Peterman connects to the larger world
His work has a social cast, but he downplays conclusive messages
By Alan G. Artner
Tribune art critic
Published August 8, 2004
Dan Peterman and the Museum of Contemporary Art have worked together a number of times, although the nature of the projects -- seats made from shopping carts, the wallboard of a gallery related to coal-burning waste processes, plaza furniture created from reused plastic -- was so low-key that, as art, the work was almost invisible.
Now, however, the MCA has organized the largest exhibition of Peterman's 18-year career, and among the pieces new and old there scarcely is one that will go unnoticed, for while the artist's cultural inquiries may be shared by artists' groups in Europe and America, the work he creates from them stands apart from most other art produced in Chicago.
The museum introduces the show by saying, "Recycling, reusing, and reworking are at the core of Dan Peterman's art," and that is true enough. But how did the native of northern Wisconsin come to processes of artistic creation that involve the waste products of cities in a consumer-oriented society?
Grad school at U. of C.
"I've always been fascinated by big cities," Peterman said, "and coming to Chicago was a deliberate choice when I was looking for a graduate school. I attended the University of Chicago and got very interested in some of the local issues on the South Side. I got involved with a not-for-profit environmental group called the Resource Center that opened up a view to the city through its materials and its loading docks and its flows of waste.
"That was the most enticing kind of studio context for me when I left graduate school in 1986. That's where I saw the issues that most interested me, which had to do with ecology and looking at the city and materials in a very expanded way. Where does the relevant material come from for me to work with? How should I formulate my studio? I left graduate school pursuing those questions, and I intuitively embedded myself locally, not just in the city of Chicago but in specific neighborhoods on the South Side with intense social and economic issues being played out. That seemed to me like the productive context to plant myself in as an artist."
Peterman had not come from an activist family. Yet as a student he was most attracted to those artists -- Allan Kaprow, Hans Haacke, Joseph Beuys, Martha Rosler, among others -- who pushed social connections in their work. They showed him he did not have to constrain himself to fit the art world. Social or activist agendas could easily be accommodated in the art world of the late 1980s.
Peterman's own work always has had a social cast, though he downplays didactic, conclusive messages, feeling he needs more room to maneuver conceptually. He wants to take advantage of the resources the art world offers to reflect on issues that can connect to the larger world in a significant way. He does not want, however, to be changed from an artist to an activist with yet another social platform.
One of Peterman's first works of art in which his social ideas came together was a project not in the exhibition called "Medium of Exchange."
"It involved casting crude aluminum ingots, putting them on the street and tracking their arrival back at recycling centers," Peterman said. "[It was] a quiet monitoring of a system already in place, looking at what generally is seen as a haphazard event: A homeless guy with a shopping cart stacked 15 feet high with aluminum siding or something wandering through the streets. Actually, it's a highly organized industry. It was really interesting to step into some of those industries. So I did some projects that were embedded within that economy and that kind of geography of the city."
Notions of utopia
The exhibition picks up Peterman's career at a point at which his projects were fairly resolved and distinct from one another. He has liked to pursue social ideas in works he allows to go in their own directions, which means pieces created close in time may look quite different. Still, the show indicates a constancy in regard to certain themes. His pursuit of them often has, in fact, continued for years. One has involved notions of utopia.
"I'm interested in utopic structures, but in looking at them squarely," Peterman said. "I'm interested in failed utopias as much as functioning utopias. And I'm interested in tiny utopias, little material networks or little modifications. I'm interested in the Swiss Army knife as a utopic model. You know, you're ready for everything.
"A project that I did, [on view] here, played with that notion. You could be prepared for everything and keep pushing that a little bit further. But then you start to introduce the dysfunction of having a Swiss Army knife with a cup as one of the attachments. And it makes it really too ungainly to wear. Ecology is about looking at complicated systems and finding ways not to leap into a reinvented, perfect world but simply to recognize that they're complex systems and you can shift the balance a bit, tilt the way people are thinking about things and move toward more sustainable practices or a greater awareness of how decisions impact the world."
Sometimes, as in the knife piece and an impromptu side-of-the-road fruit stand called "The Top of the Truck That Hit the Bridge," a certain humor is apparent in Peterman's extension of everyday objects or situations into realms unimagined. Sometimes, too, Peterman just observes and asks questions ("The Universal Lab") or sets up gentle encounters with organic processes ("Carbon Bank"). Then he creates prototypes for a close-to-the-Earth urban architecture made from trash bins rebuilt to house a bike repair shop out on the museum plaza or fishing and gardening equipment in Humboldt Park.
A greater understanding
The complexity of the work's attitude -- force nothing, inquire about everything -- has been understood more easily in Europe than the United States, where viewers have been content to accept the pieces are "about" recycling and leave it at that. Peterman says the notion of recycling as it applies to his art is just the beginning. It's what recycling leads to in spheres beyond the artistic. At base, each piece seems to say that things don't have to be perceived the way they are and we should all look for better ways to make things work.
"There's a lot of ecologically based information," Peterman said, "but there's also a lot of common knowledge that we have through the mass media about ecological issues. So the work is trying to prod people deeper into that language. I guess I'm just arguing for the hope that [the work] doesn't appear overly complex even though the complexity is what draws me into it. Ecological thinking isn't complex like how you write software programs. It's a kind of philosophical complexity. But I think some of the questions are fairly simple to engage in, and it's not beyond anybody to wonder about those things and how they impact their own lives, their own kind of material relations to the world."
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"Dan Peterman: Plastic Economies" continues at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave., through Sept. 12. 312-280-2660; the artist will speak about his work (in a program for museum members only) at 6 p.m. Sept. 7.
