Dig
It is the first Saturday of summer–sunny, warm, conspicuously free of humidity. Along the six-block stretch of Halsted south of Roosevelt, near the former site of the Maxwell Street flea market, the sidewalks are full of men strolling back and forth. They offer me gold chains, sweat socks, porno videos. When they fail to make a sale, a few tag along for a half block, keeping a respectful distance, asking for a buck, some spare change, anything will help. Up north people cram the lakefront in their Rollerblades, but down here everyone’s hard at work.
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Behind the building, in the well-tended community garden, two enormous office desks sit side by side, planted there by choreographer Sheldon B. Smith. At one, a man in a T-shirt that proclaims him to be a “master gardener” fills his metal drawers with neat rows of carrots. His job for the afternoon will be to make carrot juice. Beside him a pleasant fellow in overalls waits for his work assignment to arrive; he’s supposed to sit at his desk for eight hours and assemble blank jigsaw puzzles. “I’m doing this mostly because my girlfriend is friends with one of the artists,” he explains. “It’s not so much work as relationship maintenance.”
Back inside, other artists stroll up and down the aisles of office furniture, display cases, and shrink-wrapped computer monitors. They’re trolling for raw material–all the installations are to be built from CRW stuff.
The couple teamed up with CRW, offering to create an ongoing residency at the site. The personnel grew to five pairs of artists. Each team would create a performance installation, and all the pieces would be performed simultaneously, all day long, over the course of four days.
Such elegant mysteriousness is nearly unavoidable as I wander about for the next few hours. Carla Jean Mayer and Smith, in their desk duets, don’t pretend to examine “human labor in all its manifestations.” Rather they present sly images of meaningful and meaningless work. At a desk near the front door of the building, a soft-spoken man says he is “making dreams,” cutting black-and-white images from a 1960s medical pathology textbook and attaching them with black lace to small remnants of white carpeting. He then secures them to a large plastic pillow bearing a tag that reads “No Rest.” He seems deeply involved in a satisfying task. At the desk next to him, however, a man in a suit and tie stares at several dozen blank puzzle pieces laid out before him. He’s finished the border, but during our ten-minute conversation he can’t find a single piece to fit into the puzzle’s interior. “I’m not sure if this is interesting or just infuriating,” he says, trying to find the art in his labor. But at least he’s not working on a deadline. “I think of myself as the union employee–it gets done when it gets done.”
Meanwhile, half a block west on Halsted men continue to hawk their wares to the occasional passerby. Once upon a time people flooded this neighborhood on a weekend afternoon, hoping to unearth a treasure or two at the Maxwell Street market. Now that location is a featureless expanse of concrete, a parking lot no one ever seems to use. I wonder if anyone will plant yellow flags there a century from now.
