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.”

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.

We have Version, Artropolis, B.A. and M.F.A. shows from many Chicago colleges and universities, and here on the University of Chicago campus our very own springtime deluge, Festival of the Arts. Art, and all of the potentially staid discourse that comes with it, is everywhere. Artists try to say something, or they purposely try to say nothing. They pursue aesthetic bliss or issue shocking statements. What exactly art is has been something to discuss, ad nauseam, since anyone bothered issuing art criticism.

The art world is full of scandals, and that isn’t new either. They are monetary, like Damien Hirst’s “For the Love of God,” a diamond-encrusted human skull which sold for approximately $100 million to a group of investors. They are ambiguous, like that surrounding Costa Rican artist Guillermo Vargas, whose plans to display “Eres Lo Que Lees” (“You Are What You Read”), a piece involving a starving chained dog, have caused animal rights activists to protest his inclusion in the upcoming Central American Biennial. Whereas Hirst’s piece is pretty cut and dry (a skull, lots of diamonds), Vargas’s piece is ambiguous. The artist’s gallery has stated that the dog was not actually harmed or deprived of anything, except during the three hours that the exhibition lasted. The artist himself has made no comment on the state of the dog, but has publicly noted that he has received hundreds of death threats for his alleged animal abuse.

What do both of these artists have that is never really lacking in the self-generative, exceedingly masturbatory art scene? They have press, and the kind of attention generated beyond a few column inches in the backwaters of the culture section of a newspaper. They have Facebook groups—at least one indication that people care. A quick search for Hirst’s name turns up half a dozen groups about whether he is or isn’t a “real” artist. The most effusive, titled “Damien Hirst is the best artist to have ever lived!!!!!!!”, has 101 members. That’s nothing compared to Vargas’s anti-fan base. Vargas’s name turns up over 200 groups, many with thousands of members, calling for a boycott of the artist’s work and arguing that it is not, under any circumstances, art. There are several groups in Vargas’s favor, but outcry of “torture is not art” dominates the conversation. However vitriolic the tone, Vargas, Hirst and other artists willing to make art that generates headlines come out of the media melée with intense name recognition.

If you’ve been paying attention to the many scandals and issues that have enriched our discourse in the past month, perhaps the somewhat perplexing, blogosphere-fueled story of Yale’s Aliza Shvarts has come to your attention. In a world of serious issues, this stunt is particularly, as many commentators have put it, “annoying.” But Shvarts’s story can teach us something about the way that art works, and remind us that our biggest enemy in terms of achieving something that legitimately starts a conversation may be ourselves and the institutions within which we choose to function.

Shvarts’s story, in the end, is Self-Promotion 101. Shvarts is a senior art major at Yale who told the Yale Daily News that she was planning on presenting a senior thesis project of a controversial nature. She claimed that she had artificially inseminated herself for nine months and then used herbal remedies to cause herself to miscarry repeatedly. She had collected the blood from these potential pregnancies (though whether it was actually blood from a miscarriage or menstrual blood was ambiguous), and planned on incorporating it, mixed with Vaseline, into an installation piece, onto which she would also project video footage of her “miscarrying” in a bathtub. While the work quickly earned the tag “abortion art,” the piece’s ambiguity and actual intentions were quickly overlooked by a scandal-seeking public. She’s ended up with more Facebook groups for or against her than Hirst, whose work sells for more than any other living artist. Though, of course, many of them are calling her a murderer.

Within hours of the Shvarts story being posted on the Yale Daily News website, the story was picked up by the Drudge Report, and a few hours later a slew of other internet sources published the link. By the afternoon of the following day, Yale had issued a statement calling Shvarts’s project “a creative fiction.” While Shvarts still maintains that she did artificially inseminate and miscarry, she acknowledges that the blood itself could be ambiguous in origin and, in a column in the newspaper, called the work “an intervention into our normative understanding of ‘the real.’” Yale told Shvarts that unless she explicitly admitted the piece’s fiction, she would not be able to display it in the senior art show. She refused to describe her work as fiction, and did not include a work in the show. However, she turned in an alternate (unpublicized) project, and will presumably complete her visual arts major.

If it hadn’t been a “fiction” and so highly publicized, Shvarts’s work would have fit in with many pieces that use menstrual blood as a medium. Female artists have long questioned sexuality through pieces that display their own blood in a graphic way, using it to express femininity, fertility, and the taboos instituted by male-dominated culture. While Shvarts’s art might have been interesting had it been ultimately displayed, the quashing actions of the institution she works within, and her own insistence on creating ambiguity and controversy, meant that the work of art itself would effectively never exist except in the minds of those who sensationalize it: Shvarts herself, Yale University and, to be fair, the author of this essay.

While Shvarts chummed the waters for a media feeding frenzy, she shouldn’t be needlessly condemned. After all, she faces the pressures of a looming graduation on top of an intense media scrutiny. A friend of mine dishearteningly commented, “It’s probably good if she didn’t actually make herself have all those miscarriages. She probably still needs health insurance.” And perhaps this is the most upsetting thing about Shvarts: her art is formless, so it cannot actually be critiqued. Before graduating from college, she’s made herself hated, controversial—but, bonus! She’s famous. Though at what cost, both to national discourse and to Shvarts personally, remains as ambiguous as Shvarts’s work. A woman’s right to choose should be inalienable, but by sensationalizing it in a media circus, nobody gains any ground on which to be taken seriously, so there is a reason to be upset by this investigation of “the real.” Shvarts says she has no plans to display her art in any alternate venues. There could be many reasons for this decision, but in the end, one wonders if this is an implicit failure of the artist to get behind the work that she alleges to have created. Hopefully, being the one of the most famous college students in America for about fifteen minutes provides enough salve for the burn caused by the bright lights of the media she invited upon herself.

Space 1026 is notorious in Philadelphia for producing what they like to call “a creative community—not an institution.” The nebulous label “creative community” includes both a gallery/workshop space and an event series. Space 1026 shows tend to be interesting single events, bringing a certain joy to the viewing of art that doesn’t frequently come through in gallery settings. Sound a little familiar? While Lumpen and Space 1026 share some traits, each brings its own special brand of “collective” to their respective cities.

The marquee of the gallery was covered with whimsical letters spelling out only two words: “Home 1026.” The cardboard flowers propped up in the gallery windows expressed a similar idea—this wasn’t a show so much as a domestic guerilla operation. Crayons spilled out of boxes at the door next to a sign that read “MARK the map,” and a screen-printing workshop was set up in the back of the room. The show wants its audience involved, but as in most shows, the audience seemed to be loitering in the space and sometimes taking cigarette breaks.

The show itself reverted to patchwork—literally and figuratively. Spread against one wall was a two-dimensional image of a classic American house constructed entirely out of small squares of bright pieces of paper in colors that resembled a condensed kindergarten classroom, printed in different geometric designs, with words, or with faces.

The same panels erupted around a large map of America, traced on the wall and surrounded by yarn, with slightly distorted versions of the fifty states drawn onto it—though the artists only appeared to get the number into the mid-thirties instead of the traditional fifty. One crushed-looking mass separated Pennsylvania, labeled “OUR HOME”, from Illinois, labeled “YOUR HOME.” Every other implied state on the map was labeled with “THEIR HOME” in large block letters. On the third wall of the gallery a series of prints, paintings, and drawings by the 1026 artists were shown. At the end of the night, however, this version of home moved away, back to Philadelphia, and Chicago was left with a collective of its very own.

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