Michael Workman

Tectonic shifts are taking place across the art-world map, movements intended to resuscitate dead cities and transform the future of mass art exhibition.

This month, for instance, the much-anticipated first annual Frieze Art Fair, organized by the contemporary art magazine of the same name, premieres in a tent on London's Regent's Park. Planners hope to merge selling with a painstakingly designed visual "experience." At the same time, the 118-year-old Detroit Institute of Arts, after merging departments and working furiously to reinstall its art collections, recently announced plans to reorganize its 35-person strong curatorial staff. Hype surrounding this and the city's new orchestra-hall expansion, the Max M. Fisher Music Center, continues to generate excitement about the future of Detroit as the ultimate test of the public-art-as-urban-renewal argument.

Individual artistic missions may or may not be influenced by the art world's grasping after new models. Against this backdrop, however, a controversial Londoner has taken refuge here in Chicago, while an installation at the Chicago Cultural Center surveys the sleeping dreams of Chicago residents using sound technology that could very well make headphones obsolete.

Succor through sexuality

Patrons walking into the West Loop-based Donald Young Gallery encounter a trio of unfired clay sculptures, mounted on castered boards and situated close together at the center of the main showroom. At first, athletic calves, feet, the crumbling, crackling dried clay surface stand out. Then, looming over these figures, the sexual anatomy suddenly leaps forward. Huge, globular, egg-shaped breasts of massive proportion, with fist-sized areolae formed and peaked with thick, distended nipples. One particularly buxom figure, "Teacher (M.B.)," recalls R. Crumb's simultaneous representation of women as vessels for the exercise of male fertility and a challenge to received standards of feminine beauty. Made by UK-based artist Rebecca Warren, these sculptures tread far less inconsistent territory.

Warren buttresses her sculptural work with wall-mounted glass vitrines filled with studio collage detritus that suggests a museum-grade taxonomical research effort into her creative process. Arranged within are pencils splattered with paint, short curls of lit neon and stretched fibers pinned into the wall with thumbtacks. A number of two-dimensional boards transmute the "research" suggested by the vitrined objects onto an otherwise representational picture plane. Attached is more of the same: pieces of shorn metal, an occasional fuzzy ball. The boards are also marred with clay dust handprints, streaks and sneaker-stamped footprints, tying the artist's two-dimensional pieces to her sculptures, while also suggesting the integral role of such castoffs in their crafting.

While this faux-cataloging of Warren's private moments expands the exhibit, their undifferentiated treatment as individual art objects also threatens to collapse into mere gesture toward an unarticulated sexual biography fully expressed only by her clay figures. Yet, for those doubting their connection, Warren has also fashioned a smaller vitrined clay sculpture, "Häre," mounted on a plinth in the hall between rooms in the gallery. This figure, while sporting the familiar breast and incongruously rendered female physique, also has parts resembling the Japanese body armor worn by medieval honor guards. Against what or whom this totemic figure protects is hardly clear. The spirits of self-repulsion, perhaps?

Can you hear me now?

While Alan Stone's "Chicago Dreams" at the Chicago Cultural Center focuses on dreams related during some 300 interviews that Stone recorded, the most exciting aspect of the installation is the innovative sound technology used to conduct the audio. Developed by MIT graduate Joe Pompei in the school's Media Lab, the technology known as Audio Spotlight "allows sound to be focused like a beam of light." Unless they're standing in the path of the beam, patrons viewing the 10-foot tall video-projected talking heads will hear only a dim, generalized buzz. Once inside the path of the projected sound, patrons will be able to clearly hear the voice of the speakers onscreen.

Stone's use of Audio Spotlight parallels the activity of the subconscious in the way that elements of everyday life give rise to commonly recurring signs and symbols. Lest the dreams of average men and women on the street seem boring, Stone has rounded out the interviews with local celebrities such as Scott Turow, Ed Paschke and Jeff Tweedy of Wilco. Maybe some of them have dreamt of owning a new Dodge MAXXcab concept truck: Daimler/Chrysler has recently installed Audio Spotlight technology in its newest model, though with far less creative purposes in mind.

Rebecca Warren shows at Donald Young Gallery, 933 W. Washington Boulevard, (312)455-0100, through Nov 8. Chicago Dreams shows at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington, (312)744-1424, through Nov 16.

(2003-10-02)

Also by Michael Workman

Eye Exam
As a society, our simultaneous disassociation from and obsession with images of death and destruction are legitimately driving us insane
(2003-09-25)

Tip of the Week
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)

Eye Exam
Two current exhibitions probe the convergence points and essential nature of architecture and sculpture
(2003-09-17)

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
(2003-09-10)

Eye Exam
(2003-09-04)

Pencil pushers
(2003-08-27)

Eye Exam
(2003-08-27)

Eye Exam
(2003-08-20)

Eye Exam
(2003-08-13)

Eye Exam
(2003-08-05)

Eye Exam
(2003-07-30)

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