ARTIFICIAL HELLS

former west
artists and collectives who participated in an ambitious exhibition of
socially engaged art, ‘Culture in Action’, curated by Mary Jane Jacob in
Summer 1993. The eight projects comprising this show stand as the most
extreme instance of ‘the social turn’ in exhibition form that year.
Intended as a critique of Sculpture Chicago, a biennial that had taken
place throughout the 1980s, ‘Culture in Action’ built on Chicago’s eminent
public art tradition as one of the first cities to install a large- scale work in
public following the introduction of the NEA’s Art in Public Places
programme in 1967 (when Picasso’s Untitled [Head of a Woman] was
installed in Daley Plaza). In contrast to this ‘plop art’ model, ‘Culture in
Action’ deliberately moved commissions away from the central downtown
area and into marginalised, predominantly low- income neighbourhoods. It
resulted in eight projects from a wide cross- section of artists who worked
with local community groups over a number of months and even years.
Only one of the projects could be said to have resulted in a conventionally
‘sculptural’ object, Suzanne Lacy’s Full Circle: a temporary sculpture of
boulders (with bronze plaques) that formed a monument to women in
Chicago, both compensation for and commentary on the fact that no
women had ever been honoured in the city’s public monuments. But
although the work resembles a sculptural intervention in the manner of
Beuys’s 7,000 Oaks (1982), it would be wrong to read it solely in visual
terms. The process of nominating and selecting 100 women to be honoured
on the boulders was done by an advisory group of fifteen women, and
culminated in a Full Circle dinner on 30 September 1993 – a meal for fourteen
eminent women leaders from around the world. The work is typical of
Lacy’s output in its symbolism, ritualistic finale and relatively strong visual
identity – even if the process remains invisible in the final object.
Of the seven other projects, I will focus only on that of Mark Dion, since
he participated in all three exhibitions that form the focus of this chapter. In
Chicago, Dion worked with a team of fifteen high- school students drawn
from two schools (one private and one public) on a project that anticipates
the present decade’s fascination with education, discussed in Chapter 9.
Dion’s project had three phases: firstly, a rainforest study programme;
secondly, a field trip to Belize (where the artist had worked on a Tropical
Education Center in 1989– 90); and thirdly, the creation of the Chicago
Urban Ecology Action Group, based in an experimental field station set up
in the Lincoln Park district of the city. Located in a former clubhouse, the
field station was intended to operate as ‘an art installation, a workshop, and
an ecology information center in operation all summer long’. 29 Each week
was themed around topics – such as Darwin, Ecology, or Classification –
and featured guest speakers, cooking and tours, while also serving as a hub
for the group’s community gardening and lagoon cleaning projects. Dion
recalls that the response to this ‘eco drop- in centre and clubhouse’ was
disappointing: although the group was on site throughout the summer,
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