‘What does it mean to survive?' ‘To provide for your basic needs?' ‘To have a supportive community?' These questions were directly engaged in the summer of 2010 when three art projects focusing on food, community and economics converged in the Chicago area. The artists hailed from San Francisco (Natasha Wheat), Seattle (Sarah Kavage) and Sydney (‘You Are Here' aka Keg de Souza and Zanny Begg). While officially unrelated and quite different in execution, these initiatives all had noticeable overlap in their methods and concepts.

"Today we painted our house yellow with the help of Jillian. It was a hot day, so it was sweaty work, but after several hours we had the first coat done. When surveying our handiwork we chatted to Jimmy, the guy who lives over the road. He told us that the house had belonged to an old couple. None of their children wanted to the house so it had become abandoned. He was pleased we were doing something with the space and told us that you ‘couldn't miss that colour even at night!'" -- a post from the artist group ‘You Are Here' (aka Keg de Souza and Zanny Begg) on their blog on July 23rd.
The Australian duo was in the small city of Gary, Indiana about 45 miles outside of Chicago working on a project to transform an abandoned house into a community meeting space, mural and garden. Begg and de Souza claim that their interest is much more in engaging people in a process to work together and that the outcome of gardens and murals were the least important parts of the project.
For two months, the two women attended meetings, worked on cleaning up the area around this abandoned property, and genuinely tried to use and be a part of public space in the post industrial city of Gary.

MESS HALL

The Chicago art space known as Mess Hall ties all three of these artist projects together. ‘You Are Here' were summer artists in residence there, Sarah Kavage is the fall artist in residence and Natasha Wheat was actively involved as a member of the cultural space that hosts exhibitions, meals, screenings and discussions on a regular basis when she was living here several years ago attending art school.
Wheat returned for a short visit this summer to produce ‘Self Contained' at the Museum of Contemporary Art. For a week-long residency she attempted to reproduce the space of an orangerie (a type of building which grew oranges on Northern European estates such as Versailles) in combination with the atmosphere of a social center akin to Mess Hall. Throughout the week there were several discussions with Chicago artists and food activists accompanied by citrus-themed meals prepared by local chefs. There was also a screening of ‘La Commune', the epic film about the French Revolution of 1870 by Peter Watkins. While apparently eclectic, the project's central character, the orangerie structured the conceptual intentions of the project, as Wheat explains: "When the French people overthrew the government during the Paris Commune, the Louvre was turned into a munitions factory to build weapons, and the Orangerie at Versailles was used as a prison to hold the Communards before they were killed. They were essentially put on exhibition in the Orangerie before they were sent to death." She continues dissecting her symbolic strategy, explaining that "museums originated when the wealthy needed places to exhibit the exotic things that they had collected. I see the Orangerie as a metaphor for the Museum. I wanted to complicate that relationship, and my position and skepticism as an artist making a ‘socially engaged' project in a Museum space."
Her installation included pamphlets about the Paris Commune, a reader with writings by various thinkers related to orangeries, the French Revolution, socially engaged art and museums. At its core was this social context combined with food (essential for any socializing!) and discussion.

ENGAGING COMPLEXITY

Since 2008, Seattle artist and urban planner Sarah Kavage has been exploring the world of commodities trading and its influence on economics, farming, and what we eat. This past summer she was in Chicago, inserting herself into this system in a learn-by-doing experiment to discover how an abstract ‘wheat futures' contract connects to real wheat, real food and real people. She purchased a 1,000 bushel futures contract on the Chicago Board of Trade and also bought 1,000 bushels of real commodity wheat. After getting the wheat milled into flour, she began giving it away at food banks, soup kitchens, farmers markets and the like, encouraging people to nourish others with it and send her documentation.

Kavage explained that even though she has immersed herself in this work she has barely scratched the surface of understanding it. Like so many artists her work and research has taken her to engage with professionals in many different industries and required her to translate very complex information for non-expert audiences. "Futures trading is tough to explain, especially if you don't know all that much about it yourself. I gave a talk to the students in an artisan baking class at Kendall College culinary school this summer. And as I was telling them about the futures markets, I could tell that some of them were getting it and some were completely glazing over. Then one of the students asked me to tell them specifically about my futures contract and that transaction, and once I explained what actually happened to me, they began to get it. So I've been doing that more and more. Something about telling one's own personal experience, as opposed to the theory, seems to make it comprehensible. And when I think about it, that's part of why I did this experiential project as opposed to just
doing a bunch of research and writing an article about it."
Another learning through dialogue experience occurred when Kavage participated in a food related exhibition in Wisconsin, about 4 hours north of Chicago in an agricultural area. She explained, "I gave away flour as part of the opening reception, most of it to older folks and families still farming. Now, with ‘city people' and the art crowd I've often had to spend a lot of time explaining what I'm doing with this project, and why. But these folks just took it in stride, they got it intuitively. There's something about the futility of being a small farmer these days that I really relate to as an artist - you are constantly slaving away, working other jobs, busting your butt for no money because it's a part of you and your identity. So perhaps these folks and I were on the same wavelength more than I expected."

MIDWESTERN RECESSION

These artists were all drawn to Chicago for different reasons. For ‘You Are Here' it was the proximity to Gary, Indiana - a postindustrial city getting hit particularly hard by the Great Recession. Begg and de Souza: "Survival is a pretty topical issue at the moment... even in mainstream politics people are beginning to talk seriously about issues such as economic crisis and climate change. For us in our project ReMake Estate we were interested in how these bigger issues boil down to the day to day economy of food distribution in an under resourced area such as Gary."
"Gary has a pretty rich history; home to the Jackson family [Michael Jackson and his siblings were born there], the first major city to elect a Black Mayor and once a thriving Black Metropolis. But since the 1970s it has been a state of serious decline. Gary was named after Elbert H. Gary the founding chairman of U.S Steel and was once one of the world's largest steel manufacturers, but today US Steel only produces less than 10 per cent of the world steel. Many buildings in the downtown area are now empty. This situation has been exasperated by the recent global financial crisis where Gary is at a point of bankruptcy.
So how does Gary survive in a situation like this? We were interested by the industries that are thriving in Gary such as Barber Shops, Beauty Salons, sex work, airbrush art and the informal economies of drugs and bootleg Michael Jackson merchandise. Our project directly engaged with the local initiatives that are seeking ways of self-empowerment and community control such as the Central District Organising Project (CDOP)."
"We wanted to work with an abandoned house - as there are so many in Gary - and these empty spaces brought together what we saw as some of the key issues in the area. Coming from Sydney too, where a tiny block of land sells for over half a million dollars, it was intriguing to us that poor people would be in a situation where they have to abandon a house."
Sarah Kavage was attracted to Chicago because the Chicago Board of Trade is located here. More commodities are traded on that market than anywhere else in the world. But she went on to explain what she found here: "I didn't realize when I started this venture that Chicago had such a history of socially engaged artwork, and learning that was really inspiring. Throughout this whole process I've been really encouraged by all the people and organizations here not only doing amazing work, but creating a history and a language around it."
"People in Chicago (the ones I interact with, anyway) are super intellectually engaged but in a practical, grounded way. It's so straightforward and Midwestern - enough talk, what can we actually do about this? Maybe I relate to that approach because I grew up in the Midwest, but it seems so balanced."

Chicago is increasingly becoming associated with socially and politically engaged art. Despite our lack of institutional infrastructure for supporting such work, more and more people are coming here from other places to situate their work in the social fabric of the city, in its grassroots institutions and with what Natasha Wheat described as a "history of labor organizing and a more militant activist history", that effects the kinds of art work happening there, as opposed to her more hippie-influenced experiences on the west coast in Portland and San Francisco.

Daniel TUCKER
is an artist and organizer and recently co-authored the book ‘Farm Together Now: A portrait of people, places and ideas for a new food movement' (To be published by Chronicle Books in Fall 2010). see www.miscprojects.com.