Art on theMart kicks off with a really big-screen question: Is Chicago ready for video art?9/30/2018 Rivers of eyeballs flowed across the Merchandise Mart Saturday night. A giraffe projected against the central section of the great behemoth of a building stared out at the opening night crowd gathered across the Chicago River. Thickets of flowers sprouted, and spread, and resolved themselves into something else. Art on theMart, in the inaugural showing of what is being pitched as a three-decade, ongoing public art work, showed itself to be surreal, populist, inscrutable, obvious, confounding and engaging Saturday before a crowd that included city bigwigs down on the Riverwalk and thousands of Chicagoans up on the closed-off Wacker Drive. The project has the potential to be a lot of things as a visual backdrop to the nighttime kayakers, the Riverwalk promenaders, the Brown Line âLâ trains crossing the river on the bridge to the east, as it shows for two hours a night, five nights a week, every month but January and February. But, to its credit, it does not seem desperate to pander with easily readable takes on how to fill a 2.5-acre drive-in movie screen. Yes, there were elephant butts walking away as Diana Thaterâs nature video portion of the program announced âThe End,â but there was also University of Chicago professor Jason Salavonâs take on Chicago art history, with fragmentary visual references to Kerry James Marshall, to the fluorescent faces of Ed Paschke and to the frizzy lines of Moholy-Nagy. But whatever was showing on the screen, whether trippy or horticultural or both, Chicagoans can boast of this new fixture with a First City superlative. It is, the dignitaries noted, be the largest permanent exhibit of its kind in the world. Obscura Digital, the San Francisco firm that guided the installation of 34 projectors firing almost 1 million lumen at theMart, has âthrown lightâ all over the world, but this is the one that intends to stick around, not just be a temporary event. âWe are eager to welcome Art on theMart into the pantheon of iconic public art in Chicago,â alongside Cloud Gate, the Daley Plaza Picasso, and the murals in Pilsen, said city cultural commissioner Mark Kelly, in the minutes before Saturdayâs roughly half-hour program began. But video art, as anybody whoâs been to a museum can tell you, is a challenging medium for a people trained to expect narrative when they see images moving on a screen. The spectacle itself, of filling two football fields of architectural surface with colored light, is stunning. But if this one catches on the way those other works have, it seems more likely to be a Picasso-like process of exposure, then understanding, then, perhaps, affection, rather than the instant charm blitz of Cloud Gate, Anish Kapoorâs reflective bean in Millennium Park. Still Chicago and Vornado Realty, which owns the Building Formerly Known as the Merchandise Mart and is footing the multi-million-dollar bill to illuminate its southern facade, want this to be a showcase for curated artwork, not just the latest and largest (and most heavily windowed) video screen in town. âNo messaging, no sponsorship, only artists!,â Kelly proclaimed, shortly before he, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and some of the four artists commissioned to do the first pieces for the screen led a countdown. âThis will always be a place where Chicago artists can show their work,â said Emanuel. The coming two-hour programs will show on rotation the initial four commissions, also including a complex floral homage to Chicago art by local artist Jan Tichy and an imaginative piece transforming theMart âsimultaneously ⦠into an aperture and a void,â by Chinese artist Zheng Chongbin, plus interstitials from Obscura Digital. The biggest oohs and aahs from the crowd came when one of Thaterâs elephants appeared on screen â something recognizable, suggesting a possible story, rather than abstract imagery! â and then at the end. Thatâs when the one-night only fireworks seemed to fire out of the statues in front of theMart, the row of busts on tall pedestals that David Letterman once called âthe PEZ hall of fame.â âTo be honest, I was expecting something with a little more music and motion,â said Alejandro De la Luz, who lives near Midway and works in theMart, for the Illinois Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. (All those lumens, organizers said, are so precisely aimed that they only illuminate building walls, not the hundreds of windows.) As artists see it in use, suggested his companion at the opening event, his mother Laura Guerrero, artists will learn to adapt and to make use of the projectâs unique features. Music, though, is a challenge. Speakers played whatever soundtrack the artists wanted on opening night, but organizers donât want this to be a new noise feature in the city. Future showings will be coordinated with music that viewers can call up via the projectâs website and their own headphones. âI thought it was cool,â said Matt Greenwood, a Morton Grove resident who works downtown as a software developer. âPeople got excited when the fireworks started â and when the elephant showed up.â Added his wife, financial modeler Amanda Greenwood, âKids were saying, âWhere are the lions?â And they were grossed out by the eyeballs.â The Greenwoods agreed itâs a worthy addition to the cityâs range of attractions. âHopefully,â Amanda said, âit will get people off their phones.â Twitter @StevenKJohnson Art on theMart test lights up the Chicago River with a million-lumen rainbow » Plan would turn Mart into âlargest canvas in the worldâ for video art » Light projection project planned for Merchandise Mart » Powered by WPeMatico The post Art on theMart kicks off with a really big-screen question: Is Chicago ready for video art? appeared first on OriginalArt. via OriginalArt https://ift.tt/2Ql4GPD
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