Bad at Sports Episode 94: Jana Gunstheimer/ Chicago Politics - a podcast by Bad at Sports
from 2007-06-17T12:30
This Week: Guest interviewer Lisa Dorin talks to German artist Jana
Gunstheimer (see the blurb shamelessly lifted from the AIC website, below).
ALSO we get two different perspectives on the fight over the Public Art Program
and how they handle the selection and approval process. Kathryn talks to Olga
Stefan Executive Director of the Chicago Artists' Coalition at Monday's protest
rally, and
talks to Gregory Knight, Deputy Commissioner/ Visual Arts of the Chicago
Department of Cultural Affairs after the vote was in. This conflict has been
actively discussed on our blog, see what the hoopla is about!
Richard spent a lot of time chuckling to himself about the music cues in
this weeks show.
German artist Jana Gunstheimer combines her academic training in ethnology
with a refined figurative drawing practice to observe and comment on aspects of
her own culture. Gunstheimer responds to the transformations she sees taking
place in contemporary German society including postindustrial desolation,
drastic unemployment, and rising levels of aggression among people of her
generation by way of a semi-fictional organization she calls Nova Porta.
Complete with a logo, Web site, and an actual membership, the organization
offers People without Social Function a semblance of structure through group
cohesion and rigid hierarchy.
Adopting impenetrable rituals, tireless evaluation procedures, and managed
leisure, the organization's stated goal is risk management and its activities
are driven, if not wholly fabricated, by the artist. Under the conceptual
framework of Nova Porta, Gunstheimer effectively parodies hierarchical
structures, bureaucracy, and, most importantly, society's need to define oneâ??s
worth in terms of work.
Focus: Jana
Gunstheimer is the artist's first solo museum exhibition in the
In one all-encompassing installation, the exhibition features exquisitely
rendered, photo-based grisaille watercolors on wood panel, a large-scale paper
cutout, a site-specific wall drawing, and a newspaper intervention work that
all reference the initiatives of Nova Porta, adapted to the specific context of
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