Editing out the noise

On the second floor of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Maira Kalman is ironing.

It happens to be an Isaac Mizrahi jacket - she designed the fabric - that later will hang on a stepladder in the middle of the gallery, one of several positioned around the space.

"My living room looks like this," she says.

Nearby is a wooden pie chest, through whose mesh front can be seen neatly ironed, starched, and folded linens. The title of this piece is My grandmother, my mother, my aunt, my sister and me.

They must all be ironers in the Kalman lineage.

"It's putting things in order, that's the point of what I do all the time, make a clear sense of order," says Kalman, 60, a children's book author - Ooh-la-la (Max in Love), Stay Up Late, a collaboration with David Byrne - as well as New Yorker cover artist (the celebrated post-9/11 New Yorkistan, featuring Kvetchyna and Botoxia, among other territories) and celebrated New York Times blogger-philosopher ("The Principles of Uncertainty," "And the Pursuit of Happiness.").

"I think I edit out a lot of noise," she says.

Kalman, born in Israel and the mother of two children from her marriage to designer Tibor Kalman, who died in 1999, is now the subject of a new exhibition in the arguably unlikely setting of Penn's Institute of Contemporary Art. Entitled "Maira Kalman: Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World)," it opens tomorrow and continues through June 6.

Ingrid Schaffner, the ICA's senior curator, says art people were surprised by her project to bring the work of the beloved, inspirational, and (shhhh!) heartwarming illustrator to the cutting-edge showcase. But despite its lack of the "arch or ironic," Schaffner declares Kalman's work "quintessentially postmodern" and "packed with diverse cultural references, digressions, curlicues, and question marks."

Schaffner notes both the work's strong emotions and its light touch, which she compares to the gold used to illuminate the pages of medieval manuscripts, concluding that "today Kalman's vaguely absurd illuminations bring daily exaltations to light."

One morning last week, Kalman was dealing with the truckload of stuff from her Greenwich Village home that she has brought to fill the interior of the gallery space.

She has arranged and edited an assortment of objects, including linens she "quietly" pilfered from hotel rooms and turned into paint rags, which she then ironed and folded and positioned at one end of a table that also contains a key, a whistle, a can with a funny "mushy peas" label, and the iconic pink box with string that is the subject of a painting as well.

Inside the box are bracelets that were supposed to be a present for young relatives, but Kalman was so enamored of the box and string, delicate in both outcome and process, that she declared it would remain unopened.

In Kalman's world, a box may be more interesting than its contents. Especially if it is tied carefully with string. Balls of string, spools of thread, buckets, funnels, keys, labels, hold endless fascination and are on display. People's systems of filing odd things, like "Mosses of L.I.," are subject matter for a painting - but there's also an actual box of organized mosses. If organizing mosses isn't a Kalman-esque metaphor for how to approach life, what is?

On the walls are her artworks, positioned side by side so they touch (in Kalman's world, everything is connected, including George Washington and her mom, at least by hairstyle), in a narrative sequence dreamed up by Schaffner - 100 drawings, paintings, and unexpectedly emotional embroideries (!) whose subjects proceed from children to families to dogs to philosophy to anxiety to uncertainty to terrorism to humor to her mother's death ("What had disappeared proves real," she embroidered, quoting Proust), to sadness to winking melancholy (The Misery Day Parade) to encouragement (Don't Cry over Spilt Milk) to pictures of boxes to whole rooms to portraits to history to uniforms to another dog with a book propped up in front of him, which Schaffner says is actually a self-portrait.

That is, the usual Kalman stuff.

You say recyling, she says I must keep it. But her stuff does not crowd a drawer that no longer can be opened easily. It is polished and positioned and reflected on. There are stories behind the things, and, when exhibited in an upstairs gallery of a contemporary art museum, there are emotions that buzz and linger around them.

Try to sit at the two chairs in front of the pie chest and stare at the ironed and starched linens and not feel something akin to a combination of longing, inadequacy, memory, connection, despair, caring, and coping.

Much of the Kalman philosophy - and she willingly accepts the mantle of philosopher, albeit a confused and uncertain one - concerns time and how to spend it, life and how to live it.

How to fill time? How to be happy? Her philosophy is upbeat but knowing. It's OK to take pleasure, because you never forget the pain. It's OK to find clarity, because you know that mostly it's confusion. It's OK to fill your days deliberately, because the emptiness is always looking over your shoulder. It's OK to collect, because it shows you care and adore and have reflected upon what you have encountered. And it's OK to go out into the world to look and find what's good, what connects us. She calls it the "vernacular objects of what we live with."

"I like labels," she says. "I collect tabs. It comes back to order. It's an attempt to order the things that I have in my room. I don't want to have anything lying around that you don't know is there."

Lest those of us with overstuffed drawers and attics take heart, Rick Meyerowitz - her boyfriend and the cocreator of the "New Yorkistan" cover - says Kalman is the furthest thing from a pack rat, which implies random accumulation and lack of processing.

He says her vision continually startles him.

"She is very tough in wanting to get rid of the extras, the frivolous, to say this is the essence of something," he says. "These tables are filled with her life. The house is empty, it's all here."

Not least of all, the iron, and the can of Niagara spray starch, and a wooden ironing board that ultimately becomes part of the exhibit.

Because in the end, if all else fails, if nothing else, if you have a spare hour, you could always iron the linens. It's not a bad way to live. Says Kalman: "I'm aware of how sad everything is, so what's the point of being sad?"