SPACE: Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago)
SHOW: Recent Acquisitions: Focus on Chicago
DATES: January 19 – April 20, 2008
REVIEWER: Corinna Kirsch

Melanie Schiff, Spit Ranibow, 2006, Collection Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

If you’re an artist working in Chicago, chances are making art isn’t your only job. Just look at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s current exhibition, Recent Acquisitions: Focus on Chicago to find some truth in this statement.

Spanning across generations, the dozen artists (Rashid Johnson, Laura Letinsky, Kerry James Marshall, Dan Peterman, Jason Salavon, Joe Scanlan, Melanie Schiff, Tony Tasset, and Scott Wolniak), many of whom exhibit internationally, show off the MCA’s dedication to collecting artworks with a connection to Chicago. This connection is applied loosely, as not all of the artists currently live in Chicago or are represented by galleries in the city. Most of the artists shown in this exhibition hold positions at local schools and universities.

Many of the selected works reference art from the recent past. The late 60s-70s appears as a cogent focal point for these works, due to a considerable emphasis on process and an exploration of that process as performance. Melanie Schiff’s Spit Rainbow and Tony Tasset’s Spew might be seen as an odd attempt on the MCA’s part to start a collection centered on spitting, but the subject matter is more than a coincidence. The subject matter cleanly integrates itself into the MCA’s curatorial program because, as the exhibition’s wall text describes, these works both comment on and follow the photo performance history of Bruce Nauman.

Schiff’s artwork emphasizes light’s involvement in the photographic process. The photograph quite simply records the following act: Schiff spits water out of her mouth at just the right angle. It hits a ray of light and results in an ordinary miracle—a rainbow. Light is both process and subject in Schiff’s artwork. Even so, it is the artist-as-performer who commands the potential of light. In an antagonistic approach to the artist-as-performer role, Tasset aggressively spews paint from his mouth. It’s a dirty, messy act that parodies the concept of art as an extension of the self.

Joe Scanlan’s Four Untitled Candles are wax candles made by the artist from molds of found objects like paper bags. For the exhibition, the mold has been removed and now only the exterior indices the process of the artwork’s creation, showing subtle lines ingrained into the wax where creases in the paper bag once were. This sculpture announces the gap between action and memory when an artist handles materials; the final product leaves only traces of the creative process. This gap is further underscored by the relationship of viewing to the sculpture’s installation. Held in a glass vitrine, viewers merely peer through a barrier at the finished product.

Tony Tasset, Spew, Tony Tasset, 1993, Collection Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Gift of Suzette L. and Timothy P. Flood

One aspect of artistic process shown in Jason Salavon’s video The Top 25 Grossing Films of All Time, 2 x 2, is how to organize knowledge in a particular medium. The artist’s digital path to organizing knowledge leads to organizing experience in a non-representational framework. The way this works: the most prevalent, underlying colors and sounds from these films are extracted into color-averaged frames, while a soundtrack of the sound-averaged frequency plays. The result of Salavon’s experimentation is a curious cacophony of noise and order. In contrast to disciplines like sculpture and painting, breaking down a medium into its basic forms is rarely explored in video. This is probably due to video’s strong relationship with performance and narrative.

The artworks in this exhibition are smart, but perhaps too calculated in their obvious references and critiques. They fit so well into the grid of contemporary art practice, but how they relate to each other is less clear. In most cases, these are works by artists who just happen to live in Chicago and make art.