World according to modern art

April 28, 2005

Dear Julie,

Driving in Chicago is almost as unnerving as driving in New York City. Drivers, especially cabbies, pretend that 60 mph is a safe speed on city streets and that stop signs mean slow down a little.

Thus it was not surprising last weekend to see that a car and the small travel trailer behind it had come to an ungracious stop in front of the Museum of Contemporary Art. The rear wheels of the car hung in the air, and the back end of the trailer dipped below the surface of the plaza. The two together formed an upside-down V, as if car and trailer had just emerged from below ground.

That work of art, called "Short Cut," is one of 200 in a show at the museum titled "Universal Experience: Art, Life, and the Tourist's Eye."

The whole museum has been given over to different perspectives on traveling. One of the four floors has been decorated to look like an airport terminal. Down the center of a room on another floor is a light table illuminating thousands of slides of the kinds of pictures tourists take of monuments and landscapes. On the ceiling a video loop shows a glimpse of Andy Warhol's infamous eight-hour study of a single image: the Empire State Building. Another loop lists places that have become tourist sites because of the tragedies visited upon them. Ground Zero in New York City, the Oklahoma City federal building. The list is too long.

I like being challenged by art but stared at a stack of hard candy in the corner of one room. In his statement, the artist compares the dissemination of his works to galleries and museums to the way a virus like the one that killed his partner is passed along. The artist placed his partner's weight in candy in the museum inviting visitors to take one, in a sense spreading his partner's spirit.

"Chalet Lost History" is an installation that fills three rooms with images of war and sex and cultural degradation. It becomes difficult to tell the pornography apart. The artist said he was inspired by the looting of the museums that occurred when the American troops rolled into Baghdad.

We don't have art like that hereabouts. Our university just commissioned a mural that realistically depicts the 1870 race from New Orleans to St. Louis between the steamboats Natchez and Robert E. Lee. Our friend Charlie painted a male nude the local arts council refused to exhibit.

We don't do walk-through art.

My favorite work in Chicago was "My Body Your Body," a painting that appears simply to be a field of cosmically dark blue when approached from the side. But standing directly in front, the viewer sees something else. The center of the field of blue recedes, seemingly into a dimension beyond the wall. I wanted to put my hand inside. A wall will never look the same again.

I don't know what all of it supposed to mean about universal experience. Much of the art was scary, as if the world has become terribly inhospitable. You could make that case, I guess.

I prefer to think we're all tourists here on Earth, come to experience the world and learn about each other and ourselves. The question is, what will we return home with? I think that's up to each one of us.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is managing editor of the Southeast Missourian.