Up on the fourth floor of the Public Library Cultural Center, there’s a series of partitioned spaces filled with strange objects and constructions–“site-specific installations,” as they’re known in the art world. Such works, built specifically for a particular site and often creating an environment into which the viewer enters, are not readily salable commodities. Indeed, this type of art can trace its origins in part to a conscious revolt, beginning in the late 1960s and early ’70s, against the commercialization of art, which has by now reached almost obscene heights. The show, which comprises the work of five artists, is titled “Present at the Creation”–suggesting perhaps that the viewer’s presence and participation are necessary to the making of meaning in such works.
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One of the five installations seems particularly meaningful to me. Entering the northernmost space, the viewer is immediately confronted with a huge valise or purse, carved out of what appears to be granite (although it isn’t), displayed under a large glass case, as if in a museum. Also in the case are a small model of the Columbus Monument, the original of which exists in London, and a large anonymous bone. Inscribed around the top of the case is the legend: “That Which We Domesticate Domesticates Us,” a phrase that also serves as the subtitle of the work. And that’s just the beginning–the whole area is awash with mementos, artifacts (real and imitation), and texts, resembling a mad cross between museum, curio shop, and school. Marco Polo in the Garden of Eden–that’s the title of the installation.
Marco Polo in the Garden of Eden is by Robert Peters, a veteran Chicago-area artist whose work is always strongly conceptual and who uses his art, he tells me, as a means of thinking. What is he thinking here? The starting point, he says, is the observation that “in this culture, we’re so concerned with authenticating things.” The phenomenon of Hubbell revival blankets–a resurrected and frozen authenticity–is an obvious case in point, as is the importance that can be attached to a purebred pet or to the “authentic” history of one’s family name (anxiety about one’s own “purebred” nature?).
Peters sees himself as a political as well as a philosophical artist. He wants to open up a dialogue, to present certain ideas and get people to ruminate over them, to present questions about the cultural constructs that underlie our world. “For me,” he says, “that kind of activity is the only hope to get the world to move in other directions that might be somehow more equitable, a better place for all of us to live.”
