Something strange has happened at the Museum of Contemporary Art.
Three of the four exhibitions that open the season are devoted to Chicago-area artists, and the shows are clearly the main attractions, presented in the museum’s primary spaces.
Later this year, the MCA will mount another three exhibitions for local artists, thereby showing more such work in the last quarter of 1994 than it has done over the last few years.
Of course, no art institution ever does (or can do) enough for hometown artists. Yet we should not think that more exhibitions automatically mean a better program. The important thing is to balance local, national and international artists in such a way that indicates an equal commitment.
This seldom happen at museums, for all sorts of reasons ranging from limited funds and space to the seemingly inevitable taking for granted of local talent until it is noticed and acclaimed somewhere else.
Then, too, collectors of contemporary art often find their way onto museum boards, where they proclaim their enthusiasm for the artists whose work is the most “daring” and, thus, the most deserving of display in museum exhibitions. Often enough, this occurs internationally, with certain artists popular to the collecting community being exhibited in more than one venue, thereby excluding other artists who are perceived as lesser lights.
The more it happens, the more it continues, for museums tend to duplicate each other’s exhibition and collecting patterns. Artists’ names that are much in the air invariably get the most attention until someone with a fresh list departs from the pattern, arguing more on the basis of quality than celebrity.
It is nice to think that happened at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Why not open a season with local artists? Contemporary museums are only as good as their capacity to surprise, and sometimes the best surprise in an exhibition program is the effort to establish balance.
In any event-and for whatever reason-the MCA offers solo exhibitions for Kay Rosen, Vincent Shine and Hollis Sigler with catalogs written by the museum’s chief curator and assistants. The shows will have been up for three weeks before an exhibition for a more widely known artist has the possibility to upstage them. So conditions are better than local artists have had at the MCA since the early 1970s, heyday of the group most favored at the museum, the Chicago Imagists.
The exhibitions range in size from 16 to 20 pieces, which makes each about as large as the kind of show that many museums mount to introduce young or emerging artists. Hence, the presence of three of them; fewer would not hold enough pieces to constitute the museum’s primary offering.
None of the exhibitions is a retrospective. All focus on recent works, though the show for Rosen includes a few early pieces to indicate her development. Shine’s representation is from the last three years; Sigler’s is a thematically unified series dating from 1992 to 1994.
The shows present very different bodies of work, each unrelated to the others. Rosen uses words as her medium. Shine produces super-real sculptures of organic matter and drawings of a wasp. Sigler creates paintings and pastels with text about breast cancer.
Rosen’s work is extraordinarily good natured. It never lectures or scolds and has no subversive agenda. The meanings of her stencils on walls, paper and canvas usually come through the look of the words themselves, that is, their order, typeface, juxtaposition, cropping or spacing.
The subtitle for Rosen’s exhibition is “Home on the Range,” which also is the title of two large paintings on facing walls. Each presents the sentence “The farmer thought the chicken was too hot to eat” in three lines of type. But by moving the italicized word from one line to another the artist changes its emphasis and, therefore, the meaning of the sentence.
Trained as a linguist, Rosen notices how we perceive text and how simple it is to change that perception. The utter simplicity of the changes she makes is what makes her work not only witty but also endearing.
In “Home on the Range” the alteration is so simple that, at first, one does not notice it. Only when a spectator reads the sentence slowly and carefully, sounding out each word, does one come closer to the fineness of Rosen’s talent.
Because the effect of her work often is humorous, it has taken a longer time for it to register as being significant. But the manner in which the artist achieves her effects is, in fact, more subtle than those of such superstars of the word as Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer, both of whom come off next to her as schoolmarmish. It’s about time a wide audience recognized Rosen’s achievement.
Shine does for plants and fungi what Duane Hanson and John de Andrea did for the human figure. He reproduces them with such verisimilitude that viewers scarcely can believe they are not in the presence of the real thing.
If this talent for fooling the eye were all, Shine merely would be another artist engaged in a super-realist endeavor. But Shine attaches his sculptures to blocks and pillars that evoke the cool, machined look of Minimal sculpture, and these components underline the fragility of the others.
His many drawings of a wasp also might suggest something having to do with the environment, though here, again, the pieces are more of interest for their beautiful formal qualities, which Shine achieves through an elaborate process sometimes using computer technology.
Sigler’s works make up a “Breast Cancer Journal” that the artist began when she first was diagnosed with the disease in 1985. The trauma she experienced is clear from writing that accompanies the paintings and drawings; few will fail to be moved by it.
Sometimes the text on Sigler’s spacers and frames is autobiographical. Sometimes it gives statistics or quotes the accounts of others. But early on in the series viewers learn that the artist’s struggle with cancer is far from over.
This gives the faux naif images a poignant expressivity they do not in themselves have.
Were it not for text, the images would be almost totally mute, as the artist has, throughout her career, so overworked the frail signs and symbols that they add little to what we know about illness beyond the tone of romanticized hysteria that long has marked Sigler’s art.
Perhaps this series will speak strongly to women, as that surely is part of the artist’s intent. However, intentions are not results, and though it is sad to say it, here Sigler has been more adept at choosing words than creating images that give the words a visual form as powerful as her subject.
———-
Exhibitions for Kay Rosen, Vincent Shine and Hollis Sigler continue at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 237 E. Ontario St., through Nov. 6.
