Tyler Leeds

“Riffs” begins even before the entrance to the Renaissance Society, framing elevators, doors, and bathroom signs on the fourth floor of Cobb Hall. The exhibit begins with wallpaper that looks like the index from a book in French, or maybe Arabic. If you’re quite smart, you may even suspect it is in Berber. It is an index, but not from a book. It is a list of all the streets in Tangiers, the Moroccan town where Paris-born artist Yto Barrada now lives.

“Riffs” is a collection of the artist’s photographs and films. Together, the images swirl around the singular subject of life in Northern Africa, a place where colonizers came for raw resources, the Rolling Stones for drugs, and now European corporations for profit. The work reveals what shouldn’t be too surprising—the hippie pilgrimages to Morocco like the “Marrakesh Express” left only whispers of evidence on the landscape, but imperialism’s fistprint will never be erased. Reminders of the European colonial presence are everywhere. However, Barrada’s exhibit reveals most poignantly the effects of the global economy on the ground. In Tangiers, as with elsewhere, globalization takes more than it gives.

The first wall you see in the gallery is telling. In “Raft in Strangler Figtree,” the spirit of any American boy will instantly recognize a makeshift treehouse. There is your dad’s metal ladder and a web of rope turned into an improvised hammock, and a plank for the central deck. But this may not be a treehouse. It  may literally be someone’s house. That’s quite a difference. Barrada leaves the question open: is this poverty or fun?

The adjacent photograph, however, is less ambiguous. “Smir Park” contains an abandoned tube that looks like it may have been a water slide, but there is no pool at the bottom. The end of the slide is covered up by flora. Just over the top, in the back, a roof is punched through with holes. Here, in a concise 100×100 centimeter frame, Barrada tells the story of a broken promise—the false assurance of economic development and all the luxuries that come along with progress.

Looking at her photographs is like witnessing the global forces someone studied in a classroom for too long now visible in harsh desert light. This makes sense—Barrada received a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne in political science before studying at the New York Institute of Photography.

The images move beyond a critique of neoliberal economics to give an intimate view of everyday life. In another photograph, children lounge around a living room, playing with toys like a molecule set. In the exhibit’s most beautiful piece, a boy wears a crown of yellow flowers—handsome, even a bit cocky.

In the film “Hand Me Downs,” Barrada narrates a mythic history of her family, using clips from home movies. In one scene, she echoes Faulkner’s Vardaman, claiming, “My mother was a goat.” With too many children, her mother had no breast milk, and so children were put under the goat, she says. The degree to which this is myth is unclear, but the grainy desert landscapes haunting your field of vision make you want to believe every word. As the narration continues, fleeing revolutionary figures hide out in the home of Barrada’s vacationing neighbors. Younger sisters tear the dress their big sister made for her first date. Paris appears, and the buzz and light are ethereal in comparison to the desert.

“Riffs” is aptly named, beyond simply being a play on the Rif Mountains. The work is varied. There is another film about a conflict over an abandoned lot. The new owner wants to remove an old tree, but others fight to keep it. One wall of the exhibit contains a series of 14 posters—some with intricate designs, others with clear messages, like “I AM NOT EXOTIC I AM EXHAUSTED.” This phrase highlights an important tension found in northern Africa—Morocco’s “exotic” charm has lured tourists and money, but is acting as the living scenery for a Westerner’s spring break worth it?

Barrada doesn’t offer any easy answers. She is the 2011 Deutsche Bank Artist of the Year. The exhibit would not be possible without the support of Deutsche Bank.

courtesy of the Renaissance Society

[Show as slideshow]

Just before last Sunday’s opening of Cathy Wilkes’s exhibit “I Give You All My Money,” Renaissance Society staff briefly convened to determine where the installation’s borders were supposed to lay. One staff member suggested that gallery-goers should be permitted to step over the small purple roses scattered on the floor. Another staffer agreed, but suggested using the disintegrating pink rubber mat as a limit. Guests could approach the small pile of matted hair and shattered pottery on the floor, but probably should not go behind the abandoned counters of the supermarket conveyor belt.

As anticipated, the boundary between art and gallery space was re-drawn as each viewer interacted with the piece. One man bent down to pick up a rose and was promptly informed that touching was not allowed. Later, a young girl gleefully approached a stovetop and reached for a worn plastic fawn resting atop the burners—only to be reminded by her mother that she shouldn’t grab at the toy because “this is art.”

“I Give You All My Money,” nominated for the Tate Modern’s prestigious Turner Prize in 2008, certainly defies any singular reading. Painted mannequins draped with rags are juxtaposed with food containers with crusty residues of marmalade and porridge, creating a scene with an uncertain narrative. “I am not interested in trying to be objective in a work of art,” Wilkes said in a talk with curator Hamza Walker last Sunday. “There isn’t a point to thinking what somebody else might think as I’m working.”

Though scattered bowls, an old stroller, a stove, and the exhibit’s title certainly address the issues of consumerism and womanhood, the objects in her installation do not insist on a singular interpretation. Wilkes says she was inspired by the notion of attention, “a contemplative openness without any thoughts, a non-aggressive thinking.”

In creating “I Give You All My Money” Wilkes says she drew from her own experience as a woman, a mother, and a Christian. Repeated motifs in the installation raise some objects to icon status, serving as vehicles of communion for their viewers. “There is a type of presence in repeated actions,” she explained in the talk with Walker. The image of a basket, for example, is included both in the form of a birdcage hung over a mannequin’s head and as a shopping basket, which serve as signs of entrapment in the role of a homemaker. Yet, according to Wilkes, it also references the basket Jochebed used to send Moses down the Nile representing the ultimate maternal sacrifice.

As viewers contemplated the installation components of “I Give You All My Money,” three untitled paintings lay on a wooden table on the other end of the gallery, largely ignored. The small canvases, abstract compositions with colorful undulating lines and amorphous forms, displayed a thick buildup of paint, smeared like mud on the image surface. Though these paintings seemed at first a far cry from the other symbolic objects in the exhibition, their placement on a table suggested that they, too, should be viewed as objects rather than fine art. But as Wilkes discussed how her paintings would accumulate layers of detritus from use as impromptu notepads and coasters, the paintings began to emerge as readymades in their own right.

By taking objects out of her own life—whether pots, pans, or paintings—and inserting them into the sterile “white cube” of the gallery space, Wilkes successfully transforms them. A viewer can recognize the objects as functional or sentimental reminders of home, but the desire to touch and use them is blocked by their status as art. “A feeling of alienation or not alienation with objects is important,” Wilkes says, later adding, “I was putting them inside a cosmic space, apart from the physical world we live in.” By suspending quotidian objects in a realm of contemplation and confusion, Wilkes encourages her viewers to reconsider the relationships and borders between people, objects, and the art we often take for granted.

The Renaissance Society, 5811 S. Ellis Avenue. Through Mar. 4, 2012, Tuesday-Friday, 10am-5pm; Saturday-Sunday: 12-5pm. (773)702-8670. renaissancesociety.org

Courtesy of the Renaissance Society

An otherworldly drone wavers in and out of audible range, welcoming visitors to the show, “In a Saturnian World.” The exhibit’s walls set up a loosely circular trajectory, throwing visitors into orbit as they enter the University of Chicago’s Renaissance Society. Lacking placards, translations, and a definite order, the exhibit by Belgian artist Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven aims to disorient all who enter.

The show’s title comes from the French Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine’s “Poèmes Saturniens,” a work which explores the spiritual and occult. Accordingly, walking into the exhibit feels like stepping onto another plane of experience. Colors and bodies are familiar but not quite right: the most representational series of collages shows mildly pornographic photos of women with planets for heads. Though Van Kerchkhoven uses many different media—pages ripped from sketchbooks, plexiglass, old advertisements from magazines, pastel, and markers—all of the pieces are similar in style, immediately recognizable as a unified work. As a whole, this collection may best be understood as a mythology of an unknown Saturnian race.

The gallery’s literature on  Van Kerckhoven’s exhibit alludes to an attempt at cultural critique, comparing the “kitsch” of the soft pornography that she uses to present-day American Apparel ads. She attempts to undermine the mission of the “hidden persuaders”—the marketing industry—by giving sexual advertisements a completely different ethos. Pages from fashion magazines are torn so that the women’s bodies, situated in pencil-lined rooms with neon-colored shapes, appear distorted and unreal. The show tries to alienate us from the media but goes too far—such earthly social commentary seems removed from the artwork, especially when the show holds such a tenuous connection to our world. Instead the exhibit seems to study imagination, narrative, perspective, and the appeal of irrationality.

Her artwork makes predictions and claims dealing with the existential concerns and mortality of the Saturnians. One piece reads: “Sometime between 2002 and 2008 earth-based gravitational wave detectors will watch blackholes collide and watch their collisions trigger wild vibrations of spacetime warpage.” The works are both futuristic and low-tech, using images from old advertisements and 2D rudimentary graphics. A video piece layers transparent colors and photographs on top of a seated woman’s figure so that she is slowly obscured. The artist’s interest in manipulating and iterating colors and text is also manifest on a wall nearby, where a series of fourteen drawings of twelve circles are alternatively flagged as studies in color, chemistry, and the occult, depending on the superimposed text.

The pinnacle of the exhibit is a 24-minute video that shows an audience watching a piece of performance art. We see an almost-nude man posing on a mat and interacting sexually with a few stone-faced audience members.  It almost seems like a documentary, or a memory: all aspects of the staging (the crew, the lighting, etc.) are visible, but the video is shot with alterations in the tones and white balance, making it dreamlike. At points the video is so grainy as to eliminate the details of the nude man’s face and body, leaving the viewers to reconstruct what the people in the room are seeing. In other moments, the performer’s body is so distorted and the camera angle so extreme that the human form becomes virtually unrecognizable.

Be warned—the “In a Saturnian World” experience is largely reflective of the visitors’ mood; the cynic enters the exhibit and is unimpressed by just another example of post-modern meaninglessness. The ardent viewer, however, will find pieces that challenge perspective and time in what seems like an eerie retrospective of the present akin to prehistoric man visiting the pyramids at the Field Museum. As an actual memory, the show seems like an after-image, fantastical moons and electric orange lips burned into the brain.

The Renaissance Society, Cobb Hall 418, 5811 S. Ellis Ave. Through December 18. Tuesday-Friday, 10am–5pm; Saturday-Sunday, noon–5pm. (773)702-8670. renaissancesociety.org

Maggie Sivit

“The neighborhood’s not what it used to be.” Expressed as a sigh, this refrain is all too familiar in Hyde Park and Kenwood. For some, the real neighborhood was long ago disfigured by the neoclassical and neo-gothic constructions that line the Midway—imprints of the University of Chicago’s founding and the 1893 Columbian Exposition. Halfway through the next century, another chorus claims history’s proper course was thwarted by the destructive force of urban renewal. During this period, the vital cultural artery of 55th Street was drained of its blood, leaving townhouses where clubs once stood. And while these moments don’t lack significance, they are merely convenient benchmarks extracted from a lengthy history. A neighborhood existed long before the 1890s, and exclusion didn’t simply begin or end. Neighborhoods are eternally being made and remade; they are inherently never what they used to be.

Today, no great changes appear on the horizon. Hyde Park and Kenwood are mostly residential and tree-lined, amber and beautiful in the autumn. The lake still reflects each sunrise, sending plumes of fog rolling west in the springtime. Most of the plans for major new additions to the neighborhood are concentrated along Hyde Park’s 53rd Street. Two new developments will be adding glass and steel to an area known for brick, while new businesses procured by the University will appear in older storefronts. Surely more changes will come, but for now this area is a place for schoolchildren and undergraduates, working parents and professors, and of course, the President and those peculiar parakeets.

Best of the Best Bookstores
O’Gara & Wilson
Hyde Park is a book-lover’s paradise. The labyrinthine basement location of the Seminary Co-op carries the world’s largest collection of academic titles. Powell’s on 57th Street is awash with a changing stock of cheap reads, new and used. 57th Street Books, meanwhile, offers new books without the sterile glare and burnt coffee of Barnes & Noble. However, it is the antiquarian and used bookseller O’Gara & Wilson that makes Hyde Park appear celestial in the eyes of a bibliophile. The city’s oldest used bookstore, and according to Saul Bellow the nation’s best, is known for collecting books with a history. Recently the store acquired the libraries of Kenwood Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf and Hyde Park Alderman Leon Depres. Arranged with great care, each shelf in the store provides an opportunity to rejoice in what owner Dough Wilson called the “tactile adventure” of handling a volume in a recent interview with the Chicago Weekly. Yet, it is small charms like a taxidermy goose and stuffed moose head that add a whimsical atmosphere to this classic Hyde Park establishment. 1448 E. 57th St. Monday-Friday, 11am-7pm; Saturday, 11am-8pm; Sunday, 12pm-6pm. (773)363-0993. ogaraandwilson.com (Tyler Leeds)

Best Breakfast Sandwiches
Z&H
Good ideas catch on. The first Zaleski & Horvath MarketCafe opened along Kenwood’s 47th Street in 2008, and the company’s second installment arrived in Hyde Park last year.  Their sandwiches are known for their fine ingredients and a dose of imagination, but Z&H also has a respectable breakfast lineup. It might be tempting to begin your day alone on their counter with some prosciutto and triple crème cheese on a croissant (the “Tenzing Norgay”), but don’t forget to grab a coffee confection. Their new machines look flashy, but they’re clearly not just for show. An odd assortment of gourmet cheeses, meats, and grocery items rounds out Z&H’s offerings. Take advantage of the fleeting warm weather and escape the rush inside by sitting on the tranquil back porch, accessible through the back alley. Two locations: 1126 E. 47th St. and 1323 E. 57th St. Monday-Friday, 7am-7pm; Saturday-Sunday, 8am-6pm. (773)538.7372. zhmarketcafe.com (Tyler Leeds)

Best Comic Shop
First Aid Comics
James Nurss, owner of First Aid Comics, knows how to run a practice. Waiting behind the desk, Nurss greets customers by name, pointing them toward to a new arrival or a rare acquisition. If you have any questions, Nurss emerges from behind the counter to help, revealing his full-length white doctor’s coat, the outfit of a specialist. With shelves lining the walls from floor to ceiling, and stock running from flimsy paper comics to thick, large-folio graphic novels, it would take nothing short of a specialist to curate this collection. Mixed throughout the store are more indulgent items—a Thor replica hammer for sale, a collection of mint-condition action figures, and a series of superhero adorned glassware. But, Nurss also offers group sessions. In the back of the store is a game room, a place for card tournaments and community get-togethers. Waiting for tournaments to begin, regulars often thumb through the $1 comic boxes, hoping for a good find. 1617 E. 55th St. Monday-Tuesday, 11am-7pm; Wednesday, 11am-8pm; Thursday-Saturday, 11am-7pm; Sunday, noon-5pm. (773)752-6642. firstaidcomics.com (Tyler Leeds)

Best Thing in Cobb Hall
The Renaissance Society
Tucked above and away on the fourth floor of the UofC’s Cobb Hall, the Renaissance Society’s vaulted exhibition room attempts to push ahead of the curve. As the Society approaches its centennial, it can look back on exhibits that have featured works by Picasso and Matisse, long before those artists had their paintings reproduced in coloring books. Today, the Society’s mission is to offer the South Side a chance to see contemporary art before it is enbalmed in the textbooks of the next generation. Not every exhibit spawns a star—the venue is too intimate to have such sway—but the Society has a record of taste and the nerve to take risks. Art exhibits, if anything, ought to be tasteful and risky. Cobb Hall 418, 5811 S. Ellis Ave. Tuesday-Friday, 10am-5pm; Saturday-Sunday, noon-5pm. (773)702-8670. Free. renaissancesociety.org (Tyler Leeds)

Best Record Store
Hyde Park Records
Corporate media outlets  may criminalize such behavior, but loitering completes Hyde Park Records. Regulars wander in, chatting up employees or casually sifting through crates. If you linger among the CDs, the regulars will mostly ignore you. Atop the displays, recent critical darlings will appear, wrapped in plastic alongside dirtier jewels. Overall, the backstock leans toward established ’90s indie rock. You know a discerning eye is at work when you see music recorded two decades ago adorned with a bright yellow “NEW” sticker. This isn’t a trick, of course, but rather a signal for collectors. While purchasing such a CD may garner the modest approval of an employee, to get in with the regular crowd you have to get dusty. Hidden in the vinyl crates are old jazz and blues LPs, tempting enthusiasts from across the city to come dig. If your own excavation leads to an unfamiliar record sleeve, hand it off to one of the regulars in exchange for a history lesson. 1377 E. 53rd St. Daily, 11am-8pm. (773)288.6588 (Tyler Leeds)

Best Film Screenings
Doc Films
Doc Films, the nation’s oldest continually running film society, can trace its beginnings back to a couple of Soviet film nuts in 1932. Every quarter of the UofC’s academic year, Doc assigns a theme to each weeknight, ranging from the academic (“The Post-Classical Western”) to the whimsical (“Gore! Monsters! North Carolina?”). On the weekends, the society indulges in recent box-office hits. Admission is only five bucks, even if the night features a director appearance or rare print. The upcoming season promises to hit home. Kartemquin Films, founded by three UofC alums, will be celebrating its 45^th anniversary with showings. The group earned international recognition for its Homeric documentary “Hoop Dreams,” which traced the high school basketball careers of two South Side ninth graders lavished with promises of stardom. Adding a bit of levity to the season, Friday’s series will feature the works of Woody Allen. Meanwhile, a series showing films from dGenerate will offer a glimpse into the independent film culture of contemporary China. Max Palevsky Cinema. 1212 E. 59th St. Times vary. $5 for one film, $30 for quarterly membership. (773)702.8574. docfilms.uchicago.edu(Tyler Leeds)

Curator Hamza Walker and the Renaissance Society host his first solo exhibition, appropriately titled “William J. O’Brien.” It’s a nice anti-title for an exhibition that does its best to avoid sweeping categorization and a singular meaning (i.e., there’s a hell of a lot of stuff going on here, and anyone trying to come up with a title that neatly touches upon all that stuff will probably fail).

Like “Age of Aquarius,” the gallery’s previous show, “O’Brien” is a fun exhibition, wild, eclectic, and colorful. About a hundred ceramic pieces sit tightly arranged on a wooden, T-shaped table, and while a few terraced pyramids on the tabletop elevate some ceramics above the others, for the most part it’s pieces next to pieces next to pieces. There are plaster white faces and rusty browns vases, red masks and sea blue jars; about a hundred pieces and none of them with names.

Most of these ceramic pieces are faces, many of them smiling, a few expressionless or unhappy. One is the blue ceramic face of a woman with sunken eyes and a wide grin. There are white spots around her eyes and over parts of her hair, which is—like her nose and her smile—beady. Some of the ceramic faces take the form of elongated masks, primitive but not unfriendly. Four are red tribal masks, each about a foot-and-a-half tall, smiling with star-shaped designs between their eyes and on their foreheads.

Sitting beside many of the faces are abstract, geometric pieces. One, a black ceramic, looks like a futuristic Swiss-cheese sailing ship. The piece’s cheese-holed sides are, like every other ceramic in the gallery, neither perfectly straight nor perfectly smooth.   O’Brien doesn’t seem to be very interested in technical precision—many of his pieces look like the products of a community center ceramics class—but that’s not to say that his work is “bad.” Technical precision does not equate to artistic quality.

Because there are so many pieces, all nameless and placed inches away from each other, O’Brien’s work refuses to be evaluated on a piece by piece basis.   The forms his works take vary from piece to piece, but all retain an inexplicable quality that lends them a sameness in the midst of their structural or formal differences. In fact, the exhibition’s most notable piece—a  bricolage bust of carpet and fabric—seems to be the only piece in the gallery that doesn’t incorporate ceramics. Pieces of carpet form the upper body of the bust, which upholds a fabricated head contained under a net of pink twine. The whole bust somehow rests on top of a glass case that houses another ceramic head, this one milky white and brown.

Like every other piece in the gallery, the carpet bust is untitled. It’s a strange assemblage, a piece that stands out as a sculpture rather than as a ceramic, and one of the few pieces that suggests a title: Self-Portrait. The fabric of the head, it turns out, is waste from O’Brien’s studio, the recycled remains of other failed or completed projects. The medium, then, seems to be the fabric of O’Brien’s mind, the ideas (used or discarded) of an artist with a wildly active imagination. His head looks like it’s about to explode, and, luckily, it does, its ideas flowing out of O’Brien’s mind and onto the gallery table.

Courtesy of the Renaissance Society

“Hair” is doing a lot of public relations work for the Renaissance Society these days. The 1967 musical’s  upper-register anthem proclaims and repeats the name of the gallery’s newest exhibition, “The Age of Aquarius.” With the words,”This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius, the age of Aquarius!” ringing in your head, images of bell-bottomed hippies dancing atop the University of Chicago’s Cobb Hall can’t help but come to mind. This is a fanciful image for what initially seems to be a fanciful exhibit—after over 40 years of artistic fascination with the 1960s (the oft-called “Age of Aquarius”) it would seem as if there is not much left to be said about the period that doesn’t come across as ridiculous, trite, or inauthentic.

“Quadrangle,” a 17-minute documentary by filmmaker Amy Grappell, tells the story of a marriage in the early 1970s. “Everything is a tragedy. Everybody has a tragedy,” begins the film. “You think your tragedy is the only tragedy? Everyone has a tragedy. Everyone has an interesting life.” Already, the opening lines of the film—the first impression most visitors receive after walking into the gallery—border on the melodramatic. Despite the extravagant words, the voice sounds honest and unscripted. There are no over-dramatic musical flourishes, only a woman from New York City, driving her car and telling her story.

Gradually, the woman is revealed to be Grappell’s mother, Deanna, who, with her husband Paul, entered into an open relationship with another married couple in the early ’70s. The story is told by Deanna and Paul in separate interviews, masterfully edited together by Grappell to create the illusion that the two of them—who, until the film was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, had been separated for 30 years—are telling the story together, engaging each other in conversation.

Over the course of the short film, Deanna and Paul recount how after months of being in a foursome (a “quadrangle”), the couples ultimately divorced and married the opposite spouses. The film ends here, leaving viewers to form their own judgments about a relationship change that was intended to save a failing marriage.

“I’ve been carrying this story for a really long time,” said Grappell in a phone interview. “I don’t think it was very good for us, as kids, but in a way, them saying [the foursome] was an alternative to divorce, that ‘we’re all going to be honest about it,’ there’s something very idealistic about it…as a culture we just don’t have that kind of energy right now, or that kind of optimism, to try things. And maybe that was just a moment in time in our history, but there is something about that moment in time…I feel nostalgic for that.”

Although perhaps less direct in their approach, the other artists in the exhibition evoke the essence of the era no less effectively. A four-by-eight foot plinth in the corner of the gallery supports Carol Bove’s “The Difficult Crossing,” a piece consisting of over ten interconnected objects that include a piece of coral and concrete, a folk art bust, and a photograph of New Age icon Gerald Heard. On the wall is a tapestry of peacock feathers, another installation by Bove that toes the line between the garish and the beautiful. With its kaleidoscopic swirls of blue and green the peacock feathers are easily the most psychedelic piece in the gallery. Hundreds and hundreds of feathers hang together on the wall in an almost painfully flashy display that is more freakish than groovy.

One of the exhibit’s more striking pieces is David Noonan’s series of eight flat, life-size figures of dancers placed around the gallery floor. Taken from period photos of dance and theater performances, the frozen, black-clad figures look tribal and even fanciful in their various positions, one with its head down and hands shaking in the air, another appearing to be in the middle of a handclap, spinning on one foot. In their different positions each seems to tell a different story, and the variety of their appearances—even though all are dressed in the same black outfit—evokes a variety of emotions: amusement at the spinning figure, curiosity at the hand shaking figure and what it is he’s trying to do.

The ’60s are prone to oversimplification, perceived as either an idealistic time we should return to or an idealistic time that we should strive never to repeat. The exhibit succeeds by refusing to make these claims about the Age of Aquarius. The pieces evoke feelings of joy and sadness, hope and disillusionment, but rather than demanding a specific understanding from the viewer, they demand only to be experienced.

The Renaissance Society. Cobb Hall 418, 5811 S. Ellis Ave. Through May 1. Tuesday-Friday, 10am-5pm; Saturday-Sunday, noon-5pm. (773)702-8679. renaissancesociety.org

Courtesy of The Renaissance Society

On January 7, two days before Gerard Byrne’s exhibition “A thing is a hole in a thing it is not” opens to the public, the audio has not yet been installed and the four films that make up the artist’s new installation loop silently. Ladders lean against the walls of the gallery, mimicking the large, white rectangles onto which Byrne’s films are projected. The scene fits the art attic of the University of Chicago’s Cobb Hall, the white rectangles echoing the steep pitch of the Renaissance Society’s ceiling. Even before the art handlers finish, familiar indicators of a minimalist aesthetic, coupled with the quiet tone of Byrne’s films, create what feels like a respectful ambience.

As befits the inevitably self-referential nature of minimalist art, Byrne’s exhibit deals extensively in allusion and quotation, many works concerning the received history of minimalism. The title, “A thing is a hole in a thing it is not,” is taken from sculptor Carl Andre, whose grid sculpture is featured in Byrne’s film “Museum.” In a way, “Museum” serves as an index for Byrne’s installation. Filmed within the galleries of Holland’s Van Abbemusuem, the artist has created what Renaissance Society associate curator Hamza Walker calls “minimalist period rooms,” featuring many of the main players of minimalist painting and sculpture. The other films make explicit references to some of these artists—Frank Stella, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Robert Morris.

In “Museum,” the viewer sees the private lives of iconic minimalist paintings and sculptures, especially through the rituals of museum people: the curator, critic, art patron, security guard, and finally, the janitor who carefully and touchingly guides her broom around the edges of a Judd sculpture. Noting the fastidiousness that her task requires provides an interesting point of entry. Similarly, an extended shot of a Frank Stella painting being unpacked from a shipping frame calls attention to the care with which the frame must have been constructed in order to accommodate the unusual angles and contours of Stella’s canvas. These illustrate a quote from Byrne’s film “Radio Waves”: “Art asks to be considered art.” Art asks for special boxes, for special cleaning procedures, and ultimately for a special interpretative approach, and there is something impressive about this request.

Walker refers to two of Byrne’s films as belonging “to art historical lore.” In one, sculptor Tony Smith drives on the New Jersey Turnpike and discusses its bearing on his own philosophy of art. The second is modeled after Robert Morris’s 1962 “Column” performance. Byrne’s “Radio Waves” also revolves around a dramatization—the recording of the now-canonical 1964 interview with Judd, Flavin, and Stella, in which they explore the extent to which minimalism can be thought of as a new kind of abstraction, and to what extent it probes “the classic spirit.” The camera’s attention in this film turns to the periphery of their conversation. It moves between shots of mundane geometries: a pattern on someone’s shirt, on a lamp, a network of electrical cords, the window blinds, the winding of recording equipment through the fog of cigarette smoke. Towards the end of the interview, Stella summarizes his thinking about minimalism: “What you see is what there is,” to which the interviewer responds, lightheartedly, “Well, you don’t get too much then, do you?”

Byrne’s installation simultaneously implicates a historicization of minimalism and engages formal characteristics of minimalist painting and sculpture. In so doing, Byrne carves out a space of contemplation in which to situate the legacy of minimalism, and in which to linger over some of the motifs, impulses, and embedded logic of how minimalism has been integrated —or has resisted integration— into a conventional trajectory of modern art. In an interview between Walker and Byrne following the January 9 opening, the specificity of Byrne’s interest becomes clearer. It is precisely the tension in minimalism between its defiance of previous modernist trends in painting and sculpture and its relationship to self-reference—its elusiveness beyond the circles of the art elite—that Byrne wants to draw out. He sees this tension as finding perfect illustration in some of “the basic pragmatic questions that emerge” around minimalist work: how do you photograph a sculpture that consists of a square grid of tiles on the floor from where is it best viewed?

The Renaissance Society. Cobb Hall 418, 5811 S. Ellis Ave. Through February 27. Tuesday-Friday, 10am-5pm; Saturday-Sunday, noon-5pm. Special events scheduled every Sunday from January 23-February 27. (773)702-8670. renaissancesociety.org

(courtesy of David Moss)

David Moss is a self-described “extreme vocalist.” In his bizarre, entrancing performances, he babbles and sings in invented languages, his commanding but playful use of his voice leaving audiences speechless. This Saturday, at the University of Chicago’s Bond Chapel, Moss will premiere his latest composition, “Hyperglyphyx.”

The composition focuses on “a rhythm that drives the human genetic package,” Moss says. Trained as a percussionist and self-taught as a singer, Moss is interested in finding ”a pulse, a beat, a chant buried” deep in human memories and “chemical hieroglyphics.” It is what cannot be expressed in grammar alone that excites Moss. To find these hidden beats and pulses, he uses warped excerpts from texts selected partly for their content, “and sometimes for the rhythm and color of their language,” he says. He cites three diverse authors. “[Italo] Calvino, the Italian writer, has attracted me tremendously because of his imagery about time and memory and physical location and philosophy of places…Melville, especially in ‘Moby-Dick,’ represents this kind of incantational power of speaking and writing through repetition and exaggeration and onomatopoeia—it’s almost like chanting. [Franz] Kafka lies between the two, dealing with narrative puzzles and mysteries.“ The excerpts are critical in Moss’s improvisations. “I like to know that I have someone’s beautiful words in front of me that I can jump into and use as material to start something new again.”

Moss’s Saturday performance is part of the “Praxes of Theory” conference, a two-day international colloquium that explores the relationship between aesthetic theory and performance practice in a variety of disciplines. Appropriately, the colloquium is being hosted by the University’s Germanic Studies, Theater and Performing Studies, and Cinema & Media Studies departments, along with the Renaissance Society. Artists and scholars will discuss a variety of formal papers and conceptual performances, including Moss’s vocals.

“Hyperglyphyx” and a history of unique, titillating performances have kept Moss’s name in discussions of the avant-garde. One of his current projects is the improvisational trio Denseland, formed in February of 2008 to investigate “being compact, earthy, and massive.” To the novice listener, Denseland sounds a bit like the lovechild of Tom Waits and a washing machine. But somehow the trio’s music really does sound earthy—it suspends listeners in an alternate world of sounds that creep, crawl, scrape, and slink.

This ability to activate instruments and his voice into something that seems to move has earned Moss significant critical praise. He was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1991 and a DAAD Fellowship (Berlin) in 1992, and in 2005 he was a soloist in the opening concerts of both the Venice Biennale and the Queensland Biennial Music Festival. In 2001, with funding from the Belgian government, Moss founded the Institute for Living Voice, which offers workshops, concerts, and discussions focused on singing.

When Moss comes to town on Saturday, it will be no surprise if his audience is awestruck. He will likely turn Bond Chapel into a playground for his voice to take flight. Or to sink, swim, swoon, or skate.
Bond Chapel, 1050 E. 59th St. May 22. Saturday, 8pm. Free. renaissancesociety.org

The exhibition in Venice in 2009 (Alexandru Axiente)

“Seductiveness,” on display from May 2nd through June 26th, was initially displayed in the Romanian Pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennial. The project is a collaboration of the artists Stefan Constantinescu, Andrea Faciu, and Ciprian Muresan, and the Romanian architecture firm studioBASAR.

The piece is a self-contained unit of art—nothing lies outside the confines of its walls. A labyrinth of passageways, rooms, and stairs, the building fits as snuggly as possible into the confines of the Society’s exhibition space. Inside, it directs viewers through three video installations, a photography slide show, and a garden that sits on top of the structure.

This elaborate setup acts as a sort of theatrical stage, placing each component of the project in a carefully contrived atmosphere with the viewer. The piece’s website expresses this as “‘performances’ of an interpretative type, generated by an entire set of relationships…between the vision of the author, the expectations of the viewer, and the particular circumstances of the encounter with the work.” Isolated and immersed by the structure itself, the viewer is placed in more immediate quarters with the various pieces.

“Seductiveness” is inextricably tied to Romania’s history as a Soviet bloc country and its relatively recent transition to democracy. The slideshow looks at political graffiti in Romania, and one of the video installations addresses the issue of exile in a series of conversations with Chileans who fled the Pinochet regime to Romania and the rule of Nicolae Ceausescu, the country’s communist leader. The ideas of political freedom and the pursuit of liberty, and the ways in which they are tied to the state, are given a unique interpretation in this framework, an interpretation that is fundamentally shaped by the socio-political climate of Romania.

But the piece is also tangled up in the personal experience. Another one of the videos chronicles a fictional bus ride of a man calmly communicating death threats into his cell phone. The garden, surrounded by a sterile white roof, stands as a reminder of the simplicity and delicacy of life amidst the violent and abstract language of other displays. Even the viewer’s place in the ongoing “performance” of the piece, their immediate role in the production of the art itself, gives “Seductiveness” an introspective and immediate air.

In this relief, the question of Romanian identity or place in the world community passes into the periphery. Instead, lying at the center of all of this is, as the Society’s associate curator Hamza Walker puts it, “the question of moral progress in an existential sense.” Drawing from a fundamentally different set of experiences than one is likely to get, say, on the South Side of Chicago, “Seductiveness” attempts to pose and approach that question from many different standpoints. Be it a Chilean-Romanian nationalist or fictional character on a bus, the capacity for moral progression is addressed at every turn.

In a sense, this question of moral progress is one mark of a more unified world community. On the one hand, there is unprecedented access to new information about events as they unfold across the world, an ever constant reminder of the largeness of the world. In this we are allowed a greater picture of the human race’s capacity for good and for bad. But at the same time, this gives us a greater recognition of the difference between people and defines a more concrete sense of identity. And so perhaps it is fitting that such a work has ended up in Hyde Park, by way of Venice, from Romania.

The Renaissance Society, 5811 S. Ellis Avenue, Bergman Gallery, Cobb Hall 418. Opening May 2. Sunday, 4pm. Runs through June 2. Tuesday through Friday, 10am-5pm; Saturday and Sunday, 12pm-5pm. (773) 702-8670. renaissancesociety.org

(courtesy of The Renaissance Society)

Saunders thinks of films as “texts which are always in the air, in the back of our minds,” and his animated pieces play much the same role in the space of the Renaissance Society: their movement is inescapable. Bursts of black-white-black in the gallery come from the animated films as they switch back and forth almost painfully between negative and positive images. There is none of the smooth progression of frames expected from animation. Instead, the sense of movement here is chaotic—the jumps between frames are sudden, obvious, jarring.

Collectively titled “Passage Works,” these films are, in Saunders’ mind, the driving force behind the show. They are projected in two directions—both out into the hallway, luring viewers in, and inside the gallery itself. “I imagined walking inside of a film,” he says of the spaces. The arrangement of constant movement that Saunders created with these films pervades the gallery so thoroughly that even when looking at the still works, a progression of images never stops invading at the corners of the viewer’s eyes.

Saunders is a painter, but in “Parallel Plots” painting is part of a more complex process. Using photographs of obscure actors from the early days of film as references, Saunders draws his own film positives on mylar, retaining some of the integrity of each photo while adding brushstrokes and painted textures. He then takes the positives and makes either contact prints or enlargements, resulting in photographs that look like altered negatives. The works are recognizably both paintings and photographs—a somewhat disconcerting feeling for the viewer used to art that is easily classifiable by media. Saunders cites this tense interplay between the two mediums as a major inspiration for the show. The hybrid creations that result are almost all unframed, producing an effect of intermediacy and incompleteness, much as the films in the space are collections of moving images, but never quite movies.

Even as he deals directly with the physical experience of film, Saunders is not a filmmaker. “My interest in film is really more about how we experience films—how we encounter them, are moved by them, possess them,” he says. And while Renaissance Society curator Hamza Walker calls the subjects of Saunders’ work “stars” in his essay on the show, Saunders explains that “if these are celebrities, it’s a very personal and idiosyncratic selection.” The subjects of the portraits are not easily recognizable because the artist intentionally picked mostly unknown figures from the history of film; the subjects’ obscurity changes the effect of their presence. They become what sanders calls “performances caught in amber, but also living things that you can watch and re-watch and experience in the present.”

For “Parallel Plots,” the Renaissance Society has become a space directly inflected with this simultaneous experience of film, photography, and painting. The viewer is involved, if only by stepping in front of the projector. But more than that, the forgotten stars, their faces staring out in still images from the walls and flickering against them in film, require constant attention.
Renaissance Society, 5811 S. Ellis Ave. Through April 11. Tuesday-Friday, 10am-5pm; Saturday-Sunday, noon-5pm. (773)702-8670. renaissancesociety.org