Michael Workman

An impressive amount of art is being done online, and some of the more interesting of these projects shine through as participatory in their approach. Artist Melinda Fries, who collaborated in the show currently up at The Roof, has for some time now run an intermittently updated site called Ausgang.com. A largely project-based site, Ausgang (German for "way out" or "exit") has an impressive array of photography and first-person narrative writing on display. These entries provide the foundation for the wide range of anecdotes and stories on distinct topics that contributors send in to Fries via email. The site is spare and cleanly designed, with a comprehensive index used as the main tool for navigation. Visitors can read or browse images, for instance, related to telling lies, incidents with guns, riding on subways, dreams, encounters with doctors and police, as well as a varied collection of other correspondence, reports, and whimsies from contributors in Chicago and elsewhere.

Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July's online project, learningtoloveyoumore.com, is headquartered in Portland, Oregon. The art exhibited on learningtoloveyoumore.com is made by visitors who have completed one of the numerous assignments posted on the site, made either by Fletcher, July, other artists or guests. Fletcher contends that much of the best art is somehow similar to an assignment that you are compelled to take on. He writes that an idea or impression can be "so vibrant that you feel compelled to make something in response," comparing the experience of making art to the way that "the ocean gives the assignment of breathing deeply, and kissing instructs us to stop thinking." Assignments include such seemingly unrelated tasks as photographing a scar and writing something about it or recreating the moment after a crime. Some of the assignments are allocated for exhibition or posted with the possibility that finished assignments will be used collaboratively in another artist's project. For instance, work by participants who have finished assignment #14 (write your life story in less than a day), #16 (make a paper replica of your bed) or #22 (recreating a poster you had as a teenager) may be included in an exhibition with Miranda July at the Foundation for Art & Creative Technology (FACT) Centre slated to open this fall.

Chicago artist Cindy Loehr's site, collectiveexperience.org, contains the ongoing "Love Letter Collection" project, made up of letters sent and received (or never sent) on the subject of love. Loehr writes on her site that the project is open to addressing a wide range of types of love, including "desperate love, unrequited love, impossible love, näive love, frustrated love, despairing love, true love, fleeting love or lost love." Participants type in their letter using an online form, replacing the recipient's name with underlined spaces. All letters are posted to the collection anonymously, and participants are welcome to edit the letters to protect their identities by changing details to obscure "places, dates or careers." Mostly, love letters seem a method of calling a significant other to account or a way of ironing out the emotional terms of a relationship, sometimes not so lovingly. The letters brim with cries for recognition, effusions of self-loathing, insults, self-defensive rage, attempts at seduction, and the whole dramaturgy of the self-involved struggle with intimacy. Titles are culled from the content of the letters, producing such gems of self-pity as "Banality of Surviving," stalker-titles like "You Can't Run Away" and the outright abusive "Your Boring Girlfriend." There is hours of reading here, but some of the most captivating letters are the breathless, verbose and canny attempts at circumstantial justification that occurs in the aftermath of love's wake.

Tough terrain

Opening Friday at Vedanta Gallery in the West Loop neighborhood is "Rough Topography." A group exhibition, the notion of landscape serves as a jumping-off point for analyzing how every aspect of life molds our perspective. Ranging from quiet, contemplative works of assemblage to work that rages against the eliding of experience's more baleful moments, the show attempts to offer work that demonstrates a navigation of environments both internal and external, real and imagined.

The exhibit includes work made from raw materials collected from the environment, such as art made of duct tape or Justin Lieberman's two Klu Klux Klan figures made from tie-dye. Lieberman's biography could itself be cited as an example of the topography that is the subject of the exhibit, moving as it does from conviction for burning down a church to heroin addiction to diagnoses of acute schizophrenia and film-theory studies with Jean-Luc Godard in Milan. "The world's a pretty fucked-up place," staff member Kristen Van Deventer says of the emotional, political, psychological and other forces that compose the landscape in question. "We're all dealing with rough topography."

"Rough Topography" shows at Vedanta Gallery, 835 West Washington, (312) 432-0708, through August 14.

(2003-06-18)

Also by Michael Workman

Eye Exam
Even if you've never heard of The Roof, you're not likely to be surprised to find out that it's exactly what it sounds like: an art space on the roof of an apartment building.
(2003-06-11)

Eye Exam
Encountering The Renaissance Society space at the University of Chicago for the first time, we are told by the catalog copy that Brussels-based artist Joëlle Tuerlinckx (pronounced TUR-lynx) was struck by the context of the Society space.
(2003-06-04)

Eye Exam
Matthew Barney is here for the duration. The sculptor has long drawn accusations of preposterousness and puffery, not the least because he chooses to work with such materials as petroleum jelly and tapioca.
(2003-05-28)

Neo-religion
A graduate student at the University of Chicago has organized a conference at the U of C on the subject of video games and gaming culture...
(2003-05-28)

Eye Exam
(2003-05-21)

Eye Exam
(2003-05-14)

Eye Exam
(2003-05-07)

Eye Exam
(2003-04-30)

Sex in Public
(2002-12-12)

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