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 Eye Exam Boots on the ground
Chicago artists Bonnie Fortune and Mike Wolf have organized a series of
summer walking tours that, last weekend, included a two-mile hike of the
Bloomingdale Trail located between Ashland and Ridgeway Avenues. At the
moment, it's an unofficial trail mapped out along a freight line
abandoned by Canadian Pacific Railways, overgrown with weeds and papered
with litter, that runs a course parallel to Bloomingdale Avenue. The
artists hope their tour would give the Friends of Bloomingdale Trail a
boost in its effort to gather support from private businesses and city
government to convert the neglected path into a recreational trail.
Such preservation efforts have a precedent in the effort to save the
abandoned High Line elevated rail structure on Manhattan's West Side.
There, a group similar to the Bloomingdale team--have gathered massive
support from a host of elected officials, civic groups, architecture
firms, actors like Kevin Spacey and Glenn Close, artists and their
galleries in West Chelsea. There's a history of successful rail-line
conversion that the Bloomingdale effort can cite in support of its
efforts: in the mid-1980s, for instance, the city of Paris turned a rail
in the vicinity of the Bastille into the now-popular Promenade Plantee.
In the U.S., even the federal government's gotten into the act: the
Department of Transportation oversees a rail-banking program called
Rails-To-Trails, which has converted over 10,000 miles into recreational
trails. Locally, the support continues to grow. Friends of Bloomingdale
Trail have listed support from a few aldermen, neighborhood associations
and art organizations such as the ACME Artist's Community.
A total of four walks in the Free Walking Tour project have been
planned, with a visit this Saturday June 12 at 1pm to Chicago artist Joe
Janka's "Lost Bike Installation" near the Nelson Algren Memorial
Fountain. Janka has invited artists to make work to be installed on an
antique bike he refinished and secured to a rack at the corner a year
ago. He lost the key to the lock and it's been there ever since. On a
third walk, the weekend of June 19, local artist Julia Marsh will
oversee a search-and-retrieve assignment that culminates in a report on
the journey and, for the group's final walking tour on June 26, Jennifer
Bastian will conduct a tour of the Hyde Park site of the World's
Columbian Exposition. At each walking tour, the artists will leave
chalkboards with the route mapped out for latecomers to follow, as well
as a number of sealed "cairns" along the trail--coffee cans, that
is--with notebooks inside for patrons to record their thoughts on. Flying blind
A few weeks ago WBEZ 89.1FM premiered its new Sunday arts magazine,
"Hello Beautiful." Two years in the offing, the show replaces morning
magazine 848's Sunday spot, gathering together a "best of" from that
week's art and culture programming, presented by host Edward Lifson.
Promising a more experimental approach, hosts Philip von Zweck and John
Wanzel this past Sunday launched the hour-long art program "Blind Spot"
on independent community radio station WLUW 88.3FM, which broadcasts
live from Loyola University. Since the university stopped funding it,
WBEZ rents the management license for WLUW and has been helping plan for
the station's eventual fiscal self-sufficiency. Broadcasting from Rogers
Park, according to Wanzel, the program can be heard about "as far north
as Evanston" and as far south as the Wicker Park neighborhood.
Pioneered by Zweck and Wanzel, the program's inaugural show
compressed the nineteen hours of the 1944 D-Day invasion of Omaha Beach
into a single hour. A score for computer and cello was composed by Jacob
Christopher and Peter Rosenblum at the ratio of three minutes for every
hour of the invasion, interspersed with scripted voice-over narrative by
Wanzel and Chicago artist Brian Taylor that imagines the point-of-view
of soldiers in the attack. The recording starts with the parachute drop,
moves through a midnight bombing raid, then to the first and second
waves of the invasion. Originally, the D-Day show was supposed to
broadcast live, but it ran into a few technical problems along the way.
"I built boats with microphones in them," explains Wanzel, "but the
anchors weren't working." Instead, a recorded version of Wanzel's boats
will fill the space. This weekend, the show will host "radio bingo," a
live on-air version of the game with prizes including bumper stickers
and a gift certificate to Powell's Bookstore. Listeners can play by
emailing the hosts at pvonzweck@yahoo.com or jwanzel@earthlink.net for
cards, also available at the Art Institute's Gallery 2 and Reckless
Records locations. The following Sunday, the program will air a
"cell-phone soundscape," with seven or eight artists using cell phones
as microphones and calling in from different locations throughout the
city to create an audio landscape. Free Walking Project: Joe Janka's Bike Convergence takes place
Saturday June 12 at 1pm at the corner of Division and Milwaukee. For
more information call (773)412-2501. "Blind Spot" airs Sundays from 10pm
to 11pm on WLUW 88.7 FM.
Also by Michael Workman Eye Exam
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Blowing in the wind
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Make rhetoric not war
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Breakout Artists
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