Monday, September 30, 2013

First Friday

Please note: Don't miss Rebecca's important post below about class tomorrow, October 1st

Image for Lewis Colburn's The Noble Amateur show, opening this Friday at the NAPOLEON gallery

As some of you are probably aware, many cities including Philadelphia have "First Fridays", where on the first Friday night of each month, a variety of different galleries and other artist spaces open their doors for visitors. Since this Friday is the first Friday in October, I thought I'd give you guys a heads up if you're interested in checking out a bit of the art scene in Philly. I always find seeing fresh and exciting artwork to be inspiring. This is also a good time to familiarize yourself with some of the local artists and to make some connections.

The focal point of First Fridays can be found between Front and Third, and Market and Vine Streets. There are bunches of galleries in this area, but I find the art to be hit or miss, and the streets are swamped with people and vendors. 

Personally, my favorite First Friday spot is the Vox Populi building, located at 319 N 11th Street. The building houses a few different artist-run studio and exhibition spaces; galleries include the Vox Populi, NAPOLEON, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Marginal Utility, Practice, and Grizzly Grizzly.

NAPOLEON
Tiger Strikes Asteroid
Marginal Utility
Vox Populi

There are also two fancy commercial galleries (more like some of the galleries you may have visited in Chelsea) around Washington Square that are usually worth checking out. 

Bridgette Mayer
Locks Gallery

And a little bit more information about some of the shows and other places to see art in Philly:
http://www.philebrity.com/firstfriday/
(note that not everywhere participates in First Fridays; for example, Crane Arts does Second Thursdays instead)

I hope everyone's weekend went well and that you have some good presentations ready for us tomorrow! We'll meet you in front of Anderson (see Rebecca's post, below). 

IFA Student Template

Just in case you missed the lecture by Lori about how to use the Student Template...  

Remember-- you have to do this before the semester ends!


Sunday, September 29, 2013

Tuesday

Hi All,

Tuesday we will meet in the Front of Anderson (outside--unless raining) at 1 p.m.  Aaron and I will take attendance, and then we will be going to the Philadelphia Historical Society.  You will not need all your materials--only your sketchbook.

We will have a break upon returning.  After which, we will begin your presentations.  Make sure to test them before Tuesday!!!

Look forward to seeing you all!

R

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

From the NYT



April 29, 2012

Turkish Writer Opens Museum Based on Novel

Orhan Pamuk, center, whose novel “The Museum of Innocence” led to the museum, which opened on Saturday in Istanbul.More Photos »

ISTANBUL — The first thing you see are the cigarette butts. There are thousands of them — 4,213 to be exact — mounted behind plexiglass on the ground floor of the Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk’s new museum, named for and based on his 2008 novel, “The Museum of Innocence.”
It’s a fittingly strange beginning to a tour of this quirky museum, tucked away in a 19th-century house on a quiet street in the Cukurcuma neighborhood, among junk shops that sell old brass, worn rugs and other bric-a-brac.
But it is also, like everything else on the museum’s four floors, a specific reference to the novel — each cigarette has supposedly been touched by Fusun, the object of the narrator’s obsessive love — and, by extension, an evocation of the bygone world in which the book is set.
The Museum of Innocence” is about Istanbul’s upper class beginning in the 1970s, a time when Mr. Pamuk was growing up in the elite Nisantasi district. He describes the novel as a love story set in the melancholic back streets of that neighborhood and other parts of the European side of the city. But more broadly it is a chronicle of the efforts of haute-bourgeois Istanbulis to define themselves by Western values, a pursuit that continues today as Turkey as a whole takes a more Islamic turn. Although Mr. Pamuk said the book explores the “pretensions” of upper-class Turks, who “in spite of their pro-Western attitudes are highly conservative,” it is hard not to the see the bricks-and-mortar Museum of Innocence as largely an act of nostalgic appreciation.
Mr. Pamuk, 59, is Turkey’s best-known writer, albeit a divisive one thanks to his Western orientation. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006, around the time he was being tried and acquitted for making “un-Turkish” pronouncements about the Armenian genocide. In person he gives off an aura of the kind of elitism that can come with a privileged upbringing and a successful literary career.
As the museum was preparing to open late last week, with workmen hauling around ladders and a staff member stocking the gift-shop shelves with Mr. Pamuk’s books, the author himself was going full tilt, giving orders and making last-minute tweaks as he walked a reporter through the displays.
He said the museum cost him about what he received for the Nobel — roughly $1.5 million — including what he paid for the house 12 years ago, when he had the idea for the project. Then there is the amount of time he has devoted to it on and off over the past dozen years: by his estimate about half a book’s worth, a lot considering that his novels tend to run to 500 pages or more.
The museum’s displays are organized according to the story line of “The Museum of Innocence,” which opens as a wealthy, self-centered young man is making love with Fusun, a distant relative and store clerk he has met while shopping for his soon-to-be fiancée.
“And as I softly bit her ear, her earring must have come free and, for all we knew, hovered in midair before falling of its own accord,” an opening line reads. Mr. Pamuk paused in front of the first of 83 display cases — there is one for each chapter of the book — and pointed to a single earring. Then he moved along to other vitrines, talking about how items were chosen and how a few displays were still works in progress even after all these years of preparation.
“As far as I know this is the first museum based on a novel,” he said. “But it’s not that I wrote a novel that turned out to be successful and then I thought of a museum. No, I conceived the novel and the museum together.”
While writing the book he collected more than a thousand artifacts that reflect the story, from a tricycle to dozens of ceramic dogs, from lottery tickets to news clippings of women with black lines drawn across their eyes (once standard in Turkish newspaper coverage of women connected to scandal).
Mr. Pamuk’s protagonist and narrator, Kemal Basmaci, becomes more and more obsessed with Fusun as other aspects of his life fall apart, and eventually he begins collecting things — and stealing them from Fusun’s home — in what will ultimately become his life’s work: the building of a museum in tribute to his onetime lover. For a time Mr. Pamuk became Kemal, looking for pieces that reflected each chapter as he wrote it, searching the junk shops of Istanbul and other parts of the world. The collection he assembled reflected not only the plot of “The Museum of Innocence,” but also Istanbul during Turkey’s halting movement into the modern era.
“We remembered how the Istanbul bourgeoisie had trampled over one another to be the first to own a electric shaver, a can opener, a carving knife, and any number of strange and frightening inventions, lacerating their hands and faces as they struggled to learn how to use them,” Kemal says in the book.
Such items too are in the museum, along with old clocks, film clips, soda bottles and clothes of the era.
At the top of the house Mr. Pamuk sat down on a bench in front of the bed where Kemal is meant to have slept in the last years of his life as he assembled the museum. It was lonely-looking piece of furniture.
The Museum of Innocence opened to a small crowd on Saturday morning, after a packed news conference on Friday at one of Istanbul’s fanciest restaurants. Most of the visitors seemed to be fans of the book who wanted to match their vision with Mr. Pamuk’s. There was Latife Koker, who had traveled an hour and a half by bus that morning; Renata Lapanja, who lives in Slovenia; and Erdogan Solmaz, who, like Mr. Pamuk in his youth, is an architecture student at a university in Istanbul. He said Mr. Pamuk’s efforts had made this collection starkly different from others in the city, which has some of the finest museums in the world.
“This one is about people,” Mr. Solmaz said. “This is much more personal and dramatic.”
Personal, yes, but only to a point, Mr. Pamuk said. “This is not Orhan Pamuk’s museum,” he said. “Very little of me is here, and if it is, it’s hidden. It’s like fiction.” In his view both the book and the museum are largely about sadness, and in particular the “melancholy of the period.”

Monday, September 23, 2013

tomorrow

Tomorrow, we will meet in the classroom at 1 p.m.

After attendance, we will go to CBS for a Library presentation, followed by an e-portfolio presentation.

You will want to bring your notebook/sketchbook.

Sunday, September 22, 2013

Citywide//Philadelphia

From the UArts site:


More than 25 artist-run collectives collaborate to present a celebration of Philadelphia contemporary art this November

September 20, 2013
This November, more than 25 artist-run collectives will join forces to present a month-long celebration of Philadelphia contemporary art with CITYWIDE, a “massive collaboration” that will include a publication and feature performances, panel discussions, gallery openings and other programming in a variety of venues across the city. A Kickstarter campaign is underway through October 6 to help raise funds for this cross-collaborative event.
The University of the Arts, at the heart of Philly’s artist collective culture, is well represented at CITYWIDE, with a long list of alumni, faculty and staff whose work will be showcased during the exhibition. Participating UArts community members include Senior Lecturer and Academic AdvisorJordan Rockford BFA '00 (Photography), Craft & Material Studies Senior Lecturer Christina P. Day BFA '99 (Crafts), MFA in Studio Art Lecturer H. John Thompson MFA ’09 (Studio Art), Print Services staff member Jason Chen BFA '08 (Animation), Photography and MFA in Book Arts/Printmaking Senior Lecturer Julianna Foster MFA '06 (Book Arts/Printmaking)Sara McCorriston BFA '09 (Theater Design & Technology)Mary Smull BFA '95 (Fibers), Sculpture Shop Supervisor Lewis Colburn, Assistant Professor of Glass Alexander Rosenberg, Interdisciplinary Fine Arts Lecturer Erica Prince and Interdisciplinary Fine Arts Senior LecturerDaniel Gerwin.
These artists are members of the 25-plus participating collectives that includes Vox Populi, Space 1026, Little Berlin, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Grizzly Grizzly, Marginal Utility, NAPOLEON, Fjord, Mt. Airy Contemporary Artists Space, Rebekah Templeton, Highwire Gallery, Basekamp, McCartney/Belknap Projects, Practice, Traction Company, InLiquid, Paradigm Gallery, Magic Pictures, Termite TV Collective, the Soapbox, Title Magazine, the Nicola Midnight St. Claire, Pterodactyl, Art/ Assembly, BYO Print and the OOF Animation Collective.
CITYWIDE is the recipient of a 2013 Knight Arts Challenge Grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
“Philadelphia artists are dedicated community-builders. We pool our resources and volunteer our time to create gallery spaces, to make sure the art we're seeing and are moved by can be seen by anyone,” said Grizzly Grizzly artist curatorial member and former UArts lecturer Mary Smull. “CITYWIDE is possible because our audience has really responded and grown, and the Knight Foundation sees that and wants to support it.”
IMPORTANT DATES
Sunday, October 6
Kickstarter campaign ends
First Friday, November 1
CITYWIDE exhibit openings commence and continue through the first two weeks of November
Wednesday, November 13, 11:30 a.m.
CBS Auditorium
Nicola Trezzi Lecture: the U.S. editor for Flash Art will speak in conjunction with CITYWIDE
Wednesday, November 13, 6:30 – 8:30 p.m.
Moore College of Art & Design

CITYWIDE Panel Discussion on artist-run spaces, moderated by Richard Torchia and including Matthew Higgs, Kaytie Johnson, Nicola Trezzi and others
Saturday, November 16, 2 – 5 p.m.
CITYWIDE Trolley Day: shuttle bus service between all participating sites

Saturday, September 21, 2013

Tuesday

Make sure to bring your research archive on Tuesday

Sunday, September 15, 2013

Reading Questions for Paul Ricoeur's "Archives, Documents, Traces" and Ilya Kabakov's "The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away"

Be prepared to discuss both articles and to hand in answers to the following questions in class on September 24th. You should meet with your designated group members before class to go over the questions.

1. Briefly sum up the way that author Paul Ricoeur defines and describes the terms "archive" and "document" in "Archives, Documents, Traces". 

2. Aside from the "institutional character of archives", what differentiates an archive from a random grouping of stuff? 

3. What is the critique of archives, documents, and monuments that is brought up multiple times throughout the article? 

4. Look up the terms etymology, epistemology, phenomenology, historiography, and positivism if you are unfamiliar with them. What does the inclusion of these terms tell you about the author and his intended reader? 

5. In "The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away", what reason or reasons are suggested for people's decisions to keep or collect things? Do you agree with the reasons given in the article or are there other reasons that you can think of? 

6. Briefly compare and contrast the ideas of the archive, the document and the trace in the two articles. 




You can email me at akather@uarts.edu if you're having any problems or have concerns. Your reading groups should be accessible through digication, but I'll repost them here for conveniency's sake:

Reading Group 1 
Taylor 
Haley 
Sam 
Dylan 

Reading Group 2 
Cassandra 
Kristie 
Peter 
Alyssa 

Reading Group 3 
Olivia 
Ming 
Megan 
Evan 

Sunday, September 8, 2013

James Turrell on Art21

Hyperallergic/Famous Artists Asked to Draw a Map of the US from Memory

PHOTO ESSAYS

Famous Artists Asked to Draw a Map of the US from Memory


VAR-1 From Memory- Takahashi Hisachika version 2


Takahashi Hisachika illustrates the concept of his From Memory project (all images courtesy Sean Kelly gallery)
Jorge Luis Borges’ well-known short story “On Exactitude in Science” describes a faded Empire in which a Cartographer’s Guild had attained such fidelity in their trade that tattered maps were perfectly superimposed upon the mouldering ruin of the land itself. An exhibition opening September 13 at Sean Kelly gallery imagines the inverse, pairing memory and cartography to explore the abstractions produced when mental and physical space are entwined. The show, titled From Memory, presents a 1971–1972 project by Takahashi Hisachika in which the Japanese artist, then living in New York, asked 22 of his peers to draw the United States from memory.
That group included a number of significant participants, including Jasper Johns, Joseph Kosuth, Robert Rauschenberg, and Gordon Matta-Clark. Each respondent imbued their drawing with the kinks of their memory and the idiosyncrasies of their aesthetic expression, each map a depiction of physical territory as mediated by an indelible and highly personal process of knowing and remembering.
VAR-1 From Memory- Twombly Cy
Cy Twombly
VAR-1 From Memory- Rosenquist James recto
James Rosenquist (recto)
VAR-1 From Memory- Rockburne Dorothea
Dorothea Rockburne
VAR-1 From Memory- Rauschenberg Robert
Robert Rauschenberg
VAR-1 From Memory- Matta-Clark Gordon
Gordon Matta-Clark
VAR-1 From Memory- Bochner Mel edited
Mel Bochner
VAR-1 From Memory- Kosuth Joseph edited
Joseph Kosuth
From Memory is on view at Sean Kelly gallery (475 Tenth Avenue, Chelsea, Manhattan) from September 13 through October 19, with an opening reception on September 12 from 6–8pm.

Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Artists/Project 1



PROJECT 1 // ARTISTS

Laylah Ali
Bernd and Hilla Becher
Christian Boltanski
Gordon Matta Clark
Tacita Dean
Mark Dion
Ellen Gallagher
Robert Gober
Thomas Hirshhorn
Ilya Kabakov
Anslem Kiefer
Glenn Ligon
Gerhard Richter
Thomas Ruff
Robert Smithson
Luc Tuymans
Andy Warhol
Kara Walker
Kehinde Wiley

Fred Wilson

Sunday, September 1, 2013

ROB SWAINSTON @ MARGINAL UTILITY

ROB SWAINSTON: WOODCUT MAP OF UTOPIA FROM THE SEPTEMBER 2013 EDITION

6 September – 20 October 2013
Cover_Woodcut_Utopia_Swainston.
Opening reception Friday, 6 September 2013, from 6 – 11 pm
Artist reception Friday, 4 October 2013, from 6-11 pm
Marginal Utility is proud to present WOODCUT MAP OF UTOPIA FROM THE SEPTEMBER 2013 EDITION, a solo exhibition by the New York based artist Rob Swainston.
The show explores the interface between political and institutional structures, historical memory and print technology by exposing the “unstable image” in moments of visual interference—moiré, bitmap, collage, and line.
The exhibition draws its title from an illustration heading in a mass-market edition of Renaissance humanist Thomas More’s Utopia, picked up for free at New Harmony Vegetarian in Philly’s Chinatown, several years ago.
The illustration, Woodcut Map of Utopia From the March 1518 edition, is now out-of-copyright and displayed in cheap reproduction on self-destructing paper. This mass-market paperback is a shadow of a reminder that once people could write a book describing an idealized society via a fictionalized conversation between two people that did actually exist.
While print technologies were once cutting-edge methods of disseminating representations (maps, fine art reproductions), or political machination (treatises, manifestos, proclamations, or representations of historical events), we now have the fragmented and democratized pixel.
Swainston’s Woodcut Map addresses the dismantling of the printed image. The theme is explored in multiple forms in which different print media masquerade as each other; the line between print, video and painting is blurred; cast iron poses as wood; and a deconstruction of Léon Frédéric’s Four Seasons is translated as an inscrutable color explosion, matching our current state of “global weirding,” to Frédéric’s 1894 Academic idealism.
Swainston’s recent work employs print-based installation, video, and works on paper to explore print technology, the meaning of the image and ultimately the fragmentation and disappearance of the image.