The Essential New Art Examiner

Bigger, Better, Faster, More?

J eff H ue b ner Bigger, Better, Faster, More? Chicago’s New And Improved MCA May 1996 With all the anticipatory hoopla, speculative press, and swelling drum rolls, it’s easy to lose sight of a significant fact: Chicago will finally have a Museum, a building actually meant as a Museum, a Museum built specifically to house and display Contemporary Art. It will no longer be the museum founded essentially as a kunsthalle, a temporary exhibition hall, in a renovated office building nearly 29 years ago; it will no longer be a small place on a side street, a structure that had originally been built as a bakery and later served as the corporate offices for Playboy Enterprises. This is now something serious, something with institutional gravitas. Something that says: not only will we be a major player; we always have been. “The new facility will do a great job of putting Chicago in a national context for contemporary art,” says Kevin E. Consey, director and chief executive officer of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) since 1989. “In the past we were at the margins of the international dialogue, and now we’ll be in the middle. But we can’t be all things to all people. We can’t single- handedly solve a broad range of systemic social problems, or cause a resuscitation of the art market. But we can make contemporary art interesting, provocative, and appealing, emotionally and intellectually , to a broad range of people.” Whether or not one likes the “poetically rational” (as Berlin architect Josef Paul Kleihues calls it) limestone building fronting a street named Mies van der Rohe Way—is it too rational, too Miesian, or not poetic, 244   T h e E s s e n t i a l N ew A rt E xaminer not funky, enough?—most Chicagoans will agree that the new MCA is a spectacular advancement over the previous Ontario Street facility. When the long-awaited new building and sculpture garden, in the planning stages for a decade, formally opens to the public July 2 (following a Summer Solstice Celebration Weekend public preview in June), Chicago will finally get the spacious, stellar institution it has long deserved. The new $46.5-million MCA, located in an urban canyon off East Chicago Avenue on a two-acre, lake-facing site previously occupied by the Illinois National Guard Armory, will encompass a total of 220,000 square feet, almost seven times the size of the previous facility. This, of course, will enable the museum to exponentially expand its exhibition and educational programming; for the first time since its founding in 1967, the MCA will be able to mount temporary exhibitions and show works from its 7,000-piece permanent collection at the same time. There will be four times as much gallery space: two main, second-floor, “aircraft hangar”-size temporary exhibition galleries (5,800 square feet apiece); a third-floor gallery for video and media arts; and, on the fourth floor, four top-lit barrel- vaulted galleries for the permanent collection, three smaller suites suitable for exhibiting works on paper, and another space for the “Projects” series, which will feature solo exhibitions of new work by emerging artists. In addition to the 34,000- square-foot, terraced, outdoor sculpture garden, the building will have a museum store, a café, a special-events area, and an orientation gallery. Beatrice Cummings Mayer gave $7.5 million to establish the Mayer Education Center, which will include a 300-seat auditorium, classrooms, an art library, and a 100-seat space for lectures, symposia, films, performances, and conferences. During the course of our recent conversation, Consey kept referring to the new MCA as a center of “contemporary culture.” After a tour of the building, it soon became evident why: the museum won’t simply be a place with art on the walls (or on the floor or in a garden), but a true cultural locus—perhaps even a type of community center, a place to meet, hang, discourse. It’s really a straight-up but stunningly conceived public space: at no point do you feel that the interior (or exterior) design is compromising your ability to view art. Kleihues wanted to make a building in harmony with Chicago’s pragmatic architectural spirit (“the naked concentration of the task at hand”), yet at the same time have it embody qualities of serenity, simplicity, openness, transparency, reserve. (While the 32-stair grand ceremonial entrance may...