Chicago Opera - July 19, 20, 26, 27, 2002

by Rosanna Albertini

The little figurine seems to be glued on the sidewalk, each day, a in front of a different building as if a pedestal was supporting her voice that trills in the air. Verticality, expansion spread from a small person in black almost invisible, inaudible, among the towers of concrete. Chicago Opera does not need a traditional theater, it's a bird out of the cage. The single voice - a stroke of human presence surrounded by a dense, strong concert of city noise- is musical storytelling. When it takes place, a sequence of stories stops for a while right there where everybody rushes, crosses, the eyes lost in the mental space pointed to a goal or dropped toward the ground. There is a   striking contrast between the trains on the elevated railway, cars and pedestrians, and the artist who does not move, but sings and smiles, apparently unassailable. Rather than time, the space becomes still around her. That's why this is a sculpture, a sculpture made out of four distinct volumes of space, for a certain time.

            Everyone can say it is impermanent so it's a performance and so on. This is indeed a twenty three years old artist, and seeing her at work one has the impression that most of the hard goals that so many artists had pursued during the whole past century: to release art from purity of forms, from aesthetic constraints, and the loneliness of objects for museums or galleries looking like empty churches, are a mere background from which she moves on.

            Even Donald Judd was still divided between the dynamic of his thoughts and the need to generate sculptures whose forms and colors are so perfectly unique that nature could be envious. Rachel Mason's work, probably unwillingly, seems to make real some of his wishes about what art could be:

" A person is not a model of rationality, or even of irrationality, but lives, which is a very different matter. ...Almost none live by one of the grand systems, only by their fossil fragments, neither is art at the present based on a grand system. The unity in art is the same kind of natural unity and is made similarly in the realization that knowledge is very uncertain and fragmentary. But as one lives with some assertion, art can be made with a corresponding assertion and confidence. ... Art is made as one lives. It must be as decisive as acts in life, hopefully more so, and is made despite the same acknowledged ignorance. ... It is special in its development and not in its essential nature.

            Chicago Opera is nothing but development; the waves of sounds are highly different from inarticulate volumes of noise, they have been musically composed, adapted to the words. Then the artists has trained herself to sing like a real opera singer. In the end the artist and her music look and sound like a real opera: the ingredients, in fact, have been accurately prepared. The technical nature of the opera, nevertheless, only corresponds to Rachel Mason's physical constitution, they are both natural units. "Art is made as one lives."   The art starts as the unmistakable presence of the artist appears in places that make her irrelevant to the transient passersby.

              The stories remain unheard,   they tell about people who filled with life, or death -death in the case of John Wayne Gacy, a killer who threw four of the thirty three young man he had murdered into the water of the Des Plains river because he ran out of room and he was experiencing back pains from digging the other graves-    the special places where the art has exposed the artist to an act of offer that is not in the place where it ought to be for the awful railways of the common sense. She can be mistaken for a beggar. The sidewalk is where she belongs, along with the homeless and the absent minded. She smiles. Such a thick, isolating ignorance around her.   Otherwise, how not to see, as the pieces develop in the air of the city, that Chicago itself had made the opera, and Rachel Mason just picked it up, and made it tangible. "Oh Chicago, you make me shiver." says the Opera. A left over zest of   Fluxus spirit, John Cage's ghost playing silence? Or maybe the same kind of smart, playful silliness that had sparkled in the Joan Jonas' performances . Hopefully, more so.

Rosanna Albertini

Los Angeles, September 5, 2002

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