ART AT THE ARMORY: OCCUPIED TERRITORY
To honor the Armory’s passing and celebrate hopes for the museum’s future, the MCA opened “Art at the Armory: Occupied Territory” inside the old building last month. On view through January 23, the exhibition features 18 installations, 8 of which were commissioned for this show. Given the financial support of the Sara Lee Corporation, a growing international interest in installation, and the sprawling, history-laden facility, the MCA here has the opportunity to showcase new art on a scale unprecedented in Chicago. Yet somehow “Art at the Armory” is an event rife with could-have-beens.
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The fluidity and site-specificity of installation are keys to its magic, yet these very traits also make this kind of art difficult to “collect” and, because of its theatricality, difficult to understand alongside more traditional visual art. And because contemporary artists who work in installation are such a diverse lot, it’s hard to frame their efforts coherently. Perhaps this is part of the reason that “Art at the Armory” organizers do little to guide viewers through the artist’s wide-ranging conceptual and material choices. But how are we to make sense of such pairings as that of Eve Andree Laramee’s The Eroded Terrain of Memory (1990), a cascading pile of 3,500 pounds of glittery mica flakes, with the seven bashed-up automobiles and broken video images of Francesc Torres’s Destiny, Entropy, and Junk (1990)?
Though each of these works was created for another space, both take something from their surroundings in the Armory. Placed in a large central arena that has been used for spectacles as diverse as military drills and polo matches, Destiny, Entropy, and Junk looks like the remains of some upscale stock-car derby. That reference is soberly modified, however, by accompanying images of heroic German statues damaged during the bombing of Berlin in World War II. Placed together in the arena, the cars and pictures speak of the transience of wealth and power in the ongoing, costly games of politics.
“Art at the Armory” could also have thoroughly mined the layers of history in the structure that houses it. Old buildings tell stories about the cities that surround them, and some of the installations in “Art at the Armory” make good use of those tales. For their commissioned installation, Rumor (1992), the Chicago collective Haha hired former Green Berets to wire the Armory’s guest officers’ quarters for demolition, then furnished the rooms to appear as they might have been when in everyday use. Tranquil in appearance but armed and ready for imminent destruction, the rooms simultaneously refer to the Armory’s military past as well as its coming demise.
Finally, and perhaps most unfortunately, “Art at the Armory” gives barely any attention to the many Chicago artists who do installation. Only three commissions went to Chicagoans (Haha, Crane, and Jin Soo Kim), and a fourth to an artist who trained here (Newman received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute). The list of absent Chicagoans is considerably longer: Mitchell Kane, whose witty, cynical vision seems to change with every show; Hirsch Perlman, who in recent work collapsed the disparate environments of the art gallery and the courtroom in an investigation of how our culture comes to definitions of “truth”; the host of local artists who have utilized ARC Gallery’s Raw Space, one of only a handful of venues in the U.S. devoted exclusively to installation work; Dan Peterman, whose current exhibition at N.A.M.E. elegantly transforms a gallery space into a forum for environmental issues; the collective X-Girlfriends, who work contextually to make pointed, mass media-inspired political statements. And Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, and M.W. Burns, and . . .
The building will be impressive. To be constructed at an estimated cost of $55 million, the 125,000-square-foot museum will rise from a 16-foot base of Indiana limestone, climb another 56 feet (with a cast-aluminum exterior), and be capped by a series of skylights that will illuminate the upper galleries. Visitors will enter via a grand staircase from Mies Van Der Rohe Way (formerly Seneca), and walk through a soaring glass-curtain wall that will link the museum visually to its Michigan Avenue environs. In anticipation of new installation work and traveling exhibitions, the museum’s first-floor galleries will feature flexible walls and movable ceilings, adjusting to heights between 16 and 22 feet.
