Friday, October 29, 2010

What are you so afraid of?

By Beth Franken Special to the Tribune

(Excerpt)

From a Blue Man (royal faux pas) to Captain Hook (mortality) to the boys of Mucca Pazza (smelly uniforms), Chicago artists divulge their fears in time for Halloween

You know that terror/fantasy you have in which you're sitting in an airplane and you're gazing at the emergency exit row and you imagine that, midflight, the door accidentally flies open and a blast of freezing air sucks out newspapers and plastic cups and a couple of passengers sitting closest to the door, and everyone's screaming and the little yellow oxygen masks drop down and you can't breathe and your heart is hurling itself against your ribs?

Well, that's exactly what it feels like when you go sky diving: Your instructor throws open the door of the plane for the jump, and every cell in your body sits up and says, "Dude, something has gone terribly wrong here."

"You mean, it wasn't fun?" my kids always ask me.

"No, honey, it wasn't fun," I tell them. "It was scary."

There's a scary/fun dichotomy, it turns out. Some people like to amuse themselves with scary stuff while others just feel petrified. "It's a well-known variable in social psychology," says Kevin LaBar, a professor who studies fear at the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University. "Some people are risk-averse, some are risk-neutral, and some are risk-seeking. We don't know why."

Perhaps these differences reveal themselves most clearly at Halloween, when there's an array of ways to be frightened/entertained. Such events have their appeal to some; others are just going to want to find a place where they can listen to some very cool jazz.

Given this variety of responses to the fear factor, we've asked various Chicago artists to talk about what they're up to and what scares them.

Enjoy.

Elise Siegel's exhibition make/believe  Sep. 10-Nov. 06, 2010

Installation shot (image not included in the article)
 

To read the full article at the Chicago Tribune online click here