The MCA's Robert Fitzpatrick, paler in a rumpled dark linen suit, raises an eyebrow at his tanned, tailored colleague. The Boeing rep is nonplused as well, saying that it's "the first time I've heard publicly, or privately, Boeing referred to as a lubricant. A catalyst?" she asks. "Propellant," Fitzpatrick suggests. Gursky, compact and flat-topped, casual in jeans and windbreaker, lingers behind the congeries of media types, eyes scanning the journalists with media kits or notepads; the television sorts who look around to see who recognizes them by more than their hungry-for-notice expressions.

"A hell of a way for a company to make its impact in a new city," Fitzpatrick insists. "It took courage and genius to first organize this show." Gursky's large-scaled, digitally-manipulated photo works are equally immodest. He's like a Sebastião Salgado of excess, edifice and indulgence. Where Salgado assembles telling compositions of the servitude of massed figures, Gursky composes artifacts of raves, hotel lobbies, rock shows, factories, grocery stores with nuke-bright aisles of marzipan-assaultive color (Pictured above, "Swimming Pool Ratingen").

The New York-based guest curator dismisses photography in his impromptu remarks as a "flat-footed descriptive medium" that needs to be elevated by Gursky's "contemporariness." OK. "There is no place for us in Gursky's world," he says, alluding to the artist's punishing symmetries, but instead esteeming his volumes of historical background above our mere eyes. "Does that makes sense?" he asks after a ten-minute barrage about a single photo. "We should plunge into another room." He looks around the room. "Really, the chronology is all screwed up." Gursky has said the pictures look best when seen alone, so they hang one to a wall.

Rather than waiting around to have the cold joy of his manipulative craft explained away, I move ahead, but the curator's voice runs on, "This is what a lot of photography is," he asserts, "Noticing something visually... it's what leads you to make the picture." Uh-huh. He pauses. I lose myself in a gorgeous, unpeopled landscape. The voice in the previous room continues on: "This is an oversimplification," he says after another ten minutes of name and era-dropping. Gursky, thankfully, insists that a Chicago debut demands pizza and beer be served for lunch, and that speaks louder than a thousand facts.

Also by Ray Pride

TIP OF THE WEEK
Like a one-man "Gremlins," little blue Stitch snarls, garbles, spits, coos, and generally enforces havoc on Lilo's peaceful village until the sentimental power of a small girl's love turns him cute as well as still a little naughty.
(2002-06-20)

FUTURE TENSE
The greatest strength of "Minority Report" is that it elaborates Dick's seething paranoia with science fiction's genre conventions, in order to reflect disturbing social themes that are relevant today.
(2002-06-20)

TIP OF THE WEEK
"Windtalkers," the new World War II epic from John Woo, is a broadscale depiction of hand-to-hand combat but also mano-a-mano conflict. (Yes, the love of man for his fellow man once more. If your best friend can't kill you, why die?)
(2002-06-13)

HAPPINESS REDUX
Jill Sprecher's touching ensemble drama formally resembles a Kubrick film, incorporating his questing intelligence and a great deal more warmth.
(2002-06-13)

TIP OF THE WEEK
(2002-06-06)

SHUT THE HELL UP!
(2002-06-06)

TIP OF THE WEEK
(2002-05-30)

MORAL FEAR
(2002-05-30)

MOVIE LOVE
(2002-05-30)

TIP OF THE WEEK
(2002-05-23)

TOUGH "ENOUGH"
(2002-05-23)

SUMMER FILM PREVIEW 2002: June
(2002-05-23)