Prepare to be totally confused at the MCA by teen bedroom and chit chat as art

The kicker? Viewers like you and me are invited to join the conversation.

The exhibition is set up much like a living room, complete with off-white Ikea furniture. And there is a giant sign with the title of the exhibition hanging in the background, as if it is also meant to be a TV set.

But there are no recording devices; Deller did not want participants to censor themselves for the presence of a camera. A complete list of participants can be found on the MCA's site, www.mcachicago.org, and it's a varied bunch, from a Baghdad-trained physician to a U.S. war veteran to a peace activist.

According to Deller, the conversations are truly intended to be open-ended in order to counter the news media's simplistic stories.

So every time you go, you are guaranteed to see and hear a different perspective. This lack of content control makes the exhibition a bold move for the MCA. It also has promise to attract new visitors.

Should those visitors turn left as they enter the museum's main galleries, however, they run the risk of being completely alienated.

Liam Gillick's "Three perspectives and a short scenario" can't help but be an Art Lover's show. Too bad the disarmingly charming Gillick couldn't stay on this side of the Atlantic (the exhibition runs through Jan. 10, 2010) so visitors might hear his freewheeling-but-intellectual explanation of how he dealt with the space and worked with the curators.

Let me give you a tip for viewing this exhibition: Think of a teenager's bedroom and its museum-esque capacity for explaining just who that teen is with the mere placement of a photograph on a dresser and a poster on the door.

Now imagine what the bedroom would look like if it was actually a giant gallery with a multi-colored, lighted ceiling. Imagine the teen was actually a heady artist who had an EXTREME MODERNIST aesthetic mixed with a dash of Euro-punk sensibility. Think sparse. Think self-deprecatingly self conscious about his status as yet-another-white-male contemporary artist.

It's a walk-in diary of one artist's interpretation of his own experience as an artist of recent-and-yet-to-be-contextualized decades. So it helps to like the artist in order to like the show. I advise doing a little You-Tubing of Gillick the man in order to warm up to the gallery's cold and coded atmosphere.

Both exhibitions are deviant in their use of space and ability to draw in (or confound) the viewer. Those who have the guts to join a conversation about the Iraq invasion and those who will do their homework on Liam Gillick will likely be rewarded.

(Kathryn's note: if conversations don't sound like art to you, then read my primer on social art .)