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US Dammed

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The Dancing Dead

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Ofrenda por Caballero

Robert Loescher, 2008, by Shay DeGrandis, Brain Sykes and Bibiana Suarez

“La Vida Sin Fin: Day of the Dead 2008,” at the National Museum of Mexican Art.

By Anna Kryczka

“One thing I do know is that for a time, we did get to experience a little bit of heaven on earth with Professor Loescher in our presence. Something magical, something otherworldly, something filled with light and music… with cherubim. And seraphim. And all those gorgeous things of antiquity that some art historians only have a kind of knowledge about, but certain ones, in every great once-in-a-while, are utterly surrounded by.” (Excerpt from Golden Thoughts on Mother, Home and Heaven, 1878 by Shay DeGrandis and Alex Jovanovich.)

Each year the National Museum of Mexican Art mounts a thematic exhibit to coincide with Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). This year’s exhibit commemorates the 40th anniversary of the Tlatelolco Massacre.

On October 2, 1968 a large crowd of citizens amassed in Mexico City, taking advantage of the media presence at the Olympic Games to call attention to the human and civil rights abuses perpetrated by the corrupt Mexican government. The crowd of thousands that flooded the streets of the capital was perceived by the government as a serious threat to their standing as a powerful nation on the world stage. The army swiftly dispatched tanks and soldiers to disperse the crowd. The troops opened fire, killing and injuring unknown numbers of unarmed students and protesters.

The cover-up was nearly instantaneous; the Mexican government framed the measures the army took as an act of necessary self-defense for the sake of maintaining civil order. As a result of their propaganda and misinformation regarding the manner in which the events unfolded, the massacre is largely absent from discussions of that tumultuous year.

This year’s Dia de los Muertos exhibition seeks to correct this historical omission by culminating in a room dedicated to exposing the depths of this tragedy. The installation’s centerpiece is a replica of the memorial erected in 1993 at the site of the massacre, festooned traditionally with marigolds and surrounded by films, images and media clippings from 1968. The room was designed by current students at Universidad Nacional Autonoma (UNAM), where the massacre took place.

The room works well in the context of the broader themes associated with the Dia de los Muertos holiday, visually connecting with the ofrendas, prints, paintings, and sculptural objects by artists from all over Mexico and the United States that comprise the rest of the show. The works deal with the inevitability of death as a natural part of one’s life experience and rejoice in the memories that those lives leave behind. Communal celebration and commemoration stand at the center of the activities associated with this holiday, and the UNAM installation seeks to aggregate another community of remembrance here in Chicago. The restorative power of this sort of active form of collective memory is wonderfully palpable throughout the show.

Dia de los Muertos affords one the opportunity to share memories of those who have passed in a tangible form by creating ofrendas: collections of items that recall the deceased, arranged as altars along with food, flowers, candles and incense. The organization of one’s grief and love into an interactive visual form allows for the expression of such feelings that are unable to be harnessed verbally. This year’s exhibition not only allows for the correction of an historical indignity through commemoration of and education about the Tlatelolco Massacre, but also allows visitors and contributors a chance to meditate on and celebrate their own lost loved ones.

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On view through December 14, 2008. 1852 West 19th Street.

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The Short List

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US museum destinations for the holidays

By Emily Bauman

As you pack up for the end of the semester and ship off to wherever it is that you came from (or wherever it is that you are planning to visit for the holidays), we thought we’d give you some inspiration for exhibitions to see while you’re away from the lovely Art Institute. So, just in case New York City, San Francisco, Miami or even just Milwaukee is your New Year’s destination, here are our picks for a good stop during your vacay.

San Francisco, CA: the Museum of Modern Art, “Martin Puryear”

After having spent the last year traveling from New York’s MoMA to Fort Worth, and then to the National Gallery in D.C., Puryear’s exhibition of exquisite sculptures is currently making its final appearance at SFMOMA. This breathtaking retrospective brings together a collection of wood, rawhide and metal sculptures that entice the eye with their seeming simplicity and perfection of form, while quietly revealing their complex structures and intricate processes. While many large rounded forms, variously composed of knots of wood, latticework, or silkenly sanded pine, cedar or mahogany, populate the exhibition, the most unassuming aspects or pieces are Puryear’s most impressive. His series of wall-hung wooden circles, each differing slightly in color, form or complexity, possess a simple elegance and seamless compositions that belie the difficult and laborious task of their creation.

On view through January 25, 2009. 151 Third Street, San Francisco, CA 94103. (sfmoma.org)

Dallas, TX: the Dallas Museum of Art, “Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson”

While this show is slated to stop at Chicago’s MCA this coming May, it is not to be missed in any of its incarnations. Using the exhibition spaces provided in order to create mood-altering environments, Eliasson’s large installation works, which use light, water, sound, mirrors and some organic materials, to recreate the atmospheric extremes of his native Scandinavia, are incredibly powerful and affective. This exhibition, which was spread between two museums in New York, will be drastically cut and altered for each of its venues due to both the size of many of its pieces and the effect of various exhibition spaces. Each installation of Eliasson’s work is a unique and mystifying experience.

On view through March 15, 2009. 1717 North Harwood, Dallas, TX 75201. (dm-art.org)

New York, NY: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, “theanyspacewhatever”

Bringing together some of the biggest names in the art world, in order to indulge in their pasttime of exhibition experimentation, the Guggenheim has asked Angela Bulloch, Maurizio Cattelan, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Douglas Gordon, Carsten Höller, Pierre Huyghe, Jorge Pardo, Philippe Parreno, and Rirkrit Tiravanija to formulate a scenario that takes the exhibition as its medium. These artists come together again to create a show that comments on more than just art, extending its borders to include architecture, design and everyday life. As always, Wright’s unique architectural form for the museum only augments this endeavor.

On view through January 7, 2009. 1071 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10128. (guggenheim.org)

Atlanta, GA: the High Museum of Art “The First Emperor: China’s Terracotta Army”

Exhibiting over a hundred works from this archeological find in China, this show offers the most complete terracotta warrior figures ever to be shown in the US. These sculptures, initially discovered in 1974, guarded an immense underground palace: the tomb of the First Emperor, Qin Shihuangdi, who died over two thousand years ago. Accompanying them, both in the ground and on display, are terracotta court officials, acrobats, musicians, chariot horses, and bronze water birds discovered beside the complex’s underground river.

On view through April 19, 2009. 1280 Peachtree Street, NE, Atlanta, GA 30309. (high.org)

Miami, FL: the Miami Art Museum “Chantal Akerman: Moving Through Time and Space”

Akerman’s “hyperrealist” films take the viewer on a journey into the cracks of narratives and the spaces in time that lie between images. This exhibition, her first major traveling show in the US, features multi-media video installations from her “documentary series:” D’Est (From the East), From the Other Side, Là-Bas, Sud and Women of Antwerp in November (a new work created especially for the exhibition). These films retrace journeys and border crossings relating to physical space and identity, exploring the changes of season and terrain, issues of immigration, murder and self-identification. In her work, Akerman captures the essence of what it means to perpetually exist in transition.

On view through January 25, 2009. 101 West Flagler Street, Miami, FL 33130. (miamiartmuseum.org)

Boston, MA: the Institute of Contemporary Art, “Tara Donovan”

Using mass-produced, throwaway items such as toothpicks, scotch tape and plastic drinking straws, Donovan creates impressive sculptures that mimic and defy nature. Her process, which entails the extended repetition of an act upon a particular material in order to create something grand and unexpected, resulted in a mountain made of buttons, a cloud of styrofoam cups, coral composed of paper plates and mylar moss. These elegant and inspiring works contain a sense of beauty and drama that deny their banal creation and components.

On view through January 4, 2009. 100 Northern Avenue, Boston, MA 02210. (icaboston.org)

Milwaukee, WI: the Milwaukee Art Museum, “Act/React Interactive Art”

Taking advantage of technology’s ability to detect physical presence, the artists in Act/React have created an exhibition that allows the viewer to participate in its own creation just by moving through the gallery space. Interacting not only with the artworks on display, but with the other visitors to the exhibition in order to effect change in the work, the term “viewer” no longer seems to apply to the museum goer at this show. Through these installations, Janet Cardiff, Brian Knep, Liz Phillips, Daniel Rozin, Scott Snibbe, and Camille Utterback ask their audience to redefine their relationships to art.

On view through January 11, 2009. 700 North Art Museum Drive, Milwaukee, WI 53202. (mam.org)

Detroit, MI:Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, “Broadcast”

This exhibition investigates traditional or interventionist broadcasting and re-broadcasting techniques used by artists such as Dara Birnbaum, Chris Burden, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle and Nam June Paik, from 1966 to today. Focusing on more contemporary endeavors, curator Irene Hofmann manages to contextualize these works within an art historical trajectory. Covering topics ranging from Nixon’s  US presidential campaign in 1972 to psychics on local Venetian television stations in the late 1990s, the pieces probe the breadth and influence of this pervasive medium.

On view through December 28, 2008. 4454 Woodward Ave, Detroit, MI 48201. (mocadetroit.org) T

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Uteruses Can Wander?

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The history of hysteria

By Julie Rodriguez

One of the more intriguingly-named course offerings at SAIC is a class called “The Wandering Uterus,”  taught by Terri Kapsalis. The Social Science course explores women’s health issues and the medical and social perception of the body from ancient Greece to the present day. F Newsmagazine sat down with Kapsalis to find out just what the class is about.

The name of the course may cause some confusion for students browsing the catalog as they register for classes, but Kapsalis explains the significance: “[The concept of] hysteria started around 2000 BC. At that time in ancient Egypt and ancient Greece the main understanding of hysteria was that it was caused by a wandering uterus that would move around the body and cause illness. The words hysterectomy and hysteria are both derived from hystera, which is the Greek word for uterus. It’s what was blamed for a lot of different female ailments.”

For the first three weeks, students explore the concept  of  hysteria, and the lack of adequate care given to female patients under the guise of this diagnosis, but the wandering uterus is only setting the stage for a semester-long survey of gender in the context of healthcare. “It sets the ground for a way of thinking about different aspects of healthcare and gender. It even intersects transgender issues, and lesbian, gay, and bisexual healthcare,” Kapsalis says. “We talk about issues of race and socioeconomics, poverty. We also talk about the politics and history of birth control.”

She also believes that the subject of health can be an important part of an artistic practice. “I bring it back to art, why artists need to think about healthcare as a creative practice as something that is made and remade and therefore something that can be made and performed in many different ways. So I think it’s really interesting to talk about and discuss healthcare in the context of art.” Kapsalis has, in the past, invited guest artists to speak about their work. Last spring, SAIC professor Christa Donner spoke to students about her work, which deals with issues of reproductive health and the intersections of gender and medicine.

What impact does Kapsalis hope the class will have on her students, and their practice as artists? “I hope they get a better understanding of bodies and culture, and how bodies get made through culture. And that obviously impacts how they might think about their art-making as well.”

She strives to leave students with a different understanding of the world around them by the end of the semester: “It’s about understanding the politics of what you’re doing and what you’re doing when you make, what you’re saying when you make and how that relates to the culture that you’re living in. So hopefully it brings attention to some of the unquestioned assumptions that we may have about the world and about gender and about illness.”

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Taking a slow look at Omer Fast

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Omer Fast at the Betty Rymer Gallery

Every once in a while we are confronted with a work of art that is arrestingly beautiful but are unable to comprehend how it creates its appeal. This was my experience when I first visited the Omer Fast exhibition at the Betty Rymer Gallery. In what appears to be a big budget exhibition, the gallery has installed two video works: The Casting, 2007—which was featured at the 2008 Whitney Biennial—and Looking Pretty for God (After GW), 2008—a work commissioned by SAIC.

The Casting is a four channel video installation in which the artist interviews a US soldier about his experiences in the military. Fast splits two narratives taken from this interview over four screens. If it sounds like this might make the work confusing, that is because it does—but in a good way.

During the interview Fast claims that he is interested in the way that memory is turned into stories, and then mediated by recording and broadcasting techniques. Admittedly this sounds a bit dry, but in actuality Fast opens the door on an incredibly rich visual experience that leaves the viewer overwhelmed but highly engaged. I won’t ruin the surprise, but there is an “aha” moment when you grasp how the four screens function together as a narrative. However, that momentary erlebnis is followed by a return to bewilderment when, upon further contemplation, the other discrepancies in the way the stories are presented reveal themselves. It is in this editorial friction between clarity and ambiguity that the work really comes alive; as if a story is being told about the way stories are told, which throws everything we know about storytelling upside down and into a new light.

Fast is up to similar tricks in Looking Pretty for God (After GW). The work combines voice-overs of morticians talking about their grisly duties, with moving images of children and interior shots of funeral homes. Again the captivating aspect of the work is Fast’s editing technique, used this time to draw seemingly impossible parallels between two disparate subjects.

Formally, the piece operates in a subversive fashion. Everything is self-conscious artifice, right down to the subject matter: children modeling and the preparation of corpses to look life-like. The video masquerades as artless documentation, however, upon consideration, it becomes clear that each decision is carefully calculated for effect. In fact, the narratives are so compelling at times that it almost seems like Joe Pesci (or some other character from central casting) was booked to create the precise mood and texture. What is amazing about the work is that it quietly operates as a triple mirror: showing us all at once the fragility of life, the spiritual in death, and the artist at work, in a way that forces us out of our hurried experience of daily life.

On view through January 3. 280 S. Columbus Drive. Tuesday through Saturday, 11am–6pm.

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Quitting X 3

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Staff Illustration by Aurelie Beatley

Smokeless in art school

Health scare campaigns and the rising cost of cigarettes: These tactics seem to have limited impact on smokers, young and old, pack-a-day devotees or attempted quitters. More personal, nuanced tactics may need to be mobilized, in order to tackle the ambivalent relationship many smokers have with their habit.

In Jonathan Franzen’s essay “Sifting the Ashes,” the author described his repeated attempts to kick the habit. Franzen’s disgust at his engagement with such a senseless activity is palpable, and he convinces the reader of the profound foulness of smoking. But his hatred for cigarettes is hypocritical, it functions simultaneously with his unshakable infatuation with cigarettes. He recognizes this weakness in himself: he still finds it incredibly sexy to see a woman leaning out her apartment window, taking a long, smooth inhalation of her cigarette: “I fell in love at first sight as she stood there,” wrote Franzen, “both inside and outside, inhaling contradiction and breathing out ambivalence.”

It almost goes without saying that the act of smoking is closely associated with socialization, with boredom, with making days bearable, with alcohol and, of course, with sex. You’ve heard it all before: asking for “a light” is the ideal, unassuming way of striking up a conversation, an icebreaker, an instant bond. Then you move on to discuss your collective inability to quit. Before you know it, you’re lovers. (Albeit, lovers with sizeable debts from mounting health bills.)

Talking about quitting smoking with someone who has never smoked, on the other hand, is no fun at all: they simply don’t understand its seemingly insurmountable draw. For those who genuinely wish to quit, perhaps there we can find some middle ground, beyond the behavioral reinforcement of smoky hook-ups, and the tut-tutting of smoke-free preachers. More useful conversations can be had with people who are former smokers: those who understand the perplexing challenges of quitting.
F Newsmagazine presents three very different accounts —one from a student and two from SAIC faculty—about successful attempts to overcome nicotine addiction.

1. Quit and stay quit

When I was in art school [at SAIC] I smoked two packs of cigarettes per day. Even though I felt awful much of the time, I couldn’t imagine life without smoking. Everyone smoked in those days, even in the painting and printmaking studios.

Over the years I tried to cut back, I tried switching brands, but continued to smoke like a chimney. When I was twenty-nine I had to have my gall bladder removed. After the operation, as I faded in and out of consciousness, I found I couldn’t catch my breath. I heard the doctors remark that I was a heavy smoker.

The combination of that scare, and the enforced nicotine withdrawal from my hospital stay, gave me a golden opportunity to quit for good. It was my seventeenth and final attempt to do so, and this time, it worked. I haven’t had a puff of cigarette smoke since January 1994.

The first two years without cigarettes were the hardest. I bought hundreds of boxes of toothpicks to gnaw on and carried gum and sunflower seeds with me. Gradually I found I didn’t need these anymore, but to this day if I’m nervous about something I will often reach for a toothpick to chew.

In the long run, quitting is the easy part—staying quit is the challenge. After fourteen years I’m still painfully aware of how easily I could slip. Nicotine is a fiercely addictive drug and I’ve never completely lost my cravings. But having watched loved ones struggle with and die from cancer and emphysema, I feel extremely grateful to have succeeded. I have tremendous compassion for smokers trying to quit. If you really want to do so, you can.

Steven L. Jones
First Year Program
Adjunct Faculty

2. Quit at the gym

I smoked for five years, from when I was fifteen to twenty years old. On New Years Eve of 2003, after many undisciplined attempts to defeat my pointless desire to achieve social status through toxic inhalation, I made a New Year’s resolution to quit.

During the time I smoked I was unfit, frequently sick, asthmatic, and probably smelled bad. My friends were all the same, so I thought this was normal. We had yellowed fingers and collective coughs. We joked about cancer. The memory seems absurd now. JOKED? About cancer?

Nowadays, when I see students standing outside of the School’s buildings—lighting up, looking edgy, and loitering splendidly—I don’t think of them with any particular distaste or judgment. Rather, I see myself; I understand them. But beyond that moment of nostalgic recognition comes a major realization: seeing these smokers, I am reminded of how much I have improved as a person since quitting smoking. I have emerged into a stronger, more intelligent, more productive, healthier, and nicer smelling individual. Truly, it’s quite horrendous how wholesome I’ve become.

Here’s the catch: for me, as for many others, quitting smoking required developing a new image-related, selfish addiction. I became a gym junkie. The first time I ran on a treadmill was in early January 2004, shortly after my resolution to quit. The machine seemed alien and threatening, a conveyor belt of horror, and after five minutes I thought I was going to die. I gasped desperately and clutched for my inhaler. I’m only twenty, I thought. This is ridiculous.

I got better at running. As I improved, I had less and less desire to smoke, because I knew that my late-night, inebriated “do you have a spare cigarette?” would cause exercise to hurt again, and all I wanted to do was to make that pain go away. Instead of having control of my “don’t give a damn” art school image—through smoking—I discovered another form of control, control over my body.

If this article were to have a sequel, I would tell you all about the perils of exercise addiction, but now is not the time. If you’re looking for a replacement addiction, exercise is a useful one, because you can’t properly exercise and be a smoker, without a great deal of discomfort. One activity cancels out the other.
Five years on, smoking now seems about as undesirable as licking a Chicago sidewalk.


Megan Blackstone
Second year MFA Painting

3. Quit by hypnosis

Smoking used to be my second job. I was notorious. Worse, the damn things insinuated themselves into my writing process so I thought I had to light up to float a necessary distance and see properly what I’d done. This foolishness went on long past twenty years.  With, of course, nine months off to have one natural childbirth.

Then, on April 18, 2000, I got hypnotized. Yes, she wore a lab coat. True, in addition to serving as its Director, she likely represented the entire staff, clinical and clerical, of the Hypnosis Institute. Also true: although she claimed Long Island as birthplace, her aspect and manner of speech suggested Mars. But a person twenty years into addiction checks irony and humor at the door. That’s my tip: Arrive to a hypnosis session suitably desperate.

Also, I really think this woman was a genuine healer. My overnight quit caused such sensation here at SAIC that throngs of students and colleagues visited her successfully for quitting smokes or for creative anxiety or for weight loss or for matters simply too delicate to mention.

According to one of those online quit-counter thingies, since April 18, 2000, 5:30 p.m., I’ve skipped 124,637 cigarettes and saved $24,927.40. I’ve also experienced much joy. And breath.

Janet Desaulniers
Associate Professor
Writing Program

How to Quit

1.     No smoking.
2.     Really, don’t smoke any cigarettes at all.
3.     Don’t buy them either.
4.     If you accidentally bought some, just don’t light any.
5.     Stop going to convenience stores.
6.     And bars.
7.     With your friends. No more friends. Especially if they smoke. Or drink.
8.     No drinking for you, either.
9.     In fact no looking cool, sophisticated, or “alive with pleasure” anymore, at all.
10.     Stop being a teenager, sullen writer, private eye, motorcycle gang coordinator, haggard bar fly, art school student, post-coital bed fellow, rebel, silver screen starlet, European,  man or woman.
11.     Or cowboy or camel. You can’t be those either.
12.     See how easy this is?
13.    OK. How about this: Help enact an indoor smoking ban.
14.     In Antarctica.
15.     Where you had to move. Because you can’t smoke outside, you see. It’s too cold.
16.     And you might die.

Zach Plague
1st year MFA Writing

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Prospect.1: New Orleans’ first Biennial

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Viewers in front of the Lower Ninth Ward Center for the Arts, housed in a former residence, reconstructed as an exhibition space.

About a week before Hurricane Gustav hit in September, a number of dark, faintly humorous artworks appeared around New Orleans. A boy using a lifebelt as a tire swing, a small figure reaching after a flying umbrella on the side of the levee wall in the still-devastated Lower Ninth Ward, Military Police looting a television from an abandoned property, and perhaps most perplexingly, a small blonde-haired boy writing, “I must not copy what I see on the Simpsons,” on a chalk board.

Banksy had been to town, integrating his murals into the fabric of New Orleans. News of the graffiti quickly spread through the City by word of mouth, and further afield on blogs and Flickr pages. But whether the graffiti was formally part of Prospect.1, the first New Orleans Biennial, is predictably unclear and arguably irrelevant. The sudden appearance of the work was a fitting precursor to the vast, sprawling, exploratory nature of what is touted as “the largest biennial of contemporary art ever organized in the United States.”

“Prospect.1 New Orleans” includes over 80 artists spread across two dozen locations throughout New Orleans, in addition to various satellite exhibitions organized by local artists and galleries.
The concept for Prospect.1 came from New York curator Dan Cameron. Cameron went to New Orleans as Director of Visual Arts for the New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center in May of last year. Previously he has curated the Istanbul Biennial in 2003 and the Taipei Biennial in 2006. Cameron has a long personal history with New Orleans, and was aware that hosting such an event in the city would prove no easy task.

Some work is installed in traditional settings, such as the New Orleans Museum of Art and Contemporary Arts Center. The Biennial spreads out into other New Orleans cultural institutions, such as the Museum of African American History, while yet more work can be found in the vacant lots of the Lower Ninth Ward.

As such, Prospect 1 provides visitors with a rather unusual Biennial experience. It is one-half standing around looking at work, and one-half eccentric bus tour through the extraordinary patchwork of post-Katrina New Orleans.

For New Orleans natives it provides a rather different experience. The boost it provides to the economy is without question. While the tourist friendly areas of the city have rebounded, the recovery from cancelled conventions and the lengthy rebuilding process is not yet over.

Culturally, Prospect.1 has the potential to provide an interesting opportunity for local artists. The map provided to attendees of the Biennial is daunting in its detail. It lists not only all the “official” exhibition sites, but also the many local, independently run galleries hosting shows concurrent with Prospect.1. Outside of the downtown areas such as the Warehouse District, these galleries do not typically draw in outsiders.

However, beyond the New Orleans art crowd, Prospect.1 appeared rather ill-publicized in the local community. As outdoor installations went, residents were often initially uncertain as to what was going on. Many people seemed to know of an individual show, but were unaware of the Biennial as a whole.

Dan Cameron encouraged participating artists to visit New Orleans prior to the Biennial’s installation. What emerges is an interesting mix of standard Biennial and specific artistic responses to New Orleans.
The Contemporary Arts Center houses some of the more surprising New Orleans-specific work. Visitors are greeted by Jackie Sumell’s work The House that Herman Built, which asks, and answers, “What kind of house does a man who has lived in a six-foot-by-nine-foot cell for over 30 years dream of?” Herman Wallace, one of the Angola 3, has spent over 30 years in solitary confinement for a murder he did not commit. He is awaiting release since his conviction was overturned earlier this year. Summel documents her correspondence with Wallace over several years, presenting a replica of his cell alongside blue-prints and models of the home Wallace dreams of. As outsiders may visit with an expectation of seeing the devastation and injustices that followed Hurricane Katrina, Summel presents the face of another long-running local injustice.

One of the more eccentric pieces of Prospect.1 is a collaboration of Cao Fein and Map Office, called NO LAB in RMB City.  A room is created, with outline illustrations of the outside actors who have come to New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina: Brad Pitt, Barack Obama, Spike Lee, and the cast of Paul Chan’s Waiting for Godot, accompanied by single line statements. “Fifty Percent of New Orleans’ artists lost their homes and dozens their life’s work,” “That would be a huge boost for the economy,” “Tourists buy souvenirs. Collectors buy art,” and perhaps the greatest give away of the tongue-in-cheek nature of the piece, a quote from curator Dan Cameron describing his first time in New Orleans: “I was having my first soft-shell crab po-boy, watching the sunset and listening to the Nevilles.” Inside is a projection of a version of the Online Virtual Reality game “Second Life,” in which New Orleans has been recreated, inhabited by these outside actors, moving through the virtual city before the flood waters they came in response to. It is awkward and steeped in parody, but perhaps justifiably so in the context of an exhibition that is primarily by outsiders.

The work displayed in the Lower Ninth Ward takes a very different tone. While “disaster tourism” still profits in the neighborhood, visitors rarely go to the neighborhood outside of the confines of a tour bus. Prospect.1, to its credit has some very interesting artistic responses to the all-but abandoned area, and for visitors walking around and interacting with the surroundings.

Mark Bradford’s installation Mithra takes the form of a giant ark, created from sheets of wood once used to board up buildings in the neighborhood, still partially adorned with pasted on posters. The ark was created while Bradford was in residence at the L9 Center for the Arts, a local home for art exhibitions and education founded by photographers Keith Calhoun and Chaundra McCormick.

Calhoun and McCormick’s photography is on display as part of Prospect 1., providing visitors with a context for the Lower Ninth Ward. Their work shows decades of daily life, faith, labor and music in the neighborhood, alongside a display of prints heavily damaged and yet extraordinarily manipulated by floodwater.

Across the street Nigerian-born artist Wangechi Mutu became actively engaged in the community. Mrs. Sarah’s House is a frame of what was once the home of local resident Mrs. Sarah, covered in lights with a single chair placed in the center. Mrs. Sarah lost the money she was to use to rebuild her home as a result of contractor fraud. Mutu is creating a series of prints of the installation in the hope of raising the $125,000 needed to rebuild her home where Mutu’s representation presently stands.

There are, of course, risks associated with installing work in the Lower Ninth Ward. Paul Villinski’s Emergency Response Studio, a FEMA-esque trailer converted to use green materials and solar power is an interesting structure and concept; it raises some good and very current ideas as to, perhaps, what could be done better next time. However, in a place where residents are still attempting to rebuild, have been made sick by the toxicity of trailers provided by FEMA and are now being forced out of the trailers by city ordinances, the structure’s presence is perhaps a little hard to swallow.

And then there’s the risk of just straight misinterpretation. By making the Kafkaesque reality of the neighborhood into the setting for an art exhibition, the artwork can not only reflect its surroundings, but the surroundings can be mistaken for art. One recently returned family placed a sign in front of their hyper-modern home, built by Brad Pitt’s Make it Right foundation, notifying visitors that their home was not a display piece.

Meanwhile Leandro Erlich’s Window and Ladder—Too Late for Help suggests a belated escape route for those residents now infamously stuck on the upstairs floors or attics of their homes when the levees were breached during Hurricane Katrina. The height of the ladder is roughly equal to the depth of the floodwater. When the installation was first installed, the remnants of three houses, crushed and bulldozed into a corner, sat around 15 feet away from the piece.

A week into the exhibition, the city of New Orleans finally arrived to remove the now three-year-old debris. The next day an art enthusiast who visited the Lower Ninth Ward to show companions the exhibits, eagerly asked, “Where did the rest of the installation go?”

Additional Info:
Prospect.1 is free and open to the
public until January 18, 2009.

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You Can’t Study Illustration

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Does SAIC’s reputation as a hotbed of conceptual art come at the expense of more “commercial” art forms?

Drawing as the basis for art education is an ancient tradition, and one that has formed the foundation of art schools for centuries. Illustration is the first form of art in which we are ever invited to participate, in preschool, in our picture books, on our toys. It allows us the first expression of our imaginations as children, and aids us in learning how to organize and quantify the world and develop manual dexterity.  We recognize it as one of the most public manifestations of fine art.

There is no illustration curriculum as SAIC. There is architecture, there is painting, there is graphic design, there’s even a sound department and a basement full of performance artists. But the advanced sections of the painting and drawing curriculum are closed to illustrators, as attested by the complaints of students turned down from advanced painting for being “too illustrative.”  Students who are passionate about illustrating are left to their own devices to cobble together an education from classical drawing, and then figure out how to apply the skills they’ll need to actually make a living once they’re out of the rabbit hole.

Marion Kryzcka, adjunct associate professor in Painting and Drawing, blames the highly “conceptual” identity of the School of the Art Institute. “The pretentious nature of fine arts and a focus on hip, cutting-edge interests” contributes to the alienation of illustration, he explains.  “There might also be some anti-skill prejudice—you have to have some basic skills to be an illustrator. Unfortunately, if what you do doesn’t come easily, then there must be something wrong with it. People question the motivation.”

SAIC may just be too cool for illustration. In a school where concept dominates and the ability to talk, at length, about your practice seems to be more important than actual technical skill and execution, so pedestrian a tradition may not occupy a place of any significance. Craft has been cast as the opposite of whatever lofty artistic identity the school wants to foster in its students, mostly because to learn a craft is difficult and there is no immediate gratification to the process. In response to this, Kryzcka recalled a passage from Plato’s Republic where Socrates plans to ban all poets from his ideal republic because they are liars. Artists, however, would be invited to stay because they are craftsmen and therefore useful. It is obviously retrograde to credit such a statement, as poets and artists fulfill a very important task in society, but to discriminate against a certain class of artists because what they do is commercial, or recognized by non-artists, is simply bizarre.

There are several classes that have consistently attracted that not-so-rare student illustrator, but when they find a class that works, they often end up taking it to death, such as Peggy MacNamara’s Scientific Illustration class in the Visual Communication department, Olivia Petrides’ Natural History Illustration in Painting and Drawing, and Fashion Department instructor Dijana Granov’s Illustrated Poster, to cite a few. The hand-drawn animation classes are also excellent if you’re looking for a place to draw, and draw intensively. But none of these classes communicate with each other, and they stand isolated in their various departments, to the point where students have begun to desperately repeat them.

I myself have taken MacNamara’s class twice and will take it again next semester, but I know people in that class that have taken it every semester for four years. Peggy simply happens to be one of the only teachers at school that proposes a class where illustration is respected as a viable art form and where its techniques are explored satisfactorily. She also affords students relative freedom to explore these techniques, and has been known to let them work on projects that have nothing to do with scientific illustration simply to provide them with a haven to make illustrations for class credit.

Granov’s poster class falls under the umbrella of a fashion department elective, less because it’s actually about fashion (which it isn’t) but rather because Granov happens to teach other classes in the department. It’s one of the only classes where all of the projects have a commercial base (design a comic, a book cover, a movie poster, a wine label) and are required to incorporate a physical medium, i.e., works on paper as opposed to computer software. She too has students that have been with her for semester upon semester, because no other avenue for illustration was open to them. I got creative last semester and found a nice little 1.5 credit Continuing Education class in children’s book illustration that was fantastic in an otherwise arid landscape. There really is no reason for this dearth of a curriculum. What illustration students do isn’t some bizarre fringe practice, and there’s nothing obscure about the training they seek. Illustration is integral to the commercial art world and a very valid, thriving art form in and of itself. And Columbia has a course of studies for it. But then, Columbia seems to have everything.

Dijana Granov’s Illustrated Poster course focuses on commercial illustrative design and on the more traditional media used to create it, such as gouache, watercolours, coloured pencils, markers, and ink. It is a class that trends heavily towards the representational, and offers an ideal practice for students interested in developing a marketable skill set in the art world.

She is planning to pitch a proposal for an organized illustration curriculum, and outlined her plan for what such a curriculum might look like. “There are many classes at the school that contain the elements needed for an education in illustration,” she says.  “Joining them together would allow us to create a course of study similar to the BFAs with emphasis on architecture or visual communication that we already have in place.”

Entry would be judged by portfolio in the manner of visual communication or advanced painting, and many classes could be run hand-in-hand with the painting and drawing department. Granov also suggests that forming such a curriculum might relieve some of the congestion in the First Year Program, which is widely hailed as a bit of a mess. “The First Year Program is inconsistent and crams too much information into two semesters,” says Granov. “There are too many possibilities, and students tend to drift through the school picking up a superficial education which dumps them out into the world without any basic skills. Limiting the curriculum could ensure that they learn a few useful things. Some of them might be interested in earning a living.”

When asked about a perceived bias against illustration, Granov also cited the conceptual reputation of SAIC. “Illustration has a direct message, and that can be considered shallow. Audiences respond to the content of an illustration differently than they do to fine art, which has the option of hiding poor execution behind conceptualism. They can say that ‘you’re not supposed to get it,’ while illustrators really can’t.”

It remains that for all its commercialism, illustration is an all-inclusive medium, a very global art form. Illustrators work on specific projects, they can write their own stories, and after paying their dues can be afforded great artistic freedom. Maurice Sendak is a brilliant example of that. But apparently even he isn’t immune to fine art terrorism.  In a September interview in the New Yorker, Sendak revealed that he was plagued with insecurity at the thought of being remembered as “a mere illustrator.” The fact that Maurice Sendak is a genius is not something that most normal people would question. Why, then, do a few detractors deny him the title of “artist”? Would they deny Mughal miniatures? Would they deny a solid millennia of illuminated manuscripts, of tomb murals, and engraved stelae? Would they deny Aubrey Beardsley, N.C. Wyeth, Albrecht Durer, Norman Rockwell?

There is a strong historical tradition behind illustration, and there is also a strong democratic appeal to it. It is the art form for everyman. And if SAIC is going to continue to claim a place at the head of art education in this country, it must consider including illustration as one of its fundaments.

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Prop 8 Protests

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Photo by Christine Geovanis

The overwhelming popularity of our new president has generated a fervor for politics that this country hasn’t seen since the anti-Vietnam War sentiment of the 60s. But while November 4 was an unprecedented democratic leap toward racial equality, another slice of the population was left awkwardly disenfranchised. Following Obama’s election, Proposition 8 (Prop 8 ) quietly passed in California. The entire proposed addition to the California Constitution is just 14 words: “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.”

Legal experts and media talking heads are spinning over the new law, as no one can definitively outline yet what its legal implications will be. The constitutional change could retroactively annul the 18,000 same-sex marriages granted in California since the state approved the right for gays to marry in April of 2008. Others suggest that Prop 8 might be overturned because it’s an unconstitutional restriction of established legal rights.

Since it passed, local and national protests are organizing grass-roots style over the Internet, using organizational tactics comparable to the Obama campaign’s in terms of new media. Media pundits regularly credit one of the greatest strengths of the Obama campaign as the use of new media and the internet to engage and inspire American youth. In addition to his groundbreaking campaign funding, the viral spread of user-identified media information through Facebook, YouTube and similar new media outlets proved an extremely powerful —and free—campaign tool.

On November 9, approximately 500 protesters gathered in front of the Renaissance Hotel in Chicago to denounce Focus on the Family host James Dobson’s induction into the Radio Hall of Fame. Dobson had poured an incredible amount of money and the vast resources of his media empire toward the promotion of Prop 8, and is credited as a crucial figure in its passing. Only a week later, on November 15, a virally promoted national protest against Prop 8 in Chicago’s Federal Plaza drew a crowd of an estimated two to five thousand, organized on the web by Join the Impact (jointheimpact.wetpaint.com) and Chicago’s Gay Liberation Network (gayliberation.net). A million people around the country simultaneously protested in their cities.

This time in history is a critical opportunity for artists exploring issues of social awareness and participation to execute large-scale projects and performance pieces to a receptive audience. Singer Melissa Etheridge has already unwittingly spurred a tax-evasion movement after posting her reaction to Prop 8 on her blog: “Okay, so I am taking [Propostion 8] to mean I do not have to pay my state taxes because I am not a full citizen,” Etheridge writes. “I mean that would just be wrong, to make someone pay taxes and not give them the same rights, sounds sort of like that taxation without representation thing from the history books.” In response to Etheridge’s comment, blog posts, Facebook groups and forum threads suggesting organized tax-evasion as the key to winning various political battles have appeared across the Internet, and several speakers at the Chicago protest referenced the idea.

Artists would be wise to ride the coattails of the current social movements and experiment with their work to help shape that future in the arts. Shepard Fairey has already reached international fame with his Obama “Hope” print, but just think of what could happen with experimentation in less traditional media. The social climate and recent technological advancements have created a critical opportunity to establish what it means to be a media-savvy creative member of Generation Y by defining the new avant garde. What of a national performance piece addressing genocide in Darfur? Or a viral new media piece addressing immigration reform? A creative artistic spin with Web 2.0 resources piggybacking on issues of national attention could drive an entirely new artistic genre, while simultaneously creating progressive dialogue for the most critical contemporary social issues.

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SAIC students spend Thanksgiving in Chicago

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Thanksgiving, a celebration of family, food, and giving thanks, is typically spent at home.  But SAIC’s very short Thanksgiving break and the recent downturn in the economy will yield some interesting alternatives this year. Students who live relatively close to school will be able to drive home and very ambitious students may still fly home, refusing to miss the home-cooked meal.  Still others, most likely a thrifty minority of students who can’t manage to be temporarily adopted by a nearby family friend or roommate, will make-do with what resources they have at school.  Some stay to avoid the cost of flying home, some because the short break offers an opportunity to get work done for the following week.

“I’m celebrating Thanksgiving with my Aunt in Chicago since the plane tickets cost too much to go back to Oregon for the weekend,” says SAIC student Kira Mardikes of Portland, Oregon; “I would have loved to be able to visit my family and friends, but I’ll get to [visit them] winter break.”

The number of students who, like Mardikes, won’t travel home for the break will probably grow this year as the economy increasingly affects the nation’s approach to traveling.  With higher airfares, many people are looking for alternatives to flying home. According to a poll by Travelocity, sixty-six percent of respondents say concerns about the economy will affect their holiday travel plans. Thanksgiving airfares are “absolutely higher than they were last year,” says Tavelocity Editor Amy Ziff. She adds, “Airlines have been very candid about the fact that they need to raise their prices.”

According to USA Today, “Airlines will offer almost 3,000 fewer domestic flights a day during the Thanksgiving season, promising fewer choices, fuller planes and higher fares for millions of Americans.  Compared with last Thanksgiving season, there will be 11% fewer flights- 2.6 million fewer seats- on non-stop domestic routes from Nov. 20, the Thursday before Thanksgiving, through Nov. 30, the Sunday afterward.”

Felicia Liu, an SAIC student who moved to the United States from Korea when she was 8 years old, puts more of an emphasis on friends than family for the Thanksgiving holiday, “I didn’t start celebrating Thanksgiving until I moved here to this country, so I just like the food and atmosphere of it.  You usually find me spending Thanksgiving with friends and their families.”  She’ll be staying in Chicago with a handful of her dormmates, who have decided to cook their own Thanksgiving meal at an acquaintance’s nearby apartment in Humboldt Park.  Their only rule is BYOC, Bring Your Own Chair.

Other international students plan to use the time to relax and do work, like Vincci Fung of Hong Kong who says she’ll use the day to “rest and walk around the city.”

The school sponsors one Thanksgiving solution, its own Thanksgiving dinner, open to all students on Thanksgiving Day from 1pm-4pm. “We usually show a good movie and have some good hang out time,” says Residence Director Abigail Holcombs.  The school offers vegan options and in past years hosted about 200 students for the event.

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Hair Is.

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An excerpt from Hair Is.

by Tai Jin Kang

I am looking at a girl. I take pleasure in the summer breeze outside of Berry Chill yogurt ice cream shop on a summer day while examine a girl walking towards the shop. I notice she has the right proportion from her ankle to knee, her knee to waist, her waist to chest, and her chest to ear. I also find that she has a tiny head with fierce eyes. Her round nose follows nicely with her round eyebrows. My eyes follow her round shapes and then find nice curves through her waist and they end with her back. She really meets my visual expectations. However, it won’t be enough for me. I have to find a perfect match for my nose and ten little fingers. They are choosy enough to overcome visual pleasure.

My nerves are very picky at things, especially for hair. But they never follow ordinary standards. Rather, they lead to my memory.

I was not well nurtured thanks to my thirteen month-old younger brother. My parents were old enough to make a family quickly when they married, so I had to understand them and give away the seat of my mom’s bosom to him. In most of my memories, I am leaning on her back pursuing other pleasure rather than oral. Since my brother was a weeper, I couldn’t steal his seat. I remember. I was enviously staring at him sleeping while torturing my mom’s hair sniffing it. There are few reasons that explain my addiction to hair. It is an image from my memory that I always sit on her back. It is a smell that made me really relaxed at that time. But, It is a feeling of being deprived of care.

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Hairsay

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Hairsay, Female Pattern Beardness, and Whisker Wade

by Heather McShane

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