LOVER LEAVER
Location: Transamoeba – South Loop – Chicago
Year: 2003
All of the members of the rock band Hive of Fives, including myself, took part in the Chicago Art Department (see below). The topic chosen for the first CAD exhibit was “Love It or Leave It’. For the CAD open house H-O-5 performed a 30 minute piece titled “Lover Leaver’. I performed a video accompaniment that told the story of my lost lovers.
The Pilot program of the Chicago Art Department was an exhibition driven collaborative art ” class” which brought artists together to examine the phrase “Love It or Leave It”, create artwork based on that theme, and produce an exhibition. The class connected the themes of Love It or Leave It from personal, family, city, national and world perspectives.
The Chicago Art Department was founded in 2003, in my South Loop studio called Transamoeba. Nat Soti, Mike Nourse and myself, all art professors from different Chicago institutions, decided to invite our favorite students and working artists to agree to a ten-week experiment in which, we would meet, collaborate on artworks and share expertise.
Transamoeba has a tradition of fostering creative organizations. Three prolific visual art groups (PRDF, The Conjugate Projekt, Entheon) and several musical groups (including Hive of Fives, VCR, Boy-Deb) had sprung from this inspirational refuge. We had the benefit of working with several of these groups and tried to design CAD to take advantage of the most successful parts of each of these organizations, and avoiding common pitfalls.
The best thing about these collaborative art groups was the opportunity to be constantly introduced to new approaches to making art. We hoped that by introducing our friends and students to a wide range of different medias, styles and techniques, by way of different types of artists, each would teach the other something that they didn’t already know. We were also aware that some structure helps drive the creative process. There is a tendency for artists to get so excited about discussing their projects that they might not get around to actually fabricating them. The opposite tendency is also true in which the artist makes many artworks but never actually show them to anybody. We wanted to help people take the creative process all the way to the gallery wall. We reduced these basic tendencies down to create our super simple creative approach:
TRY IT – MAKE IT – SHARE IT
We chose to use the metaphor of ‘school’ because it is a form that everybody, including the founding professors, were quite familiar with. When we started the ‘school’, the idea was more used as a metaphor. Our primary goal was encouraging people to create exhibitions using our collaborative theme driven strategy. We were more like creative directors than teachers because we expected the ‘students’ to teach each other techniques.
ZOOM PERSPECTIVE
At CAD, we adopted a technique that was used quite successfully by several of the former arts organizations at Transamoeba. Each exhibition would have a cohesive theme. This would allow both artists and audience members to engage in a very specific conversation. A room full of unrelated artworks tends to creates a room full of unrelated conversations. Our idea was to engage both the artists and the audience in the creative dialogue. We decided that the politically charged phrase, “Love It or Leave It” would be a fitting conversation starter.
Each of the first five weekly meetings, we would attempt to make the artists look at that theme from a different perspective.
Week one was an ultra personal perspective, Loving / Leaving Home, in which artists were asked to discuss and sketch on the idea of the moment that they decided (if they had) to move out of the house of their parent(s).
Week two: Love/Leave your community (friends / romance)
Week three: Love / Leave your country
Week four: Love / Leave the planet
Week five: Love / Leave your Life.
We call this approach to studying a subject, The Zoom Perspective. The zoom steps might change from subject to subject but the idea is a simple approach to looking at an idea from multiple angles. We have since used this approach quite successfully for themes like Heroes or Man vs Machine.
We offered three semester length classes at Transamoeba. Each one was capped with it’s own exhibition. Everybody that attended these events commented on how different the room looked. For each exhibit, the artists had spent three hours per week transforming the room. The pieces were made in that room, for that room, and with the piece next to it being created at the same time.