Chicago

“Occasionally I decide spontaneously to set totally imaginary stories in New York, a city in which I have lived for only a few months in my life: who knows why, perhaps because New York is the simplest city, at least for me, the epitome of a city, a kind of prototype of a city….” Italo Calvino, Hermit in Paris, Pantheon Books, NY, 2003

I’ve decided to take Calvino’s idea further and begin writing about Chicago, a place where I have never lived and only visited as a boy. As mentioned, I have been reading Calvino; I’ve been thinking about Chicago because our son Benjamin is now living and working there. Yesterday I was reminded of Chicago by neither Benjamin nor Calvino, but because I was buying bathroom tiles across from the big ex-Sears building on First Avenue in Seattle.

It has long been common for stores selling lower priced goods to line up on streets adjoining Sears stores- looking for spillover shopping. The shops aren’t much to write about, but the situation on First Avenue is pretty interesting. Next to Tiles for Less used to be another low-rent flooring place, there is now a busy Vietnamese noodle soup emporium. That’s not news in Seattle, but at lunchtime there is a steady stream of people coming to the eatery with plastic ID’s dangling from their necks from the Sears building. They work at Starbucks world headquarters, housed in the Sears structure.

There is still a Sears store on the first floor of the building, but the rest of the huge edifice (which was once the largest Sears building W of Chicago) houses Starbucks. The building, adjoining the main rail line running through Seattle, was built as a warehouse for Sears goods arriving by train from Chicago. The store itself was always at street level, but the upper stories, which span a few city blocks, stored goods for distribution throughout the west. The floors were made of maple, and the warehouse ‘pickers’ traveled their length to fulfill orders on roller skates .

In the building Starbucks has a small corner café for the public, and a showy, much larger one for employees in the interior mezzanine . What Starbucks doesn’t have in the building is burlap bags of coffee. Yes, the company is the largest purchaser of ‘specialty’ coffee in the world, but what it packages is an atmosphere, a place to meet, now even books and CD’s.

On the other hand, Sears has from its beginnings in the 19th century been about stuff: goods, implements, appluiances, commodities. Sears wanted to put itself in the midst of American life, and was purposely based in Chicago- in the middle of the country, in the middle of the country’s farm belt. Richard Sears started his company in Minnesota, but early on moved it to Chicago, at the nexus of those very rail lines that brought trainloads to Seattle.

Along with Montgomery Ward, its fellow Chicagoan institution, Sears perfected mail-order sales, going to extraordinary lengths to assure its far-flung customers that the company could be trusted. This was no small issue- most Americans then lived in rural areas, and the large farm population was especially isolated. People were used to buying from people they knew. Sears had to establish a basic human connection to its customers, while in fact its network was strung together almost entirely by the words printed on the pages in the Big Book. These very same issues were repeated almost a hundred years later as companies began selling on-line, one of the most successful being Amazon, also headquartered in Seattle.

Sears sold pretty much anything and everything out of its catalogue: the kitchen sink, even the kitchen in pre-packaged houses and chicks to raise for eating therein. But really what they sold was the connection to the enormous network they produced, which in time included that big building on First Avenue in Seattle. Richard Sears was a genius at writing advertising copy, which he rolled out on hundreds and hundreds of thin pages in each catalogue. He ran an unceasing campaign to get the reader to believe that s/he belonged to and was an essential part of a big operation reaching out from Chicago.

This entity, this movement, embraced the country with wide open arms from the city in the midst of the wide-open spaces. When someone bought from Sears they joined and were welcomed as if into a special club. The catalogue copy often showed lithographs of the enormous buildings that Sears erected in Chicago, celebrating the grand scale because it was necessary and important in order to provide individualized service. Costco- another Seattle mega-company, has gone a step further and asked people actually to pay for that belonging.

Sears eventually developed a network of stores. But even with them, its business took place in people’s homes. It created an enormous network so people could feel comfortable letting the company right into their personal space. You could, you did, shop with the catalogue on the kitchen table. Again, this all sounds so contemporary as we are now told we can bank in our pjs at 3AM (what fun!). Sears was in the business of creating an infinitely flexible sense of space, one that could be expanded or contracted at will, built up to huge warehouses and manufacturing plants, collapsed down to get inside one’s mailbox

Starbuck’s operates with a different model. It has created tens of thousands of small ‘shops’, sometimes kitty corner to one another. It is about creating intimacy away from home, while at the same time assuring its customers they're sipping liquid from a spigot that runs round the world.

As it happens, I used to sip coffee on the street corner outside the first Starbucks, way before there was a Starbucks. In Berkeley in the 1960’s, there were two competing visions of what a coffee place should be. There was the Med (short for the Mediterranean) on Telegraph Avenue, which was the epicenter of Berkeley street life, itself was an epicenter of hippie life. For all the world, the Med looked like an Italian café (which I had not yet seen in-situ, and which was actually operated by guys who were then called Persians). It was large, open to the street, had marble tables, marble countertops and made big coffee drinks which it dispensed in large heavy glasses. It attracted a spectacularly exhibitionary crowd- especially on Sundays. Tables were ‘reserved’ by virtue of everyone knowing that certain tables belonged to certain people. And on Sunday in costume, groups parked themselves with dogs, babies and lots of hair around the tables and stayed for hours. The place was crowded, noisy, full of smoke, and the coffee pumped out of big stainless espresso machines was always good.

On a corner in a primarily residential neighborhood in North Berkeley was Peet’s Coffee, owned and operated by the Englishman, Mr. Peet, who was usually behind the counter, and who was really above all a tea-man. But he sold different blends of coffee for taking home, and everyday featured one of his coffees that was brewed and sold for consumption there. The shop had little room, and people took their cups of coffee out onto the sidewalk in front of the shop to drink it and hang out.

When we moved from Europe to Seattle in 1973 and went to the Pike Place Market to buy food, we found a small shop selling coffee. Upon entering, it seemed like we had somehow slipped through a timetravel machine, taking us back to Berkeley. I remarked to the guy behind the counter that the place distinctly reminded me of Peet’s, and he explained that was because he and his two partners had gone down to Berkeley and ‘studied’ with Mr. Peet. He introduced himself as Zev, and we are still friends. This was then the only Starbucks (strangely the original store has been removed from the company history- a second Pike Place Starbucks, a couple blocks South, and not characteristically on a corner, now sports a plaque saying it was the original store; camera totting tourists and tour buses regularly visit).

The store didn’t sell coffee in a drinkable form- only beans to take home. Years later, when the partners sold Starbucks, by then a small chain of Seattle coffee stores, to Howard Shultz, one of the original partners went down to the Bay Area and with his profits purchased Peets, which had grown to a few more shops. Peets itself has now expanded nationally.

The very intimate Pike Place Market Starbucks masquerading as a corner Peet’s Coffee shop, became the default model for the other Starbucks and eventually for the corporate Starbucks following in its wake, of course with the spigot of flowing coffee. Starbucks delivers its network not through the mailbox, but through the liquids it pours. Its message, determined in the upper reaches of the old Sears building, tells us how the Starbucks pipeline connects (ethically) to an international network of fincas, coffee graders and baristas. Sears developed a sense of connectivity that delivered both intimacy and enormity, so did Starbucks. Both companies understood that many people want to revel in private and public at the same time.

Both of the corporations manufactured a sense of personalized space to deliver their products. Much of my work as an artist is also about creating a personal space, a way of bringing the network of things into up-close proximity with the viewer. Of course this is a time honored enterprise- Walt Whitman was cataloguing the world of stuff before Richard Sears produced his. Since this website is about residencies, and since I neither reside nor am ‘artist in residence’ in Chicago- it intrigues me to play with the notion of exploring Chicago for its connections. What does it mean to think up an ‘installation’ about a large metropolitan city without being there, or for that matter, without it being installed? Can I too. like Mr. Sears find a way to deliver my sense of space across the country with words?

Space and Ideas

This is being written in a space created over the past thirty years in collaboration with my wife Patricia, an architect. We were extremely fortunate to purchase a gorgeous parcel of land in the country when it cost very little, and to know next to nothing about what building actually entailed. Young, naïve, outrageous and energetic, we went at it, and have kept at it for all this time. The place has continued to reflect our process of working and thinking, and thinking about working. Having grown organically it is highly idiosyncratic and yet quietly bears witness to the time which has passed in its creation.

I am reading Italo Calvino’s American Diary 1959-60. Admiring the author greatly, I was interested to read what he saw in America when he spent time here as a Ford Fellow. Having myself been a Fulbright Fellow in his country, I know something about living and thinking abroad- in ‘foreign’ space, and have a basic knowledge of Italian culture to which he often compares what he encountered here.

He found American culture outside NYC sorely lacking, and also criticizes the fact that many of the intellectuals he met here spent time building their own homes. Indeed, it has always amazed our Italian friends that we would have done such a thing, the act of creating one’s own space in Italy being confined only to interior decoration. And surely fifty years ago, culture in America was dominated almost completely by New York.

As we spent days, weeks, years pounding nails on the weekends, and most of many summers, I did of course wonder what in hell’s name we had gotten ourselves into. Most all of my friends were in graduate school, as budding artists or completing doctorates. Supposedly they were coming to grips with big ideas, while I was gripping a big hammer that served to mess up my painting hand. And certainly we weren’t in any intellectual maelstrom- we were up in the Pacific Northwest, and not even in its metropolitan center- not that it offered much intellectual stimulation then either.

I would argue that our experience out in the country, creating the spaces which we have inhabited and continued to modify since, has sharply shaped and honed our ideas. Perhaps counter intuitively we became intellectuals in the way Calvino meant the term fifty years ago, but did so through a route he couldn’t possibly appreciate. Our ideas produced the space which in turn affected the way we experience the world and our relationship to one another. We learned to fully and freely collaborate, and to make our collaborative place work for each of us independently.

Patricia is a superb sought-after architect because she now knows how buildings come together from the inside out, how they can grow and change. Yet she has also published several articles about the role of architecture in people’s lives around the world. Having begun as a solitary painter, the building process got me interested in constructing space and ideas, and in working with others. Buildings come together as systems. Once I began to understand how those systems played out and could be manipulated, I saw how materials as ideas could also be built upon and put together.

By focusing considerable energy on our created environment, we managed to build an on-going laboratory for ourselves, without attempting to. We set out to build buildings and not systems of ideas, but those developed too. The Italian way was to develop such structures of ideas in urban smoke filled cafes- we did it in wood fired studios in the evergreens. New York was the center, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t nail together a differently centered existence, one that revolved around the ideas we were constructing.

Given the ad-hoc way the building has come together, there are rooms that look into and through others, planes that cross at strange and wonderful angles. As I experienced the concept of rooms functioning to frame the act of looking, I began to think about taking the act of looking out into the world.

Art is usually seen as making things that people look at- I wanted to get people actively looking through, as they do at our place. I contacted Ed Mannery, an optics engineer I had met, and proposed to him that together we collaborate on some devices of our own. We have built several over several years, and continue to do so. The looking devices are only one of the many ways that building our place has brought us out into the world, doing things we would have never expected.

INFO AS MATERIAL

"Our raw materials are string and glue," said Earl Benton, Toray's director of sales and marketing. Just across the road, the alchemy is completed. Boeing turns these threads into the tailfin of the 787, the world's first largely plastic airliner." (The Seattle Times, Mar, 2007).


Carbon is everywhere around us all the time, and information is becoming the same. Like carbon which can readily combine to form elements and compounds, information becomes useful once we give it form and meaning. The work of the artist has always been to shape form in a meaningful way; it seems logical that artists should see information as material for art-making.

Information comes in an never-ending flow. Making ideas requires grouping information into new structures that can provide meaning. Ideas act as nodes, where information gathers and can become attached to other information. In the process it can become totally transformed. Not unlike chemical equations- when certain bits of information are placed in close proximity to other bits, something entirely new can result.

The artist’s job is to create ideas/nodes by exploring the grouping and regrouping of information. Novelty is important not for its own sake but because new ideas are generated by re-considering the relationship of information. Sculpture has always been about building things, connecting ideas as material structures is the same.

Networks of ideas are strings of ideas cojoined together. Concepts group information together in a structural way that produces a dynamic output.

Artists have long been occupied with the preservation of their finished artworks- using materials that wouldn’t quickly degrade. Working with ideas is no different, and ways need to be developed so that concepts are fresh and hold together.

Research is the process by which ideas become unearthed from information. Research requires digging and lateral thinking- otherwise its nothing more than note taking, and nothing important or beautiful will come of it. Like other art making methods and techniques, research into information requires patience, vigilance, practice and skill. It also takes time. The internet is a useful tool, but like all kinds of other tools available to artists, it cannot itself produce ideas, let alone art.

Boeing is using the carbon threads to hold resins that are injected into it. The carbon becomes a place-holder. The resinful threads are then woven into, shaped into, airplane structures. A seemingly simple process is the result of very complex thinking and experimentation over decades by many collaborators and investigators. Artists have always done R&D, they’ve always experimented. Doing so in networks with others increases the possibility of creating new ideas. And like carbon atoms, there are plenty of ideas to go around- working with others doesn’t lessen the amount of possibilities in the universe, or reduce the amount available to an individual artist. But it does make new groupings within the grasp of a particular artist.

Research and collaboration are natural allies of the individual artist, even if to do both well requires something different than the stance of the fiercely stand alone practioneer.
I have spent decades looking at materials and collaborating with those who work with them. This has been a terrific object lesson in the manipulation of ideas. Though the people I observed and with whom I worked were making things from materials like rubber and tin, what they were really doing was reshaping ideas, moving those ideas in the form of new products, around the world. Looked at from a global perspective- materials handling is movement of ideas.

Relationships and the Aesthetics of Space

Painting exists in two dimensions, sculpture more or less in three, theatre, dance, installation, all play out in space. Artists have always worked with the question of space because the physical objects they create take up space and the bodies that carry us around exist in it. Artistic space embraces emptiness- the aesthetics of space left between marks on a flat plane or between forms or shapes in sculpture or dance is essential to the works themselves. This ‘empty’ space carries the meaning, creating the formal relationship between the elements in the art.

For the past decades my work has been about the space between things, the relationships themselves. As I became interested in things and their materiality, I realized that objects, whether manufactured, ‘found’ or created by an artist, held meaning by virtue of where they have been. A thing re-presents something, it relates-tells a story, and that story is by definition a history, a telling of relationships. There can and I believe should be many many possible tellings and retellings available from a collection of things. In its purest forms, painting and sculpture deliver very specific, usually predetermined relationships. But I have never been a purist- to me purism has always seemed an unappealing act of reduction. I prefer the messy involvement with things as they co-exist in time and space, and the multiplicity of relationships they spawn.

We use language and ideas to describe those relationships, and the word idea itself comes to us from the root to look. Being that I have been looking at these relationships for some time, I have been called a ‘conceptual’ artist, one that deals with concepts and ideas. On the face of it, this label seems contradictory- here’s an artist who travels the globe following the connections between things- making physical trails, investigating interpersonal networks, and it said of him that he deals with abstractions such as ideas. I do. And I don’t. I deal with the relationships between people places and things- which I articulate by way of narration. I tell stories and unravel histories. The stories often involve props and settings, sometimes one or the other or both, which accumulate from sources I come to know, or which I come to have made. I have used all manner of ‘media’ to tell those stories, but I do not consider myself a ‘media artist’.

I believe that we relate to things as extensions and stand-ins for relating to one another. Since I view the things as go-betweens, I have gone and put myself between the people who make the objects, and those who consume them, between those who get or produce the raw material that turns into the things that others buy. It seems logical enough to me that some bit of those person-al relationships stick to the material- that when you get something at Costco Made in China, that something of the Chinese go-down is still part of it. Somehow. It might not be a something you or I can see or feel. But it must, I believe be there. So I try and figure what the essence of that relationship residue might be, and how I might portray it. I make art about the space between and around things. And in the process of making this art, I expose levels of history that created the space where the history took place.

One of the ways I uncover the relationships surrounding things is to examine, and then describe the network of people that has caused it to come into the world. There is no reason to assume that making visible the hands, hearts and minds that have touched an object will in fact make clear what the object means. But if I am correct that the object exists in relationship to us, in extension making visible its connections to us might describe its contours and the way it touches us.

Seeing our connections to a particular thing, perhaps we can see ourselves being changed by it, even ever so slightly. Most of us, most of the time, are completely ignorant of those relationships, and how far back they reach into the on-going world. Yet the links to things describe our life- our ever-changing relationships to our surroundings in small fluid, dynamic ways that shape us. If we are able to catch glimpses of ourselves in relation to the things of our lives, perhaps we can see ourselves as we actually occupy space and time. Offering such a privileged point of view seems a noble activity for an artist.