This scale also gets at the heart of the exhibition and both Walser’s and the modernist writing project at large: to examine the changes in the dimensions of human life in and as our relationship to an increasingly industrialized, and alienating, world.
Read MoreWhen the SAIC graduates, who have worked almost exclusively in performance until this year, first chose to make work together, they decided to spend two years on every project. Those of us who live in Chicago during the decade they showed the resulting full-length performances here were privy to their attentive, obsessive, matchlessly substantive explorations of the night sky and railroads, the mythology of the sea and dust bowls, and the infinite space of libraries.
Read MoreAs we all have become armchair curators and endless sharers of our personal relics, Mackin suggests careful thinking and self-awareness about the circulation and lives of our images that will surely outlive us. And at a time when the museum world is facing its own questions how available images of art should be online through collections, Mackin has evoked real substantive questions about the ethics of documentation.
Read MoreWhat the show's organization underscores beautifully is the constant evolution of the artist’s thought, from his early ecological photographs borne from field studies (BAXTER& began as a zoologist, and his environmental concerns are the place to find the pulse of the work), to the plastic paintings in the early sixties, whose packaged worlds make arguments about consumer culture and the role of art as a commodity that are still fresh and astonishing.
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