“Do you work hard?
Do you try hard? You don’t. Chicago, now!”
Anthony Elms
When living in a place like Chicago, a major city with expansive infrastructure that still only manages a second or third-tier role in some particular cultural contexts, it is wise to be suspicious of geographical or cartographic readings of cultural production. After all, who decides what the anomaly is, or what norm delineates? From where do we inherit the standards by which some are substandard and others exemplary? Often it feels that determining factors split along all-too-predictable class lines that go unacknowledged.
Therefore, I reluctantly admit that Chicago, both within the city limits and abroad, has a reputation for harboring an independent spirit throughout the arts. Why? To answer in the form of a river of nouns: In theater, the Steppenwolf Company, Goat Island, Theater Oobleck and the Neo-Futurists, to name only a few. In music, labels such as Atavistic, Chess, Delmark, Drag City, Thrill Jockey, Touch and Go, Thrill Jockey; venues Enemy and Elastic; clubs the Velvet Lounge, the Empty Bottle, and the Hideout; the early activity of Sun Ra and Saturn Records; and organizations like the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and Umbrella Music. The publishing world offers Ebony/Jet, Lumpen and its related empire, the shops Golden Age and Quimby’s, small publishers AREA and Green Lantern, and defunct periodicals such as The Baffler and Punk Planet. Dance offers Hubbard Street, Muntu and Luna Negra. In visual arts: the early histories of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, South Side Community Art Center and the Hyde Park Art Center; the defunct spaces of Randolph Street Gallery, Contemporary Arts Workshop and N.A.M.E.; the current activities of Academy Records, InCUBATE, Kerry James Marshall, Dan Peterman (and Experimental Station), Temporary Services (and Mess Hall); and hopefully the publishing imprint I run, WhiteWalls, might be added. This babbling list could continue through the names of hundreds of past and current individuals, spaces, organizations and presenters.
My reluctance to identify an independent spirit in Chicago is due to the list above. They share no common trait, not even a shortlist of traits. Some have progressed into multi-million dollar operations. Others are quite young and still defining their goals. And what makes the staunch pigheaded stance of the independent producer more ethical or worthwhile of support than the staunch pigheaded stance of a multinational conglomerate? The list offered in the above paragraph needs to be taken apart and each project examined in order to elicit any useful discussion of the methods by which they practice, or how they may have begun in a spirit of, independent production.
Sadly, even in attempts made to correct and champion regional endeavors, blind spots can occur, as when the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art collaborates with the Van Abbemuseum on the exhibition Heartland (on view at the Smart 1 October 2009-17 January 2010). Meant to focus attention on the “innovative forms of artistic creation taking place in the American Heartland”, the press release for the exhibition states: “Much of the art on view was discovered as the exhibition curators embarked on a series of road trips throughout the region, and Heartland is infused with the spirit of the open road.” Even if factual – the curators did indeed engage in a series of road trips – it reads as if art in the middle United States is hidden in corn fields or secreted away behind gaudy roadside attractions waiting to be brought into the cosmopolitan light. Doubtful that a press release promoting any exhibition focused on art from New York or Los Angeles – let alone Berlin, London, Paris or Beijing – would highlight the big game hunt of curatorial explorers. Then again, to have centers you need margins.
To again ask the question: Why does Chicago, both within the city limits and abroad, have a reputation for harboring an independent spirit throughout the arts? It would be nice to answer: politics. But no. Narrowing consideration to only the visual arts, the independence of Chicago is a response to some hard facts: financially, Chicago has a fairly barebones and frugal art scene. A young artist in this town cannot hope to have his developing works featured prominently by the New York Times or Artforum, forging a position as a breakaway talent, and few established artists in this town will have mature works plucked for major focus by MOMA or the Whitney Museum of American Art, casting them as a crucial maker in the international aesthetic dialogue. This keeps the capital worth of artwork – both monetary and cultural – in Chicago to a modest level. There is no Chicago-based artist under 40 with a team of paid assistants working to please collectors-in-waiting. This star-making arm of the art market is largely muted in part because no major visual arts media sees in Chicago’s galleries an irreplaceable and powerful base, and the local newspapers see the art scene as below their focus. This lack of attention by the media market draws fewer collectors to commercial galleries and artists exhibited therein, resulting in less pressure on local major art institutions to compete in the increasingly global-sized aspirations of the art world by putting forward Chicago-based artists showing regularly in Chicago galleries. When championing the independent nature of so much of the visual arts culture in Chicago, what is actually championed is market failure.
When the commercial mainstream sector barely exists, this means fewer positions in the supplemental roles of an art scene – fabricators, photo labs, writers, gallery assistants – as an option for financial support, and when the state and national government agencies provide a pittance of funding, there are fewer institutional options for support of the artists and the organizations. In this environment, an organizer with a vision working and presenting at a distance from the museums and galleries can compete at a similar level as the official and mainstream outlets. This style of artistic activity, by definition, acts within the infrastructural void provided by the local major institutions and commercial market. In assuming disinterest and a lack of reporting, programs are conducted understanding that if the project needs to be written about you write it yourself; if the piece needs to be broadcast, broadcast it yourself; if the event requires a participatory audience form it yourself – either within the city or elsewhere – you hustle. This constant contradictory-minded movement causes local waves and appears distinct to communities elsewhere that do benefit from stronger commercial or public infrastructure.
Still, an artist who rejects the accepted channels needs to earn a living and create some version of infrastructure for his activities. To this end, a ragtag number of support networks and working hands are provided by numerous art schools in the Chicago region: Columbia College, the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and largest of all, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the last alone releases hundreds of art students a year. This fact is equal in importance to the fiscal poverty of the Chicago art scene for generating a system of creative support beyond traditional institutions. Artists working outside of the commercial gallery system teach at these institutions, many as part-time adjuncts without health benefits or real financial stability. In fact, even Chicago artists hoping for success in the commercial gallery system need the crucial support of teaching in the many art departments. The students both experiment with and contribute to the various systems of support they have been exposed to in the pedagogical setting. And the constant influx of a large number of students provides both an audience and a mass that neither expects money for their endeavors nor sees the lack of fiscal support as a deterrent to creating a scene they want to participate in.
Before roundly lauding this spirit, it is important to recognize that defining terms from within your own community is no insurance policy against ill-formed perception, as the recent Artists Run Chicago exhibition at the Hyde Park Art Center proved. The exhibition press announced, “Artists Run Chicago draws attention to those outstanding spaces that continue to reinvent the artists’ molds that are unique to Chicago.” To see Chicago as distinct in this regard, one needs to overlook scenes like Philadelphia, for one example, with an extremely active alternative and artist-run scene for visual art, not to mention on the music front the inimitable Siltbreeze Records, among many others. To quote again from the release, “In particular, these artist-run spaces allow artists a platform for creating new work without restrictions while offering an extension of the artist’s studio practice.” First, I would argue that the lack of financial support and resultant smaller physical spaces, and the often quasi-legal standing and few technological resources of many artist-run projects in Chicago are real and defining restrictions. Second, if this sentence is indeed accurate, why did the exhibition proffer a muddled mass of largely cash-and-carry sized painting, sculpture, photography and video featuring tropes familiar to anyone who has flipped through an art magazine in the last ten years?
This last question finds a curious response in another sentence from the press materials: “Chicago has long been known for cultivating a strong entrepreneurial/Do-It-Yourself spirit in business and the arts.” Uncritically paralleling innovation in the arts with innovation in business, and defining innovation as a do-it-yourself spirit, removes the possibility of investigation from Artists Run Chicago, and made the exclusions of commercial galleries or registered not-for-profits illogical at best. So a series of critical questions go unexamined: if what defines a project as independent is a tactic borrowed from dropout society or from communal cultures, what does that tradition contribute? Is a government-registered not-for-profit inherently independent or not? And if not, how not? How many alternatives can be gathered together before you generate a mainstream? If an artist-run space shows the same style (or same exact) artworks and artists as commercial or mainstream institutions, is the artist-run space a viable alternative? Is the visual art equivalent of an independent record label, for example Drag City, a small commercial gallery or not? If so, why the tendency to view small record labels and publishers as more independent than any number of small artist-run, or artist-initiated commercial galleries? Does failure to be a successful business define one a market alternative? What market concerns make one venture mainstream and another venture independent or alternative? What is it to unlink ambition from scale, ambition from money? How do you avoid simply replacing the desire for generating monetary capital with the desire for generating cultural capital? What then happens to definitions of quality? Do artists in fact run more interesting or unusual spaces than curators or dealers? How can I make it in this show business?
This is not to detract from those included in Artists Run Chicago, but rather from their champions who breeze through the terms innovation, unique and reinvent without actually explaining the functions of the groups and the histories of the activities. Consider one space included in Artists Run Chicago – VONZWECK – to examine how to engage the questions. Artist Philip von Zweck has been involved in any number of activities through his years in Chicago: concert organizer, radio host and producer, curator, performer, musician, etc. In disclosure, I have collaborated with, benefited from, advised on, and produced work for many projects of Philip’s, and consider his ornery, contrarian demeanor a necessity in Chicago. When he actually completes a project (as with many independently organizing producers, completion can be the most difficult step), the project is always worth considering even when slight or sophomorically humorous. He is not always successful, but he risks awkwardness and failure, the requirement for any artistic investigation. VONZWECK operated from the living room of Philip’s apartment for three seasons; exhibitions (fall through spring), lectures (in summer). A fairly conventional set up. Philip dissuaded the exhibition of video or sound works, preferring work he could live around. Press releases were written; checklists maintained; opening receptions held; gallery hours kept – when hours were over, he turned off the lights and kicked people out. Works could be for sale or not, if something sold, the only split in proceeds he requested was $30 to cover the money spent on beer for the reception. With VONZWECK the characteristics of a commercial gallery were made absurdly personal. Taking the insularity of a small gallery operated out of an apartment to an extreme, Philip made the function of the space more private than most private dealers even while his space was more publicly available. He had to like the artist – many artists picked by Philip were regularly exhibited elsewhere throughout Chicago. Choices of who were based on what artwork he wanted to live with for a month rather than tactical business reasons; likewise the lecturers were people he wanted to hear. Every exhibitor needed to be someone he trusted giving the keys to his apartment for a month. Press releases were written for Philip’s entertainment as much as they were written to provide the press information, and a time or two no information of value was provided. It was difficult to tell if VONZWECK was a gallery, an artwork by Philip, a tactic for Philip to bring to art and people him so he didn’t need to leave his apartment, or all the above. The hierarchies of a traditional gallery were scrambled, but not in any drastically disfiguring manner. He did not do much to distinguish himself from many an up-and-coming gallerist, particularly if that gallerist had studied Colin de Land.
Now, consider VONZWECK with Philip’s other activities. He makes work in diverse media: sound, collage, video and painting; including a project where he and another artist mail drawings to a gallery for each week of the exhibition, the gallery chooses the arrangements without individually labeling works, the groupings are redone by the gallery weekly. From 2003-2006, he was the co-producer of Blind Spot, a group sometimes involving dozens of individuals that regarded radio as a practice, running a weekly hour-long live to air program. From 1995 until present, he hosts Something Else, a radio program for sound art, experimental music and the occasional live performance. Everything he plays is by submission and he does not excerpt compositions. There is also Temporary Allegiance, a flagpole on which any individual from the surrounding community can sign-up to fly the flag of their choice for a week. As his practices expand, it is the details between these projects, the sensibility one gets from context, where we can discern how some hew closely to accepted forms while others push at regimented structures that allow any one project to “reinvent the artists’ molds.” And yet, the fact these actions are undertaken by an artist is the least of their defining characteristics. As artist/critic John Miller recently wrote in reference to Orchard Gallery, “Duration, perhaps, marks the division between intervention and institution. Keep doing an intervention long enough, and it becomes an institution.” It is this symbiotic relationship between institution and intervention, and the codependency both suffer regards duration, that von Zweck manages. Manage being the key term. The most important questions for any independent endeavor are in administration: How much or how little accepted structure to adapt and make your own? It is precisely the opportunities in restrictions and limitations that Philip’s activities administer, that define them as adhering to, contradicting, or setting new tactics for activity in an engaged manner.
“I have no curiosity. That’s why I’ve elected to live in the country.”
Gary Indiana, The Shanghai Gesture.
Stateside, any place not on a coast is oft-referred to as part of the undistinguishable “flyover states” of the US by those who read myopic magazines to convince themselves that New York, Miami and Los Angeles are the only possible locales of a culture worth calling cultured in the United States. The erudite who clutch this buffoonery craft hallucinatory pictures and tales of the inhabitants of this apocalyptic middle landmass as misshapen yokels scared of their own slovenly shadows, in part because flyover inhabitants are assumed to have been bred with bibles where their brains should be. If, by some fluke, a worthwhile artifact be found in a flyover state, it is all-too-readily deemed quaint or inflicted with a benign form of Asperger’s. Independence here is defined through irrelevance.
This is where Chicago and many other cultural centers are landlocked. In 2010 Touch and Go Magazine: The Complete Years is set to be published by Bazillion Points as a single volume, the reprints will document exactly how codes of rock music were being mangled – by anyone’s standards – in the Midwestern United States between 1979 and 1983. Maybe… maybe… some will notice in the book a manifestation of the details that can’t be seen or heard while simply flying over or breezing through.
Image: Unindentified artist, Saturn business card design, 1973.
