Family Visit to the Museum of Contemporary Art
Today we went to the Museum of Contemporary Art, mainly to see the Daniel Clowes show, though there was a whole bunch of great stuff there. Here's a video:
Family Visit to the Museum of Contemporary Art from Daniel X. O'Neil on Vimeo.
Here's some background info:
Approaching architecture: the MCA is a hulking building built specifically for modern art. The scale is perfect-- big, makes you feel like you are entering, but not too big, so you don't get lost. There's always something going on outside. Here's the plaza project pictured in the video: MCA Chicago Plaza Project: Amanda Ross-Ho:
The title of the exhibition is adapted from the 1980 photography handbook How to Control and Use Photographic Lighting, which demonstrates how different lighting drastically affects how details appear in an image. Illustrating this section of the manual is a still life of three objects: a cube, a sphere, and a mannequin’s head. For her iteration of the MCA Chicago Plaza Project, Ross-Ho re-creates this trio at a monolithic scale with faithful allegiance to the original image. Completing the installation is a large-scale rendering of a color calibration card—the color grid that is used to maintain accuracy in the printing or post-production of color photography because it remains consistent in various lighting conditions. By including this card—which is usually discarded or cropped out of finished photographs—Ross Ho presents an image that is self-consciously “contaminated,” as the color calibration card disrupts the composition. At the same time, its inclusion points to it as an artifact of a bygone era in which “accuracy” or “truth” in photography was a given.
Gaylen Gerber: this is the orange-hued room. Here's the MCA's take on the show and a snip:
This presentation is the artist’s first monographic exhibition at MCA Chicago, and comprises two parts. The first component is a visually sparse, site-responsive artwork located in the second-floor lobby in which he reprises a conceptual work by artist Michael Asher. The second is a color-saturated installation containing Gerber’s Supports, panels that incorporate silver-leafed souvenirs from the exhibition Crossing Through the Colors, a work in situ by artist Daniel Buren, which are presented alongside artworks from the MCA Collection—including work by artists Richard Artschwager, Cady Noland, Jim Nutt, and H. C. Westermann—and an additional work borrowed from DAS INSTITUT (Kerstin Brätsch and Adele Röder) with Allison Katz. Asher’s and Buren’s practices in particular function as points of departure for the exchanges that characterize Gerber’s practice, and both components of this project are equally important to the connections Gerber aims to make.
The ping-pong table and other play spaces were a highlight.
On view Jun 29–Oct 13, 2013, artist Alberto Aguilar's Home Field Play is an installation of repurposed furniture, in which familiar household objects provide visitors with opportunities for play, interaction, and repose. A dining table is transformed into a mirrored ping-pong table, a carpeted area houses a musical game involving bells and balloons, televisions turned on their side invite visitors to play familiar movies in a new light, and a bed offers moments of rest, reading and contemplation. Presented in association with the exhibition Homebodies, Aguilar invites three Chicago-based artists to activate the installation with a series of performances.
It was cool to check out Imperial Nail Salon (my parents’ living room) by my old-time friend, Dzine.
Imperial Nail Salon (my parents’ living room) (2011–13) is an installation and interactive performance by Chicago-based artist Dzine. In homage to his mother’s nail salon business, which she ran in their family home, Dzine has recreated his childhood living room in one of the galleries at MCA Chicago. On two Saturdays a month during the exhibition Homebodies (Jun 29–Oct 13, 2013), two gifted nail artists will work in Dzine’s installation, creating customized nail designs for visitors with appointments.
The main event was really playfully done.
Daniel Clowes is an acclaimed comic book artist and graphic novelist—although he prefers the designation “cartoonist”—with nearly fifty publications to his credit. He is also a highly reputed magazine illustrator (and regular cover artist for the New Yorker) and an Oscar-nominated screenwriter for the film adaptation of his 1997 graphic novel Ghost World, which is widely credited with establishing the graphic novel as a credible literary form. This major survey, the first museum retrospective of Clowes’s work, presents more than 125 original drawings and artifacts in an elegant, inviting installation combining today’s graphic style with shades of a Victorian parlor. A traveling exhibition that first appeared at the Oakland Museum of California Art—the city that Chicago-born Clowes now calls home—the show will be expanded significantly for its MCA Chicago presentation.
And then beverages on the lawn. Amazing day. Here's a complete set of pics: