Happy Halloween!

click images for larger view

OK, so last year we said there was nowhere more tasteless to go after the Francis Bacon tie, but then they gone done the Figures at the base of a crucifixion cushion.

McCahon sat here

Colin McCahon once famously wrote on a drawing of the cliffs at Muriwai: “McLeavey sat here”. But where did McCahon sit? If Trade Me is anything to go by for at least some of the time it was on a Scandinavian-style couch with a small bench end that doubled as storage space. And yes, this piece of furniture refurbished has now ended up online with an ‘opening bid’ of $1000. 

According to the seller it was purchased from descendents of Colin McCahon who said that it had originally been used by him but when it became tatty, it had been given to them for a flat. After being passed around the family for a number of years, the current seller purchased it with its original “faded blue weave” (for any McCahon obsessives out there).

You can bid for the couch which is now “covered in a very expensive linen” here. 
(Thanks for the heads-up P)

Landmarks Commission's Eloquent Requiem to the Building it's About to Destroy

from the Landmarks Commission report

When I write about the Commission on Chicago Landmarks, I often make a clear distinction between the two parts, only one of which is useless, that make up this entity.

The first is the staff of the Commission, an incredibly dedicated group of knowledgeable professionals, whose work can be seen in the  Reports for Proposed/Designated Chicago Landmarks, which combines highly readable narratives with amazing scholarship in documenting each building proposed for landmark designation.  It is the job of the staff to preserve Chicago's architectural treasures.

The second is the actual Commission on Chicago Landmarks, a body appointed by the Mayor to vote on proposed designations and send them on to the City Council.  As much as it may appear otherwise, it is not the job of to preserve Chicago's architectural heritage.  The job of this body is to make sure landmarking never gets in the way of the whims of connected developers.  It is a job they do well, as illustrated in the case of the Farwell Building.  When the Commission, in an unprecedented show of backbone,  voted not to approve a cynical destruction of that designated landmark, Chairman David Mosena, a former chief of staff to Mayor Richard M. Daley, simply called a second meeting to reverse the vote.

from the Landmarks Commission report

The real function of the members of the Landmarks Commission will be on display again Thursday, when they will be called upon to ignore the evidence, abrogate their responsibility, and vote to destroy Bertrand Goldberg's iconic Prentice Hospital.  Right after they vote to save it.

The Commission staff has created a report thoroughly documenting how Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice Hospital qualifies for landmark designation.  To become a landmark, a building has to meet at least two of seven criteria.  Prentice meets four: historical value, "exemplary architecture", significant architect, and unique visual feature.  Once again, the report is great scholarship, including a biography of Goldberg, a history of hospital architecture and of the use of concrete in architecture, a detailed analysis of the building, its importance and its construction technique, and a fascinating account of Goldberg's pathbreaking use of computer-aided-design in creating the building.  It's a compelling, informative work, generously illustrated with photos and drawings, including those you see on this post.  Download the report here. 

from the Landmarks Commission report

Usually such a report is added to page of reports we've linked above.  As of this writing, the Prentice Report is not on that page.  It is available only at the end of the November agenda, which I have never seen done before.  It also concludes with a section stating the building 's concrete will - duh- probably require restoration work sometime in the future.  I don't recall ever seeing anything like this in a report before.  It's got the Department of Development's fingerprints all over it, and seems to be just another part of their script. 

from the Landmarks Commission report

In fact, the agenda and its attachments actually lay out the amazing farce that has been carefully scripted by the Emanuel administration.  The draft resolution decreeing Prentice's destruction already assumes that the Commission members will follow this script and vote in favor of landmark designation only minutes before . . . 

WHEREAS, the Commission on Chicago Landmarks (“Commission”) voted to approve a “preliminary landmark recommendation” for the (Former) Prentice Women’s Hospital Building (the “Building”) on November 1, 2012; and  . . .

It also assumes that the Commission will then accept a report by Housing and Economic Development Commissioner Andrew J.  Mooney  that looks like it was written by Northwestern, itself. Probably it was.  It regurgitates almost verbatim Northwestern's arguments that the adjacent two-block vacant lot is off-limits as an alternative, and that Northwestern's state-of-art medical lab can only be built if Goldberg's masterwork is destroyed.

Northwestern is about to surround that two-block vacant lot, which has already been gravel-surfaced and chain-linked for over three years, with a perimeter of flowers.  That is their highest use for the site at the present time, with a vague reference to new construction sometime in the next "several years."  You'd think that Northwestern, with some of the most brilliant minds in the world, could figure out how to make a plan that would integrate the new research lab into the construction on that two-block vacant lot, where it could link to the Lurie Center just across the street, just like a new facility built on the Prentice site.  But I suppose the Department of Development thought such a suggestion would be impolite.  Instead, they're recommending that Prentice be destroyed, to create still another vacant lot, so the two-block square vacant lot across the street won't feel so lonely.

The script's final lines for the members of Landmarks Commission?

Section 3.  The Commission hereby accepts and approves the Department of Housing and Economic Development report recommendation and rescinds its “preliminary landmark recommendation” for the Building.

From unprotected, to a landmark, to a corpse - all in about an hour.  The cynical audacity is breathtaking.  To general public, the Landmarks Commissioners are distinguished citizens, charged with protecting the precious architectural heritage that has made Chicago known throughout the world.  To Andrew Mooney, they're monkeys on a stick, expected to dance to the tune of the guy who brung 'em.

from the Landmarks Commission report

Lookalike

A reader (thanks G) sent us this Kate Newby lookalike

Emanuel Destroys Prentice

What we pretty much expected all along has now come to pass.   In an article/letter in the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has signed the death knell for destroying Bertrand Goldberg's landmark quality Prentice Hospital.  Barring a last-minute action in the courts, which seems unlikely, the building is toast.

Chicago ain't ready for the rule of law yet.  The Chicago Landmarks Ordinance requires agendas to be posting 48 hours before each meeting.  While agendas are usually posted on the Commission's website a week in advance, the agenda for this Thursday's meeting, now less than 48 hours away, has not.

Chairman Rafael M. Leon promised earlier this fall that Prentice would be on the Landmarks agenda this fall.  He lied.  Even if it finds its way onto an agenda in November or December, it will, given the mayor's pronouncement, be meaningless.  Chairman Leon, please spare us the farce of Commission members - all but one of them non-architects - either falling over themselves to justify and praise Emanuel's decision to circumvent the legal process for determining whether a building qualifies for protection, or the equally repellent alternative of the commissioners voting to landmark, knowing full well it's doomed in the City Council Emanuel controls.

Update:  Prentice is on the agenda for this Thursday.  Usually, this would involve one of the Commission staff's excellent reports on the building being presented, and the agenda item would say something like "Resolution to recommend preliminary landmark designation for X and to initiate the consideration process for possible designation of the building as a Chicago landmark".  Here, there's no such reference.  The agenda item "Preliminary Landmark Recommendation" is followed immediately by the item "Report and Recommendations from the Department of Housing and Economic Development and Resolution Pertaining thereto."  I'm betting "thereto" will recommend Prentice's destruction.  Wouldn't want to have an actual debate on whether Prentice qualifies under the Landmarks Ordinance criteria, would we?

Same as it ever was, there are two set of rules in Chicago.

One is for the unconnected.  If the Landmarks Commission decides to designate your home as part of a new landmark district, it doesn't matter how much you don't like it, that's the way the law works.

The second is for connected mega-institutions like Northwestern, where you get to pick and choose the laws you follow.   Don't want Prentice to go through due process for landmark designation?  Just ask, and it will not only be yanked from the Landmarks agenda, but it will kept off - for over a year and a half, while mayoral spokespersons talk about mythical "ongoing talks" that manage never to involve anyone from the broad-based, grass-roots coalition - including many of Chicago's and the world's leading architects - making the case for saving Prentice.

It's kept off to give you time to hire the Chicago office, run by a former Emanuel operative, of a beltway lobbying firm best known for defending Big Pharma and Big Chemical from being accountable for their more toxic actions, and for receiving over $43 million to create the kind of right-wing attack ads that have been flooding our airwaves as never before during this election cycle.  And, for your benefit,  the city will continue to keep Prentice from the Landmarks Commission agenda so you can work with those lobbyists to spend millions of dollars creating a deceptive PR campaign based on misleading, one-sided half truths, astroturf support, and polls carefully engineered to arrive at a desired result.

And finally, to make absolutely sure you're happy, when the Mayor of Chicago announces his decision in your favor, he will do so by repeating all your canned talking points so perfectly, you'd swear he was working for your lobbyists, himself.


There's a story about Harry Cohen, studio boss of Columbia Pictures during the golden age of Hollywood, once saying,  "When I'm alone in a projection room, I have a foolproof device for judging whether a picture is good or bad. If my fanny squirms, it's bad. If my fanny doesn't squirm, it's good. It's as simple as that."  To which Herman Mankiewicz, the screenwriter who co-authored Citizen Kane with Orson Welles, replied.  "Image:  the whole world wired to Harry Cohn's ass!"

The loss of Prentice Hospital is tragic, but it's a reminder of how "The City that Works" works.  Chicago voters had their chance, when Richard M. Daley retired after a pair of increasingly destructive terms, to take an alternative path, but they chose, instead, to elect another emperor.  It's a hard habit to break.  And so, for the foreseeable future, for better or worse, the fate of all things Chicago are, ultimately, wired to Rahm's backside.  And in the case of Prentice, it just squirmed.

Show and tell

It’s not that often that the people who run our art museums reveal their personal take on art. Some of them even take this reticence to the extreme of deciding not to collect art for themselves fearing it might conflict with their public responsibilities. That was then. Now social media is ripping open the silos between public and private in many spheres and the visual arts are not excluded. The personal preferences and thinking of the people who are shaping public institutions are turning out to be of interest to audiences. In NZ this possibility is in its infancy and marketing departments are still firmly in control of the public interface, but personality does attract audiences and everyone likes to get behind the scenes. How else did reality TV conquer mainstream media?

The new Director of the Dowse Art Museum Courtney Johnston has certainly chosen to live her life with the curtains open. As a radio commentator (Nine to Noon), regular blogger and passionate tweeter her followers have a good fix on the art she finds engaging, what works she has personally acquired and what she is curious about. You want to see what sort of art attracts her eye from the nineties for example? All you have to do is go to her nineties set on Digital New Zealand. She has also made single artist sets with commentary on people like Peter Peryer, Colin McCahon, Ann Noble and more surprisingly Richard Sharell. Sure some of these selections are bound by the availability of online images but at the very least they give you a taste of the way one of our art museum directors puts her ideas together.

At the moment you can’t search Digital NZ on Johnston so here is a sample selection of links to her sets. Fiona Pardington, Peter Peryer, Kobi Bosshard, Julian Dashper, Richard Sharell,

--> The Australians, Fine lines and McCahon: light and waterfalls 

A spectacular portrait in darkness and light: Eric Hines's Cityscape Chicago

thanks to Chicago Magazine's Dennis Rodkin for tweeting about this video 

Do NOT watch this video here.  Click on it to go to Vimeo, and watch high-res, full screen.  Says the creator, Eric Hines . . .

Cityscape Chicago is a personal timelapse piece consisting of over 30,000 still photographs shot on the Canon 5D Mark III incrementally between July and October 2012 around downtown Chicago, Illinois.

The inspiration of this piece was my fascination with the city of Chicago, particularly at night. For me, there has always been a mysterious sort of feeling to Chicago at night, so I decided to explore and capture it.

Hines's video is so amazing a portrait of the form and energy of a great city that I have to admit that, for me, the soundtrack - Transcendence by 'The American Dollar - is a bit too generic to do it justice.  I substituted the Act I prelude to Die Walküre, which is a better scoring for the drama, triumph and heartbreak, charity and cruelty that are the dynamic of the proud, vainglorious, amoral, spiritual, hopeless, hopeful hive of humanity creating and animating these stunning cityscapes. 

click image for larger view (highly recommended)

The closing shot, the body of Chicago with the circle interchange as the beating heart pumping life through its circulatory system, is as seminal an image of our time as you're likely to find.  I need to get started on that screenplay.

Eric Hines is 22 years old.

The difference engine

"The art market is a distribution system. It’s a voting machine. Art History is a value system or a weighing machine."
Marion Maneker of Art Market Monitor

Frontier Outpost: The Roosevelt Collection and the Future of the Viaduct District

click images for larger view

Other than a couple of former sandbars, Chicago is flat, flat, flat.  Even when we raised the city out of the muck in the 19th century, it was basically just to a higher level of flat. 

The Roosevelt Road viaduct is another example of Chicago's man-made levels.  It goes on for blocks, towering above Dearborn Park, over once endless strands of railroad tracks now mostly gone, and on to the approach to the bridge over the Chicago River.

In the middle of that viaduct is The Roosevelt Collection, a mixed use development with 342 residential units and nearly 400,000 square feet of retail space, A. Epstein, RTKL and Hirsch Associates, architects.  While it has a new Target to the east, the complex, whose site plan looks like an oversized clothespin, otherwise lies within a moat of some of Chicago's largest tracts of undeveloped land.

The project, conceived by Centrum Properties, broke ground in 2007, the tail end of the condo bubble.  By the time things came on line after the crash, there was so little interest in the condos that existing contracts were torn up and the units converted to rental.  And while those apartments are reportedly now fully leased, the retail component, tther than a huge Icon movie multiplex, remains uncontaminated by tenants to this day.  In 2010, Centrum put the whole thing up for sale, and last year it was acquired by a joint ventured headed by McCaffery Interests for less than half the $350 million it cost to build. 

Since then, McCaffery has moved quickly,  with a new marketing campaign for what is now named The Lofts at Roosevelt Collection.  McCaffrey turned to Antunovich Associates to restart the design.
A series of clunky, never-occupied retail buildings in the center were demolished to create a more open plaza, now nearing completion, with dramatically lit fountains dedicated earlier this month.  

Construction has been going on so long,  it's been memorialized by a couple of J. Seward Johnson sculptures of construction workers installed on the plaza.

Even after all this effort, however, the retail plaza is still eerily quiet.  When I was there last Friday, the only sound was the music from a workman's radio.  Despite of flurry of speculation this past spring over prospective tenants - including everything from Lulelemon to Ulta to an Apple Store - the shopping center remains, as of today, a festival of emptiness.

The area around the Roosevelt Collection has always been a Bermuda Triangle of lost opportunity, centered around the massive corporeal ghost of former railyards that once served Chicago's great depots.  When Mayor J. Daley initially wanted to build a new campus for the University of Illinois there, he wanted it here, but was stymied by the prices the railroads, spinning towards bankruptcy, demanded for the land.  He wound up demolishing a large part of Chicago's Little Italy instead, for the UIC Circle campus.  It's taken nearly half a century for Little Italy to recover from the damage, and still the former railyards are empty.

The Roosevelt Collection is built on land that once held tracks leading into the old LaSalle Street Station.  The two blocks to the north remain vacant.

To the west, along Wells Street, the Roosevelt Collection shears off to another empty void, formerly holding the tracks leading to Solon Beman's masterful Grand Central Station, demolished in 1971.  In the center of this site, Bertrand Goldberg's River City was erected in the 1980s.  River City was originally to have been the capstone of Goldberg's career, a massively ambitious project on 230 acres with nine 72-story-high triad towers.  In terms of civic support, however, River City lost out to an alternate project, Dearborn Park, built beginning in the 1970's on 51 acres of formerly railyards formerly serving the decommissioned Dearborn Station.  The only part of the River City to be realized was the mid-rise element we see today.

The area along the river south of River City and next to the Roosevelt Collection remains vacant, as does the 11 acres north of River City, on the site of Grand Central Station.  In 2007, it was finally sold off by CSX - the successor corporation to the B&O Railroad - to a Skokie capital firm, but its highest use remains as an impromptu dog park.

The real prize, however, is to the south of Roosevelt  Road, 62 acres of former railyards that have reverted to a wonderous, semi-wilderness.

Rezmar Development had  big plans for the site - 4,600 residential units and 670,000 square feet of retail, centered on the first Ikea in the city's borders, but they were done in by the twin curses of the economic crash and the conviction and imprisonment of Rezmar's boodler/CEO Tony Rezko.  The site was put up for sale in 2010.  2nd ward alderman Robert Fioretti has suggested it as a location for the up-to-now mythical Chicago casino.  In 2010, the winning proposal in the Network Reset design competition co-sponsored by MAS Studio and the Chicago Architectural Club called for turning the 62 acres into parkland. Right now, however, it's just the land that time forgot.

As you can see, all of these parcels around the Roosevelt Viaduct  are below it.  McCaffery seems to sense the need for patching it all together, and has taken the unprecedented step of constructing a stair at the back of the Roosevelt Collection linking down to the lower level, although the only thing  there right now is a new dog park.

A multiple-level city is something Chicago encounters so infrequently that we don't do a very good job of it.  In terms of developing a visually compelling urban landscape, nothing beats breaking the flatness, whether it be the hills of San Francisco or the Spanish Steps in Rome.  The vistas created, and the contrasts they provide, can make a city both more comprehensible and more compelling.  You no longer seem lost in a grid that seems to just repeat, unto infinity.  You can see edges and borders, with well-designed stairways or inclines the markers of transition.  It brings a dense city back to human scale.

Right now, the Roosevelt viaduct is an anti-urban disconnect from the fabric of the city, just as the retail to the west of the river veers towards an anti-urban, shopping-within-a-sea-of-parking vibe.  Assuming all those vacant tracts around the Roosevelt viaduct eventually begin to fill up, the city needs something more than a development-by-development improvisation, lest the district become just a series of insular, self-contained mega-projects, existing in near-perfect isolation one to another. That's the profile of a second-rate suburb, not a great city.  All the parcels will be developed separately, but continuity counts.  Chicago needs a plan and a set of guidelines to stitch this tabula rasa together if the Roosevelt Viaduct District is to realize its potential as one the city's great neighborhoods

Show time

Our long battle to get some sort of recognition for animal artists has been a lonely one. To be honest, most of the support has come from the lunatic fringe and people who thought we were interested in art about animals, but now the whole field of animal art has entered a new plane thanks to the well-known German artist Rosemarie Trockel. As a curious link we met Trockel when she was in New Zealand when the City Gallery in Wellington opened the current building with a big survey show of her work curated by Greg Burke. 

 Anyway, Trockel may be one of the first artist curators to include an animal artist in a public art museum exhibition with her selection of work by Tilda, an Orangutan artist from the Cologne Zoo. Tilda joins a number of other untrained (human) artists whose work is presented alongside that of Trockel herself in Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos at the New Museum in New York. 

Artist support like this is rare. The only other instance we have been able to find is when a work by Congo (1954-1964) the famous Chimpanzee artist (discovered and given his first pencil by zoologist Desmond Morris) was owned by Pablo Picasso. More animal art facts as they come to hand. 

Image: Three paintings by Tilda hanging at the New Museum as part of Rosemarie Trockel’s work Less sauvage than others

Branded: Ross Ritchie

The moment when artists become brands

Old school

A couple of years ago, almost to the day, Te Papa stripped out its contemporary art galleries and filled them with Brian Brake photographs. At the time we predicted that this would herald an end to those half-hearted guarantees by Te Papa that they would always having contemporary art on view. How did we do with that prediction? 

Regrettably, just great. For 100 days from 20 October the contemporary art space has now been given over to the gold-frame show Angels and aristocrats. This leaves the most recent piece of art in the fifth floor galleries to be one dated 1978 which is one year older than this year's winner of the Walters Prize. It’s The scarred couch, the Auckland experience by Phil Clairmont rather thrillingly described by Te Papa “like a wounded beast, the massive body of the couch convulses…” – c’mon guys, it’s a piece of furniture 

OK, there is Shane Cotton's painting Whakakitenga kit e kenehi hanging in the entry foyer to the fifth floor that is only 14 years old, but as to sculpture or installations or large scale photography, or video or performance? Nada. There you go then. Not a single work on display from the first 12 years of the 21st century.

So here's the question. Do we really need a shiny new silver National Art Gallery for Te Papa to programme? Based on their inability to maintain a sustained interest in contemporary art the answer to that would have to be… um… no.

Image: modern art at Te Papa

Chicago Skyscene: Great Cloud Day

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Puppy love

Looking for a Saturday morning DIY project? You could do worse than build a Frank Lloyd Wright doghouse (always assuming you have a dog). Thanks to one of our favourite sites, Letters of Note, here are the plans and a pic of the FLW kennel along with a letter from the young boy who wrote to FLW asking for one. You can read the full correspondence and background story here on L of N.

Spill over

ACC channels Ed Ruscha at our local supermarket

Chicago Streetscene: Before the Fall, Desert Flowers

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Stand up and be counted

We've posted before about the millions of photographs taken of artworks in museums every day and how the Mona Lisa and other destination paintings are almost impossible to see for the hordes of point-and-pressers crowded around them. Now the latest iteration of art-photography is gathering steam: snap a photo in front of your own special artwork. Two for one - an artwork and a friend.

Less endearing are the photos of the rich and the powerful standing in front of paintings they own or control.  It's a modern day version of the tradition by which landowners have their estates oiled in behind them by the likes of Thomas Gainsborough and the rest. As John Berger said of Gainsborough’s famous landed gentry painting Mr and Mrs Andrews, “their proprietary attitude towards what surrounds them is visible in their stance and their expression.” So too with modern day portraits of high flyers and their art.

We were reminded of all this when we saw these pics of businesswomen before art in a Next magazine (who knows what issue, we’re talking doctor’s waiting room here). Inevitably the two paintings are by men, but then you can’t have everything.

Images: Top to bottom, Thomas Gainsborough Mr and Mrs Andrews, snapping at the Mona Lisa, peace-signs and Pollock and what comes in Next

Possum Exploded and Made Whole: ROA's Pilsen mural

click images for larger view (recommended)

We've written previously about the macabre, spectacular rams mural Belgian street artist ROA painted on the back of Hedrich-Blessing's headquarters.

This summer Chicago got another entry in ROA's menagerie.  On a railroad viaduct along 16th street between Laflin and Ashland, the artist has given us a giant possum, split apart below the neck to reveal a slightly gory fantasy of exposed innards, just in time for Halloween.

According to an account by Redeye's Erin Vogel, the artist fell in love with the Pilsen site, because instead of a single wall, it's actually three parts - a front wall along 16th, which then curves off to a wall further north.

ROA painted the mural to take perspective into account, so that if you stand at just the right place, the front and back walls resolve to form a normal undissected possum. 

 And yes, I know I have to go back when there aren't cars blocking the full view.

The mural is part of 25th ward Alderman Danny Solis' program to create artworks all along the viaduct, which is already a bit of a museum of murals old and new.

From the stream

McCahon infiltrates the M of E

Battle for Prentice on Chicago Tonight, 7:00 p.m.

Chicago Tonight, 7:00 tonight (Wednesday)  will have Eddie Arruza moderating a discussion between Christina Moore of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and Al Cubbage of Northwestern University about the battle to save Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice Hospital.  WTTW, Channel 11. 

Mark it

Where would we be without the art market? As regular readers will know it's worth about two posts a week (bless it) for OTN. But in the UK art writer Sarah Thornton (Seven days in the art world) is as mad as hell and won’t take any more of it. She's stomped off leaving these ten reasons for not writing about the art market behind her.

1. It gives too much exposure to artists who attain high prices.

2. It enables manipulators to publicize the artists whose prices they spike at auction.

3. It never seems to lead to regulation.

4. The most interesting stories are libelous.

5. Oligarchs and dictators are not cool.

6. Writing about the art market is painfully repetitive.

7. People send you unbelievably stupid press releases.

8. It implies that money is the most important thing about art.

9. It amplifies the influence of the art market.

10. The pay is appalling.

OK, fair enough. Now here's our ten reasons why OTN still finds the art market totally entertaining:

1. You usually get it wrong (which is good medicine for show-offs).

2. In NZ at least the art market is one of the few areas where people are happy to express strong opinions about art

3. It gives a big group of university funded artists something to not participate in

4. It is run by dealers and auction people who have opinions, know a lot, and are better dressed than your average reporter.

5. It brings to the world of one of its most mysterious processes: the pricing of art.

6. Drama and excitement.

7. It’s a world free of wall texts, computer graphics and labels.

8. It is going into a time of fundamental change with bets off as auction houses compete directly with dealers and both try to work online

9. The “what’s it worth” conversation.

10. The chance to bet on how long it will be before Sarah Thornton writes on the market again.

You can get Sarah Thornton’s list with her annotations here

Chicago Streetscene: Mashup

click image for larger view