Global art exhibition that follows instructions

When "do it," the new show of original works at the Galleries at Moore College of Art and Design, opens Friday evening, it will already be the world's longest-running art exhibition.

It's not that the show is permanent (on the contrary, it closes Dec. 6). It is, however, the latest in a series of related doings in more than 50 museums and galleries around the world over the last two decades. Together, they form an ongoing, open-ended art project based on a compendium of instructions by 250 curators and artists, including Sol LeWitt, Yoko Ono, and David Lynch.

In Moore's iteration, Philadelphia artists, college faculty, gallery staff, and students in Moore's summer programs were invited to interpret those instructions, which range from the ephemeral (see Louise Bourgeois' mandate: "When you are walking, stop and smile at a stranger") to the implausible (as in artist Nicholas Hlobo's orders: "Install a work of mine on the moon"). Other instructions will be left up to gallery visitors to fulfill.

Works on display, each shown with a wall card containing the full text of the artist's instruction, include paintings, sculptures, wall drawings, and found objects - like the 180-pound pile of Peanut Chews, deposited in a corner per instructions by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. There will be stations for gallery-goers to execute instructions, like Marie-Ange Guillemot's formula for making a backpack out of tights. And there will be performance pieces during the opening reception - some will be preserved on video, while others will leave physical traces in the gallery space.

Curator Kaytie Johnson, who organized the exhibition and is interpreting several of the instructions herself - including one in the form of a message scrolling across the Peco building's crown lights display this weekend - said it was a way of bringing Philadelphia voices into dialogue with the international art community.

"It connects the local to the global," she said. "Most of the venues that have presented 'do it' have had local artists and individuals interpret the instructions, but the artists in the compendium are from all over the world. There's a connection there; to me, that's the most important thing."

That global conversation has been going on since "do it" was conceived in 1993 by Swiss curator and critic Hans Ulrich Obrist, in conversation with the artists Christian Boltanski and Bertrand Lavier about how to rethink the contemporary notion of an art exhibition. Obrist invited a dozen artists to contribute instructions to be circulated to galleries around the world. Since then, more instructions have been added, and "do it" has manifested in numerous forms, including a book and the current series of exhibitions being toured through Independent Curators International.

A unique trait of this project is that it can appear in multiple venues at once.

In fact, "do it" is also being presented this school year at the Episcopal Academy, the private school in Newtown Square. Teachers of subjects such as dance and creative writing will be working with students to execute instructions throughout the school year. From Feb. 23 to April 3, an exhibition will be installed at the campus gallery.

"We're involving different people from our community, not necessarily artists, but presenting them with a show that will inspire questions and thought about art and how it relates to their life," said gallery director Susan Coote. "It's completely relevant to an educational setting such as ours."

For Moore's exhibition, Johnson selected about 75 instructions, seeking out collaborators from across the college and around the city. Some artists she approached rejected the idea of executing another artist's instructions, but others - many of whom were familiar with the globe-circling exhibition - were intrigued.

Those include painter Robert Goodman, who chairs Moore's fine arts and photography and digital arts departments. For the exhibition, he has undertaken a project devised by the late British pop artist Richard Hamilton.

It was a refreshing change, he said, to temporarily abandon his own way of working and adopt someone else's.

"I don't have to worry about the concerns I normally worry about in painting," he said. "I get to worry about a whole different set of concerns."

Hamilton's instructions were precise: Procure a postcard from Chicago, isolate a portion of it, enlarge that, and then paint it according to a designated color scheme.

"Within that limiting set of instructions, you end up with, I imagine, endless variation," Goodman added. "I think that's a really interesting idea."

At the opening reception Friday evening, Philadelphia artist and choreographer Helen Hale will perform a piece based on instructions for a work called Shirtology, by artist Jerome Bel. The instructions she received were not a to-do list, but a photograph and links to video of a performance featuring Bel's collaborator Frederic Seguette, donning and doffing T-shirts and responding to their slogans.

"There's something kind of riddlelike or maplike about the process," Hale said. "There's been an excitement for me in studying the documentation and trying to decipher the key or distill the essence from them of what makes the piece work, while at the same time deciding not to copy and embrace the creative license I've been given."

Hale has been hitting thrift stores in search of just the right T-shirts, with the goal of creating something that responds to Bel's concept but is unique to Philadelphia in 2014.

"There's something that's very clearly about this city about the whole exhibition, even within the context of the international artists' instructions," she said. "The marriage of that is something that I'm excited about: what endures from before and what changes so that something new can come out of these previously existing works."

There's another twist to the "do it" formula: All the included works must be destroyed at the end of the exhibition. The requirement was, among other things, Obrist's way of preventing the exhibition from crystallizing into something formal and stagnant. It also prevents fetishizing (or, for that matter, marketing) the resulting artworks; Goodman and Hale said the temporary nature of the works was liberating.

"It is an experimental form, and that's how it's meant to exist," Hale said. "He left these instructions in order that people could continue to conduct these experiments. I'm thinking of myself as just conducting another experiment - and I'm curious to see how it will turn out."

do it

Through Dec. 6 at the Galleries at Moore, 20th Street and the Benjamin Parkway.

Free admission.

Information: 215-965-4027, http://moore.edu/calendar/the-galleries-at-moore/do-it.

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