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| fig.35.321) Bought and Sold (1988-89) |
Books might be required to stand together in neat rows like the brilliant tines of an unused fork, they're still often more best at having to wander around and laying down where-so-ever they happen to be when the tarantella ends. It helps them avoid any necessity that others might feel towards inventing new numerologies or exceptional meanings in the vicinity of their landscapes which are already garbled with robust rasa eating blather. Where engines are built like Gargamel there's bound to be blue. Where nobody remembers ten things and no one wins the ribbon for best in gender the page will remain still. Where most train-like will always succeed or even better yet be, there goeth the sun.
The stove is outside on the shaggy grass. It's autumn already and I'm feeling isolated from the ongoing exchange of culture. There's no pumpkin spice, no fish at hand. The meat in the middle seems to have got sour from being too long warm and away from any real care. I think it's time for the bus now. So I roll out my watch and wait for it's big thumb to land. The yard's already hot but it's still going to be another autumn day.
We've been waging privilege with such aggressive ambivalence and shouting at the street lights while burning our shoes like asses braying ten among dogs. The horrifying reality of our schools is that they're being sucked dry as the corporations leach them with impunity. Then what they cannot salt, you will burn once it's been sold back to you, to me and to me and me...
Now the water is mostly gone. The well is dry too. It's got the hive of concern looking backwards at the darker ward. Of course it is empty now and the tables in the hall seem to be clear of all of their errant glasses, the brown stoppered bottles, or hinged surgical wares. The mattresses have all been stripped and they're rolled over. Some of them are stained with oil while there are others that are just as damp as new sex should be. The room smells like smoke still. It smells like fat has met with a tart cabbage and now they proceed together towards rot like they're a famous cheese.
The fire is dead, it's dimmed and the tall windows are broke. The things that we once talked about won't come again. Making an enemy of the face that we've kept on the wall. Over our shadows but under our chairs. The dinner is cold in this ward and the gravy is thin where the thin blanket has been stretched. You shouted at me and together we tore through all of the things that two people can do to one another with their lungs.
This Chicago Tribune article, Minority Artists Blast City Exhibit takes a look at one of the final gasps of the Chicago Area and Vicinity programs held by the The Art Institute of Chicago. This program was co-sponsored with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs. This program was blind juried by curators representing each of the institutions and the city as well as two artists. The program was then installed at the Chicago Cultural Center where it was subsequently blasted for being disproportionately white in it's selection of artists. Minority communities noted their displeasure by calling for boycotts of the Art Institute, the MCA, and the Cultural Center. Even Continental Bank, a leading sponsor of the program reduced it's financial support.
This was all happening at a time when Chicago's artist communities were already feeling challenged. In 1989 the Brunswick-Balke-Collander building in River North, an area then referred to somewhat ironically maybe as SuHu was devastated a massive fire. At the time it had housed a large collections of the cities galleries and artists studios, providing a massive pipeline of exchange between Chicago and the east coast as well as the west and markets in Europe. The fire significantly limited the flow of cultural commerce to and from the city.
In this same period David K Nelson's, Mirth & Girth created an alarming stir at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1988 with his painting that mocked former Mayor Harold Washington. While the Dread Scott piece, What is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag on view in 1989 drew a visceral response as well. Both of these incidents were the center of court cases that continue to affect how institutions balance their own self interest, their trustees and boards interests as well against those of the community and the work that's on display.
In the case of the Art Institute, these incidents would also impact their funding stream for years to come. The neoliberal antagonism of the late eighties was a two fisted assault on culture that was intended to conflate the depreditions of the elite and educated with the fear that much of the white middle class already associated with minorities or anyone further down from them on the class ladder. This larger and more soft target would be much easier to hit politically and to taint socially and morally with shocking outrage that would soon be followed by indignation and the pugnacious intent to legislate or coptically obfuscate the intention of privatizing or simply defunding the arts and humanities all together.
To say that the vicinity shows at the Art Institute of Chicago were the victim of the culture war wouldn't be entirely accurate. Perhaps unintentionally so, the Chicago Show was still a skirmish. It revealed where institution would be the weakest, it's the overlap of its audience with the funding stream.
This lesson that we've learned is as long as the sand. It's frame sets fear to the sky when the hopeless bee knocks and the widows are lost. These are the things that will not do. Here is the box we dance around most. Here is our box in the sand. Under the sky with our toes. Under the sky its dry and there's a distance between the days we've buried here. Broken by time, the wall still hosts colors of every color. If this plant comes and takes me away, flower. Then I see you load and it's an easy button to push. Here I am Mr Government. My legs are a strong patch of ice. Medieval like the steel twins of tall buildings that have fallen into despair. I'm naked as a clear sky and waiting. It's blue and cold out. I'm handsome and as tight as an ash or an oak. Still, I think that Monday is going to be very sad.
My feet are now sore, they're good and bootsore and we're really drunk and handing things over like it's just noise. The crime for us is god and god is getting old like age does. God is acquiring the prison of smell and the feet that follow it. Tonight there's a face like a cock, it's shaped like two sad hanging balls. It's cast downward, supplicant or won't who cares. There are poor and malingering cockatoo are on the hood, the white truck left inside of the barn's been forgot. If you got into the backseat with me now and the burger in your lap, wrapped inside of the foil that held the sliced onions from the fridge, then maybe we could still talk about the fashion of our love and how it is that we've just finished voting the elections that bear our lovers names like they're the names of cold fruit growing warm on a plate at center of a round table that we've been known to share before this time in this very white truck, this Honda that's really mine.
Still she's flawless. You're flawless despite anything really happening between us this will always be the case. This is the reality of truth and beauty as it stands together hoping to avoid the rain. The heavy storm, alternates between cold and hot as the wind heaves itself over the low outline of the gray rolling lake. The circumstances of our trip together is unexceptional and very easy to describe. This story begins with the following words, he's not from around here while she most certainly is. Someone far away, someone is already preparing even simpler words that are intended to tickle them from above and slightly to the right, forever.
Some lurid old palindrome, Dreamy witch-head in the corner where she's demonstrating her purpose by generating a totality of meaning from the dynamic sum within our experiential parameters. "We make us feel cognizant," she says to me. All of this ends in a deathmatch and the jokes inside of her squares are falling down like so many drunk birds. "I saw that one," she says to me. She winks at me like a little boy that could make some shit up. "Goodbye," she says to me. But then she never knew me at all. Yes, I was more than sensual. I was something more the just Marilyn Monroe. Clearly I could have been a contender, a knotty pie or a piteous gravy hole filled with the weeping flesh necessary for horny flies.
There's the blurry wave of self-conscious nostalgia boiling up around the edges of the rolled paper. Seamstress of the violence that's been on display since 1968, with the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr and the subsequent riots in many of America's cities pointing to the further deterioration of racial relations. All of this has been followed by the murder of Robert Kennedy and just a few days before that Andy Warhol was shot in his studio at the Factory. Here in Chicago of course, it's the Democratic National Convention which is being held inside the International Amphitheater on Chicago's south side, down at Halsted and 42nd Street.
"Blow me like Roland Barthes. Blow me like I'm a tissue of quotations that are only references to other texts, and so on. Steal from me. Tie me up with wonder and make me blind with need and then shoot me like I'm a picture. Leave me hanging over the couch." Myko looks at Kat. She tells her, "I'm a joke, a fat and fabulous joke. I'm an elephant, just turn me around and stick some luggage in my ass. Better yet, hide two mice in front of me and yell, knock knock! I'm so full of ideas that I might as well be pregnant. Look I'm gonna poop!"
In April of 99 Jeff Huebner wrote for the Chicago Reader, Nice Works if You Can Find Them, it outlined Scott Hodes lawsuit endeavoring to correct years of the cities mishandling public artworks. This is a fascinating story that extends well beyond this one story. Hodes, a life long Chicagoan whose father was an Alderman as well as a collector of works by Joseph Cornell and Rene Magritte has been an active legal advocate for Chicago's art community for much of his life. He's also represented well placed artists such as James Rosenquist, Richard Hunt, and Jeanne-Claude Christo, who was working with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 1969 to wrap their former home on Ontario Street. Hodes had met Christo years earlier when the two were introduced by William Copley, a painter and gallery owner associated with the surrealists.
At the time of Hodes lawsuit with the city, Lois Weisberg, former commissioner of the Department of Cultural Affairs pointed out that the responsibility for the public artworks had not officially been tasked to her department which was brought into existence in 1978. The Department of Cultural Affairs had neither the funding nor the staff to undertake the long term project of finding, restoring, or maintaining so many works. This was also cited as a key factor by Mike Lash, then Public Art Program director for the city. At the time he noted that his office wasn't even aware of the extent of the cities art holdings across it's many departments. A list had never been produced or asked for prior to that time. Somewhat related to all of this is the recent discovery that several panels of a Keith Haring mural undertaken with students from the Chicago Public Schools have gone missing since their competition and initial installation in 1989.
Taking into account the vastness that further emphasizes the emptiness of our modeled pursuits, Dreamy witch-head slams on the breaks. Stopping to look around, to identify history and the little pockets that it leaves behind her. This car won't run on gas when it's so much is broken. She'll need a pencil and some gloves. She'll want to vacuum the passenger side and pull the paper cups from under the seat. She has to settle back into reality, buy some condoms and get real heavy by noon.
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