Version festival poster; courtesy of the Co-Prosperity Sphere

“Every year we have the same intention. We want to widen the networks and nodes of various groups so we can grow a multiplicity of milieus in the art world,” explains Ed “Edmar” Marszewski. He’s talking about the Version Festival, an annual eleven-day arts festival that he founded and co-curates, which celebrates social and activist art in Bridgeport and on Chicago’s South Side. The theme of this year’s festival, “Infrastructure and Territories,” is appropriate to the history of the festival and the community that has grown up around it.

First held nine years ago, Version is meant to carve out a territory for rising artists who are often lost in the city’s sprawling cultural landscape. “The art ecology is not too healthy,” says Edmar. He created Version to combat, if only for a few days, the perennial struggle of rising artists. “Version is the first exhibition for a lot of artists. It is the perfect way to introduce different facets of the Chicago art world to larger audiences.”

“The show is invested in artists of a whole variety,” says Dayton Castleman, the co-curator of this year’s festival. “What I’ve been most interested in is the idea that territories take on a wide variety of connotations. It could be everything from real property to intellectual property. It deals with ideas of space, and whether that’s physical space or cerebral space, the term is sufficiently broad.”

The relationship between art and space has become increasingly important in contemporary art practices, and Chicago was an especially important city for movements that took real environments as a space for cognitive experimentation. As artists moved away from the gallery and into alternative spaces, many began to incorporate the dynamics of their surrounding community into their practices, eventually leading to what Edmar calls “social art” and “art activism”. With its vast abandoned industrial spaces and its stigmatized, segregated neighborhoods, Chicago offered a cityscape with widely variant artistic opportunities. It continues to do so today. “When artists move into communities, it opens new horizons,” says Edmar. Among the many community-based artist groups in Chicago, Edmar cites two as model examples. The first is the Stockyard Institute, a Chicago-based artist collective that designs projects and sustainable programs for communities around the city. The second, the Experimental Station, is a Woodlawn-based organization that aims to create local infrastructures for artists and for social change by supporting artists and activists in its community in various ways—including cheap rent, meeting spaces, free technology, communal ovens, and gallery space. For Edmar, these two groups exemplify some of the most important moves in contemporary art, as each have established systems where individuals can engage a community through artistic mediums. “Art plays an everyday part of peoples’ lives, but encountering it in a structured form allows people to enjoy things that they don’t seek out or have forgotten about.”

This year, Version has reached out to new territories. Participants hail from as close as a few blocks away to as far the Netherlands. Among this year’s artists are Chris Larsen, a Minnesotan who’s built a machine-like wooden structure with a hollow interior space where he will sit as a way of manipulating his environment. Jeff Zimmerman, a Chicago local, will show two paintings titled “North Sider” and “South Sider” that will hang across from one another as a way to evoke the gap between Chicago’s latitudinal divide. Thomas Morena will create a large imagined continent from new and burnt matchsticks as a way to evoke the idea of scorched earth in territories of war. Alexa Loftis will do a performance piece where she buries herself in sand in front of a beachscape as she drinks “girly” cocktails. This latter installation is a literalizing of territory, as Loftis will both mark her territory and be subsumed by it.

The festival’s theme is important not only for artists, but for curators, as well. For the exhibition, Castleman marked the floor of the Co-Prosperity Sphere with a grid system that divides the space into fifteen-by-fifteen feet quadrants, and allocated each to an artist. “In a sense, the gallery space is divided into distinct territories,” explains Castleman. “You can move from one territory to another. They’re permeable.” Artists can often be territorial in their desire to have prime space within a gallery; Castleman created the grid in order to allow artists discrete, compartmentalized spaces while also avoiding conflict between individuals. However, Castleman also encouraged artists to imagine new kinds of work that responded to the gallery’s geography. “I asked artists to conceive new work that would emphasize the space. So in that sense, the whole exhibition became a site-specific installation.”

Among this year’s newcomers is the b(ART)er collective from Denver, Colorado. The collective is a group of six individuals who set up systems of exchange from their van. “We have a bunch of different modes of exchange,” explains Alex Erskine, one of the members of the collective. “Each one is adaptable given changes in demographics and culture. This is as much inquiry-based as it is performative and relational. The really important part is figuring out what questions should be asked and generating these questions for ourselves as well as for the community.” The b(ART)er collective is making their first cross-country trek to Version at the recommendation of the group’s leader, Nikki Pike, who first visited Version as a graduate student several years ago. “At Version, I was exposed to ideas I couldn’t have imagined. It really exposed me to outside-of-the-academy art making. Anyone I get to take to the festival would have a similar experience. Some of the best thinkers are there.”

The b(ART)er collective has been assigned the space right outside of the entrance of the festival. There, they will park their truck and let the process unfold. “In the spirit of inquiries, we can have fun and experiment and see how Chicago responds to us. We like to remain really fluid. A lot of the time, the space dictates how the performance unfolds. That’s the most exciting part,” explains Erskine.

Over the past nine years, as Version has grown in breadth and size, it has created a distinct place for itself in Chicago’s art scene. The significance of this positions is up for grabs. Chicago is not New York, and Version Festival is not the Whitney, and this is something that Edmar is only too aware of. “It’s not like we’re reaching a general audience of Cubs fans,” he reflects. “But if people didn’t care, we wouldn’t be doing this.”

Halsted Street in Pilsen (Mehves Konuk)

A few miles south, Bridgeport’s former industrial district has become the quiet home of an underground art scene. Over the past three years, the area has seen the opening and expansion of studios, artist-run project spaces, and exhibition megacenters. Shan Zuo and Da Huang Zhou, China-born artists now internationally recognized for their collaborative paintings and sculpture work, moved to Bridgeport in 1986 and transformed an abandoned 85,000-square-foot warehouse on 35th Street into an exhibition, event, and studio space in 2004. Named the Zhou B Art Center, the brothers’ space is currently filled to capacity, and according to center director Oskar Friedl, it may soon expand into another warehouse space the brothers recently purchased.

Ed Marszewski, director and founder of alternative art collective Lumpen, purchased an abandoned warehouse on Morgan Street in Bridgeport in 2006 when rent rose at the Flat Iron Building in Wicker Park. At the same time, many artist spaces along Milwaukee Avenue were relocating or closing. The former warehouse, dubbed the Co-Prosperity Sphere, functions as a community center and exhibition space. Another warehouse, East Bank Storage at Racine and 35th Street, has been partly transformed into an artist community housing over twenty studios.

These new spaces have brought a diverse range of artists and art practice to historically blue-collar Bridgeport. The range in size and cost of spaces in the Zhou B Art Center allow new MFA recipients’ start-up studios to operate beside well-established galleries. And the Co-Prosperity Sphere’s program of countercultural video installations and non-traditional work provides an alternative to the more mainstream, commercial spaces in the Zhou B Art Center.

Although Bridgeport has been scattered with studio and gallery space since the mid-’90s, events put on by its up-and-coming formal art communities are drawing a wide range of visitors to the area for the first time. In addition to regular exhibitions, the Co-Prosperity Sphere hosts two yearly multi-day festivals that draw dozens of local and international artists to the area. The artists of East Bank host regular events and semi-annual open gallery nights, and the Zhou B Art Center’s monthly open studio night alone includes more artists than those on Pilsen’s Second Friday gallery crawl.

In light of the increasing number of vacancies on Pilsen’s gallery strip, the success of these new developments leads one to ask: is Bridgeport becoming the new Pilsen? And is Bridgeport’s development complicit in Pilsen’s decline?

Brazilian painter Dagmar Bruehmueller moved into a small studio in the Zhou B Art Center in November after two years of operating a large, street-front gallery in Pilsen. Pilsen, Bruehmueller says, “has changed. So many galleries closed, and people don’t pay attention anymore.”

“It’s a 360-degree turn around,” says Robin Monique Rios, a digital photography artist who moved her gallery, 4Art, from Pilsen into the Zhou B Art Center in September. Rios describes her experience operating in Pilsen as a constant struggle, and was on the verge of closing her studio after six years in Pilsen when she was invited to rent space in the Zhou brothers’ new center.

Marco Logsdon, founder and director of Logsdon 1909 Gallery in Pilsen, believes most of Pilsen’s innovative, successful galleries continue to thrive, and says that Second Friday events are as well-attended as ever. He attributes the recent increase in vacancies to the changes introduced when John Podmajersky III, son of the couple who initiated the neighborhood’s transformation, took over business management in 2003.

The Podmajersky family, art collectors and residents of Pilsen since 1914, began purchasing warehouses and stores on Halsted between 16th and Canalport in the ’60s, converting them into art spaces, and renting them to local artists, and effectively transformed East Pilsen’s full-fledged art district by the late ’90s. Podmajersky currently owns hundreds of apartments and 250,000 square feet of studio and gallery space in Pilsen.

“The parents are the one who really set up the area. Particularly the mother, who collected ceramics, was very into the arts,” Logsdon says. Art lovers, the Podmajerskys kept rental rates far below market price and did everything they could to keep artists in the district. “Sometimes [Podmajersky II’s wife] would let them trade works for rent, and was just very supportive. The son is not in the same. He doesn’t have the same mentality. He’s a businessman,” Logsdon says.

In addition to organizing the district’s publicity efforts, Podmajersky III began standardizing rent rates in 2003, raising prices for many long-time occupants. Part of what Podmajersky III called a “cleaning house” in a December 2003 interview with the Chicago Reader included rent hikes and required open exhibition hours, which pressured artists who underutilized storefront spaces to move out. (Chicago Weekly was not able to reach Podmajersky by press time.)

Although a number of artists have relocated from Pilsen to Bridgeport, it would be inaccurate to say that gallery and studio closings in Pilsen are fueling Bridgeport’s growth. Rather, according to a Reader article published last summer, most closures are the result of galleries moving to long-established art districts on Chicago’s North Side or simply shutting down. And Bridgeport’s studio complexes are filling with artists from across the city and nation.
What can be said, however, is that differences in location, physical amenities, leadership, community structure and organization, and economic trends have shaped the divergent paths of the two neighborhoods.

Pilsen’s Halsted Street is primarily composed of low-rise store-fronts and apartment buildings. Close to the South Loop and only a half-mile north of the Orange Line Halsted stop, Pilsen is a prime candidate for the type of residential gentrification that has inflated rental prices and pushed artists out of Wicker Park during the past decade.

Recent development efforts, including the $700-million University Village project just north of the Chicago Arts District, have pushed up real estate values in the area. Rent in Pilsen is still lower than in North Side art districts, but Podmajersky tenants do face yearly increases. Unlike Pilsen, parts of Bridgeport are far from the Loop and the nearest El line, lack amenities, and are full of highly industrial structures that don’t fit well into the yuppie low-rise brick apartment aesthetic. But the abandoned industrial complexes that detract from Bridgeport’s real estate development appeal are ideal spaces for large-scale studio and exhibition complexes.

Prior to becoming director of the Zhou B Art Center, Oskar Friedl ran galleries in the River North district and the Flat Iron Building in Wicker Park, in studio art complexes that stood at the center of each neighborhood’s art communities. Alternative art districts in the ’80s and ’90s, “both areas went bust or they gentrified too rapidly to really allow for a development of the arts,” Friedl says. Friedl believes that the “possibilities [in Bridgeport] are tenfold what they were in River North…You can create ten times more with ten percent of the effort,” offering artists and art developers spaces where they can “operate almost on the museum level.” Bridgeport, Friedl says, “feels like it’s the most authentic of any of the communities that I’ve worked in and lived in.”

The type of project spaces and mega-centers opening up in Bridgeport create a professional, high-level version of the art school studio complex, especially appealing to artists who crave interaction with other artists and want to cut costs on gallery operation in light of the current economy. Furthermore, Bridgeport’s development is artist-driven, while Pilsen’s arts district is primarily the creation of a real estate developer. Podmajersky under John Podmajersky III maintains strict control of gallery promotion efforts and operation practice. Pilsen’s leadership structure, Rios believes, restricts and leads to the constant “roadblocking [of] people wanting to bring new ideas to the district.”

In contrast, the new art centers surfacing in Bridgeport are owned and managed by artists or individuals active in the art community. Already involved in art, individuals like Marszewski and the Zhou brothers have a greater stake in Bridgeport’s prosperity and are better able to attract artists and draw crowds to the neighborhood. East Bank Storage, like Pilsen’s gallery district, is not artist-owned. But the center’s corporate managers’ hands-off policy differs from Podmajersky’s approach and leaves space for tenant activity. Artists of the East Bank, a community of studio occupants, manages promotion for and organization of semi-annual gallery events and more regular exhibition activity.

In comparison to Pilsen, Rios says the Zhou B Art Center sees many more “international visitors, a more high-end clientele…I think the majority is because the brothers are so famous.” On the other end of the spectrum, Marszewski’s Lumpen Magazine and the long-running Version and Select Media festivals he runs have established an alternative following for events put on by the Co-Prosperity Sphere.

All this said, Logsdon does not see Bridgeport’s development as a threat to Pilsen. The two art districts are “different—they’re just different,” he says. Bridgeport’s isolated, one-stop art centers may supplant Podmajersky’s studio loft complexes, but are incomparable and will never compete with Pilsen’s dense storefront gallery district, Logsdon says. “The thing that’s nice about Pilsen is that they’re very inviting spaces, and they’re unique, they’re not the cookie-cutter renovation. A lot of times people enjoy seeing the spaces as much as seeing the art,” Logsdon says. “The areas that I’ve been to [in Bridgeport]—nothing is as unique as the Pilsen spaces.”

Recent work by Juan Angel Chávez, who will be exhibiting at Select Media Festival's group show (courtesy of the artist)

This year’s festival, titled “Super Bad Ass,” will be held November 19 to 22 at various locations in Bridgeport and Wicker Park. According to the website, the event will be “short and sweet. We have no filler, no excuses and no doubts.” Opening with video screenings at Wicker Park’s Heaven Gallery, the Festival closes in Bridgeport with an audience hypnosis experiment by artist Jacob Hammes.

The opening night program is an eclectic, highly accessible mix of straight-up cartoon comedy, art film, and documentary work. It will include everything from new comic works by Adult Swim animators Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, to documentary clips of past Lumpen events, to a video cover of “Like a Prayer” which reinterprets Madonna’s role as a “depression era scamp.”

The festival’s centerpiece, a twelve-person group show, will open on Friday at the Co-Prosperity Sphere, Lumpen’s experimental exhibition headquarters in Bridgeport and one of the largest alternative art spaces in Chicago. The show brings together live music, experimental interactive pieces, and visual art, and will give visitors the opportunity to trade anything but cash for painter Justin B. Williams’ favorite personal works and browse through inexpensively-priced new work collected by local artist Hui Min Tsen through national Craigslist open call ads. The latter is part of a larger project called the Seeking Art Bargain Basement, which began last spring as a part of Lumpen’s Version Festival.

Equally lively, non-interactive works featured in the exhibition include a functioning cardboard jet engine, part of a larger project by David Castleman inspired by the crash landing of a US Airways flight in the Hudson, a gargantuan wood-acrylic sculpture by Juan Angel Chavez, delicate yarn and felt pieces by Montgomery Perry Smith, and twenty-six pieces by graphic artist James Quigley that Ed “Edmar” Marszewski, Lumpen founder and festival director, described in an interview as “freakily beautiful.”

The organization of this year’s festival differs significantly from earlier formats. In past years, the festival oriented itself around an often explicitly activist theme. For example, in 2005, “Experimental Cultural Zone” filled the storefronts of a quiet, post-industrial street in Bridgeport with alternative bookstores and galleries to examine, according to Marszewski, “what happens when you put these innovative art projects in a zone that’s never seen this before.”

By contrast, “Super Bad Ass” is introspective. Instead of exhibiting art that draws attention to social or geopolitical issues, the festival brings together exemplary, innovative works in an attempt to question art practice in Chicago and address issues of conformity and the potentially mechanical output of the city’s art community. Described in Paper Magazine as “king of Chicago’s Underground Art Scene,” Marszewski has been active in the scene as publisher of Lumpen, an alternative zine, since the early ’80s. He believes that “people in Chicago are pretty lazy, it’s pretty sleepy.” Despite the diversity and talent of Chicago artists, Marzewski thinks that there is “less sense of urgency here” than in other American cities. Instead, he is worried that “some artists are just making work that will fit in these apartment galleries.”

In 2005, “Experimental Cultural Zone” created what Marszewski refers to as a “community of the future” based in his image of what could happen if a blue-collar neighborhood were seeded with innovative art practice. Similarly, “Super Bad Ass” will model an “art community of the future,” the four-day realization of Marszewski’s vision for what Chicago’s art scene can become. Whether it is geared toward artists or toward a larger, city-wide audience, “Super Bad Ass” will offer participants an enthralling, alternative art experience that is worlds away from the standard gallery hop.
November 19-22. Thursday-Sunday. selectmediafestival.org

Setting up for Version 9 at the Co-Prosperity Sphere; Ellis Calvin

“We’re here to amplify the activity that’s going on here and show it to the rest of the world,” says Ed “Edmar” Marszewski, producer of the Version Festival and head of the Public Media Institute, a nonprofit arts organization. The boldness of his statement works well with the theme for this year’s festival, “Immodest Proposals.” Edmar explains that he and his co-organizers try to keep the theme “wide open, just to see what kind of submissions we’ll get.” The title is a play on Jonathan Swift’s satirical text, “A Modest Proposal,” which recommended that poor families sell their children as food to the rich in order to ease the economic hardships of 18th-century Ireland.

So what is an immodest proposal? Edmar is quick to elaborate: “Look, we’ve just reset America, we’ve reset the 21st century with getting Obama elected, getting rid of the Bush administration. And now…what kind of crazy, awesome, weirdo project or idea do you have? How do want to live your life? Regardless of the budget, regardless of any expenses.” Much of the Version Festival is achieved through generous donations of space, time, and money from artists and larger institutions. However, financial limitations are a reality, and so certain projects—like building a life-size model of an ancient colossus on the shores of Long Island, New York—must remain, at least for now, in their proposal form.

The realized proposals themselves are nothing short of extraordinary, including a vast assortment of musical performances, art installations, curatorial endeavors, walking tours, and category-defying artistic experiments. In addition to an exhibition of European artists, a group show entitled “The Audacity of Art,” and an information/artistic tradeshow called the NFO XPO (pronounced “info/expo”), Version will feature a series of 12 alternative forms of shelter, workshops, and classes provided by the Free University and an imaginary government-funded cultural program called the Bridgeport WPA. The festival culminates with the first-ever Chicago Art Parade in the West Loop. The variety of frameworks through which an artist can choose to submit work enhances the productive communication encouraged by the festival. “People might start out with only one idea,” says Edmar, “but they’ll see that there is such an array of platforms already engaged in making weird stuff that their original idea already fits in somewhere.” Such connections occur on the level of the art, but also on the level of the artist. Perhaps one of the most positive aspects of the Version Festival is its ability to create permanent relationships, despite lasting only 10 days out of the year. A stable community evolves from a temporary event.

Certain programs, like the Bridgeport WPA, hope to maintain their presence in the Bridgeport community after the festival ends. Inspired by the cultural programs under the Works Progress Administration of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, the Bridgeport WPA reflects on the extensive funding directed to the arts during the Great Depression. Founder Emily Clayton explains, “[The WPA] employed musicians and writers and visual artists and all kinds of people to document social welfare and what was going on at the time.” The Bridgeport WPA was created as a proposal for the upcoming Version Festival, and has since grown into a viable organizing and mobilizing force within the larger event. Clayton describes it as a “theoretical social experiment that asks, ‘What if funding for the arts had been part of the stimulus package that just passed? What if they did what they did for artists in the ‘30s, and what if they did that now?’” Clayton smiles. “It would be incredible.”

On Thursday night, the Bridgeport WPA kicks off the Version Festival with a poster show inspired by the posters from the ‘30s that supported everything from education to sanitation. Clayton hopes that the posters will increase people’s awareness of the continued importance of art, but also of more general issues. “In a time where everyone’s struggling, we can still focus on positive things. What can you do within your community and in your lives to better yourself and better your neighbor?” The show features 20 to 25 artists who have been commissioned to print a series of 40 posters, one of which will be displayed at the show while the rest are placed throughout the neighborhood. The poster campaign is complemented by several public sculptures and murals installed throughout Bridgeport.

While Version is primarily an arts festival, it becomes clear, especially when considering programs like the Bridgeport WPA, that many of the people involved see art as a means towards a greater end. Change, communication, and progress are recurring themes that buzz in the artistic atmosphere even if they are not directly expressed in the works themselves. The dizzying range of artistic media at play in the festival is overwhelming: from performance artists to puppeteers, every species of musician and visual artist is represented.

The NFO XPO, which takes place on Saturday and Sunday at the Benton House (3052 S. Gratten Ave.), is described on Version’s website as a “trade show for experimental art, emerging spaces, and radical exchange.” It will provide a unique opportunity to see such artistic variety in a single location. Outside of the House, one can witness the temporary structures of the Shelter Corps in the 100-year-old lot next door. Over 24 artists have come together in this collective to create 12 conceptions of “shelter” in a show that is sure to expand one’s notion of the word, while maintaining a very practical relevance, in light of the ever-present need to generate ideas for alternative, sustainable living structures.

One often forgets that curating a show can be an artistic process as well. One category of “Immodest Proposals” strives to bring this to mind, allowing individuals and groups to administer full creative control in their conceptions of various exhibitions. Material Exchange, a group that is concerned with updating the value of used objects, has organized a carnival on the Midway Plaisance to take place during both weekends of the Version festival. King Ludd’s Midway Arcade will feature games reminiscent of those found in the World’s Fair of 1893. The Eastern Expansion gallery is hosting “Unbescheidene Angebote!!” (German for “Immodest Proposals”), which will display the work of artists from Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands, as well as the United States.

A third curatorial project, entitled “That’s What She Said,” is being organized by Chicago artist Jeriah Hildwine. It features the work of female artists exploring issues of sexuality and violence. Hildwine will also have a booth at the NFO XPO that displays his artwork, while “That’s What She Said” will show at the Benton House. He initially became involved in the festival through his wife, photographer Stephanie Burke, who encouraged him to look into Version’s numerous platforms for creative projects. Hildwine is one artist who seems to see art as serving multiple purposes within Version’s larger context. His booth at the NFO XPO is not primarily for selling his artwork, but rather for making others aware of it. “I mean, I guess it’s always for sale,” Hildwine explains. “But it’s more about just getting it out there.” Hildwine’s goal echoes Version’s intention of bring local Chicago artists to the forefront of the international community of artists and art enthusiasts alike.

Elise Goldstein, a performance artist in “That’s What She Said,” shared her theory of how the entirety of the immense variety of work presented at Version relates to the festival’s aggressive, if intentionally ambiguous, theme. “We’re in a recession, so no one is going to buy art,” she states matter-of-factly. Strangely, that’s no cause for alarm. “When art isn’t about selling and commodification,” she continues, “you can say whatever you want.” Whether this is an (im)modest proposal or a call to arms, the Version Festival has challenged its artists to think outside the box, and the result will challenge all who attend to rethink art’s potential in society.

The Co-Prosperity Sphere, an experimental cultural center that showcases all types of artists, hosts an array of events from art installations to festivals to performances. This 5,000-plus square foot gallery is the home of the Lumpen Media Group, a seventeen-year-old arts collective whose mission, according to their website, is to “create distribution outlets for critical countercultural entertainment, news, analysis and opinion.” Lumpen publishes the bimonthly Lumpen magazine, organizes the Select Media Festival in the fall and the Version Festival in the spring, and runs its own in-house internet radio station, WPBR.

On Friday, November 14, Select Media Festival 7 will kick off and will continue until November 22. Since its inception in 2001, the Select Media Festival has been an occasion for promoting and exploring eclectic and modern art, media, and ideas. Each year a festival committee cooks up a theme for the artists’ work; this year, that theme is “Infoporn.”

“It’s a way we digest USA Today graphs on everything,” participating artist Ryan Murray explains, “It’s the eroticism [behind] the graph and the chart.”

The Co-Prosperity Sphere website defines Infoporn as “a visual explosion of these [data] points and paths, these executions and exercises and maps. We want to put these moments on display, to measure them out. We want to understand and appreciate; be enraged, enlightened, amazed by them. We want to feast.”

Still baffled? Imagine, Murray describes, a USA Today article with a plethora of graphs, charts, histograms, diagrams, etc. Now, suppose you see one graph, or multiple graphs, that captivate you: not because you care about, or comprehend, the data, but because it’s aesthetically pleasing; it “turns you on.” That’s Infoporn, and what’s so great is that you don’t have to show ID or pay $20 per month to spark your libido.

On November 21, the Co-Prosperity Sphere’s new storefront space on 31st Street, the Eastern Expansion, will make its debut. The new gallery will feature a single artist’s work at a time, something Lumpen founder Ed “Edmar” Marszewski has wanted for some time. “I believe Edmar wanted [the space] to start doing solo projects in,” says Murray, “so a single artist will come in and have a cozy space to set up…something.” One of the great aspects about the new space is that the main window faces directly out to the street, allowing the passersby to glance in and see the art. “You can enter the space, but you don’t have to,” explains Murray.

Murray will be the first artist to display his art at the Eastern Expansion. He is an award-winning artist from Pittsburgh who now lives just a few blocks away from the Co-Prosperity Sphere. He creates paintings, installations, videos, and performances that mainly deal with the “connection and disconnection between science and mysticism.” Murray worked with the Co-Prosperity Sphere for about two months and displayed his paintings at one of their shows when Edmar asked him to hold the inaugural exhibition at the Eastern Expansion. For this show, Murray will create an installation of a “panacea potion shop,” in which he will use his sculptures of potions, elixirs, and liquid paint in “apothecary glassware and scientific lab glassware.”

Following the opening of Lumpen’s new addition, there will be an afterparty at Go-Go Town, a loft venue at 3117 S. Morgan Street at 11pm. Not only will this party be celebrating Eastern Expansion, it will also be hosted by the Bridgeport Art District, Lumpen’s other newest project. As a “commonwealth” of all the artists’ spaces around the Bridgeport community, B.A.D. is both an organization and event.

In order to avoid the lonely fate of separate art entities trying to “keep their heads above water,” B.A.D. will bring these artists together to organize neighborhood-wide events and performances. November 21 will be the first night of B.A.D., and on the third Friday of every month from then on artists, galleries, and local businesses will open their doors to the public to commune in the art scene of Bridgeport. Different art venues will hold events all throughout Bridgeport starting around 6pm.
“The more non-profit, community driven formats are more capable of showing more eclectic work that doesn’t necessarily have to bend to the fashions of the time,” states Ryan. “I think there is something totally exciting about spaces that don’t have to [adhere] to the regular issues of galleries and museums … These impromptu festivals can be very exciting.”
Select Media Festival: Co-Prosperity Sphere, 3219 S. Morgan St. November 14-22. selectmediafestival.com
Bridgeport Art District: Third Friday of every month, 6-11pm. bridgeportartdistrict.blogspot.com

Leave the pearls and Lily Pulitzer at home: Thursday evening, the Version festival begins at Country Club, a gallery in Wicker Park. According to the festival’s website, “Version is an annual springtime convergence that brings in hundreds of artists, musicians and educators from around the world to present some of the most challenging ideas and progressive art initiatives of our day.” Space 1026, a Philadelphia-based artist collective named after the address of their building in Philly’s Chinatown, will host Version’s opening show on Thursday evening. On Friday night, Version moves to the South Side’s Co-Prosperity Sphere for “The Dark Matter Group Show.” This former warehouse in Bridgeport was gutted and restored to reveal beautiful high copper ceilings, hardwood floors, and a fairly vast and, once preparations are complete, appealing contemporary gallery space. Music and theater performances are held in the basement, and an apartment complex occupies the second floor.

Last Saturday, the site was bustling with preparation for the show. Co-organizer of the event, owner of the gallery and notorious Chicago art personality Ed “Edmar” Marszewski was easing a paint roller along a white freestanding display wall and in the midst of about three conversations. Chicago artist Ray Nolan, designer of the clever “Go Tell Mama I’m for Obama” posters, was the first to come up in our discussion of this year’s theme for the Version festival: “Dark Matter.” Nolan is one of the many artists participating in “The Dark Matter Group Show.” Edmar cites Nolan’s work as representative of the “massive amount of undocumented [art]work in Chicago.” Despite his work’s formal artistic qualities and its contribution to political awareness, it is systematically rejected as an artform by mainstream cultural mediators such as museums, curators, historians, and galleries. And this is precisely what makes it succulent Dark Matter.

Lumpen Media Group, the organization behind the Version festival and publisher of the magazine “Lumpen,” borrowed this metaphor for Version’s theme from artist Gregory Sholette. “Like its astronomical cousin, creative dark matter makes up the bulk of the artistic activity produced in our post-industrial society. However, this type of dark matter is invisible primarily to those who lay claim to the management and interpretation of culture—the critics, art historians, collectors, dealers, museums, curators and arts administrators. It includes informal practices such as home-crafts, makeshift memorials, [and] amateur photography made and circulated in the shadows of the formal art world. Yet, just as the physical universe is dependent on its dark matter and energy, so too is the art world dependent on its shadow creativity. It needs it in much the same way certain developing countries depend on their shadow or informal economies.” Real Dark Matter, briefly, is a form of matter that accounts for most of the mass in the observable universe. It cannot be directly observed because it is too dense for light to escape it. At once both deeply pervasive and inconspicuous, dark matter is an analytic device that seeks to represent what Edmar called the “98% of work not documented in art history.”

Among the artists coming in and out of the studio Saturday afternoon to drop off material or begin setting up for Friday’s show was photographer Cole Robertson. In the midst of arranging his display, Robertson explained that his project started with photographs selected from gay dating websites, which he then manipulates using techniques to enlarge, adjust colors, blur, crop, and paint the background, among other modifications. He prints them on watercolor paper, giving the images the appearance of a painting. Cole is among many artists who have tapped into web-art culture. They feel compelled to transform the intentionally “disposable” and “immortalize it,” as he said, into “the pinnacle of photographic objecthood.” He did a series from the reality TV show “The Bachelor” comprised of four stills on rice paper of just the Bachelor’s pectorals “bouncing.”

During a break from painting, Edmar pointed out a yet-to-be-installed sculpture installation called “Humboldt Pile.” The tall, bright yellow three-sided rectangle constructed from wood is funded by a grant from the Norton Family Foundation—“Norton” as in the anti-virus software. The structure will serve as a space for the artist to demonstrate how to compost one’s own body waste. The curtain, Edmar proudly announced, had yet to be installed.

Again, nudity inside wooden structures: this time brought by Eric, another artist in Friday’s show. He will show a series of small paintings inspired by sauna culture, originally intended to fit around the borders of a door back at the California Occidental Museum of Art on the North Side. In Finnish culture, saunas were a place to “rejuvenate the spirit” and “purify the soul.” Here, he explores how “internet sauna culture is degrading into American sauna culture.” Eric asks, when we get into a hobby, do we “get at something pure” or “deny how we degrade it?”

In the early ‘90s, following its inception in Champaign, Illinois, writers gathered for Lumpen meetings (then the “Lumpen Times”) at Myopic Books in Chicago, a beloved groovy bookstore infamous for roaming cats. The group underwent a series of crazy adventures over the following years, founding organizations with names like the Federation of National Disenfranchised Lumpens (FONDL) and later hypothesizing in its magazine that “an FBI mole [was] living at Buddy,” the name of Lumpen’s headquarters in Wicker Park until 2005. By that time, Version was approaching its fourth year after not being invited back a third time by its former host, the Museum of Contemporary Art. At Version 2003, riot police showed up during a performance that was “accused of fomenting anti-war protests.” Lumpen has not ceased their anti-war campaign, dedicating about twenty pages of their most recent issue to articles both opinion and fact-based. But in 2005, escaping gentrification and ending an era obsessed with UFOs, Noam Chomsky, and the Internet, Lumpen migrated to Bridgeport, prompting a new, perhaps more serious chapter in its development.

The most interesting part about a visit to Bridgeport, besides meeting a few of the artists, is a tour of the apartment complex on the second-floor of the building. “It’s kind of like a dorm,” says resident Mariana Pos, who paused in painting the interior gallery entrance door to show me around. In fact, there are narrow dorm-like corridors, and while residents don’t share utilities, all agree to pitch in to whatever is going on downstairs, which at the moment means prepping for the Dark Matter Group Show. Aside from Pos, the show’s prepping team includes Edmar and his wife, Ringo the carpenter, two members of the band Mahjongg (which will perform at Version on Thursday night—a must see), and a few others.

When Brian Ulrich walked into the Co-Prosperity Sphere, Edmar introduced him as the best “Chicagopher” in the city. The photograph he will show on Friday, Ulrich explained, is from a series of pictures of people shopping at thrift stores. The series is part of his ongoing project, which documents people shopping all around the country. And, in keeping with the Dark Matter theme, he’s also curating a piece he commissioned from a man he met outside a thrift store who draws ornate war scenes. Ulrich, like Cole Robertson and many of those in and around Lumpen HQ, graduated from Columbia College Chicago.

Back upstairs, I was enchanted by the quaint two-bed pads and upper-level unofficial Lumpen residences. The fanciful Lumpen World had taken on living qualities. The residences’ allure may have come from the sense of a continuation of the gallery from which we’d just ascended. Aside from a huge graphic poster covering the farthest corridor, the aesthetic atmosphere was technically devoid of art in an official, documented capacity. It’s now clear why Dark Matter is so appropriate to Lumpen’s aims, which sees art in far beyond what lays behind ossified cases in museums. Parties are “Lumpenraves.” Summer is “The Summer of Bad Ideas” or “The Summer of Love.” Fascination with false identification akin to Country Club is not meant to deceive, but to explore how representation changes or offers meaning. On Friday, Deleté Behavioral, a female performance duo, will create a combination performance/sculpture piece, wherein they will blow up black balloons (the long skinny ones clowns use), make random shapes and then essentially ask, “Is this meaningful or not?”

Lumpen is best understood alongside their evolutionary timeline spanning almost two decades. The magazine comes to life each year at Version, which loves “presenting the next waves of art activity and see[ing] how it percolates and expands elsewhere.” Check out this exciting festival on one or all ten days. For more information and a program of events, visit www.versionfest.org or www.lumpen.com. Version runs April 17-28, 2008.

Photo by Bobby Zacharias

A Styrofoam covering protruded from above a staircase, beckoning. I descended through the portal to the basement below. Downstairs the edge of the universe awaited. There were a few empty cans of Old Style, a gaggle of smokers, and cinder block walls with holes punched through them. Inside lay the revealed Bridgeport underground, all pipes, dust, and a scurrying mouse. You could take a walk through a “black hole” which was a tangled maze of suspended trashcan liners. I knew all that awaited me at the end was a few high Lumpens and a strobe light. Instead, I tried to catch a ride to Party Planet, an interactive exhibit where passengers strapped themselves into a wooden box the size of a minivan and watched a simulated flight through space while being jostled around by young guys in white jumpsuits. The line was long. “I wish I had brought my camera!” a young woman in a sequined miniskirt shouted.

I decided to make a quick trip to Maria’s, the liquor store at the end of the block. On my way out, I passed two guys in rocket packs cooling off against the windows outside. Their friend, an older man in a leather blazer and wearing a handlebar moustache, declaimed, “The only thing that could make this better would be an intergalactic wrestling match.”

Right at the heart of Bridgeport’s art scene, just a few blocks from the Zhou brothers’ art complex, resides the Co-Prosperity Sphere, Lumpen’s 5,000-square foot main base of operations. Headed by Ed Marszewski (or Edmar, as he is popularly known), Lumpen is a South Side art collective/media group that puts out a monthly magazine on art, music, and politics, and throws two festivals a year, Select Media Fest in the fall and Version in the spring. It also puts on regular art shows throughout the year. The group has exhibited a growing presence in the Chicago art scene and a gathering place for many of Chicago’s newest artists and musicians.

Starting this Friday, Select Media Festival 6 commences, taking as its base of operations CPS1, but events are taking place all over the city till the 17th. This year, Select Media Fest is centered on Lumpen’s popular theme, “Community of the Future”—only this time, Edmar and the gang really mean it. The space itself—an old warehouse that Lumpen just moved into last year—has been transformed into a landscape that seems right out of Barbarella. Only open during the night, a giant metallic structure that is CPS1 dominates the ground floor, with neon green and pink lights illuminating a variety of panels and techno-gadgets. In the back is a control room equipped with captain’s chair, and in front of it, a mainframe computer.

Throughout the station are a variety of works by a smattering of different artists, perhaps most notably a gigantic robot by Chicago native Michael T. Rea, made entirely out of wood. “Suit for Stephen Hawking” dominates part of the CPS1 main floor, with two gigantic fists-something straight out of “Starship Troopers.” Also be on the lookout for work curated by the record label (or “man”) Terry Plumming. The art produced under this moniker will surely induce either a cringe or a twisted smile (if the recent issues of their magazine and the accompanying music are any indication), depending on your stance on cocaine, Satanism, and harsh noise. Video artists Thunder Horse (who happen to be closely tied to Flosstradamus) contributed to the installation—and however that manifests itself, you can tell that ’80s video game references will abound. The basement contains a gigantic black hole and a huge space ride powered by hydraulics. The windows are filled with miniature cityscapes made out of computer chips and if you attend—you’d better be in costume—the whole festival is being taped and broadcast on public access television stations throughout the universe. The festival will also act as a gathering point for much of the new burgeoning experimental noise scene in Chicago.

This year’s programming seems to take a cue from the work being done in other collectives around the country—Lumpen may not occupy a place as central to the young Chicago art scene as, say, Wham City or Charm City Art Space do in Baltimore, or as Fort Thunder once did in Providence, but if it keeps this sort of roster up, it will certainly be en route to taking up such a position.

If none of this seems to make any sense, don’t worry, it probably shouldn’t. It isn’t supposed to, but at the same time it is. If you have ever seen the work of Paper Rad you can understand the difficulty of explaining Paper Rad to the uninitiated (Yes, some work by Paper Rad will be on display—the gang’s all here.) Paper Rad’s, as well as that of a host of other artists’ work, will be displayed as part of the “Reuben Kincaid Artist Management” (yes, think Partridge Family) space on the ground floor. Further embracing this sort of new school silliness, it seems like Lumpen has pulled all the shots in bringing out a lot of the best artists who make art that is, in the words of some, “retarded,” or according to others, maybe just “fun.” Knowingly so, however, no one is suggesting that Paper Rad’s candy-fueled acid trips are supposed to induce anything besides a nostalgic sugar high and possibly a brain freeze. Let’s just hope you paid some attention to the pop culture of the 80’s and 90’s, because only then can you understand the Dada-esque cultural subversion that is going on here.

Dan Deacon’s golden boy and Baltimore star mash-up artist OCDJ christens the ceremony on Friday, and if his Lil Jon meets Nintendo bleeps don’t make you dance-well, you should go home and change out of your Abercrombie, or just have a few more cans of PBR. OCDJ, who performs in some sort of animal costume (mongoose?) spent his summer starting sweat-soaked dance parties all over the country on a recently completed tour with Dan Deacon and Video Hippos. Keep an ear out for that remix of the Mr. Softee jingle, that shit is ridiculous.

Friday’s opening at the Co-Prosperity Sphere, besides concluding with a dance party led by OCDJ, promises to contain “performance art, pop rock, and space jams.” There’s “rock” band Evolution Revolution, who purely coincidentally also dress up in animal costumes when they perform. Also, Chicago glam rocker/space popstar Brilliant Pebbles and performance art group Dungeon Majesty promise to help make the record for the number of (ironic?) Star Trek/Star Wars/Lord of the Rings/Dungeons and Dragons references you can find in one night.

Be on the lookout throughout the rest of the week, as there are scores of dance parties and other themed events going on around the city. On Saturday there are more DJs and video screenings uptown at the Hideout. Sunday you can get your fill of “space corn” and zines back at CPS1, and see a kraut-rock musical “about an East German space mission whose communist mascot was the ‘meerschweinchen’ or guinea pig” done in the style of a 1970’s documentary. Wednesday you can watch Godard’s classic “Alphaville” in perhaps the ultimate setting and communicate with satellites by radio. Later in the week, there’s a talent show, a dance party lead by The Mannequin Men DJ team, and a free play.

So, if you’ve ever found yourself doing any of the following: watching Night Rider/Thunder Cats/Mad Max, playing Magic: The Gathering, realizing you know the lyrics to Top 40 hip-hop only because you have heard the songs in mashups, wearing day-glo colors, going to sleep while listening to Lightning Bolt, Wolf Eyes, or the Boredoms, or ever taken real pleasure in playing your old Nintendo, stop what you are doing and mark your calendar. If you have done any of the aforementioned things ironically, you may also mark your calendar.

This may all seem pretty silly, but that’s the point. Lumpen does have some sort of political message to make, even if it may be second to the more playful atmosphere created by the shows it puts on. Last year, Edmar led an “assault” by scores of artists/legionaries (they even had a catapult) on the Merchandise Mart, and its corporate art fair Artropolis. The theme of last year’s Version was “Insurrection Internationale,” with a series of events surrounding the relation between corporations and individuals. Basically, there’s a serious D.I.Y. manifesto to all of this, and although you may take issue with all the neon, you have to agree that these sorts of grassroots arts festivals are the kind of thing Chicago is sorely lacking.

Select Media Festival 6. Various Locations. November 9-17. Grand Opening, Co-Prosperity Sphere, 3219-21 South Morgan St. November 9. Friday, 8pm. (773)837-0145. www.selectmediafestival.org