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Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts Matter of Time
Notating Time One of our most cherished cultural myths is the act of artistic creation, wherein a heroic male figure sequesters himself in a studio, eventually emerging with a masterwork. In truth, very little art is produced in isolation. Just as the filmmaker, playwright, choreographer, architect, and actor are dependent on working with others, so too most sculptors, printmakers, and video artists rely on the assistance of others to realize their vision. There have been many times in the history of art when artists have pooled their talents. To cite one early example, the fifteenth-century Flemish painter Jan van Eyck worked in concert with his brother Hubert. The romantic notion of art as a solitary pursuit, prevalent in the last century, has been periodically rejected in our own. The Mexican mural movement of the 1930s often involved imagery determined by group decisions and enacted by a multitude of hands. The contemporaneous surrealist movement also countered the myth of individual creation with such games as The Exquisite Corpse, in which a string of people each contributed to a drawing without seeing the work of their predecessors. Within the past decade, an increasing number of artists have teamed their talents to work together. Such names as Gilbert and George, Group Material, Todt, Tim Rollins and K.O.S., McDermott and McGlough, Joan Wallace and Geralyn Donohue, and the Starn Twins have been a visible presence in the New York art world. The common denominator among these diverse sets is their mutually agreed upon goal to work together. To explore the possibility of a joint project in which the component teams had never previously worked together, the Pennsylvania Academy commissioned a major collaborative installation, which to the best of our knowledge has never before been initiated by an institution. In January 1988 twelve Philadelphia artists were invited to meet together over a period of months to choose a theme and to discuss the potential for creating new works in collaboration with each other. The group represented a wide cross section of the Philadelphia art community: while some had achieved national recognition, others had never exhibited in a museum before; although several were born and raised here, others had settled in the city as adults. In the previous decade, none had shown in the Morris Gallery. Seven had already worked regularly with partners: video artist Connie Coleman with her husband, Alan Powell; sculptor Donald Waisnis with his brother Edward Waisnis, a painter; and video artist Cheryl Gelover with her former Tyler schoolmates Thomas Murray and Mitchell Smith. Filmmaker and performance artist Peter Rose had hoped to work with dancer and choreographer Steven Krieckhaus, but had not yet had the opportunity. Chosen by the Morris Gallery Committee, the disparate group also included sculptor Steven Beyer, photographer Eileen Neff, and folk artist Ralfka Gonzalez. Within two months, the group chose a working theme -- "Matter of Time." The prospect of one collective project was discussed and rejected in favor of smaller aggregates related to the theme of time. Four months later, the collaborative process was evident in both expected and surprising manifestations. For example, the Waisnis brothers shot footage that is part of Gelover, Murray, and Smith's video presentation, and in turn the trio, who are also musicians, contributed to the sound track for the brothers' video component. Although all of the commissioned artworks are site specific -- created especially for the Academy galleries -- an unexpected dimension to the project came from the artists' desire to "collaborate" with the Academy itself: Rose and Krieckhaus and Eileen Neff have devised installations that utilize specific paintings in the permanent collection. Ralfka Gonzalez, a folk artist who moved to Philadelphia from southern Texas five years ago, developed his contribution, Armageddon Times, from readings on religious concepts of the end of time. Already familiar with the visual traditions of Mexican popular art, he researched medieval scenes of the Apocalypse and pre-Columbian codices and wall paintings. Gonzalez's cardboard and plywood installation depicts such eschatological images as the seven trumpet-playing angels described in the Book of Revelation, the Aztec dog traditionally depicted at Hell's doorway, and a multitude of energetic skeletons. He also includes newspaper references to catastrophic current events such as famines, earthquakes, and Star Wars. Other elements of his imagery include the biblical seven virtues and vices, the archangel battling a seven-headed dragon, and two snakes configured into the numeral eight, alluding to the current year and to double infinity. Gonzalez, who has been painting for eight years, has never before worked on such an ambitious scale. For him, the collaborative process "influenced my life and the way I interpreted the subject. This was also true for Alan Powell and Connie Coleman, who have been working as a team for ten years. Their project, Gone Swimming, took shape in direct response to the ideas and energy of their collaborators, particularly Gonzalez and the Waisnis brothers. Electing to create a "playful, summer video," they designed Gone Swimming as a floor piece that would easily co-exist with the neighboring wall components of Matter of Time. In this work Coleman and Powell align themselves within the venerable genre of landscape painting, regarding their contribution as "a high-tech equivalent of the Hudson River School." Upended monitors embedded in an S-shaped simulation of a stratified riverbed constitute a continuously flowing stream, refreshing viewers with an audible babble and an everchanging video collage of aqueous images. To the duo, water represents renewal and the irrepressible life force. Shots of the artists swimming as well as glimpses of a stream littered with trash remind us of the intervening presence of humans in nature. Because water has been an abiding image in their work for ten years, it has a specific temporal reference for the artists. In segments of their tapes they enjoy slowing down time, isolating moments of the straightforward camera shots through post-production processing. Selected images shot through a wide-angle lens contribute to the buoyant humor in Gone Swimming. A delightful sense of fun also pervades Gelover, Murray, and Smith's Buying Time, a video installation documenting our society's obsession with coin-operated consumption. Three monitors continuously screening three separate tapes are enclosed within black boxes that themselves resemble coin-fueled devices. Their video images, both straight and manipulated, survey the astonishing array of products and services obtainable via vending machines, including air and water (from gas stations), kiddy rides, juke boxes, video games, porno shows, and an electric eternal flame, available in local churches. To the artists, Buying Time concerns "putting things off by turning things on; the two-sided coin of satisfaction /frustration that attempts to buy fulfillment and ultimately only succeeds in buying time." The video component at the core of Peter Rose and Steven Krieckhaus's project, nonsensically titled Foit Yet Cleem Triavith, is set within a selection of traditional and modern paintings from the Academy's collection. To Rose, the physical space of the Academy building had a "formative role" on his content, which consists in part of a "dialectic between the centuries." The three monitors show the same tape, running continuously, but not at synchronized times. Rose electronically manipulates the movement of a text that begins "Once Upon a Time," permitting us to look behind it, catching glimpses of Krieckhaus performing kinetic variations of the poses in the paintings. Playing with artful appositions of written and visual language, Rose includes, for example, an image of a brick maze as well as a text segment referring to "the labyrinthian contours of an enigma." By using the first person plural "we" in the text, as in "we saw very quickly," Rose implicates himself and the audience in the process of looking. In the artists' view, their collaborative enterprise is about "the desire to embody time in an art-historical context through cross-gene rational juxtapositions of style, structure, and medium." In addition to his work with Rose, Steve Krieckhaus has developed Under Morris Field, a performance presented twice during the run of Matter of Time. He began work on this project by reading about time, allowing a variety of concepts, such as "duration" and "the moment," to suggest concrete ideas. The collaborative process has impacted on the nature of his performance: "While the work proceeds in the foreground of my mind, the presence of the others is assuredly there, in the background." Regarding the theme of his commissioned dance, he seeks "to echo and even engender what is timeless in human existence: the elemental movement of our consciousness within its own and the world's presence." While performer Steve Krieckhaus uses his own body as a reference to time, sculptor Steven Beyer uses effigies of the human baby to embody temporal metaphors. Beyer's pair of monumentally scaled infants are locked in time at the beginning of human development. Each sits on a pillow, covertly holding such objects as a rattle and a miniature skyscraper. Beyer purposely chose his materials -- polymer and cement, with bronze details -- to align them with the "funny virginal quality" of the marble sculptures on view in nearby galleries. The outsized male babies evoke images of both Jesus and Buddha, while making specific references to the writings of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. In Beyer's words, "the hide-and-seek gesture of the hands locates four objects at the openings of the gastrointestinal tract. From mouth to anus the continuous tube traverses the traditional Western boundary between Heaven and Earth." To Lacan, these organs are sites of emotion, places where the inside opens up to the outside. The disturbing elegance and probity of Beyer's babies set them far apart from the lighthearted, saccharine images of infants that proliferate in mass media. Eileen Neff's The Arrangement: Part I conveys a poetic narrative through component images of "Water, World and Window." A free-standing stage light illuminates a silkscreened plexiglas image of a swimmer floating on his back. His cast shadow falls on the waters of a moving globe, topped by a woman wearing a surrealistic clock dress. An adjacent gold frame angles out from the wall to catch the "symbolic light of the world." A nearby photograph of a window, shot from inside a room, holds the promise of real light, streaming in through the disheveled blinds. The piece is completed by a framed photo of a large expanse of ocean, a more realistic rendering of the vast seas represented by flat blue areas on the globe. To Neff, "the core of the piece is the World, moving back and forth in time. . . ." Neff collaborated with a work in the Academy's permanent collection in her piece The Delaware Valley by using the actual painting and a facsimile of it. Taking her cues from a nineteenth-century painting by Charles Knapp with the same title, she updated the earlier sylvan scene by superimposing an industrial landscape on top of the photographic copy. In For Philadelphia: A Decade in a Day, Donald and Edward Waisnis is have created "a full-blown production," melding sculpture, architecture, installation, painting, video, and music. For them, the last ten years represent a "pertinently graspable past . . . ripe for appropriation." Their contribution consists of three principal parts: a thirty-foot "centerpiece tower, festooned with objects of artistic origin, as well as debris fresh from the streets of Philadelphia"; a video monitor attached to the tower will show a "visual journal," including both found footage from the past decade and "an ominous vision about Philadelphia in 1988"; four large paintings which are at once "emblems of our times," and "very, very, very personal." These paintings on canvas over plywood vary in shape from tondo, hexagon, rectangle to square. Concerning their choice of the acrylic medium the artists note: "The paintings are about plastic -- acrylic is unforgiving; acrylic is appropriately suited to the '80s post-Modern syntax -- its deadness, alienation, and distinctly Modern chemical tactility." The brash imagery, ranging from a sixty-ish clenched fist in Charging Particles to the actress Billy Whitelaw in My, My, My, is energetically executed in a raw expressionist style. The Waisnises took what they regard as a "perverse" step in collaborating with a friend who is not an artist for the design and colors of the painting Dirty Dog. During the past ten years, the Morris Gallery has established itself as the premier exhibition venue for Philadelphia artists within our city. The media shown have ranged from painting, sculpture, prints, and drawings, to ceramics, fiber, photography, neon, and site-specific installations. With excitingly varied methods, the group brought together to create Matter of Time has succeeded in both honoring and extending the decade-long tradition of excellence and experimentation associated with the Morris Gallery. Their individual and group projects help illuminate the process of artmaking in the late twentieth century. One artist joked that such collaboration can easily break down into "clobber-ation" if individual egos become too assertive. Happily, such a tug of wills was not operative in this group. They functioned in concert, responding to our challenge to define a common theme and to work together on a group installation. If the results could not have been foreseen at the onset, it is because the creative process cannot be predetermined, and for this the Academy salutes the Matter of Time artists. Judith E. Stein *All quotations in the text are from the artists' written and
oral statements collected by Judith Stein during May 1988. Steven Beyer Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1951 Selected Exhibitions Selected Collections
Constance Elizabeth Coleman Alan Wayne Powell Selected Individual Exhibitions Selected Group Exhibitions
Thomas Murray Mitchell Smith Ralfka Valentin Gonzalez Selected Exhibitions Steve Krieckhaus Selected Exhibitions Eileen Neff Selected Exhibitions
Selected Individual Exhibitions Selected Group Exhibitions
Donald Waisnis Selected Exhibitions Edward Waisnis Selected Exhibitions
The Morris Gallery displays the work of outstanding contemporary artists with a connection to Philadelphia, determined by birth, schooling, or residence. The exhibitions are chosen by a committee composed of area artists, museum personnel, and collectors, and the curatorial staff of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Currently serving on the Morris Gallery Exhibition Committee are: Moe Brooker, Paolo Colombo, Bill Freeland, Faith Ginsburg, Carrie Rickey, Eileen Rosenau, Judith Tannenbaum; Academy staff Judith Stein, Morris Gallery Coordinator, Frank H. Goodyear, Jr., Linda Bantel, and Susan Danly. |