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Also this issue: Book Tour The Passion of Dracula Museum Studies 6: Richard Hamilton The Etching Club of London: A Taste for Painters' Etchings |
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August 29-September 4, 2002
art
 Going public: (L-R) James Mills (represented here by a stand-in), Susan Fenton and Virgil Marti are the three local artists taking part in IMPRINT. Photo By: Michael T. Regan |
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Kerry James Marshall lecture, Thu., Sept. 12, 5 p.m., University of Pennsylvania, B-1 Meyerson Hall, 34th and Walnut sts.
Opening reception, Fri., Sept. 13, 5:30-7 p.m., The Print Center, 1614 Latimer St., 215-735-6090.
Panel discussion with artists and curators, Sat., Sept. 14, 2 p.m., The Print Center.
Dotty Attie lecture, Mon., Sept. 16, 5 p.m., University of Pennsylvania, B-3 Meyerson Hall.
James Mills lecture, Wed., Sept. 25, 12:30-1:45 p.m., Bryn Mawr College, Thomas Library 224.
"Art Usurps Advertising" lecture by Jacqueline van Rhyn, Sun., Sept. 29, 2:30 p.m., Philadelphia Museum of Art, Van Pelt Auditorium; Wed., Oct. 9, 12:15-1:15 p.m., Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
Virgil Marti lecture, Tue., Oct. 22, 6 p.m., The Print Center.
Susan Fenton lecture, Wed., Oct. 30, 1 p.m., The Print Center.
When any museum or gallery puts on a show, it hopes to leave a mark of some kind on its visitors, whether a pleasant memory or a challenge to think outside the box.
The Print Center, on the other hand, wants to leave an IMPRINT.
If the name is not familiar now, it will be. For relatively active, mobile and observant residents of Philadelphia or its suburbs, it might even be inescapable.
IMPRINT, starting Sept. 3, will reveal itself on billboards large and small, on bus shelters, on coffee cups and in six issues of the Philadelphia Inquirer Sunday magazine. Six artists, of both local and international renown, collectively have offered up to 30 of their works for wide public consumption in a way never seen in this city before. Billed as the city's first major billboard exhibition and its largest temporary art project to date, IMPRINT got six diverse artists to think about their work in a new way, and convinced several corporations, small business owners and a major metropolitan newspaper that its impact would be widespread and well received.
More than that, though, IMPRINT has the intrigue factor.
It may take people a minute to really process what they're seeing. It's not quite an ad or a mural or a poster, the usual public art suspects. No explanation will be provided, no artist name or title, no didactic label handily telling viewers what it is or what to think about it. Nothing but "IMPRINT: a public art project" and the website, www.printcenter.org.
"The element of surprise is very important, that people should be surprised and delighted by the images," says Joan Wadleigh Curran, co-curator of the project and Print Center board member.
The project isn't meant to trick, however; it's just a new element in an urban landscape, in formats usually reserved for selling something.
"We decided on using the billboard because it has a huge viewership, it increases the numbers of people who are able to have contact with the images, but it also sort of co-ops what typically is a site for advertising and starts to use it in an unexpected way," says Curran.
The concept is not revolutionary. Many cities and institutions have organized billboard exhibitions or temporary mass-media shows, including New York, Los Angeles, Vienna and, in 1999, North Adams, Mass., whose MassMOCA show placed 25 billboards on highways en route from New York to Massachusetts.
However, the organizers believe the scope and variety of IMPRINT's venues surpasses these. "There have been billboard exhibitions, and exhibitions with paper coffee cups and exhibitions with newspapers, but to our knowledge, this is the first to combine all three," says Christine Filippone, The Print Center's executive director. Consequently, IMPRINT hopes to reach 14 million people: with 40 billboards and bus shelters in the city and suburbs; 250,000 coffee cups available at area cafes such as La Colombe and Passero's; six "collectible prints" running consecutively starting Sept. 8 in the Inquirer magazine; and installations of the artists' works in a gallery exhibit in The Print Center itself, open until Nov. 9.
What's fueling all of this, besides enthusiasm, is a $181,516 grant from the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, a branch of Pew Charitable Trusts. "We were one of four organizations to receive the Pew grant [in 2001], and the other three were major, so we were the one small stepchild, the little engine that could," says Filippone. "Huffing and puffing," laughs Jacqueline van Rhyn, curator of prints and photographs at the center, and co-curator of IMPRINT. Indeed, the other three grantees were larger organizations: the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Institute of Contemporary Art; and the Paley Design Center at Philadelphia University.
The artists -- Kerry James Marshall (Chicago), Dotty Attie (New York), John Coplans (New York), James Mills, Virgil Marti and Susan Fenton (all local) -- each decided what images he or she had prepared for IMPRINT would be used for each particular format.
Curran says, "They really had complete artistic freedom in terms of how they wanted to use the formats and what message they wanted to put forth to the public."
Attie, who for years has been weaving text and visuals, chose to use an image of a nude woman lying on her stomach in what appears to be a clinical environment, inhabited only by herself and a white-cloaked figure visible from the torso down. It is accompanied by the text, "Resistance and refusal mean consent." The image will appear differently depending on the format. Sometimes there's text and the woman's feet, or the text superimposed on her midsection only.
Puzzling? Maybe. Provocative? Some thought so.
Though the organizers would rather not name names, there was opposition among some manufacturers and sponsors to some of the work's content. Some thought Attie's image was too suggestive, intentionally or not, of two politically charged issues: abortion and rape. Some thought Coplans' self-reflective photos of his own nude, elderly body perhaps too much for people simply trying to get to work on time. But in the end, none of the images were toned down or altered in any way. The IMPRINT group was able to convince its partners that viewers could think for themselves, process images as they saw them and make judgments (or not) as they felt like it. Philadelphia, the organizers believe, is ready for an exhibition like this.
The artists adapted well to the formats and their connotations.
Mills, whose work consists of a long string of white "blahblahblah" text on black pages, says he liked the billboard format. "The fact that they were ... in a commercial setting, that was good for me.... I love the idea of duking it out with the big corporations." Mills, incidentally, insisted that the website not appear on his contributions to IMPRINT. "Otherwise, I'm just another adman," he says. "I had the singular goal not to sell anything, including myself." His is the only work in the show without the explanatory information, and Filippone feels that's appropriate because it might have interfered with the all-text-based nature of Mills' work anyway. Filippone also muses that the show represents the print medium coming full circle. "Print begat advertising and now we're taking it back," she says.
Marti, whose images for the show feature enlarged bonsai trees against color-saturated skies, thought less theoretically than aesthetically. "Not that you have to compromise what you do, but you have to be respectful of the people who have to look at it. You don't want to stick something ugly in someone's neighborhood," he says.
Fenton, whose hand-colored photographs feature female models wrapped, topped or otherwise adorned with futuristic head coverings, says her work "easily overlaps with the commercial genre." She says it didn't require "a radical shift" in her thinking (except for adapting her very square works to fit that "huge rectangle" for the billboard).
The other two artists come well-regarded, too: Marshall, who satirically chronicles the demolition of Chicago's housing projects with a comic book feel, is a MacArthur "genius" award winner; Coplans was the longtime editor of Artforum and created a second, equally lauded career as a photographer.
These diverse artists offering a selection of their work all over the city gives the impression that the project's boundaries are nearly limitless.
"There are infinite possibilities of viewing the exhibition, and in that way, it breaks from the true white box, museum or gallery exhibition because it is totally part of your life, part of your routine," says van Rhyn.
But as pervasive as IMPRINT seems, some might not see it at all. If they don't drive on a particular highway, take a particular bus, read the Sunday paper, or drink hot beverages, IMPRINT might not have an impact on their lives in the slightest. Or people might simply ignore the images even if they do see them.
Van Rhyn says, "It will be complete or incomplete as much as your routines lead you to it."
So IMPRINT, ultimately, is about chance. Chance encounters are sudden, surprising and even shocking to the system. After all, most people's days in Philadelphia don't involve seeing a nude man's hairy leg looming over I-76 or sipping coffee out of a paper cup emblazoned with a touched-up image of George W. Bush in a toothy grimace.
Viewers can express themselves about what they've seen in a few ways. First, the website, by local designers Studio Z, lets viewers delve deeper into the images, learn more about the artists and even post their own interpretations on a message board. Then there are partnerships with local schools to coincide with the show and wide-ranging education programs (see sidebar for more event information).
IMPRINT hopes to go beyond the public's expectations for an exhibit of this scale, not only in size but also in the variety of meanings that people can find in the work.
Fenton thought this was key to the public's understanding of the exhibition: "My hope was that someone would go, ŒOh yeah, that's what I expected to see, but wait, that wasn't quite what I expected.'"
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