Dan Peterman: Plastic Economies
Recycling–or in some cases not recycling–is the subject of Dan Peterman’s seven large installations at the Museum of Contemporary Art. A midcareer retrospective, the show confirms that this internationally recognized Chicago conceptual artist is an original voice adept at fostering greater awareness of how we use our material resources.
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Two small sculptures, each titled Rathole, demonstrate that Peterman’s interests go beyond recycling. He made concrete casts of rat burrows in his garden, then left the soil and other debris on the casts when he pulled them out of the ground. These pieces are displayed upside down on the floor, which calls attention to the bottom of the holes, where the rats live, instead of the top, which is what humans usually see. Peterman’s memorializing embrace of the “homes” of these despised creatures calls attention to an aspect of the urban environment we don’t usually consider in sympathetic terms.
Peterman’s social critiques. The newest piece here, Recent Recipes, isn’t appealing to look at. A sprawling affair whose subject is institutional food preparation, it’s made up of tables and shelves stacked with bags, boxes, and buckets of such materials as “High Gloss White RTU Fondant Icing” whose expiration dates have all passed. On one table, red powder sits in a large dish at the center of dozens of paper cups holding a creamy substance sprinkled with the powder; red has rarely looked so unappetizing. Moreover the food’s institutional smell isn’t pleasant. Here the materials flow from box or barrel to our mouths and bellies.
“I make art out of junk,” Derek Webster says. “I think they call that recycling now.” Born in Honduras and raised there and in Belize, he came to Chicago in 1964 and worked as a janitor until he retired at 65 a few years ago. When he and his wife purchased a home in 1978, he wanted to put in a garden but was afraid his poodle would wreck it. He didn’t want just an ordinary fence, so he decorated it with small sculptures, including tiny windmills. These were his first artworks. Ninety of his pieces, mostly human figures but also animals and objects, are now on view at Intuit. And though it’s not surprising that Webster’s art would be shown at a center for outsider art and that MFA holder Peterman would be exhibiting at the MCA, it’s a shame this splitting off of artistic communities exists.
