Learning Modern: Bauhaus Legacy in Downtown Chicago
October 20, 2009 | Levent OZLER
The legacy of the Bauhaus informs a wide-ranging exhibition of installation, design, video, and digital works co-organized and presented by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and the Mies van der Rohe Society at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) this fall.
Learning Modern is now on view through January 9, 2010 in the SAIC Sullivan Galleries, 33 South State Street, a vast exhibition space carved out of an architectural landmark, Louis Sullivan's former Carson Pirie Scott department store.
As well as recent and site-specific works by such emerging and established artists and designers as Angela Ferreira, Andrea Fraser, Walter Hood, Narelle Jubelin, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Kay Rosen, Staffan Schmidt, and Catherine Yass, the exhibition features such architectural experiments as Thom Faulders's The Ames Room Project (2009) based an optical demonstration from 1946, and Ken Isaacs's Knowledge Box (1962/2009, pictured), seen here for the first time since the early 1960s, when the cover of Life magazine heralded it as a revolutionary new multi-media environment for learning.
"It is fitting that the legacy of the Bauhaus be weighed in Chicago, where Lászlo Moholy-Nagy came in 1937 and Mies van der Rohe, a year later," says Mary Jane Jacob, SAIC Executive Director of Exhibitions, and organizer of the exhibition. "The School of Art Institute and the Illinois Institute of Technology bring a unique pedagogical perspective to the process as well, for our schools are inheritors of the Bauhaus workshop model, which has influenced the way art and design are taught across the globe."
Justine Jentes, Director of the Mies van der Rohe Society at IIT, adds: "This exhibition coincides with the Bauhaus at 90 and the Burnham Plan at 100 to reengage with modernism's ideals for a better world and the legacy of the modern as more than a style, but, rather, as a way of living and learning."
"While many of these works evoke ancestor touchstones like Mies, Moholy-Nagy, and Walter Gropius, the more surprising common thread is the application of vanguard artmaking and digital strategies to heighten perception-that is, to make us experience the moment more fully and carry that with us back out into the world," Jacob concludes.
Of the 16 works on view, four are room-sized containers for immersive experience. These range from Isaacs's cube-enclosed barrage of projected images and sounds and Faulders's parametrically modeled pod to Helen-Maria Nugent and Jan Tichy's four-room, maze-like perception box, which revisits Moholy-Nagy's experimentation with light and space. On a smaller scale, another experiential container-the iconic Sawyer View-Master, the palm-sized, plastic box that contains vistas of the world-is the subject of a project conceived by its creator, the 78-year-old industrial designer Charles Harrison, with new images created by artists, architects, and designers for the occasion.
The signature rounded corner of the Sullivan Galleries, directly above State and Madison Streets, marks the 0,0 point for Chicago's city plan. Several works, such as that of Arturo Vittori, a co-founder of the design collaborative, Architecture and Vision, use this marker as a starting point for a meditation about space and time. Vittori's kinetic sculpture, which resembles an 18th century model of the planetary system and whose motion is linked to the movement of the sun, makes the visitor aware of being in the presence of this work that lies within the container of the building, which itself is contained within the city, and moves outward through layers into the galaxy.
Vittori's is one of several works in Learning Modern merging art and technology. In another, entitled Infinite Sprawl, Chicagoan Mark Anderson, along with Mark Beasley and Matt Nelson [The Mark-Mark-and Matt Collaboration], tap into the open source movement to create a work that summons up fantastic buildings from the texts of modernism, text messages sent by visitors in the gallery, or messages sent by anyone around the world. In the installation, these streams of text about modernism appear in a cloudlike formation on a giant table. Each word is weighted to inform a specific geometric attribute. Once a participant touches a word, it transforms it into a shape and adds to an architectural structure that appears on a nearby screen.
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