Dan Peterman at the MCA

Dan Peterman's well-known investigations of recycling systems and material waste were given their just due in "Plastic Economies," the first major U.S. survey of this Chicago-based artist. Employing a practice that is highly localized to address environmental issues of global magnitude, Peterman has crafted a unique vision and esthetic centered on alternative processes of use and reuse. Included here were selected works from the late 1980s to the present, as well as four new installations created specifically for this exhibition.

Peterman's early interest in readymades, debris and indigenous plant life was represented by several small objects, many displayed as artifacts from or accessories to larger projects. Woodlawn Blend (1988) is a stack of steel cans containing roasted chicory root harvested from a local weed found close to the artist's studio, housed (until 2001, when it was destroyed by fire) within a recycling center near Woodlawn, one of the city's poorest communities. Discarded shopping carts refashioned into chairs and a pasta cutter made from a lowly bottle cap impart the kind of humor one sometimes finds in Tom Friedman's work; more significantly, they share affinities with the socially committed practices of Rirkrit Tiravanija and Krzysztof Wodiczko. The pasta cutter was also an element in the installation Recent Recipes (2004), a makeshift cottage industry, in which packaged foods (ACNR apple filling, RU Fondant icing) and pasta cut from the bottle cap were arranged neatly on tables and stacked on shelves, alongside white jackets and plastic slippers commonly worn by food industry workers.

Here, and in Excerpts from the Universal Lab (good humor), 2004, Peterman presented alternative economic models that critique capitalist consumerism while paying homage to grassroots production. In Universal Lab, a modified ice-cream truck sat at the center of a sprawling accumulation of found objects and used lab equipment in this remake of a now-defunct research facility created in the 1960s by the University of Chicago to repurpose outmoded scientific materials.

In Peterman's work, the environmental and economic intersect, making visible the ethics of social responsibility. These issues were most evident in Ground Cover (1995), a floor made from reprocessed post-consumer plastics, and Villa Deponie (2002), a shelter constructed from plywood covered with recycled closed-cell foam; in both, the artist transformed domestic waste into objects for collective use. Altered steel waste receptacles formed the structural foundation of Standard Kiosk (Chicago), 2004, three temporary publicly sited huts (one a bike station on the MCA's front plaza, and two community centers for culture and health in the neighborhood of Humboldt Park).

Despite the interactive nature of the Kiosk project and the urgency of the issues addressed, there was something staid about this exhibition as a whole. Opportunities for public dialogue about it were not provided on site, and the open criticality so important to Peterman's interventionist strategy seemed somewhat subsumed by the museum's institutional authority. Central, however, was the ambiguous space Peterman's work occupies, one that allows for political provocation even in its most subtle form.

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