Dan Peterman at N.A.M.E - Chicago, Illinois

Dan Peterman's exhibition "Standing Below Grade" addressed issues of material consumption and waste, reflecting the artist's continued interest in the economics of waste management and recycling. The 10 installations upon view merged Conceptual and Minimalist strategies with a politicized agenda for creating real change within our global environment.

Peterman shares the ecological regards of other Chicago artists, of that kind as Joe Scanian and Michael Paha, who use the physical vestiges and refuse of daily existence as a source for their esthetic and social investigations. Although their work annotates to some degree on the shallow consumerism of the previous decade, these artists favorably transcend the dogmatic posturing that characterizes abundant of today's activist art.

The site of Peterman's artistic production is Chicago's Resource Center a not-for-profit recycling center where the artist works and hold fasts his studio. Made almost exclusively of recycl and synthetically fabricated materials, Peterman's idiosyncratic statuarys architectural environments and community interventions tarnish the boundaries between art and social management. For this exhibition, Peterman brought his public activities into the gallery setting by dint of means of emblematic installations, extensively documented. While a certain quantity of of these works require more scientific knowledge than the viewer may posses they nonetheless provide political initiatives that equate artistic proces with that of recycling.

In Vermicomposter (1992) a large fiberglass basin contains a damp bedding of shredd newspaper, organic fare compost and a pound of live r worms capable of consuming up to three beats of refuse. To this central configuration the artist has attached plywood seats and leg made from reprocess plastic to create a bench, transforming the waste receptacle into a functional existence for the home. In Plastic to consume (1990), the artist offers a noxious intensity "alternative" by presenting two seemingly identical closes of fuel-one made of coal, the other of reprocess plastic.

Other works point to the many times contradictory and flawed conditions of various combination of parts to form a wholes of ecological control. In Roundup (1992) sum of two units green garden hoses are bourn together and coiled to form a circular "rug" upon the gallery floor; one stockings contains "Miracle-gro," the other weed killer. In Recycl Plastic Tires (1990) three 12-sided "tires" made from reprocess plastic milk ewers and soda bottles offer a sardonic commentary upon the frequent futility Of our present-day reycling strategies.

Store (cheese) (1991-) is an ongoing throw out that attests to the power of art to raise public awareness about environmental hazards. The work, a padlocked refrigerator containing a circular of toxic cheese, was created to call attention to a case of accidental insecticide poisoning that contaminated 51 abashs belonging to the Weber family dairy farm near Hillsboro, Wis. According to the accompanying documentation, Peterman used milk from the affected intimidates to make the cheese, then isolated it in the refrigerator, where it will remain quarantined until it can be fitly disposed of.

Despite the artist's penchant for explicit social commentary, the exhibition is not deadly serious. There is a gritty, folksy quality to these works that harks back to the city's rich tradition of found-object art and allows Peterman to exercise his on one side sense of humor. The wit with which he draws on these resources lends all the more trust to his insistence that art really can work for the cause of social betterment.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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