Michael Workman

The forces of politics, public opinion, and money are causing tension in the debate over Daniel Libeskind Studio's design for the World Trade Center site. In the process, parallels between the architecture, sculpture and design fields have once again forced their way to the surface as the master plan that includes a Freedom Tower and victims' memorial is modified by debate.

Differences have long been converging between sculpture and architecture, and our spectacle culture remains quick to embrace the big-budget, brand-recognition of such projects as Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum at Bilbao, his Experience Music Project in Seattle and, on a smaller scale, the Koolhaas McCormick Tribune Campus Center here at IIT. From Oldenberg's Batcolumn at the Harold Washington Social Security Administration Building to the Anish Kapoor monument finally slated for installation this spring at Millennium Park, architecture and sculpture have likewise enjoyed a complimentary relationship in Chicago. Two current exhibitions probe the convergence points and essential nature of these two major art forms.

A house is not a home

Chicago-based artists Rena Leinberger and Ben Butler (who collaborate as "Lint") offer "Waiting" as the sixteenth installment of the Evanston Art Center's "Sculpture on the Grounds" series. Lint produces a reduced-scale mockup of the Art Center's Clarke House chimneys and shingled rooftops. Built on the grounds of the complex with trowel and mudboard, they are identical replicas of the building's Tudor house built in 1929 by Richard Powers for previous owner Harley Clarke.

The four chimneys and two roof sections create the appearance of a building either rising from the ground or buried beneath it. Appropriate for a two-artist team, the works evince the split rationale of both an engorging earth and an architectural form deprived of its utility. In this latter mode, by referring literally to Clarke House as the home of an institution, the sculpture recontextualizes the Evanston Art Center itself and the grounds of which it is a part. By removing all potential human interaction with the building, Lint removes the Art Center as an organization from the building that houses it--and whatever material-world identity that structure itself may confer. Positioned flat against the ground, these architectural decapitations also metaphorically illustrate the Art Center's life-and-death dependence on the community it serves, with roots run deep into the soil.

Subtle differences emerge in the juxtaposition of the unchipped ceramic piping, freshly tuckpointed grout and unbroken ceramic corner guards against the age-worn structure that the installation mimics. Approached in this way, the message of institutional revitalization through positive construction offers an unambiguously generous sense of hope in a contemporary society whose institutions have again and again failed their constituencies.

Be the gallery

Open now at The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and at the Art Institute of Chicago is "Isolated Rooms," a single exhibition at two locations. The latest installment in Amsterdam-based artist Mark Manders' 17-year "Self-Portrait as a Building" project, the two school's exhibition spaces are intended to function as vehicles for the artist's self. As each exhibition in the project is completed, Manders draws up "provisional floor plans [that] reveal the locations of all objects and their precise juxtapositions within the context of the larger project." The result, when combined, represents an imaginary, self-defined architectonic space meant to represent the artist as imaginatively embodied in his exhibition history.

Within this framework, Manders builds his post-Minimalist sculptures out of "everyday objects and architectural fixtures." Work in this segment of his "Self-Portrait" project includes drawings stacked in piles in the process of being eaten by a lizard as well as installations using such mundane objects as coffee cups and bricks. Gesturing toward spaces such as offices and factories, Manders, with saccharine drollness, identifies oppressive bureaucracy as a primary goal of human self-construction. By thus embodying not only himself but the larger social milieu in which he works, Manders incorporates the whole of surrounding civic structures in his englobing sculptural image.

"Waiting" shows at the Evanston Art Center, 2603 Sheridan Road, Evanston, (847)475-5300, through Spring 2004. Mark Manders shows at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan, (312)443-3600, through January 4. He also shows at The Renaissance Society, 5811 South Ellis, (773)792-8670, through November 2.

(2003-09-17)

Also by Michael Workman

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Pakistan-born artist Ruby Chisti's stitched and straw-stuffed animals and women made of cast fabric and yarn recall the Justin Lieberman tie-dyed Klan figures recently exhibited at Vedanta Gallery
(2003-09-10)

Eye Exam
The scandal surrounding German expressionist painter Joerg Immendorf, a close friend of Chancellor Gerhard Schröeder, is both humorous and instructive
(2003-09-10)

Eye Exam
It's opening night in the art world
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Pencil pushers
Patrons move through a room at "Comix Chicago"'s opening night, picking out the familiar lemon-shaped head of Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan, the marshmallow of Archer Prewitt's Sof' Boy, and the Ivan Brunetti figure
(2003-08-27)

Eye Exam
(2003-08-27)

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(2003-08-20)

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(2003-08-13)

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(2003-08-05)

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(2003-07-30)

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(2003-07-23)

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(2003-07-16)

Eye Exam
(2003-07-09)

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