I don’t live in Chicago anymore, but I frequently visit. Over the past summer I was invited to a housewarming party for friends who had rented a large loft space on South Michigan Avenue that was easiest to reach by taking the Cermak-Chinatown CTA Red Line. On the way, I passed the Hilliard Complex housing project and realized that even though I had seen these buildings many times before while on my way to eat some Dim Sum or see a White Sox game, I had never associated these projects as works by Bertrand Goldberg. Currently Goldberg is experience a type of second-Renaissance of appreciation in the city, with two retrospective shows at The Art Institute of Chicago’s Modern Wing as well as at The Arts Club. The extensive display of drawings, models, furniture, designs, and other ephemera shown from The Art Institute’s dedicated collection provides a dynamic narrative of Goldberg’s development from Bauhaus disciple into a significant figure in architecture, engineering, and urban planning.

The daunting scale of his pursuits and passions for exploration of the urban landscape propelled Goldberg into national recognition during the late 1950s, when many of his most well-known projects were either being completed or announced. His work included single-family homes, commercial projects, and several municipal or institutional works. During his 60 year career Goldberg completed over 30 finished buildings, the bulk of which exist in Chicago. He had great faith in the exciting power that comes from living in close proximity to one another, and claimed that “most men like the action that comes from living together. We like the market place, we like the forum. We like the social and mental heath that we generate when we rub against each other. We like cities.”

This undaunted enthusiasm for the experiment that is the urban environment is lucidly explored in Goldberg’s most famous multipurpose “cities within cities.” He wanted to minimize the commute of a city, the distance that travel creates amongst its citizens, and to treat every structure as its own microcosm of activity and shared cultural community. A decisive turn in Goldberg’s career occurred in the 1960s, when his designs and perspectives began to borrow from the ideas of Renaissance humanism. As the exhibition materials on Goldberg’s work published by The Art Institute suggest, the types of projects designed by Goldberg took a radical turn away from single family homes to projects that spoke “a common vocabulary… of collective participation and civic responsibility.” It seems no mistake that this type of humanistic dedication to the progressive development of the lived-in and built environment of a city would occur in Chicago. I hope that the following anecdotes attest to the brilliance that Goldberg imparted to the City of Broad Shoulders.

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Bertrand Goldberg. Marina City, Chicago, IL, Perspective Sketch, 1985. Courtesy The Art Institute of Chicago.

When I first came to Chicago in the winter of 2003, I already understood that Chicago was one of the great architectural epicenters of the Western hemisphere. Between my former high-school sweetheart’s architect father, and my own mother’s recollection of her experience of riding the L as a Baby Boomer teenager, I had been instilled with the knowledge of the extensive built environment that played an integral part in the history and contemporary cultural climate of the city. Even with these surrogate memories implanted into the architectural expectations of my first visit to the city that would soon become my second home (and first true urban romance), I was still overwhelmed with the variety of skyscrapers, brownstone storefronts (and the apartments “living-above-the-store,” as Goldberg’s mother eloquently described), museums, and residential structures that speckled the flat midwestern lake side.

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Do Ho Suh. "Luminous: The Art of Asia" multimedia installation (2011). Photo courtesy the artist and Seattle Museum of Art.

In this week’s roundup Cao Fei holds up half the sky, Carrie Mae Weems speaks at the Corcoran, Janine Antoni draws with her hair, Kiki Smith and Nancy Spero present their creative spaces, Jenny Holzer shows electric signs in South Korea, artists use Chinese scholars’ rocks, and more.

• Cao Fei is in a historic all-female Chinese contemporary art exhibition hosted by Drexel University and co-curated with the National Art Museum of China (NAMC).  Half the Sky features more than 60 artworks by 22 female Chinese artists, including Fei.  Spanning the mediums of photography, painting, installation art, video and sculpture, this collection is now on display at the Leonard Pearlstein Gallery in Philadelphia through Nov 12.

• Do-Ho Suh‘s fabric/multimedia installation is on view at the Seattle Museum of Art.  Luminous: The Art of Asia showcases the museum’s Asian collections.  Suh’s contribution includes a sequence that re-creates the crows from a 17th-century Japanese “Crow Screen” (which is on display nearby) and animates them, sending them swooping across this 21st-century screen. In a frenzy of group flight, the crows seem to disappear through the gateway.  The show closes January 8, 2012.

• Carrie Mae Weems is scheduled as a Newman Distinguished Visiting Artist Lecturer in Photography at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.  The Corcoran has invited Weems and several other artists whose words are on view in 30 Americans.  Weems’s lecture will take place on Saturday, November 12, 7pm.

• Gabriel Orozco, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Robert Ryman and several others have work on display in London as part of an exhibition on abstract art.  The inaugural show at White Cube Gallery Bermondsey entitled Structure & Absence uses Chinese scholars’ rocks as an organizing device – found objects whose textural surfaces suggest mountains, plants, bodies, flames – as ancient readymades in the centre of each gallery.  The exhibition closes November 26.

• Janine Antoni is in Dance/Draw, an exhibition currently at the ICA Boston that celebrates our fascination with movement.  The show features a video of Antoni’s Loving Care in which the artist dunks her entire head into a vat of black hair dye, then proceeds to paint the surrounding floor with the dye using only the rotations of her neck and head.  Alongside this video are other artists’ photographs, drawings, sculptures, hanging pieces, videos and even live components.  This work is on view until January 16, 2012.

• Mark Bradford‘s work is currently on view at the Dallas Museum of Art.  The show provides a comprehensive account of Bradford’s career to date, with an emphasis on his work as a painter.  This exhibition also foregrounds new works, including an environmental installation with sound entitled Pinocchio Is on Fire, which examines key moments in the history of the black community in Los Angeles from the early 1980s to the present.  The show closes January 15, 2012.

• Jenny Holzer presents her latest solo show at the Kukje Gallery in Seoul, South Korea.  This includes two new large-scale electronic signs, an arrangement of marble footstools, and a selection of her pigment prints that give a continuing presence to past projections. Each electronic sign is programmed with a selection of Holzer’s writing and speaks to the emergency of the present in hushed speed and chromatic excess.  The exhibition closes October 31.

• Richard Tuttle has his second solo show with new work at Stuart Shave/Modern Art in London.  Light & Colour touches on the essential character of an open and nuanced vocabulary of form and color that suggests an approach to ambiguous conditions of language.  The artist’s new works restate the deployment of materials, and sensitivity to touch and space that culminates from five decades of artistic practice.  This work is on view until November 19.

• Walton Ford’s newest pieces will soon be presented for the first time at the Paul Kasmin Gallery (NYC). The show, entitled I don’t like to look at him, Jack juxtaposes the animal kingdom within the man-made world and includes three monumental, watercolor portraits of King Kong inspired by the 1933 movie. These works portray a “biting heartbreak told through the context of human beings.”  The exhibition will run November 3 – December 23.

• Nancy Spero and Kiki Smith are featured in Chiara Clemente’s documentary Our City of Dreams.  Spero was at the forefront of the feminist movement of the late 50s and 60s and she questioned the polemics of sexual identity and warfare.  Smith addresses philosophical, social and spiritual aspects of the human body through work that incorporates glass, plaster, ceramic, bronze and paper.

Anne-Mie van Kerckhoven is an artist based in Antwerp, Belgium. Her work is currently being featured in a solo exhibition, In a Saturnian World, at the Renaissance Society (on view through December 18). The exhibition includes an interactive animation along with numerous works on paper and digitally-produced prints. Her mixed media works often include images from vintage soft pornography magazines along with excerpts of text and bright, bold planes of color. Her works point to the contemporary issues around technology and sexuality while sourcing material from the past.

Anne-Mie van Kerckhoven. "Some Other Solid State," 2011. Digital Collage, 48.5 x 79 inches. From the series Mastering The Horizon. Courtesy The Renaissance Society.

In viewing van Kerckhoven’s works, it is clear that texts play a significant role in their conceptualization, as well as have a presence in the final object; however, these texts are not often the same. When I ask van Kerckhoven about her process and how texts play into her thinking, she tells me about how strongly the written word has influenced her from the time she was a young child listening to her grandmother’s fairy tales. Her continuing interest in linguistics began when a young, male ingénue, Luc Steels, began telling her about his research while she was a student herself, and the interest is stirred each time she travels to a new place. She tells me that her first exposure to a naked human body was through viewing an image from a concentration camp, spurring her to read the works of the Marquis de Sade. Here, van Kerckhoven tells me of how she began making objects:

In 1976, I was studying texts and was working in a Plexiglas factory. I started writing all these things on plexi sheets and gave them to young scientists I knew as presents. The first shows that I did were in bookshops, because I could not make exhibitions in other places. In those times, it was absolutely not done that you could exhibit just text on the walls as art. The first show I ever did with these works was in Amsterdam in a bookstore run by an American woman. It was in the back of the bookshop, which only sold Fluxus free-press. You have to see my work from that perspective–Fluxus free-press, mail-art. That is really my origin and why texts at all levels have such an importance for me.

Anne-Mie van Kerckhoven. Installation view of "In a Saturnian World" at The Renaissance Society, Chicago.

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Hank Willis Thomas. "I Am A Man," 2009. From the series I Am, Amen. Photo: Tricia Van Eck.

Recently, I visited three shows– September 11, Untitled (12th Istanbul Biennale), and Creative Time’s Living As Form – all of which I highly recommend. The shows were a treasure trove in that they presented three distinct ways of curating art that reference the world around us, and offer ways to navigate that world. I’m categorizing these three different exhibition types as poetry, prose, and pamphlet.

Poetry

September 11 at MoMA’s PS1 is gorgeous, elegiac poetry. Marking the tenth anniversary of the US attacks, it shows, by way of almost 70 works, how our perception of the world–and correspondingly, how we look at artworks –has changed as a result of what happened on September 11, 2001. Walking through the exhibition, I couldn’t help but think how different the world would be if the United States’s response at the time would have had more of the tone, mood, and contemplation that is present in the show. Only one work was made after the attacks: Ellsworth Kelly’s Ground Zero, 2003, an abstract green field hovering above an image of Ground Zero that was printed in the New York Times. Yet Kelly’s abstraction is the frame through which curator Peter Eleey evokes a way of thinking about the present, past, and future as a result of 9/11.

Beautifully installed, the exhibition has a meditative resonance that is both open-ended and disarmingly sad. Much has been said about the central room that contains Roger Hiorns’s ash from the remains of an airplane engine splayed on the floor, in the middle of George Segal’s woman sitting on a park bench, and Harold Mendez’s empty bulletin boards. (Full disclosure: I own one of the bulletin boards by Mendez, a Chicago artist–bought with money I didn’t spend on a cell phone). Emblematic of the power of those associations that resonate throughout the show, it offers an individual witness to the trauma and a sense of resulting emptiness that hovers over the show. Upstairs, Eleey installed Janet Cardiff’s transcendent The Forty Part Motet, forty speakers arranged in a large circle at human height, which allows the viewer an intimate engagement with each of forty separate voices. Eleey placed the work in the same space it was immediately after the attacks, and has said about the work: “The particular combination of the individual voice and the collective song for me, and I think for many people, evoked the many personal effects of the tragedy and their sublimation into national tragedy.”

Janet Cardiff. "Forty-Part Motet," 2001. Installation view of work as it was presented at The Tate Liverpool; lent by Pamela and Richard Kramlich and the American Fund for the Tate Gallery, fractional and promised gift, 2000.

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At St. Mark’s Church in New York City, the home of Danspace Project, Jeremy Wade performed fountain. With the house lights on, Wade stumbled along the carpeted edge of the church floor, describing in detail the interior architecture of the area where he stood. His nervous tone and dramatic gestures indicated an imminence of the holy, satirizing it with the mundane and sterile minutia of which the church is composed. Wade then invited the audience to come up to the altar and touch it with him, calling everyone “pilgrims,” after Annie Dillard’s book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

Jeremy Wade performing "fountain," 2011. Courtesy Danspace Project. Photo by Doro Tuch.

Wade then guided the audience to form a circle on the floor. What proceeded was a viscerally twisted exorcism consisting of choreographed writhing, groaning, torquing, guttural moans, whispered chants, and facial contortions. Wade made direct eye contact with the audience-cum-participants, suggesting that this is an exorcism for them, too, and that the dancer is channeling their demons. Having laid the space bare at the introduction of the performance, it was hard to decipher where the energy that fueled Wade’s act of channeling came from–whether it was an exorcism of his demons, those of the audience, or of historical demons in the context of the religious setting.

My experience in this circle was one of exchange, where as a witness I felt activated, as though my presence helped to fuel Wade’s evangelical endurance. The space of the church opened up for me. I became acutely aware of its structure, and how, when stripped of its symbolic codes, the church was just a place, empty and neutral.

Théodore Géricault. "The Raft of the Medusa," 1819. Oil on canvas.

Wade’s talent lies in his uncanny ability to draw attention and energy into himself, to the degree of absorbing all activity into an oscillating, chaotic world of movement and absolute terror. From a visual perspective, one might view his singular used-up, contorted figure as channeling the multitude of destitute bodies in Théodore Géricault’s 1819 painting Raft of the Medusa. For me, Wade’s performance also struck a cord with the beginning of the Occupy Wall Street protests, and the pain, desperation, anger and wailing suffered by those who desire change, as protesters congregate to perform direct actions with a strange mix of guerilla practices and what could be deemed an almost-religious hope for salvation.

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David Hammons. "America The Beautiful," 1968. On view in "Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960 - 1980," at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

Let’s face it. Occupy Wall Street, and just about everything else, is about money – who has it and who doesn’t – and how the market can help or hurt these two groups.

Money

I recently bought an iPhone. While this may seem trivial, I hadn’t had a cell phone for over 10 years. Although most people consider a cell phone a necessity, I didn’t–although artists without studio buzzers who had to watch for my arrival would probably disagree. In my last post, I mentioned the power of the purse, which is usually considered a way of holding back funding so that the money goes somewhere else. One could say I held back money from Verizon, and since the average cell phone bill is roughly $50 a month, it amounted to $6000 over ten years. In that same post, I proposed that we should buy what we value; so what could I have bought, if art and community are what I value?

Here are some innovative ways in Chicago that community-supported commerce can foster art and the spaces that present and support artists:

1. Threewalls’ community supported art share is patterned after community-supported agriculture (CSA) “shares” or subscriptions, which offer produce in a box (in threewalls’ case, art). Threewalls sells 31 shares for $310.

2. Artist Jennifer Mills’s Dealing With New Demands, part of The Happiness Project, presents original, affordable artworks as a sales event with proceeds going to the artists, curator, and Street-Level Youth Media. The sold work becomes a catalyst for conversation in the collectors’ homes about quality-of-life issues, and the red “sold” dots suggest a booming art economy created by artists.

Jennifer Mills. "Dealing with New Demands," 2011. The artist "performs" as an art dealer and will "sell" the ideas of happiness as well as the works of art themselves, which are about happiness and quality of-life-issues.

3. Hornswaggler Arts sells hand-crafted cocktails at art openings, and with the proceeds, they purchase a work from the show, which then enters their collection and loan program.

4. According to the local Alderman, in one night Kegs for Kids raised enough money last year to hire a public school art teacher and expand the school’s art programming.

These are small-scale, local initiatives where my $6000 would go far. (If you have additional community-supported commerce ideas that foster art, please share them with others so that they, too, can grow). On a larger scale, in Chicago’s 49th ward this year Alderman Joe Moore began the first US participatory budgeting project, originally developed in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 1989, in which citizens identify, discuss, and prioritize public spending projects. Six citizen committees (one of which promoted art) were organized in order to decide which projects should be put on the ballot. Fourteen projects were ultimately selected by 1,600 people to receive $1.3 million in funding for capital infrastructure. In the 48th Ward, which aims to be a new artistic center of Chicago, artist Kirsten Leenaars, in conjunction with The Happiness Project’s Under Construction, is working with local citizens to film how democracy can function, at the same time as 48th ward Alderman Harry Osterman launches a citizen master-planning process for his ward.

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While watching Keltie Ferris Spray Paints in Solitude, I kept wondering to myself… What can students and teachers learn from engaging with this five minutes of film? I wanted a reason to share it because I was so enamored with her love of color, her approach to abstraction, even her definition of abstraction, and all the while not taking herself too seriously. After all, she is an artist who believes, “Making paintings is an enterprise in solitude,” and that, “It’s hard to do something that’s not justified by anything.”

After thinking about it for a while and hitting rewind a few times I decided that working with this film can initially be about Ferris’ approach to making art and simultaneously an opportunity to ask the questions: So why paint if she is well aware that her paintings aren’t something that’s necessarily needed in the world and could very well be in the dumpster tomorrow? Does Ferris make sense of the world by trying to “see through to other worlds”? Can painting be, like it is for many of us, a form of meditation? What does she gain by working in solitude? What do viewers gain by engaging with her paintings?

Sorry. All I have are questions this week.

What I also enjoy is watching Ferris share Josef Albers’ work and being blown away by it. I enjoy the way she talks about abstraction as “trying to undo the nameable things in life”. I enjoy the fact that she lets us into her studio to see a work in progress that she considers awful. There’s an excitement in the way she talks about her art that’s infectious.

One more idea… Juxtaposing Keltie Ferris, a painter who obviously fits the image of an artist slaving over a hot canvas, with someone like Fred Wilson, Oliver Herring or even Allora and Calzadilla, can broaden a student’s perspective on what being an artist looks like today. It allows for contrasting her approach with artists that specifically engage with people in order to realize their work.

Open Enrollment chronicles the experience of graduate school via the perspective of current students. As MA and MFA degrees become ever more the norm for the professional training of artists, educators, and administrators alike, Open Enrollment functions as a time-sensitive journal, offering readers a bird’s eye view of the challenges, rewards, puzzles, and ontological questioning that a graduate education engenders.

Art21 seeks to expand its current roster of student writers. We invite students from accredited graduate programs, as well as those studying at non-traditional institutions (temporary schools, artist’s educational projects, intensive residency programs, etc.), to apply to take up residence on the Art21 Blog. The roster of contributors grows over time, providing a cross-section of international venues and pedagogical approaches. While chronicling one’s own practice is encouraged in the context of larger concerns, this column is not a forum or vehicle for narrowly promoting one’s own work. It is intended to portray, through both personal examples and larger inquiries about the pursuit of higher education, the diversity of studio and critical academic experiences in art school today.

Requirements
Candidates must be:

• currently enrolled in an accredited art school at the graduate level in one of the following disciplines: studio (painting/drawing, film/video, sculpture, photography, new forms, etc.), art history, arts administration, curatorial studies, visual and critical studies, or equivalent; OR…
• currently studying in a non-traditional academic environment (in the spirit of The Public School, Bruce High Quality Foundation, the New Museum’s Night School, unitednationsplaza, etc.); OR…
• currently undertaking a post-graduate residency program (Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, The MFAH CORE Program at the Glassell School of Art, Rijksakademie, etc.); AND…
• committed to contributing at least 3 blog posts over the course of one 15-week semester.

Writing is contributed on a voluntary basis to start, with the capacity for growth—with demonstrated enthusiasm, high quality writing, and commitment—into a paid position.

How to apply
To apply, send a letter of interest, 2 writing samples (blog writing preferred), and a draft of your first post for Open Enrollment. Be sure to address at least one of the following questions in your application (to be further explored in the column itself):

• Why did you decide to do pursue additional education?
• What does your learning experience look like, on both micro and macro levels?
• Does your school have a visiting artist program? How do regular encounters or interactions with professional artists impact your own studio and academic practice?
• Have you had any experiences with radical pedagogy? What were they? What does it mean to you?
• How does your school interface with local arts institutions in your community?
• Is art school relevant? How or why not?

Send materials via email only to:

Claudine Isé
Blog Editor
claudine [at] art21 [dot] org

Deadline: Friday, November 4, 2011.

Exterior view: Institute for Wishful Thinking Artists in Residence for the US Government at Momenta, April, 2011. Photo: Bianca Prime.

In the past decade the visual arts have seen a retreat from traditional locations of meaning making and power. This retreat can be partially attributed to the increasing disparity between artists with professional training (BAs, MFAs, various forms of apprenticeship), and those who are able to make a living through their work, let alone become “stars.” This exodus, to use a term of the Italian critical theorist Paolo Virno, has taken shape as a mass movement under the radar of official art history, art institutions, and art “world” marketplaces, and yet as a response to the aporia these very histories, institutions, and economies present us with.

The trajectory of Maureen Connor’s work, which moves from investigations of feminism and the critique of (institutional) spaces in the 70s and 80s and 90s towards service and labor-related investigations in the late 90s and 2000s, parallels a recent trajectory among visual artists, some of whom have been covered by this column. In this trajectory, artists have become increasingly interested in service (what Cuban-American artist Tania Bruguera calls “useful art”) and “mock institutions” (Gregory Sholette’s term for organizations that appropriate corporate and governmental bureaucracy).

Connor’s recent work departs from projects like Personnel, which attempts to critique labor conditions in post-Fordist work places while also attempting to make those environments more livable for those who must inhabit them. See for instance her project, Fresh Windows, in which the artist points to the dystopian aspects of a windowless office culture, while offering the best possible solution to this problem—barring the creation of windows themselves (curtains and video monitors merely depict life outdoors). One may also check out Connor’s project for an office in Gdansk, Poland, in which she preserves vestiges of the previous post-industrial space by printing a photograph of the space on curtains. In her renovation she uses casts of toilets for seating, which she says she hopes will maintain a sense of humor in the work environment.

Side view of Peace Pentagon.

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Cai Guo-Qiang, Fallen Blossoms: Explosion Project (2009), Philadelphia Art since the Mid-20th Century, Room 410. Photo courtesy the artist and Phaidon.

In this week’s roundup Yinka Shonibare MBE discusses post-Colonial Britain, John Baldessari talks about graffiti and street art, Barbara Kruger explores the game of chess, works by Barry McGee and Fred Wilson are at the center of controversies, and more.

• Yinka Shonibare MBE will talk about the history and cultural legacy of post-colonial Britain this week at The Human Rights Action Centre (London).  This is part of Inviva’s Significant Voices program.  The event will take place Wednesday, October 19, 6:30pm.

• Cai Guo-Qiang‘s work is part of The Art Museum, a unique collection of the world’s important and influential art works, curated by a team of over 100 global art experts, from Phaidon houses – in one place.  This imaginary museum is actually a book.

• Barbara Kruger is exhibiting work at The World Chess Hall of Fame, a cultural venue that showcases art, history, science and sports through the lens of chess.  Untitled (Do you feel comfortable losing?) is one of several pieces that demonstrate an integration of chess that goes beyond the visual, incorporating elements of play or strategy that invite the viewer to reflect on the game’s intricate operations.  This show on view until February 12, 2012.

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