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Mumbai-based artist Jitish Kallat’s site-specific installation on the Art Institute’s Grand Staircase considers the events of September 11, 2001 in light of September 11, 1893, when Hindu monk Swami Vivekananda’s landmark speech about global religious tolerance was delivered at the First World Parliament of Religions, held in conjunction with the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, just feet away inside the museum’s auditorium. The force of visual impact in the artist’s installation keeps its commentary on the regression of religious tolerance and the global rise of fanaticism from feeling secondhand or pious. Kallat converts the entirety of Vivekananda’s speech into a permanent LED display that takes up both rises of the Grand Staircase, a site previously mined by artist Daniel Buren. It’s surprising how strongly Kallat’s piece resonates with the permanent collection objects surrounding it; the text reflects off the windows of the Buddhist art gallery on the first floor and draws attention to the great divide between this tradition and the Impressionists on the other side of the stairs. Kallat’s choice to reference the events of 9/11 with the colors of the Department of Homeland Security’s alert system is an easy symbolic gesture of terror’s infection on speech that’s nonetheless usefully confrontational. (Monica Westin)

Through January 2 at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 South Michigan.

photo by Cole Pierce

RECOMMENDED

Viewers familiar with Kelly Kaczynski’s work might recall how previous segments of her ongoing conceptual play, “Olympus Manger,” span years and various venues, and invited guests to involve themselves in the works, becoming participants in actions that blurred the lines between performance, landscape and artwork. Walking around the stacked stages that fill Three Walls, however, it is difficult for the audience to know their role in Kaczynski’s latest installation, “The Stagehand’s Unseen.” Though created from the remnants of prior installations, this new stage asks nothing of its audience—rather, it fills the gallery with intimidating largesse, lopsidedly angling so as to force viewers to a distance. Those who edge close enough will find their own reflections peering back at them, inciting questions over where, exactly, the stagehands are and who, if not the audience, will be performing? Read the rest of this entry »

"Floral Arrangement #2"

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Photos will never do justice to Jason Middlebrook’s installations, nor will reviews. His current exhibition, titled “Less,” is experiential, requiring your presence and your time. The reclaimed and reused wood—no new materials are used here—alters the air. It has a scent, as does the chewed gum on a school desk that spells out “I am so sick of Sarah Palin.” What is new, however, is the vitality imbued in each dirty, chipped, warped, partially painted and haggard piece, each turned and crafted but ultimately discarded segment.

“Floral Arrangement #2,” an imploding collection of bits of furniture and lumber that stretches through most of the central gallery space, needs to be walked under and around, and interacted with to see where these individual scraps of wood might have once intersected with your own lives. A bit of a bed, what’s left of a chair—this all belonged to us at one time. Our own remnant scents might linger, our weight might be seen in the fibers, our intentions in the cracks and dents. Read the rest of this entry »

John Neff glances back over his shoulder to the empty café, to make sure no one is spying on us as he divulges the details of a work in progress. With Neff, whose large-scale sculptural installations are often spectacularly theatrical, it’s difficult to tell if his paranoia is also a bit of theatrics. In any case, I swore to keep Neff’s plans secret, and they are no small plans. He often thinks big. For instance, his current gallery installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art, part of the “Production Site” group exhibition, is envisioned as a 1:5.75 scale model for a pornographic enlarging machine, of sorts. If ever fully realized and magnified, according to Neff’s scaled dimensions, the life-sized body casts here would become god-sized, and the printed pornographic images would be human-sized, and almost real. At least, that is the fantasy.

In press releases, art reviews and artist statements, we often read that a particular work of art is responsible for seismic shifts of consciousness. For example, an artwork can create a tension (political, sexual, formal, whatever), or it re-orders and recontextualizes our perception, or it unearths deep-seated fears and desires within the viewer. That contemporary art rarely attains these lofty goals isn’t the failing of inflated art speak, but the confusion of virtual reality for real reality. Whatever the fiction—porn, religion, or art—you must have a lapse of cold sober reality if the power of fantasy is to take hold. Read the rest of this entry »

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On the roof of the Art Institute’s Modern Wing, two jet engines lie naked under the sky.

For the installation “Untitled (Alliance),” British artist Roger Hiorns (born 1975) chose two Pratt and Whitney TF33 P9 turbofans and, with curator James Rondeau, placed them atop the Bluhm Family Terrace. Boeing provided major funding for the installation.

In the works for which Hiorns is better known, he’s been able to exercise complete authority over an environment or object, e.g., “Seizure” from 2008, wherein a London residence was filled with a chemical solution that precipitated blue crystal on every available surface. Here and now, rather than receiving an additional covering, the two jet engines have been mostly flayed of aluminum skin, their systems of control revealed.

Given the museum’s large collection of designed objects, the jet engines could bespeak the golden age of modern industrial design—but they don’t. Rather, on the terrace, the disintegrating engines confront the surrounding downtown architecture in an uncomfortable way: they are remainders of the horror when jet engines collide with buildings, and the ubiquitous corruption that results. Read the rest of this entry »

In a Northwest-facing corner on the twelfth floor of the Merchandise Mart, German artist Achim Zeman perches near the top of a blue-and-yellow ladder with a tape measure in one hand and, in the other, a precisely cut strip of vinyl tape so red it buzzes. He pauses to inspect the color-coded printout of the master plan for his installation. “Insight on site” is a vertiginous use of electric red vinyl tape applied directly to the wall in ambling lines. Zeman makes a mark on the wall, leans down to pick up a level, peels the back off the vinyl tape, drops the curled backing to the floor and presses the tape to the wall. He smoothes it flat and parallel to the twenty-seven other vibrant red horizontal lines affixed there.

Scattered around the room, eight volunteers work similarly and in silence doing the same, over and over. Each devises their own way to place the vinyl tape properly and track which lines remain to be taped.

Nominally, Zeman is an installation artist, and this red-striped piece he’s working on is located in the main speaking venue on the Art Chicago floor of Artropolis, an enormous contemporary-art-cum-antique fair taking place this weekend at the Merchandise Mart. The formula for his work is color, provided by electric red vinyl tape, and geometric pattern—in this case, lines. These two visual elements he adapts to highlight some aspect of the room in which they appear. Here, he explains, it’s all about the corners and creating graphic discontinuity that doesn’t line up with the three-dimensional features of the wall. Read the rest of this entry »

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Mike Schuh’s work is quiet and unobtrusive, and seamlessly integrated into the apartment-gallery architecture of Golden. It’s so seamless, in fact, that a first-time visitor would be hard-pressed to pick out all of Schuh’s pieces. His works, mostly site-specific, were created to emphasize the fact that Golden, while currently un-lived in, began as a residential apartment. Schuh implies a domestic space, and his installations hover between residential function and household decoration. For an artist who professes an interest in objects in his artist statement, there are remarkably few objects on display, but the very sparseness of the exhibit brings attention to all of the elements of domestic life that would normally fill the space if someone made Golden Gallery their home. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Under a banner announcing “EVERYTHING NOTHING” that fills one wall of the gallery space, Daniel Everett presents his sardonic photographic reflections on the way that technology has penetrated our psyches. Everett’s take on the managed environment is nowhere better encapsulated than in “Decoy I and II,” two straight black-and-white shots of surveillance cameras against pure white backgrounds; it turns out that the devices are fakes that are used to hoodwink innocent and credulous passersby into thinking that they are being watched. As if he needed to rub in our indignity more deeply, Everett serves up “Portals” in which we see an empty and forbidding underground parking garage, at the center of which is a vestibule glowing in heavenly white light that is backed by a bare wall instead of a door. Technology is a glitzy and deceptive trap from which there is no exit that seduces us at the peril of our strength and sanity. (Michael Weinstein)

Through May 2 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave.

RECOMMENDED

The theatricality of peeling back the red curtains, which drape the entrance to Diane Christiansen and Shoshana Utchenik’s first collaborative work, sets the tone for their multimedia wonderland currently occupying Gallery One and its flanking catwalk at the Hyde Park Art Center.

Imbued with a whimsical sense of play, this artist environment, which incorporates elements of collage, painting, drawing, sewing, linocut prints, sound art, animation and sculpture, is a winsome accumulation of objects and ideas that explores the dichotomies of internal and external relationships.

The journey begins amidst the coniferous trees of the Ego Forest, complete with a canopy of stylized, Buddhist-inspired swirling paper clouds suspended overhead. The sprawling tentacles of a softly glowing paper-mâché octopus dominate the Relationship Bardo, and the two-dimensional pup tent in the Teacher Garden is a sort of Potemkin pit stop. The viewer’s quest ends in the Meditation Clubhouse, constructed of re-proposed wooden doors and boards, if one is brave enough to walk the narrow plank up it. Read the rest of this entry »

photo by Jane J. Gaspar

By Jason Foumberg

There is a room. It is filled with salt. It is the “Salt Room.” Doug Fogelson’s latest exhibition pairs photograms made from salt with 3,000 pounds of rock salt spread on the floor, wall to wall, of a storefront gallery. Fogelson founded and directs Front Forty Press, an art-book publisher based in Chicago, and he often exhibits his own photographic prints and sculptural installations. “Salt Room (Winter on the Moon)” is his first publicly exhibited ground covering.

The salted layer of floor here evokes many things: the luminous snow right outside; a moonscape, wasteland or other no man’s land; a crystal palace’s ashes. It is a gravel aquarium for humans to frolic while passersby peer in through the large street-level display windows. The overall effect is crunchy and cold. Read the rest of this entry »