Charles Bernstein has been a major figure in American poetry since 1978, when he coedited the influential magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. “One of the things that interested me was poetry that was eccentric, that diverged from the norms, that was weird and queer and extreme and very self-conscious about how its forms were provisional and imaginary and invented,” Bernstein said in an interview. Since the 1970s, Bernstein has published more than thirty books of poetry, essays, and libretti. Read the rest of this entry »

“Art is a kind of religion, in a sense,” said photographer Anna Shteynshleyger in a public conversation with Renaissance Society associate curator Hamza Walker last Sunday. “For me, there’s not just an overlap—there’s similarities.” Not something often heard coming from a successful contemporary artist, but Shteynshleyger, it seems, is an exception. A practicing Orthodox Jew and the author of an eponymous exhibit that opened at the Renaissance Society on January 3, Shteynshleyger has spent the past seven years making photographs that deal directly with her religion. Along the way, she has deftly avoided the pitfalls that often prevent vocally religious artists from making universally meaningful art and from being accepted by curators, gallery owners, and the contemporary art scene. Read the rest of this entry »

Juxtaposing images of fighter jets, CIA black sites, and industrial factory farms with family portraits and shots of Polish-Americans at ethnic festivals, the forty photographs and wall-mount quotations that comprise “Polonia and Other Tales,” Allan Sekula’s current exhibition at the University of Chicago’s Renaissance Society, vacillate between depicting “a romantic role of Poland and Poland’s actual geo-politics,” according to curator Hamza Walker. Taken as a whole, the show works to tell not only the story of Poland and Polonia, a term for the Polish expatriate community, but also the way that each narrative is embedded in geo-political issues. Read the rest of this entry »

“It’s a cult,” Renaissance Society curator Hamza Walker said, addressing a room filled to the brim with art students from across Chicago. The statement was in response to a question posed by a student that he rephrased as, “Why does contemporary art work? How can artists get away with it?” Read the rest of this entry »

Joe McPhee is a Renaissance man of sound. The 70-year-old horn and reed player’s versatility has made him one of the free music community’s most cherished members since he released his first recordings on his own label in the late 1960s. The idea of revolution has been crucial to McPhee’s prolific career, and appropriately, his music has been a radical force in avant-garde jazz. But he has also shown himself capable of overturning his own standards and learning from new collaborators. As a precursor to its appearance at the Umbrella Music Festival in the Loop, his group Survival Unit III (featuring Chicagoans Fred Lonberg-Holm and Michael Zerang) performs at Bond Chapel as part of the Renaissance Society’s music series. Read the rest of this entry »

In honor of the current exhibition at the Renaissance Society, “Several Silences,” curator Hamza Walker invited music critic and Bard College professor Kyle Gann to give a lecture last Sunday on John Cage’s “4’33”,” a controversial piece which inspired many New Music composers at its premiere in 1952. Gann, whose book on Cage will be released this autumn, helped herald and legitimize New Music as a genre for critical study in his writings for the Village Voice from 1986 to 2005. Read the rest of this entry »

One hundred clear plastic balls with curled slips of blank paper embedded in them litter the floor of the Renaissance Society’s gallery. Five and seven-eighths inches in diameter, they’re big enough to maneuver around, and light enough for a toddler to pick up. As the crowd at the opening tiptoes around them like uncomfortable subjects in conversation, a bank of mute TVs loop a video of mute public figures waiting for interviews to begin and descendents of John Cage’s “4’33”” spin on turntables. Downstairs a few minutes later a German curator asks, “Can you calculate the void?” The silence is pregnant, but he answers his own question. “Not by comparing silence to nothing. There are no nothingnesses,” he says, referencing Jean-François Lyotard, “but there are some silences.” Read the rest of this entry »

Try not to feel judged as the nine Supreme Court justices knowingly smile down at you at the entrance to the Renaissance Society’s latest exhibit, “My Laws are My Whores,” by School of the Art Institute-trained artist Paul Chan. As kind as their faces are, the great height at which the charcoal sketches are placed raises them to an imposing angle, and the physical distance suggests that these figures, for all their power, are out of touch with the earthly matters that lie in wait around the corner. Read the rest of this entry »