At the Art Institute, I was in awe of an entire room of Robert Ryman paintings. His work is so bare that if you put it next to anything else, it almost disappears. So it's good for it to have its own room. Such precision: with the brushed aluminum and modern fasteners, it feels like a space-era artwork, something like NASA taken to its mosts beautiful extreme
. Other good works there that I really admired were the huge Frank Stella piece and the precarious (but immensely solid) Richard Serra works. And I was most floored by the sculpture "Hinoki" by Charles Ray, hand carved by a Japanese Temple Restoration master. This reproduction of natural decay spoke to me in a particular human sense of freezing, or postponing death, and of course, the overwhelming human effort involved. An interesting event happened to me: on my first pass through the room with this sculpture, I noticed that there was a flat spot where a piece was missing. When I came back two hours later, the piece had suddenly appeared! It's the sharp piece visible in the foreground. Apparently, some viewers had stumbled into it and broken it off, but it had been replaced during the time I was off looking at the rest of the museum. Before/After. Amusing.The SOFA show was useful for me because it gave me a very clear window into a certain style of art, a world that can be variously categorized as "fine craft" or "decorative arts" or, as the acronym suggests "Sculpture Objects". I kept wondering what the difference really was between this and what we might call "fine art," that is, what is shown at the Chicago Art Fair, or Art Basel, or the Venice Biennale. These are different games that artists play. Different worlds of interest. Perhaps the easiest way to over-generalize and wrongly simplify this divide would be to say that "fine art" is interested in the idea behind the work, the "concept" as we so lovingly use the word, whereas the "decorative art" of SOFA is interested in the surface, the materials, the finish, the craftsmanship, and what happens when this is taken to its extreme. I noticed that at the SOFA show, many people would touch the objects. They were approachable. At a "fine art" fair, this would certainly get you yelled at.
The Contemporary Art Museum had some wonderful works on display. Beautifully precise Donald Judd pieces, and a large installation by Liam Gillick that played wonderfully with color and light. I was quite moved by a work called "It is what it is" by Jeremy Deller, which gave an intimate and up-front understanding of the Iraq war through photos and an actual bombed car, complete with a social "lounge" where visitors could interact with an acutual Iraqi. When I was there, the Iraq woman was a refugee trained as a Laser Physicist, who spoke English quite well and was quite bemused by the position she found herself in, answering a variety of questions from all directions about Iraq, the war, Islam, and others. I found it a fascinating and quite engaging opportunity.
Elsewhere in the museum, there are many "hidden" works of art, such as the piece by
Harold Mendez, Nothing Prevents Anything (2007). A worked-over found object (a message corkboard) was brilliantly displayed over by the small lounge beside the elevators. It looked at first glance like it could actually be a message board, but second glance revealed the absurdity of the scnenario: a, empty board in such poor shape, with cracking paint, dirt stains, and hundreds of remnant staples on the wall of a museum that was very clean and put-together. The recognition that this was indeed a very intentional work was stunning: it sparked a kind of curiosity about everything else in the museum: "is this art?" It got to be a bit overwhelming when I began to ask if the guy vacuuming in the corner was an performance artist. Still, it raised the wonderful question of what is art, and what kind of intention does it have to have? Are the pay-phones at the museum an installation? I actually had to consider this, since they didn't have a dial tone (one, in fact made an "out-of-order" tone). Are those trees outside the museum art? Of course they are! Of course, everything bears the intentional act of creation and intentional location. Design is rampant. So what ends up in the museum? Objects that carefully and precisely remind us of this point. 
