Tamer Hassan and Mairead Delaney. The Thing That Does Not Need to Come Up for Air; performance. Photo: George Olken.

The Sunday, February 5th programming for “2nd Floor Rear” ran from dawn until eleven o’clock at night across nine venues in three neighborhoods along the Pink Line. The experience of the “annual DIY festival of art in experimental contexts, apartment galleries, and ephemeral and migrant projects” was inevitably one of FOMO: of arriving early or late, of missing work altogether while you tried to see something else, or getting lost. Following the festival map was like being on a scavenger hunt from small galleries to artists’ apartments to performances outside the 18th Street station and in the parking lot of Mana Contemporary.

Consistent with the festival’s theme of “Ritual,” many artists offered secular, aestheticized versions of spiritual practices. Nancy VanKanegan, whose work is informed by “a lifelong study of yoga,” asked viewers to participate in the construction of her playful Memory Mandala by arranging found objects including bones, flowers, keys, and plastic toys. For Wish Piece, Lauren Sudbrink welcomed visitors to her third-floor apartment to write wishes and worries on squares of red paper, which took flight when burned, reminiscent of Chinese lanterns. Sudbrink, who calls her process “cannibalistic,” collected the falling ashes for a future project. Both works flattened rather than transformed the underlying spiritual practices while retaining some of their beauty.

Continue reading Part 2 here.

Annie Kielman + Josh Patterson, et. al. The MorphoTransverse Methods, 2017; performed at Tritriangle. Photo: Brit Barton.

The first full day of “2nd Floor Rear: A DIY Festival of Art in Alternative Spaces,” in its sixth year of annual programming, seemed in earnest to address the inclusiveness and ambiguity of contemporary performance art; meaning, it can be just about anything, especially within the 2017 curatorial theme of “Ritual.” The events of Saturday, February 4th’s “2nd Floor Rear” programming took place in neighborhoods along the Blue Line. Although, what the programming made up for in everything-ism, it seemed to lack in cultivating a genuine audience experience.

As the murkiness of what makes performance art a performance, or art, became slowly more apparent throughout the day’s events, still larger and more paradoxical questions arose. How does this kind of art festival intersect with gentrification and the reverberating political conditions of migration while roaming throughout West Side neighborhoods?  What is the proper role of documentation of performance art? The day seemed divided into performances that required either audience participation or spectatorship, rarely blending the two successfully.

Continue reading Part 1 here.

(2011), Robbins reimagines the role of the artist in pop culture. In this conversation with Dan Gunn, Robbins focuses on President Trump’s rhetoric, capitalism, professional wrestling, Andy Kaufman, fake news, the problems with satire, and more. This article was originally published on January 20, 2017.

Chicago Artist Writers: Donald Trump is a crossover politician/media personality like the USA has rarely, if ever, seen before. I am interested in asking you about his persona and rhetoric because you’ve thought heavily about the intersection of art and entertainment as well as the real and the imagined. What kind of characteristics do you see in the Trumpian media theater?

David Robbins: I don’t have an especially sophisticated take, but as a good citizen, I’ll give it a try. Trump has the potential to put this country at risk. We’re all grappling with what’s happened.

First off, we have to recognize—or really, admit—that American society has been heading in this direction for a few decades now. I refer to the confusion of democracy with capitalism. Since Reagan—the first postmodern president, an actor who seemed to approach the office as another in a long line of roles—the idea has taken hold that the value of American society is primarily understood as economic opportunity, the pursuit of financial self-interest, and the social mobility this sometimes delivers. Increasingly, narratives of ascendancy—of going from nothing to something, or from less to more, or from plenty to grotesquely more than plenty!—replaced all other narratives. Which is no surprise, exactly, since money has a way of devaluing everything that isn’t oriented around money. Ascendancy stories were always important, but they used to compete with stories of freedom, of justice, of sacrifice, of pioneer hardiness, and so on. After the world decided—late 1980s, the Berlin Wall falls in ’90—to give up on formulating any real challenge to capitalism, narratives of opportunity and its conjoined twin, self-actualization, became the only stories that really mattered. This was the news that Jeff Koons delivered, no? A world of self-actualization, minus criticality.

Read the full conversation here.

Dan Graham. Pavilion/Sculpture for Argonne (detail), 1982. Photo: Yuri Stone, 2015.

Marie retired from the Argonne National Laboratory a number of years before our visit but stays busy by hosting tours of the facilities. When we arrived, she greeted us with enthusiasm. She was joined by her husband, Robert, a current employee of Argonne, and they were both eager to share the anomaly on campus. We weren’t there to tour the nanoparticle lab or the electrical energy storage grid. We asked Marie how often someone requests a visit to the Dan Graham pavilion. She replied without hesitation, “Literally never.”

There isn’t a trace of Graham’s first outdoor site-specific sculpture, installed in 1982, on the Argonne National Laboratory website. I first heard about the piece when I was working at the Renaissance Society, where we had shown the Model for Pavilion/Sculpture for Argonne (1978-81) in his solo exhibition Selected Works in 1981 and had published an accompanying catalog. The Art Institute of Chicago purchased the model and the Pavilion/Sculpture for Argonne had been realized at the federal facility shortly after the exhibition in 1982. I was always curious. I emailed tours@anl.gov, just asking for a photo or information about the sculpture and its location on the Laboratory campus. I connected with an employee from the Communications, Education, and Public Affairs Department who sent a very direct, and simple email, “The pavilion is located near our cafeteria. If you would like a better photo, I would be happy to send one to you,” with an attached PDF of an Argonne “internal publication” from 1982. After several further email exchanges over the course of two weeks, and the agreement of Marie to meet us during off-hours, the tour was booked for a Sunday evening in early August. By then a particular tone had been set by the employee asking if I was a U.S. citizen, for my age, if I had a valid driver’s license, and what state I was from since “there are five jurisdictions where [a] driver’s license is not accepted at a federal facility.” The last email was concluded with a final requirement, “Everyone must wear flat, closed-toe shoes.”

Read the full essay here.

William Dawson. Collected Figures, c. 1970.

Dan Gunn: How did you come to curate this show, and what had you heard about the previous show at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1982?

Faheem Majeed: I really wasn’t aware of the show prior [to Intuit’s invitation]. I was aware of Intuit, and they had invited me a while back to do a talk about the Chicago artist Eddie Harris, who is in the show. Anyone who knows my work knows that I was formerly the Executive Director of the South Side Community Art Center. My art practice centers around the mission of that historic WPA art center to support artists, especially artists of color. When I was invited, I spoke as an artist, I always speak as an artist first and as an administrator second. I talked about being impressed with the craftsmanship of Chicago artists and sculptors like Mr. Imagination, Eddie Harris, and David Philpot, and their ability to carve forms and do assemblage. These were things that I was interested in as a sculptor myself. The terminology of “folk artist,” “outsider,“ “intuitive,” none of these terms were familiar.

Dan Gunn: Because you encountered these people as contemporaries through the South Side Community Art Center?

Faheem Majeed: Absolutely, yes. They were people I admired because of their artwork. So I talked about that instead of how their work was classified. The board president and former executive director here, Cleo Wilson, said she really liked the way that I was talking about the work and approached me along with some of the art committee members to come and curate this show. I know what “outsider art” is in a very surface way, and I asked them to tell me what that is. Is that different than “folk art”? If there is a Black folk art, is there a White folk art? So I had all of these questions. These questions led me down the rabbit hole.

Read the full interview here.