A middle-of-the-night rule of thumb for considering objets d’art:
One person’s art is another person’s aggravation.
Rebekah, 24, a School of the Art Institute graduate temporarily on crutches as the result of an auto accident that fractured her right foot, did not actually say that at 3 a.m. Saturday on the fourth floor of the Museum of Contemporary Art, where she was resting amid a collection of paintings and provocative sculptures.
But the MCA’s Summer Solstice Celebration, a round-the-clock romp of music, performance and art-rambling that started at 7 p.m. Friday, clearly had her a little aggravated.
The museum doesn’t seem oversensitive on the question of debating art. Its own questionnaire, handed to everyone who came through the door for the solstice celebration, asked: “Which one of the following statements best describes your attitude toward contemporary art?”
The options range from “Art is my life!” to “You call this art?”
But the museum people also are clever enough to realize that this marathon couldn’t be just about art. There was another compelling reason for showing up at 220 E. Chicago Ave.: to celebrate the glorious beginning of a Chicago summer. Thus the celebration’s remarkable selection of performance and entertainment events, everything from a tai chi exercise at 7 a.m. to gospel music and family-oriented art projects on Saturday.
Who better to comment on the result than an actual student of the arts?
Rebekah, who negotiated her identity as though she were dealing with questions about the special prosecutor’s investigation of President Clinton, shifting between “Don’t use my name” and “What the hell, use my name” status, finally agreed to a first-name relationship.
She might want to exhibit at the MCA someday. It would be pointless to make enemies.
“What we have here right now is rave-sters and Lincoln Park women out looking for husbands in the middle of the night,” she said, wiggling the toes (accented by sparkling blue polish) that were peeping out of the end of her foot brace.
“The lighting is awful. The 24-hour thing is a good idea, but two years ago we had jazz, and it was a little more tonal.”
Ah, the first “art” debate of the night!
The rave music wasn’t working for her.
For the uninitiated, rave music is technical, sophisticated stuff put together by dedicated characters who want their listeners to dance, dance, dance.
You got your beat. You got your samplings of sounds and records. You got your processor. You got your speakers the size of dumpsters. You got your DJ and, in the middle of the night at the MCA, you got your clouds of fog and bright flashes of laser light.
They are designed, collectively, to push that magic “dance-now-fast” button in young people.
It’s great for them.
But for the clot of well-to-do, 40-through-50-somethings who crammed the MCA to capacity earlier in the evening, what can you say? It probably would have made them feel a lot like the way their parents felt when they first heard rock ‘n’ roll.
That’s probably why the MCA waited until the middle of the night to unleash the rave.
By 3 a.m., the Lincoln Park husband hunters were gone, all tucked in and awaiting their ritual visits with Mr. Stairmaster early Saturday morning. In the middle of the night, the MCA became a landing zone for middle-of-the-night people, as one might expect.
There were women shaved bald in slinky black dresses. Men in slinky dresses. A few determined pot smokers out in the sculpture garden. People who seemed to drip essence of art as though it were a scent you could get in a spray can.
As for the art, well, some good and some bad in Rebekah’s estimation.
An exhibition of Chuck Close’s gigantic paintings of human faces, which opened with the solstice celebration, was magnetic and almost endlessly interesting because of the way Close puts his paintings together, but Rebekah wondered whether she actually needed to see 150 of them. Nor was she enamored of the museum’s other displays.
“A lot of this stuff, if you go to art school, you see this kind of thing all the time. . . . It’s a pretty mudane collection,” she said. “It seems to me it’s more about investing in things than art. It’s like real estate.”
This is undoubtedly not the message the MCA wanted to send with its third annual solstice event. But in a way, it’s an important part of the art process. This is a spanking new building full of provocative stuff, so no one should be surprised if it elicits a strong reaction.
Besides, while trying to determine what is good and what is not in contemporary art makes a good academic debate for art students, curators and critics, it is perhaps not so fascinating for regular happy folk.
That was why the second part of the MCA agenda, crafted by co-chairs Maria Bechily-Hodes and Desiree Rogers, was so important.
Solstice means summer is here.
Right now!
Keith Kujawa, 24, Mary O’Connell, 28, and Rose Arrieta, 27, all of Chicago, were sipping their drinks in the sculpture garden just outside the east exit of the MCA. It was 11 p.m. They had seen the art, but were much more interested in celebrating the longest day of the year.
“Summer is the time to be free spiritually and emotionally,” said O’Connell, who was finishing a tough week in her job as a clinical research nurse in oncology at the University of Chicago. People stay inside all winter, but the solstice is the signal that it’s time for that to change.
O’Connell showed up because her friend Rose said she shouldn’t be moping at home, and because it was a spectacular and inviting night that promised, at the very least, an interesting time. There was talk of big, slushy, inspirational alcoholic drinks down on Rush Street, an endless collection of festivals and long months of sun and heat.
“When I go out in Chicago in the summer, I go out in the frame of mind that I am actually on vacation, even if I am not. This place is so beautiful in the summer that you can do that,” O’Connell said.
Arrieta, who works with O’Connell as a study research coordinator at U. of C., said the arrival of solstice meant liberation.
“You have to be heavily clothed all winter long and then summer comes along. You fling off those winter clothes and get happy and go outside with hardly any clothes on at all. Go to the lake. Eat out in the evening. Go out with friends. It’s not really even about partying, it is all about enjoying the season.”
Kujawa, back in school to study marketing after selling high-fashion clothing, said that as a beach fanatic he plans to live at North Beach. This process may already have begun as he is as tanned as a well-cooked french fry.
“Summer is fantastic,” he said, “and this is one of the greatest places in the nation for it.”
That sparked a rambling conversation about coming events, everything from the big Irish Fleadh that O’Connell planned to attend the very next day to the Taste of Chicago and a long collection of other summer festivities.
Then they headed off for beverages.
The solstice celebration was the perfect vehicle for watching the changing and diverse Chicago audience for art, as much as anything a sign of the value of a museum that is available to anyone who wants to take the time to ponder its mysteries. The temptation is to suggest that this kind of thing happen every Friday night, but it would certainly kill the budget and probably the staff too.
As the first pink strip of dawn glued itself to the horizon on Lake Michigan, the fascinating collection of art noir characters and rave monsters who had displaced the prowling singles after midnight disappeared in turn, like vampire bats. An 8 a.m. breakfast welcomed the next wave: families ready for a day packed full with activities.
And, of course, with the eternal question: “You call that art?!”
