Cream Co. (Chicago) has been enlisted to arrest Hyde Park Art Center’s move from the Del Prado. In this pause—between the Center’s long history of success and its new life in a new setting—the administrative offices themselves have been suspended within the historic Ruth Horwich Gallery, providing a chance to witness the details of art’s administration and, with those offices reframed, to witness the art that lingers there, on the desks and the walls, in boxes and jars.The remainder of the gallery, refurbished to evoke the institutions of art at their most serene, has been committed to the artists who work for Cream Co. Their artworks (individually and collectively) interrogate the relation between use value and aesthetic value, clock time and natural time, the specific and the universal, epistemological limits and the longing to transcend them. In their juxtaposition the two spaces ask how art itself can administer—how it can organize, reorganize, and reinstitute—the temporal and spatial registers within which we experience the real, including real art.
- Bill Brown, Curator