Chicago in the rain

Just back from Chicago where I installed another trade show at the Merchandise Mart for Neocon 2009 which opens today. The Mart, once the largest building in the world for floor space (before the Pentagon was built) is a paean to the giants of good old-fashioned American retail.

Click pix for closeup; they are big pictures with lots of detail

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Thank goodness this little chunk of dayjob appeared in time to float me into my summer's work (I have 7 oil paintings and about 10 watercolors in the works). I feared I would be surviving on the fumes of last year's almost non-existent income—not exactly conducive to doing good work—although, collecting the money will probably take til fall. I enjoy these occasional junkets to Chicago and also the fact that my food and lodgings are on someone else's dime. But other than walking everywhere and taking a few moments on the Oak Street beach in the early morning, it's usually a stressful push, as exhibits tend to be.


My hotel room looked out onto Mies van der Rohe Way at the massive and magnificent Hancock Building. The garage sort of looks like the "Guggenheim of Parking"





It rained steadily the whole time I was there and I witnessed that phenomenon so typical of Chicago skyscrapers that I rarely see in New York: the clouds come down and hug the tops of the buildings. I wonder what it's like to be inside up there.



The sidewalks were full of flowers.



Chicago is a great walking city and there are lots of underpasses & overpasses to get pedestrians safely across some daunting traffic situations, like Lake Shore Drive at rush hour. The beach is very public and heavily used; it appears they put a lot into maintenance & upkeep.



Someone had the brilliant idea of planting palm trees on the shores of Lake Michigan. "Surf's Up!"




And then, there is architecture...everywhere!



I can't quite figure out the difference between New York and Chicago: is it the scale, density, design??? Never mind that New York has only one Louis Sullivan building. Chicago is very grand, but it is s-o-o-o midwestern. I feel like a foreign tourist there.

Each block on North Michigan Avenue had a difference scheme/theme of plantings. Some were a bit overwrought, but all demonstrated civic pride and attention to detail. The crazy-Lego-looking water tower, one of the few buildings to survive the Great Chicago Fire, is a wierd delight.


The Chicago River is a defining artery. I walked east on Kinzie from the Mart towards the Wrigley building and managed to catch this drawbridge going up to the tune of loud metallic screeching and clanking.


Looking south on State Street: (as if I could forget where I was) the famous Chicago Theater sign; and, of course, shop windows on North Michigan Avenue


I got finished early on the last day and so went to the Museum of Contemporary Art. I confess, I found it lacking. The Buckminster Fuller show was worth the price of admission ($12) but the museum doesn't appear to have much of a collection: one Franz Kline and a handful of emerging/unknown-to-me artists. The Calder show was a pitiful assortment of small pieces all jammed together in what appeared a dead end hallway. And the featured Olafur Eliasson was a relentless barrage of annoyingly gimcrack "experiences" having to do with reflections, changing colors, prismatic effects, moss growing out of a wall, some hokey geometry projects and I don't know what all. Kind of like a theme-park for the not-hoi-polloi. I got nothing from it except for the installation entitled Beauty, 1993, a shower of mist in a dark room with some strategically-positioned spotlights [kind of echoed what was going on outside with the weather and it was pretty].



As photography was forbidden, this was the only piece I snapped, only because I could get away with it. We were treated to Eliasson earlier last year at the MoMA, and some of it worked better there. For instance, the swinging fan was pretty exciting in New York; it had a vertiginous, slightly dangerous-cut-your-head-off quality that was entirely missing in the Chicago space. For one thing they had it in a tiny room where it looked absolutely ridiculous. But, I tend to get my back up when an artist suggests that I need assistance to use my sensory apparatus to feel the real world. I don't find it entertaining or intellectually stimulating to be prodded and hectored by artistic moralizing. If I want a mind-altering experience, which I don't, I would choose the Cyclone Racer or the Hall of Mirrors at a bona fide amusement park.

Once outside, I realized I'd better hightail it to the hotel if I didn't want to get soaked and have to freeze to death on a soggy flight back. But, there in the park across from the main door was this Deborah Butterfield and I was entranced. I have long been a fan of this sculptor.


So, I hung around long enough to snap some shots between the raindrops. Of course, getting out of O'Hare was the usual nightmare and it was a bumpy ride home in the rainstorm. If this client likes the work enough, maybe I'll get the gig again next year. Then maybe I'll be able to afford the Art Institute where I can go back to visit my old favorites. Or maybe I'll go here instead; these folks seem to have the right idea: