About 15 years ago, museums across North America began various series of exhibitions to show the work of young or relatively little-known artists.
At Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the series was called “Options,” and its efforts were small in scale, generally occupying a single gallery.
Small or not, the series had an excellent track record, introducing the MCA audience to works of such now-prominent artists as Jenny Holzer, Rebecca Horn, Martin Puryear and Rachel Whiteread.
The current installment, devoted to Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco, is No. 47 in the series, and, while the concept behind it continues to be welcome, the show indicates so little effort that it does not serve adequately its potential audience.
When announced, the exhibition was to include four pieces, one being a slide documentation of the artist’s working process in another piece on view. As it now stands, the show has three pieces including the documentation, which is apart from the others, in the museum’s orientation space.
Orozco’s primary piece is an elevator cabin that he altered especially for the MCA exhibition by miniaturizing the dimensions of its interior. His second piece is a long paper scroll filled entirely with numbers cut from a telephone directory.
This viewer saw Orozco’s work in the 1993 Venice Biennale and has read what has been written about it. However, from only the MCA exhibition and an accompanying guide, it would be virtually impossible for anyone to grasp the artist’s purpose or aesthetic.
Moreover, on the day this viewer attended, no signage was in the gallery to indicate there was any documentation that placed the elevator piece in a context with other of the artist’s works.
Some no doubt will relate the piece to Marcel Duchamp’s famous “altered readymades,” which designated everyday objects as works of art and bore minor changes to make them appear more so.
Others may know that Orozco has cut down and reassembled large objects before, in such a manner as to make viewers acutely aware of what is present and, more important, what he has taken away.
For most Chicagoans, however, the show will be an introduction to the artist’s work and, as such, it disdains to tell them anything about the relationship between the cabin and the scroll or about affinities with any other art of the modern or contemporary period.
Which leads to the question: Who, precisely, is the exhibition for?
If the answer is the artist, the curator and the writer of the accompanying publication, fine. But the MCA does not need a new $55 million building for that. Entries can be typed onto resumes and congratulations exchanged quite nicely in the present plant.
If, however, the show is for a curious, growingaudience, that’s something else, something that has to do with the educational mission of a museum, which the expanding curatorial staff has for some time seemed all too willing to overlook.
“Options 47: Gabriel Orozco” will continue at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 237 E. Ontario St., through Oct. 30.
– South African artist Robert Hodgins will give a free talk about his work on the abuse and manipulation of power at 11:45 a.m. Thursday at Northwestern University’s Mary and Leigh Block Gallery, 1967 S. Campus Drive, Evanston. An exhibition of South African works on paper continues at the gallery through Dec. 4.
– Designer Javier Mariscal of the Estudio Mariscal in Barcelona will speak about his graphic, club, restaurant and home product designs at 6 p.m. Thursday at the Graham Foundation, 4 W. Burton Pl. Admission is $18, or $10 for students.
– More than 100 Chicago artists will have pieces up for auction in “Target Choice ’94” at 7:30 p.m. Saturday at the Oskar Friedl and Ehlers Caudill galleries, 750 N. Orleans St. All proceeds will go to Personal PAC, a bipartisan political action committee for abortion rights. Admission is $40.
– The Art Institute of Chicago will host a public memorial service for Elizabeth Nitze Paepcke, 91, a longtime supporter, at 5 p.m. Monday in Gallery 201 among six Paul Klee works from her estate.
