By Jason Foumberg

After an artist posted his art video on YouTube, he received dozens of comments from strangers: “Nobody in their right mind would do this”; “This is what crack does to you”; “This sucks gay ass”; “You just wasted 15 seconds of my life!” The artist then adapted these crude criticisms and repeated them during finals week at his school’s art studio critiques. “This sucks gay ass,” he mouthed during a classmate’s painting crit, miming the public criticism of his own art. The crit performance received mixed reviews. One classmate was ready to punch his face in.

James Elkins’ newest book, “Art Critiques: A Guide,” contains a chapter on “Tinkering with the Critique Format,” offering tips for disillusioned students who wish to shock their audiences out of lazy responses. Although the above example is not one of his tips, he does suggest a game: “Have someone play your part at the critique, and listen in the background without identifying yourself.” “Critiques are intensely strange,” writes Elkins, and he mentions throughout the book many oddball comments he’s experienced on real crit panels over the years as a professor, visiting critic and artist. Elkins’ correctives are meant to be emotionally benign and thoughtful, and he estimates that 50,000 critiques are conducted annually at art schools in the United States—all of them essentially ruleless. Many veer into boring, insolent, repetitive and pointless territory. Still, crits are essential touchstones in an artist’s education. Read the rest of this entry »

Marta Kubrak, "Resistance to Snares," 2011, silkscreen

RECOMMENDED

Looking at Chicago Cultural Center’s exhibition of the Wroclaw School of Printmaking, one gets the sense that there might be more time in Wroclaw, Poland, than we have here. Three galleries filled with large, complex, detailed and technically brilliant prints provide evidence that artists in Poland have time to concentrate on dense, romantic images. Printmaking is a traditional form which, despite the rigors of its pre-twentieth-century technology, continues to speak to the present. Like glassblowing or textiles, both taught at the Academy where these artists are faculty, reproducing images somehow seems essential to human life. The craft of printmaking shifts and expands to absorb technical innovations over time, like photo and digital applications and modernist design sensibilities, but retains its connection with traditional forms. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Images flash by in an instant, zooming in on the random minutiae of a life. A cat playing on a fence, the scenic backdrop of a mountain range, a happy couple in wedded matrimony. Laura Mackin’s video “Zoom (Dean 1962-2006)” from her solo exhibition, “120 Years,” splices, edits and reconfigures the personal home videos of a stranger named Dean. Mackin rearranges Dean’s films and edits in zoomed images, creating a disjunctive visual experience. However random or specific the scenes that Dean chooses to zoom in on, they are still oddly familiar. Moments from an anonymous life read like the images we keep in our own memory of blurred impressions, arbitrarily conjoined, resurfacing fleetingly. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Over the past decade, Mary Borgman has done one thing, and done it well: monumental, sixty-foot-high charcoal portraits of handsome, multi-ethnic young dudes, often with their shirts off, set against a glowing background. These are young adults in that exciting, though sometimes dangerous period of self-discovery before settling into the responsibilities of family and career, and the artist shares the thrill of staring into their emerging selves.

Each drawing is based upon a single photograph, selected from many others, taken under controlled conditions in her studio. So, why not just make sixty-foot photographic prints?  Why take two to four months to finish each charcoal drawing? One part of the answer is that photographic forms feel cold and factual, while drawn forms can be warm and alive. Another is that hundreds of hours of concentrated focus can give pieces a sense of overwhelming, leap-off-the-wall presence that a momentary shutter flick can never achieve. Although similar, each pose/personality presents a different challenge. Her second version of Kaveh Razani is one of the most compelling pieces she’s ever done. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

From 2005 through the present, Viktoria Sorochinski has been photographing the relation between Anna and her daughter Eve, not as a documentary of the vicissitudes of their bond, but through Sorochinski’s imagination of the many forms it might take in her staged and directorial color scenario shots. What Sorochinski’s images lose in spontaneity and the suppleness of life, they make up for in their sharply delineated moods and meanings. Read the rest of this entry »

Designed to represent an automated book-production facility, “Living Book” is a collaboration by Plural (the graphic design duo Jeremiah Chiu and Renata Graw) and Jonathan Krohn of The Center for Book Technology. The exhibition uses custom software designed by Michael Bingaman to capture images via an overhead camera, which are projected on a wall. Viewers may use an accompanying keyboard to make text appear over the projected images. In theory, a nearby printer would print out a page of the resulting text and images every sixty seconds for five hours a day, five days a week. However, a sound concept doesn’t always lead to flawless execution.

On a recent Saturday, the camera and keyboard were working with the images projected against the blank white wall, but the printer spat out blank page after blank page. A gallery attendant had to refill the paper tray just to demonstrate how the exhibit was intended to work. Read the rest of this entry »

Gao Yuan, "Untitled (Woman with construction scene)," 2010

RECOMMENDED

Contemporary Chinese photography continues to impress by its conceptual power, sophistication and aesthetic richness in this exhibit of four artists who combine postmodern complexity with subtle senses of beauty. Nobody puts it all together better than Gao Yuan in her “Tattoo” series, in which she placed her models bedecked in their body art in poses derived from Italian Renaissance paintings, and then added to her studies backgrounds from China today of which the early moderns could not have dreamed. Read the rest of this entry »

Jeroen Nelemans

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Susan Giles’ site-specific sculpture of the unbuilt Calatrava tower, toppled over inside The Mission, is a model of something unrealized. Although it might refer to the economic crash that scuttled the plans for the building, Giles’ “Crumpled Spire,” deftly built of wood, rests gracefully in the space, echoing the shapes of the windows, lighting grids and setting off the tin ceiling. Downstairs in the basement project room is an alluring and incisive set of photographs by Jeroen Nelemans that look beautiful at first glance but quickly assert a complex critical project that eludes the more poetic sculpture, upstairs. Read the rest of this entry »

Chris Hodge, "Tower of Babel"

RECOMMENDED

Attending an Apocalypse-themed art show is one way to start the new year, particularly if you follow the Mayan Calendar. Six artists’ responses to the subject are currently on view in “Wipe Out!” at Peanut Gallery.

Upon entering, one is confronted with a large white tree. Made of paper and found materials, the installation runs floor to ceiling along one corner of the gallery. Along the structure, bulbous clear plastic shapes disrupt its trunk. The edges fade into the surrounding walls, but the tree itself invades the gallery space, raising questions about its significance. An explanatory text can be found around the corner, paired with two framed fragments of the tree. This is Andrea Jablonski and Merje Veski’s conceived vision of a post-apocalyptic world: a barren landscape, with what the artists note are “Pompeian-like figures” melted into the body of the tree. Standing alone, the tree left me wanting a larger installation to truly immerse in their imagined world. Read the rest of this entry »

Karl Wirsum, "Shoestring Query Can’t Beggars be Shoe-Z," 2006

By Bert Stabler

There is a lot up in the air right now regarding city support for the arts in general, and visual arts in particular—and there are reasons to be nervous. The exhibitions at the Cultural Center, both in the upstairs spaces and in the Michigan Avenue Galleries, are set for 2012. But, as the year rolls onward, the mists of 2013 will begin to clear, in response to the various obstacles and question marks brought about by the restructuring of the Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) in 2011.

Before departing office, Mayor Daley initiated a massive reorganization of cultural agencies, putting basically everything, including the Mayor’s Office of Special Events, under the nominal oversight of Cultural Affairs—now the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events. Cultural programming positions were reduced and moved from Cultural Affairs into the Chicago Office of Tourism and Culture (COTC), a separate not-for-profit that had been jointly handling programming with DCA for visual art, music, dance and theater, as well as administering cultural grants. Now positions are being reduced and moved again, this time back under city administration proper, to be filled after a new deputy commissioner for arts programming is named, which should happen in the next couple of months. Read the rest of this entry »