I got a bunch of application rejections in the last couple of days, which is pretty normal in this spring season.
I remember being in Chicago not far from where I am sitting now, but this was in 1998 and I was getting a bunch of application rejections then too, just before finishing graduate school. Happily, I was accepted to the Whitney Program which began me on a new path and one that I’m still stunned by.
Another memory from that time is a kind of stubborn determination and promise to myself (in my own secretive rules-bound way) that applications were going to be part of my job as an artist and that the time spent doing them was something I would need to build in for the rest of my life. I have not been incorrect in that, though the tiresome slog of applying does not get more fun. And it’s not a new feeling to experience a sense of “why bother” after every rejection. But it is part of the process.
Here’s a story about acceptance, though, and one that I had almost forgotten about but that being back here in Chicago made me recall.
In 1997 I was invited by then-SAIC faculty Matthew Girson to create a piece for a brand new gallery he created—in his pickup truck. I was so excited to be invited and as I am wandering these windy Chicago streets 25 years later I still think about how important this show and the piece was for what I would do later.
Here’s the description of the gallery from Girson’s archives on his website.
7562LR was an art gallery in a 1995 Chevy S-10 pick up truck. Named after its state issued license plate, the gallery was open by appointment during the 1997-98 gallery season. This moving venue gave viewers the opportunity to experience contemporary art while driving in and around Chicago. All works were accessible in the cab while driving and all works engaged 1) the transitory aspect of the gallery space; or 2) the location of Chicago as the transportation hub of America; or 3) the transient quality of the art experience; or 4) any combination of the above.
Exhibited artists: John Arndt, David Hullfish Bailey, CAR, Jim Duignan, Barbara Holub, Jeff Krueger, Jenny Perlin, and Michael Piazza.
It was thrilling to be involved and to think about a roving rather than a fixed space in which to make and experience art. I got right to work.
Chicago was very different then, now it appears to be jammed with condos and ”revived” spaces. My neighborhood, Pilsen, was quiet, the wide streets lined with low warehouse buildings, none of which looked occupied but most of which were.
Incidentally, I chose to live in Pilsen when I moved to Chicago for graduate school from San Francisco. I lived there because it was the closest to the Art Institute I could afford to and get to school without a car (I biked mostly, even in the winter).
The nearest grocery store was too far so I bought my food at the local gas station or cajoled people into driving me places or went to friends’ houses to eat or scrounged the grad school openings for cheese and crackers.
In Chicago I worked as a TA in the film department and also got a job in the choir of St. Peter’s in the Loop, the downtown Catholic church. It was a great job, paid more than I had ever earned anywhere ($40 an hour) and I would run over there from the darkroom or a screening, change into what looked and felt like a burlap sack, look over the sheet music, and get up there and sing for the office workers and those who needed a respite before commuting to or from wherever they needed to go.
Other experiences with that chorus were the very special singing of the Ukranian Easter Vigil (we did the 8pm-11pm shift and then the parishoners continued through the night and we came back at 7am for another many hours) in the main church in Ukranian Village, and the very uncomfortable ones like when we took a bus to Indianapolis for a Catholic conference and another where we went to a TV studio to be recorded for the Catholic TV channel.
For the Gallery 7562LR project I entered one of my favorite worlds, the historical archives. I went to the Chicago History Museum’s research library and read the terrible treaties that the settlers coerced the Native Americans to sign, read about the great Chicago Fire, read about what the land used to look like and where the river was covered and the prairie paved over. And I made photocopies of the maps.
I wrote a lot and compiled texts into a script, read them aloud, copied the recording onto a cassette, and glue-sticked images, texts and maps onto individual index cards. There were not a lot of digital facilities at SAIC at the time and even if there had been it would have taken me a long time to figure out how to use them. So I cut and pasted, using my favorite supplies from the stationery store.
When visitors came to take a ride in the gallery, Matthew would put in the cassette and start driving to the locations. Like an old fashioned filmstrip that some of you might remember from elementary school, I put in a beep on the tape to indicate instructions to the viewer to take out a numbered index card. The card would tell the viewer to look at out the window in a certain direction.
Matthew would then slow or stop the car so the viewer could listen to the story in my narration of what happened there. The texts combined my writing and quotes from primary documents. The year before I had seen Joel Sternfeld’s powerful exhibition On this Site at the Art Institute of Chicago and was of course influenced by that. And somehow in the midst of all this I was also working on my MFA thesis film, The Whole History of That, about going back to sites where purported family history had taken place. So this had an influence on that project, or vice versa.
In making this work I learned so much about Chicago and about the land and what it had looked like before the systemic violence and destruction of Indigenous territory and so many more things about the city and its strangeness and the midwest that I had not known before. I do not know where the index cards or the tape went but I found a couple of photos on Girson’s website, including one of the cards and a couple of me with very short hair in the parking lot where the opening was held.
What persists. Yesterday and today I am speaking in classes where I had been a student all those years ago. I’ve wandered these enormous streets again, walking backwards in the direction of the lake as the freezing wind plows through my coat. Tonight I’ll show my film about midwestern bunker-dwellers at the Gene Siskel Film Center. I don’t usually like taking much time to reflect, preferring instead to jam on ahead. But a little bit of settling into this eddying space feels ok.
Thanks for reading.
BUNKER screens tonight at 8:15pm and tomorrow at 3pm at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago. Link to info here.
The film is also available to stream on Amazon and on Projectr.tv.