Museums: Contemporary in Chicago

For years Chicagoans have talked about founding a museum of modern art to complement the city’s long-established Art Institute. But not until 1964, when 30 critics, collectors and dealers met at the home of Critic Doris Lane Butler, did plans get off the ground. And not until 1966 was President Joseph Randall Shapiro able to find suitable space for the new museum—in a handsomely renovated onetime bakery on East Ontario Street. There last week, with a rafter-raising cocktail party replete with macromesh dresses and one dead woodpecker hung around a girl’s neck by Artist Ray Johnson, the new Museum of Contemporary Art announced its arrival.

On hand to host the guests, including Art Institute Director Charles Cunningham, whose museum’s president backed up his good wishes with a $50,000 donation, was the Contemporary’s director, Netherlands-born Jan van der Marck, 38, former director of Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center. While studying museum organization and finances on a two-year Rockefeller Foundation grant, Van der Marck realized that the early success of institutions like Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art was based on their exhibitions long before they had a chance to build up their permanent collections. Van der Marck intends to follow suit. “I think of a museum as a place of experiment, a proving and testing ground, a laboratory,” he says. “I want to show what is living in the minds of artists today.”

Monument that Floats. Judged by the Contemporary’s first offerings, the answer would seem to be “a fair amount of confusion.” The principal exhibit, “Pictures to be Read / Poetry to be Seen,” focused on the works of twelve artists who employ both pictorial images and written words and ranged from the exquisite to the spectacularly shoddy. Among the most successful were the intricate lens constructions of Mary Bauermeister, the comic-book panels by Chicago’s James Nutt, and the reconstruction of a 1964 Happening staged by Allan Kaprow, in which gallerygoers were invited to “make poetry, make news” by stapling random words together on the wall.

As a second exhibit, Van der Marck showed 34 drawings of “proposed colossal monuments,” including giant baked potatoes and pizza pies, by Claes Oldenburg, who was raised in Chicago, where his father was Swedish Consul General. Van der Marck is already talking of floating an Oldenburg on Lake Michigan, as part of Chicago’s 150th birthday celebration next summer. After all, Van der Marck figures, since his job is to show what is living in the mind of the artist, what is the point of keeping it confined to a museum?