As the Director of Collections and Exhibitions and Curator of Contemporary Art at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum, Stephanie Smith has organized articulate exhibitions marked by expansive investigations of focused themes. In conversation with Duncan MacKenzie and Jeff M. Ward from the podcast Bad at Sports, Smith discusses her most recently realized exhibition, Adaptation. The group exhibition–which includes works by Guy Ben-Ner, Arturo Herrera, Catherine Sullivan, Eve Sussman and The Rufus Corporation, as well as special guests ARTV24103–is on view at the Smart Museum of Art until May 4th, 2008. Smith begins by describing the ideas behind the exhibition. Stephanie Smith: The exhibition’s premise is the notion that adaptation is a strategy worth paying attention to in contemporary art. Movies or theater are arenas where you think about adaptation as a strong practice, but it’s often a relatively constricting conversation amongst film theorists. Discussions of adaptation tend to focuses on questions of fidelity, rather than creative expansion upon or invention through original source material. This seemed interesting  to think about in relation to several time-based works in which artists adapted source material through a  set of extended processes, adding many ideas, sources, quotations and references to make something new. In a panel discussion with three of the artists in the exhibition–Arturo Herrera, Guy Ben-Ner and Catherine Sullivan–the importance for the source material to be a starting point was expressed by all. They don’t want knowledge of the original material to be required to have a meaningful encounter with the work. Sources can provide a spark; artists then go off into other territory. Sources can, though, provide  a hook. You’ve probably heard of Moby Dick, so that provides you with an initial beginning point  when you see Guy Ben-Ner’s twelve-minute, partial re-staging. Ben-Ner has done a series of projects where he uses a poverty of means.  He made Moby Dick when he was beginning his art career. With two young kids, he needed to spend time at home, so he turned his apartment into a combination fantastical play-room and studio. His works are simultaneously a dad playing with his kids and an artist making serious investigations. In Moby Dick he puts a pole in the garbage disposal that becomes a mast. Putting his daughter in a stripped shirt, he’s suddenly  got a sailor on the deck of a ship. It suggests the power of subtle shifts in one’s space when an artist brings his or her creativity to bear on the world. Duncan MacKenzie: How quickly that kitchen can morph touches upon the idea of essentializing narrative into something totally new. That is always an interest with Catherine Sullivan’s work. SS: Significantly, Catherine’s piece in this exhibition, Triangle of Need, has been presented in a couple of different forms already. Here in Chicago, the work is presented on luscious plasma screens so you  can sit back and watch the deeply layered action play out across several screens. You are seeing images that were filmed in a small, working-class Chicago apartment, and also Vizcaya, an opulent home that was built by agricultural manufacturer James Deering. There  is this nice oscillation between the space in which factory workers might have lived and the pleasures of capital engagement Deering enjoyed. You could also treat the beautiful movements of the characters like a dance. The strange language you hear in the video is an invented version of Neanderthal. One of Catherine’s key sources was a Nigerian scam e-mail. Jeff M. Ward: How did this installation compare to Ben-Ner’s Wild Child, which is projected in front of an artificial hill with a tree? SS: Part of what I was interested in was thinking about a group of artists who had distinct approaches to  art making and could provide very distinct practices, different kinds of source materials and very different spaces. Catherine’s work is presented on multiple screens and you listen to it through headphones. This was a solution we come up with to adapt her piece to this particular space. With Ben-Ner, it is a space to rest. You can lie down on the hill and see this 17 minute long piece. Guy is very interested in the oddity of seeing time-based work in a museum. But the project works on other levels, too: it’s a hill; it’s a viewing platform; it is also re-creating part of the set. I think it creates empathy between you as an audience member and the characters. Wild Boy is an adaptation of a François Truffaut film dramatizing  a true story from 19th century France about a feral boy, taken in by a doctor who observes the child by playing games with him; in Wild Child, Guy works with his son. As in Moby Dick, there is a creation of a meaningful fiction, but again there are also other layers of reference. Guy is quoting  70s performance art and silent movies. He gives you these moments of slapstick as a way to provide a little gift to somebody who doesn’t want to stay for the whole seventeen minutes; at the same time, these moments  are really pleasurable. Maybe they  will entice you to stay also. DM: Doesn’t Ben-Ner’s piece  also directly reference civilizing  his own child? SM: Oh yeah, that is the whole crux of it. Last night at the panel discussion he said a very beautiful and kind of painful thing. He was talking about a couple of moments in the film that are hard for him  to watch as a father. There is one scene were a candy apple hangs  from the tree in “the wild.” It is an intelligence test; there is also a pair of scissors nearby. The boy picks the scissors up and cuts the apple  off the string, which trips a trap!  A box comes down and captures him. Guy’s son didn’t know that that was going to happen. It is a combination of fantasy and real; it’s a  real interaction between parent and child. So there’s a lot going on beyond the initial source, and you don’t have to know about it to get into the work. JMW: How about the Eve Sussman/Rufus Corporation piece, which  is presented in a cinema-like setting with a large projection? SS: It’s a big, operatic piece in many ways. Eve has many technical requirements that she and the Rufus Corporation developed for The Rape of the Sabine Women. Early on,  the Smart Museum entered into a conversation about the space and tech requirements before we could commit to co-producing the work. We brought in a terrific production consultant, Larry Smallwood, and I worked really hard with Larry and the artists on the specifics of how to bring the really rough idea that I and the artists had into a full-fledged form. The piece is eighty minutes, like a feature film. It was initially inspired by John Louis David’s painting from 1799, The Intervention  of Sabine Women. They dug more deeply into the ancient Roman mytho-historic story that inspired David, and updated it to the 1960s. In the story, Rome, a brand-new city-state, doesn’t have enough women to continue its growth via childbirth, so they have a big festival for the neighboring Sabines and abduct the women. Here, rape means abduction. The Sabine women marry the Romans, give birth to good, Roman citizens and become embedded in this new community. When their brothers and fathers come back to try and free them is the moment of the intervention: the women, wanting neither their Sabine fathers nor Roman children to perish, step into the fray and stop the battle. David paints an amazing, roiling image of battle and tumult. In the center,  one Roman solider and one Sabine solider stand with a women, her arms thrust out on either side between them. Eve initially thought about the choreography it would take to do an updated version of that battle scene, but then she moved  to thinking about the love triangle that is at the heart of the story.  That becomes the focus of the piece,  but there is still a battle scene.  It’s the image that we used for  the poster. You can see the layer- ing bodies; it has the feel of  a neo-classical battle painting. DM: Adaptation also features former Chicagoan Arturo Herrera’s first video installation. I didn’t  quite know what to expect, and I was quite surprised by what I got. SS: One thing I should say is that it is not a video installation. We used video installation in the title of the show as a way of giving people something to hold onto, but Arturo’s piece is a digital projection of eighty photographs that he had made of prior works. He dipped some of the film in water so that these accidental effects appear on the photographs. For this installation, Arturo worked with a computer programmer who created software that randomly pulls from the images in tandem with changes in the pitch of the Igor Stravinsky music that you hear. Arturo sequenced them himself in an earlier installation. This is the first time he has worked with moving images, and he chose as his spark a ballet that was performed by the Ballets Russes in 1923 called Les Noces. The score incorporates bits of Russian verse, so there is a collaged quality to the music. That process of re-working and abstracting popular culture in the process  of making music is something that Arturo has been interested in for  a while, as an analogue to his own process. But he also just loves this music, loves the ballet. He wanted to take a piece that dealt with all of the elements of the original ballet: very stark sets, mechanical choreography, and the flatness of the music. The frontality of the dance inter-ested Arturo as someone who has worked primarily in flat, two-dimensional media. Also, the software pulls randomly from the images. That chance-based element is analogous to dance. In performance, though there is a certain rhythm  to the steps. It is never going to be quite the same twice. JMW: It seems key to these works that the source material is altered a great deal while becoming art. What freedoms do visual artists have that filmmakers may not that allows their adaptations to move far afield from the original source? SS: There are a lot of different answers to that. One: artists don’t have an obligation to the source. Guy said, “I don’t have an obligation to Moby Dick; I have an obligation to Guy Ben-Ner.” The source material is a material like any other materials that he can use, or not, in his work. And: there are different commercial structures. Nobody has hired Catherine Sullivan to make  a movie with the backstory of some Nigerian scam email. She put together the funding, support and logistics that were necessary. DM: Finally, explain the interface between Catherine Sullivan and her students in the show. SS: Catherine is a faculty member here at the University, and she taught a practicum on adaptation last fall. Grads and undergrads worked with her to think through ideas of adaptation. They ended up forming a collective that is included in the Chicago presentation of the show, with a single channel video work. It’s a really great piece, and an extension of the kind of work we  do at the Smart as the University of Chicago’s art museum. by Duncan MacKenzie & Jeff M.Ward