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In the face of encroaching disaster, I'd like to commend
you on your bravery, on your fortitude.
Thank you, Virgil.
And thank you for showing up and arriving and facing what
must most certainly be rain.
And wind.
I'm sure there will be a storm to follow.
I'm here this afternoon to welcome and
introduce Virgil Marti.
This was a task that I actually welcomed at the time.
As I consider Virgil to be one of the most unique
individuals I know.
There's all this stuff written on this paper that I should
probably mention before I get romantic.
What does it say here?
The vanguard of the new baroque is what they said in
Art Forum in 2005.
He's been critically reviewed in publications such as Art in
America, The New York Times, The Institute of Contemporary
Art in Philadelphia he had a show, Be It All in Montreal,
the Whitney Be it All.
Marti received his BFA from Washington University and his
MFA from Tyler.
He attended [? Sco Heden. ?]
He was a print coordinator at the Fabric
Workshop and Museum.
Oh, he's represented by Elizabeth Dee in New York.
There's more.
There's much more.
But Virgil will tell you about that.
I've known Virgil for 20 years.
Yeah, that's how old I am.
Of course, we were only 13 at the time.
We were very young.
We used to trade baseball cards.
The mystery, I think, one of the most intriguing and
mysterious aspects of Virgil's work was something that was
extremely difficult for me to grasp for a long time.
It was one of the things I think that sort of moves
fondly, and it sort of moves and compels most people.
And it's, I guess basically, I asked Virgil about it one time
when I was completely confounded and found myself at
a point in my development were I was at my wit's end trying
to figure out what to do.
And I had a brief discussion with Virgil about it, and he
said, Linus he said, just have fun.
I'm still working on it.
Virgil may offer some insight into that particular aspect of
his work and more.
I'll stop there.
Thank you.
And I welcome Virgil Marti.
OK.
I'm setting a timer here so that we can
try to stick to it.
Oh, and I want to [INAUDIBLE].
I have a lot of slides, but I'm going to go
through them quickly.
So don't panic.
So as Linus said, I've lived in Philadelphia
for 24 years now.
And right after graduate school, I started working at
the Fabric Workshop and Museum there.
I had studied painting, but I had become interested in
making wallpaper.
And that, for a number of years, was sort of the primary
media was making screen printed wallpapers that were
intended for installations.
And this is the first one that I did.
This is from originally 1991, 1992 called Bully Wallpaper.
And the thing that interested me about wallpapers was that I
could produce a material that, depending on the context where
I installed it, could take on different meanings.
So initially I made this wallpaper for a show.
And I was showing in a boiler room of an elementary school
in West Philadelphia that had been
converted to an art center.
So walking through the school, I was kind of flooded by all
these memories of adolescence.
And I had this idea to make a flock wallpaper.
They were quite popular for a while in the '60's and '70's
as a sort of a fake [INAUDIBLE] wallpaper.
But I didn't know it imagery-wise.
And being in the school and thinking about black light
posters that were popular when I was a kid and how they were
[? flocked, that idea sort of came together with the idea of
a flock wallpaper.
And I thought, oh, I'll use my year books, and I'll take an
existing 12 pattern and remove the cameos and replace them
with pictures of guys from my year book that
were mean to me.
So it was taking a formal idea and then some autobiographical
information and sort of forcing them together to come
up with this wallpaper that could then be installed in
different places.
This is at the Wexner Center at Ohio State University.
So initially it was installed in this odd boiler room
situation then in a more conventionally gallery space.
And I liked that initial installation.
It felt very hot because there was a boiler going.
And it was in a basement, so it was sort of hellish.
And then installing it in a proper gallery space, it sort
of cooled it down and turned it into sort of like a stained
glass chapel.
This is all florescent paints with a black light.
So it glows really intensely.
But I sort of like the way that the same material could
read differently in a different context.
And that is something that I continue to be interested in
is the context of a piece and the
architectural frame for a piece.
This is called Beer Can Library.
And it's a four color screen print reproduction of my beer
can collection from when I was a teenager.
And again, I started with a formal idea of the tradition
of tromp l'oil wallpapers where oftentimes
it would be a library.
Wallpaper that would look like shelves and books, and you put
it up, and it made it look like you
had a great big library.
But I was taking my collection of beer cans and applying that
to that idea.
And I sort of liked that this piece could sort of function
as a sort of removed self portrait in a way.
It wasn't really my beer can collection.
But it could have actually been any boy of my era's beer
can collection.
There was something sort of personal and generic about it
at the same time which is really interesting to me.
This is the entire print.
It goes on for 33 feet before it starts over.
And it's all alphabetized.
And it goes from domestic cans to European cans to oversized
cans, and then it repeats again.
This is a framed edition version of it.
And they are actual sized, the prints.
So I for a long time I had been working with these sort
of materials from the '70's which was the time of my
adolescence, sort of autobiographical material but
in sort of a veiled way.
This is a piece from 1995 called For Oscar Wilde.
Eventually I started kind of working with other narrators
than my own.
And this is installed in a place in Philadelphia called
Eastern State Penitentiary which is a Quaker reformed
model for prisons that was widely emulated in Europe, but
not so much in the US, based on complete solitary
confinement.
And 1995 was the 100th anniversary of Oscar Wilde's
trial and imprisonment.
So I wanted to make a piece that would sort
of commemorate this.
And in my research, I found out that the first prison
Wilde had been sent to was the first English prison modeled
after Eastern State Penitentiary.
So there was this nice sort of connection there.
My main interest in making this had to do with, some of
you probably visited Eastern State Penitentiary, it's one
of the top tourist attractions in Philly now.
But you walk in to this space, and it's sort of decaying, and
there is sort of this beautiful
poetic decay going on.
At the same time, it's this place of great sorrow.
And I was interested in what it was like to have this sort
of aesthetic response in a place that was
so emotionally loaded.
I couldn't relate to the aspect of incarceration.
So I felt like it was kind of hypocritical to make a piece
about what it's like to be in the slammer.
Instead I decided I would make a piece about what it's like
to have an aesthetic experience in
kind of an awful place.
Which has a nice kind of parallel to what Wilde went
through in terms of the ideas he preached about art being
above morality and then ending up in jail for just some of
those things.
The kind of irony of that was interesting to me.
So I installed this piece, and this is an installation where
I kind of conceived of it as a series of tableaus.
And you would have these different views as you move
through it.
And I've have an image here that outside of the prison
there was a field of sunflowers growing.
And I based the whole thing around the sunflower and the
lily, those flowers being the symbols of the atheistic
movement which Wilde was a champion of.
But I was also interested in his ideals of working with
privilege artificially over nature.
So going from real sunflowers to this field of lilies in a
cell block which turned out to be actually [? sub lilies ?]
so they are artificial.
And then you move into a cell that has a wallpaper sort of
Philip Morris style based on the sunflower and the lily
motifs which also are similar to the radial
design of the prison.
Another degree of removal from nature moving into
abstraction.
So that's what this piece was about.
Ever so often we have all these [INAUDIBLE]
in here because a big source of inspiration for me are
films and specific views of in films have been [INAUDIBLE].
They sort of go into the pieces I make, but it's not
necessarily for this appearance.
So what we've got here on the left is a [? scene ?] from
Fossbinder, The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant.
And this image of Petra who's by this point the [? film ?]
lost all her furniture and just has a house with ***
carpeting and a photo print mural of I think it's The ***
of the Sabines.
And then images on the right from a science fiction film,
Logan's Run.
And these images were sort of in my mind as I began to work
on this piece for the ICA in Philadelphia which
is called Hot Tub.
I used to collect a lot of home decorating
books from the '70's.
And I was really interested in trying to use some of the
ideas that have since fallen out of fashion.
And one of them was always like a mirrored room.
So this is a mirrored room with *** carpeting.
The ceiling and the floor are mirrors, and then the walls
have a screen printed photo print wallpaper.
So you would walk into the space, and it was only lit by
flicker flaring bulbs.
And it felt very unstable that you could walk in and sit down
in this sunken carpeted pit hot tub.
And I found what happened was people would go in here and
start talking about the house they grew up in.
It was sort of a place where people would start to remember
the decor that they had grown up with even if they didn't
live with it now.
So I'm sort of interested in taking things that are often
dismissed as being out of fashion and trying to get
people to kind of think about their real emotional
connection to those things.
Image on top from The Man Who Fell to Earth.
All of these films are like the mid '70's.
Nicolas Roeg wrote a film about an alien who is played
by David Bowie, and he's incarcerated in this apartment
in New York, it might be New York.
But there is this room that has astroturf and, again, a
photo print wallpaper of a forest, and there is a
chandelier and a ping pong table.
The bottom image is from Soylent Green.
This is sort of late in the film where it's about a
society where old people are euthanized
and turned into food.
Edward G. Robinson goes to be euthanized.
And so as he's falling asleep, they project images of nature,
and nature by this point has been completely despoiled.
And they are showing these images and playing Beethoven.
So these were the things that were in my head as I started
to work on an installation for the Pennsylvania
Academy of Fine Arts.
This is, I think, in 2001.
And I was interested in taking some of those ideas from those
films like artificial nature and thinking about the
tradition of scenic panoramic landscape wallpapers and also
the landscape tradition at the Academy and Hudson River
School landscape paintings and making a sort of black light
poster version of that landscape.
And to my mind one of the classic images of black light
posters is the Garden of Eden.
Making this American landscape painting and then also or,
it's a screen print, but then also riffing on the
architectural decoration that exists
in the Academy building.
It's an 1870's Frank Furness building.
So you can see out through the doorway there is all this
ornamentation pattern that exists in the building, and I
was making these sort of '70's head shot version of that.
So this flame image is actually taken from a Frank
Furness fire place, pressed in fire place back.
And the star boarder at the top exists in the vestibule of
the Academy in the ceiling.
And there is this little boarder of mushrooms between
the flames and the landscape.
And in the Furness building there was a
carved boarder of mushrooms.
So all these things had a direct
relationship to the building.
This is a reinstallation of it in a cleaner,
modern gallery space.
This is my couch at home.
It's a George Nelson couch with Alexander [? Gerard ?]
from the '60's.
It was intended for a Branff Airlines waiting room.
And I live with it at home now.
And this was sort of the inspiration for a piece I did
at Ardmore train station.
For their waiting room.
I was interested in this idea of taking, I have a couch that
was intended for a public space, but now I use it in a
domestic space.
So I wanted to make a domesticated version of it and
put it back into a public space.
I was thinking of this train station as sort of a limbo
where you're between your home and wherever you are going,
work or school, or whatever.
It is sort of a non-space that you're not supposed to think
about too much.
You're just kind of there.
And this was a project, there were six or seven artists
doing installations in the Main line train station
outside of Philadelphia.
And some of them are these really charming Victorian
buildings, but Ardmore Train Station was once one of those
places that was torn down in the '50's and replaced with a
cinder block bunker.
So I was really interested in taking the kind of least
hospitable of those spaces and to do this gesture in it.
Thinking of it as just one really loud
gesture in this space.
I didn't put the plants there.
Those were fake.
Somebody else hung those.
Those were a previous attempt to sort of make it better.
But I wanted to see what people, how they
would react to it.
Some people at first wouldn't sit on the couch.
Then eventually people started using it.
And I was kind of thinking about it like I wanted it to
be this thing where like when you are on public transit and
you see somebody who is maybe disturbed or something, and
you are trying to not look at them, but you also
can't kind of stop.
I wanted it to be sort of like that.
And this is an image of Whistler's Peacock Room which
is in the Smithsonian in DC.
And I was interested in Whistler because he's this
painter who is also often poo pooed because he's viewed as
being too decorative.
But I liked that he made paintings, but he also did
these room decorations.
And I was getting ready to do a project at a new gallery
that was opening in New York.
And it was sort of an unfinished space.
And I had this idea that it was going to be the first show
in the space.
And they didn't really have the money to finish it.
So I had this idea that what I would do is make a sort of
veneer that we could put on the gallery to gussy it up.
And the Peacock Room was one of the things I started
thinking about.
Because this place has an interesting history.
It was originally a decoration for a room in England.
Then it was purchased by an American industrialist in the
Golden Age and stripped from its original room and moved to
Detroit and reinstalled in a room there and then moved
again to the Smithsonian.
I like the idea of this room as somewhat of a skin that
could be grafted onto different situations.
And I was also thinking about this film Last Year at
Marienbad from 1960.
The camera is always sort of moving into this castle with
all this great appliqued plasters on
the walls and things.
Taking those ideas and sort of using them to make this piece
which I ended up calling Grow Room.
So what you are seeing are mirrored mylar panels that
have screen prints on them.
And the space between the panels is sort of a rough
approximation of the geometry of The Peacock Room.
I wanted to sort of create this Hall of Mirrors like in
Versailles for the very grand opening of this funky little
non-profit space that was opening [INAUDIBLE].
So you can see they left the shoe box not even painted.
I thought it was nice to try to exploit the rawness of that
space because once it was completely finished, you would
never have that chance to really do it again.
And it was also a practical thing to save money.
And then thinking about making cast bone moldings out of
plaster to give the space some kind of structure.
It was really just kind of a box.
But I was working on this around 2000, it was starting
to come together.
And then the opening of the space kept getting delayed.
And then September 11th happened.
And then all of a sudden, I realized I couldn't work with
that cast bone imagery anymore especially within a
[INAUDIBLE]
it was going to be [INAUDIBLE] in a way that was just going
to overwhelm everything.
The thing that had been interesting to me about it was
taking the ideas of the decorative grotesque which was
a tradition of using plant and animal forms and sort of using
them to make decoration.
So human bones, I had seen chapels in Europe, the
Capuchin chapel in Rome which is decorated with the bones of
the dead monks.
I was sort of wanting to play with all these ideas but then
the human image became way too [? burdened. ?]
So I ended up buying some antlers and casting those and
using them instead because they did
some of the same things.
They were organic, natural forms that were sort of
sinuous and could make decoration and talked about
mortality in a way but without such a direct human direction.
And then I made these cast resin chandeliers that are
sort of hybrids of antler chandeliers from the hunting
lodge and Venetian glass chandelier.
Merging these plant and animal forms to make
a decorative grotesque.
These images on the wall are these macrame spider webs that
are sprouting flowers.
And I made these macrames and then shot them so that I could
screen print them.
They were based on science experiments that were done in
the '60's where spiders were fed flies that had been
drugged and then they recorded the different kind of webs
that were made.
So I think the top one was some sort of sedative, and the
bottom one is like an amphetamine stimulant.
And I was interested, again, in sort of the degrees of
removal from nature and the hand of man going in and
designing things and then redesigning things.
So I used those as basis for these macrames that would get
printed on the mirrors.
I also liked how they looked like shattered mirrors.
This is another version of this piece.
So I called it Grow Room because when I was trying to
buy mirrored mylar, my Google searches kept taking me to
hydroponic gardening sites.
And it's like oh, these are people who grow pot in their
basements, and they are lining the grow rooms with this mylar
reflecting the light.
So that's how I got the title.
This is at the Warhol museum in Pittsburgh that was part of
a show about artist using imagery of flowers.
And they have these great John Chamberlain couches at the
Warhol museum.
They are carved foam that are covered with
this parachute cloth.
So I asked them if I could incorporate them into the
installation and sort of like have like a mansion that's
been shut up for the off season or something like and
everything is covered in drapery.
And this is the sort of last version of the chandelier to
come out of that.
I made a number of those chandeliers
for different occasions.
This one is called hybrid.
And it's got each of the flowers at the tip is a
different kind of flower.
This is a show I did at a gallery, Elizabeth Dee, in New
York that was kind of inspired by JK Huysmans' book Against
Nature, which is a story of a man who is obsessed with
controlling every aspect of this aesthetic experience.
And so he moves to this house and he starts tinkering with
everything until he gets it just to suit himself.
And, as you can imagine, it doesn't end happily.
But there is one chapter of the book
where he buys a tortoise.
He has a Persian carpet, but he feels like the carpet is
sort of dull and he needs to lighten it up.
So he buys a tortoise and has it glided and encrusted with
jewels so that it would crawl around on the carpet and
activate it.
So this was all kind of inspired by that
chapter of the book.
I made these pieces that are sort of about nature and the
man-made being forced together.
This is a giant, well, it's like three foot cube with
coral embedded, and it's meant to be a candle that's stripped
with a Paul Smith shopping bag.
And then on the wall there are these sconces that are the
enlargement of the tortoise shell that's got tacited
mirror set inside and then chromed capped dyed
[INAUDIBLE].
So this is Huysmans' dead tortoise.
This is a show I did in 2006 called [? Bree ?]
Winter again at the Elizabeth Dee gallery.
By that time I felt that I could return to this idea I
had had of making casts of human bones and applying them
to the wall as molding.
It felt like enough time had passed, and it would read more
the way I wanted, which was really sort of an homage to
the Capuchin chapels and also to like French and Irish
stucco work.
So this is a cast resin, foam curtain, sort of like a beaded
curtain from the '60's but made out of femurs and tibias
and various human bones.
And then on the wall are these sort of floral motifs that are
cast and applied to the wall directly.
And another thing that I had sort of have done over the
years is initially I was making all this work with
florescent things and black light, so it was
like super hot color.
So I've often gone back and forth between things that were
super hot and then very cold and silver
or kind of the opposite.
And this is the most modern chromatic that I ever worked.
But these things would just sort of look like floral
decorations that eventually reveal themselves to be made
out of recognizable foam parts.
So you've got a snowflake made out of jaws.
Usually the tip off would be you'd see a skull and
everything would sort of reveal itself at that point.
This was also since I trained as a painter, I hadn't made an
actual painting since 1990.
But I felt like this was a way to return to drawing for me.
So I would cast all the parts and then I could sort of lay
them out to make these drawings and then they would
get installed and sort of fixed in place.
But it allowed for a much more spontaneous way of working
than I had been able to do for a long time.
The wall paper installations require a lot of planning and
once you sort of get it set up, you just execute it, and
there isn't a lot of room for improvisation.
So that was kind of a nice aspect of this.
Lots of these chrysanthemum dragonflies.
As I like these pieces were sort of self illuminating in
that when you turned off the gallery lights, the whole
thing would just sort of disappear.
I used to never show work from different
bodies of work together.
And eventually I started showing things together that
weren't made at exactly the same time but have some
relationship.
This is a show that I did in Richmond, Virginia, which was
really the first time that I did a lot of this work.
Showing some of the upholstered pieces and the
cast chandeliers and the bone pieces and wallpapers.
Sometimes these pieces have titles.
This one is called Dirty Nest.
These are fabrics that I had collected over the years, and
I was just waiting for a time to use them.
So I did a lot of this when I was in graduate school.
I bought fabrics that I thought
nobody else would want.
So rather than them just languishing at the store, I
kind of felt sorry for them, I had to buy them.
They were usually a little weired or ugly.
And then I would hopefully try to rehabilitate them or give
them a good home or something.
Initially I thought the choices were a sort of a way
of staking my taste.
But I realized that it really was like a sort of personal
thing like relating to it like the kid who was never picked
in gym class.
I wanted to kind of champion the underdog.
At the time, I was also making paintings that sort of looked
like furniture cushions.
But then eventually I started letting them
become furniture again.
I kind of think of them like painting like there are
decisions that go into it that have to do with like when
surface or color in relationship to another.
it's composing in a way that I could like make a painting but
not using paint.
This is a wallpaper that again I didn't really make
wallpapers for a while because I sort of didn't want to
become the wallpaper guy.
And then I went to chandeliers for awhile and then it was
like, oh, I don't want to be the chandelier guy.
So anyway, I realized it doesn't matter.
You should make anything that make sense to make and if you
have a need.
This is a wallpaper called Memorial Garden.
It's a digital print.
The brown that you see is a flocking.
So it's kind of like a Victorian morning pattern.
This is another part of that installation which
didn't have a title.
But this wallpaper on the wall is called Austrian Swag.
It's my attempt at a tromp l'oeil wallpaper.
And then these two upholstered poofs that I think of as sort
of metaphorical portraits of my parents.
Just kind of returning to Whistler again, but I was
thinking about what I could call Whistler's Mother, it's
actually called Arrangement in Black and Gray.
It was quite shocking to people, or some people, at the
time that somebody would paint a picture of their mother and
then just turn it into this sort of art for art's sake
exercise with just the arrangement with no kind of
personal connections seemingly.
So I sort of wanted to make these metaphorical portraits
of my parents that were based on their medication schedules
at the time.
So the dark one is my father who had passed away by the
time I had made this piece.
So these are sort of the order or the patterns who each has a
relationship to the prescription medication they
had to take and how often they had to take it and
what time of day.
So it kind of acted like a symbolic representation of pie
chart style of what they were taking at the time.
This is another room of the gallery.
The piece in the middle is called Object Relations.
It is sort of this family unit represented by these ottomans.
The candles with dripped wax onto the little
black fur are proof.
So I was kind of making an acaustic painting over the
course of the show as it accumulated.
And then these Chippendale mirrors, they were based on
classic Chippendale mirror profiles, but where you would
ordinarily have a wooden frame around it near a piece of
glass is interesting.
And kind of taking the mirroring and smearing it all
the way out to the edges and taking the wood grain and
smearing it all the way to the middle to kind of make like a
homogenized version of those things.
And for me, the show was a lot about painting even though
they're not technically painted, but they
[? function as ?] paintings for me.
There are two sizes.
There is a six foot size that's what these are.
There were these smaller four foot versions of them.
These colors were determined.
These were the colors that I picked sort of.
[INAUDIBLE]
usually [INAUDIBLE] four times a day.
And I had made another one of these portrait proofs for a
show that was at the Philadelphia Museum.
I forget what it was called.
I think it was called Picasso and the Avant-garde in Paris,
or something.
And the curator wanted to recreate the
Cubist salon of 1918.
And in photographs of this exhibition there was a pouf in
the center of the gallery.
So he approached me about commissioning a pouf to go in
this recreation of this Cubist salon.
And I was really excited to do this because I thought like,
well, I'll never be in a show with Picasso and the
[INAUDIBLE]
again.
So this is a great opportunity to make this crazy thing.
So I ended up making this poof that people could sit on which
was sort of a metaphorical portrait of Sigmund Freud.
It's called Hello Sigmund.
And then this is the most recent, call it completed
project I did, I guess.
I was invited by the ICA in Philadelphia to go into the
Philadelphia Museum storage and curate a show out of
things that were not currently on view.
And there is sort of a history to this sort of thing.
Warhol did it at the RISD Museum.
I forget the year, 1970, maybe.
And Fred Wilson made a practice of it with working
with institutions' collections and sort of teasing out
different themes from it.
So anyway he approached me about doing this, and so I got
to go into storage, which is one of the great perks of
being an artist is getting to go into the bowels of a museum
and seeing what's there.
And looking around and finding all this great stuff but way
more than I could use.
But fortunately museums have limitations on what
they'll lend you.
Something might be too fragile, it might be promised
to go to another exhibition.
So eventually things sort of sorted themselves out.
And they wanted me, initially, to work with European painting
and sculpture prior to 1900.
But I think the curators also knew that with my interest in
decorative art I wasn't going to stick to that.
Eventually, I had access to the entire
collection in storage.
I ended up drawing a lot of things from the
decorative art out.
And then I had to kind of come up with an organizing
principle for the exhibition so that it wasn't just like
stuff I like.
Although it was [INAUDIBLE].
So one of the things that I was thinking
about was Citizen Kane.
And these are some stills from Citizen Kane.
But like being in storage in this kind of incredible
treasure trove of so much stuff that you can't possibly
look at it all.
There's an image of this snow globe at the beginning of the
film and the enigmatic rosebud.
And you're trying to figure out like what was rosebud.
Maybe it was the thing that he couldn't get, which figures
into the show.
Last Year at Marienbad again, Bitter Tears of
Petra von Kant again.
Anyway, I sort of ended up calling the show Set Pieces
and sort of basing it loosely on some tableaus from some of
these films.
[INAUDIBLE]
which has a sequence, this was probably the first art film I
saw when I was like ten years old.
And this image for people searching for a lost
[? lemon ?] on an island, popping up and down on a
landscape has like stuck in my head forever.
And here's another one.
So then this was the piece I really wanted for the
exhibition.
It was going to be like the first thing you saw when you
came in the gallery.
But they wouldn't lend it.
This is me on a wax kind of shell, shells and wax to make
this fruit.
It's incredibly delicate.
So even though I was only going to travel from half a
mile from the museum to the ICA, it wouldn't lend it
because it's too fragile.
So this became my rosebud that I could not get to the
exhibition.
And it became like a tableau of the [INAUDIBLE].
It is sort of hovering over the show even though it wasn't
physically present in the show.
This ended up being the first thing you saw in the
exhibition.
It's a model of the Fairmont Kill before the
art museum was there.
What used to be a reservoir which is right here, that's
where the Philadelphia Museum of Art is now.
So I thought it was kind of a nice introduction to the
exhibition, but it also kind of referenced the way that you
are to enter the film Citizen Kane.
You kind of move though these fence, and you see a castle up
on a hill, and you kind of split into the film that way.
So this is sort of the Citizen Kane section of the show.
It's really kind of hard, I have lots of shots here trying
to express what it was like to move though the space.
But what I wanted to do was present things the way they
might not be typically and less
interested in as a curator.
The museum might be in specific history of these
objects and more kind of formal relationships that
would happen between them.
Presenting a big wooden bench so that you would see the back
of it first before you would see the front of it.
In some cases I took arrangements exactly as I
found them in storage.
One of the things that happens in storage is they aren't
arrainged necessarily chronologically.
Something might end up with something else just because
it's the right size to hold something.
So this grouping of a [INAUDIBLE] bird soft drum kit
and a bust of John the Baptist as a child and a bust of
[? Aesop ?] by [? Bishop ?]
[INAUDIBLE]
ended up in a case together, and I basically presented it
that way, which is what Warhol had done in the [INAUDIBLE]
[? shutter ?].
He just went into storage and was like, I want that.
And they just basically pulled things out of a hole and
presented them to the gallery.
I didn't have so much interest in just doing that again.
I really wanted to choreograph these objects.
But I was started choosing things and then trying to find
visual echoes that would make the show work together in some
kind of logic to them.
So one of the things I was interested in
was degrees of finish.
So you might see the back of that bench in the previous
slide which is rough hewn and basically just functional and
that would be juxtaposed with this trompe l'oeil bookcase
made out of wood that was like super degree of finish and
craft near another artifical object which is this teapot
that has a wood grain painted on it that also has an image
of an etching on it as if there is an etching capped to
this teapot that looks like wood,
but it's really porcelain.
And there is sort of material things that would be going on
through the show.
There would be visual echos of using objects to screen your
views as you moved through the exhibition.
Or this is the reverse of that bench.
I wish you could just walk through it because
it's hard to convey.
So there were sections of the exhibition that were sort of
eluding to things in these films that I
was interested in.
This is the section that was sort of based on the film
Nashville, which is my favorite American movie of all
time, in which you have real people playing themselves,
stars playing country stars, stars playing politicians, all
these people kind of playing other roles and degrees of
removal from the original.
Again, on the left is a Thomas Adkins portrait of Lewis,
shoot, I'm blanking on his name.
He was one of Adkins' students that would
model for him sometimes.
So I wanted to include this portrait that was
observed from life.
And then also this portrait of George Washington which is a
painting of a bust by Houdan of Washington.
so it's not Washington observed from life, it's
Washington observed from a bust of Washington.
And these things would have different degrees of closeness
to an original.
In the collection I have all these porcelains of the
presidents.
So I presented a bunch of these, and I was sort of
interested in the way that these would continue the sort
of trickling down almost into caricature.
I love that this one it's labeled George Washington, but
to me it's clearly Ben Franklin.
So it's kind of like they are becoming other
than what they are.
This is a still from Nashville at the bottom, it's this great
traffic collision at the beginning that throws all the
characters together, which was another way I was kind of
thinking about the whole exhibition.
Things that wouldn't necessarily meet.
This is a life mask of Abraham Lincoln.
So something that was defiantly pulled from
Lincoln's head and hands.
Beautiful black basalt there.
And then if you know the space of the ICA, they have this
incredible two story height space.
And I was kind of interested in putting some of the smaller
things back in that space.
So here we've got ivory carroted candle holders next
to these [? Jacomadi ?] carroted candle holders.
And also I was interested in mirrors that didn't function.
So I wanted to put into the double height space the
smallest objects in the show.
These are these little bronzes, the biggest one is
maybe 10 inches high.
And early American [? tilt-top ?] tea tables that
would act as a screen for this Dorothea Tanning couch.
Dorthea Tanning was still alive when this show went in.
She was like 101.
She died not too long after.
But I loved this sort of weird *** upholstered couch being
screened by these prudish tables.
And this was a piece that gave me the biggest fight at the
museum to get this to happen.
In storage some of the busts were just sort of laying on
their sides.
They hadn't been out in a while, so they hadn't been
cleaned in years so they might have been a little dirty.
And I really wanted to leave them the way they were.
And all these busts were in a case together.
And I set them into the landscape as sort of the
figures in La [INAUDIBLE] looking for the lost
[? lemon. ?]
But the curators not so much the curators but the
conservators were really opposed to showing this woman
with the bust of the [INAUDIBLE]
on her side like that.
Finally, prevailed upon them to let me do it.
And I would not like to clean them also because they were
like sort of a way to humanize them.
They weren't like this super gleaming white marble.
They had a bit of age on them.
So that's it.
So that's kind of if for now.
And I'm happy to answer any questions you have.
Yeah.
I was just thinking about the pattern and decoration
movement in the '70's and [INAUDIBLE]
wallpaper and the work that she did, the installation that
she did of [INAUDIBLE]
where they were two or three dimensional things going on
simultaneously [INAUDIBLE].
And [INAUDIBLE]
the [INAUDIBLE] also worked with wallpaper.
And I didn't know if you saw the show at the Brooklyn
Museum with Betty [INAUDIBLE]
Cynthia Carlson.