After arriving in Chicago in the mid-80s, art student Dan Peterman started to experiment with different materials: “I lined a cargo net with a sheet of plastic with its edges budged up, stuck a hose in it, suspended it from the ceiling, and turned the faucet on.” He watched the bundle balloon and sag, shutting off the water when the ceiling started to groan. “It was a way of exploring the properties of the materials,” he says, “and of seeing how if you start to push something in a certain direction what it conveys will change.”
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As an undergraduate Peterman was impressed by the simple, repeating geometric forms of minimal art, which he felt “represented a reduction to a zero point.” But he would soon move away from this aesthetic. In graduate school at the University of Chicago, he began working with aluminum scrap from the Resource Center on 61st Street. “I could have gotten it from anywhere,” he says, but having gotten it from a recycling outfit he considered its source. “Anytime you see somebody with a shopping cart full of cans or a bag of cans over their shoulder, they’re usually out collecting or they’re heading to a recycling buy-back. My aluminum had come out of this scavenging system and had a monetary value that was really significant” to the scavengers. So Peterman melted his “assortment of aluminum things down into ingots” that he numbered and “placed along alleys and curbsides.” About half were eventually returned for recycling.
Some notes on the gallery wall help the inquiring viewer learn. The drywall is made of gypsum produced in the scrubbers of coal-fired power plants, a by-product of pollution reduction. This material “used to be landfilled, but now it’s beginning to be fed into the wallboard industry.” A maquette of the MCA’s new building shows where these particular sheets of drywall will go, for this is “not a finished piece, it’s material in transition.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Loren Santow, James Prinz.
