In nice weather, the city’s downtown sidewalks long have been prime places for people-watching.
Soon that summer sport will take on a new dimension. At two sites, pedestrians will be invited to pause and watch people live lives on or next to the pavement, sort of reality TV without the cameras. Also, cruising up and down the streets of town will be a truck with clear Plexiglas sides in which people will go about the business of daily life.
Beginning June 7 and lasting through the 9th, furniture and accessories retailer IKEA is putting two couples into the furniture suite it is sponsoring for Suite Home Chicago, the city’s summer public art exhibit. For those three days, the couples will live in a tented and fully decorated “living room” in Pioneer Court (just south of the Tribune on Michigan Avenue), chat with passers-by, even invite them in to sit and watch TV.
As a crowd gathers to watch people watching TV, the promotional line that trumpeted CBS’ “Big Brother” show last summer — and the issues that statement raised — may seem to hang in the air. It was, “They live; you watch.”
Not far away, at the corner of State and Madison Streets, four bald Australians in their 40s will reside in a kitchen, bathroom (with shower), bedroom and living room built into several windows of the new Sears on State store there.
No blinds, curtains or shutters will shield these performance artists from public view as they live in a sort of human terrarium from noon on June 12 through June 25. (To answer the most pressing question: There is a small corner room with a door concealing the commode.)
The cruising truck is a promotion for the W hotel chain, which is opening two hotels in Chicago, one in June, the other in August. On previous visits, the truck has held three hired models, two men and a woman dressed in robes, towels and swimsuits, who go through the motions of life in a mockup of a W hotel room–talking on the phone, working at a computer and so on.
The truck returns to our streets the last week in June. The company and its public relations people are debating whether to switch to a wedding theme appropriate to the month. On the other hand the previous promotion drew so much attention, they may stay with that always-intriguing theme — two guys and a gal in a hotel room (although they certainly don’t do any of THAT.)
Why would anyone watch people go through the absolutely ordinary motions of everyday living?
Jon Kassel, a clinical psychologist and assistant professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago had some answers, which, he cautioned, “come more from personal than clinical experience.”
He said, “These things seem to be a variation on the reality shows, which often offer no more than what they will. Perverse curiosity may play a role. Also, people on display take on an image of being stars. The common person wants to be part of that celebrity, to be able to say, `I’ve gazed upon greatness.’ The irony is that it is as mundane as it can be. I can’t believe that, 10 years ago, anyone would have paid any attention.”
Aussies Dave Wells, Nick Papas, Andrew Morrish and Neil Thomas will shave their heads before entering Sears’ ample window space, which has been air conditioned especially for them and is to be outfitted with a set customized for our city. The head shaving is a gesture of unity or, as they’ve said, to give them the appearance of monks or mannequins or babies or maybe aliens.
They will not be able to leave what they call the Urban Dream Capsule during their two weeks on display, but can communicate with watchers via fax, e-mail or a dry erase board. A small, specially sealed window will allow them to receive presents.
`Marvelous and disturbing’
Neil Thomas created Urban Dream Capsule in 1996 for an arts festival in Melbourne, Australia. A local paper called the performance piece, “marvelous and disturbing.” Reached in Melbourne by phone, Thomas said, “Though four blokes in a shop window seems similar to reality TV, it’s completely different. It’s non-stop, totally interactive between us and the audience. It becomes kind of a soap opera in which people get to know us and come back day after day to see what we’re up to. Reality TV is based on exclusion, voting people out, becoming the winner. At first, people feel uncomfortable and voyeuristic watching us, but it soon becomes a communion.”
Susan Lipman noticed that fact when she saw later installations of Urban Dream Capsule in Montreal and London. She’s executive director of Performing Arts Chicago, the not-for-profit producing organization that is partnering with the City of Chicago to bring the performance to Sears. “I was amazed,” she said, “at the personal connections they made with the audiences.”
They’ll dance, they’ll do routines based on cooking meals, they’ll do the minutiae of life. Thomas relishes waking up in the morning to a crowd of onlookers who generally gasp when his eyes open.
“We move from vaudeville to high art to the mundane,” Thomas told a London newspaper. Sometimes the boundaries are blurred. In Melbourne, a critic wrote that the performers of Urban Dream Capsule had “more than 150,000 people seeing them turn life’s mundane details, such as brushing one’s teeth, into art.”
The London paper seemed particularly taken with the group’s “larking about with the shower.”
“We might do a little routine with the towel when we come out,” Wells is quoted as saying. “It’s about who comes closest to showing their willy. But we wouldn’t do that from Day One because you need to build up to that slowly.”
The Sears performance is not part of Suite Home Chicago but bundled in with Puppetropolis Chicago, a city-sponsored June celebration of puppetry at sites all over town (see www.cityofchicago.org/specialevents for details). Puppetropolis seems a reasonable umbrella in that the four, in responding to those who watch them are, to an extent, the public’s puppets.
The idea for IKEA’s living room evolved from thoughts that sprang from the south of France and Schaumburg.
Chicago artist Georgan Damore spent last November overseas. While there, she got to thinking about the coming Suite Home Chicago show. For the city’s 1999 public art display, Cows on Parade, Damore created a cow, which she called “Chicago Is” and which stood at Congress Street and Michigan Avenue. It now lives in Connecticut, having been bought at auction for $29,000.
Damore’s idea for Suite Home Chicago “started with the title,” she says. “I was thinking about `Love Suites’ as a pun on love seats. I envisioned huge hearts.”
IKEA looked through the city’s pool of artist submissions and chose to sponsor Damore. She has taken the fiberglass furniture forms supplied by the city and reshaped them with additional fiberglass and foam into the hearts she mentally pictured in France.
Meanwhile, in Schaumburg, at IKEA’s Chicago-area store, store manager Ian Worling thought the IKEA-sponsored site might be a place to have some fun.
“In television ads,” Worling said, “we’ve demonstrated how IKEA solves our customers’ toughest problems.” The ads have shown a decorated subway car interior, an operating room made homey. “The Michigan Avenue site would be, because of the unpredictable weather, the ultimate challenge,” Worling said.
Just like home
Using the basic Suite Home Chicago forms — couch, chair, ottoman, TV — as a base, IKEA will add furnishings — rugs, extra chairs, lamps, artwork, storage and the two couples who will be, Worling said, “living works of art.” (To again answer the most pressing question: Any of the four people can leave for a few minutes for what Worling called “functional needs.”)
Each couple will get a $5,000 IKEA gift certificate and will raise money for charity by watching television. For every hour each couple watches TV (the couch potato version of walking along the lakefront ), IKEA will donate $125 to Snow City Arts Foundation, a three-year-old non-profit group providing arts education to hospitalized children. When a visitor drops in to sit a spell and join in the watching, IKEA will add another $10.
Nearly 100 couples sent in essays explaining why they were the ultimate Chicago–or greater Chicagoland–pair. One winning essay came from Eve Wolk and her fiance, Matthew McDowell, GenerationXers who live in the city’s Andersonville neighborhood.
All in the name of charity
Wolk, who runs a gift shop — her fiance is a graphic designer — said that raising money for a worthy charity was her prime reason for applying and added, “I love the furniture idea. I think it will be great for the city. Also it’s a chance to be part of a work of art.”
The other winning essay came from Nate and Mary Jo Wyche of Northwest Indiana. “We’re in and out of Chicago all the time,” Mary Jo said. “My husband is a retired concrete finisher. We tour the construction sites he worked on. We’ll go to the State of Illinois building, and he’ll say, `That’s my sidewalk; still there.'”
Why would a 50-year-old woman and her 63-year-old husband want to live on public display for three days?
“I entered on a whim,” Mary Jo said. “For years, I’ve worked with children in a hospital, and I was mostly taken by the idea of raising funds for hospitalized kids.”
Asked if Nate was equally as excited about the outdoor living room possibility, Mary Jo said, “He doesn’t know the details. He just goes along with what I do. That’s why he’s a good husband.”
Though the Pioneer Court furniture suite will be around for the entire summer-long run of Suite Home Chicago, the IKEA furnishings and the couples will be on view only during the June 7-9 period.
The Urban Dream Capsule is making Sears on State its sixth stop, having already appeared in Melbourne, Ghent, Montreal, London, Wellington and Perth. After Chicago, it moves to Ireland.
“You’d think,” Thomas said, “that it would be getting easier, but it’s not. It is totally physically exhausting. It is life lived on higher-octane fuel. And it takes on a different tone in each city. Every time, it’s fresh and new and full of surprises for us.”
In Melbourne the same couple came every night to the Myer department store window, set up a picnic table next to the window and “joined” the performers for dinner.
In Montreal, audience members held French-Canadian recipes up to the window so those inside could cook local specialties.
And once, just once, nobody watched.
“It was in Perth,” Thomas said. “For an hour one day, there was no one out there. We were flabbergasted. We just stood around for a while, and then we all started laughing.”
