The Puzzler

Virgil Marti's reflective "Set Pieces" is a study in reconfiguration.

by Shaun Brady

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Published: Oct 20, 2010

Aaron Igler/Greenhouse Media DISCIPLES OF THE WATCH: In an odd juxtaposition, a collection of marble heads rests on furry white pedestals in Virgil Marti's "Set Pieces" at the ICA.

[ visual art ]

A voice appears, as if from out of nowhere, before Virgil Marti emerges, crawling out from underneath a display at the Institute of Contemporary Art. It's an appropriate entrance for the Philly-based artist, whose work delights in separating function from form and reuniting them in unexpected ways.

He'd been busy setting up an array of deceptive shadows cast by a horde of small bronze figurines, an effect inspired by Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad. Like the ambiguous, ever-shifting relationships between the characters in that film, the connections between the myriad objects in "Set Pieces," the new show curated by Marti, may seem enigmatic at first. But a careful viewing teases out thematic echoes — while at the same time opening new mysteries.

Marti was given relatively free rein to scour the Philadelphia Museum of Art's storage to cull items for the show. "I'd never done anything like this before, so looking at the amount of stuff they have and trying to figure out what to do with it or what's possible was a pretty daunting process," Marti says. "If it wasn't for having to put a show together, it would just have been fun. But I didn't want to seem like a dilettante, another person who thinks they can curate."

His selections include paintings, sculpture, furniture and décor, all sharing space and arranged so each object reflects the other in oblique ways. A Claes Oldenburg drum kit shares a vitrine with a Duchamp bust of Aesop and a 19th-century forgery of St. John. These forms are twinned by a collection of marble heads resting on furry white pedestals, a louche classicism straight out of '60s pop-art cinema — and, in fact, inspired by Antonioni's L'Avventura, the first of five films scheduled to be screened at International House in conjunction with the exhibition.

"I have a certain narrative in my head when I look at these things," Marti says, "but I like people to come and find their own way through it."

Marti, whose own work tends to explore and subvert the decorative arts, chose objects that fulfill much the same purpose when placed in this alien context and in such odd juxtapositions — a Dorothea Tanning is partially shielded from view by a semicircle of tilt-top tables, all resting underneath a collection of degraded Chippendale mirrors.

"When I make a chandelier," Marti explains, "it's a sculpture of a chandelier to me, but it also is a chandelier. The museum does kind of the same thing where they're not using these as tables, they're setting them aside as a type of form."

Mirrors and mirrored surfaces are a constant theme throughout the show, beginning with the model of the Fairmount Water Works — pre-PMA — that welcomes attendees to the gallery. Nearby hang two still lifes whose off-balance compositions leave significant areas of black, which, set behind glass, absorb the viewer into the image. In each case — even in the actual mirrors that appear seemingly everywhere — there is a problem in the image reflected back, made incomplete by tarnished glass or a backlit space which renders figures unintelligible.

Both the model and the paintings are also representations of reality, to varying extents. A section devoted to images of American historical figures traces the deviation from the realistic step-by-step, from a life cast of Abraham Lincoln's face and hands, through an Eakins portrait from life, to a Rembrandt Peale painting of a Houdon bust of George Washington. The first president gets further abstracted through a series of 19th- to 20th-century earthenware busts, while two figures of Benjamin Franklin are labeled "Geo. Washington" or simply, "An Old English Gentleman."

"I've always been interested in degrees of artifice," Marti says, "increasing artifice or removal from nature. Here you go down the row in terms of more and more art getting in the way, then they degenerate into these figurines."

There are also vague degrees of separation between a show of Virgil Marti's work and "Set Pieces," which is both an act of curation and a piece of personal expression, the two held in an uncomfortable tension.

"I can't really say this is a show of mine, but the things that I think about in my own work are the things that I thought about as I picked this stuff and tried to put it together," Marti says. "It was a really good opportunity because, like a lot of artists, I can feel like I'm misunderstood or that people aren't getting my point, so this is another chance to point out what I think I'm about. Maybe since I didn't make this stuff there's a certain level of distraction that's missing."

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

"Set Pieces," through Feb. 13, free, Institute of Contemporary Art, 118 S. 36th St., 215-898-7108, icaphila.org. L'Avventura screens Wed., Oct. 27, 6:30 p.m., $8, Ibrahim Theater, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-387-5125, ihousephilly.org.

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