MCA's Skyscraper: Art And Architecture Against Gravity

By Caroline O'Donovan in Arts & Entertainment on Jul 1, 2012 8:00PM

The skyscraper was invented in Chicago, but Skyscraper: Art and Architecture Against Gravity is not a nostalgic exhibit. It does not seek to recreate a sense of wonder at that turn in mechanical history. In spite of its name, it is not a show about revolution.

If you only saw one piece from the show, you’d probably want to see Portable City. Three dimensional cityscapes shaped from bits of fabric are nestled inside of rolling suitcases. Recognizable landmarks—Navy Pier, the Willis Tower—are interspersed with foreign elements, a pagoda or a temple. The work is about portability and permeable international boundaries, but it also resoundingly soft. It recalls a patchwork quilt and diminishes what is hectic and overwhelming in the urban environment.

It is, in many ways, an exact counterpoint to the Andy Warhol film that occupies the adjacent gallery. Warhol filmed four grainy hours of the Empire State Building in 1964. Warhol's film was meant to test the audience’s patience and reserve, but that was 50 years ago. The contemporary approach is to charm you; we see it again in Eliza Myrie’s raze/raise-topple/top pull, in which she celebrates her father’s career as a mason with wooden blocks shaped like cornices rigged up to a pulley system that the viewer can interact with. There is a childlike sense of discovery in the interaction—I can shape the city, too.

This is not to say that the exhibit was without tension. Somehow, unbelievably, when I walked into the second gallery, I was surprised to find the World Trade Center towers staring brazenly at me. I was drawn to Jonathan Horowitz’s Recycling Sculpture, a simple blue outline of the towers at the base of which a fresh newspaper is added everyday. Reading the headline “LANDMARK DECISION UPHOLDS HEALTH LAW,” in that context was stirring. There are some headlines you can prepare for in a newsroom, and there are others that you can’t. That said, there was no greater testament to the power of architecture as icon than Robert Moskowitz’s Skyscraper. Moskowitz painted the towers in 1998, but he stopped showing the work after the attacks in 2001; the MCA’s exhibit marks the first time they have been shown since. The painting reflects the status that the buildings held even before they were destroyed, and renders them iconic in the ancient sense.

Almost as readily recognizable throughout the exhibit were Bertrand Goldberg’s Marina Towers. The city delved deep into Goldberg’s varying work with the Art Institute’s retrospective last fall, but the representation of his work in the MCA’s exhibit illuminated something new about the how the structure is experienced by Chicagoans. Michael Wolf’s Transparent City is a beautiful shot which, interestingly, names neither the city nor building that it features so brilliantly. The curation of the exhibit shone through nicely here, juxtaposing Wolf’s photograph, which gives us a few tantalizing glimpses into the lives of Marina Tower residents (although fails to answer the eternal question, Why do they allow residents to put tube lighting on their porches?) with Shizuka Yokomizo’s Dear Stranger project. Yokomizo’s intimate portraits speak to that dusky moment before neighbors close their blinds. In a city, that moment can happen lofted in space, and Wolf’s photographs capture that magical, sparkling quality.

The show had an aural quality that was, at times, disruptive. One thing a city-dweller probably does not need to hear more of is someone drumming on a bucket, a sound Fikret Atay’s film overwhelmed a gallery with. The aggression and tension of the film was an interesting choice to share a space with Kader Attia’s shimmering Untitled cityscape. Covered in tiny mirrors, his skyscrapers underscored themes of reflection that were apparent throughout the show.

During our visit Jan Tichy, a Prague-born multimedia artist who studied in Tel Aviv and moved to Chicago five years ago, gave a talk in the hushed, darkened room of his Installation No. 3. Tichy first showed the piece before he ever came to Chicago, but said he chose it for the Skyscraper show because it moves away from the self explanatory, site-specific work he is known for (models of secret Israeli prisons and Project Cabrini Green) and relies instead on more formal visual methods of expressing ideas about structure and time. Throughout the exhibition, there is a balance between artists who experience the fabric of the city purely visually—as artist Peter Wegner described it, “in a fugue state,”—and those for whom the city as social space cannot be subtracted from its representation. After contending with the question of which approach is more powerful for the viewer while the sound of drumming plays over and over in the background, there is a sense of relief when you come around again to Warhol’s 50-minute, stationary Empire.

And yes, for those wondering, there were phalluses.