Author: Noah Fields

What’s Your Logo, Virgil Abloh?

Published by Noah Fields

Virgil Abloh, street-forward renegade of high fashion and luxury art, speaks the trickster tongue of logos. Logos are his language, the figures of speech invoked in the title of his survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. If we are to understand logos as figures of speech, then we must trace their messaging on our bodies. We are subjected to logos more or less 24/7, but are we the subject of logos? Do logos express our subjectivity? Is there space for authenticity within logo culture? Abloh remixes and samples revered logos from Nike Air to Vuitton, unmaking in order to expose their conceptual significations and limitations, especially in relation to race.  “I want to read an existential essay on logo and art,” Abloh declared at the press preview Q & A.  +++ Logos ( λόγος) has a long history in philosophy and theory of rhetoric. In a discussion of speech versus writing, Plato contrasted logos, or what is said, with lexis (λέξις), or how it is being said, creating a binary of content and …

Swarm To This Chicago Art Residency’s First Public Showcase

Published by Noah Fields

Swarm Artist Residency is not just a creative community—it is an apiary. Like a bee farm, Swarm pollinates individual artist practices and cultivates a one-of-a-kind community. Swarm started in 2015 with the intention of creating a safe, inclusive communal space to nurture underrepresented artists’ practices. Each July, Chicago artists and healing practitioners get out of the city to gather on a farm out of state for a low-cost or fully-sponsored residency. Artists nourish in each other’s co-presence in community workshops, shared meals, and healing circles. Away from the city’s noise, new ideas buzz.   Four years into the experiment, Swarm is putting on its first public exhibition in the city. Its showcase of current and former artists in residence is timed for the summer solstice: Friday, June 21, 7:30-10:30pm, at Logan Square’s FDC Studios. In addition to giving the public a chance to engage with Swarm’s art and communal energy away from the retreat space, the exhibition fundraiser will also help cover 2019 residency costs for accepted artists. I talked to two of Swarm’s Queen …

Image: Installation shot of Gregg Bordowitz: I Wanna Be Well, 2019. © Gregg Bordowitz. Image courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Analog Love: Synching Up In the Time of Queerness

Published by Noah Fields

“Queer life and love in the 1980s was cruelly characterized by the knowledge that time was running out.” —Joshua Chambers Letson, After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life What if queerness is not out of time? What if it is in fact deeply entangled in time, intimate with its intricate loops, its swells, its passing lulls? Consider the clock to be a geography of relation. To declare queer not out of time but in fact enmeshed with time is to dance towards becoming synchronous against the odds. Attuning across long distances, linking despite (or perhaps because of) grief. To fall in time is to fall into a love unrequited: time cannot love you back, cannot nurse your wounds, cannot even promise you company. Time is out to kill, racing against us. Even yet—we rush to its side, seeking its alliance at a lover’s deathbed or amidst the off-hours communion of the dance floor. + Lately I’ve been dancing with archives. Everything touches up with everything: I am experiencing what seems a surreal …