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This review appeared March 31, 2004 in NewCity Chicago, in print and online: http://www.newcitychicago.com/chicago/3295.html
Eye Exam
By Michael Workman
Welcome to the Machine
Are we truly alone in the universe? If that’s too cosmic a question, then how about just alone in the world? Curated by Sabrina Raaf, “Tart” at the West Loop neighborhood’s Klein Art Works suggests that there’s more to us than just the borders between nations and differences in custom. In the gallery’s foyer, for instance, patrons encounter “Flashlights: Conversations In the Murky Past” by Christopher Furman, made of a pair of motorized, antique flashlights in domed glass. They whir, swivel and flash senselessly, an activity meant to represent the numbing enervations and blinding emotions of uncontrolled desire. But these are just machines: neither have control of themselves. In his statement, Furman calls them “pathetic little fuckers.”
Moving past these, a slight breeze cascades down from a ceiling-mounted propellor, activated by a motion sensor that starts two motors turning a belted length of felt with brown shirtbuttons sewn onto it. As the belt turns, the buttons pass beneath a pair of rollers that open and close an electric circuit wired to a rotor with two telephone bells attached. Each of the buttons makes up a pattern of Morse code messages that artist Joseph Kohnke wants to tell his deceased father and dying grandfather. It’s meant to evoke a longing beyond all considerations of justice, beyond all our merely human powers to satisfy: a longing for communication with the lost and a hope for their salvation in the afterlife. Its ringing bells mark the passage of his messages from our world to the next, much as they would in a séance. Except, rather than a shawled, gypsy spiritualist waving her hands over a glass ball, here a robot helps make the contact. It’s a strong piece in a consistently good show. That it’s this gallery’s last exhibit adds a layer of sad drama that hangs thick in the air as, more than anybody in the afterlife, we realize Kohnke’s mystical whirlygig is trying hardest just to reach us.
By contrast, Fernando Orellana’s piece “614-220-DUCK” asks us to reach it. It’s a simple enough setup: a small plastic shelf stacked with a bean-shaped sculptural piece made of wood, metal lever with a ball of yarn at one end and a small LCD screen mounted on the wall above them. Instructions mounted on the wall tell viewers to activate the piece by dialing in on their mobile phones: doing so causes the lever to whack the bean. Simultaneously slapstick and insidious (isn’t slapstick always a little insidious?), it’s art that punishes itself.
And fear of Old Testament-style punishment seems a pervasive and relevant enough theme: in an era presided over by small minds willing to toss aside their fellow man and destroy life in the name of faith in dishonest financial gains, trading spiritual medium for robot make complete sense. A crass form of narcissistic leaching has infected our society and while defensive laughter may be the intended subject of this show, the way our dependence on technology subtly replaces and justifies our lack of empathy is clearly its content. Take, for instance, Siebren Versteeg’s “Emergency.” It looks like the view from RockStar’s popular “Vice City,” adjusted to put the player in the perspective of its homicidal first-person character (called an avatar in video-gamer parlance). If so, Versteeg has walked him out into one of the many vast, sprawling corners of the game’s virtual environment, positioned him facing into the distance and output the results to a recorder. In this computer-generated landscape display, a tree sways gently in the breeze as clouds drift across a serene blue sky, a scene that invokes a sense of well-being and connectedness in the viewer. But then a siren wails and two firetrucks race across the screen, trailed occasionally by an ambulance. Horror! Tragedy! Mass destruction! Intermittently, radio static also comes over the speakers, followed by a voice speaking in police code. It’s out there somewhere, just waiting to get us.
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