About
Objectified: Methods in Environmental Humanities is an exhibition featuring selections from the Joel Snyder Materials Collection and beyond. The materials and objects included in the exhibition represent a reckoning with some of the planet’s most pressing concerns, from climate change to biodiversity loss, through humanistic inquiry.
Staged in the CWAC Exhibitions space on the 2nd floor of the Cochrane-Woods Art Center during Winter Quarter 2024 in collaboration with Dr. Jessica Landau and students in the Methods in Environmental Humanities seminar offered by the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization (CEGU), the exhibition foregrounds an interdisciplinary lens through which the contributors approach the environmental humanities. Students interrogate how humanistic disciplines such as art history, Indigenous studies, animal studies, comparative literature, and history serve as emerging methods through which we might understand the environment. Collectively, the student curators contemplate our everyday relationships with the built environment, natural resources, and stolen land through humanistic lines of inquiry.
To demonstrate how an interpretation can change depending on the methodological approach used or theoretical lens applied to an object, student curators were asked to produce two distinct labels using at least two different methodologies. To read both labels, as well as student explanations of their methodological approaches, click on an image from the exhibition.
Objectified: Methods in Environmental Humanities is co-curated by Dr. Jessica Landau and student curators from her Winter 2024 Methods in the Environmental Humanities seminar: Yufei Chen (AB’26, Comparative Literature), Jess Senger (AB’24, Environmental Science [major] & Environmental and Urban Studies [minor]), Damary Alvarez (AB’25, Global Studies & Human Rights), Jack McDonald (AB’25, Public Policy & Environmental Science), Mariana Reed (AB’26, Environment, Geography and Urbanization [major] & Education [minor]), Justin Daab (Fellow, Leadership & Society Initiative), and Owen Castle (AB’25, Math & Environmental and Urban Studies).
About
Objectified: Methods in Environmental Humanities is an exhibition featuring selections from the Joel Snyder Materials Collection and beyond. The materials and objects included in the exhibition represent a reckoning with some of the planet’s most pressing concerns, from climate change to biodiversity loss, through humanistic inquiry.
Staged in the CWAC Exhibitions space on the 2nd floor of the Cochrane-Woods Art Center during Winter Quarter 2024 in collaboration with Dr. Jessica Landau and students in the Methods in Environmental Humanities seminar offered by the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization (CEGU), the exhibition foregrounds an interdisciplinary lens through which the contributors approach the environmental humanities. Students interrogate how humanistic disciplines such as art history, Indigenous studies, animal studies, comparative literature, and history serve as emerging methods through which we might understand the environment. Collectively, the student curators contemplate our everyday relationships with the built environment, natural resources, and stolen land through humanistic lines of inquiry.
To demonstrate how an interpretation can change depending on the methodological approach used or theoretical lens applied to an object, student curators were asked to produce two distinct labels using at least two different methodologies. To read both labels, as well as student explanations of their methodological approaches, click on an image from the exhibition.
Objectified: Methods in Environmental Humanities is co-curated by Dr. Jessica Landau and student curators from her Winter 2024 Methods in the Environmental Humanities seminar: Yufei Chen (AB’26, Comparative Literature), Jess Senger (AB’24, Environmental Science [major] & Environmental and Urban Studies [minor]), Damary Alvarez (AB’25, Global Studies & Human Rights), Jack McDonald (AB’25, Public Policy & Environmental Science), Mariana Reed (AB’26, Environment, Geography and Urbanization [major] & Education [minor]), Justin Daab (Fellow, Leadership & Society Initiative), and Owen Castle (AB’25, Math & Environmental and Urban Studies).
Curator: Justin Daab (Fellow, Leadership & Society Initiative)
Label One
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Wolf Vostell
German artist, 1932-1998
Concrete Traffic – Cadillac Einbetoniert, 1970
Screenprint on Schoeller-Hammer cardboard after photo by
David Katzive, ed. 37/100
71.4 x 50.6 cm
Joel Snyder Materials Collection, 2021.7
—
Wolf Vostell was a member of the Fluxus art movement, which can be characterized as seeking to disrupt the urban environment through spontaneous chanced-upon experiences they referred to as “happenings.” Vostell stated an overall goal of his work to have the viewer “…confronted with something ordinary that is not quite right. Something disturbs his understanding of reality.”
Commissioned as a “happening” by Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art in January 1970, Wolf Vostell’s Concrete Traffic embedded a 1957 Cadillac in an angular, multi-ton concrete shroud, on site, as curious onlookers watched. In the end, the auto’s once sweeping fins, delicately curved steel panels and broad expanses of transparent glass were replaced by crudely fashioned, impenetrable geometry—the lowest fascia of the tires and hubcaps remaining the only outwardly visible of the Cadillac’s original purpose.
Its home, alongside conventionally parked cars in the MCA Plaza in 1970 and in its current home in the University of Chicago parking structure at 5501 S. Ellis Avenue, further enforces and commensurately violates viewer expectations. It is as if the road, once dominated by the automobile, has turned the tables and upended the balance of power, rendering a cultural icon of freedom, mid-century progress, and power virtually immovable.
Label Two
—
Wolf Vostell
German artist, 1932-1998
Concrete Traffic – Cadillac Einbetoniert, 1970
Screenprint on Schoeller-Hammer cardboard after photo by
David Katzive, ed. 37/100
71.4 x 50.6 cm
Joel Snyder Materials Collection, 2021.7
—
Commissioned as a Fluxus Art Movement “happening” by Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Wolf Vostell’s Concrete Traffic is a study in the arresting power of opposing forces. On January 16, 1970, a crowd gathered at a parking lot on the corner of Ontario and St. Clair to witness museum staff, using detailed instructions from Vostell, embed a 1957 Cadillac DeVille in an angular, multi-ton concrete shroud. As Vostell would acknowledge, the Fluxus Movement’s goal was to disrupt the urban environment through spontaneous chanced-upon experiences. Traffic manages to call into question both the ephemerality of this chance encounter and the symbols of urbanism itself.
Using the most common material of post-war urban renewal, raw unpolished concrete, Vostell’s Traffic instantly rendered that era’s most cherished instrument of mobility and freedom irretrievably immobile and the parking lot, an urban planning response to facilitate frequency of travel to commercial areas, transformed to an unmarked mausoleic resting place.
Ultimately, Vostell’s Concrete Traffic transforms a happened-upon moment where one is “…confronted with something ordinary that is not quite right. Something disturbs his understanding of reality.” into a question on the ethics of human progress that has persisted for more than five decades.
Common Sources
Unpacking Concrete Traffic, MCA Chicago, Fluxus, artsy.net
VOSTELL CONCRETE 1969–1973, University of Chicago Smart Museum 2017
CAR CULTURE: WOLF VOSTELL’S CONCRETE TRAFFIC, By Christine Mehring, ArtForum
Concrete Happenings, publicart.uchicago.edu
Environmental issues: writing a more-than-human urban geography, Bruce Braun, Progress in Human Geography 2005 29:5, 635-650
Urban morphology and traffic congestion: Longitudinal evidence from US cities, Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, Volume 89, 2021
‘Take a Cadillac, Add Cement’: Forgotten Sculpture Gets Deserving Reboot, Jason Foumberg, Chicago Magazine, September 28, 2016
Blacktop history: The case for preserving parking lots, David Rotenstein, National Council on Public History, June 2014