Category: writing

In March 2013, Libby Rosof and Roberta Fallon, co-founders of Philadelphia’s grassroots theartblog.org, presented a brief guide to blogging to a group of 20 artists, writers, and curators. They invited anyone in the audience—from hoodie-clad teens to bespectacled retirees—who had ever contributed to the online publication to sign their names in marker on a flipchart displayed in front of the group. About half stood up and signed. Then Rosof and Fallon invited everyone else in the room to sign their names, too—a welcoming gesture intended to underscore the decade-old arts publication’s commitment to giving a voice to a broad spectrum of the local art community. This lecture-cum-performance took place at The Galleries at Moore—the exhibition space maintained at Philadelphia’s Moore College of Art and Design—as a part of Show-and-Share, a weekly program by local online journal-cum-arts-organization The St. Claire (the-st-claire.com), held in conjunction with Creative Time’s traveling exhibition Living As Form: The Nomadic Version [January 26–March 16, 2013]. Matt Kalasky, The St. Claire’s director, invited some of the city’s cultural producers to teach open, skill-share lessons on topics at the margins of their practices. The community responded: Institute of Contemporary Art Assistant Curator Kate Kraczon advised on collecting and repairing vintage clothing, and Beth Heinly, an artist-member of the 26-year-old collective Vox Populi, taught fire-sculpting. Following each group of presentations, attendees and lecturers convened and discussion often continued into the night.The St. Claire is one of several artist-led magazines to have emerged in Philadelphia within the last five years, perhaps as a contributing force in the past decade’s exponential increase in the activity and visibility of collectively organized galleries and creative co-working spaces in the city. Run collaboratively by groups of artists and other cultural practitioners, these publications include Machete (newsprint and PDF, 2009–2012, restarting this year), Title Magazine (title-magazine.com, 2011–present), and Never Edition (newsprint, 2013). Their founding principles have much in common: to provide necessary infrastructure for critical dialogue about Philadelphia’s art, and exchange between its artists. Rooted in Philadelphia’s 45-year history of collective practice and sensitive to the city’s polarized socioeconomic situation, these magazines do far more than cover area exhibitions. They both serve and challenge local audiences, and propose powerful models of critical, creative community-forming and friendship-building, in which artists can learn together, as opposed to merely networking.All four magazines are Philadelphia-focused in content and mission, yet they reach audiences beyond the city limits. Title and The St. Claire run local reviews, commentary, interviews, and artist projects on their WordPress-driven websites. Just over one third of Title’s readership, and two thirds of The St. Claire’s, is from Philadelphia, with United States readers making up the majority of the rest. Their contributors are area arts professionals, students, and former Philadelphia residents. Following the editorial lead of its parent publications, Title and The St. Claire, Never Edition was a three-issue, eight-page newspaper made in collaboration with the curatorial duo McCartney/Belknap for CITYWIDE, an exhibition exchange between 23 of the city’s artist-led spaces involving more than 150 artists. Never Edition was distributed throughout Philadelphia, and volunteers maintained a special newsstand at the Crane Arts building in the city’s up-and-coming area of Northern Liberties. To extend the conversation, each issue was made available in over 20 artist-led spaces in major cities across the United States, some of which shipped their own publications back to Crane Arts. This interregional participation is evidence of these projects’ ability to translate across state lines—local arts production, it would seem, has national applications.Machete was a newsprint zine founded, published, and distributed by the artist-led project space Marginal Utility. An integral part of the gallery’s programming since it opened in 2009, Machete’s columns, reviews, and interviews with leading thinkers such as Jacques Rancière and Cornel West operated together as a critical reader with which to interpret work made by artists—like those who exhibit at Marginal Utility—who borrow complex ideas from philosophy, art history, and radical politics. Co-directors Yuka Yokoyama and David Dempewolf noted in a 2009 interview that without such critical apparatuses, “much of the intellectual content of their efforts [is] lost and the work is only read formally and/or emotionally.” They continue, “Philadelphia is developing a robust art scene that will hopefully churn out an articulation of the present that is not derivative of New York and Artforum, but is native of and has grown out of the conditions of living in Philadelphia.” This invocation of Artforum implies that the discourse found in magazines is essential to building strong regional identities and communities—just as much as exhibition spaces are.There is a precedent for this type of local, printed discourse in Philadelphia Arts Exchange (1977–1981). This bimonthly, low-gloss magazine founded by Richard Flood and Joan Horvath emerged shortly after the city’s first group of collective spaces—such as NEXUS, Bricolage, Étage, Old City Arts (all founded 1975), 3rd Street Gallery (1976), and Muse Gallery (1977)—established themselves. Like its contemporary counterparts, Philadelphia Arts Exchange featured carefully edited, locally focused critical content, as well as artists’ interventions (often perforated, pop-out mailers), and articles that engaged both the city’s socioeconomic conditions and those of artistic labor in general. Columns such as “Philadelphia: Lost and Endangered” reflected upon problems of urban development and decay; such series as “Information Exchange”—contributed by the Philadelphia Bar Association—provided legal advice for artists on topics including contracts, copyright, and droit de suite. In 1977, the periodical co-hosted a symposium with the Philadelphia College of Art (now University of the Arts). The focus, as in today’s artist-run publications, was on how to develop Philadelphia’s cultural scene from a grassroots perspective.Labor remains a concern across contemporary initiatives’ organizational values, published content, and the extension—and/or integration—of several magazines’ editorial remits into public programming. “Any responsible and earnest examination of Philadelphia’s cultural output would also have to encompass a broader network of social, political, and labor issues …. To talk about an art show but not about the artist’s professional career as a dog walker/nanny/waiter is just plain negligent,” Kalasky explained in a 2013 interview. Accordingly, The St. Claire’s recent podcast “Light Refreshments on Radical Pedagogy” included a passionate conversation on the rights of adjunct professors, and a Title review writer’s byline describes her as “currently traveling, curating, making art, writing, and waitressing.” Artist and Drexel University professor Cindy Stockton-Moore’s personal response to a recent New York Times series, “The Cost of Being an Artist,” appeared in a recent Never Edition essay titled “Giving it Away.” She comments: “The underlying sentiment [of the Times series] is that working gratis makes one an amateur or—even worse—a dilettante,” before outlining why she chooses to donate some of her scarce, uncompensated time to co-direct a nonprofit gallery. Drawing upon the sociological concepts of “bonding” and “bridging” capital coined by Robert Putnam, a Harvard public policy researcher, Stockton-Moore notes that donating her time “builds a peer support system and offers insight into my otherwise-solitary studio practice.” This bonding, in turn, provides the foundation for bridging—working reciprocally with other communities in Philadelphia, the United States, and internationally. The magazines considered here offer similar opportunities. This is not to say that these projects matter because they have somehow escaped the requirements of financial capital—volunteers such as Stockton-Moore and the collectives that organize Philadelphia’s artist-led magazines are able to “donate” their time because they have paid employment in such fields as web design, photography, and gallery administration—even marketing and accounting.Theoretical discussion of labor naturally segues into a very practical conversation about cash. Jeffrey Bussmann, one of Title’s co-editors, told me the magazine is entirely volunteer-run: Philadelphia is a transient city—perhaps because there are relatively few full-time arts jobs here—and Title’s editorial team of Jeffrey Bussmann, Samantha Dylan Mitchell, Jacob Feige, and Daniel Gerwin put their (unpaid) effort into mentoring writers who will eventually move on, either when they graduate from MFAs and seek work elsewhere, or when adjuncts migrate in search of tenured teaching positions. “We value people’s time immensely—the people who participate are putting in the effort because they want to represent themselves and be part of something high quality,” Bussman told me. The St. Claire’s team raised $8,000 in general operating costs through a Kickstarter campaign; most donors belonged to Philadelphia’s art community. Kalasky assumed that having financial resources would cultivate a business-oriented model for the magazine—one in which paying writers would ensure specific results, such as met deadlines and an end product, again, of “high quality.” “As it turns out,” he told me, “unless you are paying people a professional wage—and perhaps even then—your compensation is more of a gesture. No one is going to support [herself] in Philadelphia getting paid $50 for writing an essay or $100 for running a group discussion. Our honoraria are good faith tokens that let people know we do value labor.” In a beautiful reversal of that assumption, almost all of The St. Claire’s contributors so far have chosen to donate their honoraria back to the organization—a measure of “belonging” that Kalasky and co-editors Stephanie Bursese, John Crowe, Emily Davidson, J Makary, Stuart Lorimer, Bethany Pelle, Suzanne Seesman, Mike Treffehn, and Nicole Wilson have cultivated over a short period. This is “bonding capital” in action. As in Stockton-Moore’s proposal, this initial bond provides a support system for outreach to ever-broader groups of artists; this in turn boosts participants’ professional networks. It also models a generous community-based approach that co-exists with the concerns of financial capital and competition. For example, The St. Claire’s 2014 event series The Night Course: An Independent Art Seminar—which might be said to have “bridged” many artist groups—included a discussion on the history of Philadelphia’s co-operative spaces in the general context of collectivism as a still-valid historical model for contemporary practice.The editorial policies of these artist-led publications tend to encourage alternative approaches to established journalistic and critical formats. “The Form Review,” a regular feature of The St. Claire, invites both critic and exhibitor to respond to the same five short prompts, employing a simple Q&A format to subvert the usual roles of the observer and the observed. Straightforward cues such as, “Who would be this exhibition’s parents?” and “What might its children look like?” gently mock and repurpose the interpretive platitudes common in art criticism; the resulting replies appear as a pair alongside the usual installation shot. By including exhibitors outside The St. Claire’s established pool of writers to contribute—such as ICA’s chief curator, or a collective member based elsewhere in the city—some efforts are made to move beyond a “clique” mentality. (These are, however, first steps only, and more could always be done.) This experiment and similar ones seek to stimulate readers, too, making them complicit in these publications’ apparent communal goal: to short-circuit critical and curatorial authority, and to do so with humor.Machete’s mission was similarly inclusive. As Avi Alpert, a University of Pennsylvania doctoral candidate and frequent Machete collaborator, explained in an email, its contributors “often wrote collectively, anonymously, or with pseudonyms,” producing “nearly fictional pieces,” “lists of theses,” and similarly experimental forms alongside more traditional critical work. Theirs is, ostensibly, a performative approach to criticism. A way of “inhabiting the world as a critical subject” also found social form with the Machete Group’s monthly public seminar, co-founded by Yokoyama, Dempewolf, and Alexi Kukuljevic, and attended by philosophers, critics, and other creative practitioners who also ran the event. Discussions addressed topics such as appropriation, “The ‘End’ of Art,” and its politics. “We would pre-circulate texts,” recalls Alpert, “then two of us would give mini-presentations, which acted as ‘prisms’ that refracted the text into a series of interventions and concerns. This was central to our understanding of public pedagogy as a process of learning together … to create a space in which we could collectively think together.” The results fed back into Machete’s content. Later, the group joined the Occupy Philly movement, holding similarly political conversations at Dilworth Plaza opposite City Hall.The St. Claire, which began as a digital forum for free exchange between critics and artists organized by a group of Tyler School of Art graduates, quickly expanded into in-person gatherings that engaged the magazine’s published material. As Kalasky explained, realizing a goal of free creative and discursive exchange requires “an expanded range of engagement beyond journalism.” Increasing Philadelphia’s art-minded readership, for example, the organization “would first have to nurture and coalesce the larger art community from which it draws.” Event series such as Show-and-Share, Local Instruction (2013), and this year’s Night Course have provided multiple forums for these social goals and demonstrate the enriching reciprocity that can exist between print and live event. In the right environment, the events proposed by Philadelphia’s artist-led magazines surpass their established use-value of professional network-building. Instead, they become conducive to a kind of friendship.In “Giving it Away,” Stockton-Moore notes that such “lofty goals” are, of course, not always met: “Inequitable divisions of labor and interpersonal politics can (and do) temporarily sour working relationships …. Those sacrifices can breed tension if left unchecked.” Yet the possibility of “tension” may be worth the productive potential of such community-driven structure—and not only in Philadelphia. “When friends connect, it’s not to gain value for the individual, but rather to strengthen and invigorate the community as a whole,” Kalasky writes in an email. His description of this social capital-driven model might apply equally to any city. “Granted, friendships take time, patience, generosity, and unquestioning love, while ‘network’ connections are quick, easy, and efficient … but strong communities are how art scenes survive and thrive.”

Originally published at ICA.

“Would you like to draw?”It’s noon on a bright spring Saturday. Ingrid is wearing a black-and-white puppy Cerberus t-shirt with a short navy blue artist’s apron over her jeans. Zippy with excitement, she stands in ICA’s lobby welcoming every visitor.“This is drawing-all-over ICA day!” she explains. “We’ve got a still life set up on the ramp, we’re sketching art in Ruffneck Constructivists and drawing with light in the auditorium.”Organized by artist Beverly Semmes, this ICA@50 program is a response to the ICA exhibition Drawings: The Pluralist Decade (1980), which also represented the United States at the 1980 Venice Biennale. Performance artists Vito Acconci and Laurie Anderson were in the show, alongside Christo and dancer/choreographer Trisha Brown. In keeping with this variety, Life Drawing Studio is an expansive day of (almost) anything-goes drawing. The sole rules: pencils only, and don’t lean on the walls. It’s still early, but already a group of three generations of women are crowding through the door. Grace hands them large plywood drawing boards, pencils and graphite sticks in a range of softnesses, brightly colored pencil sharpeners, and brown paper bags for capturing shavings and stray bits of eraser. Beverly sets them to drawing Kendell Geers’s glass and steel sculpture, Stripped Bare, in the exhibition Ruffneck Constructivists in the first floor gallery. A teenage girl with long, glossy black hair holds her drawing board against her waist as she traces the lines of the shattered glass in green and blue pencil.Semmes, who had her first museum solo show at ICA and has taught college-level drawing for years, is costumed for visibility in a dress designed by artist Ann Agee. She has invited four artists to act as roving instructors alongside her: Anthony Campuzano, Jeffrey Gibson, Rune Olsen, and Sheila Pepe. All wear calf-length blue aprons—”so that they know who we are,“ explains Beverly.Our models, Kendra Greaves and Lynn Lunney, are true performers. Athletic, they work at the Philadelphia School of Circus Arts, and have brought with them an array of brightly patterned clothes—flowery 1950s-style dresses in bright red and electric blue; yellow-and-orange harem pants—allowing for costume changes throughout the day.Rune sets up his activity—drawing with light—in the darkened auditorium, his iPhone clipped to a tripod. Inspired by Picasso’s drawings made with light on a long-exposure film that were published in LIFE Magazine in 1949, Rune offers people a handheld nightlight to “draw” with. As a draw-er makes fleeting shapes in light by moving around in front of the iPhone’s camera, the app LongExpo captures the intertwined glowing pathways as a still image.Next, in the dimly lit auditorium, Kendra and Lynn perform short acrobatic poses. People sit in a circle around them, focused, requesting encores of the most interesting positions.“How about trying something more intertwined, so we can’t tell which body parts belong to which model?” Rune proposes.That’s a real drawing challenge. It forces you to pay exacting attention to the relationships between angles and curves instead of merely approximating “leg” or “torso”-type shapes. Jeffrey’s drawings expertly combine thick and thin, fast and slow marks, which animate the bodies on the page.After a picnic lunch of falafel, hummus, pickled red cabbage, and grape leaves for all, we are refreshed and ready to start drawing again on ICA’s terrace. The models are in everyday costume now, the draw-ers seated on benches. Kendra wears brown boots and a grey hoodie, a blue gingham bow in her hair. She looks serious, grounded. I’m amazed she can keep so still.Beverly is instructing us in the surrealist game of Exquisite Corpse drawing. First you concertina a piece of paper into multiple horizontal sections. Then you draw the top section (i.e., the model’s head) and fold it back so that it’s hidden from view. Then you pass the paper to your neighbor, who draws the next section (the torso) without looking at what you drew. They then fold their contribution back and pass the paper on. And so on.“Can someone do the last quarter of my drawing?” Beverly asks.A twenty-something Penn student obliges.“I got to the bottom and there wasn’t really room for legs,” Ingrid laughs. She holds up an Exquisite Corpse drawing of Lynn, who—thanks to our Chief Curator’s imagination—appears to stand in a geometrical flower pot. The drawing reminds me of three-time ICA exhibitor Louise Bourgeois’s Femme Maison (Woman House) series of paintings and etchings.Throughout the day, I take iPhone snaps of all kinds of drawings for a virtual pinup on ICA’s Instagram feed, including: a carefully contoured profile of one of the models; a bold portrait of William’s dog Francie by Sarah McEneaney; and an angular architectural study of the museum itself. While photographing some gorgeous, rapid-fire sketches of the two models intertwined, I ask their creator if she is an artist.“Kind of,” she says shyly.Her friend squeezes her arm. “Of course you are.”“I’m a beginner artist,” she concedes. “I’m taking life drawing classes at Fleisher Art Memorial in South Philly—my instructor there let us know about this drawing day.”She and her friend stay all day, until the last visitors straggle away and Grace collects their drawing boards.“When’s the next drawing day?” someone asks.”Give it another fifty years,” Ingrid laughs.I vote sooner.—View the virtual pinup, read more about Life Drawing Studio, and find out about upcoming ICA@50 programs.

“She is me, I am her” is the refrain of Riot Grrrl band Bikini Kill’s “Alien She,” performed raw and off-tempo by Kathleen Hanna on the 1993 album Pussy Whipped. Borrowing this song’s title, the first exhibition to work through Riot Grrrl’s legacy is curated by Astria Suparak and Ceci Moss, who came of age in Los Angeles and the Bay Area (respectively) during the punk feminist movement’s 90s heyday. In the exhibition text, Suparak and Moss explain that Bikini Kill’s anti-anthem treads an “uneasy line between feminist critique and collectivity,” a description that applies equally to this show. Alien She kicked off in 2013 at Carnegie Mellon University’s Miller Gallery and will travel to San Francisco, Newport Beach, CA, and Portland, OR, through 2015; Vox Populi’s more than 25-year history of collective organization makes it an ideal space to host the show’s Philadelphia iteration [March 7–April 27, 2014].In the gallery’s reception area, hundreds of photocopied zines, posters, and distribution catalogues dated 1991–2013 sit neatly on tall plywood shelves and inside wide vitrines. The materials are on loan from individuals or from the Riot Grrrl Collection, held at New York University’s Fales Library—also home to Hanna’s personal papers. Perspex sheets protect such DIY publications as Blockhead, Chainsaw, and Catalyst, making their covers visible, but also preventing visitors from leafing through them. In this way, the presentation celebrates the movement’s prolific production and strong distribution networks, while highlighting the problematic nature of preserving a living, growing, and ephemeral archive by taking these documents out of circulation.Each of Vox Populi’s divided gallery spaces contains a solo micro-exhibition by an artist informed by Riot Grrrl. Activist, filmmaker, and curator Faythe Levine’s segment features publications and production shots from two projects documenting the resurgence of handmade practices—such as knitting or sign painting—and considers their value. Tammy Rae Carland’s photographic series, Archive of Feelings (2008) includes grids of mixtapes, postcards, and playlists; among its featured works is Vaguely Dedicated (2008) a grid of feminist book dedications that identify and emotionally connect a diverse community of women, from mothers to “the oppressed.” The photographs propose an approach to Alien She’s archive as a chronicle of precisely those connections.The exhibition avoids cozy nostalgia, despite such inclusions as Miranda July’s Love Diamond (1998–2000), in which the artist’s lo-fi performance simulates drowning in an ocean of blue light, or an MP3 of Ginger Brooks Takahashi’s band, The Ballet, performing the synthy, upbeat I Hate The War (2006). Instead, Alien She questions the commodification and institutionalization of radicalism. For example, Stephanie Syjuco’s The Counterfeit Crochet Project (Critique of a Political Economy) (2006–ongoing), consisting of knitted knockoffs of Chanel bags and Burberry scarves, is shown alongside rows of bootlegged album covers and, on two walls, black-and-white printed posters that present tear-off hyperlinks to PDFs of canonical texts on art and public life. By including the latter piece—titled FREE TEXTS (2011–2012, updated 2013)—Syjuco juxtaposes aesthetic and political theory with brightly colored high fashion and pop music references. In this context, FREE TEXTS provides a useful, if transgressive, distribution service, but also a critique of elite consumerism compelled by the writings of academic and art world “celebrity” theorists, from Deleuze and Guattari to Brad Troemel.In addition to its ambitious mix of artists, archival materials, collaborative platforms, and contributions from regional music curators out of California, Brazil, Belgium, and elsewhere, Alien She has a generous programmatic reach, including a zine-making class, a self-defense workshop, panel discussions, and burlesque and karaoke performances taking place around Philadelphia. The show’s digital component includes free, downloadable resources on feminism and race at bit.ly/AlienShe as well as a map-in-progress charting current Riot Grrrl chapters at bit.ly/RGmap. Through this broad focus on community, channeled and multiplied through a diversity of accessible communicative media, Alien She asserts that Riot Grrrl’s power is very much in the present.ART PAPERS, May/June 2014

In Lines: A Brief History (2007), anthropologist Tim Ingold observes, “What is a thing, or indeed a person, if not a tying together of the lines—the paths of growth and movement—of all the many constituents gathered there?” Sarah Sze’s first solo exhibition in Philadelphia materializes just these sorts of ephemeral, linear traces throughout the Fabric Workshop and Museum’s three floors of gallery space.

The show is the culmination of a non-traditional residency, in which the artist collaborated with the Fabric Workshop’s preparators mainly remotely from her New York studio. On the first floor, two near-equally sized rooms—the reception and a cozy gallery space—are related asymmetrically. The reception, co-opted by Sze, contains only the museum’s front desk and a few appropriate objects—green plants, a telephone, a cup; the gallery installation centers on a porous, desk-like structure made of sticks of thick, roughly soldered wire. Linearity is this installation’s formal priority. Next to a loose weaving of thick, cream colored wool, luminous lilac-blue thread winds around the wire, pulls down and along the floor, and wraps around a small rock, tracing its contours; coils of electricity cables match the gentle curves of thin, metallic light fixtures.

Speaking about her Random Walk Drawings (2011) series in Sculpture (September 2012), Sze comments, “All of it had to do with the idea of an extended line that goes through something invisible—from the interior of the museum to the outside.” Developing this sensibility, several of the Fabric Workshop objects signal connections between the museum and elsewhere. For example, on both desks are blue-and-white, used Amtrak coffee cups—metonyms for the railway line between New York and Philadelphia, and metaphors for the creative back-and-forth between Sze and the museum’s preparators.

Due to the building’s structure and the works’ fragility, a guide leads visitors on an elevator tour through the exhibition from the first to the third floor. This increases awareness of one’s own movement producing an experience of narrative progression and growth, as certain objects and images reappear throughout. Passing through the second floor gallery, which has been transformed into a landscape of massive paper boulders, one can imagine the first floor’s lilac-blue thread traveling up the walls and delineating these meticulously constructed, rounded forms.

If the first floor installation focuses tightly on the contents of a room and the second expands to a panorama, the final installation zooms out further, to include the world. It comprises lines and surfaces of global significance, represented by altered New York Times front pages laid flat on the floor and covered with strategically placed mounds of elemental and artistic materials, such as white sugar, grey stone, brown cloth, and blue paint. The broadsheets cluster at the right hand side of the gallery and then fan out across the space; skeins of orange and black cables, connected to slim lamps, trace pathways between the pages that might—like the Random Walk Drawings—exceed the gallery’s limits. This layout suggests chains of events, headlines happening one after another, and indicates that the studio, the workshop, and the museum are inextricably bound to what unfolds outside of their walls.