"Notes on Apartment Culture", an article about the state of apartment galleries in Chicago. Part of the (con)Temporary Art Guide
"The (Con)Temporary Art Guide is a map of the city showcasing some of Chicago's best cultural offerings during the spring art season. The floorplans are made up by prominent art institutes and initiatives, several annual art festivals and fairs, independent art spaces and other culturally significant projects. The Guide is a project of Proximity Magazine and is published by the Public Media Institute, a non-profit community-based grass roots arts and culture organization.
Notes on Apartment CultureThe apartment gallery is resourceful before it is anything else. Rent is relatively cheap and space is available to anyone feeling disenfranchised by other cultural outlets or just wanting to craft one of their own. All you need to do is make some room.
By their very nature, apartment galleries exist on a continuum between the “white cube” and domestic aesthetics. Galleries can choose to suppress or heighten the domestic and functional aspects of the space. For the galleries that choose to foreground the living space, any artwork gets examined against a backdrop of furniture, light fixtures and coat closets. Others assume the symbolic look of the professional art apparatus with white walls, information packets, and bright lights. These two mixing contexts, the domestic and the conventional, become a way to negotiate the terms and structure of both. In his book The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau writes that the structures of life are habitable like a rented apartment. It transforms another person’s property into a space borrowed for a moment by a transient. Renters make comparable changes in an apartment they furnish with their acts and memories.
Apartment galleries then borrow from two different “owners,” the archetypal gallery context and the mass cultural archetype of consumer home furnishings. The conventional gallery aesthetic is pliable with continually changing content, and each display choice is measured. When the conventional gallery is mapped on top of the space of the everyday, always unseen by virtue of its ubiquity, it can elicit a re-evaluation of both contexts. If carefully considered, the construction apartment culture can generate new forms of art practice and exhibition.
This attention imbues even marginal spaces with possibilities, whether it’s a wood-paneled basement (Old Gold), a strange architectural feature (the former artLedge), a stairwell (Knock Knock Gallery), a shelf (the former Modest Contemporary Art Projects) or a refrigerator (Normal Projects). These spaces share sympathies with Fluxus artist Robert Filliou’s Galerie Légitime (a gallery in his hat) or Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise (a box in a suitcase), both of which were filled with appropriately-sized art. Apartment culture is not simply built in strange places because it’s easier, but because these locations emphasize the importance of the people around the art event and place art in closer proximity to environments that challenge the relevance of artistic discourse.
The freedom of DIY apartment culture means that individuals can quickly initiate projects on their own behalf and on behalf of their immediate art community. In conversation these efforts are referred to as “labors of love,” made by the type of plucky folk that artist David Robbins begins to describe in his New Art Examiner article (2001): Teaching some, running clever shops, holding down part-time gigs, interesting, dreary or ridiculous they get by, and save a deeper commitment for their real work; having seen something of the world, both physically and virtually, they’re not thrown by close, continual proximity to existential uncertainty.
Over time, however, the logistical concerns of running a gallery tends to suffocate the passion needed to keep it going. Artists rarely want to be art administrators. But apartment galleries’ flaws are their strengths. The same proximity to control that allows them to organize quickly and change without a committee also links them to their organizers. If the caretakers circumstances change, then the gallery vanishes. But this volatility hasn’t decreased Chicago’s persistent enthusiasm for new venues. Caroline Picard, [Proximity writer and] director of the not-for-profit gallery called Green Lantern, writes in her article “Apartment Galleries in Chicago: At the Intersection of Art and Domestic Habitat” that
Apartment galleries are a community with a short shelf life and little continuity. It is a community typically limited in means, quick to cut corners and as tireless as any ecological habitat. The galleries teem with new energy, even as they suffer from cultural amnesia. With a focus trained on the present moment, dedicated to the current audience and the celebration of current work, they contribute to their own fleeting times.
This “amnesia” is only dangerous in that it prevents energetic young practioners from benefiting from or raging against past forms of apartment culture. For instance, does Vega Estates know that it is the new Suitable (both spaces that show/showed art in garages), and what would the operators do with that information?
In 1984, then-MCA curator Lynne Warren chronicled Chicago’s alternative artist-run gallery history with her exhibition and catalog Alternative Spaces: A History in Chicago. Ms. Warren’s historical account ends as a new wave of artist-run centers, such as Randolph Street Gallery, N.A.M.E., Artemesia and ARC Gallery, were burgeoning. These adventurous groups lasted until funding problems torpedoed them in the late 90’s. The vacuum left by their absence started a cycle of influential but short-lived replacements like the Uncomfortable Spaces, Chicago Project Room, Rx gallery, the Pond, Standard, Suitable, FGA, the Showroom, A-OK, Deadtech, Dogmatic, the Butcher Shop, the Roof, NFA, Gallery1R, 1/Quarterly, Joymore, Law Office, and many, many more.
It is interesting to compare the scene then with now. Take Michael Bulka’s description of an apartment gallery show in 1999 in the New Art Examiner: The crowd, the disruption, and the occasional discomfort were as much a part of the event as the art, and as good as some of the individual pieces are, the issue isn’t aesthetics, but energy.
A decade later the energetic whirlwind of curatorial activity continues to form itself, die and reform itself in cycles. Thus today it is the aesthetics that are the issue because the energy is still omnipresent. The murky DIY landscape of Chicago is ripe for definition and written history. Luckily, the Hyde Park Art Center is planning a selected survey titled Artists Run Chicago. Including spaces from ‘99 to ’09, the show will present documentation, lectures and new projects from each gallery. Artists Run Chicago is curated by independent curator Britton Bertran and HPAC Director of Exhibitions Allison Peters Quinn and slated to open on May 10th between Art Chicago and the opening of the Art Institute’s Modern Wing. Hopefully Artists Run Chicago will provide a forum for these spaces to get together in a similar way to the old Stray Show. It might also help fill in the gaps between generations of artists establishing a record of some forgotten portions of Chicago’s DIY arts programming.
Apartment culture produces mini-institutions that are important to participants and visitors alike. The question of cultural criticism isn’t focused any longer on whether or not art institutions should exist, but rather what those institutions should represent and how they should act. What better place can there be to test out speculative ethical or aesthetic projects than where you live? And the ethics embedded in the “apartment institution” shape our arts community heavily. They present a unique opportunity to build upon a foundation of the collective history of experimental culture in Chicago within a contemporary landscape where firm philosophical, aesthetic or cultural ideals are fleeting at best. Apartment galleries function to generate cultural capital for their proprietors and artists and this capital should be put to good use, here in Chicago. Apartment galleries needn’t be seen as training grounds for future larger pursuits but instead they can be ends in themselves. If a pooling of this experimental wealth of experience were to occur, Chicago could produce revolutionary and relevant visual art institutions.
Bibliography
Bulka, Michael. New Art Examiner 26 No.8 pp50, May 1999.
de Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life, Translated by Steven Rendall
University of California Press, pp xxi 2002
Robbins, David. Notes on a Midwest Makeover, New Art Examiner May-June 2001
Picard, Caroline, Apartment Galleries in Chicago: At the Intersection of Art and Domestic Habitat, September 10, 2008
http://greenlanternpress.wordpress.com/2008/09/10/apartment-galleries-in-chicago-at-the-intersection-of-art-and-domestic-habitat/
On the Make, Chicago Art Spaces
http://onthemake.org/chicago-art-spaces/
The Unofficial Uncomfortable Spaces Website, Site Host: Spaces.org / Outflux.net, URL: http://spaces.org/archive/spaces/index.htm