In late June, during summer solstice, a pilot will take off from a suburban airport. High above Lake Michigan, he will squirt colored mists from nozzles under the wings of his plane, shaping a “sky mural.”
Following a design by Gary Simmons, an African-American artist now living in New York, the dissolving images will hang for a couple of minutes– depending on the winds–as art, though not, of course, the type meant to be hung over the sofa.
Nor is it the stuff of traditional art museums–set in frames or encased in glass cases–to remind viewers of wars, scandals, hubbubs, religious and romantic ecstasies that once inflamed entire civilizations.
This is contemporary art–an often maligned, perhaps more often misunderstood, category of creative expression that has influenced and shaken up American life since World War II. And it is a field in which Chicago will take a giant leap forward June 21 when the largest single building devoted solely to contemporary art in America will open on the site of the former National Guard Armory at 220 E. Chicago Ave., with a sweeping view of Lake Michigan.
Last week the first paintings were being hung, unpacked from crates that have been arriving from around the world, and the museum’s reality–a tricky concept, as its art will reveal–was taking shape.
The new Museum of Contemporary Art, replacing a building several blocks south that closed Feb. 7 and once housed a bakery, has the potential to rank with the most energetic contemporary art museums in the world, a showcase for living artists, here-and-now concerns, fresh ideas and new ways of seeing the world.
But in some ways, the new MCA–a dream of Chicago’s art community for decades–promises to be a rocky launch. This is Tough Art: confusing, combative, challenging. Philistines have always made fun of contemporary art. Contemporary art, by tradition, is a high-wire act without a net. So as the MCA begins the fanfares for next month’s opening, it’s fair to ask just where it will fit into the cultural landscape of the city and beyond.
The perpetually unsettling issue is that, unlike that nice Mr. Monet, whose paintings were such a big hit at the Art Institute of Chicago last fall, the long established notions of beauty do not, for the most part, apply.
Some pieces can be grasped without background information. Others remain puzzling to the informed citizen, even after research and study.
And that, as they say, is the rub for those preparing to program an impressive physical facility–45,000 square feet of gallery space, plus classrooms, a one-acre sculpture garden, a 15,000 art-book library and an 300-seat auditorium. The difficulty is what they call “accessibility.”
Or as Kevin Consey, director of the MCA for the past seven years, put it the other day, “how do we make sense of art history as it is unfolding, a process that is messy, difficult, even unsettling for our visitors–in the same way a morning newspaper is unsettling.”
Yet at its best, a contemporary art museum–as Consey sees it–can be a modern-day cathedral of thoughts and impressions, a combination arts festival and cultural mall, a place to sit and think and a center where one pays homage to contemporary culture. In short, it can be a lot of fun.
It also must face, often head on, the topics of the day: massacres in Bosnia, child abuse, AIDS, homelessness, urban crime, racism and a sense of human alienation, despair and decay.
Like newspapers, contemporary art museums often face complaints that “this is difficult, we wish you wouldn’t do it,” Consey said.
But facing such issues, he went on, makes a person “more informed, more thoughtful, more interesting.”
The MCA’s challenge is to get that message out–and bump attendance from the 150,000 a year for shows at the old MCA at 237 E. Ontario St. to crowds of 500,000 or more needed to sustain the new space.
“We are like a spaceship, filled with aliens, landing in the middle of the city,” says MCA chief curator Richard Francis, warning: “Artists are not satisfied with conventional explanations–of anything.”
“To use a baseball image, we’re like an expansion team,” he adds. “We are in the major leagues, but we still have to prove ourselves.”
It’s not an easy task, as Francis found out at a recent seminar at the Latin School of Chicago, 59 W. North Blvd.
A crowd of three dozen adults, gathered in an upstairs classroom for a “Preview of the New MCA,” was, to put it mildly, somewhat testy.
“This is making me mad,” erupted one matron, looking at a slide of a work by Mike Kelley, “Craft Morphology Flow Chart,” in which 150 sock monkeys and other soft toys were laid out on long tables.
Many issues were raised by that piece, done by a blue-collar Catholic raised in Detroit, among them the emotional expectations of parents who give gifts to children and “expect endless love in return,” Francis said.
It asks viewers to consider the nature of guilt.
Andres Serrano decided to challenge “our response to death and other matters we do not like to look at,” Francis said. He talked his way into a morgue, photographed corpses and labeled them according to the principal cause of death.
Some contemporary art, Francis added, is “too big or too difficult” for home consumption. In dealing with new forms, collectors must be inventive.
One New England couple, he reported, recently added a barn to their rural home to house huge artworks. A New York doctor had to warn guests away from his Robert Gober, a signed sink in the living room.
In turn, Christo, known for wrapping objects not for sale, such as Berlin’s Reichstag and the MCA’s former home, sells drawings of his proposals, to raise funds and includes his fans in his projects.
“We are about current ideas. War. Peace. Identity. Great and base human emotions,” noted Allen Turner, a Loop lawyer and chairman of the MCA board of trustees that raised, from a relatively small group, $62.5 million to build and endow the new museum.
“This is the second-richest art city in the country, in number of collectors and its art market,” Turner said. “We are something of a late player, but we know what we want to do.” That, he and other MCA backers agree, is to make the MCA a “must-see” institution, as much part of the city’s cultural fabric as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra or Lyric Opera.
As art historians note, contemporary art should not be confused with modern art. Though there is disagreement over time boundaries, the modern period roughly runs from 1850 to 1950. Contemporary art, in turn, takes in (1) art that is current by virtue of its being done by people still living and (2) art that gives form to concerns that are truly of our time.
In its first decade, the Museum of Contemporary Art reflected the first category in its record-breaking exhibition of works by Norman Rockwell, a longtime painter of covers for the Saturday Evening Post.
That was topped, in the museum’s second decade, by a hit from the second category, photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, whose homoerotic work, shown across the country, prompted an assault by the radical right on one of his sponsors, the National Endowment for the Arts.
Contemporary art is the latest species in a long evolution in which artists have turned from broad reflections of the communities in which they worked toward more individual concerns.
Medieval art was mass-produced by guilds of anonymous workers who expressed commonly held views, religious or secular, of the community. Renaissance art asserted the individual, but the content and values of such work still were community-oriented. Works were commissioned by civic-minded patrons or the church.
The Age of Humanism presented commonly held humanistic ideals, but this focus gradually narrowed until the middle of the 19th Century, when the Impressionists opposed the last monolithic dispenser of widely held values: the art academy. Contemporary art, in the late 20th Century, completes the process, by breaking entirely with ideas that speak for a unit larger than the individual.
Pop art of the 1960s–as exemplified by the work of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and former-Chicagoan Claes Oldenburg–was perhaps the last “vanguard” movement to engage a large, diverse audience on many levels, both funny and serious.
The forms contemporary art take today can range from an orthodox painting or sculpture to an idea typed on a sheet of paper to works involving video and sound.
Contemporary art’s self-oriented quality is what lies at the root of the difficulty even informed viewers can have with much of it.
In Chicago’s art community, the MCA has something of a mixed reputation. Some carp that the museum should not have formed a permanent collection because of the difficulty of adequately representing the vast number of movements, currents and trends that sprung up internationally since World War II.
But its defenders note that the MCA, with seven times more space and a budget of $11.5 million, up fourfold, will be on a par with contemporary art museums in Berlin, Madrid, Munich, Tokyo, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Minneapolis–even if it still does lag behind the multipurpose Georges Pompidou Center in Paris.
To celebrate the MCA’s leap forward, staffers from 50 contemporary art museums around the world will fly in for the opening. Then there will be the inevitable shakedown period.
But after that, “more people will be able to see more things. And how can that be bad?” asks Dennis Adrian, an art history instructor at the School of the Art Institute.
One barrier the new MCA will quickly knock over is time.
To introduce its new home and celebrate summer solstice, the museum will stay open starting at 7 p.m. June 21 for 24 hours, allowing visitors to wander the galleries for free at, say, 4 a.m., then stay on for a sunrise breakfast, set for the garden at dawn.
With their formality and solemnity, “museums often make people feel they don’t belong,” notes MCA education director Wendy Woon.
In addition to tours tailored to individual interests, a school program will dispatch MCA buses to fetch 10,000 students a year.
Children, Woon said, will play surrealist games, learn how light is used and explore balance by examining wire sculptures by Alexander Calder.
The new MCA will be a place, one staffer said, “where a visitor can have a meal, enjoy a decent cup of coffee, buy a book, hear a talk, sit in a garden–as well as wander through galleries full of art.”
Already, the MCA has moved to deal with one longstanding complaint about museums in general. There will be, a staffer said, “lots of places to sit down.”
