Naomi Klein would probably object, but no logo has a long, if not exactly anti-capitalist history in the Chicago area, which is filled with companies that brandish (or do not brandish as the case may be) their rather nondescript brand names: General Automation, Inc.; Accurate Products, Inc.; and proudly (or reticently) standing on the shores of the Chicago River, General Growth, which is, fittingly in these times of general recession, struggling to overcome a “mammoth bankruptcy.”
Art roving keeps turning up maps. Where do they lead? Why do artists want to make them? Where do they locate us as viewers? It all depends on the situation.
Buenos Aires Tour, 2003, mixed media (box, booklets, postcards, map, CD-ROM, stamps). Courtesy Bomb Magazine.
Peter Cardone, Chicago Transit Authority Bus and Rail Map, June 2006
2006. Installation (offset printed CTA Map, Adhesive). 68” x 86”
David Byrne’s project, Playing the Building, available for viewing, playing, and listening at New York’s renovated Battery Maritime Terminal, explores a number of questions, among them:
What is a musical instrument?
What does it mean to be able to “play” a musical instrument?
How do people interact around musical instruments?
What is the relationship between music and architecture?
David Byrne, Playing the Building, Battery Maritime Building, New York City, Summer 2008
Most of all, to me, the project does something odd. It starts out complex, an art piece that seems to pose as many lines of inquiry and questioning as the bundles of pneumatic tubes, wires, and coils tumbling out of the old pump organ at the center of the exhibition. You could write a dissertation about each one.
But then, the more I think about Byrne’s piece, the more simple it is. All that the project seems to really want to do is to ask “wouldn’t it be cool to be able to play a building?”
As Byrne puts it in a Pitchfork TV interview (see below), the point of the project is the pleasure of touching parts of the building one would never imagine being able to affect…and, to boot, touching them through sound.
