Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art

Note to self and Betsy (and John if he was paying attention to the conversation at the time): ~175 miles from here there.

Great! I actually decided to write a bit more about Chicago, starting, and possibly also ending, with the Museum of Contemporary Art. It was the only museum we visited; we would have made it to the Museum of Science and Industry, which looked pretty cool, if it hadn't closed too early. I think that pretty much the same happened to the Children's Museum and the aquarium was just too bloody expensive; all of that would have been Thursday, but we went to check out that arbitrary and abstract art just after three on Wednesday.

So we get in and, of course, turns out that they close at four. Great. 45 minutes to see four floors of stuff? Dag...at six bucks a person, not quite worth it. It was highly fortunate, then, that the lady working at the counter at the time was extremely cool and let us in for only two each! I don't recall if she had a name tag or not, but if she did, then I'd post her name here in thanks or something. Meh. Thanks.

The MCA has an exhibit on Andy Warhol going right now, but it was on the top floor, which, of course, we hit last. What little I had time to appreciate was pretty cool, but since it's Andy Warhol, of course, I'd probably seen all of it before; it was just a little better on larger scale and in the environment. There were most of his most famous star and disaster prints around; Monroe, Presley; uhh...various most wanted criminals from the time; scenes of car crashes, etc. It was kind of interesting but not much more.

I guess that I'll highlight some of my other favorites in no particular order except, of course, my favorite last. Well, there was one mildly intruiging normal ticker bar with, apparently, very many various pessimistic messages scrolling across; talking about how television is the detriment of the family, the world is being overpopulated and undernourished, and throwing other the-universe-is-shrinking ideas around. It was cool, but...I don't know if I'd really call it very fine art. Just took a dreary mind and a few minutes' programming. Top floor.

Lower floor: a strange black painting. Like, totally black. Actually, if you looked carefully or caught the right angle, then you could tell that there was actually a thick, horizontal stripe of red over a similar vertical one of blue. And...evidently it was a criticism of...the convention of color? Something like that...I guess. Near it were two perfectly blank canvases. Framed. Criticism of the convention of, you know, painting on them. My five-letter response (verbalized or otherwise; I can't recall) was, "Pssht."

Back to the top floor, in the same (large, wide, and very open) room as the ticker bar, not far from Warhol, there was a tall medley of differently colored or tinted light bulbs fixed on a white board and run through timers to their outlets. As the time of day changes, successive bulbs, so successive shades, grow brighter and ascend the sculpture. If my memory serves me succcessfully, orangeish-yellowish on the bottom through white middle to blue/violet/purple ceiling with a few diffused lights throughout and several small to large silver globes placed seemingly randomly. Cool.

What Betsy declared her favorite was another thing in that room; a life boat. Made of bronze. And designed with all kinds of extremely smooth curves so that, at least to me, the urge just to touch it and ensure that it was actually bronze, not like plastic coated in spraypaint or anything, was nigh-overpoweringly compelling.

On reflection, now, I think that everything that I've described on an upper floor was just on the fourth story; anything else was on the second, perhaps. Well, then the only thing that I'm going to mention on the third has to be a room with a bunch of well balanced, for want of a description much more apt, torque-mobiles (remember Garner-physics? Yeah, ouch.). That is, structures hanging or balancing on a single thin fulcrum with typically significantly more mass towards one end, say, a heavy weight, and a huge complex of smaller, neatly arranged bits. The great majority of the pieces were silverish, but there were other mostly primary or pastel colors. I think that, in fact, not one piece was resting on the ground. Also, they were all quite nifty.

Falling down to one of the lower (second) stories, I guess that some artists actually go to their exhibition halls/rooms to do their art. One of the products was a certain room whose walls were covered by approximately six-foot "pink and "gold"" (sic, unless I'm mistaken, as per the wall description; they were actually more of a strong yellow) glowing neon tubes. On each wall, they started very close together in the middle, then gradually spaced out farther and farther towards the corners. It wasn't especially thought-provoking or paradigm-redefining; it was just neat and the glow was notably beautiful.

Finally, adjacent to that room was a work by, I believe the same artist. Now, the previous room was perhaps 20' x 60' or something (very, very rough; I'm utterly awful at estimating in general, but especially distances in specific). This one was probably about as wide but maybe twenty feet shorter. One half of the room was pretty much bare, but the other half was marked off--no walking around over there--and had models of a conceptual city, train tracks, a bridge or two, and an amalgam of other...things; some very small, like children's toys, and some on bigger scales, as big as the security people standing watch over every room. Over all of that, and all of the room, with various curious strutures and designs hanging off of it, were strings. Indeed, high up out of reach on the open end, they were fixed across the entire wall; if you connected their attachment points, you would have had a gentle curve. They hung down, complete with all of those other things down off of them, smoothly sloping down and towards one corner in which most stuff was concentrated. Near the center of the room, where the "Do Not Cross" line was, the string was low enough that I had to bend not to disturb it. Beneath a few parts of the structure, on the ground, there were huge splotches of white or slightly blue-tinged white carelessly spilled and green petals lying around on top of straight black line designs. The overall effect...sweet.

Yeah; overall, actually, it reminded me of two of my favorite sources of easily digested art: Hugh MacLeod's stuff at gapingvoid.com--his line designs--and the way that Sam Brown at explodingdog.com does buildings. Breaking my general code of not posting excessive pictures on this blog, here are a few examples:

...So then the MCA was very cool. Later, that night, we spent about half an hour in a Borders browsing Chicago tourist books (heh) figuring out what to do with the rest of the day. Well, we picked out a few restaurants to check out, looked through a bunch of clubs (WAAL'd several times at some of them such as "Neo", whose only entrance was through a side alley and whose description read something along the lines of, "You'll want to enter through the alleyway and if you come with pretty girls and look just right, the lady with her clipboard will let you in soon enough." We actually saw this "Neo" walking around later. We also found clubs for goths, metalheads, industrial...ites, etc. No description necessary for humor there, I believe.), lounges (one very sweet-sounding one, the Velvet Lounge, open from like five PM to three AM or something, but, unfortunately, we were too exceedingly tired out by the time we had finished our plans up until that point), and, the activity which we chose and actually coordinated well, improv shows.

Of course, this is Chicago, so there were seven or eight dozen (exaggeration by about a factor of seven or eight) possible events which we could find on a Wednesday night, but improv stuff sounded and looked good, so we went with that. Well, of course, with the many of them that stated things like, "BYOB" at the bottom, and knowing that things like this are actually scheduled, we decided that it'd be a good idea to call ahead to make sure that we'd be able to get in etc. After several failed attempts (namely, problems with things like being under 21 and not having shows on Wednesday nights...), we found Improv Olympic, or Improvolympic, as it may be, reserved three tickets (many hearty thanks to Betsy's credit card--and at $5 a ticket, absolutely worth our money) for their ten o'clock show, and made it with a bit of time to spare after dinner.

(Our first choice for which, by the way, was a nice-seeming Indian restaurant...which was inexplicably closed, evidently indefinitely. So we had very nice Italian. So nice, in fact, that since Tuesday had been their chef's/bartender's/someone important to the people's birthday, another employee had (home)made two cheesecakes for everyone to share! Yays! And we (the patron body) sang happy birthday to the guy! Yays! But Betsy missed the singing; her and her bathroom...pssht. And I missed the cake. Me and my bathroom...='(. After being upset for a while, Betsy let me have some of hers. Then after I'd been upset for a while longer, she pulled out my slice, which she and John'd hidden. Dag. Pwn'd.)

...And so I guess that the prior Improvolympic show lasted a bit long, so we had to wait for a little while outside while they finished and filed out. Of course, that means that homeless or otherwise disadvantaged people could come and ask for money. And, of course, hang around, talking loudly (and about 70% incoherently, really) about rap and hip-hop, artists, mostly. And, like, not know what techno music is ("'S that like jazz?"). Well, it was totally worth it when the guy left us and went over to harass a group of some other people, including at least one hardcore hipster. =). He was nice, though; when he accidentally swore, he looked over quickly and apologized to Betsy. =).

...So when the improv finally got underway ("So, if you need the restroom, they're over there on your left, and if you need another drink or whatever, the bar's right there on the other side; thanks, and enjoy the show!"), it was in a room that was about the size of, say, Mr. Fallis's old room, only twice or so as wide; the stage was pretty bare, but had left- and right-side doors, one in the middle, and windows that opened on hinges between the stage-right and middle doors. I guess that in places where going out and watching some guys make up funny stuff on the spot is as commonplace as going out and watching some guys play rehearsed, refined, and retuned songs, they're going to treat it similarly on the production end; the two groups which performed for us had their repective group names but I'm afraid that I can't recall either. Nevertheless, the first group was more than LOL hilarious and the second was pretty good but obviously had their stuff ready beforehand. I'm not about to try to describe everything that happened, but probably my favorite sketch (considering I remember much of it and still IAAL when I think about it) involved two men tilling a field without any tools (with their "HANDS OF STEEL") arguing about authority (over each other), including taking cheap shots, such as one of them losing in basket ball to his fat son ("Hey, Dad, let's play basketball...It went in! Let's play again...It went in!").

...Who also happens to be a little retarded.

IAAL. But Jebus, now, do I wish I were living at least within reasonable commuting distance (and ease) of a big city. Well, at least I feel like my spring break was definitely worth something now. Definitely. I'll have something to compare against all of my friends going to Florida or wherever together.

=)