SELF / PRESERVATION
Notations on Urbs in Horto
A temporary tent school in Columbus Park
Jim Duignan
I have been thinking of late... those obscured intentions of a natural life. I can only speculate that it was the
intent of landscape architect Jens Jensen, who realized his design for Columbus Park in 1920 to re-establish
the prairie which drew attention to a natural condition, rather than establishing a park with furnishings
primarily for human activity or our current idiosyncratic practice. Jensen’s finished product is a
perpetuating of a specific ecology and more likely, anticipated the resistance from the adults who would
capitalize on leisure. One Hundred and forty four acres of land was secured from the Archdiocese of
Chicago between Central and Austin just south of Adams Street on Chicago’s far west side. It remains a
majestic park today, a sweeping landscape that carves a deep, deliberate path through the west side of the
city, standing as a reminder to me of what lay still, undetermined. This park at one singular moment
became a focal point for the Stockyard Institute in Chicago and the Committee on Historical Landmark
Preservation with reasons separated by philosophy and our individual missions regarding preservation. I do
not choose to regard landscape here initially, as simply a developed natural space to exact potential
interactions and site activity with residents, but rather an efficient, exploratory outpost to reveal the safety
and equal aesthetic shift(ing) from an urban space around it’s periphery. The park was an opportunity of
unrestrictive physiological change and visible ecology (breathing / seeing), a reasonable means to gather as
we did on October 12, 2003 for Urbs in Horto and benefit from the adjustments to our collective physical
states by moving from across the street to talk and pose ideas about how to produce work within the park
and how the nature of working elsewhere places restrictions to the same production. Our expectations to
use the park wasn’t and isn’t as much a last resort of sorts, but an attempt to address the ever expanding
opportunities of the natural space and sometimes only feel that we were in fact, somewhere else.
The Stockyard Institute is an artist project and pedagogical initiative that moves towards community
collaboration through all forms of artistic practice, exploring projects that seek primarily, to accommodate
interpretations of community experience. Our work is not consistent with the qualities of the Illinois prairie
as a habitat, but to some extent, stakes a relationship with the daily influences from a far more inconsistent
ecosystem that although is within eye contact from Columbus Park, manages to collide with our efforts.
Urbs in Horto on one front was a sought after deferment to a quieter, more productive space. The park was
equipped to isolate us from the obvious sound levels, physical, unpredictable actions of residents, and the
general distractions that a current escalation in brutality on youth and their families manages to disrupt. A
brutality that places little regard towards the unsuspecting young people whose life, artistic pursuits and
education are anything but a seamless, uninterrupted action. The unsuspecting qualities these young people
face not only make few distinctions between what they participate in as a developing project in response to
a personal issue, but how that contribution must be seen and understood as a new experience that breaks
from models evident within their classroom life. It is not that their schools are not able to secure their
contributions as collaborators but schools operate along paths that not only places the writing, art, and
performance of the street as suspicious even within the chambers of art history, but discourages the lived
experiences of youth from bringing a more engaged and personal world inside. More importantly, the park
was and is a reminder of what the community represents in pieces and a chance to identify positive
movements towards some kind of response with reasonable invisibility. It was obviously a tactical
maneuver to talk somewhere else and examine the larger community that has been developed and
maintained primarily for adult activity that encourages the same behaviors that drive those patterns. It is
most important that as adults we reconcile when will the spaces in which we teach and deliberate about
human conditions take on greater attention.
Many of our projects or enterprises begin as dialogues and the idea of Columbus Park as an alternative
space for exchange appeared appropriate. Conversation and the showcasing of works within a natural
laboratory might encourage the youth to deliberate upon the meanings of exposing oneself to a
consciousness, particularly of place and the presence and usefulness of support by outsiders. One project
of note was the live, 7 hour radio broadcast though the park fed by portable generator and hand built dipole
antennae secured at the top of a tree. This ongoing exploration in radio has been a reliable, maybe
fundamental medium for sharing or deliberately about personal experience and transmitting the works of
others. It has opened up the potential for individuals and groups to come in contact with the youth
regularly positing a positive, indelible mark. The concerns that are being raised by some of the young
people I have come in contact with reveal commentary around patterns of behavior that surface naturally
which are reasonable, yet contribute to understanding a contrary future. There is much that is
undetermined as the challenges of lived situations and the youthful articulation of future, blueprint a
collapse that impedes forward progress.
The shifts in location or locating has been inextricably tied to our content and sustains with some
efficiency, an ease in exacting applications in response to questions around being versus feeling safe. These
youth negotiate a world from a vantage point of dense specificity with pressures from influential others
who make it clear that change has never been an inevitability to a stable life. Our conversations gravitate
around these questions and shape solutions that can function in recognizing the instability of their living
space that seems to poorly adjusts to change. I listen to these young people define a world which is them
self, making comparisons to that which they see, offering us moments to lean and reflect on the prospect
and genuine possibility of purposeful work. The Stockyard Institute’s projects and pedagogical pursuits
have been driven to respond to issues like the nature of mobility, safe passages, family, and a kind of brut
force that helps us identify issues that circulate around self / preservation. Contributions to an existence,
shaped through long, heart felt dialogues about context and the need to envision and walk towards a life
dreamed of. Our talks have operated within spaces that the youth who I have come to know well, refer to
as home, and the devices and public practices we employ resist making their lives more difficult. For I too
am distracted and have come to expect a kind of reliance on the street, an almost ease of acquiescing to
those unavoidable points of least resistance. A space I spent my early classroom life squirming in,
dreaming, and looking out onto Chicago streets, imagining it’s relevance brought indoors.
Outdoors can also be identified as a comparative, public sphere that must accompany the natural space in
which to locate an exiting from the probability of provocation. Standing on the streets, the young eyes in
front of mothers are scanning the sidewalks and alleyways, tuned in to a neighborhood’s score, a
neighborhood like many others which remain a fundamental consideration for everyone if freedom from
persecution is important. Considerations that must place a priority on the safety of some of our young
people in some of our communities. Unfortunately youth respond when they have no choice and the
decision of where their life is played out is not entirely out of their hands, but often just out of their reach. I
watched these young people sit in Columbus Park not assured of their potentials and often content out of
habit, still dreaming and complicated by patterns of learning that shuffle through early, formidable lives.
They are conflicted by adult mandated patterns, paths determined by general consensus and the
effervescent illusion of a better life. Their lives are portrayed forward and the time for us to involve them
in a reasonable set of determinants is not only within reach, but possibly beyond us. We don’t often drive
conversations with the young people about art or education specifically, which as our work unfolds or is
placed within venues for outside audiences, intentionally becomes defined by new contexts, current
politics, and comparisons of other youth or inter-generational practitioners within art worlds. I feel artists
as a public need to place educators on alert as deficiencies surrounding the limited choices young people
have in being introduced to a complete set of tools to interpret their experiences. This movement that
chooses to disregard the arts must be understood as not only accurate, but in general support. The kind of
support where learning occurs has become in my view a public health crisis. The same individuals sitting
on the grass are pleased by opportunities, long hours, and relish in the pleasures of some responsibility and
direction. They are elevated by the opportunities the outside audiences evoke and their spirit and
understanding of what is possible becomes a sudden, promising revelation. These potential visionaries who
view risk as deaf, stand in pathways waiting patiently for any reasonable gesture that might indicate some
attention. These youth are guided like many of us at that time in our lives, provisionally so, relying on
individual’s experience for answers as peers come forward, willing to afford them significant regard and
the temporary promise of assurances, extinguishing the feeling of loss that is irreducibly deficient. Here
still, we forge liberties, radical approaches to free up what determines teaching, content, or even
perseverance. Freedoms to speak, engage and acknowledge the source of ideas and to recognize the
urgency of an open space to enable change for the young lives speckled with embedded dispositions and
the challenges specific to having very little.
Pedagogy requires invention and young people’s world and their fundamental human needs pose no actual
threat to influence content within educational spaces whose plans are already in place, compromised by an
ever expanding incompleteness, only indicating what needs some attention. I am concerned by the many
youth I have engaged who make no distinction or even reconcile the vast inconsistencies of their lives and
the outcomes imbedded within their education which underscores the degree to which their classroom life
can provide them with a set of tools to answer primary questions of their immediate world. Columbus Park
is within our view, unable to be heard from the noise of the street, a potential oasis with the visible
remnants of an earlier, natural time, around the corner of a community wrought with brutality, surrounded
by architectural demarcations and immersed with the pathways that fix choices to immediate, instinctual
needs. I remember a former student of mine at eleven years of age, some eight years ago speaking softly to
me, writhing in his chair as if to prepare himself to inform me of something that was uncomfortable. His
eyes like many of his peers, veered from my face never indicating to me the difficulties in establishing eye
contact. He glanced around with some effort, his thoughts may have hovered with the promise of revealing
something that could sabotage the future of our collaborations. He appeared to me as the embodiment of
what looked uncertain. He was encumbered with a discouraging weight as I watched his eyes. It was his
youthful, inarticulate speech and awkwardness that raised more questions than we could ever answer,
exposing a distance between our experiences forged from two different worlds. His face young, emanating
only awareness and potential, the kind of face surrounding those seasoned eyes that assured me that our
talks would go on for some time. His simple impressions illuminated the disconnection between his child
likeness and the burdens and responsibility of adulthood. Fear was developed in his prime, educated by
sheer will and the need to sustain an almost daily regiment of self / preservation. He stated after some time
he was afraid of being shot in the back, accidentally. Support for what I determine as an authentic voice
has always had an irresistible kind of freedom on the street, a prerequisite only to some interaction,
remaining a viable respite to relevant communication. A communication although discouraged in most
schools as standard operating procedure, represents another set of challenges as questions from youth like
creativity gets checked at the door with reasons no one seems to be able to answer. Children are murdered
and their physical landscape intersects and claims a subjective sense of self-hood. This is outdoors, a
objective landscape of sorts, brutally subjective, activated and appropriately not accountable to either
school or self preservation. Comfort is located in brief encounters and intimate connections, a pathology
disproportionate to these young people’s descriptive lives.
As I stood outside the Stockyard Truck stop on south Halsted Street in Chicago in the summer of 1995
waiting for a couple of young guys I imagined what it might take to isolate their ideas. Also, what was in
store for me to provide the necessary means to realize their intentions without any conditions or questions
surrounding content. These statements are influenced by my memory, perceptions of a world and
remembering my youth, the run of the streets, the predators, and the dreams of what could be. Pre
occupations that followed me around, relying on judgments based on dreams and exercising caution based
on anything remotely aligned to self preservation. The Stockyard Institute has examined the community as
an underground, not so much a sanctuary from dispositions or deficiencies, but a mobile artist project in
electronic and visual arts, social activism and radical pedagogy. Our current efforts in radio and an
ongoing investigation in video and media secure through some effort, to treat our city and our collective
participation in it with youth, artists and community residents, as discursive, experimental, and
pedagogical. That young male in his chair doing the best he could to adjust to something he was
introduced to, started me forward without looking back. However, I can’t avoid looking back, tripping
over the illusions of meaningful artistic learning experiences and practice.
As I was finishing this paper, a shoot out occurred outside my window, gunfights and panic that mobilized
everyone as the students upstairs hit the floor. Neighborhood schools were letting out and the collision of
this outdoors which remains undeniably unsafe, presses these questions of what we are doing to prepare
young people in spaces to understand, reflect, exchange and adequately respond to the exposure of that
which contradicts promise. The young eyes will always scan the streets, urgently and with a kind of
completeness, witnessing a landscape that is impossible to imagine from outside and even more difficult it
seems to access from the same space. A space fixed not entirely by the infrastructure of some past
metropolis or predetermined landscape, but consumed by the internalization of learning to walk the street,
still bordered and families compartmentalized by rivalries with mobility and the residual access portioned
off. The youngest children have been taught to walk a different way. Bipedal development and warfare
assume the same ingredients to similar cumulative manifestations to self-hood, informing personal histories
and delivering testimonials to what suggests a challenge to our understanding of fixed, inherent, biological
functions.
Stockyard Institute maneuvers around the city and outlying areas and shapes public, exploratory work in a
host of spaces and with various individuals and groups that enable the collaborative development,
exchange, and dissemination of narratives, public works, and ideas. In 2003, artists Michael Piazza and
Jim Duignan hosted a day long event of multiple operations and activity within Columbus Park. The event
occurred on Columbus day. In 2004, Piazza and Duignan hosted the Austin Walking Tour in collusion with
the Version 4 Festival in Chicago. Contact Us www.stockyardinstitute.org