Emory Douglas

By Abraham Ritchie

The exhibition “Paper Trail” at Gallery 400 is not a typical art exhibition, and it doesn’t claim to be one. Instead, it recreates the gallery as a gathering place, bringing together ephemera, mostly photographs, newspapers and books, from the late 1960s and early seventies related to various American radical political groups. The hope—now that “hope” is in vogue again—is to have visitors consider solutions to social problems that have existed in Chicago for more than four decades.

What are these persisting problems from four decades ago? Consider Marvin Gaye’s 1970 sonic masterpiece, “What’s Going On.” Gaye sings, “Brother, brother there’s far too many of you dying”—still shamefully true as Chicago closed out 2008 with 507 homicides. “We don’t need to escalate, war is not the answer”—the US continues war on two fronts. “Don’t punish me with brutality”—unbelievably, police brutality is still a problem, a recent shocker being that a CPD officer beat a man handcuffed in a wheelchair.

The problems Gaye immortalized in song are given visual form here in a large group of anonymous and untitled photographs from about forty years ago. They display the visual history from the protest era; concerns about community welfare and livelihood, and efforts to abolish violence. There are images of communities organizing and banding together: a rally for a playground, children playing on bare asphalt and lots of speeches, protests and raised fists. Two images indicate that era’s racial solidarity against “The System” and “The Man.” In one, Black Panther Party co-founder Huey Newton strongly clenches a fellow radical’s hand. The other shows a press conference attended by both whites and blacks, and all are dressed in typical revolutionary gear of black berets and dark sunglasses.

The underground newspapers of the time, Seed and The Black Panther Community News, featured artistic illustrations on their covers, and both are on view here. Whereas the designs for “Seed” were often psychedelic and anonymous, The Black Panther Community News featured work by Emory Douglas, Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party from 1967-1980. Douglas was the subject of a retrospective at LA MOCA’s Pacific Design Center last year, and his images use photocollage techniques, certain elements of Chinese Communist propaganda and the artist’s own hand-drawn illustrations.

One of the most powerful images that Douglas created was a poster for the August 21, 1970, issue of Community News. Headed with the phrase, “We shall survive. Without a doubt,” the image depicts a brilliantly smiling young African-American child wearing glasses and, in place of lenses, are images of the young being educated—we assume in Black Panther community schools. Atop his head is a floppy, zoot-style hat, emanating red rays quoted directly from Chinese revolutionaries. Douglas’ consistent use of Communist propaganda techniques appropriates the galvanizing force of that style. Typically in the Chinese source images, one would see the red rays emanating from behind Mao, the leader, but in his works Douglas links them to the children, granting them agents of change. Douglas’ image posits hope and optimism in stark contrast to an era characterized by violence, racism and uncertainty.

The children depicted in Douglas’ work, and in many other images throughout the exhibition, are an unexpectedly repetitious motif, yet they successfully invoke “the future.” With the election of Barack Obama, it would seem that one of the objectives from the 1960s has been fulfilled, but this exhibition shows us that individuals and communities have the power to affect change, perhaps even more so now that our leader speaks the same language. “Paper Trail” comes at a time to keep the momentum from the election-elation going, and explicitly cites issues of affordable housing, health care and poverty—all these battles need warriors.

“Paper Trail” takes the stance that, above all, education is central to solving these issues, and visitors are presented with a large, well-stocked reading room full of revolutionary and alternative literature. Here you can learn the history not told in school, such as the FBI’s COINTELPRO program, which was aimed at dismantling radical political organizations like the Black Panthers and the Latino Young Lords.

“Paper Trail” fits into an unofficial series of exhibitions that have taken place all over Chicago this past year, marking the fortieth anniversary of the radical sixties. Other exhibitions have focused successfully on the period’s art, such as the DePaul University Museum’s excellent “1968” exhibition and the University of Chicago’s “Looks Like Freedom,” so “Paper Trail” uses an educational strategy in line with AREA’s special issue, “1968/2008” which is available in the reading room. The exhibition’s approach relies on the initiative of the viewer to read the books and study the newspapers, which can be daunting because of the mass of materials on hand. But the creation of an historical continuum, alongside many of Chicago’s alternative organizations behind this exhibition, prompts us to create the future by learning from the past.

“Paper Trail” shows at Gallery 400, 400 S. Peoria, through March 7

Abstract painting has had a long history in Chicago, with luminaries like Morris Barazani, Miyoko Ito, Moholy Nagy, Miklos Gaspar, Charles Biederman, going all the way back to the Armory Show in 1913. Manierre Dawson, who had traveled to Europe, was the first to bring the new ideas home to Chicago galleries, and the Palette and  Chisel Club sponsored the “Abstract Show” of 1915—even if it was only a semi-serious event. Few Chicago artists took up the new approach because there was no money in it, while illustrators could earn as much as movie stars. Among those early abstract painters, Dawson returned to Michigan to become a successful farmer.

It wasn’t until universities began their own art schools, and Ab-Ex flooded the art world, that abstract painting could be considered a practical career option—and this was  the path chosen by William Conger in the late 1950s. He found an early mentor in Chicago abstract painter Raymond Jonson, who had moved to New Mexico by that time,  and later in Elaine DeKooning. Their transcendent, formal approaches were dramatically different from the “monster roster” of Chicago Imagists of that decade, and are still  reflected in Conger’s work, although he has gone in his own, unique direction.

Conger also began his career in academia at this time, taking an MFA at the University of Chicago, and began a lifelong interest in the methods and institutions of  academic study. In 1971 he returned to Chicago as chair of the Art and Art History Department at DePaul University, and in 1984 moved up to Northwestern where  eventually he would chair the Department of Art and Art Theory.

How does a stellar career in academia impact the life of an artist? Is it somehow connected to all those frightening, high-tech, aggressive images of Conger’s work in the  1980s and ’90s? Maybe, maybe not, but at least it has led him to become immersed in the theoretical literature of contemporary art, and encouraged him to become an  articulate voice in that field. An extensive interview can be found online at geoform.net, and if you actually want to talk with him, he’s been holding forth daily on the  aesthetics-l listserv for almost a decade.

Conger practices and advocates painting that is allusive: “The important thing for me is to make paintings that exist somewhere between actual depiction and complete abstraction,” he says, so that they can serve as “surrogates or metaphors of selfness—layered metaphors of self-imagining” in a style that critic Donald Kuspit now calls “Fantastic Abstraction,” as it asserts “the repressed psychic reality” of living in America. (Although it also strongly resembles the Bauhaus period of Kandinsky.) The artist Lorser Feitelson had said much the same thing about his own paintings from 1950-51 as a “configuration that for me metaphorically expresses the deep disturbance of our time”—and it’s interesting to compare the discomfort of Feitelson’s Los Angeles with the ominous visions of Conger’s Chicago.

Whether “Fantastic Abstraction” will stick around as a Chicago style remains to be seen. Despite his four decades of teaching, Conger has few followers, and the “repressed psychic realities” of younger artists don’t seem to require Conger’s brand of meticulous craftsmanship and formalist credentials. He may just be an historical anomaly, an outsider on the inside. (Chris Miller)

William Conger, Paintings: 1958-2008, shows at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington, through March 24, and at Roy Boyd Gallery through March 3.

An overhead projector, familiar to anyone who attended high school between the years 1960 and 1990, sits in the center of artist Leigh-Ann Pahapill’s multimedia installation. Its presence signals the exhibit’s educational component—a bunch of ideas that cling to academic French philosophy made popular during the selfsame technological era as the over-head projector. While Pahapill’s art claims to explore the nature of meaning itself, her installation better succeeds at questioning how an arrangement of objects can possibly express a complex philosophy. Alongside the overhead projector are schematic diagrams or maps of theories—one can’t be sure since they aren’t labeled. Removed from whatever textbook they first appeared in, here the line drawings only serve to represent an idea, or Idea, without any specificity.

The French Deconstructionists—“Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, whateva”—often played with the notion that ideas are, at heart, incomprehensible, and the deeper we launch into the mind’s capacity, the further we get from certainty. Formlessly following function, Pahapill piles on the incomprehensibility. On a set of video monitors, Pahapill shows a series of gesticulating hands, presumably people ‘talking with their hands.’ Disconnected from actual bodies, though, the gestures are rendered meaningless, but enjoyably strange, and ultimately turn the viewer deaf-and-dumb.

Geographers and explorers use the phrase ‘point of inaccessibility’ to mark the most difficult sites of access on a map (for example the spot in the ocean furthest from any land, or the most remote part of Antarctica)—no doubt a very attractive endeavor for some. In this installation, where the darkened gallery is punctuated by sparse artificial illumination, Pahapill locks the viewer in a constellation of points of inaccessibility, a trompe-l’oeil black hole without air, without footing, and forever receding. (Jason Foumberg)

Through February 21 at DOVA Temporary, 5228 S. Harper.

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Sigmar Polke’s series of “Lens Paintings,” which won the coveted Rubens Prize in 2007, seem more like experiments than masterworks. The German artist here developed a new surface for painting: a transparent, resin-based corrugated ‘screen’ that supports imagery both above and below, creating layers in flat relief. The technique is based on a lenticular optical device that allows still images to appear animated if either the image or the viewer changes position. While kitschy mass-produced postcards, and even the magic-eye posters that once hypnotized viewers in shopping malls, work more proficiently at creating a total optical illusion, Polke’s technique aids his painted philosophy—presumably his painting is far too serious to be entertaining; at one point in the show Polke negates the optical illusion by painting on the entire surface of the viewing device.

The oft-cited reference by both Polke’s historians and the artist himself is a 1685 Latin text on the telescope. Polke makes his privileged view into this text visible with illustrations of period-costumed gentlemen viewing a dragon. Their sight-lines extend from their eyes to the flying beast, mirroring the viewer’s own efforts to see the choppy images sandwiched in the resin. The corrugated dips and divots on the paintings’ surfaces split our eye into multiple lines of sight, and if we move to view the painting from an oblique angle, we’re rewarded with the otherwise invisible image below. This is a delight for anyone who enjoys optical tricks and holograms—although the pleasure is limited in Polke’s hands. The artist has little in common with the passionate Rubens, and more to do with fellow German painter Hans Holbein, whose 1533 oil painting “The Ambassadors” reveals a floating skull when viewers get on their knees—a reverential pose that viewers are often tricked into assuming. (Jason Foumberg)

Through April 17 at The Arts Club, 201 E. Ontario, (312)787-3997

"Love Knots," 1996

RECOMMEDNED

At 84, Morris Barazani qualifies as the grand old man of Chicago abstract painting. His personal history here goes all the way back to Maholy Nagy and the Institute of Design. That remote outpost of Bauhaus civilization is long gone, but its sense of carefully measured design lives on as a kind of constructivist blueprint beneath the turbulent, Ab-Ex surfaces of Barazani’s gutsy painting. The current exhibit at Corbett vs. Dempsey spans the last thirty years of his career, from 1972 onward, and makes a nice comparison with a previous show that spanned the first twenty (1948-1968) shown at the gallery in 2006. “I’ve always tried to adjust between those two poles, formal and informal,” Barzani recently said, and it seems like his “adjustment” just keeps getting better and better, running the gamut from subtle arrangements of almost-white, almost-perfect rectangles to Ab-Ex explosions that look like the jumbled memory of driving all the way down Western Avenue. His paintings feel positive, passionate, modest, sincere, and hard-working—which is to say, they are very Chicago—though a few miles inland from the fashionable lakefront. (Chris Miller)

Through February 14 at Corbett vs. Dempsey, 1120 N. Ashland.

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Self-taught and clearly influenced by Cy Twombly’s embodied mark-making and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s expressionistic graffiti scrawl, Von Kommanivanh’s artwork is experienced viscerally in staccato moments of almost whimsical violence. He is most successful in the largest paintings whose worked surfaces swarm with armies of cartoon-like figures wielding bloody scythes and nuclear warheads. Kommanivanh’s interest in cultural criticism and anti-war protest holds him back in some places—the more literal, the more he limits the strongest aspects of his work: its manic energy and unsettling juxtapositions. Kommanivanh is a Laos native and it’s hard not to wonder what he thinks of Brad Kahlhamer, the Native American artist whose paintings about identity and alienation Kommanivanh’s so strikingly resemble. The found-object flying-ship assemblages included in the current show provide its most straightforward pleasure. Standing amidst the hanging ammo shells, discarded utensils, fur, gears, feather, rope and metal scrap, it is easy to imagine oneself having stumbled into a mad general store run by an artist of terrifying imagination. (Rachel Furnari)

Through March 21 at Walsh Gallery, 118 N. Peoria.

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Justin Cooper’s varied (and usually collaborative) performances provide context for the objects in “Paranormaldise” at Monique Meloche. Several sculptures congregate in the main room while the back room houses a video titled “Studio Visit” surrounded by drawings. Shown sped up, the video captures the endeavors of a wild intruder in Cooper’s studio. The visitor attempts to draw a still life of oranges and apples, and when unsuccessful, proceeds to trash the studio in a fit of rage. The trope of the sped-up video illustrates Cooper’s performances, which tend toward the comedic, the libidinal and the chaotic. While the playful drawings are tenuously related to the video, they find their fullest expression in the sculptures.

In “First wet dream,” Cooper balances a wheelbarrow vertically by one handle atop a conch shell, a rare moment of perpetual stillness in the maelstrom of folding chairs atop loops of garden hose, or the large steel armatures of “Giant Leis” covered in plastic ruffles. Cooper’s sculptures oscillate between the residential aesthetics of the hardware store and the party store. For instance, a prefabricated paper palm tree titled “Exhausted” rises out of its pot only to droop quickly and lay flaccid on the ground. “Exhausted” is an image of the insufficiency of cheap entertainment made with disposable, single-use decorations. Cooper’s engaging work feels as seedy and discontented as an office party luau but suffers slightly from the absence of the enlivening presence of Cooper himself. (Dan Gunn)

Through March 14 at Monique Meloche Gallery, 118 N. Peoria.

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Devastation never looked so attractive as it does in Curtis Mann’s 14×6 grid of appropriated photos from the war zones of the Middle East. With bleach and washes as his weapons, Mann attacks his images, attenuating and coloring them brightly with a predominance of yellow so that they end up as elegant spidery abstractions that, only on close-up, reveal their subjects, which take on the appearance of twisted shrapnel floating in clouds of fine white smoke above heaps of ruins and sometimes a forlorn human figure, or below a sliver of pale-blue sky. One cannot imagine a more complete beautification of violence, although that is not to say that Mann glorifies war, but only that he has taken the tried-and-true photographic mission of redeeming the ruins to its maximum explosive limits or, perhaps, beyond them. Mann’s two triptychs and his single images are more representational, but the sensibility remains the same. (Michael Weinstein)

Through March 1 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave.

"Motel Sign," 2008

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If cows, corn and cockapoos can be genetically modified to serve perceived human needs, why not trees, too? Think of the green possibilities if ordinary conifers could do double duty as international-style shelter, street signs and urban infrastructure, even playground equipment. The line between the utopian and the ridiculous is thus wittily crossed in David Lefkowitz’s clever and vaguely creepy new paintings, which depict topiary meticulously sculpted into various implausible forms: a freeway overpass, a slide and something less recognizable that resembles a partially groomed shrub fleeing the shears. Painted in oils on buttery-smooth birch-wood panels, the trees’ foliage is made up of countless miniscule brushstrokes, each leaf the size and shape of a grain of rice. The paintings’ digital aspects are twofold: when viewed up close the image pixelates, but at the same time Lefkowitz’s painstaking pointillism reminds us that it is made by human hands. These painted topiaries are as fastidiously constructed as the decorative shrubs they parody, an irony that’s clearly not lost on the artist.

Lefkowitz’s images are straightforwardly rendered, his delivery wry, as seen in a painting of a topiary cut like a palm tree. His use of birch as a substrate recalls his 2004 “Improvised Structure” paintings of elaborate, modernist-style cardboard dwellings executed on flattened cardboard boxes. Lefkowitz’s current works are more playful and living-room friendly than this earlier series. This softens their edge, but also enables them to nestle, burr-like, in today’s domestic environments, where candles are shaped like apples and artichokes and synthetic orchids thrive without attention. (Claudine Isé)

Through March 21 at Carrie Secrist Gallery, 835 W. Washington

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Nearly 100 years ago, political scientist Edward Corwin presciently called the American presidency an “elective kingship.” You would never suspect that when you look at the forty-four news photos gathered here of our chief executives, from Teddy Roosevelt to Barack Obama, shot for the Associated Press. Smiles, mugging and gaffes prevail with nary a trace of magisterial dignity and not a clue that life-and-death decisions are close at hand. We see Richard Nixon breaking out in gales of unrestrained laughter as a sly Sammy Davis, Jr. hugs his arm; George W. Bush dolefully holding up an inverted umbrella in front of Air Force One; and Jimmy Carter in rapturous glee as he sprawls on the hood of a limo in a motorcade pressing the flesh of flag-waving throngs—along with dollops more of the same. A paean to celebrity culture and democratic myth-making, this show, which is the last one at the museum before it closes its doors on March 1, teaches us volumes about our take on “democratic values.” (Michael Weinstein)

Through March 1 at the McCormick Freedom Museum, 445 N. Michigan.