CHICAGO
Chicago greeted me with an event in the vicinity of art and history, a re-enactment of a panel discussion by art critics and historians like Rosalind Krauss performed by Jackson Pollock Bar as part of “Our Literal Speed”. After 12 hours of traveling time from Europe and 2,5 entertaining and yet forgotten movies, this performance was a warm welcoming into the world of conceptual art and yet into the world of art in Chicago. Programmed around the time of Art Chicago “Our Literal Speed” (www.ourliteralspeed.com) hosted a series of events and projects in different art related Chicago institutions.  Gallery 400, College of Architecture & the Arts, was the host of the actual exhibition opening of “Our Literal Speed”, featuring the live theory installation presented by the Jackson Pollock Bar, Alexander Dumbadze’s “Fuck It”, and Art & Language’s “Confession”.

Work of Carol Jackson at NEXT Art Fair, Chicago, 2009

It is only been 3 months since my last visit to the city and altogether the 7th research travel in the Heartland from Chicago to Detroit, Omaha, Kansas and back to the Netherlands. This time Stephanie and I further worked on the concept and artist projects of Heartland “Making the World You Want to Live In” at the Smart Museum in Chicago as well as on the Heartland publication that should be ready for the opening at Smart on October 1st.

Work of Carol Jackson at NEXT Art Fair, Chicago, 2009

My 2nd day in Chicago I spend in and around the Merchandise Markt, home of NEXT and Chicago Art Fair. At the fair I met up with Ruba Katrib, MOCA Assistant Curator. Together we visited the Freij Collection, one of the many private collections that the city has to offer. She is in preparation for CONVENTION at MOCA in Miami. She explains: “Convention examines forms of gathering in our society; every artist in the exhibition is examining this phenomenon from a different perspective.”

“In Miami, we have seen first-hand the enormous impact of events such as Art Basel Miami Beach, Miami International Boat Show, Winter Music Conference,” states MOCA Executive Director Bonnie Clearwater.  “In most cases, these mass gatherings alter the culture of the city.  Although the current economic recession is impacting participation in events such as these to a certain degree, conventions, meetings and informal social gatherings continue to play an essential role in effective networking, innovation, and serendipitous encounters.”

CONVENTION will feature performances, workshops, site-specific installations, and video projects by international and local artists examining the effects and roles of conventions, festivals, and other social and professional gatherings.  Participating artists include: Julieta Aranda, Fia Backström, Xavier Cha, Anne Daems & Kenneth Andrew Mroczek, Jim Drain, Fritz Haeg, Corey McCorkle, Dave McKenzie, Gean Moreno, My Barbarian, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Sean Raspet, Bert Rodriguez, Superflex & Jens Haaning and others to come. As pointed out by Ruba the exhibition’s interactive elements and open-ended format will actively engage the community and challenge the definition of a conventional museum exhibition. I am looking forward to the challenges that the museum encounters in a local setting that is mainly based on seasonal event culture.

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As a north-western European, there seems an obvious failure of political leadership at the civic level, with little thought in city hall as to how Detroit might be reimagined if it is not a car producing factory town. It makes one more content with economic initiatives like Brainport in Eindhoven or civic cultural ambitions in other European cities that are steered by democratic local government. Here landlords and private investors seem ridculously short termist, if art as a regeneration tool is mnetioned it is in terms of artists themselves providing the payback directly , not investing in a longer term process of tramsformation through gentrification etc. The artist initiative 555 for instance is being thrown out of their building before any glimmer of improvement to the economic conditions. Instead, their literal investment in the building in terms of cleaning and structural improvements will perhaps squeeze out a tiny profit for the shortsighted landlord. While I am very dubious of the critical value of the longer-term, planned economic instrumentalisation of art, at least it offers space and resources for artists to produce their own critical frames in the meantime - which is often enough to produce some excellent new work. It is also odd that this imaginative civic vacuum is happening at a time when there is certainly a new sense of political agency coming from the Obama government, combined with its apparant desire to remake the democratic context by speaking directly to constituencies and demanding an emotional change in social relations and senses of mutual responsibility. It is beginning to be inspiring to be in the USA again. Early days…but oh so much better than the last 20 years of end of history, triangulation, war on terror and all the rest of the crap excuses for exploitation.

In Detroit, or more precisely Hamtramck a city state within the larger conurbation. The last two days were spent thinking around and about the idea of buying a property or investing in some appropriate way in the art systems of this city. What strikes almost everyone who comes here immediately is the unmitigated potential of the infrastructure in this place. Driving or walking round its unoccupied houses and factories, almost forces the words “but you could do so much here!” our of your month before you can stop yourself….yet stop yourself you should because, though true, it is a reaction that leaves so much unsaid and ununderstood. For while the civic authorities have been in some kind of crisis for years, people here have got used to living “off-the-grid” in ways that are smart and sustainable over time. As they say, money fled long ago so the new recession of 2008-11 is unlikely to have much effect. While residents of the Detroit suburbs might be panicking and foreclosures and empty properties rises to unheard of levels, they are still some way behind the city core itself. Hamtramck’s small-scale retail and production capitalism is already much closer to what I have experienced in Alexandria or Istanbul than to the chain store monoliths in most of the rest of the USA. It doesn’t work that well in terms of shareholder value and rising profitability - but it works enough to allow people to live without always being confronted with their own inadequate purchasing power, as is the case in poor communities in much of the USA.

But why it is then important, at least in my thinking, to avoid seeing new opportunity in every broken down neighbourhood. There are a number of reasons but I think it boils down to a sense that seeing decay as opportunity underestimates or alomost excludes what exists here already and how people are constructing “the world they want to live in” (as Stephanie Smith calls it) within the given situation. Talking to Andrew in Ann Arbor and involved with the Unreal Estate Agency helpfully asked us to see that decay and decline is also creation and growth of something else if we can reframe our expectations - for every empty lot there is another “tree of heaven”, to simplify it. This is an important observation and worth documenting in the way I think he plans but I am not totally sure that such organic growth is sufficiently socially engaged. It comes down again to human agency, the basis of both art and politics, and how much the collective “we” is able to shape its environment or simply respond top changes from outside. The collapse of faith in fundamentalist free market theology here allows for a new sense of this agency to emerge…and here the initiatives of our hosts Design 99 are crucial.

I want to suggest, without growing too rhetorical, that they are working on a new kind of artistic agency, in which relational art and site-specific production (even US land art traditions) are combined.In the area in and around Hamtramck, the collapse of house prices allows for a new way of shaping the urban environment with relatively modest resources. They are buying up property, generating community by inviting others to join while attentively responding to what is here. Their work has precedents in other kinds of intentional communities and projects such as Rick Lowe’s in Houston but it has a different taste, more modest, less openly artistic, crossing disciplines and often just about being in the world in this place and time. For me, it recalls some old thoughts I had around “modest proposals” as a viable artistic strategy in the post-1989 world of no new grand narratives - something that might worth reviving, I suddenly think.

An even more interesting issue for me (or us in the museum) however is if and how we as a museum and art collection should become involved in their process and practice. Some time ago, I talked about how we need to move from a collection of objects to a collection of (inter)relations - something we have begun with a turn to the archive and the museum’s own history, as well as new forms of documenting artistic practice. Design 99 set us a new challenge. To figure out how to “collect” their project (and in doing so, support it) because it seems to offer a new and more radical art form than most of the object production processes that the art market has sustained up until recently. Working out a solution to this will take some time and head stratching, but I am convinced, being here, that it is worth it. More to follow…

Hello, fellow researchers/readers. Til now I’ve been lurking, but as the third curator of the Heartland project along with Charles and Kerstin I’m overdue to join the fray. We’ve been having great conversations in person and in email as the project has evolved over the past months. We’ll be shifting more of that process of discovery into the blog and using this forum more fully as a place to sort through all that we’ve been learning.

But first, introductions/positions. I’m a curator and adminstrator at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art (coorganizer of Heartland along with the VanAbbemuseum). I’m collaborating with Charles and Kerstin to shape the project so my first role is “co-curator”, a comfortable enough designation. But I’m also in the less familiar role of “local informant/interlocutor.” I’m seeing the region—my region—through Charles’ and Kerstin’s eyes. I haven’t always agreed with their reads of things, which has led to some usefully intense conversations about our responses to places, people, social constructs, cultural possibilities, everyday realities, and, of course, art. Through our exchanges I’ve learned a lot about their external perceptions as well as about my own insider’s-blinders and the partial, idiosyncratic, and incomplete nature of my local knowledge. All of us are developing an increasingly nuanced understanding of the complexity, diversity, and sheer scale of the area that we’re staking out as “the heartland.”

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