Works of Art at 1S1: Jennffer Bartlett’s “In the Garden” and I “Interpenetrtsdona” by Handel Evans Number 33 August 17,1981

Within the past year-and-a-half, sever- work—” Interpenetrations,” a 4’ x 12’ SI works of art have been commissioned, (121 .92cm x 365.76cm) oif painting by executed, and instafled at ISI@’s corp~ Welsh artist Handel Evans. I wilf also rate headquarters in Philadelphia. These discuss the 9’8’ x 32’6’ (294.64cm x have included “The Cathedraf of Man,” 990.6cm) mural, “In the Garden,” by a 310-square foot (27.9 sq. m.) mural by New York-based artist Jennifer Bartlett, Guillermo Wagner Granizo; 1 “Commu- Installed in ISI’S main lobby on April 13, nication, ” an 8’6” x 30’ (259.08cm x 1981, this mural is the work we commis- 914.4cm) sgrafitto mural by Joseph Slaw- sioned to discharge our legal obligation intil; 1 and “The History, Gods, Myths, to the Redevelopment Authority. Rituals, and Future of the Huichol Indi- Corporate interest in-and the pur- ans, ” an 8’ x 12’ (243.84cm x 365.76cm) chase of-original artwork has been on yarn painting by Emeteria Martinez the increase in the last two decades, ac- Rios.2 cording to Mary Anne Craft, a lecturer The original stimulus for the creation in art history, Frick Museum, Phts- of these works was a regulation by the burgh, and a research librarian special- Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority. izing in pictorial materials. In a recent It requires that a mtilmum of one per- article appearing in Business Hon”zons, cent of the construction budget of a new she listed a number of factors influenc- building be devoted to publicly accessi- ing the acquisition of art by business, in- ble art. We at 1S1 were so enthusiastic cluding: the desire to decorate or refur- about this idea that we decided to go bish new or existing company facilities, beyond a strict, letter-of-the-law com- an interest in art as an investment, con- pliance with the Authority’s dmective. tinuing a personal collection started by For example, the three works I have just the company’s founder, altruistic sup mentioned were “optional,” in the sense port of the arts, and a desire to foster that 1S1 did not submit any of them to good public relations by presenting the the Authority as fulfiient of their re- viewer with an image of the company as quirement. Instead, we commissioned forward-looking and progressives them simply because we felt that each Some or all of these motivations may artist, in his or her own style, could be true of any of the various corpora- make a unique and significant contribu- tions now involved in collecting or spon- tion toward enhancing our work envi- soring artwork. In IS1’s case, we were ronment. interested in art primarily as a vital, in- In this essay, I would like to focus at- tegral part of our environment. ISI’S tention on another such “optional” corporate art has stimulated the ex-

207 change of values and opinions among 01 J he Art ~n Famtlrtg, ~ bel]eved that employees, which I feel is extremely im- the purpose of art is to reveal the signifi- portant in a company as large and cant qualities of an object or situation diverse as ISI. Moreover, as Craft notes, that might otherwise have escaped an the values of individualism and human observer. A landscape painting should creativit y—values not traditionally capture the spirit of the scene, and not fostered in the business commu- necessarily a photographic image. A nity—are reinforced in employees when portrait should reveal what is essential art is not simply an investment or a about the sitter, rather than render a decoration, but an integral part of the perfect likeness. T company. 3 Finally, a visually attractive It is in the pursuit of this “essence” environment can only have a positive in- that art begins to take on the bizarre fluence on the mental and emotional forms so characteristic of such modem well-being of employees—always a sub- 20th-century movements as Dada, Pop ject of concern at 1S1. and Op Art, Surrealism, Abstract Ex- Of course, art has been around far pressionism, Minimalism, and a host of longer than modern business’ interest in other “isms. ”b I shalf discuss Barnes and it-or, for that matter, far longer than hk ideas on art in a future essay. But modern business itself, although it when the pursuit of the intellectual should be noted that the Dutch masters ideas Barnes spoke of is taken to an ex- were supported substantially by Hol- treme, it then becomes possible to un- lands merchant class. Though much has derstand Wolfe’s criticisms of modem been written over the years about the art. nature of art and what it is ultimately Even a casual glance at Figures I for, the essence of artistic endeavor has through 4 (on the full-color insert in the remained peculiarly elusive. For in- center of this issue) wilf be more than stance, in her books Philosophy in a enough to teIl you that Bartlett’s mural, New Key and Problems of A rt, philoso- “In the Garden,” is well within the pher Susanne K. Langer defined art as a bounds of modem artistic styles. And as “nondiscursive” form of communica- I have just indicated, modem art tends tion—as opposed to “discursive” forms to be controversial. ThM is certainly like writing and speaking.q.s In other true of “In the Garden. ” Bartlett herself words, art is a means of getting across a has avoided commenting on the work’s feeling or an idea when words won’t suf- meaning, since she believes that a paint- fice. ing dcwsn’t necessarily have to have a But in The Painted Word, social com- meaning-that it is created to be react- mentator Tom Wolfe suggests that ed to.s Indeed, even the imagery of the modern art is anti-communicative. For mural interests her less than the Woffe, and perhaps for many of us, methods she used to render it. a It is not some contemporary artists seem to ele- surprising, then, that whenever I am vate the mechanics and techniques of asked, “DO you like it?” I must respond creating art to the level of art itself. Art with a rather ambivalent expression. I seems to have become the pursuit of don’t know whether I am being asked if abstract ideafs, no longer touchhg base I approve of the mural, or whether it with human experience. G turns me on. On the other hand, Albert C. Barnes, Bartlett, born in 1941 in Long Beach, American physiologist, chemist, inven- California, has been acclaimed as one of tor of the antiseptic Argyrol, and author America’s foremost young painters. She

208 received her bachelor’s and master’s de- that is held every two years in Kassel, grees in fme art from the Yale School of Federaf Republic of Germany. Bartlett’s Art and Architecture in the mid- 1960s awards include the Harris Prize from the and is currently working on a commis- Art Institute of Chicago, a Creative Art- sioned painting in London. Her credits ists Public Service Fellowship, and the include the 20’ x 160’ x 22’ (609.6cm x Lucas Vkiting Lecture Award from 4876.8cm x 670.56cm) enamel-on-steel, Carleton College, Northfield, Min- oil-on-canvas mural, “Swimmers Atlan- nesota. ta,” in the Richard B. RusseU Federal The mural itself, “In the Garden,” Building in Atlanta, Georgia; the 7‘ 6’ x actuaUy consists of two identical 153’9’ (228.6cm x 4686.3cm) “Rhapse works—one appearing in conventional dy, ” part of a private collection in New fashion affixed to the east waU of our York City; and “At Sea, Japan, ” an- main lobby, the other dispersed in care- other major large-scale work to be in- fuUy calculated sections throughout the stalled in the Keio University Libraries building. Each mural consists of 270 in Tokyo, Japan, next year. Each of the one-foot-square steel plates. However, latter two works makes use of the same while the lobby version is made up of type of one-foot-square enameled steel five contiguous 9‘ 8- x 6‘ 6“ (294 .64cm x plates employed in creating ISI’S mural. 198. 12cm) sections making up an inte- Bartlett’s work has been featured in grated whole, the dispersed version is various one-woman and group exhibi- broken down into six groups of one tions throughout the US, Europe, and plate each, six groups of two plates Japan. A partial listing of the establish- each, six groups of three, and so on, up ments in which she has had individual to the last six groups of nine plates each. shows includes the following: Dart- The subject matter depicted by the mouth College, New Hampshire; Uni- mural, as Grace Glueck of the New versity of CaUfornia, Irvine; San Fran- York Times puts it, consists of “a patch cisco Museum of Modem Art; Balti- of garden attached to a viUa [that more Art Museum; and Wadsworth Bartlett] occupied in Nice for several Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut. Her months [during the summer of 1980]. work has been shown several times in The main adornment of the garden, group exhibitions at the Whitney apart from the natural elements, was a Museum of American Art and the rectangular pool on whose edge was Museum of Modem Art, both in New poised a.. ,statue of a urinating youth.”9 York; at the Art Institute of Chicago; This image, painted with Testor’s Pla and at least once at the Tyler School of enamel (the same stuff chddren use to Art and the Institute of Contemporary paint plastic models), is repeated five Art of the University of Pennsylvania, times in the mural, but is varied by both located in Philadelphia; as welf as changes in both perspective and time of at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in day, In the fnt section, for instance, Washington, DC. The European institu- the viewpoint is aeriaI (“bird’s-eye”), tions in which she has exldbited her under rooming light. In the last section, work include the Mus&e d’Art Modeme the image is from a “worm’s-eye level,” de la ViUe de Paris, the Kunstmuseum and night has faUen. in Dusseldorf, the Kunsthaus in Zurich, Like most works of art-modem or and the Akademie der Kunste in West not—”In the Garden” functions on sev- Berlin. She has afso been included in the eraf levels at once. The format of the Documents, an international exhibition gridded steel plates was conceived of in

209 order to restrict and formalize the com- While I recognize it as a success, the positional decisions that had to be made mural does not turn me on for a variety about the painting. Yet, for Bartlett at of reasons. “In the Garden” does not least, the plates encouraged experimen- contain many of the bright colors I am tation within their strictly defined struc- so fond of, nor does the subject matter ture, and in an article appearing in New itself relate to an information theme in Image Painting, she explains how: “If a the way that I would prefer. My criti- pairsting is comprised of units, it is possi- cisms of Bartlett’s work, however, are ble to think of it as always being divisi- less objections to her methods and ble or changeable. The gridded steel philosophy and more a protest against plates allow me to approach painting in the manner in which modem art is a very methodical manner, where each judged to be art. I get the feeling that thought can be seen as if it were a this mural would have been done even clause. The white spaces between the without ISI’s commission, and yet I am plates act as punctuation—they func- told that this is the very quality that tion lie the space between words and makes it art, as opposed to illustration. sentences, dividing one unit from This tends to reinforce the oft-voiced another. MIO (p. 20) Whatever Bartlett’s complaint that artists only paint for rationale, the method apparently works, each other, as was recently noted in the as John Russell notes in the New York New Yorker: “The New York art world, Times: “She can plot and chart her sub- to be sure, is a dubious entity. No ject matter as strictly as a naval cartog- academic body sets the tone, and the rapher, but she also has a juicy free- few critics who try to measure new art running way with the loaded brush. ”1I by traditional standards of quality have It is Bartlett’s concern for a system of lost even their power to irritate or an- fitting free-flowing, gestural shapes into noy. For some time now, the most tell- an inflexible, unyielding Iatticework ing factor in a young artist’s reputation that makes her work somewhat analo- is what other artists say about him. ”lz gous to the information gathering and Despite these reservations, however, disseminating functions of 1S1. Informa- I am pleased to have “In the Garden” tion occurs in distinct, internally consis- join the other fine works of art on tent bundles or units, comparable to the display here. As Roberta Smith notes in individual steel plates Bartlett used in Art in Amen”ca, Bartlett “seems inter- the creation of the mural. It is ISI’S ested in just how much information she function to gather the randomly distrib- can get into a painting-” an “almost uted, highly dispersed bundles of infor- scientific [obsession] with the large, mation scattered throughout society given constants of the universe and the and systematize them into an intelligi- problems of representing them. ”lo ble, integrated whole. This was the in- These characteristics, together with a spiration for the duplicate of the lobby penchant for “ritual spontaneity and mural distributed throughout our build- random order, ”~d make Bartlett’s work ing. The relationship between the “dif- appropriate for 1S1. fused’ version and the “assembled” ver- Bridging the gap between art and sion of the mural is representative of the science by approaching art with a con- nature of ISI’S work. trolled, rational attitude and painting in Since I have a sense of history, how- a mathematically precise way are the ever, I want to use this occasion to avowed purposes of artist Handel record my true feelings about the mural. Evans. Born in Pontypridd, Wales, in

210 1932, Evans attended both the Cardiff Evans describes ltts pautting as “a Colfege of Art and the University of visual metaphor of the relationship be- Wales, and now dhides his time be- tween mind and information.” 16 The tween residences in Europe, America, five central figures, painted with and the Caribbean. He received a Na- restraint, precision, and sensitivity, tional Diploma of Design in 1953, an Art symbolize the mind through its five Teacher’s Diploma in 1954, and became senses. The complex structures sur- a licentiate of the Royal Academy of rounding them, of which the figures are Music in 1958. a part, represent the information en- Evans’s works have been exhibited vironment. According to Evans, the widely throughout Great Britain, picture came into being as a result of hk Europe, and the West Indies, and he is search for an image expressing the in- represented in a great many collections terdependent nature of the relationship throughout the world, including those between modem humanity and the of the Arts Council of Great Britain, growing mass of information on which Lessittg Rosenwald its Philadelphia, the its weffare depends. 16 Ashrnolean Museum in Oxford, and W. Arriving at the final concept present- Guggenheim in New York. His work is ed in the painting entailed a consider- also owned by a large number of cor- able struggle and many dkcarded ver- porations, among them Alcan, in sions: Canada, and the Charterhouse Group, in England. In addition, he is a member The gigantic scale and scope of the of Atelier 17, a famous group of etchers information industry was a source of difficulty, by reason of the sheer founded in New York and Paris in 1932 multiplicity of possible images [which by J.W. Hayter, who evolved the use of could be created. This] was an a single-plate method of making multi- obstacle rather than an aid, and only colored prints, replacing the process of after much deliberation and many false starts ... did the idea of ‘interac- using a series of plates which had en- tion’ between brain and information joyed common practice untif then. 15 become the basic one .... In the pro- , “Interpenetrations,” the oil painting cess of trying to convey something of Evans executed for ISI, has been on the dynamic nature of [this mutual in- display in the second-floor lobby since teraction], I gradually eliminated most of the vertical and horizontal midsummer 1980 (see Figures 5 and 6). elements in the design, [since they] Though Evans commands a wholly con- possessed a static, passive, even temporary technique, KS art is steeped monumental air, and.. had no power in classical themes and ideas. The intri- to suggest the existence of the busy action, reaction, and counter-reac- cate labyrinth of wildly interconnecting tion which is constant between Man geometric forms in “fnterpenetrations” and Data. lb exhibits an almost medieval flatness of perspective, and, indeed, the artist con- “Interpenetrations” is not only a siders himself a “traditionalist” in the pleasure for the eye but a challenge to sense that he is not in sympathy with the mind, combinhg both cerebral and much of what has been done in art in re- sensual components, the human and the cent decades. Though his own style is abstract. “In the ‘real’ world,” according obviously modem, he has been far more to the artist, “the twin entities of mind influenced by the great movements of and data interpenetrate and generally the 1920s and 1930s than by present ;ondition one another. I have symbol- directions in art. ized th~ interaction by fusing the

211 ‘human’ with the ‘abstract’ elements . .. . I agree that art education and instruction have expressed a state of constant in aesthetics is rudimentary at best in growth, change, and development, our respective school systems—both [and] in order to suggest something of British and American-and if only that the nature of scientific and other intel- education were improved, the public’s lectual inquiry, I have represented the appreciation of the beautiful art being entire image in as clear and strong a created today would also be improved. I light as possible .“ 16 liie to feel that 1S1, by commissioning Evans believes that a painting is not these works, is taking a step in the direc- only a portrait of the person who exe- tion of helping fine art to find a more cuted it, but also of the viewer. But the meaningful place in our lives. impression a viewer wiU get from a In concluding this essay, I want to pay painting depends to a great degree on special tribute to my assistant Calvin the background and training he or she Lee, who has been my main point of brings to it. 1’7In other words, people contact with all the artists who executed who are not trained in how to view art works for 1S1. In addition, I want to will be able to recognize only the thank Steve Bonaduce for his extraor- crudest, most obtrusive, and unsophisti- dinary effort in clarifying my thinking cated qualities of what they are looking and helping me to express naive at; the subtle nuances of what makes a thoughts on a subject which I tackled drawing or painting art will entirely only with great trepidation. I want also escape them. to thank Bob Ewing, manager of our Yet, it would not really take much in creative graphics department, for his the way of training to enhance most work on the color insert in this issue as weU people’s perceptions of art. Evans and I as the previous inserts. 01,, ! IS,

REFERENCES

1. GarJleld E. Fine art enhances 1S1’s new building, Currem Conlenrs (5):5-9, 2 February 1981. 2, ...... H“icho] m~hology and culture, Part 1, World’s largest yam painting 1s latest in Sc?fleS of IS1-commis40ned artworks. Curren/ Contents (28):5-11, 13 July 1981. 3. Craft M A. The corporation as art collector. Bus. Horiz. 22:20-4, 1979. 4. Lmnger S K. F’hdo$ophy in a new key. Cambridge, MA: Hamard University Press, 19S7, 313 p, 5. ------Probfem$ of 4rr. New York: Scribners Sons. 1957, 184 p. 6. Wotfe T. The painled word. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975. 121 p, 7. Bam~ A C. The art tn painzing, Merion StatIon, PA: Barnes Foundation Press, 1965.522 p. 8. Baritetf J. Personal communication. 13 April 1981, 9. Gfsmck G. Art: garden drawings by Jennifer Bartlett, NY Ttme.s 23 January 1981, p. C19. 10. Mamtmtf R. New /mage pain(ing, New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1978.96 p. 11. Russ4f 1. An: figures in American painting. NY T{mes 9 November 1979, p. C23. 12. Tomkhs C. The arl world, New Yorker 57[8):1 12-b, 13 April 1981. 13. Smltb R. Bartlett’s swimmers, An Amerma 67:93-7, 1979. 14. Hess T B. Ceremonies of measurement. New, Fork IO(12):6U2, 21 March f977. 15. Evam H. Telephone communication. 4 June 1981, 16. ------In[erpene(ra[mn.. Unpublished es.$ay, 1980.4 p. 17. ------, Telephone communication. 14 May 1981.

212 In The Garden by Jennifer Bartlett BACK

The latest addition to ISl's collection of corporate art is the 10'8" × 33'6" (325.12cm × 1021.08cm) mural "In the Garden" by New York artist Jennifer Bartlett. Consisting of 270 one-foot-square steel plates, Bartlett's mural (Figures 1-4, at right and below) portrays the garden behind the villa she lived in while visiting Nice, France. The focus of Bartlett's mural is a rectangular pool, on the edge of which stands a small statue of a urinating cherub. Painted with Testor's Pla enamel, the image is repeated five times. In each repetition, the viewer's perspective and the time of day change. In the section on the reader's left in Figure 4, below, the viewpoint is aerial, or "bird's-eye;' and the time of day is morning; in the last section on the far right of Figure 4, the viewpoint is from a "worm's-eye" level, and night has fallen.

"In the Garden" actuallyconsists of two murals, identical in appearanceexcept that one (Figures 1and 4) isassembled in conventional fashion on the northwall of ISIs main lobby, while sections oftheother are randomly dispersed throughout the building.Two of these sections are shown in Figures 2 and 3, below.The gathering together ofthescattered sections of the mural intoan intelligible,integral whole in the lobby represents Isrsinformation-gathering and systematizing functions.

http://garfield.library.upenn.edu/art/isiart/bartlett.htm (1 of 2) [12/11/2000 10:57:54 AM] In The Garden by Jennifer Bartlett

http://garfield.library.upenn.edu/art/isiart/bartlett.htm (2 of 2) [12/11/2000 10:57:54 AM]