1. Forlesen at The Renaissance Society

Work by William Pope.L.

The Renaissance Society is located at 5811 S. Ellis Ave. Reception Sunday, 4-7pm.

2. Anyone Who’s Everyone at DOCUMENT

Work by Suara Wilitoff.

Document is located at 845 W. Washington Blvd. #3f. Reception Friday, 5-8pm.

3. Breathing at Tritriangle

Work by Hiba Ali, Evelin Garza-Luna, HaeJoo Jung, Eunice Kim, Robin McKay, Peter Nichols, SunMin Park, Nathaniel Stone, Liang Su, Sarah Verhoeve, Blanche Vivian Villarouge, Jason Williams and Darya Zorina.

Tritriangle is located at 1550 N. Milwaukee Ave. Fl. 3

4. the fiction is outside at PSA Projects

Work by Dan Paz.

PSA Projects is located at 2509 N. Lawndale Ave. Reception Sunday, 8-10pm.

5. Apocalypto Nouveau at Firecat Projects

Work by David Tanimura.

Firecat Projects is located at 2124 N. Damen Ave. Reception Friday, 7-9pm.

This week, I feel like writers have been articulating an inherent push against traditional boundaries and bounds — what is art that smells? Where do we locate the human/non-human divide? What if we dissolve that distinction? What becomes of performance then? I am deeply interested in blurring the borders and bounds between human/non-human, natural/unnatural, living/non-living, as in doing we can destabilize hierarchal patterns that have been in place for decades. It sounds crazy, maybe — but consider how much one’s thought would shift if we simply de-emphasized the Human. If the Natural panorama was equivalent with a panaromic, digital experience — the immediate recoil and rejection of such a thought reveals some the depth of our quasi-relgious interpretations of “landscape.”

Greenpoint Water Treatment Plant

We began the week with a buffet of smells, as provided by Shane MacAdams’ visit to a “smell show” called Art and Scent in NYC, a show that called enough attention to smell that it affected his experience of surrounding environs. As he put it, “Any quaintness Greenpoint offers is mitigated by the realization that it’s sitting on 30 million gallons of spilled oil, that comes out in occasional farts that engulf the neighborhood.”

There seems to be an obvious connection between that undercurrent of oil and João Florêncio’s post, “Performing Ecology,” where Florêncio goes through series of snapshots (or “Scenes), describing the performance of the body in space, illustrating the connecting networks that such performances can highlight. For instance:

Scene 6. Johannesburg, South Africa. A white man in drag wears an old chandelier as if it was a tutu and struggles to balance himself on his disproportionately high high-heel shoes while walking on debris, stones, and dirt in one of South Africa’s shanty towns. Around him, workers hired by the local authority, armed with crowbars and wearing orange overalls, demolish the locals’ dwellings to allow for the construction of the future Nelson Mandela bridge. This is Steven Cohen’s Chandelier.

These scenes are not strictly about humankind. Rather, they illustrate our position in our present ecological time, a time that has been coined: “Anthropocene.” Florêncio will continue to write about this in the coming months: “I will be presenting an overview of the anthropocentric role theatre and performance have played throughout History, some of the ways in which they have been criticised and reinvented, and, ultimately, the ways in which they ought to be thought differently as a consequence of their unfolding on the broad Anthropocenic stage.”

This Apple Tastes Like Our Living Room Used to Smell, Dimensions Vary, 2007

Victor Delvecchio posted about Performance Architecture — focusing on the work of Alex Schweder and how his intervening “scripts” at the TATE altered visitors’ movement through the museum. “Having worked seven years as a mold and leak expert… [Schweder] comes to the point that buildings are alive, uprating much more similarities to our flesh than we want them to.” Schweder, who’s show at Opus Project Space in NY opened this weekend, describes the work this way:

Performance architecture is about aestheticizing the action that occurs within the building and using the building as a script for doing so. There is a whole history of architecture involving the body as an example giving a kind of history of how idealized bodies have come to inform the way we design building, building as effigies of those bodies that we would like to have; and then we occupy these bodies that we would like to have.

Juliana Driever posted a great interview with Mare Liberum, a “freeform publishing, boatbuilding and waterfront art collective based in the Gowanus, Brooklyn.” Throughout the week, I feel like there is a regular return to the idea of our environment and this interview is no exception. In the words of one ML member, Dylan Gauthier:

We borrowed the name Mare Liberum – which is latin for Freedom of the Seas – from a 17th century commentary which championed the natural rights of maritime trade and navigation and forms the basis of modern maritime law… In taking the name we oriented the collective toward a study of past relationships with the water as well as to the present environmental threat to the sea through global warming but also the exploitation of oil resources and other risky undertakings that threaten the health and stability of this water-commons. For us Mare Liberum is also a bit tongue-in-cheek, since we were interested in getting out on the water for as little cost as possible, hence our translation and our website “thefreeseas.org”.

Our Atlanta-based correspondent, Meredith Kooi posted a great essay about Full Radius Dance’s performance of Touch:

Touch, in its multiple parts involved dancers of varying bodies and abilities. As a physically-integrated dance company, Full Radius’ dancers are both abled and disabled, some use wheelchairs in their everyday lives. [Douglas] Scott first became engaged in this practice through a workshop offered at Shepherd Center, a hospital and rehabilitation center located in Atlanta that specializes in medical treatment, research, and rehabilitation for people with spinal cord and brain injuries. He realized that all bodies do not move the same way that his does and that there was opportunity to explore the “limits of physicality” with various bodies. 

What’s amazing about Kooi’s description of the dance, is the way wheel chairs are fully absorbed and incorporated into the whole choreography, thereby pushing the bounds of what we might consider “body” and “non-body” (or machine). This article raises questions about how we define the body, and especially, how we might engage and incorporate the non-normative body. It reminds of Anthony Romero’s post from a while back, “What Can Be Done with Dance?” where he reminds us that most space is defined by “an athletic body.”

Work by Jovencio de la Paz, PSA Projects.

The week would be remiss without Stephanie Burke’s TOP 5 — a veritable road map for gallery enthusiasts. (CHECK IT OUUUT!)

Richard Holland has started a new column in the spirit of levity and delight — so keep your eyes peeled for that, and here is his first installment. It’ll be a nice respite from the Anthropocene…… 

(At least we can safely say, the Mayan’s were wrong)

Abraham Ritchie was inspired to post an essay about everyone’s darling THE BEAN, in reaction to a live tweet he disagreed with (that’s intended as a kind of bread crumb trail. In case you want to go back and follow the tweets, so to speak). What I’d like to repost here is an excerpt from the end of Ritchie’s essay (and please, take note of Ritchie’s use of the word “alien,” because I at least have always assumed that if the world ever does end, that thing is probably going to turn into a space ship and carry the president to safety.):

The alien form of the abstraction identifies itself immediately as Art but does not alienate, instead it draws people in through their curiosity and the work’s generosity. Kapoor’s contribution accomplishes the mission of Millennium Park, while being wholly successful on its own terms. Rather than an indifferent sculpture, this is public art that lives up to the aspirations of its genre, bringing people together and inspiring them.

Part of what is so awesome about The Bean is that it is alien, and strange, and yet it engages its audience (us) by reflecting our faces. We are fascinated by the translated-fun-house-mirror distortion.

Nicholas O’Brien asks about site specificity when applied to the digital space? How does such an application challenge traditional ideas about installation, and can we apply the same terminology Land Art employs with regard to site. Here too, O’Brien engages a virtual landscape as a literal one. In doing so it can easily feel alien, it might even reflexively alienate oneself (or me) from the supposed “natural” landscape (after all, I certainly spend more time on line that outdoors).

Perhaps it makes good sense that we begin the week in NY and end the week in LA: a successful coast-to-coast transfer. We began with smell and we end with Adrienne Harris’ post on a murder mystery game at the Getty. There is something I deeply dig about the simulacre of a murder mystery scavenger hunt — the body-lessness of the crime. The parody of real life located in the land of Hollywood. In Chicago we stand in the dregs of winter — warming days that melt and muddy the world, only to morph into freezing night that stiffen everything anew. The point is, I’m always daydreaming about California. Someone told me once that California was the future — it was as far into the future as any American could go. The edge of the West. On the edge of that coast you stare into the east, though my same friend pointed out there is an island of plastic in the way, otherwise known as the Plastic Vortex.

1. Chicago Sky Interior at PSA Projects

Work by Jovencio de la Paz.

PSA Projects is located at 2509 N. Lawndale Ave. Reception Sunday, 6-8pm.

2. GASPAR / HALL at The Franklin

Work by Maria Gaspar and Andy Hall.

The Franklin is located at 3522 W. Franklin Blvd. Reception Saturday, 7-10pm.

3. Old Work/New Work at Happy Collaborationists

Work by Garett Yahn.

Happy Collaborationists is located at 1254 N Noble St. Performance Saturday, 7-10pm.

4. Typeforce 4 at Co-Prosperity Sphere

Work by Alex Moulitsas, Alexa Viscius & Drew Ryan, Anthony Lewellen, Baozhen Li, Lucky Pierre (Bill Talsma, Michael Thomas, Mary Zerkel, Holly Abney, Travis Hale, Kevin Kaempf, Jeffrey Kowalkowski, Heather Lindahl, Tyler B. Myers), Blazo, Chris Branson & Jeremy Van Cleef, DePaul University Graphic Design Student Chapter (Chris Kalis, Samantha Rangel, Julia Simplicio), Drew Tyndell, Emily Haasch, Franchec Crespo & Adrianne Hawthorne, Greg Calvert, Jason Frohlichstein, Kelly Dorsey & Tricia Chamberlain, Kyle Louis Fletcher, CMYKittens (Laura Rafson, Maria Squeri, Erika Galvez and Liz Rosenberg), Slightly Insulting Chicago Posters (Lauren Schroer, RC Jones, Jeni Brendemuehl), Lou Medel, Renata Graw, Tanawat Sakdawisark, Todd King, and Double Blind (Victor Fong, Stephen Lee, Simone Martin-Newberry, Aaron Maurer, Lou Medel, Margo Yoon).

Co-Prosperity Sphere is located at 3219 S. Morgan St. Reception Friday, 6-11pm.

5. I Know Nothing, Daya at Chicago Art Department

Work by Vanessa Luna, Cassie Hamrick, and Jen Gorman.

Chicago Art Department is located at 1932 S Halsted St. Reception Friday, 6-9pm.

1. Studio Audience (WEATHER PATTERNS) at Johalla Projects

Work by Andrew Mausert-Mooney.

Johalla Projects is located at 1821 W. Hubbard St. Reception Friday, 8-10pm.

2. Returning to the Cave at The Mission

Work by Jeroen Nelemans.

The Mission is located at 1431 W. Chicago Ave. Reception Friday, 6-9pm.

3. The Unreliable Narrator at threewalls

Work by Matthew Paul Jinks.

threewalls is located at 119 N. Peoria St. Reception Friday, 6-9pm.

4. Exchange: Chicago—Detroit at Chicago Artists’ Coalition

Work by Taurus Burns, Design 99, Jessica Frelinghuysen, Scott Hocking, Chido Johnson, Nicola Kuperus, Faina Lerman, Adam Lee Miller, Clinton Snider, Vince Troia and Graem Whyte.

Chicago Artists’ Coalition is located at 217 N. Carpenter St. Reception Friday, 6-9pm.

5. The Dead of Winter at PSA Projects

Work by Mike Schuh and Yuan-Chen Li.

PSA Projects is located at 2509 N. Lawndale Ave. Reception Sunday, 5-7pm.