We now know what the plan is for the Chicago Cultural Center’s former gift shop, dumped by the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events last spring.
Those who did while I was there lingered an average of 20 seconds, about the time it takes to decide that you’ve seen better installations in your neighbor’s garage at Halloween.
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Cahill is a lecturer in the visual arts department at the University of Chicago. He also coordinates the U. of C.’s Open Practice Committee, which according to its website “fosters a genuinely experimental, yet conceptually rigorous environmental space in which strategies of production and description are challenged and renewed.”
The installation includes culturally allusive ursine figurines, a big pile of expiring balloons, and a video screen flashing plaintive messages like Ghost bear can’t sleep. It’s all slapdash and ambiguous enough to be a takedown of both gift shop consumerism and conceptual art pretensions.
“This plan is your plan,” says Mayor Emanuel in the document’s introduction. Whatever the final version contains will be attributed to the public, whose attendance is encouraged at “ground-truthing” meetings to discuss the plan, currently scheduled for July 24, 25, 28, and 31. (For details and reservations see the website.)
