Rachel Mason's Chicago Opera

For Ten by Ten Magazine

Christopher Johnson

Against the urban stink and grind of downtown Chicago, Los Angeles sculptor Rachel Mason performed Chicago Opera on four dates in July. Owing to the artist's investigative interest in the at once binding and dynamic parameters of time and physical location, the piece's five operatic songs were stripped from a more traditional exhibition space and each performed outdoors at a separate landmark. The Yale-bound Mason studied opera and trained extensively prior to the performance. By omitting all constituents of an operatic performance except for the singer and the song, sh e afforded a lucid study of concept. It's the s ort of work that stands on the shoulders of that done by "action sculptor" Roman Signer--a nd the confusions and distractions inherent in such a piece took little away from the experiment.

Mason used obscure facts of Chicago history to link locations to one another: Daley Plaza, the Florsheim Building, the Chicago River at the LaSalle Street Bridge, Cook County Courthouse on Hubbard Street, the Moody Bible Institute, and Oprah's Harpo Studios. The most unlikely thread between these seemingly unconnected Chicago landmarks is none other than John Wayne Gacy, wh ose personal history is wove n into several songs. He worked at Nunn Bush Shoe Company, which is owned by Weyco, the firm that recently bought Florsheim. He dumped bodies into the Des Plaines River, which is fed by the Chicago River. And he was convicted and sentenced in the Cook County Courthouse (though at its 26th and California location). By the e nd of the performance, the songs managed to carve unexpected, looping paths between the landmarks and across Chicago history.

Conceptually, the piece detected the human inclination to attach a collective memory or history t o corpuscular things. This is of particular interest in a big city, whose physicality is in constant regenerative flux, and it lent a sort of urgency to the event. Interruptions from the overhead El and the exhaust of traffic crashed and pulled eerily at the piece, only becoming annoying when the swelling of the crowd made finding a cab to the next landmark more difficult. This led to confusion and delays, and between song interludes dragged on. Mason's submission to the whims of the city was a gamble, yet it largely paid off. And unsuspecting passersby on the street got more than they bargained for in the course of their busy Chicago afternoon: a taste of public art practi ce for the price of a song.