Here is my final article in a 5 part series on Chicago arts for the Belgian art magazine H-Art

Series Description:

This series of five articles will be an introduction to Chicago, Illinois USA and its local critical cultural experimentation, written from the perspective of a magazine editor and curator committed to navigating the city in all its complexity. In previous articles in this series I have overviewed local art history, arts publishing, artists working in groups and running spaces, and surveyed the state of local cultural institutions.

6/20/09

Critical Culture in Chicago – Article #5: Artists Making Community
by Daniel Tucker

I’m always hearing arts organizations talk about “outreach.”

In 1999 Malcolm Gladwell published an article in the New Yorker magazine that described Lois Weisberg, the Commissioner of Cultural Affairs for city government here in Chicago, as a “connector.” While this article popularized the term, the concept has been utilized in sociology and the research of social networks for many years longer. And as a concept, it’s pretty straight forward – there are people in this world who know lots of people, are good at making introductions between people, and generally behave socially in a similar way as a “node” does on an communications network – connecting and redistributing connectivity.

Connecting people in service of building community is particularly impoverished at this historical moment. This is due in part to the new and unresolved networking potential of the Internet, yet there are certainly other material and psychic reasons for gradual fragmentation and alienation that are much more complex than communications technologies. While it can be easier than ever to accumulate “friends” through online social networking or mass distribute information via the web, those of us interested in artistic practices that have potential to affect and alter social relations know that getting together in the same room as others to dialogue about and enact our passions and commitments is as necessary now as ever.

With this final text in the five part series, I will focus on introducing individuals that do the hard work of building community in Chicago – in person. They don’t have fixed organizational affiliations and they float around town engaging and touching many projects, communities and spaces. This is intended to be an introduction to their work based on my observation of local cultural production over the last nine years. I must acknowledge that there are many other people involved in this work, that community is the result of more people’s participation than just those that organize and promote its existence and do projects to foster it, and that these are a few strong examples among many occurring simultaneously and historically here in Chicago.

Making Introductions

Nicole Garneau was born in Chicago and makes performances that use the city as a backdrop and as a material. In recent years she has taken to developing long term projects that combine research and playful acts in public space that help her and others think through challenging history. One such project was the 2005 series Heat05 where Garneau did one performance everyday (often enlisting the help of others) to honor and reflect on the nearly 500 lives list in a heat-wave in Chicago in 1995.

Dan S. Wang is the only person in this listing that does not actually live in Chicago, but his impact is so significant in this city that he had to be included. Dan strives to identify potential connections between disparate communities which should have a lot to share but because of various forms of segregation cannot seem to see one another. He was one of the founders of Mess Hall, has had a role in other southside institutions like Southside Community Art Center, Experimental Station and most notably at the Hyde Park Art Center where he recently completed curating 18 sessions of a monthly lecture series featuring local artists.

Another artist with tremendous influence on the southside of town, whom also carefully concocts collaborations between institutions in different corners of the city is Theaster Gates. Raised on the westside of the city, his roots in various communities run deep. Through the creation of a number of his own micro-institutions he blurs the line between an individual practitioner and a collective force, even creating elaborate mythologies around some of his more conceptual identities like the Yamaguchi Institute and the Black Monks of Mississippi. Gates makes things out of clay, he also pushes and pulls his audience throughout the city – encouraging them to learn to discover the place where they may live but do not yet know.

Unfortunately music, art and politics don’t mix as much as they should in Chicago, but one person who defies that dynamic is Damon Locks who fronts a band called The Eternals, DJs all around town, makes socially conscious collages and illustrations, and directs the content of The Population – a website that tries to bring together essays on the politics of architecture with interviews of punk musicians reflecting on their changing industry.
Two other musicians doing an immense amount of community organizing are Mark Messing and Jon Cates. Messing is the instigator of a number of large scale noise, music and dance exuding marching bands which tour the conventional music circuits, as well as street parties and protests. The marching bands often serve as connecting points for different communities in the city, at times through performing at fundraisers for activist causes or through bringing a large scale celebratory spectacle to a neighborhood picnic. Cates has been able to bridge his interest in new media and noise music through the curation of a number of festivals such as r4WB1t5 and gatherings like the Upgrade Chicago and Dorkbot. Many of his most frequent collaborators are the people of criticalartware, a collective research project about the early history of new media and making art inspired by those traditions.

Sometimes what is needed is for someone to just take the time to tell others about what is happening around town. Salem Collo-Julin is the person. She will take the time to send an email to her friends about an upcoming event organized by an out-of-town artist that would likely go under attended otherwise. She also brings people together as the administrator of GoChGo, an email listserv for artist-activists in Chicago that sometimes hosts physical conversations when the online dialogues do not suffice. She is also one of four Free Store organizers who turn empty lots into temporary chaotic malls of reciprocity (’bring something, take something’). One Free Store collaborator, Melinda Fries is the proprietor of Ausgang.com which documents the city (and other places) on a seasonal basis and has been a platform for Chicago’s and non-locals alike. Collo-Julin’s collaborators in the group Temporary Services play similar roles in other contexts: Marc Fischer hosts events dedicated to obscure music histories and special collections while Brett  Bloom and his partner Bonnie Fortune develop publications, exhibitions and gatherings like the 2008 “What we know of our past, What we demand of our future” which serve to clarify visions and cohere community for politically engaged artists.

Miguel Cortez is another person that keeps everyone in touch. From his own visual art and curating that often tackles politically urgent subjects, to being a force behind organizing artists in the Pilsen neighborhood where he lives via Pilsen Open Studios and art-pilsen.org, to his ten years of work running the Polvo venue, magazine, events newsletter and art making group he manages to draw people together. Now with Antena a gallery he operates out of his apartment, he has a new base for his same busy practice.

Jennifer Karmin is a local poet and performer with her hands in everything. Together with Lisa Janssen she programs the monthly Red Rover reading series – one of the more experimental of the local literary events. With Kathleen Duffy and others she is Anti-Gravity Surprise. Duffy bridges the gap between art, health and food politics with her dedicated efforts as an organizer for Campaign for Better Health Care and as the initiator of a drive to create a food cooperative.

Another person mixing ecology and art is Nance Klehm. Her diverse practice includes writing a column for the Arthur music magazine about edible weeds, leading walks in neighborhood parks and along streets to identify edible plants growing in public space, and teaching classes locally and abroad about the intersections of art, space, food and ecology. She sometimes makes work which is more familiar as sculpture or performance, but there is almost always a pedagogical or social component to the work – consistently engaging people in learning processes that help them to think about their bodies, the land, and food.

Aay Preston-Myint jumps between three ambitious projects and still manages to show up everywhere. He recently became affiliated with Mess Hall, an experimental cultural center on the far northside of the city. His other organizing work places him mainly on the southside where he collaborates with six other artists to run No Coast, a printmaking studio and shop that also hosts irregular events and popular 24 hours silk screening “epic” parties. Finally, the last leg of his practice situates him in the northwest-side neighborhood of Wicker Park where for the past five years he has collaborated with a rotating cast of friends to produce Chances, a monthly dance party for the young queer community that lacks cohesion and doesn’t relate to the commercialized atmosphere of the Chicago’s more prominent gay and lesbian ‘districts.’
A frequent collaborator of Preston-Myints, Charlie Vinz is another local figure who bridges disparate worlds. He works as an architect and diligently attempts to get architects, designers and educators to meet and talk and collaborate. One concrete contribution he has made to two local cultural venues, No Coast and the Orientation Center, has been to design and build recycled furniture customized to the uses of the spaces. He also hosts regular dialogues between those working as architectural educators, and teaches Chicago youth design principals through an after-school program. Education is a substantial recurring theme across many people’s work and backgrounds.

Two public school teachers who manage to bring critical culture into their classroom and still maintain active practices outside of school are Lavie Raven and Bert Stabler. Lavie Raven founded the University of Hip Hop and has collaborated with numerous others from Hekter Gonzalez to Trinidad Castillo and others at the Southwest Youth Collaborative to produce exciting and politically relevant arts education a since the mid ’90s.
Bert Stabler could easily be writing this article. He consistently writes texts that promote local activist art scene for Proximity magazine and other outlets, while also maintaining a connection to more eccentric art communities concerned with psychedelia and utopia. In the classroom on the far southside of the city, he has been known to develop creative curriculum using the music of Sun Ra and highway underpasses.

This article couldn’t be complete without mentioning the work of Ed Marszewski, the consistent force behind Lumpen and Proximity Magazines (organized with his wife Rachel and collaborator Mairead Case) and the Select and Version annual new media and public arts festivals. His rotating cast of collaborators includes most of the people listed in this article and countless like-minded cultural producers from outside Chicago – he is a local booster without being too provincial.
Chicago is a city where community organizing, in the tradition of Jane Jacobs, Saul Alinsky, Jesse Jackson, Fred Hampton is really strong. Numerous artists and arts organizations have integrated parts of these traditions into their work. One prominent example is Tom Tresser, an organizer who actually treats arts “scenes” as constituencies (in a political sense) which are ripe for organizing. He has tried to get more artists, who he identifies as insightful critical thinkers and actors, to run for political office. Additionally, he an organizer working to protest the current bid by the city to hose the 2016 Summer Olympic games with the coalition “No Games Chicago.”

Anne Elizabeth Moore comes out of publishing independent zines and magazines, a tradition she connected with as a teenager. She hates consumerism and commodification. That much is clear from her nearly two decades of hating on capitalism and the banal culture it encourages. In recent years her work has shifted from being primarily a writer and editor for magazines such as Punk Planet and In These Times to working as a curator, a public artist, public intellectual, and organizer of an ambitious series of Unlympic participatory sporting events, another project intended to protest Chicago’s bid on the 2016 Olympics.

Laurie Jo Reynolds has been behind many group efforts from Brechtian theater productions to large scale social events like ASK ME! where everyday people with expertise sit behind booths and get to talk to everyday people with questions. These projects have often been produced under the name Chicago County Fair, but the grouping and its identity is quite loose. Most recently Reynolds has been a major force in a political organizing effort to reform a prison in Illinois that has been torturing prisoners in conditions worse than Guantanamo Bay for over ten years. For this work she has called upon the arts community heavily to produce symbolic events relating to the prison and has strategically used the special interest the arts receive to break the barrier of the media which refuse to write about torture in their backyard yet dedicate immense resources to promoting the entertainment industry.

Aaron Hughes is a relative newcomer to the city, but his impact cannot be understated. He is a local leader in the Iraq Veterans Against the War and has found ways to connect his art practice to his organizing efforts with that group. Connected to his recent thesis project concluding his graduate studies he developed Demilitarized U, a temporary learning space dedicated to the intersections of anti-war organizing, activist art practices, and countering military recruitment in the city, among other subjects.

Conclusion

One thing that is consistently said about culture in the city is that people are incredibly willing to collaborate. Its common to hear debates about what it means to “be a Chicago artist” or what local rootedness means in relationship to globalization. But these debates will not help us see one another differently, they will not negate the meaning of place or the presence of global connectivity in our lives – they can only distract and make us question our potential. It is for this reason that the work of the people listed above is so important – they are realizing in themselves and others a great potential. These people are going to create the new languages and frameworks that we need to see ourselves in relationship to one another in this age of fragmentation. They can do this because they reach across subcultures, scenes, disciplines and niches. Yet this is not “social work”, and its not professional networking – these are artists making community, for themselves and others.

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Daniel Tucker is one of the editors of AREA Chicago and is currently working on a book of interviews with activist-farmers throughout the US with Amy Franceschini, due out on Chronicle Books in 2010. see miscprojects.com

http://chicagojournal.com/Metropolis/06-24-2009/At_the_Modern_Wing

link to new issue of AREA

link directly to my “inheriting the grid” editorial

This is from my new Chicago Journal monthly column “Art Department”…

(Claudio Onorato, 2008, “Assassinio di un sindacalista Colombiano a Brooklyn” http://www.claudioonorato.it/)

ART DEPARTMENT
Consider the city
By DANIEL TUCKER
Contributing Reporter
Urban space is a fashionable subject. Walk into Prairie Avenue Bookshop or Powell’s on south Wabash or and you’ll see a plethora of books about the future of the city, the city and tourism, walking the city, the city and technology, sports and cities and more.

But most of them are quite useless, in that they have no aspiration beyond describing phenomenon in the city – they want to change nothing. Art shows about cities and space are kind of the same way. You can get away with a lot of vague ideas because the aesthetics of cities, suburbs and other people-populated environments are often exciting and rich with associations and icons viewers know and connect with. You can get away with loose ideas because, hey, cities are complex and complexity is complex.

A number of near-downtown art spaces are currently exhibiting visual works that deal with urban or rural space. Taken together, the art in these shows are compelling but the trend behind the work, less so. As viewers and makers of art, we should aspire for more than depictions of the city around us, we can use our fantastical imaginations to produce or contribute to real future cities.

The most ambitious of all of the exhibits is “The Edge of Intent” at Columbia College’s Museum of Contemporary Photography. Featuring 10 artists working mostly in photography, this show was programmed in coordination with Burnham Plan centennial year events and commemorations. The show sets out to critically explore the implications and unintended consequences of master plans and urban planning in general — likely one of the only such critiques presented officially within the Burnham Plan celebrations.

Outstanding works include Liset Castillo’s large color photographs of sandcastle-like depictions of urban environments composed or wrecked versions of various iconic architecture from different historical moments all mashed together in one frame.

Andrew Harrison’s depictions of New Jersey, meanwhile, show the state reconfigured along the planning systems of famous fictitious lands such as Oz, Eden and Atlantis. The other set shows the same New Jersey state map sliced up in pieces to be recombined according to the principles at work in well known historical master-plans that actually existed, like Garden City, Brasilia, Radiant City and even Burnham’s plan for Chicago.

The result is a rather simple and compelling demonstration of the absurdity of imposing visions (fantasy or actually existing) of better futures through urban planning that do not take into account the already existing culture, geography and land use of a place. The only strange decision made in this work is to use the map of a rather large territory (the state of New Jersey) as the base for these puzzle-like renderings of urban spaces of much smaller terrain. Why not pick a familiar city to re-work into the image of these fantastical and historical master plans?

Other notable works include Eric Smith’s photographs of an abandoned and derelict Detroit train station; Christina Seeley’s “Lux” series of portraits of several city’s light pollution; Simon Menner’s series on Mumbai, Paris and Chicago, which utilizes contexts where the homeless populations have remade corners of the city for their own use. The work of Dionisio González prefigures the gentrification of a poor neighborhood in his modified landscapes of Brazilian shanty towns with components of fancy contemporary architecture digitally inserted into the panoramic photographs of favela building facades.

“Edge of Intent” runs through July 5 at the Museum of Contemporary Photography , 600 S. Michigan.

Over at Kasia Kay Art Projects on Fulton Market, a group exhibition entitled “The (Un)Real City” opened on May 15. Stefania Carrozzini curated this exhibit of predominately Italian artists. While half of the work is sloppy in its digitially edited composition, carefully handmade works by by several contributors stand out.

Claudio Onorato’s paper cut-out “Assassinio di un sindacalista Colombiano a Brooklyn” (”Assassination of a Colombian trade unionist in Brooklyn”) addresses the ongoing murder and torture of Colombian SINALTRAINAL (National Union of Food Industry Workers) union leaders and organizers who work at Coca Cola bottling plants — content which seems substantially more pointed than the rest of the works, despite its fantastical and somewhat silly placement in a chaotic street scene in Brooklyn.

“City Dream nr1”, a tall painting by Qin Fengling, has a three-dimensional quality. Fengling shapes and details straight-from-the-tube multicolor paint blobs into mad city scenes: people get pulled from their cars and buildings fly into the sky as if gravity has surprisingly given way. People have to cling onto each other and their built environment for dear life, for fear of floating into space.

Pino Chimenti’s paintings on wood combine iconic qualities of ancient Egyptian illustrations with the informational graphics associated with geological or architectural textbooks. He shows castles, palaces and churches in mythic environments with faces, fish, birds, clouds, machine cogs and snail tails — some merge into one another to create anthropomorphic or cyborg-type figures. Others float next to one another, some on a flat plane and others clearly with multiple dimensions. The effect is dizzying, the work calls for close examination and attention.

“The (Un)Real City” can be seen at Kasia Kay Art Projects, 1044 W. Fulton Market St, through June 12.

At the West Loop’s Monique Meloche Gallery, central Illinois based photographer Joel Ross heads into the country and the suburb to install curious, humorous signs on the side of the road. Imagine being on the last leg of your road trip, after driving past miles of monotony, and then on the outskirts of the suburbs, with farm fields mostly passing by, you see a colorful sign advertising a “Uni Sex Bordello” with an arrow pointing in the direction of … nothing.

Ross erects the signs, often without permission, and then photographs them, most often at night. Some of the ads seek to entice drivers into a rural porn or fireworks store on the edge of a state border. Others make use of hand painted or movable text signs used by churches or small businesses. The signs play on our expectations of advertising along rural highways.

“False Promises” is a 55″ x 80″ color photograph depicting a gravel side road at sundown with a handmade sign reading “False Promises” over a large arrow pointing one direction on a split direction road. Presumably if you went the opposite direction that the arrow was pointing you would find true promises, or no promises? The blue sign has reflective materials on it and is lit up as if by headlights of the car which is easing down the dark path.

Ross’s work at Monique Meloche Gallery, 118 N. Peoria, will be up through June 13.

The orange glow cast over the fictitious city in Aaron Delehanty’s new painting/installation “Visible City”, at Finestra Art Space, is eerie and dramatic. It is unclear if the sun is setting or rising. The city center is built up while the edges face into farmland and fog. And in the foreground the viewer is confronted by a flock of birds cutting across the large painting from top to bottom and side to side. The flock is messy, no flying v. It resembles a cross between a mid-flight bird fight and the mythical dust “monster” from the popular television show “Lost.” Delehanty elaborates in a written manifesto for this series about this imaginary city being within reach, perhaps this work would move more forcefully in that direction if it was directly engaging an audience? I see murals in his future, and I hope his murals are in our future.

Delehanty’s work is shown at Finestra Art Space, Fine Arts Building at 410 S. Michigan, Suite 516, through May 30. The human-operated elevator in this building is worth a trip in and of itself.

Here is my 4th text in a series about Chicago art for the Belgian publication (H)Art due out later this month

Series Description:

This series of five articles will be an introduction to Chicago, Illinois USA and it’s local critical cultural experimentation, written from the perspective of a magazine editor and curator committed to navigating the city. In the final article in this five part series I will focus on individual artists working alone or without a consistent group identity.

5/1/09

Critical Culture in Chicago – Article #4: Art Media and Publishing
by Daniel Tucker

(Publication pile from "How We Coordinate" Discussion at Version 07 Festival in Chicago)

Documenting, Clarifying, Promoting, Projecting, Interpreting, Evaluating. These are some basic answers to the question: what is the function of writing about art? To consider the impact of that project on a local level, it will be necessary to survey the range of outlets for such work. This text will serve as a brief introduction to Chicagoan’s efforts to write and create space for writing about art. Additional, yet limited, attention will be given to the broader literary production occurring in the city, and infrastructures that support or nurture this work.

Chicago’s major daily newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, just laid off their only art critic Alan Artner last month. The Chicago Reader, the most widely available weekly newspaper, doesn’t publish regular reviews of art, music, theater or independent publishing – but serves as an active space for promoting events associated with the arts. The smaller weekly papers Newcity and Timeout both cover arts events with consistency, yet have limited resources to do so and also fall into the event promotional paradigm. The Chicago Sun Times, our other daily paper, doesn’t put enough resources into visual arts reviews despite being an important place to find out about neighborhood and city politics. And that is really the state of affairs – writing about art is completely absorbed within the logic of the market – it is promotion for the entertainment and culture industry. Writing that purports to do something different – to critique, to unearth lost histories, to address history, to experiment – is destined to remain at the margins.

Luckily, this city is home to a several print publications and websites that write from the margins about art and culture. Yet that means that very few people are getting paid to write about art or reflect on the local cultural production. Thankfully we are home to critics like Michelle Grabner, Brian Holmes, Hamza Walker, Lane Relyea, Jason Foumberg, Kathryn Hixon, and James Yood. But for everyone else, it has to remain a side project.

The city has also seen people with a great interest in producing publications that define this place or produce a sense of local culture. Ausgang.com is a web platform organized by local artist Melinda Fries that takes thematic approaches to examining everyday life. She publishes every season and is credited with being the longest running local art website. There are a few printed publications that really consider the social and political context of art production in the city, but a few of them include the Marxist paper Platypus Review that occasionally includes exhibition reviews, the irregular yet highly acclaimed Baffler Magazine, the School of the Art Institute’s F-News, and AREA Chicago which I am involved in editing. The Public Media Institute publishes two great projects, the long running and rather open-ended Lumpen Magazine and Proximity Magazine – the new effort at taking stock of local arts and culture and presenting it to people outside of the city. Proximity shows great promise and will hopefully fill the void left by the loss of locally focused art publications like New Art Examiner, MouthtoMouth, TenbyTen, Bridge, and the short-lived BAT journal and Prompt magazine initiative by the Chicago Artist Coalition.

Websites which try to document the local “art scene” in a broad sense are numerous and ever changing. Some of the most consistent efforts include: The Shark Forum, On the Make , Art Letter , the broad reaching View From Here, the Gapersblock A/C Blog, Houndstooth, Art or Idiocy, the mostly defunct but still useful spaces.org and Panel House, the gochgo list-serv for socially engaged art discussion and announcements, the ChicagoArt.net gallery announcement network and the Art and Culture in Chicago blog. Some of the more robust web initiatives include podcasted “Bad At Sports” weekly local art talk show and the impressive publicly funded Chicago Artist Resource.

Other publishing endeavors have the feel of curated collections including the publishing efforts of two galleries who are often in cahoots, ThreeWalls Press who publish the quarterly “Paper and Carriage” as well as Green Lantern Press. They have both opted for use of the term “slow media” adapted from the “slow food movement” as a counterbalance to the gradual disappearance of the printed art publication. Both of these presses have done significant work to make more connections between the visual arts and literary arts scenes locally and nationally, including publishing the annual “Phonebook ” of artist run spaces throughout the US. The art group Temporary Services has been one of the most consistent publishers of printed art projects and also shares a passion for compiling and archiving marginal culture and directories of collaborative art practice. The now defunct print-only Skeleton News served a similar role of bridging gaps with the strong community of comic artists, providing a free monthly paper in which their work could circulate to new audiences. It would be great to see more collaboration between the various local art scenes, especially in the realm of publishing since there is so much of the same labor that goes into producing a publication despite specific focuses.

Pooling resources between the local visual and public art communities and the local literary and creative writing projects like Poetry, Say What? the project of the teen writing initiative Young Chicago Authors, the 2nd Hand, Afterhours, Journal of Ordinary Thought, MAKE Mag, or the web platforms bookslut or Is Greater Than would not only expand audiences, it would also inspire more cross-disciplinary cooperation. For those interested in following efforts at documenting this kind of work, three online sources Chicagopoetry.com, Literago and Chicago Literary Scene Examiner keep up to date on big events like Nextbook and The Poetry Center as well as small readings like Sunday Salon , Quickies , Bookslut, the Green Lantern Gallery/Bad At Sports collaboration The Parlor , Red Rover, Reading Under the Influence , or the numerous weekly and monthly poetry “slams” that have been made so famous in this city.

Book publishing is a changing industry anywhere you go, and while it is certainly centralized in New York City, we have a handful of local publishers keeping things going including Third World Press (the largest independent African American press), the University of Chicago Press, the feminist Switchback Books, the brilliant pamphlet series Prickly Paradigm Press, Featherproof Books, and soon Stop Smiling Books (an example of a successful local magazine turning into a book imprint). For years the only consistent art book publisher has been the diligent Whitewalls headed by Anthony Elms, and now they are joined by the Half Letter Press – recently initiated by the folks from Temporary Services to publish their own fascinating and obsessive collections, interview projects as well as other people’s like-minded work.

One place where all of this comes together is the annual Printer’s Ball event organized by Poetry magazine. So the story goes, Poetry magazine had a commitment to writing thoughtful rejection letters to poems which were submitted but not accepted for publication. They rejected the writing of Ruth Lilly, who upon her death in 2003 decided to donate a substantial portion of her amassed wealth to the Modern Poetry Association who published Poetry. The organization was then renamed as the Poetry Foundation and is now one of the largest literary organizations in the world. One small use of this significant increase in resources is paying for the Printer’s Ball, a free event every year for the local publishing scene. Other efforts at networking initiatives involved in publishing include the publicly funded, Chicago Publishers Gallery, as well as other archives such as Chicago Underground Library, the eclectic Public Collectors , Lichen Lending Library, DePaul University’s zine collection , and the Alternative Press Centre who specialize in indexing leftist culture and politics periodicals from all over the world.

This overview of the local independent publishing landscape gives a sense of where things are at in this moment. Yet one of the most consistent features of arts-oriented publishing in Chicago has been the inconsistencies of publications and platforms for dissemination. Either they dissolve into thin air, they have inconsistent quality, or they slow down to such an irregular pace that its hard to rely on them. The same is equally true with printing as it is with the web, with online publishing often being less reliable because of over ambition and poor planning born out of the convenience of starting up. What this city, and most places, need are consistent outlets for evaluating culture and creating a sense of place through documentation, historicization and critique. We may need to imagine platforms for collaboration across artistic fields in order to remain resilient and to acknowledge the complexity and overlapping desires of contemporary cultural producers that cannot be satisfied in disciplinary confines. After all, most of these efforts are representing the margins of cultural production, so why not take advantage of being small and marginal and actually experiment a little!

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Bio: Daniel Tucker is an editor of AREA Chicago (areachicago.org). For more information see miscprojects.com

Facing the movement

Mixing the official and unofficial campaign imagery (From Chicago Journal 5/5/09)

Art review by Daniel Tucker

One month ago, “Officially Unofficial,” the exhibition of mostly posters of President Obama’s face, opened at the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs special project space on Randolph Street. The works in the exhibition traverse a wide variety of aesthetic strategies to depict Obama and his promise as an agent of change. Some of the artists are well known while others are relative amateurs. Some of the more famous works include the now iconic Shepard Fairy “Hope” graphic, presented next to a revised version of pop artist Robert Indiana’s famous “LOVE” sculpture, altered into a simple “HOPE” text piece.

Shannon Moore of Maryland produces one of the more comical and also strangely visionary pieces — a campaign poster for a 2044 presidential campaign for Sasha Obama and Chelesea Clinton. Mike Jacobs made the most abstract work entitled “Obama44” which simply features 44 dots neatly arranged in 11 rows of four resembling something that could be a game board. Chicagoan Lowell Thompson, whose writing and art generally takes on racism, is one of the few painters in the exhibit. His “Dreams Can Come True” features an Obama side-facing portrait which bleeds into a series of smaller portraits depicting historically significant black leaders and events.

My favorite oddball piece was an unlabeled small oval painting near the entrance of the exhibit that included a misty fog in which Barack Obama rode a flying unicorn through space. The style of the drawing was naïve, and it was difficult to tell if it had been produced by a child or someone more experienced and motivated by irony and humor.

These oddball pieces are really just that, rarities in an exhibit of rather straightforward propaganda. The vast majority of the posters use conventional techniques common in political posters from Soviet Russia to Rooseveltian America: They depict the face of the leader in a bold and often simplified color scheme and mix in text made of affirming generalities, like “Our movement,” or virtue words such as “Hope” or “Change.”

The mixing of officially endorsed campaign materials reading “Paid for by Obama for America” with unofficial graphics, while fitting with the title of the show, warranted more explanation. There is a significant difference when someone is paid to produce graphics for a politician or has campaign support on some level, and independent citizens making graphics or art to communicate with their fellow people.

And strangely, so many of the independent artists made work that was entirely consistent with the political line of the campaign, with no difference beyond their financial backing. This begs me to question the use of the concept of a social movement running throughout official and unofficial campaign materials. If all the voters, including artists and non-artists alike, who were interested in Obama’s campaign were completely uncritical of it and the administration and supported its self-presentation entirely, that’s more fandom than a movement. And if the Democratic Party political line is a movement, then we’ve got to reclaim that concept for more radical and dissenting ideas. The real change comes in these moments of crisis when the margins push the center and the center rethinks its priorities.

Seeing all the posters and paintings in this exhibition in one room is impressive. But it left me concerned that if we cannot move beyond the vague belief that Obama will spawn change if we just believe in him and the party-line, then this movement will move nowhere fast.

Last week I wrote a review of the “Starting with the Universe” retrospective of Buckminster Fuller’s work at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Check it out in Chicago Journal here.

This piece will run in the April 16th, 2009 edition of the Belgian art magazine (H)Art. Check out their new website here.

Series Description:

This series of five articles will be an introduction to Chicago, Illinois USA and it’s local critical cultural experimentation, written from the perspective of a magazine editor and curator committed to navigating the city. Look for two more articles in 2009: In the next article I will deal with cultural media, criticism and journalism and the final article in this five part series will focus on individual artists working alone or without a consistent group identity.

3/10/09

Critical Culture in Chicago – Article #3: Cultural Institutions
by Daniel Tucker

This article, the third in my five part series, will introduce international readers to the cultural institutions both big and small, old and new existing presently in Chicago. The cultural institutional landscape here is vast and diverse, rich and imbued with history. For the purposes of this introduction, I will focus on the venues that host contemporary visual art with special nods to the spaces that are sympathetic towards work with socially engaged content, that function to build community, or that present work in various disciplinary forms all at once.

Museums

If you are interested in large scale institutions that have the capacity to execute large and expensive exhibitions and projects, there are only a few options in town. The Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) was established in 1871 following the great Chicago fire that killed hundreds of people and decimated nearly 4 square miles of the still young city which was settled first by non-natives in the 1770s. While the Art Institute is known for its massive collection of Impressionists and post-Impressionists from Europe, the collections also include a substantial amount of art from the U.S. and Asia andpre-Colombian meso-America. The museum is drawing closer every day to the opening of the new Modern Wing designed by Renzo Piano, the first major expansion since the 1988 expansion to incorporate its growing contemporary collection. The contemporary visual art and performance presented by the museum is significant but conservative, confirming the role of this institution as the arbiter of culture of the past. To give a sense of their scale and budget, the president of theAIC made $371,985 in 2007 and the overall budget reported to the government for that year was $187,779,151.

Located just 1.4 miles down the street from the AIC is the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), its closest compliment in the city. Opened in 1967, the MCA moved to its current location in 1996, which significantly expanded the potential to execute large projects and educational programs, and to show the collection of art made after 1945 that it began collecting in 1974. The director of theMCA made $450,000 in 2007 (one of the highest paid museum directors in the world, who has since been replaced) and the overall budget reported to the government for that year was $14,670,821. The museum has struggled to differentiate itself and stand out, yet has opted to constantly reference and take cues from other global centers for art selling and collection. This tension has left theMCA generally stifled and uncreative, without a clear mission or objective in terms of the kind of work it shows, its relationship to the city or region, or its relationship to the art market. Over the years many attempts have been made to show local artists, including a series of solo shows in 1994 and the establishment of a tiny yet prominent gallery for “emerging artists” in 2002. The institution received significant criticism and a partial boycott in 1989 when they partnered with the local government’s Department of Cultural Affairs and theAIC to mount “The Chicago Show” which ended up selecting only 6 out of 90 artists of color, despite the exhibitions goal of celebrating the diversity of the city. The racially diverse selection jury was a “blind jury” and argues that their decisions were not informed by race and that only 6 percent of the original 1,417 applicants were minority artists. TheMCA published an apology in the exhibition catalog and also featured an additional profile of 25 artists of color. Regardless of the afterthought, many artists from the catalog and exhibition worked to organize a counter exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center (though the exhibit boycott did not occur).

Along the same artery of Michigan Avenue is the Chicago Cultural Center – a nerve center of public culture in the city -  the largest 100% free gallery and performance venue in the city. It is also home to offices for the local government’s Department of Cultural Affairs, headed up by Lois Weisberg who founded the Cultural Center in 1991 in the renovated building formerly used as the main public library. The building is home to numerous performance venues, large public sitting and meeting rooms, an archive of local literary culture, the main public tourism office, several art galleries and an arts education project for local teenagers called Gallery 37 is located across the street. While the budget for producing exhibitions and events is tiny compared to the Museums across the street, this venue feels more vibrant due to the multiple uses that bump against one another on a daily basis in its halls. For years they were home to the Museum of Broadcast Communications which is slowly moving into its new location less than eight blocks away.

Other midsized exhibition venues for contemporary art include National Museum of Mexican Art, National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum, Spertus Museum, Experimental Station, Experimental Sound Studio, Hyde Park Art Center, ThreeWalls, Southside Community Arts Center, Intuit Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art , Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art , State of Illinois Museum Chicago Art Gallery, Beverly Art Center, and Zhao B Center.

Festivals that bring art to town or highlight what is happening here for art tourists include ART Chicago , Next Art Fair, Versionfest , SOFA , Chicago Humanities Festival , Chicago Calling , and Around the Coyote .

BFA/MFA Factory

The city has taken a similar trajectory as many places, in that it has become home to a number of competing art degree programs. In addition to boasting strong lecture series and public programs, many of these schools are also home to high caliber exhibition venues for students, local as well as non-local visiting artists. There are only a few private art schools that are unattached to universities. One is Columbia College, which boasts several exhibition venues including the Museum of Contemporary Photography and the remarkable Center for Book and Paper Arts. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago is the other prominent private art school, which has a strong history and dedication to socially engaged art. The School is associated directly with theAIC museum and has a number of exhibition venues located downtown, including the Rhymer and Sullivan Galleries and their own Joan Flasch Artist Books collection. One of the best features of this institution is its association with the Video Data Bank and Gene Siskel Film Center, with experimental and foreign videos and films (often accompanied by discussions and lectures) that are a great compliment to the other main venues for film and video in town like Facets Cinematheque and Chicago Filmmakers on the north side, a half dozen informal microcinemas, numerous festivals, and the DOC Films programs at the University of Chicago on the south side.

Among the private universities featuring art programs, the University of Chicago brings a small MFA program, the incredibly consistent and smart Renaissance Society and the fantastic mid sized Smart Museum . Northwestern University has a similar sized graduate program in “Art Theory and Practice” and also has its own Block Museum. The two Jesuit Catholic universities Loyola and DePaul both have small museums. University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) is by far the best public (therefor the most affordable) program for art study. The school is also home to two of the city’s most interesting small venues for exhibition, performance and lecture. One is the Gallery400, which hosts student exhibitions as well as commissioned exhibitions called “At the Edge.” The other UIC based museum is Jane Addams Hull House Museum which is actually a history museum about social work and community organizing around poverty and human rights that occured at the turn of the 19th century. But the Hull House Museum has taken a turn in recent years to become not just a history museum but an embodiment of that history through contemporary culture and action. The place is a hub for all sorts of arts and culture as well as debates, activist meetings and conferences – serving as a reminder that sometimes the best way for the lines between art and life to blur is to actually allow them to be in the same room together.

Other cultural institutions that have their own focuses but occasionally mount exhibitions as demonstrations of different ways of seeing or thinking include: Chicago History Museum , Dusable Museum of African American History, Newberry Library , Chinese American Museum of Chicago (temporarily closed), Museum of Holography, the Little Black Pearl arts education facility, McCormick Freedom Museum , Cervantes Institute , Oriental Institute ,Smith Museum of Stained Glass , the Nature Museum , Goethe Institute, Pullman Porter Museum , the Museum of Science and Industry, and the International Museum of Surgical Science who’s “Anatomy in the Gallery” project brings contemporary art about the body into their unique facility.

Progressive Institutions?

While my series for this publication is focused on so-called “critical culture” in Chicago, you’ll easily note that most of the institutions (like most cultural institutions, universities and museums) I have listed here don’t necessarily have a reflexive dynamic that could produce what we generally understand to be institutional critique from within (self critique). They certainly have the capacity to present the work of artists who critique institutions as their subject matter, and they have the capacity to more generally present culture and ideas that are addressing social and political concerns in their content explicitly. This is what they do already. They show art about war, about oppression, about cultural amnesia, about revolution, and about democracy. And in fact, they are showing more and more work about challenging social and political subjects. But does that constitute a progressive institution?

I would suggest that one way that they could become more “progressive” beyond the relevant content of the art work would be to self-critically address their internal mechanics. These institutions rely on the steady stream of aspiring artists and young people willing to be subjected to labor insecurity out of necessity or of desire to work in the field within which they hope to some day professionally achieve success. This is combined with the caterers, guards, and janitors that may or may not have a vested interest in the field of art, but who have come to rely on its institutions through their precarious and often subcontracted labor to reproduce their lives. So how could cultural institutions find a balance between presenting ideas and embodying ideas through focusing on the intersections of art and labor?

In this time of economic depression, we cannot only speak of hypothetical ways of reforming the existing institutions. We must also think of life after these institutions, for we will undoubtedly see some of them fall, some of them further contract, and likely all of them layoff workers and  compromise their missions and goals in order to stay afloat. So perhaps it is time to start thinking: If you had hundreds of thousands of square footage, millions of dollars of A/V equipment, thousands of new BA and MFA students getting pumped out into your streets per year willing to subject themselves to internships and ladder climbing, free days for the public sponsored by corporations that no longer exist….what would you do? How will the institutional landscape which I have described be altered in our city and in your city?

Sources:
NY Times; May 12 1987 “Burst of Growth in Chicago’s Art World”
Chicago Tribune; Apr 13, 1990 “Minority artists blast city exhibit”
NY Times; April 20, 1990 ” Chicago Journal; Art and Ire Mix Again, This Time Over Race”
Chicago Tribune; Apr 21, 1990 “Art exhibition boycott called off”

Bio: Daniel Tucker is the editor of AREAChicago (areachicago.org). For more information see miscprojects.com

I just did a guest blog post on Art21, the PBS project about contemporary art. Check it out here or see the text pasted below

This post is written as a dispatch from California, where I was at the College Art Association conference and speaking in classes at CalArts, SFAI, and the CCA Social Practices studio.

Initially when invited to contribute, I was challenged by the prompting question, “how can art effect political change?” because of how broad it was and because I didn’t think that I could begin to address that in one short post. It is one of the central concerns of my work. But the challenge was interesting and offered an opportunity to try to communicate (somewhat) concisely some of the lessons I’ve learned from many years of practicing socially engaged art at various levels.

Off the cuff, I should be clear that I work in many different places and in many different ways, which strongly influence my ideas (hence my forthcoming eclectic listing and ranting). Most often the place is in Chicago, and the most consistent method or form I work in has been a biannual publication, AREA Chicago. I also find myself working on numerous other projects simultaneously. That diversity of tactics and approaches is both informed by my life situation, which requires me to work in different ways and different places to earn a living. It is also a recognition of the fact that there are limits to all forms and there is much to be learned by trying new ones. So you’ll find on my website that my time is also spend writing essays, organizing conferences and exhibitions, lecturing extensively, and working on various kinds of documentary and research projects.

Last Wednesday, while speaking on a panel discussion entitled “Relocating Art and its Public” at the CAA conference here in LA, I was compelled to think through the work that I care about and am involved with as it relates to audiences and participants. I realized I could not clearly talk about any of this without spelling out what kind of relationships I wanted to have in this world, in a broader sense. That is not to say that the work I’ve been involved in has always succeeded in creating those relationships which I desire and want others to have. But the work that I do is so informed by a political concern about people’s potential to self-actualize in a world which stifles that possibility that I have to be up front about it. This is how I intend to address the question posed on this blog.

I concluded my presentation by recounting the provocation put forth to me by my friend Chris Carlsson in San Francisco: that the challenge for those opposed to capitalism and in favor of a different (”anticapitalist”) organizing principal for life and economies is to take the “anti” part of our perspective and make it into something that we can all strive for together. A further elaboration would be that a challenge for anticapitalist cultural work is to articulate and represent a life better than the competitive and commodified social relations that currently dominate how most of us relate to one another. One step in that direction would be to create contexts that allow us to see our relationships in ways that both benefit from our diverse experiences and insights needed to face everyday challenging situations, and that also allow us to be powerful enough together through organization so we can tackle the big stuff we all face. I honestly think that most of us barely know what free feels like or looks like. We need each other to figure out how to know how to get there. In the last eight years, most of the projects that I have been involved with  have had some component that was about articulating a different kind of “we” or collective toward the ends described above. Admittedly, they are on a pretty micro scale. To the extent to which any transformed social relations are actually realized, the impact beyond the people directly involved is limited, rendering it primarily symbolic and experimental.

DSLR Call For Participation Spring 2001. For more information about DSLR and other critical public art in Chicago from 2000-2005 see “Trashing the Neoliberal City” booklet (free download) by Tucker/Forman at http://www.learningsite.info/trashing003.htm

I’ll now summarize few of the events with which I have been involved as a participant or organizer that have tried to articulate a new or different “we.” The first is the Department of Space and Land Reclamation (DSLR), which took place in Chicago in April of 2001. The “campaign”  was organized through an open call for participation circulated in email and via heavy postering throughout the city. It asked for people who are concerned about the state of public space in the city to come together and launch a coordinated and highly visible collective effort to highlight potential uses for public space, as well as to articulate criticisms or protests about how space was being controlled. This took many forms. Some were quite playful, such as poetry slams on El trains or ladders leading to nowhere placed on fences to suggest potential over-comings or transgressions. Others asked neighbors to sign petitions in order to get sidewalk kiosks to be accessible to everyone, not just real estate developers. There were over 70 similar small scale temporary initiatives that took place throughout the city that weekend. The effort, like so many complex social projects that involve people from many political persuasions and cultural backgrounds, had its successes and failures. One general success is that temporary space, opened up through coordinated space reclamation, allowed for housing activists, graffiti writers, urban planners, activist educators, pirate radio broadcasters, and critical artists to see themselves in relation to one another through a shared concern about public space in Chicago.

The DSLR spawned many relationships and catalyzed many new projects that continue to this day. By 2005, some of the folks who met through that work, along with others with overlapping interests, got together to develop the biannual publication AREA Chicago, of which I am still an editor. AREA has built on this methodology of creating a lens through which various practitioners and concerned citizens of the city can see themselves in relationship to one another. We have done that through 8 “local reader” publications, the collection of hundreds of hand-made personal maps about subjective experiences of the city into an archive entitled “Notes for a People’s Atlas of Chicago,” as well as over 50 events in the last 4 years.

Our methodology is quite simple: what is a pressing or challenging question in the city? What are people doing or not doing about it? Once that is identified, then a call for participation is circulated and people from local networks associated with art, research, education, and activism formulate a response. That response is edited, designed, and printed, then circulated back out to the networks from which it came.

AREA Issues #1-5

We’ve asked the following question in our publications:

• What kind of infrastructure of services and resources do we need when our welfare state is in disrepair and being increasingly privatized? (AREA #1)
• What kind of food policy can we create to make sure that people of the city are healthy enough to pursue organization? (AREA #2)
• What are the things we mean and want when we say ‘we’? What are critical approaches to the commonplace political concept of solidarity? (AREA #3)
• In contexts where more and more Chicagoans are entrapped in the expanding industry of mass incarceration, how can meaningful, visionary, and practical changes to the criminal justice system occur? (AREA #4)
• What is the role of education and pedagogy in strengthening social movements? (AREA #5)
• How do experimental policies turn the city into a social and economic laboratory? (AREA #6)
• What kinds of logics and strategies do contemporary social movements inherit from their predecessors, especially the New Left and Counter-Culture Left of the late 1960s/early 1970s? (AREA #7)
• How does the concept of money and the financial crisis impact our political and cultural work? (AREA #8)

“How We Learn” panel discussion at Hyde Park Art Center (July 2007). Co-organized by AREA Chicago, Neighborhood Writing Alliance, and Stockyard Institute

Other projects elsewhere in the world frmo which I have taken inspiration include the incredible work of:  What is to be done? (St. Petersburg); Collectivo Situationes (Argentina); the Neighborhood Story Project (New Orleans); Center for Urban Pedagogy (NYC); Justseeds (US); the City From Below (North American); What, How and for Whom? (Zagreb); Victory Gardens (San Francisco); Mute Magazine (London);  16 Beaver Group (NYC); Public School (LA); and Pericentre Projects (Cairo).

Participating in this work and observing the like-minded efforts listed above have given me greater insight into the potential for art to change society and social relations. I am not overly concerned with the difference between so-called art and so-called activism. The categories that are more profound for me are culture and politics. I have to be very honest when talking about those two categories of life, as they are indeed different and mean different things in terms of their role in making our lives and the lives of people everywhere better, more just, and more complete. At the same time, I’ll be the first to admit that these two huge aspects of our lives—culture and politics—are completely shaped and informed by one another. So teasing out the differences can be a challenge. I have spent time in another text articulating my basic understanding of what politics is:

[Politics involves] views about social relationships involving authority or power, with specific recognition that capitalist states have a monopoly on the form of power that structures most of our lives. In relation to artistic practices, the political relevance is not as easily understood, as it is in, say, organizing workers or communities, running for government office, or taking direct action to make a point.

When I think about culture, it is equally difficult to define, but I would start out by saying that it is comprised of the ideas, beliefs, and experiences that make up how we understand society and our relationship to one another.

Considering the dialectical relation between culture and politics, in which that each produces the conditions in which the other is realized and enacted (which we see everyday on the scales of both us as individuals and the national governments whose policies affect all of our lives), I want to spell out other reasons why I feel that working in culture can or might effect social change:

• At this moment in time, culture is a strategic politically-charged terrain, as the “culture industries” become an increasingly significant part of our economy;
• Art and culture bring subjective, emotional, and effective considerations to society and politics that would be less explicit otherwise;
• Art can bring experimental methods and doesn’t have to be effective in a traditionally measurable sense. This highlights its non-instrumental or counterproductive potential to change how we think about efficacy;
• Visual communication is multilingual and available to people at multiple literacy levels. This is increasingly important as more elements of our diverse society collide and co-exist (this is certainly part of the argument for sophisticated visual propaganda used in so many political campaigns throughout history);
• And the space of culture facilitates unique and unexpected resonances and potential cooperation between people who might otherwise not see one another as equal or part of the same society.

Social change will get occur as time moves on, regardless of the art we produce or the experimental situations we create. The challenge for those of us who actually want to know a life better than the one we have, is to enact carefully considered cultural work that helps us better understand the role of history in shaping the present, critically approach the present moment, and imagine our possible futures. The biggest challenge to making culture that produces the kind of social change we want is not the limits of our imagination, as I am quite sure those boundaries do not exist. The challenge that is much harder to address is how we can behave differently (less competitively) towards one another, trust each other, and organize ourselves so we might avoid reproducing the same deformed social relations that capitalism has inscribed in our work, behavior, and relationships. Culture can help us represent, analyze, and refine our approach to articulating and realizing a different and more supportive social body—a better “we.”