Play With My Feet, Magritte

Imagine if you will, coming out of Lake Michigan after a swim at Oak Street beach.  The sun is warm. the sand hot.  Your eyes slowly adjust to the glare when, suddenly, you see it - a pair of huge silvery feet that turn . . . into boots.

click images for larger view

No, you haven't been stung by a rabid zebra mussel.  It's not the latest experiment in genetic engineering, or even a commentary on Hanig's Footwear being forced from their flagship store.

It's the latest inspiration from Chicago ad agency Leo Burnett in their ambitious Unthink campaign promoting the major retrospective, Magritte: the Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938, which runs at the Art Institute through October 13, 2014.  The strategy is to bring surrealism to Chicago locations other than the City Council chamber.

We've already written about the Unthink Voyeurism mural painted on the roof the Art Institute's Morton Wing, where the most surreal component is not the content of the mural but the fact that it's invisible to everyone not in a nearby tall building or airplane.

The feet at Oak Street Beach are seven feet tall, made out of plywood and carved foam, hard coated in urethane.  Each one weighs 800 pounds..  They're a re-imagining of the pair in Magritte's 1934 painting Le Model Rouge, blown up to Oldenberg proportion.  The AIC press release says they were the artist's �way of calling attention to the fact that we often cover our own flesh with dead animal flesh.� Unlike at the beach, where we uncover our flesh with plant fabric over the naughty bits.

According to the Trib, da feat is expected to stay at Oak Street until mid-month, after which they're expected to stomp down somewhere along Michigan Avenue.

Unlike the rooftop mural, accessible only to the maintenance staff, the Big Feet are doing a pretty good job of engaging beachgoers, skillfully engineered for climbing with shoelace ladders.

Theater on the Lake may have been exiled from its waterfront venue for the season, but urban theater on the beach is alive and well at Oak Street.

 And now, your Ozymandias moment of Zen . . .

Voyeur on the Roof - What was the Art Institute Thinking? And You?

Say what you will about those blockbuster exhibitions at the Art Institute, the folks behind AIC's marketing have become especially adept at finding imaginative ways to sprinkle their promotions throughout Chicago's cityscape.

click for larger view (recommended)

For Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective, the museum's school co-sponsored a competition that resulting in the entire upper reaches of a building along the Kennedy Expressway being transformed into a

giant mural of Chicago landmarks done up in the artist's signature Pop Art style.

For Impressionism Fashion and Modernity, entire double-decker buses were turned into canvases that drew you directly into a painting of turn-of-the-century society at play.

The Art Institute's current blockbuster is Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938, running through October 13th.  It was drawing big crowds when I took it in on Saturday.  I recommend it if for nothing else than the experience of walking through the maze-like circuit of galleries in which it has been installed.

To promote the show, Chicago ad agency Leo Burnett has come up with an �Unthink� Magritte campaign that includes a mobile app and links the word to a host of different values in different iterations of the theme.  In addition to use usual appropriation of tour buses and trolleys, there's installations like these at the Chicago Avenue Red Line stop . . .

One variation of the theme, however, has been a little-known secret, not in intention but by design.  We're grateful to our indefatigable correspondent Bob Johnson, who uncovered the secret for us in these photos.

photograph: Bob Johnson

Can you see it?  In the right side of the photo, right next to the Metra tracks?  Let's get a little closer.

photograph: Bob Johnson

The larger part of the roof of the Art Institute's Morton Wing has been turned over to a striking Magritte seaside portrait of a seriously abstracted nude, with the inscription  �Unthink Voyeurism�.  Visible only to people in nearby tall buildings, birds, and passengers in low-flying planes, this has to be one of slyest, most surreal adverts ever.