Hidden City Five Studies in Site

FIVE STUDIES IN SITE

Five StudieS in Site

InterventIon SIteS: Constellation, 2009, by Sanford Biggers Mother Bethel AMe Church, 419 South 6th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19147 Der Sandmann, 1995, by Stan douglas German Society of Pennsylvania, 611 Spring Garden Street, Philadelphia, PA 19123 Sonambulo, 1998–2009, by iñigo Manglano-Ovalle Shiloh Baptist Church, 2040 Christian Street, Philadelphia, PA 19145 Newsroom Philadelphia, 2009, by Aleksandra Mir Philadelphia inquirer Building, 400 north Broad Street, Philadelphia, PA 19130 nothing but what is therein contained, 2009, by Steve Roden Founder’s Hall, Girard College, 2101 South College Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19121

Hidden City Philadelphia was made possible by the generous support of the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage through the Philadelphia exhibitions initiative, and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the visual Arts. Additional funding was provided by the Pennsylvania Humanities Council, the Philadelphia Cultural Fund, and Senator Constance H. Williams and the trustees of the Hess Foundation. in-kind support was provided by the trustees of Girard College, the German Society of Pennsylvania, Mother Bethel AMe Church, Philadelphia Media Holdings LLC, Shiloh Baptist Church, Laura Fisher Heritage, Jesse Schlabach, and the Greater Philadelphia tourism Marketing Corporation.

Foreword by Richard torchia introduction by thaddeus A. Squire Project entry texts prepared by Susan eberhard edited by nell McClister Historical research by Sarah L. Hunter All photographs by Joseph e. B. elliott © 2009, unless otherwise noted. design by tabula Studio Printed and bound by Paradigm Grafix in the united States of America

COntentS Acknowledgments

5

Foreword

7

introduction

13

Sanford Biggers

19

Stan douglas

27

i単igo Manglano-Ovalle

33

Aleksandra Mir

37

Steve Roden

49

Production Credits

58

installation Specifications

60

Copyright Š 2009 Peregrine Arts, inc. and the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia All rights reserved. no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by an information or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Peregrine Arts, inc.

Crane Arts Building, Suite 412, 1400 north American Street, Philadelphia, PA 19122 t: 267 597 3808 F: 215 763 7140 www.peregrinearts.org www.hiddencityphila.org the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia 1616 Walnut Street, Suite 1620, Philadelphia, PA 19103 t: 215 546 1146 F: 215 546 1180 www.preservationalliance.com iSBn 978-0-615-34447-8 Five Studies in Site is published in conjunction with Hidden City Philadelphia, May 28–June 30, 2009, co-produced by Peregrine Arts, inc. and the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia.

ACknOWLedGMentS

My deep appreciation goes to our principal producing partner John Andrew Gallery, who provided the first affirmation and founding spark for the project; to the five artists whose work appears in this study: Sanford Biggers, Stan douglas (with Brodie Smith and Linda Chinfen), iñigo Manglano-Ovalle (with Jack Sloss), Aleksandra Mir, and Steve Roden (with Adrienne Wong); and to our artistic and historical advisors: Bill Adair (during his time at the Rosenbach Museum & Library), Bruce Laverty of the Athenaeum of Philadelphia, Bryant Simon of temple university, kathleen Forde of the experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic institute, Richard torchia of the Arcadia university Art Gallery, Stephen vitiello of virginia Commonwealth university, and Christian Marclay. Of course, our project would have been without a home were it not for the tremendous support of our site partners: elizabeth Laurent of Founder’s Hall at Girard College, Rev. Mark kelly tyler of Mother Bethel AMe Church, Laura Fisher of Laura Fisher Heritage, Rev. edward Sparkman of Shiloh Baptist Church, Sharan knoell and tony Michels of the German Society of Pennsylvania, and Brian tierney, ed Mahlman, and Ruth Auslander of the Philadelphia Inquirer. the physical challenges of producing a project of this scope and keeping the public safe in such a range of places kept many people busy, notably Gary Steuer of the City of Philadelphia; Shawn evans and Mike Schade of Atkin Olshin Schade Architects; and James timberlake and Richard Maimon of kierantimberlake Associates. Hidden City’s stunning imagery owes a great debt to photographers Joseph e. B. elliott, Shari Goldenberg, and J. J. tiziou, and its public success to the wonder-working of Cassandra Oryl and John Miller of Braithwaite Communications; Mark Gisi, Crystal Marinelli, dan Park and david Wolf of tabula Studio; kendra Gaeta and Laris kreslins of Lime Projects; Meryl Levitz, Patricia Washington, and Almaz Crowe of the Greater Philadelphia tourism Marketing Corporation; and, as always, our beloved ed

tettemer for his whiz-bang insight and profound commitment to celebrating Philadelphia. i would like also to thank my parents, Rev. James and vicki Squire, whose insight into the leadership of Philadelphia proved invaluable, and my partner, Meredith Rainey, for his unflagging support and willingness to turn our living room into meeting and storage space on many an occasion.

Peregrine’s home office produced endless miracles with the initiative and superhuman efforts of Becca Bernstein and her 102 fabulous volunteers, and Jay Wahl and his production team of kala Moses Baxter, Susan eberhard, derek Hachkowski, Amy Harting, Sarah Hunter, Perry Fertig, nick kourtides, Jesse Schlabach, Josh Schulman, Catherine Pidgeon, Becca Starr, and Andrew White.

A special thanks also goes to Jordan Rockford for his work over 2007 and 2008 as managing curator for the five projects documented in this book. the legal and accounting work of Peter Gulia and Susan Lee, respectively, ensured that the interests of everyone involved were well documented and protected. the work of this group was largely made possible by the tremendous enthusiasm of our board: Heath Allen, Christine deutsch, david elderkin, Linda Jacobs, vanaja Ragavan, and Andre Stephano.

Finally, Hidden City would not have been possible without the great trust and support of Paula Marincola, daniel Fuller, doug Bohr, and Gregory Rowe and our other colleagues at the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Pamela Clapp and James Bewley at the Andy Warhol Foundation for the visual Arts, Joseph kelly and Mimi iijima at the Pennsylvania Humanities Council, and Senator Constance Williams and her fellow trustees at the Hess Foundation. thank you all for helping us reveal and celebrate the wonders of our Hidden City.

Thaddeus A. Squire Northern Liberties, Philadelphia December 15, 2009

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the journey of creation that has led to Hidden City Philadelphia took close to four years. And hopefully it isn’t over. there remain a multitude of unexplored places along the byways of the city, and many aspects of the project’s potential impact have yet to be fully realized. We have achieved, though, a point of repose, and i am honored to thank the legion of people—too many to name all of them here—who made Hidden City a success.

FOReWORd

By Richard torchia

Facing Page: detail of manuscripts and paint chips from the archive room on the abandoned third floor of Founder’s Hall, Girard College.

the term “site-specific” was first applied in the mid-1970s (often in combination with the word “installation”) to describe artworks whose presence and interpretation were dependent on the spatial and physical attributes of the locations in which they were exhibited.1 these attributes included not only the nature of the given room or architectural container and its lighting, but also the seasonal and climatic characteristics that the artist might address to create an experiential, phenomenological understanding of the site. it is telling in this regard that works by early practitioners, such as Michael Asher, Robert Barry, and Robert irwin, were initially developed for interior spaces, possibly as a way to ensure a nominal sense of context and limit. Grounded in the legacy of Minimalism, works by these and other artists were so integrated into the situational specifics of the chosen location that it was often difficult to determine what the artist had done or where their “interventions” began or ended, thus enacting a blurring of art and life (non-art) as well as a confusion of intention and interpretation that was equally compelling for both artist and viewer. A noteworthy example of this phenomenon occurred in Hidden City with Steve Roden’s nothing but what is therein contained for Founder’s Hall, Girard College. Roden’s work inhabited three of the four former classrooms on the abandoned third floor of the building. the fourth room, indeed one of the first encountered by visitors reaching the top of the stairs, is an old archive room that Roden asked to have open to allow visual access to many of the documents he mined to generate the contents of the other three rooms. Most visitors, however, assumed that the manuscript-filled space was also part of the work itself, its grand state of disarray too theatrically staged to be anything but pure artifice. the interdependence of work and physical site inevitably became an affront to Modernist claims of autonomy and universality. in her 1979 essay “Sculpture in the expanded Field,” Rosalind krauss invokes the tradition of the sited monument to describe Modernist sculpture’s lack of connection to

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Generated from an interweaving of historical, architectural, and artistic discourses, Hidden City Philadelphia provided an invitation to explore the evolving and complex nature of site-specificity on a scale unprecedented within the city’s exhibition history. this opportunity was made apparent by the festival’s deliberate mixture of approaches to site-specific practices as exemplified in the five visual arts projects treated in this study: two commissioned works by Steve Roden and Sanford Biggers; an iterative project by Aleksandra Mir (whose antecedents and Philadelphia rendering engaged print media as “site”); and two site-inspired re-installations of existing works by Stan douglas and iñigo Manglano-Ovalle. these projects, each in its own way, demonstrated the manner in which “site-specificity” has become a contested term that hinges on the range of ways in which “site” may be defined: from physical and geographic locations within and outside architectural structures to communities, printed materials, virtual spaces, and discourse itself.

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location, a condition she referred to as a form of “homelessness.”2 elaborating further, douglas Crimp suggested that the Modernist art object belonged to “no particular place, a no place that was in reality the museum….Site specificity opposed that idealism—and unveiled the material system that it obscured—by its refusal of circulatory mobility, its belongingness to a specific site.”3 Whereas Modernism had proffered the ostensible neutrality of the white cube as an alternative to ornate, culturally loaded exhibition salons, early site-specific works, such as Lawrence Weiner’s removals of the sheetrock of gallery walls and Michael Asher’s dismantling of barriers that revealed the backroom storage areas and administrative offices of commercial gallery spaces, exposed this vaunted neutrality as an artificial construct that was equally freighted with physical and ideological baggage. each of the landmark spaces in Hidden City was distinguished, indeed encrusted by layered markers of evolving function, neglect, and renovation in ways that required both artists and audiences to recalibrate standard procedures of production and reception not only within physical space, but also within historical time. each of these unique sites calls for a renegotiation, even a reinvention of the accepted rituals of visitation and spectatorship, eschewing the ahistorical aspirations of Modernism and its reliance on what we could call the site-generic.

According to artist and critic Brian O’doherty, one consequence of the proliferation of white cubes was the possibility of capitalizing on the fact that every variation had “a presence possessed by other spaces where conventions are preserved through the repetition of a closed system of clues.”4 the white cube’s “ungrubby surfaces…untouched by time” offered painting and sculpture a place to bask in an “eternity of display”5 that matched the “presentness” and “instantaneousness” attending the ideal apprehension of Modernist painting and sculpture espoused by critics such as Michael Fried in his essay “Art and Objecthood.”6 to visit the works that comprised Hidden City was

to navigate unexpected interfaces of site and time.

Within what is now a cultivated practice of situating contemporary artworks in non-traditional, historic spaces,7 site-specificity can also be understood as a hermeneutic attribute of a project, a means by which to measure the degree and quality of interpretive integration and interference that viewers must elaborate for themselves. increasingly, the designation of site-specific signals to the viewer a dialogic, experiential engagement with both art and place. As a result, site-specific work presented at historic venues produces a reciprocal neutralizing effect on both the location and the artwork: the layers of expectation of a pure “art experience” that one might carry when entering a gallery are displaced; and likewise, whatever purpose or use the given site may have is momentarily set aside to allow entry into an aesthetic experience. Many visitors to Hidden City, for instance, noted that were it not for Sanford Biggers’s project and the context of the festival, they would not have been “comfortable” entering Mother Bethel AMe Church. Conversely, many also said that they would not seek a contemporary art experience in a gallery or museum, but that the allure and familiarity of “non-art spaces,” such as churches and school buildings, became welcome facilitators of artistic experience. All the works in Hidden City required some form of temporal and bodily investment from the viewer. this appeal to the observer has distinguished site-specific practice from its inception while posing a challenge to the categorical purity of genre and medium championed by formalist critic Clement Greenberg. not only did the viewer have to “be there” in the “here and now” to have the intended experience of apprehending, for example, the molten lead thrown against the floor and walls that comprised Richard Serra’s Splash Piece: Casting, 1969, but the makers of these works often claimed that such pieces ceased to exist if removed from the space.8 Over its more than half-century of evolution, sitespecificity has grown to embrace the emergence of other practices that are more adaptable in their topical applications. the wall drawings of

Sol LeWitt and the Measurement Series, 1967, of Mel Bochner offer two examples of works that are generated by following systematic instructions (or scores) but whose finished results are determined by the particular contingencies of the given spaces.

Such intentional flexibility allows such works to be executed over and over again for multiple locations without the artist having to be present and with the understanding that any unexpected variations that result are welcomed by the artist. iñigo ManglanoOvalle’s Sonambulo, 1998–2009, could be said to be an example of this type of work, while at the same time offering a new precedent for site-specific practice. never intended as a site-dependent work, Sonambulo, in its first conception in 1998, required the precise construction of an isolated space that would cut off visual and aural access to the outside world. Since this initial presentation, the work has been exhibited on numerous occasions at a variety of venues. Just prior to its presentation at Hidden City, and in a significant departure from its original concept, the work was installed at an outdoor site in Marfa, texas. Sonambulo’s installation in the former Boy Scouts of America meeting room at Shiloh Baptist Church made it appear so carefully tuned to the space (as well as the neighborhood) that it could be read as an intentionally site-specific work. this moving pairing of artwork and site offers another example of the confounding exigencies of a practice that are still actively evolving. eventually, site-dependent works migrated outside the confines of conventional exhibition spaces into abandoned buildings and derelict urban sites. Works by daniel Buren and Gordon Matta-Clark, as well as “Rooms,” the inaugural exhibition at new York City’s P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in 1976, are landmark examples of this development. Robert Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed, 1970, a project involving the bulldozing of soil over an abandoned structure on the campus of kent State university, is perhaps more relevant to the legacy of site-specificity summoned by Hidden City than his iconic Spiral Jetty, 1970. Site-specificity also grew to encompass the many modes of performance-

By the mid-1980s, site-specificity had not only become a more standard option available to a second generation of artists, but it also had started to become a criterion, if not a misunderstood convention, of public art. this shift from radical practice to a kind of design utility and public service is most vividly and infamously demonstrated by the forced removal of Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc, 1981-1989, from new York’s Javits Building Plaza and its replacement by the more user-friendly amenities of architect Martha Schwartz’s curving benches for the same site, installed in 1997 and still extant. in 1992 Fred Wilson’s “Mining the Museum”—an installation at the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore—concretized a new model of intervention that merged institutional critique, material history, and identity politics. Wilson’s project followed exhibitions such as “Chambres d’Amis,” a group show curated by Jan Hoet in 1986. An innovative disintegration of the boundaries between private and public space, “Chambres d’Amis” invited fifty American and european artists to create works for as many private homes in Ghent, Belgium, which were then opened to the public for several weeks.9 Fusing artist’s studio and public institution, as well as the role of artist and curator, Wilson’s operations on the Historical Society collection similarly forged a new vocabulary of tactical placement and display of cultural artifacts that were noteworthy in their nuanced details, such as the drafting of new exhibition labels and refocusing spotlights on the backgrounds of existing paintings to reveal their black subjects. the effects of “Mining the Museum” were not so much phenomenological as discursive and political. the show’s potency as a model has become so pervasive as to encourage both artists and curators alike to avoid duplicating

its strategies. in many ways, Wilson’s work gave rise to the notion of the “curatorial intervention,” a mode of practice in which the creative role of the artist and the interpretive and facilitative functions of the curator are blurred. Artists such as Christian Marclay, Mark dion, and indeed Sanford Biggers in his work for Hidden City, positioned the objectbased, museological maneuvers of the curator at the core of their practices. Curators, likewise, became increasingly co-conspirators with artists in the creative development and realization of projects. this is seen perhaps most prominently in the growing practices of revisiting historical site-specific works through re-envisioned installations. the early1990s heralded museum exhibitions such as “the new Sculpture 1965-75: Between Geometry and Gesture” (the Whitney Museum, 1990) that historicized seminal examples of site-based works from the 1960s and 1970s. Reconstructions and refabrications of “unrepeatable” precedents, such as Barry Le va’s scatter installation Continuous and Related Activities Discontinued by the Act of Dropping, 1967, betrayed what were assumed to be defining principles of site-specific works and the artists’ investment in the original locations. the debate about whether Smithson’s Spiral Jetty should be restored now that the work is threatened not only by the climate of the Great Salt Lake but by art pilgrims eager for souvenirs uncovers a new layer of the problematic posed by the ideals of the genre. (the issue is underscored in this case by Smithson’s own celebration of entropy.) thanks to these and other developments, the transferability, portability, and restorability of site-specific works are becoming conventions of the idiom, all unforeseen possibilities that coincide with the formation of commercial markets for a practice once defined by its resistance to commodification and institutionalization. in 2002, responding to the myriad and contradictory uses of the term “site-specificity,” art historian Miwon kwon published One Place After Another: Site Specific Art and Locational Identity, the first critical history and authoritative interrogation of

the practice. in her book, kwon offers a theoretical framework for assessing the evolution of sitespecificity and its often bewildering permutations and intersections with other practices. Among her chief intentions was to address the indiscriminate use of the term as an “automatic signifier of ‘criticality’ or ‘progressivity.’”10 Acknowledging the emergence of new terms and synonyms, such as “contextspecific,” “audience-specific,” “community-specific,” and “project-based” to question received notions of site-specificity, kwon notes that these variants “signal an attempt to forge more complex and fluid possibilities for the art-site relationship while simultaneously registering the extent to which the very concept of the site has become destabilized in the past three decades or more.”11 She describes how artists such as Mark dion, Andrea Fraser, Christian Philipp Müller, and Fred Wilson, among others, have helped redefine what we mean by sites for art as they move from familiar contexts (museums, galleries, parks, and gardens) to more public realms and the domain of the everyday: “dispersed across much broader cultural, social, and discursive fields, organized inter-textually through the nomadic movement of the artist—operating more like an itinerary than a map—the site can now be as various as a billboard, an artistic genre, a disenfranchised community, an institutional framework, a magazine page, a social cause, or a political debate. it can be literal, like a street corner, or virtual, like a theoretical concept.”12 Hidden City presented itself as a sample index of the diverse manifestations that site-specific practice has attained at the outset of the 21st century— from multidisciplinary modes of creative practice to curatorial intervention. even the complex relationship of these practices to community-based work and public art was not left untouched. While Hidden City never consciously set out to explore communal creative process, the festival created many productive accidents of community engagement. these included the establishment of an annual art exhibition and benefit held by the congregation of Shiloh Baptist Church, Girard College’s interest in

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based practices, such as Mierle Laderman ukeles’s Maintenance Works, 1973, for the Wadsworth Atheneum; and choreographer trisha Brown’s Roof Piece, 1973, a work for twelve dancers positioned on twelve different rooftops over a ten-block area in new York.

using the third floor of Founder’s Hall for more regular programming, and the adaptive commercial re-use of a building at the disston Saw Works. in addition, Hidden City received a positive citation in a recent study on public art in Philadelphia, even though none of the projects of the festival constituted “public art” in the true sense of that term.13 Considering the festival’s provocative contributions to the debate surrounding the aesthetics and politics of site-specific practice, Hidden City is poised to ensure that Philadelphia maintains a prominent position at the forefront of this vital artistic discourse.

Richard Torchia is an artist and the director of the Arcadia University Art Gallery in Glenside, Pennsylvania, where he has curated one-person exhibitions and projects by artists including Dave Allen, Olafur Eliasson, Amy Hauft, William Larson, Donald Moffett, Paul Ramirez Jonas, Kay Rosen, and Beat Streuli. He is currently working with co-curator Gregg Moore on an exhibition for Arcadia showcasing the iconoclastic ceramic work of Ai Weiwei. Torchia was the inaugural curator of the Levy Gallery at Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia (1987-95), and since 1996 he has been an adjunct professor at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

1.

Facing Page: detail of the ceiling in the Sunday school space of Shiloh Baptist Church.

Peter Frank, “Site Sculpture,” Art News, October, 1975.

2. Rosalind krauss, “Sculpture in the expanded Field,” October, vol. 8. (Spring, 1979), p. 34.

3. douglas Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins (Cambridge, Mass.: Mit Press, 1993), p. 17.

4.

Brian O’doherty, “inside the White Cube: notes on the Gallery Space, Part 1,” in Looking Critically: 21 Years of Artforum Magazine (Ann Arbor: uMi Research Press, 1984), p. 188; originally published in Artforum in 1976.

5. Ibid.

6. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Ibid., p. 67; originally published in Artforum in 1967.

7. in Philadelphia, it is important to note the 1995 exhibition at eastern State Penitentiary, “Prison Sentences: the Prison as Site, the Prison as Subject.” Co-curated by Julie Courtney and todd Gilens, the show featured installations located throughout the historic building by a roster of international and Philadelphia-based artists and played a pivotal role in the site’s sustained programming of contemporary art.

8. Robert Barry stated in a 1969 interview that each of his wire installations was “made to suit the place in which it was installed. they cannot be moved without being destroyed.” Fifteen years later, as part of Richard Serra’s legal defense to keep his Tilted Arc at Javits Building Plaza (its original, intended site), he wrote: “it is a site-specific work and as such, is not to be relocated; to remove the work is to destroy the work.” Rosalyn deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Mit Press, 1996), p. xi.

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9. “the Home Show,” an American (suburban) version of this idea featuring ten projects, was organized by the Santa Monica Contemporary Arts Forum in 1988.

10. Miwon kwon, One Place After Another: Site Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Mit Press, 2002), p. 1.

11. Ibid., p. 2.

12. Ibid., p. 3.

13. the study published by PennPraxis states among its key findings that “the most interesting work being done in the public art realm in Philadelphia is coming from private and nonprofit organizations, not the public sector…[various projects] and Hidden City Philadelphia have captivated the city for weeks at a time.” Harris M. Steinberg, FAiA, et. al., Philadelphia Public Art: The Full Spectrum (Philadelphia: PennPraxis, 2009), p. 17.

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1 2 | Hi dd en Cit Y

intROduCtiOn By thaddeus A. Squire

“The more one explores and the more one gets to know, the more one sees. Sooner or later one is bound to find the Hidden City, those numberless little back streets of old houses, or old houses newly restored…that slip through the city from one river to the other…”

—nathaniel Burt, The Perennial Philadelphians (1963) “Whatever form it takes going forward, Hidden City will remain valuable for giving local and international artists a source of new inspiration, and the cobwebbed corners of Philly’s architecture orphans new life.”

—Shaun Brady, Philadelphia City Paper (2009)

Facing Page: view into the interior of the Joseph P. Horner Memorial Library of the German Society of Pennsylvania.

Hidden City was born of a series of conversations beginning in 2004 between Susan Glassman, executive director of the Wagner Free institute of Science; John Andrew Gallery, executive director of the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia; and myself. Prior to founding the producing and consulting organization Peregrine Arts in 2005, i had been artistic director of the contemporary music ensemble Relâche in Philadelphia. While at Relâche, i undertook two projects that explored unconventional performance locations as a means of creating new contexts and interpretive points of entry for contemporary music and sound art. One of these programs, featuring sci-fi-inspired works by Randall Woolf, Charles dodge, and Annie Gosfield, took place in the Wagner’s stunning industrial Revolution–era lecture hall in February 2003. the first artistic program of any kind to be presented there since the building’s construction in 1859, the project was a curatorial intervention that brought contemporary composition inspired by the physical sciences and 19th-century technology into a space whose memory provided a portal through which the audience could connect more deeply to the ideas and aesthetics of the music. Reciprocally, many members of Relâche’s audiences were brought to one of Philadelphia’s great heritage sites for the first time. the other project was produced in partnership with and presented at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in May–July 2003, and featured a new multimedia performance installation, The Bell and the Glass by

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the five projects that are the subject of this study were part of Hidden City, a festival exhibition produced by Peregrine Arts that ran from May 30 to June 28, 2009. the festival featured ten works in a range of disciplines (visual and sound installation, new media, dance, and music), created for nine heritage sites throughout Philadelphia: all important landmarks of the city’s cultural history that have for various reasons over time become less known to, if not forgotten by, the public at large. the only true mandate given to the artists was that their work be inspired by a site and created to animate and interpret its history for visitors. Six of the sites were home to visual art installations, which were free and open to the public on weekends during the festival; the other three sites housed music and dance works and were accessible only for performances.

Christian Marclay. Referencing the Liberty Bell (situated three miles away) and Marcel duchamp’s The Large Glass, or The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, 1915–1923, (the centerpiece of the PMA’s celebrated duchamp collection), Marclay created a multi-part composition consisting of a video, a book of images, a collection of objects, and a “score” for live music improvisation. Structured free improvisation, as a pure performance practice, is often challenging for general audiences to access, as it leaves behind traditional modes of rhythmic and harmonic organization. in this instance, however, Marclay’s video and installation lent the music a rich visual context and many points through which even the uninitiated could grasp the complex layers of meaning within the work. in addition, situating such performance practice in a museum gallery permitted visitors to be more in control of their experience than, for instance, the more rigid rituals of the concert hall typically allow.

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these two projects, each in its own way, succeeded in generating new audiences for and experiences of art and heritage by crossing traditional disciplinary, institutional, and situational boundaries. While this kind of exploration was in itself hardly novel, the series of conversations that followed with Susan and John focused on expanding the idea to a citywide scale and presence—something that had not yet been done in Philadelphia. We were interested in creating a festival around art as a mode of site-based interpretive practice with the goal of attracting wide public participation and building audiences for both the city’s under-known heritage sites and histories, as well as for some of the more abstract and conceptual practices of contemporary art. thus there arose two curatorial intentions for Hidden City Philadelphia. First, the project intended to bring historically significant places and contemporary artistic practice into mutually interpretive dialogue, so that art and history would become keys to reading each other, and offer the visitor two possible points of entry—to access history through art, or vice versa—both avenues

made possible by their physical proximity in discrete space. Second, the festival set out to explore a diversity of contemporary approaches to site-specific visual art practice, from place-inspired artistic composition (visual or sound installation, print, dance, video, music, etc.) to historically informed curatorial intervention. the first planning meeting for Hidden City took place in the library of the Wagner in June 2005. We invited about ten leaders in Philadelphia’s historical and preservation community to suggest the most significant (in their minds) under-known or inaccessible heritage sites within the city limits. An index of roughly one hundred sites emerged, from which a short list of about thirty was compiled by a team of historians and myself, based on historical significance and visual “impact”—places that were guaranteed to astonish. not all of the sites were out of use entirely. Many of our sites were specific unused spaces within otherwise operating institutions. For instance, many spaces in Girard College’s Founder’s Hall are used today, but the third floor, which we occupied for Hidden City, has been closed to the public and out of use since 1916. the only operating space that we included was the sanctuary of Mother Bethel African Methodist episcopal (AMe) Church, which is home to one of the city’s most vibrant congregations. We wanted to include Mother Bethel on account of the wondrous nature of the space, and while it is one of the most significant African American churches in Philadelphia, it remains under-visited, and its history remains little known to a great many Philadelphians. the reasons for our focus on under-known sites and spaces that were predominantly no longer used, as opposed to well-known sites and functioning spaces, were twofold. First, i have long been fascinated by the broad-based allure of adventure and mystery associated with uncharted places.

Growing up in suburban Philadelphia, i spent many weekends exploring the sprawling (and then largely neglected) Henry C. Gibson estate Maybrook, whose 1881 Gothic manor house designed by the

Hewitt Brothers still stands today. it is possible that the seed for Hidden City was planted in my subconscious during those excursions. the robust public response to the festival—more than 10,000 attendees—proved i am not alone in this interest.

Second, abandoned or unused spaces do not as readily foreclose on imagination as those that are actively “imagined.” it is harder for us to access the depth and breadth of memory in space that is subject to a current use or purpose. When walking through the bustling grand concourse of 30th Street Station in Philadelphia, for example, it rarely occurs to us to think of who might have walked there in 1933 when the station opened. ironically, it is precisely the absence of human activity at a site that serves to foreground its memory and open up the possibility for imaginary narratives and the reterritorialization of the space into new identities, meanings, and even uses. Art functions similarly, demanding that the viewer discern meaning within a compositional space of form, texture, color, etc. the abstract nature of much contemporary art often challenges the viewer’s ability to construct meaning. However, when such art is introduced into spaces already laden with memory, potential meaning becomes induced reciprocally onto the work and the space, like an electrostatic charge, illuminating wide vistas of possible interpretation and understanding. no one would disagree that space, creative practice, and meaning-making are inextricably intertwined through circumstance. Yet presumptions about the severability of art and site and their relationship to meaning maintain a high degree of purchase within the fine and performing arts, as indicated by some of our persistent terminologies. We still talk about “site-specific” and “installation” practices, as well as “non-traditional” and “alternative” space, all of which imply a normative counterpart, which we presume to be non-site-based practices and the white cube gallery, respectively. But no art, whether monumental or ephemeral, can avoid the imprint of place. the idea of neutral space for art—space that allows the art to speak for itself without regard

As the dichotomy between site-specificity and the rest of artistic practice increasingly reveals itself as false, such terms grow to denote less the physical arena of art-making and more the work’s relationship to the discursive politics of the art world—here defined as those institutions and individuals that agree to participate in the complex process of linking artistic practice to academic meaning and market-based valorization. “Site-specific” in this sense connotes a space in which other forces are at work, where the rules of artistic and public engagement and hermeneutics have the potential to shift dramatically, often uncomfortably beyond curatorial or institutional control. if we accept these two categories of space—the physical and the discursive—then the projects of Hidden City were situated well beyond both normative “spaces.” not only were the individual projects located outside the physical gallery, more significantly, they were negotiated outside the discursive reaches of established arts institutions and curatorial personalities. Perhaps it is this condition that enabled Hidden City to develop along less-traditional organizing principles. As the festival evolved, place became the primary organizer of creative practice, not practice itself—a departure from the aesthetic-based motives that typically underpin artistic and curatorial exploration. in the end, artists were matched to sites, not the other way around. Sites were chosen by the artists, but

from a very select group of vetted locations. the artists’ dialogue with space and the conventions of site-specificity exposed the distinction between traditional/non-traditional and site-specific/ non-site-specific as dubious, and at best highly flexible—and most interesting and potentially meaningful if left that way.

and in apt reflection, his three-part composition proved an elegant solution to the over-scale aesthetics of architect thomas u. Walter’s design, teasing insight and experience out of the smallest crevices of Girard’s monument. For Constellation, Sanford Biggers likewise engaged deeply with the site of Mother Bethel AMe Church and its extensive underground Railroad history. unlike Roden, Biggers did not have scale to contend with, but rather the rich color and patterns of the church’s sanctuary and stained glass windows, as well as the practical challenges of creating a work for the festival’s only actively used space. His solution was simple yet profound and navigated the complex interests and delicate treatment required of both his subject matter and his hosts.

the five artists of this study (and in two cases, the projects themselves) were brought to Hidden City by kathleen Forde, Christian Marclay, Richard torchia, and Stephen vitiello, who served as curatorial advisors. While these individuals are widely respected figures in the art world, in a position to make a statement about contemporary art by presenting a collection of individual artistic practices, they focused instead on bringing to the project significant artists and works whose Aleksandra Mir’s Newsroom Philadelphia was collaborations with site were sure to bear a rich unique among the projects in that she chose the variety of fruit. And indeed this was the case. Along print media of the Philadelphia Inquirer as her with Like Lambs by Steven earl Weber; Running “site.” She explored a new rendering of an iterative True by John Phillips and Carolyn Healy; The New intervention project that she had been exploring Royality by todd Reynolds, Bill Morrison, and for several years: reworking news periodicals by Laurie Olinder; Battle Hymns by Leah Stein and culling and reorganizing their content to create new david Lang; and Revival by Wally Cardona and critical readings of contemporary culture. in order Phil kline, these five projects—by Sanford Biggers, to satisfy the mandates of both the Inquirer and Stan douglas, iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Aleksandra Hidden City’s promise of offering an experience of Mir, and Steve Roden—represent a broad spectrum physical space, Mir’s work was “installed” by placing of approaches to site-specific practice, falling into 5,000 printed copies of eight new broadsides she three categories of intervention: creative, iterative, created from past Inquirer editions in the abandoned and curatorial.

18th floor of the central tower of the newspaper’s headquarters on north Broad Street. two of the five projects in this study were creative interventions. this approach speaks to a relatively the other two installations, Der Sandmann (1995) conventional assumption about site-specificity, by Stan douglas and Sonambulo (1998–2009) namely that there needs to be a process-based by iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, were pure curatorial interaction by the artist with the site. For nothing interventions. Both were pre-existing works that but what is therein contained, Steve Roden undertook were matched in critical and interpretive ways with an extensive process of research and visitation; his the German Society of Pennsylvania and Shiloh installation came to occupy three rooms of the Baptist Church, respectively. Originally designed for long-vacant third-floor vaults of Founder’s Hall highly controlled acoustic and visual environments at Girard College, the minute scale of his work created through custom-fabricated isolation rooms standing in stark contrast to the massive spaces he positioned in conventional gallery space, both chose to engage. His research led him into some of works were radically re-envisioned for spaces that the more esoteric corners of the college’s history, provided neither isolation nor control. the images

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to its physical context—is questionably tenable. equally spurious is the corollary that art can possess a fixed materiality or performative specificity whose significance is somehow self-contained and transferable through time and space, without the prospect of substantial change in meaning or perception. As the Hidden City projects demonstrate, work need not be expressly made for a specific site to derive meaning from that new spatial context, and other work may be made expressly for a place yet intentionally challenge the viewer’s ability to draw connections between the work and the space it inhabits.

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and sounds of douglas’s work were removed from their sterile container and cast against the dim bibliographic backdrop of the German Society’s library, allowing the work’s literary references to resonate within a new textual envelope. Prior to inhabiting Shiloh’s former Boy Scout meeting room, Manglano-Ovalle’s Sonambulo had been re-installed on numerous occasions by the artist, who thereby transformed a work that was not originally site-specific into a piece whose message is capable of occupying a multiplicity of frames, each in its own way “site-related.” in the case of such curatorial interventions, the curator’s selection of the piece to be installed and the artist’s permission constitute a kind of collaborative reading of the site. More significantly, not only is the memory of the artist brought into dialogue with the history of the site, but the memory of the work itself offers an additional layer of interpretive potential that “new” creative interventions would not necessarily bring to bear. to situate an artwork or performance outside the white cube or beyond the proscenium no longer reads as sharply critical or carries the avant-garde tenor that it might have in the past. But in this post-political stage in the relationship between space and art, there is much more than criticality at stake. As artists and curators struggle increasingly to establish points of communication with audiences, the role of the site and its potential to ground art in a community are becoming central to the conversation around the meaning of art within our broader cultural fabric. Space, more than ever, is imbued with the power to create, amplify, thwart, or undermine the connection between artist and audience. On the one hand, the conventional space of a gallery or concert hall can offer logistical ease and ready room for a seemingly endless diversity of work. it can be a familiar beacon and welcome safe haven for audiences. On the other hand, such dedicated space can be a liability, imposing prescripts and limiting the terms of engagement for contemporary creative and curatorial practice. More critically, space can interpose strong conceptual and

perceptual barriers between the work of artists and new audiences. Most exhibiting institutions, by virtue of their euro-American institutional lineage, prescribe and proscribe their audiences, against all ecumenical intent. driving creative and historical practice to escape the well-trodden corridors of our cultural institutions into more feral environments leads to disturbances and conflicts that allow us to perceive more keenly the barriers and borders that define the frontiers of cultural exchange and understanding.

Philadelphia is indeed a city rich with wondrous places both known and unknown. i hope this project will grow to be a mechanism for exploring the uncharted social, historical, and artistic potentials of these spaces. Art should permeate the landscape of our Hidden City, transforming spaces from mere locations of artistic work and audience experience into powerful platforms for sustaining the value of creative practice and charting new futures for our shared cultural heritage.

Thaddeus A. Squire is founder and president of Peregrine Arts and originator of Hidden City. Having grown up in Philadelphia, he left the city to study music composition, conducting, and the history of science. In 1997 he returned to Philadelphia, where his work has grown to embrace the fields of the fine and performing arts and humanities.

Facing Page: detail of a photograph wall from the interior of Mother Bethel African Methodist episcopal (AMe) Church.

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interior view of the sanctuary of Mother Bethel facing west.

SAnFORd BiGGeRS Constellation, 2009 Mother Bethel African Methodist episcopal (AMe) Church

HiStORY OF tHe Site

Richard Allen memorial plaque, exterior of Mother Bethel.

thus an important organization was established in 1787 under the leadership of Jones and Allen: the Free African Society, the first mutual aid society formed in America by blacks, for blacks. Allen left the Society a few years later due to religious differences, but continued working with Jones and the community. With growing support he purchased a building and founded the new Bethel Methodist Church, which officially opened in 1794. the congregation worked to abolish slavery, assist freed slaves, end the colonization movement by which free blacks would be resettled in Africa, and improve education for African American children and adults. By the early 1800s Bethel was Philadelphia’s largest black church, and in 1816, it was declared legally independent from St. George’s Methodist Church, which had sought to control it from the beginning. Allen promptly called a meeting of black churches, which led to the establishment of the African Methodist episcopal Church, the first African American denomination. this gave black Christians a strong institutional voice and a clear sense of identity and community. As many new branches were founded and black Presbyterian and Baptist congregations assumed the AMe denomination, Bethel

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Mother Bethel African Methodist episcopal (AMe) Church traces its origins to the journey of Richard Allen, who was born into slavery in 1760 and first held in bondage by Pennsylvania judge Benjamin Chew. After he was sold to a farmer in dover, delaware, Allen was converted to the Methodist faith by an itinerant preacher in 1777. Allen traveled, preached to many, and converted some before he was able to buy his freedom in delaware at age twenty. Allen’s preaching brought him to the attention of white Methodist elders, who brought him to Philadelphia in 1786 to preach to the black members of St. George’s Methodist Church, whose congregation was segregated. But hostility grew between the white and black parishioners. When black worshippers, including Absalom Jones, were forcibly removed one day during prayer, Allen and Jones and their congregation withdrew from the church. Allen went on to preach in common areas in black neighborhoods, gathering a significant following.

Church became known as the “mother” of all AMe churches. in the early nineteenth century, Philadelphia had the largest and most prosperous black population in the north. the neighborhood of Washington Square was a stronghold for this thriving black community.

From the churches, the community developed to include schools, newspapers, insurance companies, Masonic lodges, literary societies, libraries, women’s groups, and dancing societies. But from the 1830s until the Civil War, Philadelphia became increasingly segregated, and the racial, economic, and religious unrest led to riots and violence, mainly targeting blacks. even after Allen’s death in 1831, Mother Bethel and other black institutions helped the community endure.

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interior view of the sanctuary with quilt installation for Constellation, 2009.

As its congregation grew, Mother Bethel continued its social service efforts. during the Civil War era, its basement became a stop on the underground

Railroad. notable abolitionists, including Frederick douglass and Sojourner truth, spoke from its pulpit.

After the Civil War, a new (and current) church, designed by Hazelhurst & Huckel in a Romanesque Revival style, was built in 1889 on the site. in the 1900s, thousands of southern blacks came to Philadelphia in search of a better life and joined the Mother Bethel community. in the 20th century, the congregation continued to expand in size and influence, as the denomination grew rapidly on an international scale. Mother Bethel continues to maintain its presence on a piece of land that is the longest continuously held by African Americans. until recently, the congregation still included descendants of escaped enslaved Africans who had been assisted by the church. the community is presently vibrant, remaining connected to its history through the Historical Commission and the Historical Society of Mother Bethel Church, which provides academic services, guided tours of its own on-site Richard Allen Museum, and care for its holdings.

inteRventiOn

For Sanford Biggers, tubman’s pursuit of the north Star conjured an image of the underground Railroad network laid out like a constellation across Philadelphia, invisible by day, and “visible” by night. installed in the sanctuary of Mother Bethel, Constellation is composed of disparate elements that intersect at various points of narrative. A star map, plotting many of the confirmed locations of safe houses and significant events along the underground Railroad, posits Mother Bethel as the north Star. this map was editioned and offered as a free limited multiple to visitors. Antique quilts hanging in the sanctuary also reference the north Star story, and represent the shroud of silence that covers many issues of race relations in this country today. each quilt features a “star” swatch, whose points are formed by a historic woodcut image of slave-ship hulls with bodies laid out like cordwood. the matrices formed by the quilts’ patchwork, as well as their iconography, echo and are amplified by the stained-glass windows of the church. Both surfaces form constellations of meaning through intertextuality, as the Star of Bethlehem in glass becomes abstracted into the north Star, which in the swatch becomes a symbol of human subjugation and physical bondage. Biggers provided a sample swatch for each viewer to take away, as a reminder of the actions and language, both overt and covert, that continue to define the boundaries of freedom today.

top Left: detail of “snake path” quilt, one of ten installed for Constellation, 2009. Photo: Shari Goldenberg. top Right: detail of one of the screen-printed swatches of the star or “lotus” design for Constellation, 2009.

Photo: tabula Studio.

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Constellation, 2009 Constellation is a metaphor for our fragmentary yet immediate relationship to history, particularly with regard to the African American “quest for freedom” and its attendant mythologies. An exploration of Philadelphia’s underground Railroad, the installation maps associations from Mother Bethel AMe, which was a shelter space for fleeing enslaved Africans, to 21st-century narratives, symbols, and desires. the 1849 story of Harriet tubman following the north Star to freedom from Maryland to Philadelphia, which describes the secret messages and networks that were thought to direct her journey, is source material for the project. Historians have since determined that the use of hidden signs to indicate safe houses or danger along the freedom trail—a coded quilt flung over a fence, a lit lantern in a window, a spiritual sung in a field—is largely myth, yet such mythmaking and storytelling are not only compelling points of connection to history, but also symbols of the real adversities endured by African Americans in their struggle for freedom and equality.

top: Recto view of the star map designed by Sanford Biggers in collaboration with Jesse Schlabach for Constellation, 2009, showing a listing of known underground Railroad sites in the lower left.

Photo: Original digital Print File.

Bottom: verso view of the star map designed by Sanford Biggers in collaboration with Jesse Schlabach for Constellation, 2009, showing the north Star or “lotus� design. Photo: Original digital Print File.

Facing Page: detail of the star map designed by Sanford Biggers in collaboration with Jesse Schlabach for Constellation, 2009 showing underground Railroad sites as stars positioned on the city street map of Philadelphia overlaid with a celestial sphere projection. Photo: Original digital Print File.

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B i O G RA PH Y Sanford Biggers draws on black American experience, conceptualism and process art, ethnographic objects, eastern spiritualism and popular icons. His multidisciplinary, multimedia installations plumb the cultural imagination, destabilizing visual and sensual representations. Particular and meaningful historical contexts are often recalled, made present or made strange. viewers engage with his work through performance, in a theatrical activation of the space, and investigation, by teasing out his constellations of reference.

Born in Los Angeles and currently based in new York, Biggers received an MFA from the Art institute of Chicago in 1999. As a young art student, he was inspired by what is now termed Black Romanticism (artists including ernie Barnes, elizabeth Catlett, Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden and John Biggers) and Surrealism (RenĂŠ Magritte, Max ernst, Salvador dalĂ­). Biggers worked toward reconciling these disparate, often contradictory influences by focusing on their surprising points of contact, foreshadowing his later practice. throughout, his work has combined the contingencies of experience with social critique, enigma, humor, and improvisation.

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Piles of screen-printed swatches for Constellation, 2009, displayed in the narthex of Mother Bethel and available for visitors to take away for free. Photo: J. J. tiziou.

Biggers has exhibited internationally at venues including Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany; ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Poland; Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, California; ARCuS Project Foundation, ibaraki, Japan; and the Art in General/trafo Gallery eastern european exchange in Budapest, Hungary. His awards include the Creative time travel Grant, Creative Capital Project Grant, new York Foundation for the Arts Award in performance art/multimedia work, Art Matters Grant, and the Lambent Fellowship. He is an assistant professor at Columbia university and was a 2009 Artist in Residence at Harvard university.

Left: view from the balcony in the sanctuary of Mother Bethel.

Photo: Shari Goldenberg.

Bottom Left: detail of pews from the sanctuary of Mother Bethel.

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Bottom Right: view of the main entrance and south staircase to the narthex of Mother Bethel.

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interior view of the Joseph P. Horner Memorial Library of the German Society of Pennsylvania.

StAn dOuGLAS Der Sandmann, 1995 German Society of Pennsylvania

HiStORY OF tHe Site

detail of a photograph of the German Society’s building committee in 1888 from the Horner Library.

during its first thirty years, the Society continued these humanitarian activities, while growing in prestige and expanding in membership. in the 1800s, the Society widened the scope of its programs, setting out “to teach and improve poor children, both in the english and German languages . . . and enable the proper objects to receive the finishing of their studies in the university.” the Society established its own library in 1817 and worked to popularize German literature among the community it served. this proved difficult, as many immigrants had little interest in literature, and library patrons often requested works in english translation. in 1818, the Society made english its official language. during this period, German immigration to the city dropped off, and the Redemptioner system, thanks in large part to the

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Since its founding in 1749, the German Society of Pennsylvania has remained committed to its fundamental social, educational, and cultural missions; however, as the cultural landscape of Philadelphia has changed, the Society’s identity and social position have shifted in response. the organization was originally established to address the plight of German immigrants, who arrived in droves during the mid-18th century, often having obtained transportation to the colonies by signing over their freedom and becoming indentured servants. With little command of english or colonial law, these people were known as Redemptioners: their near-impossible task was to buy their “redemption” through years of forced labor. A small community of well-established Germans, “moved by the sorry condition of many of our countrymen,” formed a group to “provide relief for these strangers.” in 1750, they successfully lobbied the state assembly for an act prohibiting cramped vessels. in 1764, the group officially became the German Society of Pennsylvania, whose mission was to monitor and assist the arrival of German immigrants. it paid for medical care, provided legal counsel, offered job referrals and monetary loans, and ensured that ship captains did not abuse their power.

Society’s efforts, fell out of favor. As the Society’s services were no longer in demand, membership waned. However, in the mid-19th century, German immigration rose again, and the Society enjoyed new growth, reestablishing German as its official language, adding an archive to its library, initiating a lecture series, offering evening classes, and creating a Legal Aid committee. A property was purchased in Philadelphia’s Spring Garden neighborhood for a new headquarters, which was designed by architect William Gette in the Renaissance Revival style. the main building, with an assembly hall on the first floor and a library on the second, was finished in 1888.

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By the twentieth century, Society membership numbered in the thousands, but world events were soon to affect the Society’s image. during both World Wars, the Society at first vigorously defended the German homeland, its culture, and the German-American community in the face of American criticism and suspicion, but soon changed its stance to one of American patriotism. the Society maintained its pride and identity alongside its allegiance to the united States. during World War ii, membership dwindled to about 350. the remaining members acted with renewed ambition during the war’s final years, partnering with American Relief for Central europe; the Women’s Auxiliary of the Society processed and shipped almost three million pounds of clothing for european families.

in the second half of the twentieth century, the Spring Garden neighborhood became predominantly African American, rather than German, and poverty increased. nevertheless, the Society continued its programs and renovated its headquarters, enlarging its library and archive collections. Over the past twenty years, the Society has seen the resurgence of the neighborhood, and has grown into a new and powerful leadership position within Philadelphia’s cultural community. today, the Society’s library and its extraordinary collection are accessible to scholars and its nearly 700 members, and Gette’s building is one of the few remaining examples of 19th-century architecture in its neighborhood, a monumental record of German history and presence in Philadelphia.

Above: view of Der Sandmann, 1995, projection screen installed in the Horner Library.

Below: detail of interior of the Horner Library, German Society of Pennsylvania.

inteRventiOn

Hoffmann’s story was interpreted by Freud in 1919 as an exemplar of the uncanny (das Unheimliche), an experience that is familiar yet strange, a feeling of self-estrangement and repulsion at the return of a repressed object. Freud’s reading of Hoffmann’s story focuses on the fear of blindness as a recurring theme. in the beginning of the story, as in douglas’s film, the main character’s fear of the Sandman is revealed to be a repression of his own oedipal guilt; his father was murdered in a café the night the child went out in search of the Sandman in the community gardens. in the double projection, the screen is split into two continuous shots that pan in a circle from a Babelsberg film studio in Potsdam (the former east German Hollywood), to a shed, to the garden. the shots, which are shadowy and occasionally undecipherable, begin and end with a man reading a letter. His voice is doubled and soon layered with the voices of his sister and childhood friend, which are also doubled. the two shots alternately blend into and erase over each other, so that the images become simultaneously remembered and unfamiliar. these tactics convey the unheimlich experience of the narrator.

While Der Sandmann does not refer directly to the German Society of Pennsylvania, it was inspired by Germany’s Reunification in the 1990s, and the unease and sense of disconnect that often accompanies such dramatic cultural shifts. the Society has a rich history filled with its own changes in direction as it has stewarded the Philadelphia German-American community over more than two centuries. Like the surface of this film, the organization has been traced and retraced with desires and memories, as well as haunted by its past.

Still images from the film Der Sandmann, 1995.

Photo: Stan douglas.

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Der Sandmann, 1995 Der Sandmann is a two-track, black-and-white 16mm film projection originally commissioned for the 1995 Whitney Biennial. it takes its title and subject from the German writer e. t. A. Hoffmann’s 1817 short story, and draws on the history of the community gardens (Schrebergärten) near Potsdam, in the former east Germany. during the Communist era, these gardens were used for sustenance farming and youth fitness programs, but after the fall of the Berlin Wall the sites were developed into luxury hotels and apartments. in the film, three narrators read correspondence in which they uncover repressed memories from their childhood, recounting fears surrounding the nefarious activities of an old gardener. they are convinced that he is the Sandman, a horrific folklore character who steals sleepless children’s eyes and feeds them to his own children.

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Still images from the film Der Sandmann, 1995.

Photo: Stan douglas.

BiOGRAPHY

Born in vancouver, where he currently lives and works, douglas studied at the emily Carr institute of Art and design. His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including the Biennale of Sydney (1990 and 1996), venice Biennale (1990 and 2001), documenta (1992, 1997, and 2002), Biennale d’Art Contemporain de Lyon (1995 and 1997), Whitney Biennial (1995), Carnegie international (1995), Berlin Biennale (1998), and Moving Pictures at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2002 and 2003). He has had solo exhibitions internationally. He was the first recipient of the Hnatyshyn Foundation visual Arts Award, and also received the Bell Award in video Art and the Arnold Bode Prize.

Below Left: detail of an emancipation banner with Franz daniel Pastorius’s (b. 1651, d. 1720) design for the seal of Germantown with the motto “vine, Linen, and Weaving,” the three focus industries of German settlers (grape and flax farming and textile manufacture) from the Horner Library.

Below Right: interior staircase view of the Joseph P. Horner Library, German Society of Pennsylvania.

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Stan douglas’s film and video installations, photography, and television work reference the histories of cinema, literature, and music in order to defamiliarize the modern. in the words of Hal Foster, douglas investigates “failed utopias and obsolete technologies,” as well as historical traumas, the interrelationships among people in urban spaces, questions of race, and cultural change. His source materials include Samuel Beckett, Marcel Proust, Romantic writer e. t. A. Hoffmann, the Brothers Grimm, blues and free jazz, Hollywood and television, karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. His film and video installations, as well as his television interventions, often use repetition, gaps, cycles, delays, and montage to play with the viewer’s experience of temporality and the temporal paradox of cinema.

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interior view detail of bishop’s mitre design in the wall of the former Boy Scouts of America meeting room in Shiloh Baptist Church.

iñiGO MAnGLAnO-OvALLe Sonambulo, 1998–2009 Shiloh Baptist Church

HiStORY OF tHe Site

detail of a parishioner photograph hanging in Shiloh Baptist Church.

the congregation flourished, but what set the church apart was the exponential growth of its Sunday school programs. From only 37 students at the outset, the school grew to nearly 500 students in a few years. the church required additions to its facilities in 1873, 1893, and 1903, and a new tower was built in 1902. Hewitt designed each of these additions. Member George C. thomas, a banker and missionary who was instrumental to these expansions, also understood the importance of the surrounding neighborhood, and bought some of the nearby houses so as to improve the community; some of the structures were converted into low-cost housing. By 1920, the neighborhood was equipped with the “latest modern improvements” for its “respectable and home-loving” population. By 1918 church membership topped 10,000, and the building’s multiple spaces were adapted for community activities, such as Scouts, men’s and women’s groups, basketball, and Bible reading. despite the church’s growth, attendance declined in the first half of the 20th century as the fabric of the neighborhood changed. in the face of steadily diminishing membership, the Church of the Holy Apostles

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On the corner of 21st and Christian Streets in Philadelphia stands a victorian church that has been the center of two very different communities within a changing neighborhood. in the 1860s, 21st and Christian was at the southwestern outskirts of the city, but at the close of the Civil War the area experienced a building boom. Local leaders of the episcopal Church, itself a fast-growing congregation, believed the burgeoning area needed its own parish, and chose this site in the midst of what was then a predominantly working-class neighborhood. the Church of the Holy Apostles was established in 1868, initially within a modest frame building. Later that year, church leaders enlisted the firm of Fraser, Furness, and Hewitt to create plans for a new structure. George Hewitt was the primary architect.

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relocated in 1945, and Shiloh Baptist Church purchased the building. Shiloh had been founded in 1842 for the city’s African American Baptists in south Philadelphia; one of its first pastors, Jeremiah Asher, was a prominent abolitionist during the Civil War, and according to its records, the church assisted travelers on the underground Railroad.

Having moved through a series of buildings in the area before settling at 21st and Christian, Shiloh quickly instilled itself within the community at its new site; it was home to over twenty groups involved in music, missionary and community work, and church beautification. the church had a packed calendar of events, including visits to other churches, fashion shows, recitals, banquets, children’s programs, guest speakers and musical acts, breakfasts, concerts, and parties. it used each room of the massive church complex, hosting basketball games and the Boy Scouts, and providing roller skating parties in the gymnasium.

At its height, Shiloh served a congregation of roughly 3,000. the new congregation was obliged to renovate and restructure the building to meet their needs, but remarkably, many of the original design elements survive: stained-glass windows, original furniture, tiling, polychromatic brickwork (a Furness signature), and multiple pipe organs. it is the only church designed by Fraser, Furness & Hewitt that is still standing. Like many inner-city churches, Shiloh has seen its membership dwindle over the latter half of the 20th century. With a present congregation of about 200, Shiloh has relied on the assistance of grants, funds, and partnerships with community and preservation organizations in order to maintain the large, complicated church complex. in the past fifty years, the proximity of the church to blighted parts of the city has exposed the congregation to crime and neighborhood deterioration. But recently, new community associations and Shiloh’s outreach activities have positively impacted the area. While many of the rooms of the church are now out of use and filled with relics of a larger, active congregation, Shiloh continues to be a force for positive change and revitalization in its community.

interior of the former Boy Scouts of America meeting room at Shiloh Baptist Church showing the decorative brickwork “Chi Rho” christogram (first two letters of the name of Christ in Greek).

inteRventiOn Sonambulo, 1998–2009 in recent years, Philadelphia has struggled with some of the highest gun violence statistics in the nation.

Southwest Central Philadelphia, where Shiloh Baptist Church is located, has been one of the worst areas in the city for violent crime. not far from Shiloh, the neighborhood of Southwest Philadelphia was referred to as a “homicide hotspot” in 1997 by Congressman Chaka Fattah, whose initiative “Groceries for Guns” (co-authored by Councilwoman Blondell Reynolds Brown) has removed thousands of guns from the neighborhood’s streets. Sonambulo questions how active or complacent we are in curbing the gun violence that marks not only Philadelphia, but the nation as a whole.

interior of the former Boy Scouts of America meeting room at Shiloh Baptist Church showing the large tables that are original to the room.

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Sonambulo is a “sound sculpture,” formed by an eleven-minute looping sound track that resembles a field recording of a summer rainstorm. the work begins with a loud gunshot that quickly disintegrates into the sound of thunder. Collaborating with a sound engineer, a mathematician, and a computer scientist, Manglano-Ovalle composed Sonambulo from a single gunshot sound, recorded in his Chicago neighborhood. duplicating and manipulating this sound using fractal equations, the artist reworked the single shot into 385,000 fragments that combine to evoke rolling thunder, rain, and even chirping crickets. Mimicking the ambient, textural qualities of nature recordings used for contemplation and relaxation, the piece paradoxically derives its origin from the shattering violence that literally and figuratively surrounds us. the Spanish word sonambulo means sleepwalker—a person enshrouded in the false safety of sleep while risking real physical harm. taken as a comment on American culture, the title suggests that we may be dreaming our way through a landscape of imminent danger. Manglano-Ovalle chose to re-create Sonambulo in the former Boy Scout room of Shiloh to remind us to remain vigilant. Yet the piece also holds out a promise of hope: the fractured sound of a random act of human violence is transformed, becoming the sound of a life-bringing act of nature.

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interior of the former Boy Scouts of America meeting room at Shiloh Baptist Church showing the decorative brickwork rendering of the seven-branched menorah that stood in the temple of Solomon as a symbol of the how the light of God is spread through the world.

BiOGRAPHY through multimedia installation works, sculpture, and film, i単igo Manglano-Ovalle investigates the global impact of social, political, environmental, and scientific systems. Often working in partnership or employing experts from disciplines including engineering, architecture, genomics, and climatology, Manglano-Ovalle produces objects that are as technically complex as they are conceptually engaging. His early work focused on collaborative explorations with young people in his hometown of Chicago, which led to the founding of Street-Level Youth Media, a community arts organization for youth in 1993. More recently, Manglano-Ovalle has employed genomic and meteorological methodologies to explore identity and the dual promise and threat of technology.

Bottom Left: interior view into the locker room connected to the former Boy Scouts of America meeting room in Shiloh Baptist Church.

Bottom Right: interior view down a second floor hallway off the main Sunday school space in Shiloh Baptist Church.

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Manglano-Ovalle was born in Madrid and lives and works in Chicago. He attended Williams College, where he got a BA in Art and Art History and Latin American and Spanish Literature; he then completed his MFA in sculpture at the Art institute of Chicago. He has had many solo exhibitions internationally.

Select group exhibitions include documenta, kassel, Germany (1997); the Liverpool Biennial (2004 and 2006); Moving Pictures, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, new York and Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain (2002 and 2003); Bienal de S達o Paulo, S達o Paulo, Brazil (1998); and the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, new York (2000). He has received the John d. and Catherine t. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2001), the Media Arts Award from the Wexner Center for the Arts (1997), and a national endowment for the Arts fellowship (1995).

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interior view from the mezzanine balcony overlooking the main newsroom floor of the Philadelphia inquirer Building.

ALekSAndRA MiR Newsroom Philadelphia, 2009 Philadelphia inquirer Building

HiStORY OF tHe Site

After only a few months, norvell and Walker had difficulty competing, and sold the Inquirer to Jesper Harding. Harding worked quickly to improve the paper’s circulation: he obtained the first American serial rights for several Charles dickens novels and eventually absorbed four rival Philadelphia papers. Harding’s son William took over the paper in the 1840s, and innovated from the start, changing the paper’s name to the Philadelphia Inquirer, cutting single-copy prices, establishing delivery routes, changing the paper’s size, and positioning newsboys on the streets. under William, the paper supported Abraham Lincoln for president and gained renown for its subsequent Civil War coverage. Harding filled the paper with special correspondence, war maps, and woodcuts of generals, admirals, and political figures. the Inquirer gained a national reputation for its objective coverage of the war, which boosted its circulation to 70,000.

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A typewriter in the abandoned 18th-floor office space of the central tower of the Philadelphia inquirer Building.

in the early 19th century, Philadelphia was burgeoning with industrialization and an attendant boom of population, modernization, and media. Six newspapers were engaged in lively competition based on who could produce the most entertaining copy or uncover the latest scandal. At that time, the media was less focused on current events than it is now, and content often consisted of editorials, letters from readers, poetry, travel narratives, and recipes. John norvell, a former editor of the city’s Aurora & Gazette, started the Pennsylvania Inquirer with printer John R. Walker in 1829. While their intentions were entrepreneurial, they ostensibly established their paper as a populist alternative. in the first issue of the Inquirer, the editors dedicated the paper to the “maintenance of rights and liberties of the people, equally against the abuses as the usurpation of power.” they affirmed the right of the minority to set forth its opinion, “however discordant they may be with those of the majority.” though they placed their support behind then-current president Andrew Jackson, they issued a condition: “We condemn a blind, indiscriminate vindication of the acts, right or wrong, of any administration as much as we reprobate a factious and uniform opposition to them.”

Following the war, Reconstruction took its financial toll on the country, and Harding sold the paper to James elverson in 1889. elverson characterized his paper as “progressive” and “Republican.” the Inquirer campaigned for public works and created task forces to investigate large city projects and agendas. elverson’s son James, known as Colonel elverson, took over the paper in 1911 after his father’s death. elverson intensified the pursuits of his father’s administration; the paper became known as the “Republican Bible of Pennsylvania,” and it followed public works campaigns.

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While the paper often changed spaces as it grew, elverson was responsible for the construction of its current building at 400 north Broad Street. dedicated to his father, the eighteen-floor structure contained the latest technology in the industry, including the largest composing room in the world, the fastest printing presses, an assembly hall, an auditorium, and a water filtration and refrigeration plant. Colonel elverson and his wife lived on the 12th and 13th floors, where pieces of their art collection presently remain. A golden dome tops the building, and underneath there is a four-faced clock. upon its completion, thousands of visitors toured the facilities.

After elverson’s death in 1929, ownership of the paper passed to his sister, eleanor elverson Patenotre. the Inquirer’s sole female owner had no interest in managing the paper. She did seize the opportunity to give employees and the public a greater stake in the paper, as she reorganized its capital structure and made 49 percent of the company’s stock available to them. the depression and other events necessitated a series of sales of the majority share, and the changes of leadership were reflected in the paper’s public identity. new owner M. L. Annenberg declared it an “independent newspaper for all the people”; it subsequently passed to his son Walter H. Annenberg, who became one of Philadelphia’s most prominent cultural leaders and philanthropists. knight newspapers, inc., a large national newspaper chain, acquired the paper in 1969, and oversaw an

era of editorial independence and quality reporting that garnered many national awards between 1975 and 1990, including eighteen Pulitzers.

While profits and circulation soared in the 1980s, hard cuts by the parent company and a push toward local coverage in the 1990s led to circulation drops. this precipitated the paper’s sale to a group led by local businessman Brian tierney. tierney vowed to revitalize the paper, but, as was the case with many other newspapers nationwide, circulation figures continued to decline. Presently, the Inquirer’s daily circulation is about 340,000, with an average of two million readers of print and online editions. the paper focuses on maintaining local and web coverage, as newspapers continue to adapt to the changing needs of contemporary readers.

Below: interior view of the abandoned 18thfloor office spaces in the central tower of the Philadelphia inquirer Building hung with the screen-printed edition of Newsroom Philadelphia, 2009.

Below: exterior view of the Philadelphia inquirer Building showing the central clock tower and the 18th floor (the first row of windows below the clock face) where Newsroom Philadelphia, 2009, was installed.

inteRventiOn Newsroom Philadelphia, 2009 in 2009, the Philadelphia Inquirer celebrated its 180th anniversary. Like newspapers worldwide, the paper is battling financial and market forces as communications technology evolves at breakneck speed—from the internet and e-mail to texting and twitter. the future of journalism is increasingly uncertain, yet news continues to play a significant role in generating history and informing cultural self-understanding.

People connect to information through different horizons of reception, but media fragments linger and recur in various ways. From President John F. kennedy’s assassination, the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion, or the events of September 11, 2001, to local events, Facebook updates, advertisements, or celebrity snapshots, certain media materials leave psychical imprints. throughout the Inquirer’s history, as is the case with most newspapers, its representations of society were molded by its predominantly male leadership. the paper’s coverage catered to their particular perceptions of the public good and the desires of its audience. Working in the milieu of dadaist photomontage artist Hannah Höch, Mir made an edition of the paper that pastiches ephemeral articles and images from 2000 to the present: bits of advertising, headlines, announcements, images, and words that together form a picture of the paper’s representations of women. Fragments shorn from a temporal archive, the scraps contain concrete kernels of historical forces. According to Walter Benjamin, the cognizance of these discarded, forgotten objects jolts us out of our understanding of the past and present as a grand progression. through this awakening, the artificial continuum is revealed as such, and the ‘now’ is opened Above: to new potentials. Change inherent in these defunct elements is indicated by Mir’s re-assemblage. the interior detail view of the screen-printed edition work conveys new narratives of women out of the vast expanse of Inquirer detritus, through which the of Newsroom Philadelphia, 2009, in the abandoned viewer charts personal agendas, desires, and memories. Philadelphia readers may recall some of these 18th-floor office spaces in the central tower of the articles and photos, though their original meanings are overwritten or made strange. the Inquirer has Philadelphia inquirer Building. Photo: J. J. tiziou. been instrumental in creating Philadelphias identity by shaping its stories, but now the paper must entirely re-imagine itself in order to survive. the ontology of “news”—as a record of the past and transcription of the present—may change, similarly to our understanding of “woman” through the discourses Mir unveils and challenges.

Left: Stack from the limited edition 5,000 full newsprint copies of Newsroom Philadelphia, 2009, that were originally envisioned to be stacked around the installation space and free for the public to take away. Photo: tabula Studio.

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Newsroom Philadelphia was installed in the Inquirer headquarters. in addition to framed copies of the eight original montages that Mir created, the work was printed by a news press in an edition of 5,000 copies that were to be free take-away multiples for visitors. Following a controversy over the content and intentions of the project, these editions were destroyed.

2k Full views of the layouts of Newsroom Philadelphia, 2009, that Aleksandra Mir composed from digital “tear sheets� from the Philadelphia Inquirer from editions starting in 2000 to the present. Photos: tabula Studio.

Full views of the layouts of Newsroom Philadelphia, 2009, that Aleksandra Mir composed from digital “tear sheets� from the Philadelphia Inquirer from editions starting in 2000 to the present. Photos: tabula Studio.

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Above Left: interior image of the newsroom floor of the Philadelphia inquirer Building.

Above Right: exterior view of the smokestack from the former printing plant building of the Philadelphia Inquirer, currently occupied by the Mathematics Civics and Sciences Charter School of Philadelphia.

Right: exterior view of the main entrance to the Philadelphia inquirer Building that houses Philadelphia Media Holdings LLP, which publishes the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Daily News.

detail of the newsprint edition of 5,000 for Newsroom Philadelphia, 2009.

Photo: tabula Studio.

BiOGRAPHY

Mir is a Swedish-American citizen, born in Poland, who lives and works in Palermo, Sicily. She received her BFA in Media Arts from the School of visual Arts in new York and subsequently attended the new School for Social Research, studying cultural anthropology. All of these subjects conflate in her present practice. As a student in new York, she looked to 1960s and ’70s political art for influences (Fluxus, Allan kaprow, eleanor Antin, vito Acconci, Hannah Wilke, Ray Johnson, et al.), aspects of which are still present in her work. She has exhibited in a range of international exhibitions and garnered public commissions at venues including the Biennale of Sydney, the Whitney Biennial, Palais de tokyo in Paris, the institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the venice Biennale and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in new York. Her first solo show was in 2006 at the kunsthaus Zßrich. She won the Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel.

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Aleksandra Mir concentrates on contemporary social processes, cohabitation, and the everyday. Attuned to popular cultures, she focuses on the traces remaining from public and private exchange; in particular, she examines the pathways and transformations of information through conversation and the media.

From this material, Mir turns mundane objects and cultural detritus into renewed experiences that are critical, yet often whimsical and entertaining. Her work frequently takes the form of a site-specific, situation-bound process, intervention, happening, or installation.

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interior view of the third-floor archive room of Founder’s Hall, Girard College, containing school records from the mid-19th century to the early-20th century. this room was the former “Room of Girard’s Relics” and contained personal artifacts from the life of Stephen Girard (b. 1750, d. 1831) before the third floor was closed to public use in 1916.

Steve ROden nothing but what is therein contained, 2009 Founder’s Hall, Girard College

HiStORY OF tHe Site

detail image of a 3,000-pound block of anthracite coal cut in the late 19th century from the Girard estate Lands in the City of Philadelphia for exhibition purposes; it sits in the back of the archive room. (See the left edge of the picture on the facing page.)

Girard’s largest posthumous philanthropic project, to which he allotted $6 million, was a trust and boarding school that he designated specifically for “poor, white, male orphan children.” He had many stipulations for the erection and plan of Girard College, including specific, and largely uninformed, dimensional requirements for Founder’s Hall (then called the Main Hall), which added time and consideration to the planning process. For example, he specified the number of rooms (four per floor), their size (at least 50 feet square), the thickness of walls and foundations, the location of doors and windows, the placement of staircases (one in each corner), and even the size of the stair treads. the Board of trustees held the first united States architectural competition for the building’s design; the winner was thomas u. Walter, the architect who would later design the Capitol dome in Washington dC. though Girard wanted no “needless ornament” in the structure, Founder’s Hall was both grandly designed and the most expensive building project in America before the Civil War. the school opened in 1848, thirteen years after construction began. Founder’s Hall was intended for classrooms, but its echoing domes and poor traffic flow proved ill suited to teaching. it now houses student functions as well as archives, consisting

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Founder’s Hall, the Greek Revival centerpiece of Girard College, is both a harmonious space and a point of convergence for civic discord. Frenchman Stephen Girard began his remarkable mercantile career as a cabin boy on West indies trading voyages; by 21 he was a licensed ship captain. Settling in Philadelphia, Girard established himself as a merchant during the Revolutionary War and furthered himself in banking and real estate. Girard became a philanthropist, in one instance funding health care efforts during the 1793 yellow fever epidemic. His will, created five years before his death in 1831, gifted money to an array of Philadelphia public service organizations. As the City of Philadelphia was the executor and main beneficiary of such a large estate, the will become a closely studied, and often challenged, document.

of minutely detailed records kept by Girard and college administrators.

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interior view of the third-floor former classroom (one of three) of Founder’s Hall containing fleet, one of the three individual installations constituting nothing but what is therein contained, 2009.

the school’s opening coincided with the urbanization of the area surrounding the campus. But by the mid-twentieth century, the neighborhood was experiencing a decline in population. While at the time of Girard’s death, Philadelphia had fewer than 10,000 black inhabitants (of a population of 80,500), with blacks not even considered citizens, by the 1960s almost a quarter of the city’s total population was black. in 1954, the first African American boys sought admission to the College, but were turned away due to the stipulations of Girard’s will. the case went to court, and for the next decade Girard’s campus became a crucible for the Philadelphia Civil Rights struggle. Cases were filed and re-filed, and the campus became a demonstration site. Martin Luther king, Jr. spoke at the College’s ten-foot wall, which he referred to as “a kind of Berlin Wall

to keep God’s colored children out.” in 1968, the united States Supreme Court ruled that Brown vs.

Board of Education superseded Girard’s will. Since that time, additional challenges to the will have reduced the criteria for admission to children with single parents and financial need. Presently, African Americans constitute the majority of the student body, and more than half is female.

Over the past twenty years, Girard College has struggled with a declining student population and neighborhood blight. However, with the aid of alumni and community associations, revitalization efforts have taken hold. Girard is perceived as a potential anchor for positive social change and growth both in its own neighborhood and beyond.

inteRventiOn nothing but what is therein contained, 2009 installed in the four former third-floor classrooms of Founder’s Hall at Girard College, nothing but what is therein contained is a series of sculptural, text, drawing, and sound compositions. the title is a quote from Stephen Girard’s will, in which he stipulates that Founder’s Hall would only house things that he specified, and nothing more. Architect thomas u. Walter adopted the phrase as the title for his first building designs, which were extremely minimal and guided by Girard’s extensive document. However, the building’s realization, under the influence of College trustees, became quite different from what Girard imagined. With his installation, Roden takes his cues from Girard’s working principles. Yet by allowing additional elements and references to enter the space, he acknowledges the impossibility of unaltered translation—between mediums, languages, and even message senders and receivers. each element of Roden’s installation is a linguistic rendering of the expansive spaces of this building, its histories, and the fastidious notes, drawings, and habits of Girard and Walter. Additional reference points are Benjamin Franklin, Henry Lapp (a 19th-century Amish furniture maker), and Reverend Lorenzo Langstroth (a Philadelphia clergyman and the “Father of American Beekeeping”).

through these compositions, Roden explodes Girard’s constraining dictum, making space for intuition and mutability beyond Girard’s carefully controlled framework. taking the given proposition of Founder’s Hall as empty container, he fills the space with an excess of signifiers—themselves void of content and thus open to infinite interpretation.

Bottom Left: interior view of the third-floor former classroom (one of three) of Founder’s Hall containing fleet, one of the three individual installations constituting nothing but what is therein contained, 2009.

Bottom Right: interior detail of the third-floor former classroom (one of three) of Founder’s Hall containing the glassychord displayed on two oak teacher’s desks ca. 1900, one of the three individual installations constituting nothing but what is therein contained, 2009. Photo: J. J. tiziou.

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in the first room, there is a letterpress book titled the glassychord, which was Franklin’s first name for his famed musical instrument, the glass armonica. the book contains a collage of fragmented quotations ranging from the construction of Founder’s Hall to Langstroth’s beekeeping. the next room contains fleet, consisting of seventeen wooden boxes, fashioned after the shipping crates that were central to Girard’s mercantile business and inspired by the aesthetics of furniture maker Henry Lapp. the words found in the related drawings, as well as on the boxes themselves, list the names of all the ships managed by Girard in his lifetime. the crates double as speaker cabinets; they amplify small sounds of a banjo whose notes were transcribed from a voice singing each ship name. the final room contains a vessel of silence. the pieces of wood that make up the sculpture were cut proportionally to the linear dimensions of the letters that form the phrase “nothing but what is therein contained.” the accompanying sound piece was composed on crystal goblets struck by mallets, referring again to Franklin’s glass armonica. the untouched archive room is the ultimate expression of Founder’s Hall’s vast institutional memory rendered into an architecture of text.

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Facsimile reproductions of the ten individual layouts constituting the accordion-bound letterpress book the glassychord designed by Steve Roden in collaboration with Adrienne Wong as one of the three installation elements of nothing but what is therein contained, 2009.

Photos: tabula Studio.

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Facsimile reproductions of the ten individual layouts constituting the accordion-bound letterpress book the glassychord designed by Steve Roden in collaboration with Adrienne Wong as one of the three installation elements of nothing but what is therein contained, 2009.

Photos: tabula Studio.

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Facsimile reproductions of the ten individual layouts constituting the accordion-bound letterpress book the glassychord designed by Steve Roden in collaboration with Adrienne Wong as one of the three installation elements of nothing but what is therein contained, 2009.

Photos: tabula Studio.

BiOGRAPHY

Roden received an MFA from the Art Center College of design in Pasadena, CA. He has participated in solo and group shows internationally, at locations including Studio La Città Gallery in verona, italy; Susanne vielmetter, Los Angeles and Berlin Projects; the Mercosur Biennial, Porto Alegre, Brazil; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the San diego Museum of Contemporary Art; the uCLA Hammer Museum, LA, the Singuhr-Hörgalerie in Berlin; and the Museum of Contemporary Art (eMSt), Athens.

interior view of the third-floor former classroom (one of three) of Founder’s Hall containing vessel of silence, one of the three individual installations constituting nothing but what is therein contained, 2009.

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Steve Roden is a visual and sound artist based in Los Angeles. His working process systematically translates forms of data or notation (text, architectural plans, maps, etc.) into “scores,” which are then transmitted into abstracted compositions through painting, drawing, sculpture, film/video, sound installation, and performance. Roden’s scores are fixed blueprints, yet they allow for slippages and improvisations inspired by the original material. through the scores, he generates parameters for his visual work, such as color choice, geometric forms, number of elements, and construction. Roden’s sound works are formulated to coexist with a space, its contents, and its histories. He electronically processes objects, architecture, and field recordings to create new audio spaces, or “possible landscapes.” Sound subtly inserted in strategic locations becomes a conduit for new emotional and contemplative understandings. Roden also performs his sound works at live venues. For the movement of extreme ambient minimalism he developed, he coined the term “lowercase,” in which quiet sounds are sandwiched by extended periods of silence.

PROduCtiOn CReditS

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ProductIon thaddeus A. Squire, President, Peregrine Arts Jay Wahl, Managing Producer, Peregrine Arts Becca Bernstein, director of development & Administration, Peregrine Arts Sarah L. Hunter, Samuel S. Fels Research intern & Research Coordinator Catherine Pidgeon, Production Assistant Jordan Rockford, Managing Curator (2007–2008) Perry Fertig, technical director Josh Schulman, Lighting director derek Hachkowski, Master electrician nick kourtides, Sound Advisor Rebecca Starr, Administrative Assistant victoria Lewis, Administrative intern Peter escalada-Mastick, electrician Shelley Hicklin, electrician Paul Moffitt, electrician

MarketIng & vISItor ServIceS Amy Harting, Box Office Manager Andrew White, Marketing Coordinator ed tettemer, Messaging Consultant Joseph e. B. elliott, Architectural Site Photographer J. J. tiziou, Performance & neighborhood Photographer Ryan donnell, textile Photographer Jesse Schlabach, design intern tabula Studio, Website & Graphic design Braithwaite Communications, Publicity kala Moses Baxter, tour Actor Lime Projects, Game Consultants Greater Philadelphia tourism Marketing Corporation, Marketing Partner Fairmount Park Commission, Marketing Partner dutch umbrella, Marketing Partner

artIStIc advISorS kathleen Forde, experimental Media and Performing Arts Center Christian Marclay, Artist Richard torchia, Arcadia university Art Gallery Stephen vitiello, virginia Commonwealth university HIStorIcal advISorS elizabeth Laurent, Founder’s Hall, Girard College Bruce Laverty, the Athenaeum of Philadelphia Bryant Simon, temple university arcHItectural advISorS Atkin Olshin Schade Architects kierantimberlake Associates MGA Partners Architects cIty of PHIladelPHIa Gary Steuer, Chief Cultural Officer John Higgins, department of Licenses & inspections vISItor exPerIence cHarrette PartIcIPantS (June 2008) Robert Cheetham, Avencia incorporated Christopher dougherty, Fairmount Park Commission Medard Gable, Big Picture Small World John Andrew Gallery, Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia Mark Gisi, tabula Studio Matty Hart, Solutions for Progress daniel O. kelly, FAiA, MGA Partners Architects Laris kreslins & kendra Gaeta, Lime Projects Bruce Laverty, the Athenaeum of Philadelphia Jim McGorman, SBk Pictures Roz McPherson, the Roz Group Michael norris, ArtReach derrick Pitts, the Franklin Colin Ripley & Geoffrey thün, RvtR Michelle Schmitt, Metropolitan Philadelphia indicators Project Susan Seifert, Social impact of the Arts Project Harris M. Steinberg, FAiA, PennPraxis

We extend our deepest appreciation to our many individual contributors: Lori Aghazarian, Heath Allen, Bob Beaty, Alice Berman, Laura Blanchard, Andrew Blanda, Andrea J. Braslove, diane Burko, Peter and Miriam Burwasser, Rochelle Christopher, Josh Cohen, Gene Coleman, Penelope and Andrei Constantinidi, Clare Cotugno, Anthony B. Creamer iii, Judy daniels, david deery, Anthony deFlorio iii, Christine deutsch, Allitia diBernardo, Rollo dilworth, Morris and Susan disston, Judith dorf, Ginny duerr, Robin eaton, Ben elderkin, david elderkin, Mike Felker, Graham Finney, Matthew Fisher, Adam Forman, Anna Forrester, Leonard Frank, Aaron Goldblatt, Rob Goldman, Matthew Goldfine, Peter Gulia, Alan Harler, Joanne Harmelin, Amy Harting, Anna Headley, William Hooper, Lydia Hunn, Job itzkowitz, thora Jacobson, Sophie Janney, Gay Gilpin Johnson, Len karp, Jill katz, Lorna kent, Robert and Susan kettell, Muriel kirkpatrick, Sharan knoell, kathleen kurtz, Harry kyriakodis, elizabeth Layberger, nina Liou, Bill Madeira, elizabeth Main, kelly McBride, Sherri Meade, ellen Cole Miller, Ross Mitchell, Sue Moore, Susan nanes, Michael norris, Glenavie norton, Jena Osman, Christopher Plant, vanaja v. Ragavan, Jeanne Ruddy, kim Sajet, douglas Schaller, Christine and Anthony Shippam, ellen Beth Siegel, Jerry Silverman, Jake Soumis, vicki Squire, Andre C. Stephano, Constantine and Jan Stephano, thomas taggart, Charles thrall and Sally Simmons, doug troutman and Hannah Margolis, Senator Constance H. Williams, and Barbara Zalkind.

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General in-kind support for Hidden City was provided by: the Athenaeum of Philadelphia, Blick Art Materials, Fiduciary Guidance Counsel, Philadelphia Live Arts Festival & Philly Fringe, the Prince Music theater, the university of the Arts, Michael and nancy verruto, Walnut Street theater, West Chester university of Pennsylvania, and Young Scholars Charter School.

inStALLAtiOn SPeCiFiCAtiOnS Constellation, 2009, by Sanford Biggers ten quilts (antique American quilts, ca. 84 x 60˝ each, two “treated” by the artist with designs in oil paint); a star map (digital offset print on coated paper, 18 x 24˝, limited edition of 2,000); and fabric swatches (rough-cut cotton “backing,” each screen-printed in one of four colors, 11.75 x 11.75˝, limited edition of 500 swatches per color).

Der Sandmann, 1995, by Stan douglas two-track 16mm black-and-white film projection (screen: 96 x 144˝) and stereo sound track, ca. 12 minutes.

Sonambulo, 1998–2009, by iñigo Manglano-Ovalle Looping sound work with stereo playback and subwoofer reinforcement, 11 minutes; natural-light illumination with blue tinting film applied to all light sources.

Newsroom Philadelphia, 2009, by Aleksandra Mir eight half-layouts, 12.5 x 22.75˝ each, printed on news presses and folded newspaper-style, limited edition of 5,000, and one edition of all eight half-layouts screen printed onto newsprint and framed, 14 x 28˝.

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nothing but what is therein contained, 2009, by Steve Roden the glassychord (letterpress book in red ink on cotton paper, accordion-bound with cloth-covered end boards, 4.25 x 4.25˝, limited edition of 20, displayed on two oak teacher’s desks, ca. 1900); fleet (seventeen pine wood boxes, 12 x 12 x 18˝ each, with ink lettering, speakers and cable, two digital video players, 5.1 surround amplifiers, with looping sound work of 20 minutes consisting of electronically processed sounds of a banjo, and 14 ink drawings on paper, with pine wood frames ranging from 7 x 14˝ to 15 x 20˝); and vessel of silence (sculpture of ca. 168 x 108 x 108˝ made of 2 x 2˝ painted pine timbers of varying lengths, with looping sound work of 40 minutes consisting of electronically processed sounds of two wine glasses).

Crane Arts Building, Suite 412 1400 North American Street Philadelphia, PA 19122-3803 www.hiddencityphila.org info@hiddencityphila.org T 267 597 3808 F 215 763 7140

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