small version Chicago Artist Group Portrait 5mb

EPILOGUE

"The most powerful human forces are found in the meeting of the face and the gaze. Only there do we exist for one another. In the gaze of the other, we become, and in our own gaze others become. It is there, too, that we can be destroyed. Being unseen is devastating, and so is not seeing." --Karl Oove Knausgaard, New Yorker, 2015

On June 20th, 2015 I organized a group portrait on the iconic, three-tier, front cascade of steps to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Billing it through email solicitations, social media, and press as an invite to any \u2018Chicago Artist,\u2019 the final decision of whether that label successfully applied was left up to the individual.

The notion to create this moment was personal and collective. Having recently accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Photography and Digital Media at the University of South Florida, Tampa I had recently come to obsess on all of the significant relationships and experiences I\u2019ve had in Chicago, a place where I became interested in art while working at a conceptual theatre in Hyde Park in 1999. Newly post-MFA in 2003, I began to experience many moments of doubt and precarity.

Twelve years later and about to leave the city, I can say for sure that whatever talent or work ethic I might have employed, the city MADE me. Chicago artists ambitions, thoughts, tweets, criticisms, ingenuity, writing, profundity, collectivity, pragmatism, and single-mindedness MADE me. I have belonged to many communities while in Chicago\u2013institutional or medium-based, communities based on attitude, humor, poverty, privilege, empathy, criticality, collectivity, in-communities, out-communities, moments of bodies and minds coming together that only lasted one night. Communities based on drunk musings and mutual desire. Some of the most transformative communities are unplanned, totally liquid, and may last a moment at best.

One of the most profound moments of the Chicago Artist Group Portrait was two weeks prior when talking to a former student who displays much talent and future promise. When I asked her if she planned to attend the portrait, she replied that she didn\u2019t feel like she was part of the Chicago artist community. I asked her to explain, but I immediately understood her point of view. These memberships are intensely subjective, impetuous, and momentary. For all of the goodwill a collective moment may create, her response was the perfect irritant to a tidy narrative, and charged the edges of the actual portrait as violent and revelatory.

Solidarity with a community, momentary or otherwise, can soften and embolden in a career that is at the end of the day still based on stretches of solitude and salt to create meaning. Perhaps with the collectivity of myriad networked communities, a sense of solitude is most important to keep in focus?

Still, having that many bodies together in 2015 feels RADICAL! Through proximity, feeling the sweat and heat of those past community members is beyond eroticism. There is undeniable goodwill here, but still, individual sitters generate heat yet cast shadows on each other. There is a front and a back. There is the loud shirt and the averted gaze. There is the nausea of claustrophobia, the social anxiety, the benign and unknowing dog. What to make of all of this?

History will tell us, or not. More likely, these community thresholds will be crossed by our minds and our hearts before our bodies catch up. Where our body ends up is a footnote to the real story.

--Jason Lazarus, August 2015