Script of We All Are Streeter (2006)

WE ALL ARE STREETER

A sketch in one act

Pablo Helguera

Loving Chicago is like loving a woman with a broken nose.
Nelson Algren

Characters:

Pablo Helguera, a lecturer
Encarnacion Teruel, the moderator
Scott Vehill, art critic from Peoria
Sharon Stein, a Peoria artist and arts administrator

We All are Streeter was first performed at the Hyde Park Art Center on April 2006, in celebration of the opening of the new facilities of this art center. The program was presented as a real panel discussion to the public.

Time: Chicago, Illinois, April 2006
(all panelists and lecturer arrive. Pablo will lecture from a podium, opposite from the panel table, and will be showing slides throughout. The panelists sit at a table. They will not acknowledge Pablo’s presence nor will they look at him throughout the piece)

Encarnación Teruel
Ladies and Gentlemen: Thank you for coming to this discussion, presented in celebration of the Hyde Park Art Center’s reopening. My name is Encarnacion Teruel and I am Director of Performing Arts at the Illinois Arts Council.

Pablo Helguera
Good evening, and thank you for coming to this program this evening. We will speak tonight about an obscure chapter about Chicago’s history that hopefully will shed some light about the link between the  geography of a place and the idiosyncrasies it inspires.

Encarnacion
For this particular event, and in order to illuminate the Chicago audience a bit on the arts in Illinois, we thought we would present a debate around the subject: “How Do You Define the Spirit of Peorian art?”

Pablo Helguera
Oprah said once: “When in 1983 I set foot in this city, and just walking down the street, it was like roots, like the motherland. I knew I belonged here.”

Encarnacion
Peoria is home to great and diverse creativity. Our objective here in this panel is to talk about their common links and what defines Peorian art.

Pablo Helguera
But I am not here to speak about Oprah. I am here to speak to you about a person who is almost forgotten in the city’s history, and yet, whose life would very much define Chicago’s urban landscape. He has been ridiculed and criticized as a plain eccentric, but he should be regarded as a visionary.

The history of Chicago changed forever on an unusually stormy day on July 10, 1886. An old boat crashed against the sandbar of the shores of Lake Michigan 450 feet from Superior Street. Little did people know that this incident would define the future of the city.

The man in charge of this boat was Captain George Wellington Streeter, born in Flint, Michigan, in 1837. Captain Streeter was quite an adventurer. He made the Great Lakes his working environment. He worked as a logger and trapper in Canada, as Ice-cutter in Saginaw Bay, and a iron and copper miner. He joined the civil war on the side of the Union Army, and was later discharged as a captain. When he retired from the army, his wife Minnie convinced him to start a circus, and he did so. However, Streeter was not such an accomplished showman, and his enterprise collapsed into bankruptcy in two years. His wife left him with all the remaining money, and Streeter had to start all over again. He remarried with Maria Mulholland. We don’t know how, but the endless enterprising Streeter managed eventually to buy and repair an old boat, which he named the Reutan, and which we presume it was used for logging and transportation.

After his accidental landing in Chicago’s shore, Captain Streeter didn’t have many options. He decided to stay there, however, since it was impossible to move the boat and he didn’t have any money to pay rent.

Streeter landed in Chicago at a momentous time of the city’s reconstruction after the great Chicago fire. He realized that building developers we looking for a place to dump debris, and he convinced them to do this near his boat for a fee.

In the meantime, the New York millionaire that owned the land where Streeter had landed started trying to get rid of him.  His name was Kellogg Fairbank. Fairbank had at the beginning left Streeter stay where he was, as he seemed a harmless presence, but then things started getting more complicated.

Encarnacion
With me is Sharon Stein, a Peoria artist who lives and works in Peoria. She is the director of We Are Peoria, an organization that promotes the arts in Peoria. We have also invited the international art critic Scott Vehill, also from Peoria, who is the editor of New Art Peoria. Scott has devoted many years to the study of artistic psychology and behavior, and who will hopefully shed some light on the idiosyncrasy of Peorian artists. Scott has contributed to Artforum and is very active in the curatorial circles in the U.S. and abroad.

Perhaps we can start by asking you Sharon about the work of your organization and what kinds of programs you do.

Sharon
Thanks Encarnacion. I am very happy to be here. We Are Peoria is a not-for profit organization that was founded in 1977, with the purpose to set the record straight regarding Peorian art and give it the importance it deserves. It supports Peorian artists and Peorian art institutions. We seek to prove that art made in Peoria is equal or superior to any art made in the US today.

Scott ( smiling, to Sharon)
You know I am planning to contest that statement.

Sharon
Oh, I bet you will…

Encarnacion
Well, we will discuss that later. So, how is Peorian art better? I mean, how do you quantify this?

Sharon
Well, it’s very simple. Peorian artists are not dominated by the pressures of the market like in Chicago, nor are they prone to careerism and fashion like Chicago artists, and they also are not overshadowed by politics or rivalries like in Chicago.  We focus on the work, not on the talk, or the glamour. We at Go Peoria seek to prove that the art of Peoria is actually the most balanced, original, and independent, at the level or greater to the art of any big city.

Encarnacion
What kind of programs do you do?

Sharon
We have a lot of programs. We have the Peoria Only Art initiative, which is an initiative that gives substantial grants to museums that collect only Peorian art. It is a very competitive grant.

Encarnacion
What do you need to do to apply?

Sharon
Basically the grant requires institutions to stop collecting art from other places than Peoria. We also have a grant for Peorian artists to make art about Peoria, titled About Peoria Grant Initiative.

Encarnacion
Do you fund anything outside of Peoria?

Sharon
Well, we do have a grant named Make Me Peorian, which is directed to non-Peorian artists who may consider moving to Peoria and make art there. The grant supports you for five years, during which you are not allowed to exhibit outside of Peoria.

Encarnacion
And do you really reinforce this rule?

Sharon
Oh yes, of course we do. Last year an artist that we had funded participated in a group show in the community library of Decatur. We took away the grant immediately. He claimed that he thought, “It was just a very informal show”. But for us this lies at the core of the mission of the organization. We are serious about this. We can’t allow artists to serve other publics than those that we intend to serve. We need to show the city and the state that we are serious about nurturing out arts community.

Encarnación
I saw in the news recently that there were some debates regarding how some people define South versus Northern Peorian art… could you talk a bit about that?

Sharon [reluctant]
Well… it is really not such an interesting issue, really.

Encarnacion:
Could you talk about them? I think it would be useful…

Scott
Basically, its that some committee members in their organization have been pushing for a South Peoria initiative, where South Peorian artists can be funded only to make artwork about South Peoria.

Sharon
Scott— it’s not like that, like you described it. It’s not a real initiative. They are in the minority and they are totally disorganized and under funded. It’s not even worth talking about.

Scott
But why not mentioning it? I think it’s a very telling fact.
Of course this has not sit well with the North Peoria artists, nor with the East Peoria artists, some of which have already proposed the East Peoria Artists Council. And now, a group of West Peoria artists have formed the West Peorian Association of Chicano-Asian –or is it the Latino-Asian?—the Chicano-Asian American Women Sculptors, that’s it—  and are searching funds from Springfield to build a museum by and for West Peorian, Latino-Asian American Women Sculptors.

Sharon
That’s not  a serious proposal in the least! I don’t know why you even bring it up.

Encarnación
Ok, going back to your grant initiatives: don’t you think that Peoria artists who exhibit internationally can give a good name to the city?

Sharon
It doesn’t work that way, you see. Artists who exhibit outside forget about Peoria the moment they leave. We experience a serious talent exodus problem, which originates when local artists start showing outside. This in turn, makes them want to move out.  Artists who are talented think that by leaving Peoria to places like Chicago they will have a better shot at success. The same goes for galleries. But that is not true. Peoria galleries who move out to Chicago inevitably fail.

Encarnación
What do you do when a Peorian artist leaves Peoria for good?

Sharon (showing it is a very painful subject)
Oh yes, them. To be honest, I don’t give much thought to them. It’s their loss, really. Simply, my thinking is— out of sight, out of mind. They don’t exist for me, really. (fake smile). Yeah, really, its’ their loss.

Pablo
As the shore grew from the debris and the natural erosion process, Captain Streeter declared that the land where his boat stood “’twas a separate commonwealth, under the direct jurisdiction of the United States government”.  He declared it “the independent district of Lake Michigan”. Streeter then started renting this land to whoever wanted to live there, which mostly were prostitutes and lowlifes. Soon it became a shantytown, and the rich people who lived around there started complaining about the smell and the fact that these shacks were lowering the value of the area.

Encarnacion
Well, I would like to focus now on the subject of our discussion. How would you characterize Peorian art? how do you define the sensibility that produces it? Scott, perhaps you can shed some light on the subject for us?

Scott
Hopefully. I have done some research on this subject in a lecture I recently gave in Austria,  and in fact published an article on the American Association of Art Critics journal this year that touches on the character of the Peorian artist, as part of a paper about artists who live in cultural regions that are similar to Peoria. There is not enough time to present all the ideas on that paper, but I will try to provide a summary.

It is very difficult to arrive to a unified theory of the Peorian artist mind. There has been a lot written about it. Psychologists have been interested in it since the times of Hermann Rorschach, who in his early studies did research on art and madness, and one of his subjects was a patient precisely from Peoria.

Freudian psychologists believe that the creativity of Peorian artists is fundamentally rooted on a sentiment of abandonment or lack of external attention, very similar, that is, to the psychology of an orphan, something like a sense of inferiority in regards to people in other urban areas.

Sharon (visibly insulted)
That is just so absurd…

Scott
I am sorry- we can discuss this idea later, but If you let me finish…

Encarnacion
I’m sorry Sharon, if you could…

Sharon
How can you possibly base a theory like that based only on an insane guy who lived in the 1920s!

Scott
I just need that you let me finish presenting this idea and we can talk about it.

Encarnacion
Ok.

Pablo
Streeter’s legal argument was that the state of Illinois had no jurisdiction in giving shore owners title to the land.  This was based on the 1821 survey of the Chicago area authorized by Congress as part of a treaty with the Indians.  Rather than giving “the shore of Lake Michigan” as a general eastern boundary, the surveyor John Wall minutely described the shoreline.  Thus, when Robert Kinzie acquired a 103.27-acre tract north of the Chicago River, it had definite eastern boundary.  Over the years, the courts had consistently ruled that the heirs of the Kinzie grant could never claim more than a total of 103.27 acres, and here lay the strength of Streeter’s case.

Regardless, however, a series of battles to evict Streeter followed. The first one was in 1889, when five police officers tried to evacuate Streeter. They, however, were faced by rifles and chased away. The second battle was until 1899, when five police officers again managed to grab the captain, but his wife Maria attacked them with boiling water; Streeter managed to get a hold of his rifle then and chased them away.  The Independent State of Lake Michigan was not going to give up its fight so easily.

Scott
As I am saying, we depart from a study of city rivalries. Chicago is to Peoria what New York is to Chicago, what Istanbul is to Ankara, Berlin is to Munich, Paris is to Lyon, and so on. So  if we study how an artist here develops professionally, according to this theory, we see artists exhibit a series of attitudes that people have come to associate largely with Peorian art.  One of them is known as “compensation for invisibility”. As the artist feels that he or she is not visible enough in the art world, he or she tries to compensate by making work that is quantifiably different, either by size, erudition, or extravagance- but these traits are clearly intentional and have the objective to make the work more visible and emphasize its different character from the centralized mainstream. Examples are Bill Johnson’s “million egg march” installation- he placed one million eggs on the floor, that is, and claimed it was a demonstration to defend the rights of caged chickens in an egg farm near Peoria. He thought if you place one million its has greater impact than if you place, say, a hundred- although someone told me the other day that they actually were like a nine hundred, but who would spend the time to count them, really. The other is the work of Archie Phillips, who is known for his famous performance referencing the fact that Caterpillar trucks are manufactured in Peoria. The piece was entitled “Explaining pictures to a dead Caterpillar”.

Sharon
I think it is a very poignant piece.

Pablo
In the meantime, Fairbanks had sued Streeter for illegal occupation in 1893 and had won, which meant that Streeter needed to get out legally. However, he decided to stay. Streeter continued creating schemes to prove that the land belonged to him. He even produced a document that he claimed that was signed by president Grover Cleveland. While he never managed to get legal acknowledgement that he owned any land, Streeter continued to sell plots to other people, and the community started to grow. It went from Oak Street to St. Clair.

Chicago was changing furiously at the time, the fastest growing city in America. Another Chicago millionaire, Potter Palmer, realized that if they built a road on the sides of this land, they could make a lot of money selling it back from the city. He started building this road, which would be later named Lake Shore Drive, but he encountered the infamous Captain Streeter on his way, who opposed the building of this road in “his” land. Palmer died in 1902, without finishing his project, and the legal battles continued between the Chicago millionaires and the poor captain.

Scott
Anyway, my point is that living in the cultural and economic periphery leads to make work that affirms peripheral sensibility, and thus the eccentricity that sometimes is talked about when one deals with Peorian art. This connects with something I call the “intense introspection” trait, rooted in romanticism, which seeks to dwell in the personal psychology and in the strangest obsessions. Another trait is known as the “negation of the outside” which is when one is self-convinced that nothing outside of one’s immediate surrounding really exists.

But my contention, actually, is that Peorian art doesn’t really exist. When it is self-proclaimed a regional movement, then it becomes a political strategy not an artistic one. Art is art, period. Regionalism is an expression of psychological weakness.

Sharon [visibly irritated]
Oh my god. O-kay, I really have to interject here. I had never heard so much baloney in a panel, really.  I don’t know how many more psychological definitions you have in there Scott,  but I find these incredibly offensive to Peorian art and artists. First of all, Peorian artists don’t suffer from those introspection sicknesses you describe. And it’s just not true that Peorian artists are obsessed with Chicago or any other city.  We simply don’t care about it. In fact, we at We Are Peoria have an initiative entitled Boycott Chicago. As part of it, we prevent Peoria artists to exhibit in Chicago or any other city, and do all we can to prevent non-Peorian artists to exhibit in Peoria, be as they may be from Chicago or Kazakstan.

Encarnacion
But don’t these policies seem a bit extreme?

Sharon
Not in the least, if you consider that Peorian art has been so misrepresented by important Chicago museums over the years, and that the Chicago Tribune had the nerve to write, when Richard Pryor, a Peoria native, recently died, that the best thing that ever happened to him was getting out of Peoria. How dare they?

Encarnación
Scott,  don’t you think that what is peripheral and what isn’t is a very subjective discussion?

Scott
Excuse me, Encarnacion— Sharon, if I may—and I am still not done- what you are saying all but proves my point in question,  since you are confirming to us that Chicago art is such a sore subject in the Peorian art scene.

Sharon
No—you are presenting this as an inferiority complex, which I find completely insulting to Peorian art. Why do we always have to make everything be about Chicago, why?

Scott
But if you have an initiative that is specifically about boycotting Chicago!

Sharon
Well we have no recourse, do we? Specially if there are people out there like you, saying that we feel inferior to Chicago or whatever. I think that your way of thinking just reveals your own personal inferiority complex. You of all people, Scott!

Scott
(sarcastically laughing at her)
What do you mean “I, of all people”?. I am sorry, but you are the one with the inferiority complex, not me. You are the one who doesn’t want to acknowledge the outside just because the outside doesn’t acknowledge you.

Sharon
Well, if that is true, how more pathetic is it to be like you, who is totally ignored by the outside and then disregards his own city as a revenge. Last time you contributed to Artforum was in 1981, and you pretend you have an international critic career? Give me a break!

Scott
You are just jealous…

Sharon
I don’t sit around pontificating about other people’s psychologies, pretending that I am above the rest. I only value what I have. You have a disregard for what is yours, and that is pitiful.

Scott
How do you know that I disregard what I have?

Sharon
When you are critical of everyone, when you think that everyone else is pathetic, when nothing is good enough for you, doesn’t that say something about the psychology of that person? I mean, ever since we co-curated the Peoria Invitational in 1987…

Scott
I can’t believe you are going to bring that up again…

Sharon
Scott: at that event you brought this awful German artist or whatever, who was the worst of the whole show, and you pushed and pushed to give him the first prize just because you wanted to look international and because no one understood the work. And the caterpillar piece by Archie Phillips did not even get an award because of you…

Scott
Well yes, I thought it was a very derivative piece! And I still do. Even if Archie won’t talk to me again since that day.

Encarnacion
I think we need to backtrack here…

Scott (to Sharon)
You know, I can’t believe you are telling me this. You know nothing about conceptual art! You can’t lock yourself in a room. There is a world out there. People were furious that he won just because he was not from Peoria.

Sharon
Well, you may know a lot, but are in total denial about yourself.
How many shows have you curated internationally in the last ten years?

Scott (who has no answer)
I think this is just ludicrous… that is no way to judge what I do…

Sharon
And yet, who is the person who bashes Peorian art more than anyone, and who at the same time, every time there is an opportunity for someone to talk about Peorian art, there you are, first in line. Look at yourself, you are sitting right here. The expert on Peorian art psychology telling us that Peorian art sucks, who hates Peorians and himself.

Pablo
But then, Streeter’s audacity reached a high point. He started claiming land that was already owned by the Palmers as his own, So things finally escalated to a point where it was critical to evict the Captain and his people. Streeter raised a small army to defend the Independent District of Lake Michigan.  500 policemen from the city of Chicago surrounded the district and attacked the army. And the great battle for the independence of the State of Lake Michigan took place.  15 people died in total. Streeter was captured and finally evicted.  But he would continue fighting for his land in the courts until the day of his death.

The opening of the Michigan Avenue Bridge in 1920 catapulted Streeterville into the most prime real estate in Chicago.  Having been kept relatively vacant for decades because of the constant litigation, the land was still under dispute when the construction boom began.

Sharon
(after a brief silence, in a more reflective and melancholic mood)
I have a dream of an artworld that truly belongs to Peoria and makes it special.  I feel that meaning is always stripped away from us, from what we actually own and are rightfully connected to. When I walk down the streets of downtown Peoria, I often think about this. Why do we have to exist in a world where someone else tells you how much what you have is worth? Peoria is our place, and even if it is not paradise, we need to make art about that place.

Scott
Just for the record Sharon, at that 1987 invitational— I know that German artist wasn’t necessarily that good. But I wanted to set an example, I wanted to show that we can be international too.  It has been frustrating to me that we always have to remain local. I am a Peorian too, and I also want to claim something of my own that I can be proud of. I also wanted Peoria to be the center of the world.

Sharon (Who did not even pay attention to Scott and is turning confessional, in tears almost)
I am from Ohio, actually. I went to art school in Cleveland. I always wanted to move to Chicago. And I did, when I was nineteen. It was an awful experience, living in a horrible neighborhood in a rickety apartment with mice. It was not welcoming at all. I hated Chicago ever since. Peoria was not in the plan, but one day I landed here, I got a job here after that and never left. Maybe there is something about this place that makes us never wanting to leave. If you excuse me.
(leaves)

Pablo
Streeter moved to a houseboat on the Calumet River in  East Chicago, Indiana with his third and last wife, Emma Lockwood.

Before he died, rumor has it that he wrote a cryptic letter to his “subjects of the Independent State of Lake Michigan”. According to some of these accounts, that must not be trusted, the letter said: “Fellow citizens of our State: I shall soon leave your company, as the infirmities of age catch up with me. I sorely regret not being able to return your land to your rightful hands. God knows that I fought to the best of my abilities for our land rights. But regardless how many people try to strip us away from our lawful possession, and how many buildings may be imposed, the spirit of that site will always be ours, and the land shall carry our name, and our mark, for the ages to come”.

George Wellington Streeter died on January 24, 1921.  His body was sent back to Chicago and hundreds of people went to pay his respects to him.

Streeter’s land ran from Oak Street to the Chicago River, and extends from Pine Street to Lake Michigan, and is the place where Navy Pier, the Hancock building, the Magnificent mile and the Drake Hotel now stand. Who would know that the heart of this city would have been founded by this eccentric man, that it was once claimed as a separate state, and that the name of this neighborhood would end up coming after the illegal squatterer and not after the legal owner?

You may think that Streeter was insane, but maybe he was vindicated by his claims of ownership, of place. The place that he once claimed as his own, is now named after him, –Streeterville—
and not after those who had purchased the land.

Identity lies in between where we happen to be and where we want to be in our minds. We create mental places out of the physical places.  We divide our territory in parts, we plant whatever we like in it. We also can put a fence around it and claim it as our own. Sometimes it doesn’t really belong to us, but we seek for ownership anyway, because ownership means identity. It is natural to claim something as your own. It helps you affirm who you are. But you need to remember that no piece of land is truly yours. And that legacy is entirely in your mind, and maybe carried along in the minds of others.

Encarnacion
Thank you so much for joining us. Next week we will address the subject of  “What is the spirit of Chicago art”.
(leaves)

Pablo
Which makes me think, it is our stubborn embracing of a reality as our own that eventually will make us transcend who we are.
We all are Streeter, because when we arrive to life we have no set place in it, and it is up for us to accept the place where we are, which is a combination perhaps of a place in the world, and a place in our minds. And like Streeter, like an artist, the place that once existed in his mind became the place that now exists in our lives.
(leaves)

Scott (last one sitting at the table, slowly picking up his papers, meditative. He stands up and prepares to leave. He stops mid-way, looking back at the room)
I really thought his work was good. You know, that German artist. I thought he was so much better than the caterpillar.
(pause)
I guess the caterpillar was OK too.
(exits)

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