Carl Cheng, thinker, maker, poet, experimenter, in ‘Nature Never Loses’ at Institute of Contemporary Art
By Lane Timothy Speidel for Artblog
March 24, 2025
Lane Speidel visits Carl Cheng’s exhibit at ICA several times, taken with the breadth of the artist’s thinking and making in this large retrospective. Speidel says there is poetry and humor in the complex works, commenting, “While critical of war, capitalism, urban expansion, pollution, and more, there is something more engaging, more interesting, more open, and complex than critique going on.” The exhibit, ‘Carl Cheng: Nature Never Loses’ is up at the ICA through April 6, 2025. Check it out.
“Breakdown repair,
breakdown repair,
!@#%^&*@$@#
Whoops, I have to treat it like my loving
relationship with my cats.
“How are you feeling today, my purring machine?””
-John Doe Co.
Out-of-Order Technology, 1975
I’ve visited and revisited the show Nature Never Loses at the ICA, a survey of sixty years of Carl Cheng’s work. A resounding takeaway for me is the insistence on impermanence, erosion, and change. Humanity can be so obsessed with immortality, constantly looking for ways to create permanent projects, maintain them, and ensure their intransience. After my second viewing of the show and reading the materials, I listened to the interview between Carl Cheng and the exhibit’s curator Alex Klein, Head Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, The Contemporary Austin and formerly a Curator at the ICA . They discussed “John Doe Co.”, his one person company, invented it to better acquire industrial materials, and to more easily file his taxes. This gesture also serves as a powerful allegory for the disidentification of capitalism. At the time John Doe Co. was set up during the war in Vietnam, soldiers’ bodies who were not able to be identified were returned to the country without a name and were referred to as “John Doe.”