The Great Good Place
The Great Good Place
threewalls, Chicago
November 7 - December 12, 2015
The Great Good Place, organized by Brandon Alvendia, is a multi-layered set of exhibitions, which considers the poetic, political, and aesthetic potential of curatorial practice within the setting of everyday life. Tasking artists, independent curators, and collectives based in Chicago with the challenge of outfitting Threewalls’ gallery spaces, the exhibitions within the exhibition will take inspiration from Chicago’s make-do and artist-run culture and reconsider a range of contexts from the one-car garage workshop, the living room sleepover, the backyard bbq blowout, the networking dinner party potluck, the closet office conference, the second bedroom studio visit, to the illegal basement nightclub, all as sites of artistic inquiry.
The show examines the capacity of curatorial ideas to address or even ameliorate the loss of “third places,” a term coined by urban sociologist Ray Oldenberg in his 1989 book, “The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community.” These spaces are sites where individuals can come together for the pleasure of good company and dynamic conversation and serve as the basis for maintaining the vital social energy required for democracy and civic engagement. As more and more artists, curators, and organizers take it upon themselves to transfigure their own personal, private, and work spaces into shared public and social “third places,” this exhibition and program series delves into this cultural ethos that gets by with gritty resourcefulness and playful idiosyncrasy. Artists, independent curators, and collectives will be activating the space throughout the exhibition with programs, interview sessions, podcasts, hanging out, and making things together with gallery-goers.
TRUNK SHOW with Scott Wolniak
Michelle Grabner
ADDS DONNA
THE FRANKLIN with Alberto Aguilar, Erik Brown, Michelle Anne Harris, Marc Fischer, Jeremy J. Foy, Josh Ippel, Jaclyn Jacunski, James Jankowiak, Anna Kunz, Melissa Leandro, Ivan Lozano, Matt Nichols, Catie Olson, Josue Pellot, Cole Pierce, Ryan Richey, Christopher Smith, and Alex Tam
D Gallery with Holly Cahill, Greg Cook, Jacob C. Hammes, Kevin Jennings, Andy Moore, Will Staples, Shannon Stratton, Brian Taylor, Olivia Swider, and Erik Wenzel
NEW CAPITAL
Roots & Culture with Super Sub
Kitchen Space with Spears art space curating Ashley Cook, Elizabeth Weiss, Danny Giles, Caleb Yono, and Jacob Goudreault)
Inside/Within
Don’t Hate This podcast
filmfront
Anthony Stepter
Lillerne Tapes
Caitlin Ryan
Ron Ewert
RELATED EVENTS
ATLAS DRIFT RELEASE PARTY
Saturday 12/12/2015, 3 PM
INSIDE/WITHIN ARTIST CONVERSATIONS
Thursday 12/03/2015, 7:00 PM
TALKS
INSIDE/WITHIN ARTIST CONVERSATIONS
Thursday 11/19/2015, 6:30 PM
TALKS
SUNDAY PAINTING ON SATURDAY WITH NEW CAPITAL
Saturday 12/05/2015, 11 - 5 PM
COLLABORATION
WORKSHOP
DOMINODOMINO TOURNAMENT
Saturday 11/21/2015, 11:30 AM until all matches are played
COLLABORATION
SUPER SUB AFTER-PARTY
11/07/2015 - 11/07/2015, 9 PM - 11:30 PM
PARTY
OPENING RECEPTION: BRANDON ALVENDIA’S THE GREAT GOOD PLACE
11/07/2015 - 11/07/2015, 6pm-9pm
OPENING
RELATED RESOURCES
Artist Website
Gallery Slideshow
Podcast: I don't hate this at The Great, Good Place
To my dear allies,
I would like to thank you profusely in advance for your consideration. I hope to communicate my desires to the best of my ability with the precision of a finely honed Swiss-made machining die, manufactured to calibrate measuring devices of the highest quality. Failing that, I might toss a handful of hot noodles against the wall and see what sticks.
I could bore you to tears playing the experienced creative professional occupying the multiple roles of artist-slash-curator-slash-publisher-slash-performer-slash-educator-slash- metaphysical/metaphorical slasher (hell bent on “killing” it). I’m not necessarily expert enough to pontificate on my Mid-Century armchair theories about how the creative class might catalyze actual innovation, vibrancy, and change in society (while Richard Florida’s children superficially revive American rust-belt towns suffering from identity crisis).
Really, I’m just another creature in this particular ecosystem in the forest of ambition. I speak not as an authority on these matters, but as a scout, returning with my scrawled list of observations. I’m only trying to roughly mark out (with belated website updates left at each waypoint) the pitfalls, predators, insurmountable chasms, enclaves, and vistas to chart the way (but most certainly not the way back home). I sense there is a YOU ARE HERE arrow around here somewhere. Either way, we are definitely still very lost.
Given the context of this statement, you might expect a response from me alluding how my investment of time, money and blood (and blood money) has paid off, and years of developing a creative practice resulted in actually knowing about anything. To do so would be encouraging a tendency to over-determine what formula there is to success in a contemporary life (with a Keynote lecture queued up and ready to go, slides in chronological order, on an Epson pico-projector color-balanced to compensate for the stainless elevator doors).
Conversely, one could over-intellectualize the opposite; deconstructing the pedestal on which it rests; lost in theory at The Grand Hotel Abyss: we check in but don’t go to our rooms, instead we philosophize in the lobby as the baggage of reality glides by. The only formula is that there is no formula. However, I subscribe to what Lucy Lippard told me long ago to “maintain a cynical mind but follow an optimistic heart.”
That said, we must pay mind to RIGHT NOW and on what is inside of us. Of course, it’s easier said than done when the incessant drone of a 24/7 information culture and its siren’s song of ring-tones, alerts and updates overtaking our internal monologue with an addictive dopamine cycle. Sadly, contemplation is a dying practice, obliterated by the anxiety-inducing social obligation of hyper-prolific consumption, production and the fear of missing out. 4’33” indeed!
The truth is that wave after wave of newly minted BFA/MFA students all over the country have plenty of experience of what the “punch-in/punch-out” rhythm of life of art out of school consists of. It’s a banality involving an everyday normalcy, consisting of a healthy dose of tedium mixed with general annoyance, frustration and crushing doubt. Plus, declaring your to-do list a conceptual text art piece won’t solve anything.
Unless you’re one of the lucky ones able to employ teams of young folks happy to invisibly administer your career, it’s not difficult to imagine the hustle. We all have logged countless hours pursuing countless opportunities, heartbreaking form letters of rejection, even more heartbreaking “honorable mentions”, endless errands, playing email tag for weeks setting up a 30-minute meeting and so on... then you’re off to your job (likely part-time or worse, volunteer). I’m not bitter (honestly I’m not!) but it seems as though success finds those who, as in politics, are gifted at campaigning but dedicate little energy towards serving their public. Alas, “radicalized insurgent activist/artist/poet” is not a common job title (cue Claus Oldenburg’s “I am for an art...”)
Yet our contemporary cultural field incentivizes this lifestyle by constantly nurturing dangerously narcissistic and capitalistic ideas of freedom, and more often than not, breeding paranoid and precarious artists that ultimately develop student loan corporation stock portfolios instead of their own. Our toxic obsession with money, glamour and celebrity is not that it is necessarily evil; it is that it is an internalized response.
It is the kind of cognitive dissonance we gradually accept without being fully conscious and we are willfully ignorant that we have resigned to this reality. The hyper-connected world will not discourage our automated responses, because the conservative world of men, greed and power operates smoothly on fear, contempt, desperation, cutthroat competition and the worship of the SELF.
Our contemporary society harnesses these powerful visceral feelings in ways that have netted extraordinary wealth, comfort and individual freedom for very few. I believe the draw for young artists to take the risk of following a life of art stemming from a gut feeling that creativity yields some abstract sort of freedom; an individual freedom from the zombie rat-race and a freedom to do pretty much anything with little consequence in reality. That is, until the bills come due.
I cannot be more emphatic in sharing what I believe is the most important freedom. It is a human-centered and human-scaled freedom that is messy, exuberant and urgent. It is a freedom that requires heightened attention, awareness and discipline. Above all else and despite all odds, it is about truly caring for others, building community and sacrificing for it, day in and out, in a million little un-sexy intangible ways (RIP DFW).
That is true freedom.
-Brandon Alvendia