[susan morelock] practice

(July 2005)

STEVE DALY, Moth on Fake Marble Tile Rendered in Halftone, Archival Pigment Print, 2011

SECOND CITY PSYCHASTHENIA

Curated by Daniel Bauer

January 12, 2012 – February 18, 2012 

Andrea Meislin Gallery is pleased to announce a new exhibition curated by Daniel Bauer. Including work by Steve Daly, Jose Ferreira, Gwynne Johnson, Susan Morelock, Kristin Nason, Anna Shteynshleyger, Rob Swainston and Learning Ross.

Opening Reception:

Thursday, January 12, 6 - 8 p.m.

But they will teach us that Eternity is the standing still of the present time, a nunc stans (as the schools call it); which neither they, nor any else understand, no more than they would a hic stans for an infinite greatness of Place.

Leviathan, IV, 46. As quoted by Borges in Aleph

What does it mean to pass through a city? How long does one stay? What is the residue left behind? Perhaps it is we who compose the residue while our doubles flee the scene leaving us in the lurch. Perhaps we are the residue. The Second City was all about passing through. Here commodities really knew how to dance. They danced to the music of the future. A future that existed as long as it could be bought and sold. By river, rail, road and air nothing was static, nothing remained in place. Anything that did not move was torn down.

What happens when the music stops? Do those passing through get stuck? Do we continue in the perpetual nowtime of a graceful ghost dance or do we stagger like zombies tripping over one another’s feet? In the Second City the Louis Sullivan Stock Exchange is in the museum. As a sign of lost élan vital or evidence of an uncanny collective clairvoyance.

Motion and stability are still up for grabs. The Second City conjures trans-millennial debates on cosmology in their current vogue as urban theory. We inadvertently slip back and forth between the rival camps - Ptolemy and Copernicus. “Every photograph is a still life” Garry Winogrand once remarked, with camera to patrol the border between self and other. The supercooled liquid of the glass lens and the camera’s electro mechanical guillotine shutter still bear the brunt of negotiating the present collapse into our surroundings. 

The artists in this exhibition met in a City Within a City; in a grid of depersonalized confessionals, the networked interior of oversized cubicles that constitute the studios at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Part brothel and part clinic in both form and function. Accumulating and manufacturing symptoms.

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The reference is to Roger Caillois’s infamous 1935 essay Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia, in which the dissident Surrealist suggested that the phenomenon of insect camouflage should be compared to a type of schizophrenic psychic condition characterized as a “depersonalization by assimilation to space”: an entropic loss of distinctions, of ego boundaries, of any bodily sense of inside and outside.

George Baker, Piss Eloquent

Tom Starkweather:

6th Avenue, New York, NY