Checking in on Chi-Town

Ed Marszewski could very well be the king of Chicago's underground art scene. He's the founder of The Co-Prosperity Sphere, one of the largest alternative art spaces in Chicago, located in the south side neighborhood of Bridgeport. In addition to hosting regular exhibitions and occasional concerts, each year he puts on two weeklong festivals, Select Media in the fall and Version in the spring, showcasing experimental work from around the world (the theme of last year's Select Media festival was "Infoporn," and Version's theme was "Dark Matter.") Marzewski also runs Lumpen, a free local art publication, and his most recent project, the Chicago-centric but nationally distributed, Proximity magazine, connects this scene to the larger art community. Marzewski recently sat down with PAPERMAG to shed some light into the booming alternative art scene in Chicago.

How long has the space been around and who all is involved?

Well this space, the Co-Prosperity Sphere, has been around for over two years now. It was an abandoned building and had been for maybe 10 years. This whole space was full of junk. I started fixing it up, the apartments, the plumbing and the electrical. I scraped the ceilings for three weeks straight with a wire brush and some friends. Back then it was people who used to be at the Buddy space we ran in Wicker Park. Reedo, this guy Matt, and I moved down here, and we just worked on it. I also hired a bunch of people to do plumbing, electrical and some construction stuff.

You guys have been doing Select Media and Version Festival for seven years now, and it used to be at the Buddy Gallery?

Well Version Festival started at the Museum of Contemporary Art and a bunch of other venues including Buddy and Heaven. We always use multiple venues for those programs, but in recent years we've been using The Co-Prosperity Sphere space as our headquarters for most of the main exhibitions. It's just more convenient. And we don't have to rent other spaces. This place has been operating as a regular facility since April 2007.

And now you guys opened a new space in the area?

Yeah, it's a tiny storefront called Eastern Expansion on 31st Street, a public display area in a different part of the neighborhood. The great thing about this space is the display window. The neighborhood kids and the people in the community can look at art from the street in a neighborhood that never had any kind of visual art. So we use storefronts whenever we can get them to do installations. In 2004 we met these guys who own some huge factories down on 35th Street. So we took up like 100,000 square feet in these two different factories and started doing our festivals there. One festival had the theme "Bridgeport, Community of the Future." We actually rented out a bunch of storefronts on this block, opened a Quimby's Bookstore, a Myopic Bookstore and a video store. We called it "The Experimental Cultural Zone" as a way to see what impact the freaky, independent artist culture would have on the neighborhood.

And those were all meant to be temporary?

It was a one-month-long project. We had no idea we would actually be here at that time because we were still doing our thing in Wicker Park. So it's really ironic that we ended up being back in the Experimental Cultural Zone three or four years later.

(Above: Clockwise from top left) The installation of Version>07 at Co-Prosperity Sphere; Paper Rad Window Installation; Michael T Rea Opening; Ray Noland Installation

And Wicker Park isn't what it once was. There are a few spaces that have held on, but much of the art community has left.

There were a bunch of spaces up and down Milwaukee that closed. I was sick of being kicked out of places when rent went up double or triple. So we got this space as a way to understand what our cost would be and not worry whether we would be able to rent a facility to do something.

So The Co-Prosperity Sphere space is a very central part of the Chicago art community.

I don't know if we're a central part, but we want to show that there are many different opportunities to get involved in the arts/culture in Chicago. We have these open platforms for people to plug in and learn how we do things. Then they move on and do their own things, start their own publications, festivals or whatever. And we're really excited by that. We also like to encourage younger, emerging artists to work with established artists in some of our group shows, for the experience and as a chance to meet those working artists in the city. It's a networking and social function, but we're also really proud to showcase a lot of great work.

Last year at Version, I remember you guys brought in people from 1026 Gallery from Philadelphia…

And also Team Lump from North Carolina, some German photographers from Berlin, a Dutch group… Yeah, the Version Fest brings outside artists to meet people here. We encourage this global network beyond Chicago. There are people doing similar projects throughout the world, in collectives, starting art spaces and publications. There are multiple art worlds that have nothing to do with the official art world. The theme last year was called "Dark Matter," representing the majority of this kind of art practice going on around the planet, not recognized by art magazines, etc.

This is still very much a DIY space, so at what point does it become not DIY, but an institution? And is it important to make that distinction?

I don't really know. Honestly, things for me have changed since I've decided to buy a building. I think people's conception of what we're doing has changed. I've become the man or institutionalized in a way. Although we still have the same activities, we're doing it in a more interesting space, and everything is produced more professionally. But it's all DIY. We're all volunteer run; no one makes any money. We have a non-profit that merely pays for the cost of flying people over here or for materials to build stuff.

And Lumpen started before the space.

I've been doing it for 17 years with a bunch of kids from school [University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana] and people we met at Quimby's and Myopic. These spaces are where you meet people to do things. If you're around creative people that actually want to get shit done, you'll do it merely by being around each other. So Lumpen started that way. Then came some art events and parties. We covered what was happening in the music scene, literary arts, poetry, etc. Then we started supersphere.com for taping live music and short film/video. We had like 50 different zines as content partners. After that stopped, we began the Select Media Festival and the Version Festival around 2000/2001. But media led me to that. To me it's all distribution of ideas, whether it's a newspaper, space, or a web based/cable access show. You use all media to distribute ideas.

So tell me about Proximity.

Proximity magazine is an art/culture publication. It's different than Lumpen. It historicizes what's happening in Chicago. It also showcases artists that we feel do interesting work, and talks about issues that are not really covered in a lot of art magazines. We're trying to marry the commercial art world's institutional non-profit realm with the alternative spaces and the whole morass of people making art in various locations and formats. It puts everything on the same playing field.

The Co-Prosperity Sphere: 3219 S. Morgan St. Chicago, Illinois
www.lumpen.com
www.proximitymagazine.com