 1930s. The show also explores issues deeply interrelated to narration, homosexual desire, camaraderie and nostalgia.

Fire Island is associated primarily with the summer season. You have included winter scenes in the exhibition — silence, desolation, aloneness. Why did you expand the exhibition into a time of year that so few have experienced?

Traveling to Cherry Grove or Fire Island Pines via the ferry from Sayville during the winter months is impossible. The bay is usually frozen. I wanted to experience this sense of impossibility and to explore the quality of the island, by myself, during a moment that is the polar opposite of the high season. s a sort of pilgrimage, I hiked five hours in freezing temperatures from Robert Moses Park to reach Cherry Grove and Fire Island Pines. What I discovered was isolated and solemn, yet powerfully charged. I wanted these images to present an atmospheric antithesis of the festive social scene that was/is Fire Island. I created multi-layered hybrid prints (silkscreen, inkjet and silver leaf) that evoke and mirror a sense of what I felt that particular day: decay, tragedy and trauma.

Mythology is a major currency in the perception and story of Fire Island. It is a place that almost seems to evaporate as soon as you are back in “reality.” How much does the concept of that place conflict with or complement the actuality of it in your work?

This factors greatly in “Bayside Revisited.” Once you enter through Donna Summer, your journey begins. The space is dimly lit alluding to a nocturnal experience. The soundtrack to Wakefield Poole’s Boys in the Sand permeates the space with angelic voices. You are within the fantasy. Stepping back out of the main exhibition space, you are coldly reminded of the paradise to which you immediately long to return.

By projecting an original copy of Boys in the Sand onto a mirrored ball you splinter it into a kaleidoscope, giving tantalizing glimpses rather than a full screen. Why?

I’m indebted to the source material and at the same time feel that it’s imperative for me to transform it. By projecting the 16mm print the film disperses into the realm of the cosmos, day into night. The images seem to radiate around you, enveloping the viewer. The wall onto which the film is projected via the mirror ball is coated with sand from the Meat Rack [a section of the island known for public sex], and glitter. Both the ephemeral and tangible are depicted.

The viewer enters the exhibition through a wall-to-wall curtain of Donna Summer in ecstatic voice against a blazing sunset: it’s carnivalesque, implying something to be discovered on the other side. It could be illusionary, supernatural or historical. What do you intend to communicate through the supernatural or magical artifice inherent in the subject?

On July 7, 1979, Donna Summer was scheduled to perform before an audience of 5,000 adoring gay men on the oceanfront there, but she canceled last minute. Many speculated that the “queen of disco,” growing increasingly religious, did not want to be so directly connected or associated with the gay community.

Last year, I placed her iconic Live and More (1978) album cover on the Fire Island seashore and let the waves drag her away. Through photography, Summer now posthumously performs on the island for the first time ever.

That image has been converted into a curtain that signals the beginning of your journey through the exhibition. I definitely intended to set up a kind of funhouse atmosphere resplendent with wonder and excitement, with just a touch of anxiety and apprehension. You’re entering Neverland; let the Peter Pan Syndrome take over.

There is the vaguest sense that you long for a Fire Island that no longer exists. You are too young to have been there in its ‘70s heyday, and it is understandable for men of our generations to wish to have seen a pre-AIDS Fire Island. How do you negotiate the distance between you and the times you portray?

I look back at the ‘70s with a great sense of admiration and empathy. It was a time of intense struggle, but also of outrageous courage and creativity. Yes, I wish to have lived though that era, and at the same time grateful that I came out when I did, in the mid ‘80s.

The theme of AIDS has been embedded in my multidisciplinary projects from the outset of my career. I have created works that pay homage to those who perished since the start of the epidemic. I have also created various works dedicated to the memory of those who have lost their lives while seeking freedom from oppression.

Lately, I find myself positioned in the middle, both as a mid-career artist and as an openly gay Latino man centered between the older and younger generations. I sympathize greatly with the older generation, a group of individuals who fought so vehemently, faced such animosity and experienced such profound loss. I liken my current role as an artist to that as conduit between the two generations, as inter-generational mediator.

“Gabriel Martinez: Bayside Revisited” is on view at the Print Center, Philadelphia, through December 19. For more information please visit printcenter.org/100

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May 16 to August 3, 2015
2025 Benjamin Franklin Pkwy (at North 20th Street)
Philadelphia, PA, 215 278 7200

The Barnes Foundation’s recent exhibit, “The Order of Things,” in their contemporary gallery, is at once dynamic and problematic. Intended to relate to Barnes’s enigmatic approach to exhibition design, fantasy and appropriation abound. Installations by three renowned artists — Mark Dion, Judy Pfaff and Fred Wilson — mine varying aspects of Barnes’s approach to installing artifacts and paintings. His system for exhibiting work was intended to be carried into in perpetuity and is mimicked in the work of the artists selected for this project.

Pfaff created a sprawling installation in the main space of the gallery. Center stage, this work honors Laura Barnes’s arboretum, which she cultivated alongside Albert Barnes and a cluster of specialists. The arboretum is an extensive garden of hundreds of rare trees and flora from around the world, still flourishing at the Foundation’s original museum in Lower Merion. Pfaff’s Scene I: The Garden, Enter Mrs. Barnes (2015) is a dazzling psychedelic display of photos of the arboretum and Henri Rousseau’s paintings gone awry. Perhaps an abject backdrop to Alice in Wonderland, the installation is replete with digital prints on plastic and vinyl, poured pigmented foam, natural wood and steel. Swirling renditions of a simulated pond’s edge and bank are constructed using wood and liquid foam. Repeated in several key locations within the installation, these frothy sea-green islands create a sense of boundaries and depth. Punctuating this expansive landscape are leafy steel structures, painted white.

Incongruent elements abound, with white steel chandeliers overhead and neon lights that are, disappointingly, never illuminated. An installation of plastic wallpaper with distorted floral patterns is strategically placed on the gallery’s southern wall. Plastic floor panels extend across the space and were based on Henri Rousseau’s paintings; they serve as a conceptual bridge between Pfaff’s installation and the collection. Other connections include an area over the eastern wall of the gallery that alludes to the framed lunettes of Henri Matisse’s The Dance (1910).

Laura Barnes was integrally involved in the development of the arboretum at the original Barnes Foundation. She cultivated an expansive array of flora from areas within the states and other countries. Laura Barnes selected blooming plants that were considered difficult to grow in the Pennsylvania’s blistery winters of Pennsylvania such as southern magnolias, etc. Her approach to constructing the Foundation’s gardens paralleled the landscapes found in the work of Calude Monet, Paul Cezanne and other landscape paintings in the collection. Pfaff’s title channels the contribution of Laura Barnes to the development of the Foundation’s botanical gardens.

Fred Wilson’s rooms, located to the right of the entrance, are conglomerates of staged tableaux, some more successful than others. At the entrance three scenes are created in a sparse, modernist fashion, using furniture borrowed from the Merion offices, desks chairs and even an early Dell computer. The interior rooms hold greater intrigue; these spaces represent a sculptural approach to furniture, art objects and glass works from the collection. While visitors walk through these spaces, African drums and chanting waft through the air. Wilson inserts the African presence through sound rather than including it materially in his installation. Perhaps using African art directly would have been too obvious a move for Wilson, based on his past installations at museums throughout America. The soundscape is a compilation tape. Wilson has chosen not to disclose its origin or name the people recorded. Nameless voices surround the viewer — the ubiquitous presence of Africa is in our midst.

In his 1983 book Flash of the Spirit, Robert Farris Thompson uses the metaphor that if aliens descended on earth and sampled the music produced around the world, overridingly the music from Africa and the African Diaspora would be the most prevalent. Wilson has reconstructed this reality for us in Trace. However, it is interesting that he has chosen not to name the African cultural groups represented in his compilation tape. Is this again an example of a Western intervention that includes the artistry of Africa and deciding to render it anonymous?

Mark Dion’s installation is delightful, yet foreboding, in its inclusion of guns, knives and the like; however, would these be included in the collection of a naturalist? These emblems are contrasted with butterfly nets, fishnets, satchels and garden tools. Dion’s The Incomplete Naturalist is a tour de force in symmetry. According to the curator, Dion’s use of symmetry is mimetic of Barnes’s aesthetic. Like an archeologist, he puts everything in order and builds relationships to construct a narrative.

Overall, the Order of Things was a fascinating array of dissonant styles of installation art brought together. Therein lies its intrigue. Each artist serves as an individual conduit into the mind of Albert and Laura Barnes.

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Frank Bramblett: No Intention at the Woodmere Art Museum

March 7 to June 21, 2015
9210 Germantown Avenue
Philadelphia, PA, 215 247 0476

Attention art materials: if you see Frank Bramblett coming, run! Through four decades of work, the Philadelphia-based artist has slashed, sanded, and frozen his way through pools of paint, loads of marble dust, and acres of canvas. The results he has achieved are on display in the exhibition “No Intention,” at Philadelphia’s Woodmere Art Museum through June 21.

I take issue with the exhibition’s title, as it suggests a lack of direction. From his arrival in Philadelphia in the early 1970s, Bramblett has shown a clear intent with every piece he made — but sidestepped the conventional application of brush to canvas. In early works such as Red Wrap (1973), for example, the artist poured acrylic paint into a frame to create both the illusion and the reality of an undulating surface. Shiny pools of paint form a light-to-dark brown gradient that resembles the humps of a Naugahyde couch. The artist took this pour method to extremes in White Face (1974), burying a layered pool of paint in the snow and snapping its frozen edges. The resulting fissures revealed thin, colored lines that frame a buckling white field. Like Jo Baer’s paintings from the early 1970s, Bramblett’s pour paintings push the action from center to extremity.

In pieces such as FeO (1977) Bramblett heaped minerals onto the painted surface, loaded his paint with ferrous oxide sand and scraped it across the canvas in razor-sharp diagonals. The resulting charcoal-gray grit pushes past the edges of the panel support, making the canvas resemble a slab of chipped slate, blurring the line between sculpture and painting.

During the 1980s, Bramblett’s small, abstract work turned large and figurative. Oh No Yoko! Where What Where (1982) filled an entire wall with a frieze-like progression of bodies borrowed from myth and art history. We move through Manet’s Dead Toreador (1864), Picasso’s Three Musicians (1921), and Matisse’s Dance (1910) — all laboriously cut from linoleum tiles of varying patterns and colors. It would be tempting to say that in this stage Bramblett was drawn into a trendy post-modern phalanx of appropriation, pattern and decoration, and pop cultural fetish. A closer look reveals that the Bramblett’s labor-intensive “destruction-as-creation” practices from the ‘70s continued to be the driving force in his work. Instead of applying paint to a surface, he applied one surface to another, cheerfully breaking mirrors into shards and cutting hard tiles into precise shapes in order to build a material object.

More recent works embrace the large scale but shift the narrative from grand themes to personal experience. Holes in Dive In (2001) reveal small sea or lakeside photographs showing endless expanses of pebbles and rivulets of water. These tiny windows into natural topography are engulfed by a broad field (90 x 72 inches) of meandering parallel lines made by running a comb-like instrument through a thick layer of pink paint. There is an almost seamless continuity between the photographic documentations of nature and Bramblett’s simulations of the same.

The traditional attitude toward paint is to view regard it as plastic — i.e. a formless substance ready to take on whatever characteristics the painter gives it. Although Bramblett certainly puts his paint and canvas through boot camp, in the end he lets them decide what they will be. Rather than lack of intention, his approach is a confidence that the materials have become so infused with his personality that they tell his story on their own.

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23 January – 21 March

This expert survey of Jörg Immendorff’s career reassesses an artist whose period of notoriety in America lasted a relatively short time in the 1980’s. This was partly a matter of mistaken identity – he was too closely linked with the neo-expressionist and new image (?) bandwagon prevalent at the time. His connection to direct contemporaries who gained mega-celebrity status, Anselm Keifer and Gerhardt Richter, is also shown to be partly incidental. From this exhibition, Immendorff emerges more fully as an original artist of great complexity. This reevaluation also makes distinctions that remove him from convenient generalizations made about the “postmodern” Eighties, the Trans-Avant-Garde, and art generally, and it illustrates thoroughly the conceptual nature of his work.

Born in 1945, Immendorff was of the generation that experienced post-war disillusionment that politicized every waking moment. As a student in the 1960s, he faced the task of examining Germany’s tragic history and its fraught relationship with modernity. This forced him to devise a balancing act between eras.

Immendorff subsequently takes on the multiple roles of jester, storyteller and historian. He actively participates in a self-conscious continuum of twentieth-century German art while simultaneously throwing stones at the powers that be. After running the full gamut of conceptual work á la fluxus, his adoption of painting appears as a sort of purposeful and elaborate bluff. Although this suits his needs, it makes the connection to Ludwig Kirchner and the original German expressionist group die Brücke seem almost superfluous. What comes to the fore instead is a weaving together of political, social and personal myth making. It is the content that matters most, putting him more in line with the social, satirical and metaphorical intents of George Grosz and Max Beckmann respectively.

Immendorf’s early work from the sixties tells of the political upheavals of his days under the mentorship of Joseph Beuys. At that time, with the strong fluxus influence, there existed all sorts of manifestos, sloganizing and politicized minimal art. A petition to end the Vietnam war from 1965 (signed by Beuys and others) serves as a defining historic document here. This section of the show also conveys how Immendorff’s later shift to painting, in all it’s conventionality, is not so much an “about face” as it is a specific strategy-he goes on to combine his well-learned conceptual precepts and his inherent politics with his painterly methods.

The large “Café Deutschland” paintings (1978-83) feign expressionist representation and zeal and move towards a system of complex metaphor which is in some way novel. Although illustrative, viewing these so-called Picabian “bad paintings” is merely the first step one takes in deciphering their meanings. They must be read as “multiple texts” not just formally as paintings. The bars with wooden floors serve as meeting places of mythic characters where the artist and converses with Mao, Marx, Stalin, Beuys and Brecht. Whether conspicuously or not, Immendorff avidly adopts the mantle of Beuys and with it, the ability to fabricate and mix myths with facts.

Beuys’s image appears continuously in Immendorf’s work. A small painting, “Gertrude Stein,” includes a depiction of Beuys piloting his Stuka dive bomber with “Fluxus” written (in typical Immendorff fashion) across the wings. In the large painting, Sun Gate, a diagrammatical outline of his teacher becomes a Beuys’s museum.

Eventually, Beuys turns up in Immendorf’s theatrical productions of the 1990s. As the paintings progress, Immendorff both pays homage and mocks, cycling his own personal myths, those of East and West and those peculiar to the art world. This process reaches a natural culmination when Immendorff uses theater — for which he was originally trained — as his canvas. Immendorf’s video production of Stravinsky’s opera Rake’s Progress is ingenuously used as an unlikely channel for German art and society. Key figures appear-Beuys, Penke and Lüpertz -all playing different historical figures in the play. The artist Baselitz plays the Keeper of the Insane Asylum, while Lüpertz becomes Mick Shadow, Rakewell’s alter ego. With Immendorff as Tom Rakewell, one can see a fantastic interweaving of past and present, a confluence of Germanic art historical reference brought to life. Immendorf’s use of Hogarth’s morality tale shows his strange affinity with the English caricaturist and reinforces where Immendorff’s interests lie: in promoting an open-ended dialogue on culture. The fall of the Berlin Wall, so long at the center of his rationale, may have been the reason he went looking for alternative fertile ground to further extend his content and may partially explain his disappearance after his 1980s heyday.

Immendorff promulgates a watertight tautology that runs progressively through his ideas and delivery. His questions about the purpose of art and the conceptualization of the artist’s role are answered by the work itself and indeed, in retrospect, by Immendorff’s own life. His question, “What Can Art Do?” resonates particularly well now as art continues to develop an apolitical global/corporate mind set. This superbly researched show qualifies his unique contribution to art and ensures his enduring legacy.

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As the first in a projected series at the Woodmere Art Museum, the Triennial of Contemporary Photography is not only an attempt to showcase the diverse currents in photography in the Delaware Valley, but also a purposeful bid to update the museum. Due to a positive change in their financial circumstances, and with an impressive wing designed by Venturi, Scott-Brown soon to begin construction, the Triennial signals a new direction at the Woodmere. Spearheaded by Curator of Collections, Douglass Paschall, it is a sign that the museum wants to change it’s spots in the new century.

The 7 photographers chosen for this invitational were selected from an original pool of 150 and the quality is high. Adding to an already loose thematic, the museum presented by way of historical preface “The Legacy of Philadelphia Photography” as a mini-show in the foyer. This included rare and remarkable photographs from the Woodmere’s collection with some by Eakins and Muybridge. A gorgeous history lesson, the show was something of a distraction to a triennial already pushing the boundaries in its eclecticism.

Several generations of photographers were presented in a way that pitted an old guard against newcomers with a major gap in-between. In fact, the show runs the gamut from modernist work through American journalistic tradition to the contemporary. Larry Fink presents confident journalistic style and his paparazzi-like shot of George Plimpton sitting glum-faced at a table of party people is carefully placed to form the centerpiece in his section of the show. Ray K. Metzker follows in the footsteps of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans; his carefully captured plays of light are mostly street scenes from 1962 and they are delicate, meticulous and a perfect combination of craft and moodiness. Fink and Metzker form the backbone of the show and are worth seeing in their own right but they bring nothing “contemporary” to the table. Indeed, can pictures from 1962 really classify as contemporary?

Leif Skoogfor’s photojournalism from the early seventies is strong work in the Magnum tradition but it is not contemporary either. The great leap across generations to Amanda Tinker, Jessica Todd Harper and Trevor Dixon is abrupt and Charmaine Caire stands out as the only representative born in the fifties. Claire’s work has ironic content and use of the “set-ups” full of objects and toys from popular culture produced as digital prints. In the context of the show, her pictures indicate the departure from the classic “realism” to art photography. The remit here is not “documentation” but playing with the nature of truth in photographic images complicated further by digital manipulation.

Harper’s large family “snapshots” seem to comment on class, money and taste and channel portraiture of the landed gentry of the eighteenth century. It almost seems a red herring that she inserts extra figures digitally in the manner of Jeff Wall. This is part of the painterly aesthetic that photography sometimes mimics these days. Tinker’s and Dixon’s work seems to be the link connecting the “masters” and the early experimental work in the hallway to the present day. Playing with such formalities as focus and scale, Dixon’s pictures are intellectually engaging and strange: images of half-blurred churches and woods evoke the passing of time generally and photography’s past specifically. They also mark a formal difference between optical and photographic vision which is a truly contemporary concern.

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Victorian wallpaper was used as a status symbol along with other tasteful furnishings by the burgeoning bourgeoisie of the 19th century. Densely packed and richly colored, its heyday coincided with the apex of mechanical reproduction. Oddly enough, this “machine-made” quality is what English designers like William Morris were reacting against when they introduced a handcrafted process and designs that mimicked the gothic. Their work continues to form our view of “classic” decorative wallpaper. In the early 20th century, wallpaper design followed the arts loosely through many styles: art deco, modern-abstract and mock colonial; but by the mid century it had evolved into a debased variation created for suburban houses. These were cheaply made, inoffensive and made little statement apart from matching the avocado or beige color scheme. Now, after decades of white and off-white walls, we have begun to decorate again with Pottery Barn leading the way, selling us an ersatz “Arts and Crafts” movement. Though today’s domestic interiors have the emphasis on technology (have we begun to think of the “house” itself as an “appliance?), and are littered with computer gear, we want a little coziness,albeit in a post-modern sort of way. It is interesting, then, to see how contemporary artists deal with this quaint notion of wallpaper.

The exhibition, On the Wall: Wallpaper and Tableau, at the Fabric Museum and Workshop In Philadelphia, updates our view of wallpaper in a major way. Including 33 artists and numerous historical pieces, the exhibition showcases excellent examples of contemporary art. (Of contemporary art or contemporary wallpaper? Or do you mean excellent examples of the ideas inherent in contemporary art.?) This is not an easy task since contemporary art envelops so many concerns normally not confined to walls. The usual axioms of race, gender and politics are to be expected, but when the artists grab onto some aspect of decoration and twist it -this is where the show really does make a statement about the relationship of contemporary art (wallpaper?)to its wallpaper (Victorian?) predecessor. This double intention gives the show an inherent contradiction that could have been emphasized; it deals with issues of art versus decoration by default while simultaneously dealing with artists’ usual concerns. Having said this, the show becomes more of a showcase for these concerns rather than attempting to make any larger cohesive statement about our wider relationship to the decorative arts.

Andy Warhol succeeded in using this medium and set a well-known precedent with his Cow Wallpaper from 1966. He was the first to make the connection between art and domestic (commercial?) products, and artists have been following his lead ever since. Virgil Marti’s Lotus Room nods to Warhol and forms the centerpiece of the show. This is a mixture of homage to a “tasteless” past and a formal exercise in reflective qualities of Mylar and stick-on flowers. This is a wonderful work, though I was disappointed in not finding a sofa, a large palm and a stereo playing Abba to complete the installation. His day-glow, black-lit Bully Wallpaper, which literally depicts people (bullies?) from his high school yearbook, does not have this contextual problem. Installed cleverly in the men’s room, it evokes the seventies so strongly it is scary. This is where the mix of materials and metaphors is most effective, a successful amalgam of style as (and?) content. Other witty works by artists Renee Green and Rodney Graham update the past effectively though they both needed to be more enclosed. These are pieces that could easily be pasted up in work places and homes. (explain what these look like) Notables like John Baldessari and Robert Gober were marginalized in glass cases, and Jenny Holzer’s Inflammatory Essays seem out of place perhaps because there is no nod to decoration (explain what they do have if not a nod to decoration.). This is where the contemporary “historical” aspects of the show didn’t work so well. Adam Cvijanovic’s hand painted removable mural wallpapers show a clever technical development on traditional wallpaper but his suburban scene doesn’t connect much with the method. (this last sentence should be moved up in sequence; the “doesn’t work so well” sentence should be your last to sum up the general feel of the exhibition.)

Organized by Judith Tannenbaum, Curator of Contemporary Art at the RISD Museum, the show began as a smaller version (on a smaller scale?) with a slightly different title: On the Wall, Wallpaper by Contemporary Artists. It has now been expanded by Marion Stroud, Director of the Fabric Workshop and Museum, and includes more artists and tableau. This ambitious expansion perhaps included too many possibilities to explore. Curator Tannenbaum’s assertion concludes that artists subvert the everyday simply by adding content in the form of politics or sexual imagery to the so-called “background,” but this is simplistic. Although many works in the show do this, there is not enough tableau to contrast it nor enough “real” rooms to emphasize the inherent ironies. It is certainly the use-value of these decorative objects that is most interesting (regardless of the subject), but that can only truly be gauged outside the museum context. The wallpapers that worked best were the ones that indeed subverted our idea of decoration but they were, oddly enough, the prettiest to look at in the conventional sense. Nicole Eisenman’s amusing Dr Suess-like illustrations of life in a women’s prison are an effective example. That is the twist. Omitting that twist made the Jenny Holzer work fall “flat” and made the Bullies in the bathroom effectively creepy. Apparently film director Gus Van Zandt (My Own Private Idaho) has wallpapered his office with Virgil Marti’s “Bullies.” Now, that I’d like to see.

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