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the archives
Zachary Cahill
USSA 2012: The Orphanage Project
September 9-October 15th, 2011
Opening reception: Friday, September 9th, 6-9pm
Artist talk: Thursday, October 6th, 7pm
Much of contemporary art is motivated by the relational – a position-cum-buzz-word that has grown to frame nearly every studio and post-studio practice. From performance to installation to sculpture to craft, art is reaching its hand out to the viewer in an attempt to create relationships, at once an attempt at articulating a use-value while making a bid for social relevancy. Peppering these practices is much debate about labor and art, with practices designed to both visualize labor or to celebrate a kind of anti-capitalist leisure. In either case, art is struggling to find its place with-in the demands of a capitalist market, ostensibly cut-off from the promise of other origins via the institutions of the market and the museum.
Zachary Cahill proffers a solution to use-value by his creation of an Orphanage here in Chicago. The Orphanage Project, out of which Cahill’s fall SOLO exhibition arises, looks to examine the position of the ultimate “other” – the mythic Orphan, torn from any root or history and presumably set-free to self-author. Cahill’s Orphans are models, “modes of being” that The Orphanage Project wishes to make relatable through its study in human capital and the condition that awaits all. Cahill’s attempt – whether a failure or temporarily on-hold – is documented through a series of sketches and a few published conversations. For threewalls, Cahill reproduces a few elements of this project, granting access to Cahill’s long-term study.
Circumnavigating the relational through both the formation of the Orphanage and the work done therein, Cahill challenges the idea of relatedness or lack-there-of through the perhaps the ideal red herring: the creation of an institution that both houses potential and has the potential to house everything and all.
Zachary Cahill is an interdisciplinary artist whose work has been exhibited at the Center for Art and Media Technology in Karlsruhe, Germany (ZKM); Aarhus Kunstbygning in Aarhus, Denmark; DeVos Museum of Art, Marquette, MI; and Gallery 400, Chicago,IL, amongst other. His writings have appeared in the Journal of Visual Culture, the journal RETHINKING MARXISM, Proximity Magazine, and Artforum.com. Currently he is a Lecturer in the Department of Visual Arts & serves as the Open Practice Committee coordinator at the University of Chicago.
To download the pdf of the essay from the April 2011 edition of the journal RETHINKING MARXISM, please click here: The Condition of the Orphan: A Dialogue
For more information please click on the following link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yt-ybUuZjLE&feature=related
To view a PDF of Collected Notes and Sketches and listen to the accompanying soundtrack, please play the video and click the link below:
Click here to view a PDF of Joan Copjec's essay, The Art of the Orphan
Click on the following link to hear Cahill discuss his work with Philip von Zweck on Bad at Sports:
