“art” chicago.

This past weekend I had the opportunity to attend Art Chicago, a Midwestern version of the Armory Show (meaning there were lots of potato chips and ranch dressing). I spent the better part of Saturday walking down seemingly endless hallways of art. It was, for the most part, pretty much what I expected your standard international arts fair to be.

Two things caught my attention Yes, only two, in a building full of thousands of pieces of art. Granted, I have attended several of these types of events, so perhaps I was just in my usual “art overload” phase. Tackling one of these arts fairs is like walking into any major art museum an hour before closing (to get a discounted entry price of course) and trying to see all the art the museum has to offer. Even the sections “temporarily closed for installation.” By the end of the hour, you’re sweating your ass off and can’t feel your feet. But it was worth it right, and you retained all that art seeing? Exactly.

The first thing that actually made me stop my speed-walk pace through the hallways was this:

 

 

 

I actually did a double take, thinking that I had seen something in my imagination. Surely no one would actually create such a ruthless pun. Yet my eyes were not deceiving me, it was real. Someone had defaced the ABC’s. I took a moment, said a prayer for my kindergarten teacher Mrs. Rose, and moved on silently.

Soon after my devastating experience with the new format for the alphabet, I came across Yossi Milo Gallery. Their “booth” was filled with photographs. One series specifically caught my attention; the work by Sze Tsung Leong and his series titled Horizons. They were beautifully crafted photographs of various landscapes, all lined up in a row. Each image had a certain stillness and vastness to them. I was actually in the process of writing down his name for future reference when two things happened.

First, I read his artist statement:

Horizons is an ongoing series of photographs, begun in 2001, that depict expansive views of a broad spectrum of environments throughout the world. The locations of the images may be distant in geography and diverse in subject matter, yet the photographs are linked by a horizon which continues in the same position from image to image. When placed side by side, the images form an extended landscape composed of an accumulation of varied continents, cities, terrains, situations, textures, and colors.

I immediately tried erasing his name from my notebook but couldn’t, as I had written it in pen. I tore the page out and immediately burned it. I was disgusted by this “concept” that Sze Tsung Leong had so un-eloquently inscribed for us. “All the horizon lines line up in these pictures, thus making them seem the same, even though they are different.” At first viewing, my only complaint was that all the horizon lines matched up across the wall. Then I read the title and statement, in fear that this was actually the point. 

And then came the icing on the cake. In the same gallery, about the same work, a man walks up and begins to make comments about each one with the gallery assistant. She explains the deep conceptual thread within the work, and he is awestruck! He begins to make comments about each image such as, “Wow, look at this one,” and, “hey, this one is neat.” But then came his comment about the following image:

 

 (Avebury 1, 2007, from the series Horizons)

 

The man, attempting to hold an intellectual conversation with the gallery assistant about the conceptual nature of these images, says, “Are these crop circles perhaps?” At first I didn’t know what to do, and neither did the gallery assistant. Was she to say, “Why yes sir, you’re exactly right,” in hopes that he would be so proud of himself that he might splurge and buy the print? Only to then be a victim of sticker shock when she tells him how much Crop Circles in a Field actually costs. Was I supposed to turn around and slap that man? Of course not (ok, maybe I should have slapped him). Instead, she nodded and smiled at his comment as they moved on to the next image.

I couldn’t take any more pain as he continued to move through the rest of the gallery to “talk” about the other works. I proceeded to leave the gallery and Art Chicago, with a bad aftertaste of Ranch Dressing in my mouth.