JANA GUNSTHEIMER: STATUS L PHENOMENON | ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO
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This “crisis” supposedly occurred June 4, 2007–exactly one month before the Fourth of July. And as with the Katrina and 9/11 disasters, insurance companies are reluctant to assume liability. People are fleeing Chicago in droves while President Bush makes vague proclamations about freedom, terrorism, and private property. A firm called “Besserem Trust” runs an advertisement declaring that “Capitalism Is Dead” but also reassures its potential customers that “Our management knows how to keep your total assets.” Communists, aliens, and God are all blamed for the crisis, and one commentator argues that “politics should react immediately by forming an epidemic delegation to turn words rapidly into deeds so that, in the near future, science fiction can be based on life, rather than science fiction becoming reality.”
Prophecies of disaster can seem absurd, however, and as a result are often accompanied by gallows humor. Gunstheimer includes an eye-catching map, painted directly on one wall of the space, depicting the three devastated buildings in cartoony visual shorthand. Arrows lead to terse, hilarious descriptions of the events befalling the structures, the behavioral mutations of people on the premises (servants become subletters, a refined young woman becomes a white-trash metalhead), and “before” and “after” drawings of the drastically altered exteriors. Gunstheimer has also hung beautifully rendered watercolors of newspaper clippings, one of which features a homeless yuppie in a rolling office chair setting up his “home office” on a street corner. A Frankfurter Allgemeine headline announces the Chicago disaster ignorantly or ironically, declaring “Happy Birthday Amerika!” a month early. In these comic moments, Gunstheimer’s installation calls to mind critical but funny fake news outlets like the Onion and the Daily Show.
As dry as this installation might seem at first, like earlier romantic German art–Joseph Beuys’s performances and installations come to mind–it conflates anti-imperialist politics and pantheistic chaos. It also clearly draws on the straightforward approach of Fluxus protest art, like Yoko Ono and John Lennon’s 1969 “War Is Over (If You Want It)” campaign, which emblazoned the statement on billboards and posters. Beneath the cold facade of Gunstheimer’s exhibit are a relevant message and the warm handicraft of her pieces.
