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Brutalist truth
A Hyde Park Art Center show builds on avant-garde architecture.
The housing project in Yves Bélorgey’s painting (pictured) isn’t Cabrini-Green or the Robert Taylor Homes. It’s located in Saint-Étienne, France. But to a Chicago audience, the decrepit 1960s monolith needs no translation—nor does the gleeful mood of the people watching the building blow up in Bélorgey’s accompanying 2003 video.
“It’s like a celebration for the community. It’s like a picnic,” Nicholas Frank says of the piece. Frank curated “Spatial City: An Architecture of Idealism,” which brings Bélorgey’s work and dozens of other pieces by artists from the FRAC (Fonds Regional d’Art Contemporain, or French Regional Contemporary Art Collections) to the Hyde Park Art Center (HPAC) through August 8.
We recently called Frank, curator of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Institute of Visual Arts (Inova), to find out why contemporary art from 21 far-flung French collections made its way to the Midwest. (“Spatial City” premiered at Inova before traveling to the HPAC and finishes its tour at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit this fall.) Three years ago, Laurent Maillaud, the cultural attaché at Chicago’s French consulate at the time, encouraged Frank to organize a show based on FRAC’s holdings. “Initially, I was thinking, what’s the point,” the curator admits. But he quickly realized French cities are coping with “some of the same social problems” as Chicago, Milwaukee and Detroit, including inadequate public housing and anxiety about what can replace vanishing industries.
FRAC’s experimental works by Yona Friedman offered ingenious solutions, particularly the octogenarian architect’s Spatial City. “It was totally ridiculous in the best way,” Frank recalls. “It was making buildings in the sky. It seemed to answer so many current questions of overcrowding, being more environmentally considerate, having less of a footprint. And then I realized this work had been made, initially, prior to 1960.” Frank adds that the exhibition is shaped by the “tension between utopian, pie-in-the-sky thinking and what had happened since.”
At the HPAC, Friedman’s drawings and collages occupy the same gallery as pieces from the ’90s and beyond, including inflatable sculptures by Italian-born artist Tatiana Trouvé, a video by Chinese artist Cao Fei, and Didier Marcel’s Sans titre (labours 4), a massive wall-mounted cast-resin sculpture of freshly turned earth. The HPAC’s second-floor Black Box Gallery houses videos from “Spatial City,” which change every two weeks. Sarah Morris’s Midtown and Bertrand Lamarche’s Autobrouillard, which offer radically different perspectives on urban environments, are now on view.
Most of the exhibition comes off as less optimistic than Friedman’s dreamy proposals, but visually it’s powerful. Elisabeth Ballet’s cardboard-box Temple is a stark reminder of the homeless whom utopian schemes haven’t helped. In Philippe Ramette’s photograph Balcon, the nattily dressed artist surveys a lush garden from a wooden balcony. It takes a moment to realize that Ramette stands parallel to the ground, and that the balcony emerges from a grave-like pit. Though the piece is from 1996, it resonates with the upheaval wrought by the recent real-estate bubble.
To enhance local relevance, HPAC director of exhibitions Allison Peters Quinn added three Chicago artists to “Spatial City.” Jeff Carter presents a model—made from IKEA components—of Walter Gropius’s 1922 design for the Tribune Tower; Sara Schnadt represents information architecture in her twine installation Network; and Hui-Min Tsen’s On the Trail of a Disorderly Future: A Guided Tour of the Chicago Pedway consists of actual city tours, which begin June 17.
Quinn says she would love to pique FRAC’s interest in Chicago artists: “By seeing this work in relation to their work, [maybe] they’ll have some interest in collecting it.” That seems like a reasonable hope, given that Frank’s decided “it’s strange to regionalize” art and architecture. “We have Renzo Piano in Chicago and Santiago Calatrava in Milwaukee,” he says. “It’s not like these ideas are stuck in particular locations. They travel.”
