It’s been a busy week both on and off Bad at Sports. A number of our contributors were at CAA and I, for my part, took my hat (and new best friend) on the Carl Sandburg train to Macomb, Illinois for an overnight trip to Western Illinois University. I happened to give a talk there about (among other things) transcription and translation which no doubt has colored the way I’m thinking about the last week on Bad at Sports. In looking back and taking stock on what was posted, so we ready ourselves for the new week ahead with its ever lengthening days. My sense of this week is that it was about windows and frames and the transmission of ideas. It’s about education and the power that stories have over us, to affect change and muddy whatever assumptions might be otherwise taken for granted.

 

 
Tonight, I am excitedly headed to Every house has a door’s performance at Links Hall, They’re Mending the Great Forest Highway. I’ve seen an iteration of the piece once already, and am looking forward to seeing it again. Goulish posted an essay about it here last Sunday, including a couple of amazing youtube videos with some excellent dance moves.

In the Absence of Light, Darkness Prevails from Double Trouble on Vimeo.

The week began with Jesse Malmed’s interview with contemporary filmmaker Fern Silva. Among other highlights, Silva talks about teaching film. “Experimental films that were made 50 years ago can be as fresh as films being made now in a classroom setting. I like to show films that I found inspiring and share stories about the filmmakers who we’re watching. For example, when I show Meshes of the Afternoon, I’ll tell the story of when Maya Deren threw a fridge across the kitchen while she was possessed in her West Village apartment that Brakhage writes about in Film at Wit’s End.” (Reconfirming my perhaps over zealous love for Deren). There is also a lovely moment, so brief as to almost be missed where Fern states that structure, (non-)narrativity and collage are all the same to him. Monday went on with another description of class dynamics from Shane McAdams.  There was a subsequent dispatch from Gene Tanta on Tuesday, where he described a performance workshop with Irina Botea and 13 other performers. He asked each of them (and got five responses) “What does your work protest?” I reposted one response

“Our work focused on the impact of this replacement (of old windows with multiple-layer double-glazed windows) on the people who purchase them. In Romania, this transition is advertised and widely acclaimed as being more than just necessary – but the defaultupgrade, perfect for every house. While questioning this widespread idealistic belief that Termopane are the right (almost the only valid) choice, we pursued in deconstructing its “promises”. And since you referenced Adorno’s claim that art documents history, one of the key aspects this work documented is how the perfect isolation, the safety promised by the Termopane comes with an unexpected turn: isolation means protection, security, intimacy but it also raises questions regarding responsibility and anxiety. These new guidelines of the private space influence people’s social and psychological behaviors, by means of a rather unnoticeable slow process of adaptation.” Ioana Gheorghiu

The way that windows and cameras and frames tie in together always makes me happy.

Laurie Jo Reynolds, “Tamms Year Ten Campaign Office,” SAIC Sullivan Galleries

Mary Jane Jacobs covered a lot of ground, as she reflected on an a Grant Kester essay in Engagement Party: Social Practice at MOCA, 2008-2012, and interviewed Kyungwon Moon and Joonho Jeon. The biggest moment for me comes at the beginning of Jacobs’ post, when she announced that TAMMS Super Max Prison was officially closed on January 4th of this year, in no small part due to the hard work of artist Laurie Jo Reynolds who took up residence at the Sullivan Galleries this past fall. Abby Satinsky goes on to provide a bibliography for “Creative Placemaking,” while musing on the complicated scenario artists are faced with as they move into and revitalize depressed neighborhoods, a subject discussed at length in a recent conference,  The Art of Place-making.

Jeffrey Songco interviewed performance artist Renne Rhodesabout her background in dance (among other things) during which they discuss Rudolph Laban’s “Labnotation” — as a means to score dance moves — an image of which you’ll see above. As I have been thinking a lot about transcription lately, and since so many of this week posts focused on the transmission of knowledge or experience, this seemed like a particularly lovely moment. The image of those static, abstract footprints(?) have been in my head every since. That they would somehow convey movement in time and space is beyond me. Sam Davis follows suit with a suite of videos that try to articulate what FUNK really is — namely “it’s about juicing a feeling.”

I rounded out the week with a post about Sofie Calle’s Address Book (which is now available in English). She seems always to be providing windows into private worlds, activating the aura of an individual, in this case Pierre D. who has recently passed away (thereby enabling her to release her findings about him). It seems like a macabre kind of dictionary in a way, and reminds me of Graham Greene’s biographer who was allegedly hired by the author to follow in his rather debauched footsteps, at the expense of the biographer’s family. I ended the week with a post about a sound performance at LAMPO by Hong Chulki and Choi Joonyong, — which like so many of LAMPO’s events effectively blew my mind. Maybe even more than this little red comb which I purchased for a mere 5cents at a Macomb antique mall.

Angela Ellsworth, (from Phoenix, Arizona) “Stand Back,” Sullivan Galleries until February 1st, 2013.

We are in the midst of a winter festival. Its occasions take place at a variety of locations across the city, featuring a variety of performance artists from all over the world. In each case, the art work at hand is dynamic and ephemeral; the culmination of hours/months/years of work fit into a small, public window of time. Audiences come to experience that time-concentrate and in so doing are transported. Born in the UK, Chicago-based performance artist, Mark Jeffery, is similarly invested in temporal, aesthetic exercises. Over the course of his career, he has a regularly incorporated collaboration and experimentation into his work. It seems fitting that he would address curation as well, opening the field of performance into an administrative capacity. The result is a bi-annual festival, IN>TIME. There have been two other iterations of this festival, in 2008 and 2010 — both of which were co-curated by Sara Schnadt and took place at the Cultural Center. This year Jeffery has expanded the scope of the project, curating roughly 26 different events at 15 different venues from January 11th – March 2nd, 2013. I wanted to ask Jeffery about the origins of this bi-annual festival, as well as how it fit in with his overall practice as an artist.

Caroline Picard: Can you talk a little bit about how IN>TIME 13 came together?

Mark Jeffery: There have been two previous editions of IN>TIME in 2008 and 2010 at the Chicago Cultural Center that I co-curated with artist and Chicago Artist Resource webmaster, Sara Schnadt. Sara has since now moved to Los Angeles, but during the summer and fall of 2011, before Sara left, we discovered that our contact at the Cultural Center, lost her job. At the time there was no support for this program to continue. As a result, we considered how we could expand this festival from a one-night event at the Cultural Center to a multi-venue festival throughout the city of Chicago. We were both excited to contact and connect with local venues and spaces that we already respected for their public programming of performance, symposia, exhibition, talks, and/or readings — spaces that already had an affinity towards IN>TIME’s desire to showcase performance practices in the broadest terms. We met with curators, directors and programmers of spaces in their venues, at the Palmer House, on rooftops of hotels, in phone conversations, in meeting rooms to discuss the possibility to program work in the winter of 2013. What we didn’t expect when we cast this net was that the community would be equally excited to focus their programming on performance, giving an extended platform to this experimental form.

CP: Does IN>TIME reflect on your own orientation/aesthetic agenda as a performance arts practitioner?

MJ: I was a member of the performance group Goat Island for 13 years and have collaborated with Judd Morrissey for the past 10 years. I take collaboration and working with fellow artists very seriously. I learn so much from working with others and during my time of making performance work I have had multiple opportunities to be in many diverse and interesting contexts to present my work since 1994. For me, I grow from conversation. I learn from working with others and I see that permission, openings and discovery happen when doors are opened. I think I discovered this as a student at Dartington College of Arts from my teachers Sally Morgan, Sally Tallent, Nancy Reilly, Rona Lee, Gillian Dyson, Roger Bourke and Tim Brennan. My teachers gave me access to being curious, to being open, to allowing my voice to grow, to not be isolated, but to discover other artists and other ways of working through connecting with others.

In Goat Island I leant from my fellow collaborators and performers and director Lin Hixson to open up a space, even if this was an uncomfortable risk. In coming to America, and in the ending of Goat Island in 2009, I suddenly had to be on my own feet, here in this Midwestern city, as an Assistant Professor in Performance Art. I had to be engaged. I had to become an adult. I had to share my knowledge of the spaces, networks and connections I had made now over the past 20 years.

Chicago is my home, it is a place where I can engage through teaching, through making, through performance and exhibitions — and now also through curation, as another way to open up spaces for? collaboration. I am grateful to be here and I am grateful that 14 venues are willing and interested in working with each other to make this dream come true. For the 2008 edition of IN>TIME Sara gathered a group of makers, curators into the Chicago Cultural Center in the summer of 2006. At that time I remember saying that I would love to see how we as a city could have a multi-venue performance art festival, similar to the one where I was first curated into in 1994 as a 21-year-old in Glasgow by Performance Art Curator, Nikki Milican and her National Review of Live Art Festival. Now, seven years later we have arrived.

Vlatka Horvat, (from New York City/London), “This Here and That There,” Sullivan Galleries and Hyde Park Art Center, until February 1st, 2013.

CP: I am always suspicious of generalizations about localized styles or approaches to a given medium, but specific environments seem to facilitate peculiar dialogues. I have heard, for instance, that New York art performance is more integrated with dance, or that Europe is more open to experimental works. I don’t know if those comments are true or not, (they certainly came out of casual and speculative conversations) but I’m interested in whether or not you feel like Chicago has a particular conversation of its own. Does IN>TIME 13 respond to that at all? 

MJ: Good question. I remember being in the library as a 19 year-old at Dartington College of Arts studying Visual Performance in the UK, (Dartington was a similar place / space to Black Mountain College). In the library I would read the High Performance and P-Form journals and read reviews about performance in Chicago. In 1996 I came to Chicago for the first time to join Goat Island Performance group. For me the roots of performance came from reading those articles, from being part of Goat Island and seeing the trail end of Randolph Street Gallery — a non-profit performance/gallery space here that ended I believe in 1998. In the past 15 years that I’ve been here, I have seen some extraordinary work from performance makers in their studio performance spaces and venues here with Lucky Pierre, Dolores Wilber and her collective, Julie Laffin, Joe Silovsky, Cupola Bobber,Joan Dickinson, Larry Steger, and more recently Erica Mott, Justin Cabrillos, Joseph Ravens and Peter Carpenter.  More recently I think of Chicago as a place for experimentation, a place for artists to really explore and test rigorous ideas. It is a place for research to take place, and for non-traditional, informative intersections and overlaps that to spring up unexpectedly via collectives and collaborations. That is what I get excited about. My training at Dartington and also in Goat Island taught me to be open, to be curious, to not be hierarchical, to give permission, to open up new spaces. I am about to hit 40 in 4 months and to have known this practice now for over 20 years and still be working: that’s is what I am grateful for. Performance is a medium that is forever shifting, one of the things for me about coming to Chicago and living and working in America is that things can happen. I am ambitious and a workaholic and in a funny way I am thinking of this festival as my mid-life crisis! (this is my sense of humour btw). Sometimes you have to give yourself permission to ask and see what is out there. I am lucky now to be here two decades into this practice and that when I ask certain things, like a 14 venue performance festival where hybridity, where venues that wouldn’t normally work with each other have an opportunity for exchange, for dialogue and conversation. Where doors open and the container of performance can be a storefront gallery, a video installation, a reading, a movement art endurance work, a reenactment, a meeting between museum spaces, schools, galleries, DIY spaces.

Miguel Gutierrez and The Powerful People (from Brooklyn, NY) “And lose the name of the action” MCA, January 31st-February 3rd, 2013.

CP: How did you go about organizing the programming? 

MJ: The programming of the festival came firstly from Sara and I meeting with all the venues in the summer and fall of 2011 and then slowly from there having conversations to see about what would be the best fit for each of their spaces. Some venues suggested if a particular artist would be a good fit for the festival in regards what they were already considering, venues like the Dance Center of Columbia College with Zoe I Juniper or Museum of Contemporary Art with Miguel Gutierrez and Threewalls with Mary Patten and Mathew Paul Jinks. All the venues have really exciting work that will enter their spaces and showcasing incredible talent. I am excited about the three venues I have just mentioned in the openings these spaces can present these artists. I am also excited to see how these artists present their work here in Chicago. These are highlights, other highlights for me are being able to go back to the Cultural Center and have the US premier of Spanish, Swiss based artist Maria La Ribot perform her 5 hour work Laughing Hole. I have never seen her work live but have followed her work closely with a video work of hers I show in the classroom, a documentary called La Ribot Distinguida filmed at the Tate Modern in London and the Pompidou in Paris. Through the new director of Performing Arts, Shoni Currier at the Chicago Cultural Center we are able to showcase her work. Also at Joseph Ravens Defrillator performance gallery we are able to bring Singaporean artist Lynn Lu, she will share an evening with British visual art poet cris cheek from Ohio and two emerging local artists Kitty Huffman and Hope Esser. Croatian Movement Art Group OOURR, local dance artist Peter Carpenter will be on the same bill and have been excited to follow him these  past two years. at Links Hall local Chicago Artists Every House as a Door, Erica Mott and Trevor Martin, Hyde Park Art Center and having artists in residents Minouk Lim from Korea and Croatian born London-based Vlatka Horvat. The challenge to me is to keep curious and to put things together that normally wouldn’t be together in a program. I like group exhibits where experimental forms of performance, movement. Language, actions, durations, emerging, established can come together. Again, to me this comes from my training and also wanting to connect people. The curator / caretaker is first to open up a space and the last to leave.

OURR (from Zagreb, Croatia), “Salon,” DEFIBRILLATOR, March 1st-2nd, 2013.

CP: Maybe because the title of your festival is IN>TIME, I’m reminded of the ephemerality of performance, and various conversations I’ve picked up on peripherally about how to document performance, how the documentation can eclipse the performance itself as an art object, or what happens to a piece when it is recreated in a different time and context, by different performers. I realize those conversations are vast and intricate, but it occurred to me that you might be negotiating some of those as an organizer, putting together a multi-faceted, multi-venue festival. How you have been dealing with documentation?

MJ: Last week eight students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago worked with London Based artist Kira O’Reilly with the three-week visiting artist class called FROZEN IN>TENSITIES that is a course driven exhibit at SAIC. Each week there is a presentation at SAIC of the work they have been doing with the artists. With Kira the students found an old filing cabinet that has been in the green room this past semester. The filing cabinet was full of files that is an archive of the performance department when it was being chaired by the departments founder Tom Jaremba and former chair and now Graduate Division Chair, Werner Herterich. I site this filing cabinet as it became both a rich treasure trove of correspondence and a source of material for students to respond to. There were files from Linda Montano for example, and Alistair MacLennan when they visited the department. This cabinet has been making me think about how do we document our lives now in 2013. What are our filing cabinets? How do we store and retain this information, this memory of being here, especially with performance? For the class we also have 3 rooms in the Sullivan Galleries, and so we are also having this conversation about the document, of how to archive what remains. It becomes an exciting challenge. Yesterday I helped Sabri Reed, the teaching assistant for the class, take the filing cabinet on a cart from the Columbus Drive building to the Sullivan Galleries. It was quite unwieldy and heavy, but became this opportunity to walk and mark those moments of exchange spanning the past 30 years across Monroe Street. The students are also going to insert a record of their work in the class into a file and put it back into the filing cabinet for the exhibit and this will remain.

Last week I also renewed the Goat Island website as it was going to run out, the domain name in five days or something. This position between the physical and the virtual, the mixed reality of archive and document is a really interesting question for me. If we don’t maintain the upkeep of our websites what does remain. What are our filing cabinets of 2013?

Maria La Ribot (from Switzeland/Spain) “Laughing Hole,” Chicago Cultural Center, 24th February, 2013.

CP: This image of time keeps coming back…

MJ: To me this is an experiment. Since 2006 I have also been curating and have developed series of OPENPORT A performance, sound and language festival (2007) co – curated with Nathan Butler, Judd Morrissey and Lori Talley at Links Hall, Intimate and Epic (2006) co – curated with Sara Schnadt in Millennium Park and The Simulationists (2011) co – curated with Claudia Hart and Judd Morrissey at SAIC as well as the IN>TIME series. Time becomes an important thing and I often think about how to stamp time now as it moves so quickly (the 40 thing again ) – yet, if you take time to make something, I think something can come through and with Sara and I meeting all the venues 18 months ago, the results of this time has come through. I come from a father who was a herdsman who milked 200 Friesian cows each day, woke at 5 and worked till 8, seven days a week. A life’s work, working for over 30 years on the same farm. There is something in building a life through projects, through ritual, through time that you can get a lot done and through the creative make a place and space for opportunity to enter. Again for this I am grateful and I always thank my teachers for giving me the space, time and attention. You work towards something to thank them.

Further Information:  http://www.in-time-performance.org/

Upon entering the exhibition space of “Mythologies,” an excellent showing of artwork produced by six young artists at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Sullivan Galleries, the eye is almost instinctually drawn to the bold, blood red palette of Rashayla Marie Brown‘s video installation “Puro Teatro (Coming to Theatres).” Projected large upon the far wall of the gallery, the single-shot, still-frame video elegantly documents what appears to be the meditative staging of a soon to occur evocation. Brown’s hands extend from beyond the frame to light three white votive candles placed in a triangular formation on the red surface, later joined by the slow setting of a steel incense burner, rosary beads, and the black winding cord of a microphone. The video is accompanied by the tune “Puro Teatro,” meaning ‘pure theatre,’ performed by Latin soul and salsa singer La Lupe in the 1960s. La Lupe was a known practicer of Santería at the time of the song’s recording, and the romantic drama of her singing coupled with the ritualistic imagery Brown has produced certainly evokes the sensation of saints being summoned.

Installation View, “Mythologies.” From L to R: Black Motif by Cameron Welch, All American (Banner Series) by Alexandria Eregbu, and Puro Teatro (Coming to Theatres) & Pomba Gira (Deja Vu) by Rashayla Marie Brown

Indeed, preceding the video spatially are three artworks intent on making explicit the theme organizing the included artworks altogether: a contemporary consideration, and continuation, of black aesthetics from a political, art-historically informed subject-position. “Black Motif,” a 7 by 6.5 foot mixed-media painting on cotton by Cameron Welch, features a golden, protruding mask in the style of African ancestral objects (or commercial knock-offs thereof) surrounded by layered, clashing colors and patterns of different kente cloths that the artist has painted asymmetrically into a patchwork composition. Neighboring the painting is “All American (Banner Series)” by Alexandria Eregbu, a triptych of bedazzled vinyl wall-hangings heralding famed contemporary black artists Kara Walker, Kehinde Wiley, and Mickalene Thomas as though they are college sports stars. Mirroring these works is “Pomba Gira (Deja Vu),” an installation by Brown replicating the aesthetic of her aforementioned video in three dimensional form, but instead featuring a vinyl LP copy of Beyonce and Jay-Z’s hit song “Deja Vu” suspended over two self-portraits the artist intentionally produced in the style of Lorna Simpson.

L to R: Cameron Welch, Mispelled Agression (one of two in the series), 2012, and Christina A. Long, Miss Jessie’s Exuberant Hues & Henry Just a Hater, 2012

Images of earlier, though none too far gone, eras permeate throughout “Mythologies.” Elsewhere in the exhibition, Welch paints black and white appropriated civil rights era imagery for the diptych “Misspelled Aggression,” hanging the companion artworks across from one another like mirror images. Scrawling the words ‘nigga please’ over a photorealistic rendering of civil rights leader Stokely Carmichael mid-speech, and the words ‘nigger police’ over an image of attack dogs being used against black protestors in the 1963 Birmingham, AL, “race riots;” Welch’s large-scale paintings of bold aggression (both state-sponsored and grass-roots resistant) make enormous and unavoidable the persistent issue of racial violence and the failures of binary ‘riot vs. revolution’ understanding. Photographer David Alekhuogie similarly investigates the mediation of racial violence, but with more of a critical orientation towards the marketing and mass-manufacture of stereotyped black male aggression. In a stunning photo simply titled “Beef,” Alekhuogie places a super-sized McDonald’s cheeseburger (and Monopoly themed bag) at the center of two posters hanging on a deep blue bedroom wall, one of Notorious B.I.G. and the other featuring Tupac as the star of the 1992 gangsta film Juice. The work produces a thoughtful visual metaphor for the corporate profiteering of engineered black-on-black violence. In the exhibition’s most contemporary reference, Alekhuogie places a mass-produced ceramic head labeled ‘Africa, Cameroon’ purchased from a local art supply store, featuring generically racialized facial characteristics, within a pale grey hoodie now indissociable from the image of Trayvon Martin for a photograph the artist provocatively titles “Self Portrait (Africa, Cameroon).”

David Alekhuogie, Beef, 2012

It is a compelling commingling of artworks: expansive in its time-lapsing pastiche of (art-)historical and pop-cultural references, polymorphous in its inclusivity of art forms (video, painting, textile, photography) typically segregated museologically. Additionally, “Mythologies” adds an interesting, youthful dimension to conversations currently about the importance and relevancy of identity-themed group exhibitions at a time when post-structural criticality and neoliberal pipe-dreams of being ‘post-whatever‘ threatens to make irrelevant concerns over specific authorship. This is particularly so in the wake of the much maligned New York Times review of “Now Dig This! Art & Black Los Angeles 1960-1980″ at MoMA PS1 by critic Ken Johnson, who reductively oversimplifies the insurgent artistic strategies of assemblage (while assuming it to be an exclusively white tradition) and insipidly criticizes a portion of that show for perceived failures in the Modernist ideal of universal aesthetic communication, as though that’s the primary artistic motivation behind producing (and promoting), for instance, gnarly, gorgeous, challenging artworks made with detritus collected from the Watts Rebellion.

Alexandria Eregbu, All American (Banner Series), 2012

What the content of “Mythologies” seem to be suggesting, instead, is that the formation of group exhibitions linked to the theme of identity offers a powerful means by which to outline, preserve, contextualize, build upon, and (as this exhibition especially makes clear) assert one’s own artwork as participating within a specific aesthetic lineage. This is, perhaps, why Beyonce and Jay-Z’s “Deja Vu” on vinyl (something contemporary being delivered through the media of an earlier era) makes for such an ample metaphor within Brown’s Lorna Simpson-quoting installation, and for the entire exhibition furthermore. It is why Welch’s and Alekhuogie’s respective aesthetic investigations of the evolving mass-mediation of racial violence transcend disciplinarity. It is also why the tongue-in-cheek cheeriness of Eregbu’s banners feels so sincere, if also abundantly fan-girl self aware. The works seem produced as knowing, generative gestures of willful apprenticeship derived from self-tailored canons of influence made available and immediate, at last.

“Mythologies,” featuring the work of David Alekhuogie, Rashayla Marie Brown, Alexandria Eregbu, Christina A. Long, Hannah Rodriguez, and Cameron Welch, is open now through January 8, 2013, at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Sullivan Galleries (33 S. State Street, Seventh Floor).

1. Between Places: Chicago-Detroit at 6018NORTH

Work by College for Creative Studies students Austin Brady, Megan Leigh Jessup, Sean Maxwell, Tom Burns, Fatima Sow, Andrew Mehall, Maggie Kozma, Benjamin Thompson, Eric Maurer, Kristina Sheufelt, Shaina Kasztelan, Jen Wang, Leucochloridium Paradoxum, Joanna Marie Care, and Jordan Stohl.

6018 NORTH is located at 6018 N. Kenmore Ave. Reception Saturday, 5-9pm.

2. 24HRS/25DAYS Presents: Schlong Night at New Capital

Work by Anastasia Chatzka, BEERY/KARP, Carl Moberg, Catie Olson,EC Brown, Jonathan Ozik, and Tom Burtonwood.

New Capital is located at 3114 W. Carroll St. Reception Friday, 7-10pm.

3. Life, in Some Form at Chicago Artists’ Coalition

Work by Marissa Lee Benedict and Brittany Ransom.

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

4. Mythologies at Sullivan Galleries

Work by David Alekhuogie, Rashayla Marie Brown, Alexandria Eregbu, Christina A. Long, Hannah Rodriguez, and Cameron Welch.

Sullivan Galleries is located at 33 S. State St. 7th fl. Reception Friday, 4:30-7pm.

5. One By One at 65GRAND

Work by Sam Jaffe.

65GRAND is located at 1369 W. Grand Ave. Reception Friday, 6-9pm.

Flávio Rodrigues, “I Am a Memory,” proposed memorial project, 2012.

It is difficult then to delve into the past and exhume whole passages of injustice, especially when those passages operate inside of a system one believes to be good. In doing so, one must discuss the significance of trauma, peel back old wounds and attempt in some way to make peace. Or perhaps it isn’t about making peace at all. Perhaps it is instead about admitting and honoring discomfort, frustration and unhappiness, for while it is horrific to admit that there are cracks in the systems we employ, it is worse to gloss over or deny them. The Chicago Torture Justice Memorials Project (CTJM) addresses these issues directly, engaging a local history of police brutality to create a platform for public monuments and discourse.

Rebecca Keller, “Soft Prod,” Fabric sculpture, 2012.

Rather than cover up those horrific moments, CTJM seeks to uncover and air out the darker edges of our past and present, pulling them into focus with the help of survivors, artists, activists, community organizers and lawyers. Together, they invited proposals “for speculative ways to memorialize the torture cases,” in an attempt “to honor the individuals, families, and communities affected by torture, as well as address the obstruction of justice that has occurred in the aftermath.” That call was issued in 2011 and asked for anything from “from architecture to haiku, website to mural, community organization to performance, bronze plaque to large-scale memorial.”

The electrical device used for torture during interrogations by former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge.

“Opening the Black Box: The Charge is Torture” is features 70 of those proposed monuments at SAIC’s Sullivan Galleries. The exhibit is  named after a particular torture device (the “black box”) that was used by Officer John Burge to coerce confessions from 1972-1991. Burge is responsible for as many as 200 incidents of torture, many of which involved electrical charges that shocked prisoners. Although legal routes had granted some success, many of the case advocates (lawyers, victims and activists alike) felt that the law was unable to offer adequate retribution. They turned to art. “Opening the Black Box: The Charge is Torture” is one aspect of that process. It is open until December 21st.

William DeShazer, Chicago Tribune. April 4, 2012.

Complementing the theme of that exhibit, the Sullivan Galleries are hosting two additional shows: Laurie Jo Reynold’s Tamms Year Ten Campaign Office,where Reynold’s has effectively installed a working office from which to advocate for the closing of Tamms: a “supermax” prison on the southern tip of Illinois. It opened in 2008, intended as a site for “super shock” treatment that would not extend beyond a year. Now, something like 1/3 of Tamm’s prisoners have been there, non-stop for a decade.”[Inmates] live in long-term isolation—no phone calls, no communal activity, no contact visits. They are fed through a slot in the door. Prisoners at Tamms only leave their cell to shower or exercise which they are allowed to do, depending on their behavioral level, from zero to 7 times per week. Exercise is solitary, in a concrete pen.” Reynolds and her collaborators (including former inmates and inmate family members) also work to connect inmates to the outside world in some way — including, for instance, taking photographs of certain objects at the prisoners’ request. Requests include “the Masonic temple in DC”, “what’s left where the Robert Taylor Homes used to be”, ”a heartsick clown with a feather pen”, “my mom in front of a mansion with money and a Hummer”, “Michelle Obama planting vegetables in White House garden”, “any Muslim Mosque or Moorish Science Temple in Chicago or Mecca or Africa”, and “fallen autumn leaves (which we do not have access to in the “concrete box” which is deemed a yard here)”. During their residency at the Sullivan Galleries, Tamms Year Ten continues their regime of activism while planning additional public programs.

Tirtza Even’s Preview: An Assembly from Natural Life (work-in-progress), which  describes itself as “a feature-length documentary produced by SAIC faculty Tirtza Even alongside the legal efforts of the Law Offices of Deborah LaBelle. The work challenges the inequities in the juvenile justice system by telling the stories of several individuals sentenced to die in prison since youth. The project’s goal is to depict the experiences of these youths who receive the most severe sentences available for convicted adults—a sentence of ‘natural life’ or life without parole—against the contexts of social bias, neglect, apprehension, and alienation.”

It’s a tremendous line up with much to think about and discover and there are a few additional events on the horizon well worth checking out.

Saturday November 17 Claire Pentecost will facilitate a conversation around Photo Requests from Solitary. Men housed at Tamms supermax prison were able to request a photograph of anything in the world, real or imagined, and members of the public realized the pictures. Men formerly housed in Tamms, the family members of current inmates, and other special guests will be on hand to view the photos and respond to the project.

Thursday November 29 Kevin Coval, Darby Tillis, Achy Obejas, Gary Younge, Quraysh Ali Lansana, Krista Franklin and others present I AM A MEMORY: Chicago Writers Against Torture. This evening of readings and performances is dedicated to the survivors, their families, and their communities who endured unspeakable acts of torture at the hands of the Chicago Police.

Saturday December 15 brings the final program. A Film Festival Against Torture presents a daylong screening of three powerful films about torture, featuring discussions with the filmmakers: Peter Kuttner, Cyndi Moran, and Eric Scholl; Jackie Rivet-River and John Lyons; Ines Somer and Kathy Berger.

Jim Duignan, “Salve,” Repurposed cabinetry, soil, succulents, Chicago Police Department service coat button.
2012