In what appears to be an instance of serial miscommunication, an exhibition in The Inquirer's public room was removed Monday, largely because some editors and managers thought the exhibit was a joke and others were offended by the subject matter.

In fact, the exhibit was part of Hidden City, a monthlong arts festival unfolding in historic spaces across Philadelphia, including the Inquirer and Daily News Building on North Broad Street.

Last night, Ed Mahlman, Philadelphia Newspapers' vice president of marketing, said the company had decided to move the exhibit to another venue while still fulfilling its commitment to promote the show.

"We are talking to our partner Hidden City about finding an alternative venue," Mahlman said. He said the company wanted to respect the feelings of some employees who took offense at some of the material and to fulfill its contractual obligations with Peregrine Arts, producer of Hidden City.

The new location is still being discussed, Mahlman said.

Thaddeus A. Squire, Peregrine's artistic executive director, could not be reached last night. In an earlier interview, he called the affair "somewhat a comedy of errors, but an interesting one nonetheless."

The exhibit, "Newsroom 2009," by Aleksandra Mir, consists of eight collaged section-front pages of the paper, each with the Inquirer logo and filled with material culled from the paper's archives.

To Trish Wilson, an assistant managing editor, the works - which contained provocative juxtapositions of type and photos involving women - were "strikingly inappropriate," particularly in a workplace. But since the exhibit panels were not identified in any way, Wilson said, she had no idea they were part of an art exhibition.

Nor did Brian P. Tierney, publisher of The Inquirer and chief executive of Philadelphia Media Holdings L.L.C., or several other executives and editors who gathered Monday evening to celebrate the paper's anniversary in the public room. Tierney, thinking the work "a gag," suggested that it be removed after Wilson complained.

The artist, an avowed feminist, was in Italy yesterday and not available for comment. She has shown work all over the United States and Europe, and often has explored newspapers as shapers and embodiments of cultural memory.

"Newsroom 2009" focuses on women as presented in the pages of The Inquirer, often juxtaposing text and image in a jarring way: a photograph of female roller bladers wrapped around text describing women "power brokers"; a snippet of news about Nancy Pelosi next to a photograph of a bikini-clad woman.

Officials at Peregrine said they received permission to hang the works from the paper's marketing department. The public room, as Tierney pointed out, is often used as a gallery space by such institutions as Moore College of Art.

"We don't endorse the cause or create it," he said. "I don't know who the artist is. But I'm not going to be the one to censor this artist."

Both Tierney and Mahlman said removal of the works resulted from confusion as much as anything else. That confusion had some irreversible consequences: Faux news pages created by Mir and meant to be taken away by viewers were removed and apparently thrown away.

Squire said that the works had identifying labels when they were installed May 18. But for some reason, the labels were removed.

An art exhibition removed from The Inquirer's first-floor public room on Monday following employee objections and confusion over its content has been reinstalled on the 18th floor of the newspaper building at 400 N. Broad St.

The dismantling of Aleksandra Mir's "Newsroom 2009," which consisted of eight large mock Inquirer section fronts, was the result of several misunderstandings, according to officials at The Inquirer and at Peregrine Arts, the exhibit's presenter.

The faux fronts featured material drawn directly from the newspaper's archives, but reconfigured by the highly regarded artist in sometimes jarring, sometimes humorous fashion.

Zeroing in on a fragmented and veiled portrayal of women in news, advertisements, captions, and photos, the exhibit was mounted as part of Peregrine's Hidden City, a festival of performances and exhibitions taking place at historic venues throughout Philadelphia this month.

"Newsroom 2009" will be open to the public on weekends from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. until the end of June.

Mir has been in Italy and unavailable for comment.

Jay Devine, an Inquirer spokesman, said the newspaper would honor its agreements with Peregrine and had worked with the presenter to relocate the exhibit. A spokeswoman for Peregrine said the exhibition would continue as planned at The Inquirer. She had no further comment.

Still unresolved was how to replace a stack of mock Inquirer sections that had been printed as exhibit takeaways. The sections were discarded Monday after newspaper officials thought they represented some kind of joke or prank.

Some employees had complained about the mock fronts, which were not accompanied by identifying labels and featured such images as tussling female roller-derby players next to blocks of news text discussing female "political power brokers."

The 18th floor of the Inquirer and Daily News Building, in the iconic white tower, is largely unused these days. In the past, it served as a home base for special projects.

by jacob hellman

www.theartblog.org, Philadelphia, June 21, 2009.

Finally, just before 7pm, I ascended 18 floors of the Inquirer Building on North Broad to see Aleksandra Mir’s piece titled Newsroom Philadelphia. I anticipated it too literally; the elevator opened to only a small office with dropped ceiling and a secretary facing me – whoops, that’s the docent. No typewriters dangled from above, nor was there re-mixed audio of editors and writers hollering across a newsroom. ‘Installation’ is not an applicable term. Instead, Aleksandra has cut up and re-mixed headlines, images, and copy from the past nine years of the Inquirer, and hung them in staid frames around the room. Every re-created page makes clear the absurdity of biased gender coverage in our society’s most venerable of institutions, the daily paper. Trifling headlines like “Girls Left Wounded By Hook-up Culture” are juxtaposed with articles on e.g. the dearth of females on corporate boards, mismatched to photos of…Hillary Clinton and…women in lingerie.

I fully endorse Aleksandra’s agenda. I also share her stated concern that “the future of newspapers is under increasing threat.” However, for a site-specific festival, you do not feel that she spent much time stewing in her particular spot. (The docent seated by the giant corinthian columns at Girard College, in contrast, shared with me her take of that piece: “it seems to come up from the ground of the place.”) Visually, in its materiality, Newsroom Philadelphia also fails to satisfy. I’d have loved real collages, but Alexandra only got to the paper’s digital archives. Short of newsprint, I wish she’d worked with her digital printer to make them bigger – they’re a bit diminutive compared to the morning paper’s full spread – and blacker – everything’s got a dark blue hue, not a true newspaper black. Finally, the work itself was quite quotidian; I saw the irony but not the art.

Interestingly, Aleksandra did manage to rile some powerful elements at the Inquirer, who, after its opening weekend in the building’s lobby, ordered the work moved up to the unused 18th floor. The paper even covered the controversy themselves. Whoever was offended clearly misunderstood the target of her critique: she’s pointing to a society-wide gender bias, with the Inquirer only an easily visible manifestation.

The project utilized the archives of the Philadelphia Inquirer. Hundreds of articles on the subject of 'Women" were sourced directly from and in co-operation with the paper. They were then cut up and re-assembled in an condensed mix of seemingly arbitrary design. The creation of a mash-up of content - adverts and editorial - reveals the often contradictory messages that the reader picks up from the paper as a whole and is then left to sort out any confusion for him or herself.

The original intention and contract stipulated that the layouts were to be inserted directly back into the newspaper, one page at a time. Due to production constraints (at the last minute), it was the commissioner's decision to then print all 8 pages as a separate publication to be distributed in the lobby of the Inquirer's office headquarters. This version of the work was subsequently censored and dismantled by some offended employees. Subsequently, a third version was then exhibited and framed behind glass on the commissioner's initiative and design. At this point, I felt my original idea had been compromised to such an extent that I walked away from the whole debacle.

—Aleksandra Mir, July 2009.

Download the full size page HERE (4,5Mo).