Michael Workman

Strange days have found us
And through their strange hours
We linger alone
Bodies confused
Memories misused
As we run from the day
To a strange night of storms

--The Doors, "Strange Days"

As a society, our simultaneous disassociation from and obsession with images of death and destruction are legitimately driving us insane. Strangest of all, perhaps, is that in our wars we have reached a point at which it is not clear why we should be willing to die, but we do so anyway.

Far past the nostrums of psychotherapy, adult sublimation of the fears and astonishing recent traumas of our Information Age has produced masses of men and women obediently marching off to the slaughter. How do artists contend with the ignobility of a society gorged on its own hubris?

Alone and laying on his side in the north barrel-vault collection gallery at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago-based artist Tony Tasset clasps his hands around the trunk of an eight-foot tall cherry tree made of oil paint, wax and steel armature sprouting up through a hole in a white riser. As he shifts the base, the boughs shake above him. Tasset is merely installing a piece, but he could almost have remained as part of the exhibit. Not far from Tasset's "Cherry Tree" hangs Sharon Lockhart's "Lunch Break Installation, "Duane Hanson: Sculptures of Life," four large-scale photographs depicting five men, alternatively standing near and sitting on a scaffold in a gallery. A moment of contemplation reveals that the three construction workers in the image are super-realist sculptures, while the two other men in the image are real, live human beings.

Associate curators Dominic Molon and Staci Boris have drawn together more than 100 works to mount "Strange Days." Taking up nearly the entire fourth floor of the museum, "Strange Days" is divided up into eight sections: Travel Anxiety, Reconfiguring Labor, Warped Spaces, Breaking the Law, Paradise Lost, Post-Traumatic Culture, Carnal Knowledge and Communication Breakdown. Included is a mind-boggling array of works from Andy Warhol, H.C. Westermann, Jeff Wall, Rineke Dijkstra, Robert Mapplethorpe, Jenny Holzer, Gordon Matta-Clark, Richard Prince, Raymond Pettibon, Andres Serrano, Cindy Sherman and a constellation of other bright lights in the art star system. Intended, as Boris explains it, to address the "pervasiveness of anxiety and uncertainty of contemporary culture."

Take Chris Burden's "Spook Planes," for instance. Located in the Breaking the Law section, the image is a kind of minimalist collage: a postcard of the World Trade Center Towers with a small decal depicting a pinkish fireball pasted over its bottom third. Above the postcard in black ink is written "what has man wrought"; a line runs from the postcard, loops around and splits into two arrows that point to the phrase "the earth is exploding." If this image were made post-9/11, it would read as cheaper sentiment. But it was made in 1979 and the effect is to realize that you're gazing upon a hair-raising piece of artistic prophecy.

Encountering Robert Morris' "Portal" of latex and aluminum in the Travel Anxiety section is no less disturbing. An earthbound, handle-less tuning fork, this strict geometric figure immediately resembles nothing other than an airport metal detector--though it doesn't have to. Yet, the shape has imprinted itself into the modern mind as an inescapable element of modern architecture, one doomed to vibrate with the portent of invisible forces scanning for signs of hatred and death. Doug Aitken's "Turbulence," hazy shots of commercial airliner jet wings, hangs on the wall nearby.

Besides Tasset, local artists represented in "Strange Days" include Stephanie Brooks, Robert Davis and Michael Langois, Michelle Grabner and Brad Killam. The latter two, in collaboration with David Robbins, have on display "One Mother's Love," shot in the mode of an instructional video in which a mother demonstrates for her son the proper way to roll a joint. Instead of marijuana, however, Grabner substitutes oregano. Davis and Langois' oil on linen, "Meth Lab," continues the tune-out approach to global traumas: self-sustenance in the face of worldly indignities may require altering our very brain chemistry.

At the heart of "Strange Days," however are video works by João Onofre and Aida Ruilova. In "Untitled (Vulture in the Studio)," death in the form of a shrieking vulture confronts the artist in his studio, the sacred space of any artist's creative work. A crude, venomous-looking animal, the heavy bird stomps across Onofre's studio and extends its wings to full span while clacking its carrion-tearing beak at stacks of papers and books. Ruilova's looping video in six parts shows people crawling, drooling, laying in bed, gasping orgasmically, scraping records against floors and stone walls. The videos, admittedly influenced by the vampire films of French horror auteur Jean Rollin, signal a descent into discontinuity that manages to eke out an often heartening caprice that are the films' sole consistency.

Not a cheery exhibition, what's worth appreciating about "Strange Days" is the way in which it manages to pierce, however briefly, our programmed impulse to be happy at any cost.

"Strange Days" shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 East Chicago, (312)280-2660, through July 2004.

(2003-09-25)

Also by Michael Workman

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Filling the gallery walls with arrows made of blood wood mounted with Swarovski rhinestones, Larson transforms the masculine arsenal of arrows and snare into a collection of "feminized" objects that would make even Liberace proud
(2003-09-17)

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Two current exhibitions probe the convergence points and essential nature of architecture and sculpture
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Tip of the Week
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
(2003-09-04)

Pencil pushers
(2003-08-27)

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(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)

Eye Exam
(2003-07-23)

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