Finally having unpacked her overstuffed bags, sharkskin sat down this moment to type up all her adventures in Chicago of the past weekend only to find that the new little notebook, made of recycled prints, she bought at the MCA Chicago is missing. Which is disconcerting, because I, much like be-still-my-beating-heart Pipilotti Rist, am not the girl who misses much--a video included in the epic exhibit MCA's "Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock 'n' Roll since 1967." But, wait, I'm jumping ahead. Clearly I need my little notebook to maintain at least a degree of coherence. Harrumph.
Anyway, my trip was originally planned around a concert by the Zhou brothers and ICE, but, due to extranneous circumstances, the concert was canceled, and sharkskin boy and I found ourselves with a rehearsal-free and unusually temperate weekend to traipse around the city like little happy tourists. And so we did, hitting two museums and the best Chinese food this side of the Pacific on Saturday, and the Shedd Aquarium (love the dolphins) and Wicker Park on Sunday before departing on a 6am flight Monday morning. (And then collapsing Monday afternoon in front of my computer and all those books on postmodernism I need to read if I intend to finish my dissertation.)
"Sympathy for the Devil" was an impressive array of international impulses in and reactions to the relationship between art and rock 'n' roll over the past four decades, ranging from general rock paraphernalia to painting, video, and Rirkrit Tiravanija's Untitled 1996 (Rehearsal Studio No. 6 Silent Version), 1996. Known for creating performative spaces, Tiravanija extends the relationship of pop music to high culture by literally inviting the spectator to become a part of the history exhibited, by appointment only:
As part of the Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967 exhibition, the MCA presents Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Untitled 1996 (Rehearsal Studio No. 6 Silent Version) (1996), a work that offers our visitors an hour of free rehearsal time in a makeshift recording studio. Comprising a 13–square foot Plexiglas room, the work features instruments and microphones that are not amplified but are fed directly into the recording equipment, rendering the musicians’ rehearsals more or less silent. (The players hear themselves via headphones as does the audience on headphones provided outside of the space.) This work replicates a recording studio that Tiravanija and his friends rented at Context Studio in New York and extends the artist’s interest in the audience’s direct involvement in the work while giving away a typically commercial service for free in the unexpected location of the museum.
Perhaps this could have been an alternate venue for the Zhou bros. show, come to think of it. sharkskin boy and i passed on the opportunity to immortalize our rendition of "I Got You Babe" (some things remain sacred) and moved on to the Art Institute, which currently features William Pope.L's "Drawing, Dreaming, Drowning," the artist's "first solo show at a major museum." Bracketing the potential problematics of assigning value according to exhibition history, particularly in juxtaposition to the collapsing of "high" and "low" culture accomplished fairly well through rock 'n' roll show, Pope.L's show was a brilliant counterpoint to the morning's wanderings.
The two-room exhibition was divided into a massive collection of smaller works--drawings, mostly, but also featuring the Chicago version of Pope.L's Rebuilding the Monument, 2007, 40-pound bags of lawn fertilizer on which the image of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s face is affixed where a logo would usually be--and the full-room installation Relational Painting aka If Black Is Beautiful..., 2007. Relational Painting was arranged as if in an artist's studio, with a small table in the corner to the left upon entering littered with the makings of the installation (where, attached to the wall was a handwritten to-do list including instructions re the lights and whatnot as well as more conceptual ponderances), and, in the back center of the room the sculpture itself.
The back-wall piece was a Rauschenbergian collage of detritus (painted and written over paper coffee cups, cigarette butts, speakers, wires, stools, among much else) and paint, under a grid from which a number of industrial spotlights hung lighting the space. Comprised of quotations from W.E.B. DuBois, Barbara Maria Stafford, Featherstone and Hepworth, and Darnell J. Hunt interspersed with a larger-than-life caricature of a hand throttling the neck of a not-quite-human, the piece is strangely organic in its accumulation even as it offers a violent critique of cultural identity, particularly as it regards the black body. To the immediate left of the main image is a smaller framed image surrounded by painted-over Polaroids. At first, I thought the paint on the glass surface of the image was the object in itself, but a closer look revealed the paint to be a ghosting over of what might have been a child's book picture of a young black boy and a watermelon--epitomizing the larger issues of what is concealed, hidden, and, like history, written over. Yet in his writing over of the image, Pope.L is in fact revealing that very act of concealment.
Accompanying the "visual noise" of the installation, as Lisa Dorin and Darby English note in the catalogue essay, is a "sound track of 'white noise' and prerecorded jungle sounds," augmenting the junglelike atmosphere one experiences while negotiating the hanging wires from the lights overhead. A sign on the floor before the exhibition invites the audience to walk through the space without touching anything, but once one is inside, stepping on random paint flecks that cover the floor, one realizes it is nearly impossible to enter the space without, in a sense, having some small effect on it. It is a piece that one becomes a part of, is implicated within, through the experience.
The small pieces in the second room of the exhibition are mostly pen-and-marker drawings on found objects: hotel stationery, airplane bags, even a napkin on which from out of an apocalyptic scene emerges the NYU torch. Not a subtle indictment there. Many of the pieces are populated by little wrinkled beanlike figures, often with glasses, that are apparently penises--#987F 4.16.04 Penis with Glasses and Friends, 2004, on which the oddly endearing little guy is juxtaposed on a photo from a newspaper clip, for instance. sharkskin boy mentioned, as we were leaving, that the penises reminded him of Philip Guston cartoons, in which a recurring nose or glasses become identifying signifiers. Within the whimsy, though, is a scathing critique.
Other points of interest during our trip were Tino Seghal's The Kiss, at the MCA--one of the artist's performative
"situations," as he prefers to call them, in which two dancers engaged each other in choreographically intimate manipulations culminating intermittently in much kissing. As amorous as this may have been intended to be, it was a bit too choreographed even to be surprising, though there was something unexpectedly lovely about the idea of making out in a museum. More intriguing, and a brilliant and painful example of the political efficacy of art, was Chris Burden's The Other Vietnam Memorial, 1991, a large-scale metal sculpture on which three million Vietnamese names are engraved. One is invited to don a white glove and touch this memorial, much as one might the DC memorial, and for a moment, run one's hand over a reinscribed history.
The afternoon ended with sharkskin boy and I sprawled shoeless in Vito Acconci's Convertible Clam Shelter, 1990, an open clam shell composed of shells and plaster, sounds of the sea whispering in our ears. I could not have been happier.
sharkskin boy by a Serra in the park...
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