ART REVIEW - A Parting Shot for Chicago’s Armory

CHICAGO — 

Sometime late in 1995, the Museum of Contemporary Art here will move to a new home. Sleek, gridded and minimally adorned, the proposed design by Berlin-based architect Josef Paul Kleihues seems a natural for this architecturally exceptional city.

Plans and a model for the new building, which plainly means to recall Chicago’s history as home to the American Bauhaus even as it embraces more contemporary style, are currently displayed in the cramped and rambling rabbit warren of galleries on East Ontario Street that have served the museum since 1967. The site for the new structure faces Mies van der Rohe Way, a brief length of pavement with a clear view of the nearby apartment tower in which Van der Rohe lived during his productive years in Chicago. Currently occupied by a hulking, architecturally undistinguished and decidedly decrepit National Guard Armory, commissioned as a cavalry outpost in 1910, the site is nothing short of magnificent: a two-acre parcel between the landmark Water Tower and the sparkling shore of Lake Michigan.

Only a few blocks from the Museum of Contemporary Art’s current home, it is a 10-league leap for the 25-year-old institution. In order to mark the significance of the impending move--and, cleverly enough, in order to give the public a head start on getting used to the new address--the museum has recently opened an ambitious exhibition of installation art sprawling over 75,000 square feet in the old Armory.

Called “Art at the Armory: Occupied Territory,” and principally organized by Museum of Contemporary Art curator Beryl Wright, the 18 installations include six specially commissioned for the event and a dozen that have been adapted to fit available spaces. When the expansive show closes in January, the building that houses it will be torn down.

Beyond the obvious pleasure and publicity to be derived from spectacle, however, it’s difficult to say just what the intent of this exhibition of installation art might be. Clearly defined in the show’s as-yet-unpublished catalogue as “a broad spectrum of works that have in common the desire to veer away from making spatially autonomous, discrete objects,” installation art was significantly emergent more than 30 years ago, from a complex constellation of aesthetic, social and political vectors. Lately, the genre has pushed those ostensibly “autonomous, discrete objects” called paintings and sculptures into the fuzzy corners of the art world’s peripheral vision. At the moment it’s the medium with the leading edge.

Existing works borrowed for the occasion dominate the show. Several are weak. Among them are “Womb Wars,” a silly, Frankensteinian lab of scaffolding and light boxes by the New York collaborative, TODT; a group of Arnold Crane’s blown-up, close-up photographs, which begins with the stale convention of conflating a woman’s body with the suggestion of landscape and then merely expands it to the scale of a walk-in room display, and Vietnamese-born, California-based artist Toi Hoang’s “Stretcher Series,” which literalize the canvas and stretcher bars of a painting into a hospital litter for damaged bodies. (Only nominally an installation, Hoang’s paintings-cum-sculptures are most reminiscent of the figurative Expressionism touted at the Museum of Modern Art’s failed “New Images of Man” exhibition in 1959.)

All of the abundant video pieces have been seen elsewhere, and they form a relatively strong core for the show: Dara Birnbaum’s “Tiananmen Square: Break in Transmission,” with its devastating soundtrack that mimics the bewildering horror of the event; Doug Hall’s creation of a stunning parallel between the awesome powers of nature and of technology, in “The Terrible Uncertainty of the Thing Described”; Lynn Hershman’s interactive video, “Deep Contact,” which is problematic in its narrow assumptions about erotic desire but deftly demonstrates how interactive TV’s promise of liberation from corporate control is in fact no cause for faith; Gary Hill’s “Inasmuch as It Is Always Already Taking Place,” employing multiple monitors embedded inside a wall and displaying human body parts, and, dating from 1985, and thus the Old Master of the whole exhibition (everything else dates from about the last three years), Bill Viola’s mesmerizing “Theatre of Memory,” which creates a kind of video equivalent for the fragile, electro-chemical explosions that rage inside the brain.

The welcome abundance of video installations, which is somewhat unusual in group shows not devoted specifically to the medium, might be trying to make a point. The pervasiveness of ephemeral, electronic imagery in contemporary culture is one reason for the large-scale emergence of installation art, in which context supersedes the art object. But even though most of these pieces have been widely shown, the exhibition doesn’t use this existing work to attempt to write a recent history of the installation phenomenon.

A few works are specific to the Armory site. Vernon Fisher’s “Pac. War Diary” fills the walls of a military briefing room with drawings of undersea creatures (the bulbous man-o’-war looks remarkably like a billowing mushroom cloud), while the map of the Pacific theater at the head of the room features an oddly shaped Japan that, on closer inspection, turns out to be an upside-down silhouette of Godzilla.

In an evocation of both the violence of war and the future fate of the Armory building, a four-artist, Chicago-based collaborative called Haha has planted surrogate demolition charges throughout the building’s remarkably bleak officer guest quarters. Elizabeth Newman’s highly romantic, multi-room installation uses ritualized vignettes--from breast-feeding to cleansing--to counterpoise death and destruction with life and nurturing. And in two stairwells the team of Diller + Scofidio has used photo-voltaic panels and live video cameras to create a quietly chilling surveillance environment, in which you can believe neither what you are seeing nor what you are being told.

Francesc Torres’ “Destiny, Entropy and Junk” wasn’t made for the site, but it benefits from its location in a gladiator-size arena once used to drill the cavalry horses. In spotlighted splendor, Torres has paired seven luxury cars, their front ends crumpled from high-speed crashes, with seven pictures of medieval European statuary whose noses have been smashed. Historically, breaking the nose off a sculpture was a symbolic way to negate its totemic power--an act whose spooky violence ricochets off the demolished Mercedes-Benzes, BMWs and Jaguars in the Armory’s arena.

Eve Andree Laramee’s “The Eroded Terrain of Memory” wasn’t made for the site, either, but its adaptation here is especially pungent. An enormous mound of glittering mica chips, spotlighted to enhance their shimmer, is piled up under the eaves near the entrance, cascading over windowsills and mounded around steel I-beams and in air vents. The mica, which is somewhere between a useful mineral for high-tech manufacturing and a kind of old-time fool’s gold, is like an accumulation of hidden wealth in the cast-off spaces of the military-industrial complex.

The most beautiful work in the show is visually the simplest: Michael Shaughnessey’s twin, room-size, upright rings of hay, perfectly scaled to the interior of a second-floor basketball court and filling the urban space with the wistful smell of faraway fields. The center holes are just a bit too high to see over or through, compelling close and thorough inspection of these graceful, Minimalist forms and infusing them with a sense of monumental play.

There is also an agit-prop installation titled “The Lazaretto” by an anonymous collaborative from New York. Named after a 16th-Century Venetian leprosy hospital, it is an amateurish display about the AIDS crisis. Meant to raise consciousness, the installation’s sequence of caricatures and tableaux has the unfortunate--and surely unintended--effect of transforming sober issues of public policy into a carnivalesque Fun House. (Step right up! See the Amazing Two-Headed Cardinal!)

With four artist-teams or collaborative groups, “Art in the Armory” gives some suggestion of the way installation art has provided an alternative venue for approaches uncongenial to painting and sculpture, whose object orientation has become a vessel for highly individual identity. The show also displays an evident commitment to artists working from diverse cultural backgrounds--Korean (Jin Soo Kim), Japanese (Tatsuo Miyajima), Spanish (Torres), Polish (Diller)--as well as to parity in gender (it’s roughly even in the split between men and women, which doesn’t often happen).

Still, the show feels haphazard and arbitrary in its selections. If more of the work were fresh, historically resonant or simply better, it’s likely you wouldn’t be continuously distracted by puzzling over the curatorial choices. The effort to represent diversity and to use an artistic genre that might “occupy the territory” of a military site and thus transform its function have taken precedence over curatorial refinement and discrimination.

Museum of Contemporary Art at the National Guard Armory, 234 E. Chicago Ave., Chicago, (312) 280-2660, through Jan. 23, 1993. Closed Mondays.