I hate to admit it, cranky as I am, as much as I did not want to like it, I have experienced a marvelous new contemporary space here in Chicago. A space that with an economy of means, employing the most modest of building materials, with a sense of purpose and an adherence to that purpose conflated in its vision, is simply dazzling. As you wander through the spacious produce section, or stop for a nosh at any one of the fabulous food islands,
just imagine what if, the new Modern Wing at the Art Institute was even half as good, with even some of the terrific site-lines or sensitivity to proportion as this great, modest and purposeful new building....OH! You thought I was discussing the new Art Institute Modern Wing....nooOOOo -I'm talking about the new WHOLE FOODS on Kingsbury at North Avenue! Completely Brilliant!
Now. If we could just clear out all the groceries, put in some fancy lighting, SWITCH! TRADE PLACES! A Whole Foods at Michigan and Monroe (complete with a bizarre -one way skywalk (tried to exit the place yet using it yet?......Kafkaesque is the best way of describing THAT! security guard (think Commandant) aided experience) completely makes sense...
...THINK: that 60 -70 -80- I don't know, 100 thousand square foot hedge-fund financed suburban-like mall space (dwarfing btw the amount of square footage dedicated to actually exhibiting art) would make a food court for the ages! CONVENIENT! AIRY! and like Whole Foods, you can even have live music to entertain the customers -actually the Art Institute is all over this already; Rob Thomas! 'the' -Rob Thomas- played there just the other day, how brilliant is that?.......lets face it, no matter how hard Renzo Piano tried, this ain't the Guggenheim- (or, more accurately MoMA Midwest)...what would they do with those long, narrow, spatially challenged shallow gallery spaces? Well, bathrooms, employee training and lunch areas, a perfect place to stash extra grocery carts, they will just fit -perhaps a daycare center! What, with those awkward, never ending glass doors, (climate control does become an issue when your galleries are small ancillary rooms attached to a 4 story mega-mall space with nothing in it!)....you'd never have to worry about your child wandering off- or anyone else for that matter, negotiating that space without a major shoulder wrenching experience.
You probably catch my drift by now -I think the new modern wing at the Art Institute is not only not a particularly good building for exhibiting art -(if they could borrow Sue from the Field Museum down the street and spruce up that mall space, give it some personality, it might make a swell party space, weddings, bar mitzvahs, the Fine Arts Societies' be there to be seen blowouts! -what have you.) But for art, I don't think its awful, but it flirts with awful, and here is why I think so: To understand this building, it is necessary to to put it in the context of its inception, ie. THE ERA OF BLING! ....poofy and promiscuous, a paen to an age of conspicuous consumption fueled by a war time economy, an art world run amuck -but not the art, just what was being paid for it, and of course, a building sympathetic to this idea of culture, that how the work actually looks, is essentially irrelevant. its not about any kind of excellence, but how much it 'looks' like it costs, and that 'look' usually being one of deskilled incompetence, where importance is ordained rather than being in anyway evident: the epoch of non-spectacle spectacle of for instance, having a Marlene Dumas hanging on the walls of one of our great institutions -or a Doig or a Tuymans or that rancid Sue Williams!, it isn't the drab reality of the towering incompetence on display, -its the insane (as Jed Perl noted, "fiendishly expensive" ) amount of money being spent on such ordinary fare, that confers importance for no discernible reason beyond economic insanity, not unlike the rest of our current culture! But I digress; -the dichotomy that exists between the spacial feel of the exterior of the place when confronted with the tortured and cramped poorly lit maze of an interior is weird, to put it mildly, (don't take a wrong turn coming off the skywalk -you will end up in the cafe kitchen-and who knows, given the institutes current financial travails, you might very well run the risk of being enlisted for a stint as a pro-bono dishwasher.)
Then there is the lighting problem: want to see the Cornell Boxes? Bring a flashlight -or better yet, in keeping with the 19th century, plein air lit claustrophobia. all tarted up in the guise of some form of later day romanticism, bring a candle! Its all dulled out -someone needs to face the reality of the 20th century and get, that after Cezanne -or late Monet -plein air painting is over! Screw in some light bulbs you idiots -or I know, perhaps reconfigure the Felix Gonzales Torres -put those light bulbs to use viewing actual art! But that would make too much sense -and besides this mini MoMA has some big shoes to fill -at least until Mr Curator can weasel his way into a job at the real thing....why couldn't we have had something original -you think I'm joking about the Whole Foods -its a better, far more realized and thought out, more functional building! They actually got the lights right -not adhering to some outdated premises -but by actually being concerned as to how the organic bananas were going to look in the banana bin! Speaking of whole -shall I ask just why we need an entire, WHOLE room -basically the same size as the single, solitary room (back by the cafe bus station) housing the entirety of the mid 20th century American Painting - dedicated to anti painting -party line favorite, Gerhard Richter? Those four sentimental and schmaltzy, squeeged, ab-ex pretty postcards, that really, forget wing, don't belong in the same BUILDING! with a rigorous piece of apex originality as embodied by de Kooning's seminal Excavation (which btw is in imminent danger of having a latte splashed on it at any moment...the curatorial echo-plex of mindless conformity...I hate these people!
...wait a minute -I'm off topic again -back to the original debacle -the building itself: word around town for years was how in trouble the MCA was going to be when the Art Institute with more money than god (except when it comes to paying customers or the hired help) opened up its new modern wing -well that notion just went up with a resounding poof -or should I say poofy? If nothing else, when one strolls through the very ordinary exhibition space now housing Cy Twombly (another stroke of blazing originality! we shall return to this conundrum of yet more conformity momentarily) when we stroll through these surprisingly small rooms -miraculously, the first floor of the MCA suddenly reeks of genius -forget it, the Art Institute will never challenge the MCA for contemporary supremacy here -they can't handle it -because they didn't allocate enough room for it! And there it stands! Griffin Mall Hall in all of its fund-raising money pit glory....btw, the coffee bar is vastly superior at Whole Foods, as are the four or five (to one-) cafes -its not only terrific, but in the hot food area -they have several different varieties of chicken wings - though what you won't find is poorly realized, ineffectual grandiosity, with actual exhibition space as an afterthought, and large amounts of trendy crap slapped up on the walls. I give it four stars!
Coming next: AGENTS OF DECLINE -the contemporary work at the inaugural exhibition of the Modern Wing-
Whole Foods! That's hilarious WK!
I love this part:
"But I digress; -the dichotomy that exists between the spacial feel of the exterior of the place when confronted with the tortured and cramped poorly lit maze of an interior is weird, to put it mildly, (don't take a wrong turn coming off the skywalk -you will end up in the cafe kitchen-and who knows, given the institutes current financial travails, you might very well run the risk of being enlisted for a stint as a pro-bono dishwasher.)"
An inspired comparison!
Brilliant contrast - -
What’s with the bridge? It looks like an out-of-place monorail structure from a city of the future that never happened. Two American-sized adults with strollers can barely pass each other on it (good luck if people are taking pictures of each other in front of the Michigan Avenue skyline) and the starting point is hidden in the middle of the park.
I'd love to see a video of a shark swimming through the AIC, but I don't think it would be any more disturbing than this video, with the child carrying a BALLOON all the way through on her 'tour.' What do people think, it's an amusement park!?
Yeah, carrying a balloon and being stalked. Good family fun.
Big Box art. Inspired. I'll help with the fundraising.