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The Philadelphia Inquirer, Sunday, April 23, 2006

"Percent for Art" Jury Chooses Four Deserving Local Artists and
One Impressive Wild Card

By Edward J. Sozanski, Inquirer Art Critic

When the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts opened in December 2001, it was supposed to contain public art purchased under the city's Percent for Art program. The center did open with art, from other sources, but the process of selecting, buying and installing the public art ended up taking five years instead of the seven months originally scheduled.

No matter. The seven-member jury has finally completed its assignment by selecting three paintings, a sculpture, and a mixed-media work. They have been installed on three levels on both the north and the south sides of the center.

The artists, chosen from an initial field of 499 who submitted slides for consideration, are all Philadelphians - painters Sidney Goodman, Elizabeth Osborne and Moe Brooker, sculptor Fritz Dietel, and mixed-media artist Stuart Netsky. According to Marsha Moss, the Kimmel's public-art consultant and one of the jurors, the jury spent about half of the $260,000 available under the Percent for Art regulations.

More money has to be spent to properly light the works, which will be done this summer, she said. After these expenses have been tallied, there might be a second round of purchases, she said. The jury has already recommended six other artists whose work would be eligible.

The process was more protracted than expected, but at least it produced a commendable result. It's not surprising, though, that four of the five artists are well-known in the city's art community, with extensive exhibition records and connections to the local art establishment.

Brooker, Goodman, Osborne and Netsky are seasoned artists whose names would have popped up in any preliminary, off-the-cuff brainstorming about what to buy for the Kimmel.

The wild card is Dietel, who, despite an impressive body of work, has yet to achieve quite the visibility enjoyed by the others. Yet his lyrical wall-mounted wooden sculpture, Twist, proves that he clearly deserved to be chosen.

To be fair, the jurors had to cast their net as widely as possible - if they hadn't, they might not have found Dietel. They first narrowed the 499 entries down to 23 semi-finalists, whose studios they visited. They chose wisely, if predictably. The art is generally of high caliber and appropriate to its location and its audience.

Only Netsky's work, a postmodern riff on Claude Monet's famous "haystack" paintings, could be considered in any way iconoclastic. The piece reinterprets the shimmering effect of impressionism with large colored sequins called "billboard flickers," which jiggle when disturbed even slightly by air currents or vibrations.

Three works - Dietel's horn-shaped sculpture, Goodman's full-length figure of an angel who might be singing, and Brooker's animated abstraction, which suggests the improvisational ebullience of jazz -- strongly evoke music. Osborne's boldly brushed, semiabstracted landscape and Netsky's flicker piece aren't overtly musical, but their vibrant color harmonies might suggest the brightness and clarity of a brass ensemble.

Moss said that the delays the jury encountered actually proved beneficial: "The judgment of the jurors sharpened as a result; they were able to see the finished site, its spirit, its materials, and its changing audience."

The other jurors, who remained anonymous during the selection process, were artist Louis Sloan; Joseph J. Rishel, curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; gallerist Helen Drutt English; collector Marciarose Shestack; Janice Price, president and chief executive officer of the Kimmel Center; and Nancy Rogers, a former Kimmel vice president. They worked under the oversight of the city's then deputy city representative for arts and culture, Carol Clark Lawrence.

The city contributed about $30 million to the Kimmel's construction, which, under the one-percent provision of the public-art ordinance, made $300,000 available for art. Of that, $40,000 was set aside for administration and contingencies. All the artists were paid directly, with individual prices reportedly ranging from $10,000 to about $45,000.

Three works are installed on the south side of the Kimmel, each on a different level, and two on the north side. The placements confirm that the building isn't especially receptive to art, especially to paintings, because it lacks adequate and logical hanging space. Dietel's sculpture looks comfortable on its staircase wall, but its location on the second tier north is on the fringe of public awareness.

Goodman's gloriously theatrical Angel, on the south side of the ground-level plaza, probably will enjoy the most foot traffic, and of the four paintings it's in the best position to be seen to advantage.

Energetic art. Carlos Basualdo is making his debut as the new curator of contemporary art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art with a series of permanent-collection exhibitions called "Notations."

Exposing the collection this way is a splendid idea -- it not only deepens the public's knowledge of what the museum owns, but it also creates a sense of ferment and allows visitors to perceive relationships among various works that otherwise would remain obscure.

For his inaugural presentation in Gallery 176, Basualdo has selected art that purportedly expresses or generates energy. An installation by Argentine artist Victor Grippo, a primitive and fanciful "battery" made from a table covered with a mound of potatoes wired in series, actually generates a weak current that registers on a voltmeter. For a charmed moment, I was transported back to my eighth-grade science fair.

The show, called "Energy Yes!", is dotted with big names such as Joseph Beuys, Andy Warhol, Bruce Nauman, Ana Mendieta and John Cage, whose 1968 book supplied the series title. Sculptor Phoebe Adams is the only Philadelphia artist represented.

Some works connect literally -- Warhol's "camouflage" self-portrait with Thomas Hirshhorn's wall installation that uses camouflage patterns to evoke the violence of war, or Warhol's portrait of Beuys with works by the German artist nearby, such as his famous felt suit. (Felt kept him warm and alive after a wartime plane crash.)

Some evocations of energy are visual, such as a drawing by Martin Ramirez dominated by U-shaped "force lines" and a similar image by the Cuban José Bedia called Spell of the Moon. Like the potato battery, Nauman's spiral neon apothegm, The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths, comes alive electrically.

Despite Nauman and Grippo, the energy in this gallery is more conceptual, and perhaps even imagined, than actual. The show's most thought-provoking aspect turns out to be its title, "Energy Yes!", which abbreviates a motto coined by Hirshhorn. His full motto is "Energy Yes, Quality No!" At least in his case, it sounds more than apt.

Art | Art at the Kimmel

Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, Broad and Spruce Streets. Public art on the plaza, first tier and second tier is accessible on days and evenings of performances, and during daily 1 p.m. building tours. The center plans to begin Saturday-morning art and architecture tours this summer.