Tiernan Alexander and Tim Eads in their shared studio

I stopped by Tiernan and Tim’s space at Art Making Machine Studios recently to ask them a few questions.  They shared some details about current projects they have underway and also a bit about their experience working on their collaborative show last year at Grizzly Grizzly, Husband vs. Wife.

ANNA What brought you to Philly?

TIERNAN We’re both from Texas, when we met we were both really into ceramics.  In fact we met in a clay class.  I decided to spend a year in Mexico studying ceramics and Spanish.  Tim came to join me.  Later, when we were in Dallas we decided to apply to grad school.  I got into University of the Arts here in Philly and Tim got into Cranbrook.  The perfect thing was that UArts was low residency so we spent the summers here and the rest of the year in Detroit for a couple of years.  After a couple of summers here we knew this was where we wanted to move.

TIM Because it’s not Dallas and it’s not Detroit.  And it’s not expensive.  Because of the Cranbrook connection people starting coming out of the woodwork.  It really helped in the beginning.

TIERNAN Tim got this awesome job.  I was in my last summer of grad school.  He had just finished and was in Detriot by himself.  We collect stuff like no other people on earth so we had two giant trucks full of our garbage.  He and a friend left Detroit with all our belongings before we had signed a lease here.  I didn’t have a studio during the last semester of grad school so I had to put on my degree show from my South Philly house.

Working Woman-Foot, Tiernan Alexander

ANNA Do you think working in your living room affected the type of work you were doing?

TIERNAN It was very domestic.  It gave me the excuse to do what I wanted to do.  I was becoming obsessed with these shrunken heads and these embroidered hair foot stools.  I just wanted to make this domestic work that wouldn’t require a studio anyway.  If I were paying for a studio I would think, “I must be making work out of clay.”  If I had been dying to make my entire thesis show out of clay I would’ve found a way.

ANNA So the lack of studio space gave you more freedom?

TIERNAN Definitely.  It gave me permission.  One of the things I was trying to learn in grad school was first of all there’s this incredible plaque buildup.  There were layers and layers of plaque build up about what I thought art is.  They just accumulated over my life without me realizing it.  Things that had come into my head over a lifetime of looking, thinking and reading about art.  You don’t realize that they are there, shaping you and forcing your hand in the studio.  The choices I made were shaped more by assumptions than by my own actual desire and intent.  I spent more of grad school trying to strip away my layers of plaque.

TIM It drove me insane.  Cranbrook was a lot more like a residency.  It was two years of doing exactly what I wanted to do. And then going to having no studio in a city I didn’t know.  I started my Kickstarter project because I had all this time. I started to do little models.  Around that time Fluxspace wanted to do as studio visit.  I had to set everything up in my house.

TIERNAN He built a full on installation in the stairwell.  This is a South Philly row house with tubes and wires going up the stairs, into the master bedroom and the office.

3,178 minus 366, Tim Eads

TIM I told FLUXspace that I would build the bike in the basement knowing at the time that it’s completely packed with boxes.  They called up and asked if I wanted to meet up at the space and look at it.  They said, “We do have this residency program.  We don’t really talk about it but we have some free studios and if you’re part of the residency program you can pick out a studio.”  I worked in there for 3 months.  It was dark and cold with clip lamps everywhere at first.  The facilities manager they had at the time was leaving so we worked out a deal where we took over that.

TIERNAN We’re trading services for studio space.

Tiernan's portion of the shared studio

ANNA How is the dynamic working in the same space together?  Do you bring any dynamic or distraction from home?

TIM People ask us that question a lot actually – how is it sharing space.  It never even crosses my mind.  I mean, it crosses my mind that she takes up too much of it.  So I wish I could take over half this building.  For me that’s the hardest thing.

TIERNAN But that’s his actual battle with the universe.  How much space he is allotted for his work.  As a couple I think it’s actually allowed us to do more work because it’s a date.  Every hour or so we take a break, drink some tea, look at each other’s work.  We genuinely feel like between the time we spend chitchatting, driving to and from or eating a meal here it’s like we have a life together.  It’s like we’re having a romantic interaction but really, we’re at the studio.  If we had separate studios we would miss each other so much.

ANNA Could you talk about the show you did together at Grizzly Grizzly?

TIM We don’t really collaborate.  Our work is so different and our approach is so different.  But Tiernan started playing with the installation in the house.  Drawing on it, messing with it, changing it up a little.  That’s when we came up with the idea husband vs. wife where we split the gallery exactly in half and then over the course of the month we went into each other’s space.

TIERNAN We didn’t want it to be a joke piece.  The work we made before we started switching each other’s work up was real.  I made an installation called the Voodoo Living Room.  It was a piece that had been brewing in my head for awhile.  It started with the idea of the great grad school question “Where does this work belong?” or “Where does it live?”  If you say, “I don’t know.” then you haven’t thought your work through but if you give an answer then the response is, “Then why haven’t you built that?”  So this was the big answer.  I hand painted the walls and then I put hand cut wall paper over it and then we made windows.  Furniture, rugs, I just really went all out.  I thought, “My work is in the collection of the voodoo grandmother.”

TIM My installation was an interactive piece called Pumping.  There were hand pumps that were attached to hoses.  I completely filled the space.  I changed all the lights.  What would happen is that you would pump the pumps, the air would go through the tubing to blow air into Gatorade bottles.  It made the room smell slightly like cherry Gatorade.  My work centers around inefficient mechanisms or very child like things.  Sort of like blowing through your straw into a cup and causing bubbles.

TIERNAN You would be pumping and you couldn’t tell if it was doing anything.  You would look around to see where the action was.  In many cases you couldn’t see the result of what you were doing.  It was very invasive.  After the opening finished each of us were given free reign to reinterpret each other’s work and do whatever we wanted.  The thought that we were going to hurt each other’s feelings didn’t really ever come into play.

Husband vs. Wife-Tiernan Alexander

Husband vs. Wife - Tim Eads

ANNA So vandalism came into play?

TIERNAN That’s the whole concept right there.  It was hilarious.  He immediately goes in and starts throwing ropes and pulling around pieces of furniture.

TIM It’s like I went into a living room and turned it upside down

TIERNAN He reached into the room and opened up a portal.  Everything in the room sucked into that spot.  Chairs suspended from the ceiling.  Rugs bolted to the wall.  He also brought in some of his bend wood pieces and cantalevered my lamps.  I’d had this careful, precise attitude toward placing everything and watching him was such a relief.  I cut him to the heart on the first day.  I changed the light bulbs.  It changed the whole color palette.  He just looked at me like, “AW.”  I said, “I didn’t know you were that attached to it.”  And he was like, “I didn’t either.”

TIM I am surprised by my own reaction.  Specifically one thing that bugs me is gallery lights being used like they are supposed to.  For me it’s like every single thing must be questioned.  One of those things are the lights.  I’m either changing them or turning them off.

TIERNAN Everything I did was invasive species related.  I had some sort of slime mold attack his work.  I created this hot pink paper mache paste and had it invade like vines.  There is something so clean about Tim’s work.  It has a sharpness to it.  Then there was this grubby invasive vine growing everywhere, looping over things.  I created very brightly colored icing. It wasn’t something I would normally think to do.  It was just about me and my reaction.

Husband vs. Wife

Husband vs. Wife

ANNA What are you two working on now?

TIERNAN I just got a show shipped back from Denver.  The pieces lit up on the inside.  It was this coral reef.  It’s all porcelain fiber work that I do.  I knit or crochet or sew together things out of various fibers and then soak them in porcelain slip and fire them and they become fossils of the knitted objects.  I really love the porcelain and I love the whiteness but I’m also enamored with color.  I just started playing with the same idea in colored clay.  When you add the color you’re losing all the visual cues that it was sewn so it becomes something else.  I also make these little strange vignettes, I’m playing a lot with them right now.  I call them sushi because when I started making them I was stacking little pieces of clay together and they looked like tiny little sushi.

TIM I think I have 12 bodies of work right now.  I’m trying to narrow it down and I’m also doing a couple of proposals.  I have the bubble machine but I’m also starting to think about a larger bubble machine.  An object on wheels that I can drag around that has 20 bubble machines on it.  It just bubbles everywhere.  I want to do performance type pieces where I drag it around town.  One of the things I want to do with it is spell masochist with the bubbles going through the streets of Philadelphia in a tyvex suit.  I really think a tyvex suit is important in this.  The other thing with that object would be to take it into Chelsea and do the same type of thing.  Those pieces would be called the address of Chelsea galleries.  Very specifically Chelsea, again dealing with the perceptions of fame.  My work was in Chelsea.

TIERNAN Documenting it in front of Pace.

TIM Tim Eads at Pace.  I’m also Photoshopping my work into galleries and also into museums.

TIERNAN The thing about the magazine cover is that they were really funny when they were Art in America but when you get to things like Oprah magazine and National Inquirer they are much better.  Oprah pointing at Tim’s work.

TIM I studied these magazines so I try to come up with statements or quotes that coincidend with the current magazines so one of those statements on Psychology today is, “Are all artists crazy?”

Tim Eads' bubble machine in the studio

Tiernan Alexander

Tiernan Alexander is currently developing a solo show titled “Spoils of Ottoman Empire” for the end of summer in 2011.  You can see work by Tim Eads in an upcoming exhibition at Crane Arts – Old School Studios opening Thursday, April 14th from 6-9pm.

I’m going to go ahead and chalk this one up to being a fault of advertising, both by Temple Exhibitions and Vox Populi, and the poor formatting of the two-part event by Bruce High Quality Foundation themselves. I would hope that bringing a “big name” into an event space doesn’t mean that the host of the event and the said big name are under the impression that each and every audience attendee has followed the name’s career and work closely. The largest demographic of the rally attendees, students, were most likely at this event because of the buzz and pressure generated by hearsay from their peers and faculty – not because they have heavily invested interest in the NYC art world going-ons at the Whitney and elsewhere. As much as the BHQF might have wanted to believe that all listeners were on board and in sync with their every intention, it simply was not the case. What many eager and open-eared undergraduate students ended up getting was a sliver of drama, energy, and confusion entirely out of context, followed up by a vaguely potentially cool hangout at a bar they couldn’t legally access. And scene.

The rally and the discussion were importantly intertwined, and out of context the discontent vented by some community members about the arrogance of this stand-alone “lecture” is more than justified.

At the conclusion of it an hour later, one of the professors I had while at Tyler said to me in the lobby, “I’m not sure what I was told exactly.” This was a mostly true statement for many.

the rally in context
Because I understood a genuine, close-knit discussion was to take place the following day, I saw the painstakingly focused kid standing at the microphone barreling forward with a slideshow I never believed he or any others of the BHQF believed was remarkable or profound. It was just a statement. This was a manifesto, a line in the sand. This was not institutional critique easily perceived as unaware of its history and attempting to be shocking fifty years later. This was institutional critique merely as necessity. It laid in bare concrete structure a belief system founded on a specific qualm: the degradation of art and art education by an increasingly capitalist society. It was naïve, it wasn’t the most pragmatic. But it was an ideology. I kind of respected it.

But most importantly, I saw this as a spark. A spark for conversation to follow. At the bar later on, as they planned, at the discussion the next day. But hopefully with students too. While I felt this slideshow detailing issues with capitalism and education was overly outdated and almost child-like in death-of-my-innocence-this-is-how-things-actually-are-out-in-this-cold-world?! drama, I am in no way unsure of the fact that there were undoubtedly freshmen, sophomores, fuck, even senior undergraduates at this lecture who may have never given these issues thought. For this, I hope the lecture actually did spawn an honest conversation outside of the arena BHQF never provided for them.

the discussion at vox
The real reason why no one was aware of the discussion itself was because it was invite-only. As a total fuck-your-wine-and-cheese-events type, I have to say this was a little unsettling for me. Granted, the idea for shutting down questions and comments at the end of the rally and for scheduling further discussion to take place at an event across town the next day was based on the largely true opinion that no productive or truly thoughtful conversation could take place between two hundred people in an auditorium via microphone and shouting. But it also placed the Bruce High Quality Foundation in a room with select educators, university administrators, local critics, gallery curators, and Vox Populi members, but most importantly and problematic: no students.

I was on the guest list because I held a discussion in this exact likeness at the closing of my BFA show last year that a Vox member happened to participate in. To be honest, I wasn’t even aware that I was on any kind of list – I just received an email announcement and then showed up, surprised to find myself in a room full of Philadelphia’s cultural elite. One year out of a BFA program and $40,000 in debt, I was the youngest attendee and closest representation of a student.

BHQF initiated the talk by having the room circle in introductions, mid-way through described by one as a “self-help group” for the disenchanted university administrators and broke MFA students, and then explained their own organization’s history. They wanted to start an art school based on the sole structure of “no payment” and “no authority.” Within one year, they’d had unexpected success and wanted to tour the country to “find out what’s worth hearing about” from others in order to help their own school expand and grow.

The problem then rested in the fact that the department heads and MFA students and PMA community outreach coordinators had all left their day jobs at 3pm on a Friday in order to come here for the exact same reason.

It went like this: a few honest and worn down educators vented about stifling institutional bureaucracy, and then the BHQF moderators bragged about the lack of it at their own free school.

This was essentially an advertisement for the BHQFU, and no models, or “things worth hearing about” other than them were ever actually discussed. It went forward, a charismatic and sweetly earnest BHQF member yammered on excitedly about the open structure of the free school and the surprising moments of “ohemgee, nothing’s gotten stolen yet” glee yielded by the relaxed and trusting environment. They were all articulate and clearly well-educated in the matter. But with high-ranking employees of the ICA and the PMA at this event, and smart, thoughtful individuals with wide and varied levels of their own educational experience from the community present, both institutional and from without, silently listening to the joys of a few well-off Cooper Union students creating a skill-share with funding provided by Creative Time while labeling it “without authority or money,” I couldn’t help but feel extremely annoyed and just letdown in general.

By the end of the talk, the largest, most important, yet never discussed elephant in the room was not this organization of artists in New York City. It was art schools. The institutional ones made out of brick and mortar and with ID swipe card security systems. You know, that multi-billion dollar industry that will continue until the destruction of Earth itself despite any calls for action otherwise? Even if every person in this room had raised their hand to say that they could agree wholeheartedly that a BFA/MFA education is absolutely unnecessary in making an artist’s practice function, it still most likely took them, at minimum, a traditional undergraduate degree to form this opinion firmly. And no matter what, young people everywhere are still going to attend art school. It makes more than common sense to say that this traditional model of school should be somehow addressed other than just as a “what not to do” example.

where do we go: a real discussion
I’m not sure if anyone even reads Thomas More’s book any longer, but to touch lightly, the word “utopia” from which its taken simultaneously means “good place” and “no place.” For BHQF to posit that it has no authority and no payment while not-so-subtly skirting aggressive questions by discussion participants about who, then, holds the keys to the front door and how, then, is the building rent paid, is not just naïve, but idiotic and offensive.

It might be easy to assert that college isn’t necessary for some, but the organizational capacity it would take to overcome the lack of structure you would encounter without this institution to provide it would have to be phenomenal. Not to mention the collection of information decided on being structured into the curriculum in the first place. It’s made to seem often as though it’s incredibly easy to wander into a public park and start a fiery, passionate discussion about Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason with any random stranger that happens to be feeding pigeons that day. Not that this, as an example, is what BHQF is proposing or that their “students” are random park goers. But if I can be promised a lively conversation and engaged community, the two most important qualities every Vox discussion attendee from both sides of the line claimed vital to education, I wouldn’t even mind paying for it. Many people agree with me. In fact, millions.

Let me make clear that I’m in no way in favor of over-priced fine arts educations that are outdated by the time students graduate. Clearly there are issues to be discussed. Issues that never were actually addressed at this talk or its rally. But these issues involve a system of money and authority and education and the conflicts and negotiations that will and should occur in a myriad of ways between all of these things in our complex society. They aren’t evil words or impossibly soiled. They are reality.

And between the specific conversations I’ve personally learned are taking place between undergraduates at both Tyler and Moore, and maybe elsewhere, in response to the lack of reality portrayed by the Bruce High Quality Foundation’s Teach 4 Amerika talk, I hope some genuine, compromising, and hopeful solutions to the model the vast majority of Americans are currently using are actually proposed.

About two years ago now, some students at Tyler School of Art got wind from varied sources that, as usual, funding was running low.  And as a result, University officials of some rank and caliber intended to raise class sizes in an effort to alleviate some of the budget issues.  Temple University’s class size policy rests at a minimum of 16 students.  And for many years, Tyler classes were the sole exception to that rule – not too unreasonable an exception for any art student that knows a critique with more than a dozen students tends to veer toward a miserable experience.  The hearsay basically made clear that Temple’s mandate was soon to be enforced upon Tyler students.

In reaction, this group of students, myself included, started a petition with our concerns.  We received over four hundred signatures from students, faculty, and staff.  Along with these signatures, one still “anonymous” member of the organizing group wrote a scathing letter of disapproval that would lead the administration to later claim it was too eloquently written to have been penned by a student and accuse faculty members of having a hand in the protest.  The documents of the petition were photocopied three times and delivered to 1) the acting Tyler dean, 2) the office of the Bursar, and 3) Temple University President Ann Weaver Hart.  None of us had ever organized like this before.

And then shit hit the fan.  Big time.  Like, within an hour.

The Dean abruptly resigned, but not before she held a public meeting in order to publicly ridicule and chastise concerned students.  She claimed she could never have imagined her students would do something like this to her.  And afterward, the Dean’s office staff accosted students in the hall.  Big, red-faced women with tears in their eyes yelled in shrill voices, “Do you know what the Dean has done for you?  She works so hard!  Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

We were told that it was mostly a big deal, and somewhat embarrassing for her, because we had given copies of the petition to the Dean’s “bosses,” though we would later find out that she had had her foot out the door for a while and was looking for any excuse to resign. And to be honest, I don’t really blame her: I can’t really imagine any administrator eager and prepared to run a university with massively accrued debt from a recent building expansion right in the middle of a worldwide financial system collapse.

Professors and department heads were berated for talking to their students and “spreading rumors” – after all, funding shouldn’t be something that students are concerned with! – and then forced to sign a confidentiality agreement pledging  allegiance to the University. Meetings were held, heads rolled, students turned on students, and a departmental slander war began.  Oh, look at what you have done!

As with anything, it was clear we needed transparency.  After having been forced to move into a brand new, inhospitable, and unfinished building away from a magical art utopia in Elkins Park, we were angry.  We weren’t “grateful” for our brand new facilities (which were always held over our heads as they fell apart around us).  We felt that the bureaucracy of Temple University was slowly confining us and we wanted to do something about it.

And what did we actually do?  No one really ever discusses that.  But we accomplished exactly what we set out to do.  The sixteen-student class minimum never officially took hold.  There is now a Student Advisory Committee to the dean, consisting of students recognized by their peers and faculty as having active involvement in the community.  The replacement dean holds open office hours for students.  According to administrators and professors I’ve come into contact with, this new “interim” dean, who is also the dean of the adjoining music school, is great because, “he actually gets shit done.”  As a prior student, I can attest to it too: he opened our graduation ceremony by saying he’d like to try to “make this thing last only an hour” while glancing at his watch.

But, more or less, things are still the same at the Stella Elkins Tyler School of Art, which is experiencing some serious changes as it actually settles into its North Philadelphia home.  Ann Weaver Hart continues to go back on her word as she pushes outward to make Temple U more of a shopping mall rather than a University.  And I continue to resent her leadership and most of the university’s policies.  So, when the Bruce High Quality Foundation came to Tyler School of Art to lecture on anarchy in art school, I was excited because they’d picked an interesting art school to tackle: one that is part of an incredibly large monster.

This past Thursday at 7pm, Bruce High Quality Foundation held a rally at Temple University’s Beury Hall.  Which basically solidified my first conflict: that this lecture was using the school’s facilities (and select members of the marching band) – why didn’t this take place more organically in the atrium or in front of the building?  Why didn’t we meet in a public library?  And then, BHQF on a lecture circuit, takes money from Tyler for the rally.

To overview, BHQF more or less talked ideas surrounding the corporate complications of art education at individuals who, I am more than willing to bet, are well-aware of the system they partake in.  Nothing new or revolutionary was proposed.  Instead, they romanticized the role of the artist in society as the keeper of freedom and then stated dramatically that art school is a business.  I can’t help but question whether they could have possibly thought that this would be something eye-opening for audience members.

Because of this, I assume that this “rally” had to be a performance for performance’s sake.  I found it to be a terrible performance.  The lecture begins – after we enter a lecture hall with select members of Temple’s marching band playing Lady Gaga songs while someone in a Nixon mask shoots t-shirts into the audience with an air gun – with a long-haired, bearded young white guy in front of a podium.  Bad music and a funny slide show ensue.  From the beginning, we can tell that this guy will, quite possibly, be one of the absolute worst public speakers that we will ever witness.  His eyes never leave the computer screen, never once does inflection enter his tone.

I get it, putting on a performance is hard.  Unless it is spectacular, it is rarely ever believable.  You can always tell that someone is acting.  The question then becomes, for me, did this feel genuine?  And the answer is no.  It felt like a gimmick.  I wondered what my role was sitting in a seat and being shot at with a t-shirt gun.  Men are filming this from every angle.  I am a pawn.  I am to be passive.

And I am being talked down to … about ideas that I am already deeply considering and invested in.

As the rally progresses we are asked to follow along with the case study of a young woman, age twenty, who is studying painting at MICA.  We know that (past tense) her parents are divorced, that (future tense) she will end up in serious debt, and that (currently) she is trying to remedy the consequences of historical painting as it pertains to painting today… and then we follow her down her three future life paths that Bruce High Quality Foundation has chosen for her:

1. Become world-famous and incredibly successful selling her paintings
2. Have two kids, never paint again, and think about some day converting the laundry room into a studio
3. Have mild success, but never be able to make a living off of her work while laboring as a waitress in downtown Baltimore

Thanks, BHQF, for laying out these profound paths for us.  I never knew that I would sell, not sell, or sell moderate amounts of artwork after art school graduation.

Perhaps I found the greatest fault in BHQF using this ultimate sale of work at the end of it all as a means for determining the value of an arts education.  And then, suddenly, the talk switches abruptly from all issues being described in dollar signs to a weird and sappy “art is supposed to be different” and “the artist is special” and “making art means that we are free” dialogue.  Cue American flag images.

The speaker continues by making the claim that administrators need to “be better” and that professors need to “not cave in”.  And he is right; it’s fairly obvious that the school should hire a faculty that they feel can handle the dynamic of structuring and tailoring an education for the students they are educating while time moves forward and cultural importance in art shifts.  But BHQF then shows images of faculty and administration at Tyler and asks, “Can you really rely on this person?”  A picture of Jude Tallichet flashes.  I chuckle.

Actually, yes!  Jude doesn’t teach with rubrics.  She has open structure in her classes and nothing is set in stone.  She is consistently asking students individually and in groups what they want to be getting from her classes and what she can be doing better.  BHQF: you forgot to speak with students to see who the “bad guys” actually are!

———-

Clearly, y’all… I agree, the system is sick.  The system is getting sicker.  President Obama is calling for “education for all” and the emphasis is placed on vocation.  I was more or less made to feel that I didn’t have the choice to go to college.  So I went to art school.  I’m no different than 90% of middle-class suburban students that feed into Tyler School of Art.  But as much as I resent that my fellow peers paid as much as $25,000 a year in out-of-state tuition as a right of passage, I still feel like art school was a great decision for me.

BHQF has a free art school, BHQFU.  It is one of many models.  They posit that interesting interactions are arising when artists get together and donate their time to one another.  (Really?  Who would have thought?)  But clearly there must to be a middle ground between something like BHQF’s free art school and the business-centric model that we have now.  After all, someone needs to pay the rent.  I can’t help but question why one extreme to another?  We can find a way to compromise, can’t we?

But at BHQF’s rally nothing is proposed.  It ends with no opportunity to ask questions or make comments.  They shout, “Meet us at the El Bar!”  Mind you approximately half of all college students are under the legal drinking age.

I’m left legitimately frustrated as I consider what we, as audience members, were expected to gain from this rally.  I guess all we really learned is that if we had the credentials of something like the BHQ Foundation, we could turn our disenchantment with the system of art school into a performance piece too.  And that the institutions we are ultimately critiquing could pay us for it!  We learn that the critique of art school has become just as contrived and commodified as art school itself.  And BHQF teaches us that this critique need not be taken seriously anymore: you can use your resources to print tie-dye t-shirts and ride around in a spray-painted limo.

If politics have taught us anything, by way of the Bruce High Quality Foundation, it is that it’s more fashionable to be obtuse and pretend that we care.  Joseph Beuys is crying in his next life.

At the end of the day, all I can say is that I still believe we are most successful in simply demanding certain things from our education system.  And for me, a simple petition got a lot done.

Thursday, March 31st
Flux Space: East Coast Video
March 31st at 7:30pm.

Tyler School of Art: Bruce High Quality Foundation Lecture
March 31st at 7:00pm.
Register here: http://tylerteachforamerika.eventbrite.com/

Friday, April 1st
Bodega: Soft Smoke Rises in Gay Rings Above the Roof
Opening reception from 6-10pm.

Extra Extra: Common Place
Opening reception from 6-10pm.

Marginal Utility: A Larger Refrigerator
Opening reception from 6-11pm.

The Soil Kitchen!
Runs April 1st-6th from 11am-6pm on 2nd & Girard.

Perhaps it appears a little late in the game to think upon the December 2010 controversy, and maybe even counter-productive to regurgitate widely held liberal views, but prolonging thought and discussion on it may prevent future attempts at censorship. Jonathan Katz, a co-curator of Hide/Seek and well-known queer activist, spoke at Tyler School of Art on February 16th to a cramped basement auditorium. He explained the purposes of the Hide/Seek exhibition, basic knowledge of the work presented, and some of Wojnarowicz’s personal history. The most disheartening point of his presentation was his frustration with faulty constitutional rights. These rights have been forfeited before, at the Hirschhorn, another component of the Smithsonian museum network, concerning Robert Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio twenty years ago. The positioning of this exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery was not solidified until other large metropolitan institutions denied the offer to house the show, and yet it seems entirely appropriate for the Smithsonian to house an exhibition connected to such an historically-forgotten identity.

Conservatives have elaborated tirelessly upon the illegitimate use of taxpayer dollars and have argued with Hide/Seek defenders on where the exhibition’s support came from. The debate over whether the exhibition was publicly or privately funded is entirely irrelevant, particularly because it was a combination of both. This exhibition documents queer tendencies and expression in art history dating back to Thomas Eakins, explaining the included works’ significance according to their LGBTQ cultural value rather than their assumed place in the art historical canon. This documentation, especially because it is the first of its kind at a large institution in the United States, and the fear and ignorance towards the LGBTQ community is where relevance lies.

If an exhibition that fills such a void as this cannot be accepted or “tolerated” by the the general American public, I can’t help but wonder what that says about the position of the queer community-at-large within the U.S. Twenty years have passed since the culture wars of the late 1980s and the same themes are again being greeted with fervent uproar from the conservative population, obviously illuminating that the same problematics are relevant. It would seem as though conservatives have cloaked general distaste for homosexuals, transgendered people, and alternative sexualities with the debasement of Christian iconography. Censorship is not the only consequence at hand. We have seen a surprisingly strong push by the conservative right to silence Hide/Seek, which typical to censorship, has given the exhibition an even stronger voice, still however, without A Fire in My Belly. This disappointing instance should be taken as a warning of the trying times to come, not only for the LGBTQ community, but also for the art world in its totality, that not much has changed in twenty years.

[LINK]

Jayson Scott Musson – NEOTENY | THE HARD SELL at Marginal Utility
[6-11pm in Chinatown]

SATURDAY
Alex Da Corte: The Island Beautiful/Mortal Mirror at Bodega & Extra Extra
[6-10pm in Old City & East Kensington]

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Funnel Pages currently seeks writers, commenters, and wise-guys alike to blog on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis about art culture in Philadelphia. Must be clean, disease and drama free – drugs okay.

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