Swords into ploughshares: the future MCA - Museum of Contemporary Art; Chicago, Illinois

Art in America, July, 1993 by Susan Snodgrass

With spring began the demolition of the Chicago Avenue National Guard Armory, on the future site of Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA). Approximately four times the size of the current MCA, the new facility, designed by Berlin architect Josef Paul Kleihues, will house galleries for the permanent collection and temporary exhibitions, an education center, an art library, a 350-seat auditorium, a cafe and special-events area, a book and design store, and a one-acre outdoor sculpture garden. According to MCA director Kevin Consey, the new site has been a major component of the museum's planning since 1984-which is to say, for almost half the museum's history. The museum announced its intention to relocate to the site of the Chicago Avenue Armory in 1988, after rejecting Mayor Richard M. Daley's offer of the Chicago Cultural Center, a city landmark and fiscal albatross which the local government had been trying to unload for some time. In fall 1993 the groundbreaking for the new building takes place, although the museum's operations and programming will continue at its present address until the building opens in 1995.

Perhaps to lure viewers into the museum's future home before the Armory itself was destroyed, the MCA recently used the structure as the site for "Art at the Armory. Occupied Territory," (Sept. 13, 1992--Jan. 23, 1993), an ambitious but flawed exhibition of installation art. Conceived by Consey and put together by associate curator Beryl Wright, the exhibition did serve as something of a harbinger of the future MCA. But it also provided the occasion to reexamine the role of the museum on the heels of its 25th anniversary, since the exhibition reflected many of the museum's overall successes and failures.

"Art at the Armory" consisted of 18 projects that occupied the 75,000-square-foot facility, one of the city's few remaining monuments of 19th-century architecture. Designed by Burnham and Root and combining elements of French Gothic cathedrals with the severity of a military fortress, the Armory was the staging ground for military and police actions associated with such historic events as the 1894 Pullman Strike and the violent 1968 Democratic Convention.[1] Eight of the installations were specifically commissioned by the MCA for the occasion; the rest, dating from as early as 1985, were culled from the archives of projects sponsored and exhibited by other institutions. Only three Chicago artists (or collaborative teams) were represented in the exhibition.

According to Wright, the purpose of the exhibition was to introduce audiences to "current approaches to installation art," and it was loosely built around the topics of "collective and personal history; the human body ... ; associative power of both technology and natural forces; and pressing political issues." Yet the exhibition neither substantially advanced our understanding of these themes nor presented any new interpretations of contemporary installation art. Instead, the MCA opted for a safe and rather conservative approach, drawing primarily upon idioms that are already well established in the mainstream art world and choosing to define the show's mandate in bewilderingly broad terms.

Indeed, even among the newly commissioned works there was little attempt to address the specifics of the Armory site itself, a place that could hardly be said to be lacking in historical or political associations. The projects of Jin Soo Kim and Elizabeth Newman drew some of their poetic resonance from their context, but they spoke more forcefully to the artists' own interest in the transformative, even alchemical properties of their materials than to the issues of military power, politics or destruction emblematized by the building. Kim's Sentient Plexus (1992) was a three-room installation constructed around various materials and themes, from personal memories of her native Korea to her experiences as a nurse (as symbolized by a room of screenlike armatures bound in muslin bandages and plaster). Newman's Histories of Human Flesh (1992), a collection of disparate objects both found and altered (wrapped gauze, diapers, containers of frozen breast milk), addressed healing and the role of women as mothers and nurturers.

Similarly, many of the preexisting projects seemed ill-suited to their new surroundings and forced one to question the MCA!s definition of and criteria for installation art. Anne Rorimer's catalogue essay, chronicling institutionally sponsored installation projects in Chicago since 1967, addressed installation art's inherent relationship to object, site and viewer, highlighting projects by Vito Acconci, Daniel Buren, Dan Graham, Bruce Nauman and others--important pioneers who were not, unfortunately, represented in the Armory exhibition. Thus, the inclusion of early projects by Doug Hall (The Terrible Uncertainty of the Thing Described, 1987) and Bill Viola (The Theater of Memory, 1985), for example, provided an awkward framework to begin a recent survey of the medium, as they are neither pivotal works in the history of the genre nor significant moments in the respective careers of the artists. Furthermore, the repackaging of Dara Birnbaum's video Tiananmen Square: Break in Transmission (1990) and Lynn Hershman's interactive videodisk Deep Contact (1990) underlined the various problems in defining contemporary installation art. In these cases, the term appeared to be a catchall for any work outside the traditional parameters of painting or sculpture.