Exhibit focuses on the experience of travel

CHICAGO -- The world's first tourists were pilgrims and sages, traveling to sacred and important sites in search of enlightenment.\nToday hundreds of millions of people travel internationally each year for business, for pleasure, to see the masterpieces of the Louvre in Paris or the replica of the Eiffel Tower in Las Vegas.\nA new exhibit has taken over the entire Museum of Contemporary Art, examining art, history and culture from the tourist's view.\nJapanese artist Kyoichi Tsuzuki's photographs depict humorous and bizarre public places, such as a strawberry-shaped bus stop and the giant statues of Easter Island. A group of Dutch architects have created fantastical digital images of cruise ships carrying floating amusement parks, and an American artist has built a model of the Tower of London Bridge with an erector set.\n"The idea of traveling is not just traveling in space and in reality, not just traveling via planes, but traveling inside your mind," curator Francesco Bonami said. "Traveling through the tales of other people, through the experiences of other people and creating an experience inside your head."\nBonami got the idea for the exhibit, called "Universal Experience: Art, Life and the Tourist's Eye," about five years ago while contemplating the Chicago's World's Fair of 1893. The fair drew 27 million visitors over six months, a massive figure in an age before airplanes.\n"I started thinking of an exhibition that should be an experience in itself," Bonami said.\nThe show is the largest ever organized by the MCA, and its permanent collection was stored to create enough space.\nThe exhibit begins before visitors even enter the museum. Outside, a life-sized sculpture gives the impression that a white car pulling a camper trailer has driven straight through the earth and popped up on the museum's plaza, whimsically evoking family road trips.\nOn the fourth floor, orange carpet, mod-looking chairs and televisions hanging from the ceiling create the effect of an airport lounge circa 1970. But rather than planes, the view from the floor-to-ceiling windows is of the old limestone Water Tower, one of the few buildings to survive the 1871 Chicago Fire.\nPhotographer Catherine Opie, who is spending a few years documenting a series of American cities, focused her part of the exhibit on the lighting of Chicago's architecture at night -- and not just the famous buildings. One panoramic photo captures the beauty of a spiraling, concrete parking garage behind the John Hancock Building.\n"What I'm interested in is ideas of specificity of identity of different American cities. How do you identify that city whether you live in it or experience it from the outside?" she said.\nOther exhibits twist reality. One photo depicts Maurizio Cattelan's re-creation of the famous Hollywood sign on a landfill in Palermo, Italy, a project he describes in the exhibition catalog as "like spraying stardust over the Sicilian landscape: It's a cut and paste dream."\nBonami said he hopes those who tour the exhibit will leave with a new appreciation for their role as viewers of art.\n"I would like that they would feel that art, with all its flaws and failures and things, is the last unknown territory ... where you can feel that you're not a tourist," Bonami said. "You can feel that you're finding a land that you have not seen before and that you are there, free to explore it in the way you want.\nAfter closing at the MCA June 5, the exhibit will travel to the Hayward Gallery in London.