A few years ago at a Portland performance festival, a couple of local guys, Dutes Miller and Stan Shellabarger, dug two side-by-side graves for themselves, with a tunnel in between so that they could hold hands. Partners in marriage as well as art, the pair bring a real sex-death thing to work that often explores queer identity; in a public performance project this month at the Museum of Contemporary Art, they crochet opposite ends of a long pink tube they’ve been working on now for ten years.
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Miller and Shellabarger aren’t the only artists bringing a legacy of grave digging to the MCA this season. Life, loss, and the possibility of early interment are in the air: See also “The Way of the Shovel,” a new exhibition curated by Dieter Roelstraete, which sprung forth from Roelstraete’s observation that contemporary artists rely increasingly on archival research and obsess increasingly over historical questions. They’ve even adopted the language of archivists and archaeologists, Roelstraete says, and begun to refer to what they do in terms of “digging,” “mining,” and “excavating.” This show, then, is about excavation, conceptual and literal, and includes video from a 2007 piece in which Derek Brunen, like Miller and Shellabarger, digs his own grave.
Elsewhere, a room with work by Rebecca Keller, Shellburne Thurber, and Jazon Lazarus is devoted to Sigmund Freud, himself a collector of antiquities who, more to the point, believed heartily in the possibilities of psychiatric excavation. Lazarus’s picture Above Sigmund Freud’s Couch shows just that, but this room is too reverent, and the work in it feels like an empty tribute. (That’s Freud’s ceiling. Cool!) Many of the pieces in the exhibit rely on repetition or recursion, as in Moyra Davey’s grid of 100 photographs of copperhead pennies at various stages of degradation, or a photo series by Susanne Kriemann of a limestone quarry. The way the rocks have settled on top of one another echoes Douglas’s bookstore photo: history stacked atop history, a record of itself.
Through 3/9 Museum of Contemporary Art 220 E. Chicagomcachicago.org $12 Tuesdays free for Illinois residents
