ONE PLACE AFTER ANOTHER - Monoskop

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under the direction of Joyce Fernandes, Sculpture Chicago has been inactive. A major portion
of the “Culture in Action” archive is currently housed in the library of the Center for
Curatorial Studies at Bard College; all other files pertaining to Sculpture Chicago’s activities
are housed at the office of Robert Wislow, its founder and chair, in Chicago.
2 To say that the exhibition was “on view” is not strictly correct, since most of the projects in
“Culture in Action” were event-oriented and not object-based. The broad geographical dis-
persion of projects across different locales in the city, on top of the very immateriality of the
projects, made viewing the entire program a complicated challenge for anyone interested,
especially for out-of-town visitors. In fact, the exhibition coalesced as such through its exhibition
catalogue and other publicity materials.
Sculpture Chicago tried to facilitate the viewing through a series of eleven five-hour
guided bus tours on select dates in the summer months of 1993. These bus tours were the
primary means of physical access to the exhibition as a whole. Moreover, because the process-oriented
nature of the projects required much narrative support, or simply explanation,
even for those quite conversant with contemporary art, the bus tours became a primary
source of interpretive access as well. Thus, audience access to the meaning of the individual
projects—their ambitions, their formal and/or organizational structures, and their (im)material
manifestations—became completely dependent on the “supplementary” offerings of the tour
guide, usually a staff member from Sculpture Chicago. That a program devoted to inventing a
new relationship between art and its audience resorted to such a hermetic interface between
the two raises questions as to the general confusion between community and audience in new
genre public art.
3 “Sculpture Chicago History and Present Program,” undated press release, n.p.
4 See Culture in Action, exh. cat. (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), for more detailed information on
each project. It should be underlined, however, that a few projects—Ericson and Ziegler’s
Eminent Domain and Robert Peters’s Naming Others: Manufacturing Yourself in particular—
were not realized to the degree that the catalogue claims. For example, when “Culture in
Action” opened in May 1993, Ericson and Ziegler’s paint charts existed only as mockups.
Visitors to the exhibition saw displays of the prototype at Ogden Courts but did not see them
distributed in local stores, as was originally intended. Based on preliminary communication
with True Test Manufacturing Company, the artists and Sculpture Chicago announced at this
time that the charts would be distributed at True Value Hardware stores nationwide by the fall
of 1993. But this promise was never fulfilled. Almost all critics of the exhibition, however, have
addressed Eminent Domain in terms of its representation in the exhibition catalogue and
other promotional literature, emphasizing the general primacy of discursive production (publicity)
in constituting the meaning of artistic practice.