Michael Workman

Millions travel every year to see the Mona Lisa, or to look up through the latticework of the Eiffel Tower's black iron girders. Art as tourist attraction: it's an idea Chicago freshly experienced with the opening of Millennium Park last summer. This spring and summer, when patrons flock back for the April art fairs, or for shopping on Michigan Avenue, or to sit under Gehry's pavilion or frolic in the Plensa fountain, the Museum of Contemporary Art will offer them a chance to reflect on themselves. While geographical tourism plays a central role in "Universal Experience: Art, Life and the Tourist's Eye," which opens February 12, various other types of tourist experience also come into play--cultural tourism, class tourism, even religious tourism. But artistic tourism gives context to the entire exhibit, a vast show that will take up the entire museum. It's only the second show at the museum to have done this--the first was "At the End of the Century: 100 Years of Architecture" in 2000--and curators hope that this show will serve as a landmark in the museum's history. As if to ensure it, they've selected a sculpture by German artist Thomas Schutte that will sit on a plinth beside the museum steps, a feature that they hope will become permanent if the public enjoys it enough to spur sufficient funding, as symbolic of the museum as the lions are for the Art Institute. While Schutte's credentials are unquestionable--he once designed a fully functional ice-cream parlor as his contribution for the international exhibition of contemporary art in Kassel, Germany known as Documenta--he clearly works at his own pace. At press-time, details regarding the finished sculpture he plans to deliver were still largely unavailable, locking in the element of surprise. Even more of a surprise, however, will be the effect this show has on the reputation of its curator, Francesco Bonami, for whom "Universal Experience" offers a chance for a critical resurrection after his controversial stint at the Venice Biennale back in 2003.

Whereas "100 Years" opened first in Tokyo, "Universal Experience" will start its life here in Chicago. Also unlike "100 Years," which was divided into twenty-one different thematic sections, this exhibit has been organized as one seamless whole. It's a huge effort to install, with more than seventy artists from twenty-four countries participating, involving equal thirds video, photography and a combination of installation and sculpture. (Painting, which has enjoyed a popular resurgence in recent years, remains conspicuously absent.) In an upstairs room at the museum, for instance, workers are still busily installing Zhan Wang's "Urban Landscape," a mountain city in miniature. Mirrors have been fitted in a grid pattern on the walls, three huge stainless steel garden rocks situated in the middle of the floor. Several oversized wooden crates sit outside the installation room, brimming with steel pots and pans in hay that workers will arrange and stack to resemble office towers and skyscrapers. When finished, the room will be filled with simulated smog pumped in from a dry-ice machine, bringing Wang's mystery city to life as a magical if somewhat claustrophobic destination somewhere in the human imagination.

Down the hall are rows of light-box tables by Zurich-based artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss, a project called "Visible World." A few workmen mill about in dirty jeans and clanging utility belts, measuring transparencies, replacing bulbs. Each tabletop has been covered with hundreds of boxy little travel snapshots: valleys tucked between mountain ranges; long, sleek private jets in flight. It's an installation consistent with Fischli and Weiss's interrogation of mass culture through such works as their airport travel photographs from the early nineties. At the end of the row of tables, a 16mm transfer to DVD projection of Andy Warhol's classic Empire State Building film, "Empire," floats near the ceiling in grainy black and white, unmoving as the moments pass, at pause in an eternally reverberating now. The floor outside the door is covered by "Untitled," a shockingly bright safety-orange color carpet by New York artist Rudolf Stingel that screams airport lounge. It's a sight to see, mainly because the sheer intensity of the color threatens to burn the viewer's eyes from their sockets. While the sun rises up through the museum's front windows, the light striking it can be seen from several floors down as a radiant fire-colored halo above the mezzanine.

In the middle of the room, a circle of wooden chairs sits below six television monitors, suspended on pipes descended from the ceiling. In one of these chairs rests the Italian-born Bonami, Manilow Senior Curator of the museum, artistic director of the Fondazione Sandretto ReRebaudengo per l'Arte in Turin and of Pitti Discovery in Florence. He's a picture of curatorial propriety in his perfectly pressed suit, salt-and-pepper hair and neat two-day grain of beard.

"Orange is supposed to stimulate people to eat; some scientists say it spurs people's appetite," he says, eyes twinkling at the thought. "This is a basic orange, a color that some wholesale-food company used to advertise their products." He rises with a wave of his hands and takes a few quick, short steps in the direction of the elevators. Against the wall are a handful of half-wrapped 30x40 chromogenic development prints, resembling tourist posters, by Dinh Q. Lê: one depicts a row of men and women on motor scooters, superimposed with a cursive text that reads: "Come Back to Saigon! We Promise We Will Not Spit on You." Another depicts a trio of young women in bright white gowns lounging on a street bench that says, "So Sorry to Hear That You Are Still Not Over Us. Come Back to Vietnam for Closure!" After we contemplate the images, Bonami swoops his hands forward and says, "Now let's go eat," as, with a slight smile, he steps into the elevator.

Bonami certainly knows a thing or two about art as a tourist attraction, having presided over the fiftieth anniversary 2003 Venice Biennale, a once-in-a-lifetime curatorial experience that ended very, very badly for him. Not even twelve months ago, drums of ink spilled in response to Venice, an event that critics and journalists the world over ridiculed, reviled and denigrated. Bonami was blamed with disgracing this oldest of the world's biennials, of dismantling one of the planet's most exalted "exposition des artes." Part of the outcry was pinned to his decision to break with the Biennale's longstanding tradition of one curator ruling over the entire process, thus stamping it with a singular artistic vision. His philosophy differed radically from this approach and he broke with it publicly by announcing he would hand over his authority to eight different curators from around the world. It was a strategy that soured with most in attendance.

Does any of that matter anymore? To hear Bonami speak on the subject, not at all. But it's still hard not to wonder whether he sees this show as somehow an extension of his effort in Venice, from where Bonami has drawn some artists in the show. "I didn't travel particularly for this exhibition," he explains. "It was more the idea to find work that was related to the theme, work that I was seeing, it was more about artists who travel, curators who travel. I am always interested in the viewer's reaction to what they're looking at." This notion of "looking" provides one of the threads that connect it to Venice: there, the gaze of the viewer was a major theme. Exactly what kind of connections does Bonami himself see? "Well, Venice was about this `Dictatorship of the Viewer;' it was very much about a world where a viewer becomes a dictator of his own experience. Venice was built to try and offer a new direction in a very chaotic world that offers a lot of visual stimulation, new types of contact and how we negotiate today's different kinds of realities. From that, it was not much to build a theory about travel, tourism or viewing--the "tourist's eye"--which was more about the non-linear aspect of our contemporary experience. Anybody can go anywhere in this show, everybody and anybody. There are no boundaries."

Seated at a table in the museum's Wolfgang Puck restaurant, Bonami continues his exegesis between bites and it slowly becomes clear that the impression he's most concerned to make is about the city and its institutions. "I'd like this to be a Chicago show. My idea was to transform the museum into a tourist attraction. In 1893, with the world's expo it was the first time an American city was transformed into this kind of tourist attraction." It's worth noting that Venice, of course, began in the city's Giardini Pubblici in 1895, taking after such world's fairs as Chicago's Columbian Exposition and, earlier that century, London's 1851 Crystal Palace show. It's this basis that situates "Universal Experience" as having derived from Venice--but to what end? As an attempt to correct past mistakes or as some kind of reconciliation with the artistic home he went forth to represent? Neither, actually.

"I was looking at how they built the expo and how, though at that time there was no communication, over seven million people visited. And from a very short period of time from May until November--that was the starting point, this idea of how the city became an attraction. So here, a museum has become an attraction." It's precisely this notion of a museum as a place for the preservation of art that Bonami hopes to zero in on, and an attitude that he wishes in particular to redefine. Rather than nations accounting for themselves, this time, it's simply the city of Chicago. Here, too, Bonami remains somewhat an iconoclast with regard to the function in a culture of its art and the place of its artists. "Artists are very protective about what they do, which in a way is contradictory to this notion [of tourism], which is about viewing and going, which is about touching and seeing. Artists now are trying to defend an elitist role that doesn't exist any longer."

Travel is at the core of our civilization's conception of itself. Anything that affects our free movement affects everything else. In this sense, the phenomenon of terrorism also figures prominently in "Universal Experience." Belgian-born artist Johan Grimonprez addresses the subject in his 68-minute DVD video "Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y," originally shown at Documenta. "He did this video making a collage of all the terrorist attacks that happened in the seventies and eighties," Bonami says. "This is a way tourism has been disrupted by this need for security, and by fear. I will be very interested to see the reaction of the public. It will probably be a very controversial video, even if every day we look at these images on the television--once you put it in a gallery it's viewed very differently." Parisian Thomas Hirschhorn's another artist who deals with the subject in terms of events spurred by the American response to terrorism: his "Chalet Lost History" will entirely fill one of the museum's upstairs galleries, fitted with faux wood-grain paneling and divided into three separate rooms. Replicas of the Sphinx, pyramids and other tourist sites have been built into them as degraded symbols of lost cultures. As Paul Galvez wrote in Artforum of the installation, "Eastern hookahs are transformed into makeshift bongs...while the beauties of the Turkish bath are made over into hard-core porn images." It's tourism as a metaphor for the spread of consume-and-dispose culture. Iraq and the looting in Baghdad figure prominently: fans, refrigerators and a representative cross-sampling of the objects that were looted during the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime have been thrown into the mix.

Bonami views this parallel between looting and looking as an important one: "Sometimes, looking is not enough, you have to have it." It's representative of a kind of class tourism spurred on by the desperate pursuit of individual freedom through stolen treasures. America's response to terrorism, after all, has in large part been an attempt to wrest control of terrorists' finances. Domestically and in Iraq, the concept of freedom has been steered away from concerns with social justice to an understanding of freedom as a personal situation, improved upon in degrees by the constant accrual of material wealth. Bonami sees this concept as one rife with logical problems. "Paradoxically, we're planning the future of a country based on its capacity to be a tourist destination, but if you loot everything, what's left to see?" This notion of free movement applies as well to our financial markets and, specifically, how we distribute or restrict our country's wealth. Danish artist Jacob Holdt's "American Pictures" series, for example, shows the consequences of rampant American consumerism here in the United States, with photos taken from 1981 through 1991 when Holdt hitchhiked over 100,000 miles across the country as a tourist of poverty. His images of shriveled men and women living in squalor, as victims of alcoholism and economic oppression, evoke the spirit of Walker Evans and James Agee's "Let us Now Praise Famous Men." These images and the Iraqi example stand in stark contrast to the kinds of transcendent, often flagrant displays of capital excess on display in even the poorest of countries. "I once rented a room in this new hotel in Butan in southern Mongolia," Bonami recalls, gesturing in disbelief. "It was a very small room. But it cost $1,400 per night. When I saw the bill I couldn't help thinking, `Oh my God.'"

No single work captures the international role played in the show's concern with artistic border-crossing quite as well as New York artist Jim Hodges' 18x36-foot color-printed wall mural. Put up in the place of the wall mural of pencils in the museum's entry corridor, it's an open, fun invitation to an otherwise unimaginable international unity. Hodges approached each member of the United Nations and asked them to write out the phrase "don't be afraid" in their own native language. It's an entertaining game to guess who's been left out. Yet, the question remains whether contemporary art can inspire the level of tourism as, say, a Sistine Chapel. Instead of Da Vinci's Mona Lisa, for instance, "Universal Experience" will instead have Andy Warhol's 1963 "Double Mona Lisa." Major leaguers also include Jeff Koons and Mauricio Cattelan, themselves reasons to travel long distances. This show also has its own sprouting mythologies: Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang had originally proposed to assemble a boat that would carry visitors through the entire exhibit, an idea that was nixed due to the impossible logistics. Instead, his 11-minute DVD, "Explosion Work," showing black daylight fireworks ignited between 1990-2003 will be shown.

The only Chicagoan in the show, artist Jeff Carter's contribution offers a plausible answer to the question of tourism as a kind of spiritual compunction. Carter, who travels extensively, brought back from one of his trips to the Middle East a small arrow made of aluminum, Plexiglass and neon. Called "Great Circle (Mecca)," the arrow in its native locale and at the museum points toward Mecca, a holy site off the Red Sea Coast to which the worshippers of Islam are commanded by the prophet Muhammad to make a pilgrimage at least once in their lives. It's a powerful symbol for the command to witness the whole of creation. "I think we are all tourists. We cannot avoid this destiny," Bonami says, then pauses. "What do we bring back with us? Memories, photographs. He brought back a very important contribution. He brought back the idea of a place, which is what I think this show is really all about."

(2005-02-01)

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