On our first evening a few of us explored the giant art works in Millenium park, including Anish Kapoor's giant stainless steel bean, which reflects the city sky line day and night (remember the large maroon trumpet 'Marysas' in the Turbine Hall in the Tate Modern?)
Then we were up nice and early to breakfast with the 'Narrative Discourse and Pedagagy" node from the University of Western Sydney. We had a lot to talk about together as Ken and Jon are presenting a session with Bronwyn Davies and Susanne Gannon on Saturday; Suzanne's work on 'the collective girl' is central to Ying Lin's EdD dissertation, Jane has various e-book writing projects in the pipeline with Bronwyn, and Bronwyn is our visiting Benjamin Meaker professor for March/April 2010 and now we know that application was successful we wanted to firm up plans about the work we are doing together then.
Bronwyn Davies and
Suzanne Gannon,
University of Western Sydney
The modern wing of the art Institute is just fabulous , overlooks the park and the lake and again reflects the city skyline from all its windows. I cannot really do justice to it with these photographs. You could easily spend a week here.
You might be able to make out Ying Lin here ..she is walking into the ground floor hall of the modern wing and I took this photograph from the gallery. The whole place is architecturally somewhat overwhelming. All the galleries are light airy spaces, but somehow not antiseptically or starkly white (unlike the new look Arnolfini in Bristol). There is a lot of white and a huge amount of light, but the vast expanses of warm wooden flooring lift the whole building away from the 'clinical'.
I found it a very beautiful building - it is clearly currently the pride of Chicago.
At the moment, as well as the regular exhibits there is an exhibition by Cy Twombly (some of which came to London recently). His images seem fragile but are haunting and...well...huge...his 'peonies' paintings have stayed with us all day, in the same way (although a very 21st century version) that Monet's lilies stay with you all day if you visit them in the Jeu de Paume in Paris.
I knew there would be a Joni Mitchell moment on this trip and sure enough it came as we left the museum and got into a 'big yellow taxi' to take us down to the river on our architecture tour.
There are lots of commercial tours going up and down the river and along the Lake Michigan shore line, but the advantage of going with the Chicago Architecture foundation is that the tour guides were passionately knowledgeable about the city, past and present. Too much to tell you in this blog, and way too many photographs to download.
Here's my current favourite , wherein the art deco wealth of pre-depression Chicago is reflected in the shimmering modernist mirrored, curved glass walls on the opposite shore. Apparently there is a city ordinance in Chicago decreeing that anybody putting up buildings for commercial purposes in the central area is also obliged to spend 5% 0f the total costs on public art (hence the huge amounts of public art dotted all over the city...not just in parks and museums, but on street corners, roundabouts and bridges...) Is it too late to get this law passed retrospectively for the Bristol floating harbour developments we asked ourselves?
Well we were all really tired by this time, but we kept going...and after a short sojourn back at the Travel Lodge (some of us might even have taken little nap- no names no pack drills) we met Tami Spry from St Cloud State University for supper at Gioco's (highly recommended) and to discuss our plenary in some detail. ( Tami will be in the UK for three months in 'the fall' this year, so look out on the CENTraL for the work we are planning, bringing together performative and narrative inquiry methods. Tami will be facilitating a day's workshop on perfromative /writing and also perfroming some of her work, followed by discussion ).
Tami is co-chairing the plenary with me and will be chairing the question and answer session at the end. She is great to be working with on this as she comes from a performance studies background and instantly grasped the concept of four papers that had developed seperately but would, in effect, segue into each other without pause until the end; were interconnecting in terms of ideas and practices and would be performed by a variety of us, most of whom were completely different people from the original 'authors'.
Some of us were beginning to flag at this point
and although we managed a creme brulee between six,
we decided that the best plan was to get some sleep...
to get to Urbana early enough the following day, register and then go and check out the plenary space...which is fairly large...to see how this was all going to work.
At least some of us did. There were a few total reprobates who then whizzed off to Rosa's Lounge to listen to the blues...but I couldn't possibly tell you who they were or how come there seems to be a record of these events downloaded onto my camera. It was wonderful blues actually - soulful and funky. There was an amazing drummer whose photograph sadly did not come out, (who seemed to be called Poopy Sticks, although it is hard to believe we heard that right), who according to Tami 'seriously kicked ass' (she wins this discussion on heritage alone, since her dad had played drums with Count Basie, amongst others)
Jane Speedy, early hours, May 20th, Chicago Illinois.
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