Research and Relationality: An Interview with Zach Cahill
Installation view of Zach Cahill's "The Orphanage Project" at threewalls, Chicago.
Chicago-based multimedia artist and writer Zach Cahill’s The Orphanage Project is easily the most conceptually difficult gallery show I’ve attempted to write about in criticism. A sprawling conceit about the parental nation-state, the exhibition ostensibly spun out from Cahill’s purported attempt to create an orphanage on the South Side–conceived partially as a relational art project. In a Bad at Sports podcast previous to the show’s opening at threewalls this past fall, Cahill expounded on this project to his seemingly confounded interviewer, fellow artist Philip von Zweck, describing it as both a “site for orphans” and “living painting or sculpture,” which was enough for people to come into the gallery show enraged. (Cahill refused to elaborate on any truth status regarding the actual orphanage project in my own interview with him.)
The Orphanage Project’s first incarnation at threewalls in October was a baffling and exhilarating collection of pseudo-propaganda art, sculptural flotsam and jetsam, and the Soviet bear iconography–the use of the USSA epithet in several works clearly drew parallels between authoritarian, imperialistic power here and in the former Soviet Union. Some rough drawings Cahill attributed to his orphans. The back room of three walls was turned into a darkened cave with stalagmites.
Installation view of Zach Cahill's "The Orphanage Project" at threewalls, Chicago.
All of the work gestures at a murky project with no clear outlines and loaded with political and social suggestions more than answers; what exactly is the role of the orphanage here? If it is merely symbolic, what structures is the metaphor standing in for? Or, as it seemed after awhile, not standing in for?
Reasons to Write Into Art: On Textual Collaboration with Artist Heidi Norton
Focusing on the relationships/constellations between the act of writing, the process of research, and contemporary visual art practices is how I’ve attempted to anchor this series of guest blog posts, but until this winter I could only have spoken to the first two. It’s curious that as a critic and arts writer, you can work full-time to become as fully fluent as possible in the language of contemporary visual art–recognizing it, and occasionally producing its most important turns of phrase, without ever actually speaking it yourself, so to speak. (In other words, so many people who write about art only ever have to learn enough to be able to identify the most important connections, the most obvious expressions, and so forth, without ever learning how individual words and phrases might actually translate to everyday practice.)
Then one day last spring I bought a piece of work by Heidi Norton, my first real significant art purchase, after seeing her show at ebersmoore gallery (the title of the piece I bought, The Radicant, also happened to be precisely the same as that of a Bourriaud book I was arguing with in my head at the time), and I began an email conversation with her about her work, after which she invited me by for a studio visit. The rest of that history should make up a blog-post-long disclaimer about conflict of interest as a writer, because I want to write about a show that I was involved in creating–and what I learned about the process of making artist books and more generally making text that’s part of a visual art show rather than a response to one. So, here is my disclaimer: this entire blog post is a conflict of interest (and in a way, it is also about that very conflict).
Some very brief background on Heidi’s work: She works in photography, living plants, wax, the earth, and is influenced deeply by the light and space movement. Her photographs are among the most exquisite surfaces I’ve ever seen.
Microscripts and Visual Conversations: “In the Spirit of Robert Walser” at Donald Young Gallery
Installation View. Courtesy Donald Young Gallery, Chicago.
If, as I discussed in my previous two guest blog posts, both the artist collaborative Cupola Bobber and MCA guest curator Helen Molesworth are working with the idea of expansiveness, Donald Young Gallery’s In the Spirit of Walser, a series of shows by major contemporary artists in conversation with the nearly-lost writings of Swiss writer Robert Walser, operates on a self-consciously diminuitive scale.
This smallness stems from Walser (1878-1956) himself. An eccentric modernist who notably influenced Kafka, Walser both wrote about modest subjects (he was, according to W.G. Sebald, a “clairvoyant of the small”) and is now most famous for his handwritten miniscule script written on small pieces of paper– nearly illegible writing that at first appears to be encoded. In fact, Walser was simply using a highly miniaturized script in a rare “Kurrent” German style. These notes weren’t discovered until after Walser’s death in 1956, found on everything from the backs of torn envelopes to calendars, receipts, and the covers of novels. The size of the writing may owe much to the fact that Walser had almost no possessions throughout his life– he almost certainly was not buying paper regularly.
Many of these “microscripts,” recently collected and put out in book form last May, are on display at Donald Young in cases along with novels and published work. From a distance, they look like collections of ants crawling on paper surfaces, or pencilled crosshatching for shading effects.
The MCA’s “This Will Have Been” and the Subjectivity of History
General Idea. "AIDS Wallpaper," 1989. Image courtesy AA Bronson.
Where Cupola Bobber turns deluges of impersonal information into gradually unfolding epic explorations, guest curator Helen Molesworth’s stunning show of 1980’s art at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s, shows the power of an unabashedly partisan approach to history, research, and framing of the past. (Molesworth is Chief Curator at the ICA Boston).
It’s immediately apparent that Molesworth’s dynamic, vibrant, deeply affecting show of political (in its most inclusive sense) art in the 1980’s has uncanny reverberations today. From the first moment of entering the space, viewers come into contact with a flatscreen television on which appears newly-produced, filmed interviews of artists talking about what they were up to more than thirty years ago. Many of them cite Reagan’s refusal to recognize the AIDS crisis, Thatcherism and the beginnings of neoliberalism, and most of all the political indifference to unfairness around them as the inspiration for some of the most ambitious activist art made in America to date.
Other artists featured in the video program cited the “real” end of modernism (Tony Tasset wryly remarks that the conceptualist/minimalist model of the artist as critic and art as philosophical criticism “failed, frankly”), giving rise to appropriation art, practices across media, and true postmodernism pastiche as we recognize it now.
But most of the artist interviews cite their sense at the time that, as Molesworth herself articulates, “culture is really capable of changing society.” Of all the moving art in the show–and my eyes watered more than usual, as I’ll no doubt get into soon– what’s most remarkable is how much the artists in This Will Have Been truly made work as material for democracy.
The Art of Enduring: An Interview with Cupola Bobber
Collaborative duo Cupola Bobber, comprised of Stephen Fiehn and Tyler Myers, work slowly. When the SAIC graduates, who have worked almost exclusively in performance until this year, first chose to make work together, they decided to spend two years on every project. Those of us who live in Chicago during the decade they showed the resulting full-length performances here were privy to their attentive, obsessive, matchlessly substantive explorations of the night sky and railroads, the mythology of the sea and dust bowls, and the infinite space of libraries. This last subject, taken up by 2011’s The Field, The Mantel performance, is also explored in the ongoing projects seen in Cupola Bobber’s current exhibition at the independent art space ADDS/DONNA; in the meantime, the duo moved to New York (they were offered a residency at the Manhattan Cultural Council for this spring).
Since their move, Cupola Bobber have begun a number of interrelated and massively formidable projects that require indefatigabile persistence–even for them. For The Dictionary of Endurative Actions, in which they plan to record an endurative action written by hand on index cards by friends and strangers (anyone can contribute) for every word on dictionary.com, the first question they asked themselves was “What tree should we grow?”– that is, the tree to get the wood to build a 24-drawer card catalogue-desk to house the cards. The temporary home of the dictionary is displayed in the ADDS/DONNA show, where visitors are encouraged to provide definitions and new words.
Installation shot of "Dictionary of Endurative Actions" by Cupola Bobber.
