September 16th - The West Collection

Museum Legs is a populist book.  So it makes sense that the first stop on the tour was about art in its most everyday environment: the workplace.  I was going to see the West Collection, the art collection of SEI Investments, about twenty miles outside of Philadelphia.   It is one of the most heartening things I have ever seen, a great example of complicated, toothy art that is not "difficult" in a prickly way so much as simply compelling and interesting.


Arriving late the night before, even in the darkness, with droves of deer at the side of the road, you could feel the spaciousness of the landscape -- quiet, rolling dark hills, calm and dignified, already far from New York.  

SEI is a financial services firm -- in the back office of asset management, making things happen sense -- that was incredibly technologically inventive when it was founded in the 1960s by Alfred P. West.  It is also the kind of place where you might work next to a three-foot-tall pair of wingtips made entirely out of licorice.

Paige West, daughter of the founder, spearheaded an art collection now directed by Lee Stoetzel, himself a practicing artist.  I was there to meet Lee who had kindly offered to take me around, on introduction from Sunny Bates, patron saint of the Museum Legs book tour.

You drive up to SEI corporate campus, a cascading series of large, artful, corrugated metal buildings, most a deep slate green with bright red trim, marked by a simple sign and not near much else.  

The visitor's lobby

is a clue of what is to come with a wall full of Roxy Paine fiberglass poisonous mushrooms (same artist of the beautiful aluminum modernist swamp tree on the roof of the Met), 

a candle-dipped saw, 

and a massive spherical light fixture covered with flittering loops that looked like insect wings crossed with rose petals.  The tables are covered with neat arrangements of The Wall Street Journal or the FT, and an array of business monthlies.  Lee came out to me and we walked through heavy doors into the offices proper.  The first sight was a row of landscape paintings, in bright, stylized colors, immediately adjacent to the large LED screens showing the stock market stats for exchanges around the world.

The interior of the building is almost entirely open plan, a vast room with many windows onto the uninterrupted landscape outside.  Large clusters of coiled cables -- they call them pythons -- fall from the ceilings at intervals, chunky bunches of black and red cords that stretch down to various desktops at different angles.  All the desks are on wheels.  People can move their desks to sit where they want.  There is art everywhere.  Groups of people can chose the art that will be near their desks.  Lee and co. curate the art in the common spaces.  

Chairs next to a towering sculpture made out of Fiestaware dishes.

A second collection of Roxy Paine mushrooms 

sits near a life-size Humvee that is sewn out of fabric, long strings dangling.  

Outside the auditorium, you come across a workman's set up of ladders, wood, and power tools -- 

except that the entire thing is carved out of wood, including the tangled cords of the power saw.

Lee explained the principles for collecting: They can only buy first-rate work.  They cannot, with rare exception, spend more than $5,000 on any one piece.  If they cannot get a first-rate work for that price, they decide that they have missed the window for that artist.

When works come into the collection, anything that may be controversial is shown in the downstairs hallway called the "Hot Hall."  Near the artworks there are computer terminals where people can anonymously comment on the work.  

Lee and team then print some of the comments and post them on the wall near the work.  

There is a series of photographs in the hall upstairs of primates who are specially trained Hollywood acting animals.  The artist hires them, pays them a day rate, and then gets them to make certain very human expressions.  They look uncannily like people, except with odd physical features, as if a person whose head slopes immediately backwards from the top of the forehead, or with eyes very close together.  Their pathos is otherwise eery.  

The same artist had two works in the Hot Hall in which instead of hiring highly trained animals she hires child actors.  The children are paid their day rate and come with their parents.  The artist is really nice to the children and gives them lollipops.  Then on a cue, the parents snatch the candy away and she takes their picture.  The result are huge, up-close, probably five-by-seven-foot images of photogenic children absolutely bawling.  

One comment next to them basically said, "I have to look at crying children all the time at home.  It is unfair to make me look at them at work too."

If your interest is (as mine is) in making art more accessible to people, seeing art in museums has huge limitations in comparison to living around art in the workplace.  These people see work day in and day out.  And it is not just small poster-size work hung by the elevator so you can tell which floor you got off on (see later post on Microsoft's art collection).  It is big and it simply sits there.  

(if you look a the top, you can see that it is carved out of the sides of phone books)

(not digitally altered, these are the actual colors -- I just liked this one.  Below, with power drill)

In 20001, Forbes said of SEI, "based in Oaks, Pa., has a five-year average growth rate of 37.7%--more than double the 17.8% average growth rate of the companies surveyed by Forbes.com."

Here is a picture of Lee Stoetzel's own art.