Industry of the Ordinary (IOTO) is a two-person conceptual art collaborative, made up of Chicago-based artists and educators Adam Brooks and Mathew Wilson. [1] Their work is usually performative or sculptural, often incorporating audience participation and interaction with the artists. [2]
Industry of the Ordinary document their projects at their website, where their manifesto states, "Through sculpture, text, photography, video, sound and performance, Industry of the Ordinary are dedicated to an exploration and celebration of the customary, the everyday, and the usual. Their emphasis is on challenging pejorative notions of the ordinary and, in doing so, moving beyond the quotidian." [3] Industry of the Ordinary formed in 2003. IOTO's work appears in diverse forms, including performances tailored for specific exhibitions and performance art openings, artist-driven interventions on the streets of cities throughout the US and internationally, and public works commissioned by the Nebraska State Historical Society, [1] the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) [4] and the Billboard Art Project, [5] among others. They have shown work at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, [6] the Chicago Cultural Center, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hyde Park Art Center, [7] and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Industry of the Ordinary's work deals with themes of faith, freedom, politics, youth culture, celebrity, competitive sports, sex and drinking. [8] They often employ collaborative strategies, as in their piece 39 Verbs, for which they commissioned fellow arts professionals to create 39 works inspired by arbitrarily assigned verbs taken from their previous works' titles. [9] This emphasis on collaboration subverts traditional conceptions of art creation as highly individualistic, calling into question the elitism of the institutional art world. Works like Celebrity and the Peculiar, an installation of oxygen tents suffused by humidifiers with various celebrity perfumes, question popular culture's obsession with notoriety and our individual attempts to identify with celebrities. [10] IOTO's preoccupation with public interaction and stated intention that their work be completed by the creative interpretation and engagement of the audience has led some critics to categorize their work within the umbrella of Relational Aesthetics. [11] Their work has also been linked to the Situationist International and Fluxus movements. Their public interventions, usually ephemeral and existing afterwards only in the form of documentary photographs, videos, or text, has also been compared to the Happenings of the 1960s. One piece, Re-Work (for Allan Kaprow, Marina Abramović and Philip-Lorca diCorcia), re-imagines Allan Kaprow's delegated performance, Work. In his original, Kaprow hired professional house painters to paint and re-paint the hallway of a gallery space. For their Re-Work at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, IOTO hired two sex workers to perform the same task while wearing their "professional" attire. Just as Kaprow's piece questioned the distinction of artist by contracting out the actual art-making process, IOTO's piece questions our assumptions about the nature of, and our subsequent judgements of, certain types of labor. [1]
Industry of the Ordinary's mid-career retrospective, Sic Transit Gloria Mundi, was shown at the Chicago Cultural Center from August 2012 to February 2013. It was an exhibition of many of their works to that point, as well as several new pieces and a series of commissioned performances and installations which occurred throughout the run of the show. One of the elements of the show, the Portrait Project, consisted of 71 portraits of Industry of the Ordinary, commissioned from 71 different artists in various media. Another piece, Everyone, was a projected, scrolling, crowd-sourced list attempting to name every professional artist in Chicago. [2] The show was well received, being accorded one of the spots on Newcity's Top Five Chicago Art Exhibitions of 2012. [12]
Installation art is an artistic genre of three-dimensional works that often are site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space. Generally, the term is applied to interior spaces, whereas exterior interventions are often called public art, land art or intervention art; however, the boundaries between these terms overlap.
Vito Acconci was an influential American performance, video and installation artist, whose diverse practice eventually included sculpture, architectural design, and landscape design. His foundational performance and video art was characterized by "existential unease," exhibitionism, discomfort, transgression and provocation, as well as wit and audacity, and often involved crossing boundaries such as public–private, consensual–nonconsensual, and real world–art world. His work is considered to have influenced artists including Laurie Anderson, Karen Finley, Bruce Nauman, and Tracey Emin, among others. Acconci was initially interested in radical poetry, but by the late 1960s, he began creating Situationist-influenced performances in the street or for small audiences that explored the body and public space. Two of his most famous pieces were Following Piece (1969), in which he selected random passersby on New York City streets and followed them for as long as he was able, and Seedbed (1972), in which he claimed that he masturbated while under a temporary floor at the Sonnabend Gallery, as visitors walked above and heard him speaking.
Allan Kaprow was an American painter, assemblagist and a pioneer in establishing the concepts of performance art. He helped to develop the "Environment" and "Happening" in the late 1950s and 1960s, as well as their theory. His Happenings — some 200 of them — evolved over the years. Eventually Kaprow shifted his practice into what he called "Activities", intimately scaled pieces for one or several players, devoted to the study of normal human activity in a way congruent to ordinary life. Fluxus, performance art, and installation art were, in turn, influenced by his work.
Deb Sokolow is a Chicago-based artist.
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Claes Oldenburg is an American sculptor, best known for his public art installations typically featuring large replicas of everyday objects. Another theme in his work is soft sculpture versions of everyday objects. Many of his works were made in collaboration with his wife, Coosje van Bruggen, who died in 2009; they had been married for 32 years. Oldenburg lives and works in New York
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Nick Cave is an American fabric sculptor, dancer, and performance artist. Cave's family was large in size and always supportive of his artistic interests. He claims his upbringing gave him an artistic attentiveness to found objects and assemblages. Cave started his artistic journey by manipulating fabrics from older sibling's hand me downs. After he graduated Hickman High School in 1977, he enrolled in the Kansas City Art Institute where he finished a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1982. He is best known for his Soundsuits – wearable fabric sculptures that are bright, whimsical, and other-worldly. He also trained as a dancer with Alvin Ailey. His later sculptures focused on color theory, mixed media and large scale installations. He currently resides in Chicago, Illinois and is director of the graduate fashion program at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He still continues to work on Soundsuits as well as works completed as a sculptor, dancer, and performance artist.
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Adelheid Mers is a visual artist, Associate Professor, and the Chair of the Department of Arts Administration and Policy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL. As a visual artist her practice involves: drawing; digital design; animation; and diagramming texts, events and organizations. Her research interests include: Art Based Research, New Media Policy, and (Visual) Discourse Analysis. Mers' overlapping areas of expertise as a visual artist and a professor of arts management come together in the organograms, or maps of institutions, that she creates. These visualizations, based on theory and research, are a particularly creative way for institutions to assess themselves.
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