Recently by Lynne Warren

"It will be beautiful, it will be beautiful," is the stubbornly repeated, vague incantation of Roger Buergel, artistic director of the forthcoming Documenta 12, scheduled to open in June 2007. --from Artnet, June 2006

I knew I wouldn't be able to visit Documenta early on, as I might assume many of my colleagues would have, given the propensity of the international art world to show up at opening celebrations, tempted by the sure knowledge, I suppose, that they'd run into dozens and dozens of their colleagues and be able to chat, unimpeded by the crowds of ordinary art tourists that can clog the works at other times, so I steadfastly blanked out all references, news stories, and opinions about it. The catalogue sat on my desk for a month with its plastic wrapper intact.

I returned from Documenta depressed and exhausted, and sat at my computer now doing the research most would have done prior to attending such an event. I didn't type into Google “Documenta exhausted depressed” but one of the first things that came up at the search "Documenta 12" was an article by Richard Dorment of the Telegraph (UK) returning from the show in June "exhausted and depressed" to write about his desperate search for "signs of artistic talent at the 12th 'Documenta' show in Kassel, Germany" under the headline "The Worst Art Show Ever."

It is spring, and my thoughts turn softly to dealing with the back yard. I use the term expansively. I have a rather large back yard by many standards, and especially by urban standards, although it is not as large as some of the other Wicker Park properties I view when walking the crazy dog about the neighborhood. My “back yard” includes my garage roof, upon which, as I have previously mentioned, I have installed large boxes in which I grow both tomatoes and potatoes. (I prefer the “toe-mato,” “poe-tato” pronunciation at the moment, but then again this is about being weak.) And a lot of other things. Carrots. Okra. Jalapenos. Cucumbers. Baby Bok Choy. Indian Corn. Zinnias. But even on the garage roof, the trees are encroaching. One of my favorite artworks is a section of a video opera by Miroslaw Rogala, a hugely underrated media artist who happens to live in Chicago. The section is entitled “The Trees Are Leaving Us.” I know what he means, and I want to cry at the truth of it. But in my back yard, the trees are coming to me. Shading the southern half of the yard, there’s a diseased Siberian elm that just won’t die while all the magnificent American Elms in the entire metropolitan area wither and succumb to Dutch Elm disease. And then that huge mulberry tree from my northern neighbor’s yard that has claimed all the airspace the Siberian elm hasn’t. And then there is the crab apple tree that was the sole feature of the back yard when I was a mere renter and my elderly Polish landlord kept four or five dogs who trampled the earth so effectively that nary a weed would grow. The crab apple tree hovers over the garage, and it a convenient place to hang my tomato cages when turning over the boxes, but it has grown tall and blocks the sun as it sinks into the west. It has gotten to the point where the yard is dark, and not even shade-loving plants will grow. So of course, being the self-reliant person that I am, I must trim the trees.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Chicago is no longer the City of Big Shoulders. It is the City of Vines. There are vines everywhere, up the sides of buildings, covering poles, forming bat wings over power lines (check the one out on Ashland as you approach Clybourn from the south. It’s magnificent.) Not only are there more vines,the leaves on the ivy that has now made its way half-way up the ash tree outside my window are much bigger than I ever remember them being, when they merely slithered around on the ground lo these many years I’ve stared out that same window. They never even made it a few feet up the tree before. Now they are thirty feet up in the air. In fact, the Virginia Creeper is now duking it out with the ivy for the right to cover the entire north side of my building, and it has even deigned to crawl up the side of the hideous condominiums of a mere decade vintage to my south.

Reading widely as I do, the other day I discovered the existence of the “heavy element community.” Now I had thought, being in contemporary art as I am, that I would have known or guessed at all the possible communities in the entire universe. The contemporary art community, naturally. The health-care community. The gay-lesbian-bisexual-transgendered community (did I get them in the right order?) The fundamentalist Christian community. The NASCAR community. The American Girl community. The Civil War reenacter community. The koi enthusiast community. The Castle of Mad King Ludwig community. And on and on and on. I can imagine a tatting community without straining the slightest brain muscle (for those of you who’ve never heard of tatting, it is an obscure form of handwork). I can be certain there is preservation of spelunking songs community, in fact I think I have their spiral-bound songbook somewhere. And though I might not have thought of it without sitting myself down to be quiet for a moment or two, I can even envision a nematode community, especially as these non-segmented worms were a key plot feature in the Val Kimler epic “Red Planet Mars.” But a “heavy element community?!

A man in the grocery store check-out line said to me, when I was buying the ten-pound bag of sugar I hadn’t been able to find the week before, “That’s the biggest bag of sugar I’ve ever seen.” Now if I was my friend Mary I might think the guy was coming on to me, but I don’t think that way, and if he had been coming on to me, why I must be sending out the most inexplicable signals of approachability as the fellow was haggard, mostly toothless, and the shade of yellow that indicates either liver disease or habitual cigarette smoking.

I was bewildered. This guy, who had to be at least in his sixties, had never seen a ten-pound bag of sugar! My epiphanies tend to be of the prosaic sort, and this was definitely one of them. I said, “I do a lot of baking.” It wasn’t an apology, but stern defiance. Yes, I am a contemporary woman, and I do a lot of baking. My pies are particularly renown, and I have one mild friend whose anger is leoninely fierce if I tell him of the pies I’ve baked, as he lives far away and can only remember their pleasures. Now if the fellow had been sixteen, I would have understood the comment (and certainly even my friend Mary wouldn’t have thought it was a pick-up line). For my aforementioned pie-loving friend is in his forties, and author of the statement “I thought green beans somehow grew ‘French cut,’” one of my earliest prosaic epiphanies about the difference between my rural upbringing and that of the majority of my peers, raised as they were in suburbia where green beans came either from Green Giant cans or Birds Eye frozen packages, not the truck garden. (For those of you in Rio Linda, as Rush Limbaugh is fond of saying, a truck garden is a large garden from which you sell as well as subsist.)

When asked by a visitor why he had a horseshoe over the door to his laboratory—did he really believe in such superstition—the famous physicist Nils Bohr replied, “Of course not, but I have been assured that it works even if you don't believe in it.”

I could never live in an always-pleasant climate. I grow flaccidly empty three days into a sojourn in LA, even if I’ve been riding around in a rented red Mustang that got rear-ended in a Kinko’s parking lot on the first day of my visit causing my blood pressure and insurance rates to sky rocket. I’ve spent a bit of time in Florida and Texas as well, two other well-known temperate climates where at least three of my brothers reside, the ornery sea-cuss Neal whom I have previously mentioned and two others, whom I am sure are supportive of their only sister, but shall remain nameless as if I were to name them I cannot be quite sure what professional reputations might be in jeopardy by such a close association with contemporary art (and who are but a minority in my allotment of brothers, I assure you). Florida is disappointing to me not only because everything seems utterly scrubby (on my first visit, despite the malfunctioning of my mind because of the heat and humidity I figured out it was the fact of frequent hurricanes that discourages tall growth) but because the air seemed malodorous even when one adjusted for the smoke from the almost constant piney forest fires. I guess it was the whiff of Disney in the air. Or maybe the dominance of Palmetto palms, which due to the miracle of modern advertising, inevitably make me think of enlarged prostates.

Although the tempering my spirit received from my rugged peasant upbringing generally prevents me from speaking too freely of my personal travails, I have not been able to hide that I recently broke a bone in my foot and have thus been quite hobbled. Having had various episodes of infirmity in my past, including a previous crutchly passage that lasted eight long weeks, I have long been of the mind that being waylaid by an injury can be a valuable instructive experience. For if you have never been deprived of the use of a hand or arm or leg and thus needed the kind assistance of others, you haven’t had the privilege of being sadly helpless. And being sadly helpless allows you to realize that most people are kind and will lend assistance, even if being helped makes you feel more pitifully vulnerable than you ever wanted to feel. I’ve noticed that men are particularly kind, which makes perfect sense as I am a female and would thus tend to bring out a male’s protective qualities, while women, except one’s truest friends, tend not to want to be bothered, really. I understand this as well. Women generally have a lot of caring and helping already on their plates. And perhaps the supply of caring and obligation grows ever more limited in our modern times.

A few months ago Dan Peterman and Connie Spreen hosted an open house at the still-under-construction Experimental Station, acknowledging the fifth anniversary of the predawn fire that left only a shell of brick from what was then mostly called "the Building," and which had formerly housed Ken Dunn's Resource Center and most recently served as Dan's studio and hosted a number of other community-based concerns.

I was surprised to learn it was only five years ago, April 2001. It seemed much more time had gone by. I remembered hearing about the fire from Stephanie Smith of the Smart Museum. She had just completed a project that featured Dan's work, and being on the south side, where the Building stood on the south edge of the University of Chicago's domain, she knew about it before most of the rest of us did. She wrote urgent letters to everyone she could think of who might help. Dan needed all that help, as apparently City of Chicago workers had showed up at 9 am the day of the fire with demolition permits in hand. Regardless of the cause of the fire, it seemed pretty clear someone wanted that place, and whoever that someone was had no idea of the integrity and tenacity of the admittedly ramshackle building's owners, Dan Peterman and his wife Connie Spreen. The help helped, but it was Dan and Connie that made the Experimental Station happen.

You know how it is. You’re superproductive, and then all of a sudden, you seem to get nothing done. Paperwork piles up. Faucets start dripping and the toilet clogs, and you vaguely think you need a plumber. But my god, getting a plumber. That’s almost a full-time job. You don’t have the time or energy. There’s so much to do, but school hasn’t started yet, and it’s really hot, but then all of a sudden you are behind paying your bills, and you haven’t kept up with your friends, and on top of it you pick up a bug that your son caught on a flight to Paris. Fever dreams, and you wake up to notice the weather is very cool, and it has been raining for days. Raining, raining.

Note: I wrote the below before the turmoil of Art Chicago 2006 that still hasn’t completely played out at the time of this article’s posting. I hope everything works out, but I have to admit, I wasn’t planning to attend the opening night no matter when or where it takes place. Just too many memories….

Dave asked that we all put forth our best stuff this week, as Sharkforum is participating, due to the generosity of Tom Blackman, in Art Chicago. I thought for a moment, wondering what my best stuff might be, and with a cut of dread realized it is probably Nostalgia.

Last week I was a guest speaker for a undergraduate class at UIC. I was there to talk about the inner workings of museums. In introducing myself, I was appalled to hear myself say “I’ve been at the MCA probably longer than most of you have been on this earth.” Of course I wasn’t appalled because I was exaggerating or anything like that. I was appalled because when I was ‘their age’ I would have squirmed to hear anyone saying such a thing. How old-fogey can you get. (Now that’s a term you don’t hear much these days.) How does saying such a thing do anything except point out the obvious while using a really really embarrassing cliché? But the truth of the matter is I have been around a while now, and yes, I remember the ‘old days.’ In the course of my speechifying and exhorting of the ten or twelve earnest young people, including a girl who brushed her hair during class, which of course catapulted me far enough back to realize, with a start, that my self-conscious, how-do-I-look, hairbrushing-in-public days were so long past as to be terrifying obscure to me, I even mentioned the old days of the art fair. Yes, the art fair, for it wasn’t always Art Chicago, having started out at the Chicago International Art Exposition. Tom Blackman’s Art Chicago was in fact the upstart, much like Nova is to Art Chicago, begun with great excitement and anticipation cheek-by-jowl with the Navy Pier’s CIAE, in a tent on a parcel of real estate on Ogden Slip that surely now sports at least one, maybe even two, sixty-story shiny condo highrises. For this class, interested as they were in the inner workings of museums, especially the one I work for, I pointed out that in the 1980s and well into the 1990s the MCA routinely scheduled its ‘best stuff’ in May, when the international art world came town for the Fair. (The late April dates being a function of the “new” incarnation of Art Chicago, returning to its roots to a tent as it did last year).