Michael Workman

Dan Peterman stands beneath the exposed ribcage of two incomplete silos at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Two assistants crouch on their haunches, one holding a rail of aluminum girding while the other waits for a drill to bore through the metal. These will eventually get filled with wood chips and become what the artist refers to as "carbon banks," indicating the carbon dioxide that will be emitted as the chips slowly decay. Curator Lynne Warren interrupts, sternly waving people away and directing Peterman's attention to a stack of paperwork on a clipboard. They discuss assembly details and the intensity of his interest snaps palpably into focus.

Peterman's no stranger to the MCA--in fact, he's literally a fixture: the drywall on the fourth floor was produced using the gypsum left over from one of his earlier art projects at the museum. Most probably know him, however, for "Accessories to an Event," those lovably clunky brown picnic benches that sit on the MCA plaza. Yet he has somehow received more attention for his work overseas than in the city where he lives and produces it. A survey show, his new exhibit "Plastic Economies" gathers together previously shown pieces and projects from European institutions such as the Kunstraum de Universitat Luneberg and MediaLabMadrid. "It's Dan's first large show and his first survey in the United States," says Warren. "Part of the reason for the show is to redress that fact."

Born in Minneapolis in 1960, he has taught as an associate professor at UIC's College of Architecture and the Arts in their School of Art and Design and was included in the 1993 Venice Biennale. His work shares affinities with art groups, such as the collaborative Haha, comprised of former art students who met at the Art Institute in the eighties, and artists such as Mark Dion, who once organized a Chicago Urban Ecology Action Group with high-school kids from racially exclusive Chicago schools. Whether or not "Plastic Economies" cements a place for him in art history, this exhibit should certainly mark a tipping point for Peterman. For Peterman is still very much on the mend from the devastation of a highly publicized fire that destroyed his studio and wreaked destruction on several organizations close to him. Peterman still can't make art the way he once did.

While pointing out that he doesn't really have any grand expectations as to what viewers will take from the exhibit, Peterman's hopeful that the show will "provide a broadened language for thinking about complex relations between ecological issues or processes that touch us in a lot of different ways, either through ecology or economic relations." Namely, recycling. Recycling plays a huge role in Peterman's work, with much of his art constructed purely from recycled materials. Among the work on display will be "Recent Recipes," an installation that uses units of tables and shelves stacked with expired packaged wholesale foods disposed of by major food chains. A "Reading Room" project will contain shopping carts salvaged after use by the homeless and converted into chairs for viewers to sit in while reading one of the many books from previous projects that will stock the space. Peterman hasn't left out the MCA plaza, either: built exclusively out of standard waste containers, a number of sheds called "Standard Kiosk (Chicago)" will be stationed at the foot of the museum steps. Each will serve a public utility, such as blood-pressure screenings and bicycle-repair workshops. After sitting out on the plaza for a month, they'll travel to Humboldt Park where they'll remain operational for the rest of the summer. An active centerpiece of the exhibit, the MCA received a $50,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to support the "exhibition, educational programming, and temporary installation" of Peterman's kiosks.

Peterman wants to get viewers thinking about the process behind the post-consumer materials he's building the exhibit from. "I'm trying to open up a way of thinking about art or some of the ideas of ecology, economics or things connected to the exhibition," Peterman explains. It's a sticking point for Peterman, who's keenly aware how the recycling label reduces his work if it's just given a one-dimensional read. For him, it's not as simple a problem as the claim that recycling will save the planet. "Metaphorically it's very rich and ecologically it's very rich, this idea of looking at how something is cycling. But it's kind of a fiction to think that you can just reuse something and that energy is perfectly conserved. Instead, there's always a glitch, there's always a flaw in the system and I've always been alert to that and tried within my projects to acknowledge how that's also part of the process when you're looking at ecological equations."

Case in point: plastics. One form of plastic commonly used in plastic bags, polyethylene, can't be recycled. Most people simply throw them away. Warren agrees that Peterman's advocacy works sympathetically with environmental efforts by addressing the cultural stigma of certain materials. "Most of us have a problematic relationship to plastics. In our human drive to improve ourselves, we're blinded. We don't think about the other side of the metaphorical coin. Plastic's not inherently bad. Dan's doing a kind of advocacy to get us to look at our social and aesthetic attitudes so that we'll take more responsibility and not just depend on our knee-jerk reactions. He wants us to take everything into account and then make our decisions."

Confusion as to what makes this stuff art doesn't seem to worry Peterman who, paraphrasing Thomas Hirschhorn, doesn't make political art--but he does make art politically. Implicit to his work is a theoretical message about finding the good of our inner motivation in a form of social responsibility. His art indicates a skeptical approach to the art "market," choosing instead the boundary between art and instrument, between the Brillo boxes of his recycling as an art project and the actual Brillo boxes of recycling. Peterman's is thus essentially a conceptual-art project. Building shelters from waste containers for instance, takes viewers beyond the perception of waste containers as mere objects and replaces them with a concept of them as objects; the finished shelters are predicated on our recognition of the construction materials. But are they still waste containers? Or are they a shelter? Though he hopes his work will have the added value of educating viewers about the importance of material reuse, it's not necessary. Rather, the source of his art is its own relative conceptual weight--it need not have any particular inherent utility to qualify. That's what makes his work suitable for the Museum of Contemporary Art rather than the Museum of Science and Industry.

With all the issues of material reuse and civic responsibility packed into it, Peterman also takes pains to distinguish the consumer mentality that's a subject of his art from the populist views of recycling that he rejects. "It's not just about referencing something--oh, let's all just now understand what this utopic model is and assume that we can just get there--that simply showing an unachievable state is somehow making the world a better place," he says. "I think it's much more important to have dialogues about what the flaws in those utopias are. What are some of the models that exist today that intersect with some of those ideas? There are links, there are small steps and local things that can actually help and create a basis for thinking about how things could be in the future." Studying how recycling represents a "material economy" has led him to examine how our manmade environments affect our thinking. Much as his "carbon bank" pieces look at some fundamental material relations and ideas about decomposition, his greenhouse projects explore the different aspects of what greenhouses are as a kind of architecture. "It can be a very pragmatic kind of agricultural architecture or an aesthetically driven structure, like bank-lobby atriums with glass and light," Peterman says. "It can be a very nomadic sort of architecture."

Greenhouses serve for Peterman as a Joseph Beuys-like social architecture with their own self-contained life-support systems, a kind of metaphor for human biology. Peterman's greenhouse projects aim at the effort to enact small social changes, one in which access to information makes all the difference. Even just striving to act as an informed consumer holds enormous potential for change. He's interested mainly in the implications people buy into as consumers, for instance, when they purchase an SUV living in a flat city like Chicago and, moreover, the signal that sends to the oil industry. Do consumers intend to send a message of willful self-destruction? "There's such an enormous chain that's connected to certain patterns of consumption that are corporate-driven, and passively consuming the message that's sent to you has major implications. Simply becoming more sophisticated in terms of really thinking through the implications of certain kinds of material use or certain energy patterns are important steps. In some ways, this hopefully increases some of the complexity and awareness of those issues, and doesn't do it in a way that knocks you over the head and says `We have to do this now.' It's important to recognize that small agriculture is different from agribusiness. To say, `Look, I want to eat and feed my family off of food that's actually connected to a sustainable strategy of production as opposed to a petrochemical over dependence'."

For Peterman, life intersected with art on April 25, 2001. For years, he'd housed his studio at the Resource Center at 61st Street and Blackstone Avenue. A community recycling program had been started there in 1969 by Ken Dunn in a building that Peterman first stumbled across in the 1990s while still a graduate student at the University of Chicago. Though the Resource Center enjoyed an active start, the building fell into disuse. By the time Peterman found it, the building had been dormant for years and was jam-packed with refuse and abandoned junk: a perfect place for a messy artist's studio. He took a job with the Center, buying back bottles and other recyclable materials and, over time, started putting aside some of what he found there for use in his own work.

Peterman's personal art practice and the community-service mission of the Resource Center made for a good match. Under his stewardship, the Center found new life, establishing strong ties with the Woodlawn neighborhood and Hyde Park residents, playing host to some of the neighborhood's community service and small, civic-minded organizations. Then tragedy struck. His studio burned to the ground in a multiple-alarm fire famous for also consuming the Blackstone Bicycle Works, a visiting artists' program called Monk Parakeet, the Urban Farm Project and the offices of the Baffler magazine. In the weeks following the fire, a widely reported struggle to save the Resource Center ensued and after much wrangling with city officials who wanted to simply raze the remaining structure, Peterman saved the Resource Center with a promise to rebuild. Plans continue to reopen the building as the Experimental Station, a name taken from a speech at Hull House by Frank Lloyd Wright, in which Wright called for the construction of a place where ideas in design, technology and art can be explored together. Peterman's quixotic quest to rebuild was another motivating factor in Warren's proposal. "I thought it was either brilliant or insane, but then I also thought it could help give him focus; the fire has really hampered him."

Fulfilling that promise has been a laborious process for Peterman, a literal crawl from the belly of the fire's beast with the reconstruction effort an enormous strain on his time and resources, including a forced rethinking of the often daunting logistical aspects of his own work. "In terms of loss," explains Peterman, "I have to say that it eliminated a certain portion of my practice entirely. My studio-based work disappeared and I still haven't had a studio for years now. How can I have things done externally that normally I would do internally?" He must now contract out many of his fabrication needs rather than build himself. It's a compromise that involves relinquishing a certain amount of freedom.

Even when complete, the future of a rebuilt Experimental Station remains uncertain. With permits in hand, the construction effort has finally approached the point of having a roof. But no date has been put on overall completion. And it's still a serious question whether the original tenants will even want to return. "It's been over three years now." Says Peterman. "There's clearly a price you pay with that kind of delay, especially with small not-for-profits."

Money for the rebuild remains an ongoing problem as well. "Taxes are changing. We're in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood," Peterman points out, not at all sounding confident. "We need to figure out what model will work; it's just impossible to get back to where we were, which is really unfortunate because we could operate below market and that bought a lot of freedom and flexibility and helped the site be useful to a pretty broad community. So we need to figure out how to do that and part of that has involved establishing a not-for-profit, formalizing the mission of trying to provide subsidized space, highly organized and equipped, so that a lot of mutual sharing of resources can happen again."

In the weeks following the fire, the city and alderman pushed for demolition to provide land to expand the nearby Andrew Carnegie Elementary. Peterman eventually brokered a compromise, giving up the Center's adjacent community garden. But for a while, former tenants were forced to camp outside the building, wary of city plows showing up in a "Meigs Field"-style operation. It made for something of a surreal scene, with the Baffler's David "Diamonds" Mulcahey and friends sitting outside for twenty-four hours on folding chairs pulled up to a card table, drinking from a bottle of scotch, locked in charged political debates or merely lazing in the crisp air of a spring night while, nearby, Peterman scouted the charred debris of the building. Trying to prepare trailers for the businesses to continue operating from, he couldn't get one of them to mount correctly on its industrial-grade jack. Wedging a ceiling beam between the jack and the trailer front, a line of people tried jumping on the long end of the beam to leverage the trailer up high enough for him to work the jack up to a stable height. He couldn't pump the handle quickly enough, but people were in a convivial mood, talking and laughing as the trailer rocked dangerously on its moors. Peterman kept working and eventually figured it out.

Now he's trying to figure out the biggest challenge of his career: how to recycle a community that could never be replicated.

(2004-06-16)

Also by Michael Workman

Tip of the Week
Maybe it's the broken-lined masks with their yawning nose, mouth and eye-holes that makes this show intriguing
(2004-06-09)

Eye Exam
Chicago artists Bonnie Fortune and Mike Wolf have organized a series of summer walking tours
(2004-06-09)

Eye Exam
Influenced by Deleuze and Guattari's description of a "body without organs," CarianaCarianne interrogates notions of the modern self
(2004-06-02)

Eye Exam
At this time every year, thousands are overtaken with the urge to view art and crafts while sampling the city's most savory fine dining options
(2004-05-25)

Blowing in the wind
(2004-05-25)

Tip of the Week
(2004-05-18)

Make rhetoric not war
(2004-05-18)

Eye Exam
(2004-05-18)

Eye Exam
(2004-05-12)

Tip of the Week
(2004-05-05)

Breakout Artists
(2004-05-05)

Eye Exam
(2004-05-05)

about Newcitychicago | about Newcity magazine | advertising | privacy policy | FAQ | employment