Living & Arts
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With Mercury in retrograde, disaster appears imminent Swarthmore College, I’m afraid I have some really incredibly bad news. This is news, which is not at all good, understand; it is very bad. Listen, the entire school is in trouble. This Wednesday, Mercury will go into retrograde. If you are reading this, it is already Thursday and Ariel Swyer yes, we’re in the midst Let’s Be Serious of it. You’ve probably lost track of what I’m talking about, because that is the way things are when Mercury is in retrograde. Some of you of course have had no idea what I’m talking about from the beginning and so, I will outline the basic facts. 1. Sometimes Mercury up in the sky appears to us on Earth to be going backwards. 2. According to the field of astrology, this makes communication on Earth more difficult and everything much more confusing than it is normally, which is quite confusing. 3. It also makes perception, mental processing and most of what is within the realm of education difficult. I think it has some other detrimental effects, but unfortunately the webpage I’m using to confirm my knowledge of what happens when Mercury goes into retrograde is being obscured by ads for California psychics. At this point, I assume many of you are turning to one another and saying “Ah yes, now we very much understand what she is talking about.”
Others of you are tossing your newspapers to the side so that they land in your companions’ orange juice, and going off in search of something normal, muttering vaguely about how you still don’t know what I’m talking about, you never will know what I’m talking about and, in fact, you’re certain that I don’t know either. To you, I say, “Well! This may indeed be the case! But believe me, Mercury is going into retrograde and it’s going to be bad!” I’m afraid that Mercury going into retrograde is going to be especially disastrous for Swarthmore. This is the sort of event which hits those who are in the habit of existing in the world of the intellectual with particular force. (“Ah,” you say to yourself. “Oh dear.”) The other factor — as you will know if you have read this column before — is that most Swarthmore students are already inclined to have trouble with communication. We do try very earnestly. In any given trip to Sharples, for instance, one will encounter at least eight people who will ask The Appropriate Question. The Appropriate Question, which you are all quite familiar with, varies according to what part of the semester we are in. We are just coming off of the “How was your spring break?” period and slowly approaching the dawn of “Do you have many exams?” This makes the fact that Mercury is about to go into retrograde even worse. These in-between times are unusually difficult and generally result in mildly incoherent but none-the-less, well-intentioned sentiments such as “How are the exams springing?” The answerer will make an equally well-intentioned effort at communication. “Well,” she might say, “Western Art, Astronomy, Existentialism, and German. And you?” With Mercury in retrograde our intentions will be noble
as ever, yet the results will be beyond redemption. “Um …” the questioner will inquire gesturing vaguely at his acquaintance’s nose “how was the, uh, bleugloofle?” “Deutch!” she’ll reply. “Astronomie, Ich bin ein banane untereinandersein pirat.” (Translation: German, Astronomy, I am a banana being-among-one-another pirate) Yes, it’s true, when Mercury is in retrograde, two thirds of the English-speaking population will at some point wake up speaking German. I would like to emphasize that everyone is at risk of this, even those of us whose only knowledge of German comes from a children’s book about pirates and Heidegger. In case you should encounter such a situation, it would be wise to familiarize yourself with this phrase: “Merkur ist rucklaufig!” Over the next month it will be completely legitimate for you to conclude any social interaction with the shouting of these words in the company of no prior or further explanation. That’s the nice thing about Mercury going into retrograde actually. It justifies such awkward tendencies as these, which many of us at Swarthmore practice regardless of what the planets happen to be doing. Never mind. The important question now, is what the blooming hell do we do about all this?! We don’t speak German! We don’t even remember how to say, “Raise the sails, matey!” We did, but we forgot! Oh no! There are two answers. First, we should panic. And then, when the dust has landed and we’ve found our shoes, we should give up. Mercury is in retrograde, we’re all a great mess and there’s nothing we can do about it. Ah well, segelboot tomate (Translation: sailboat tomato). Ariel is a first-year. You can reach her at aswyer1@swarthmore.edu.
Student exhibit explores complexities of 3-D form BY STEVEN HAZEL shazel1@swarthmore.edu Photography and other visual art forms are sometimes categorized as forms that can be examined and understood from one angle, placed in a frame, picked up and carried away. However, a group of Swarthmore artists have blurred the line between art as a two-dimensional picture and a three-dimensional sculpture. A new exhibit at the Kitao Gallery, titled “Introducing: The Tomorrow People,” will open today and will display three-dimensional artwork and videos by Alex Hollender ’11, Nick Brown ’13, Kate McNamara ’12 and Bruno Levy, who is an established artist from New York. As an art history major who originally studied business at NYU prior to Swarthmore, Hollender discovered his passion for art at an early age when he attended a Waldorf school. The institution, which focuses on fostering creativity, allowed Hollender to enroll in a many more art classes than a traditional elementary school. This translated to his time at NYU, where he created a clothing company called Create Build Destroy with two friends. Once at Swarthmore, Hollender began to explore different forms of artistic expression. “I came to Swarthmore and started studying art history and my first inclination was to paint, but I didn’t have time to learn so I started making different kinds of photo collages,” Hollender said. While Hollender was pursuing his art history major and interning at the List Gallery last year, List Gallery director Andrea Packard encouraged Hollender to
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create his own exhibition. “I started just doing things,” Hollender said. “That’s what I recommend [for other art students] — you just need to find some little tool, some gateway that works — buying a camera or some paint, whatever works for you.” Brown, a photographer and one of Hollender’s creative partners, became interested in photography at a summer camp where he had access to a darkroom. The experience inspired him to take up photography as a hobby. Once at Swarthmore, Brown enrolled in a photography class with visiting professor of studio arts Jessica Harper, who strongly influenced his development as an artist. “I first learned the basic building blocks of the photograph: lighting, shape, form, framing, as well as the creative possibilities involved in the developing and printing process. And then [I] began to develop my own style,” Brown said. The inspiration for “Introducing: The Tomorrow People” emerged when Hollender visited New York and met Levy, an artist whose 3-D videos motivated Hollender to consider the contrast between the two-dimensionality of photos and the three-dimensionality of sculpture. An experienced photographer who received his B.F.A. from the NYU Tisch School of the Arts in 2001, Levy has photographed in locations from Nepal to French Polynesia. He has also worked for a variety of clients such as Sprite, Pepsi and Wired, and his work has been displayed at exhibitions at the Guggenheim, the MCA in Chicago and the Bronx Musuem, among many others. Levy’s videos will be screened as a feature of the
exhibition and the artist may speak at the opening Thursday. Hollender’s own work is inspired by Levy’s artistic considerations. “I was building on [Levy’s] notion of two- versus three-dimensional space,” Hollender said. “The art object is inherently this two-dimensional thing that you can hold and buy and sell. I wanted to break out of that paradigm and make something life size.” Along with Levy, other well-known artists also influenced the exhibition. For example, the Spanish painter and sculptor Pablo Picasso is famous for his involvement in the Cubist movement. In his work, Picasso experimented with the visual limits imposed by working in twodimensional space through drawings and paper collages. “[Picasso] complicated the idea of a two-dimensional surface by tricking your eyes and getting you to question what exactly you are looking at,” Hollender said. Another influence for the exhibition is artist David Hockney, a contemporary British painter, printmaker and photographer. An important figure in the pop art movement of the 20th century, he has often been compared to Andy Warhol. “[Hockney] is brilliant in his use of photographs and approximating reality and then messing with it. [All three Swarthmore artists] love his art, so that was a common ground for us to come together on,” Hollender said. In creating the actual exhibition, the student artists spent hours cutting out cardboard shapes and printing hundreds of pictures for use in the exhibition. The objects created, all made of cardboard, will be familiar images to students since
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they represent objects commonly found in a dorm room. Also, there will be an ‘inspiration wall’ that displays collages and photographs the artists find appealing and interesting. Brown believes the artists have generated a sense of camaraderie. “Alex, Kate and I have been working closely on the exhibition every step of the way; we have been mutual inspirations to each other,” he said. The exhibition will be quite different from more traditional collections found on campus or in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, for instance. By mixing collage and three-dimensional cardboard creations, the artists hope that their work will broaden viewers’ perception of what constitutes art. “It is always exciting when a new exhibition opens up at Kitao or List [Gallery],” James Pao ’13 said. “Especially work that challenges my conceptions of art as oil paintings and twodimensional photographs that I usually see in museums and presents something different.” In order to create texture on the cardboard pieces, the artists pasted images of the desired texture to the object. For example, for a cardboard couch, the artists pasted pictures of various materials commonly used for sofas. With this technique, when each object is viewed from a distance, it looks completely real. However, when an observer approaches, they discover that the image is actually a collage of multiple, individual photos. “It was almost a joke on photography, on the fact that you can only get one angle from a picture,” Hollender said. “The photos are like pixels or paint — we’re painting the objects with their real textures.”
THE PHOENIX