While the Chicago Humanities Festival celebrates its 25th anniversary with a season that’s all about journeys, artistic director Matti Bunzl is about to embark on a one-way journey of his own. At the end of this year, Bunzl will leave the festival—and the University of Illinois, where he’s spent the last 16 years as a professor of anthropology—to return to his native Austria. It was announced last month that he’s been tapped to be the next head of Vienna’s estimable Wien Museum, the municipal institution of history, art, and culture that he says inspired his career.
The larger, more public reason, Bunzl says, is that “I never imagined that Austria would come so far as to give someone like me— based on who I am and what I do—this kind of a chance. The Vienna Museum is the center of Vienna’s cultural heritage. It’s amazing that they would have made me the steward of that heritage.
It wasn’t without its own drama, however. As Laura Pearson noted in a preview for the Reader‘s Fall Arts Issue, Bunzl’s MCA book was initially slated for publication a year and a half ago, under a flashier title: In the House of Balloon Dog: A Year Inside Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Review copies had already been sent out when suddenly they were clawed back. Why? No one was saying exactly, but as Pearson reported, the MCA had apparently required specific edits to the original manuscript, with details including names and descriptions of artists whose work was being considered for acquisition removed. University of Chicago Press promotions director Levi Stahl told me in an e-mail last week that “there were some minor editorial tweaks that delayed the book,” and referred me to Bunzl for elaboration.
In his fantasy, he says, there’s a future Vienna Humanities Festival.
