The Essential New Art Examiner

. . . In a Place Like This ?

M ar í a J os é Barandiar á n . . . In a Place Like This? What’s a Contemporary Show Like ‘About Place— Recent Art of the Americas’ Doing at the Art Institute of Chicago? September 1995 As a survey of contemporary art whose dates roughly coincided with those of the 1995 Whitney Biennial, “About Place: Recent Art of the Americas,” at the Art Institute of Chicago, could hardly escape comparison on some levels with that much-anticipated New York show. Each exhibition was tightly commanded by a single curatorial hand and each included works by Jeff Wall, Brice Marden, and Andrea Zittel. But all similarities end there. By including artists from Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, and the United States in its survey, the Art Institute leapt beyond the idea of “American Art” to “Art of the Americas,” moving toward the more international focus of contemporary art centers such as the Pompidou in Paris, the Reina Sofia in Madrid, and the Dia Foundation in New York. “About Place” marks the revival, after a nine-year hiatus, of the Art Institute’s “American Exhibition” series. Instituted in 1888, these surveys of contemporary American art took place every year or two and featured up to 58 American artists and 500 artworks at a time. Since the ’50s, as the North-American art scene grew in productivity and gained international critical and commodity status, the exhibitions decreased in size and, presumably, became more selective. This tendency continued in 236   T h e E s s e n t i a l N ew A rt E xaminer “About Place,” the seventy-sixth “American Exhibition,” which included only 16 artists and 51 works; and, in response to the new cultural and economic climate of the ’90s, featured work from North, South, and Central America. The central theme of the exhibition was a definition of “place” as metaphor for the convergence of time, location, and ideology: place as local history; place in the canon of art, in ethnic displacement, and in political upheaval; place as a center/periphery relationship; place as the destruction of nature; place as social project; place as the economic condition; place as the poetic journey in search of self. By the curatorial hand, as critic Dave Hickey eloquently describes in his contribution to the catalogue, place is replaced by time, geography is replaced by history (Hickey 54). While curators are often accused of not having clear and wellformed agendas for the exhibitions they create, “About Place” curator Madeleine Grynsztejn, the museum’s Associate Curator of Twentieth Century Painting and Sculpture, might have overplayed her own. Throughout the support materials (catalogue, pamphlets, guided tours, wall labels, and press releases), each artwork’s reference to place was carefully sliced open and eviscerated for the viewer’s contemplation. Given Grynsztejn’s claim that the organizing concept of “place” came after the selection of the work, in the process of mounting the exhibition the internal narratives of the individual works were replaced by the metaphor of place: be it home, city, shelter, the Apocalypse, a garden, the land of the free, cultural regionalism , the universe, or the mattress as “primal dwelling.” The narratives and metaphors operating within the pieces themselves were finessed to become “about place.” In most instances the poetic sensibility of Grynsztejn ’s vision, as elucidated with great eloquence in the catalogue, complements and compliments the work, while in a few it becomes a case of the Emperor’s new clothes. For Andrea Zittel’s “perfect living units” (selfcontained , hyper-efficient, portable interiors), for example, the issue of place—or, more accurately, lack of space in urban apartments—is not a metaphor, but a necessity, which the work addresses. On the other hand, applying a concept of “place” to Jeff Wall’s Cibachromes, which mimic both commercial photography and European painting, amounts to little more than a strategy enlisted to impose theory on an aesthetic style that can barely reflect the splendor of Wall’s original sources. The drama of two men fighting in an alley in Fight on the Sidewalk combined with M A R í A J O S é B A R A N D I A R á N    ...In a Place Like This?   237 the intellectual satisfaction of recognizing its Caravaggesque chiaroscuro effect still pales in comparison to that of advertising’s perfect fictions. In other artists’ oeuvres, the concept/metaphor of place is historical , at times almost illustrative. There...