Tamms Year Ten mud stencil on the lakefront at 37th Street East. Photo by Paul Kjelland.

By Lori Waxman

Dirt, water, whisk, sponge, bucket, box cutter, tar paper—these are not your typical artist’s materials. Mix the water and dirt in the bucket, lay the cut-out paper against a cement surface, and sponge on the mud, however, and the result is a handsome work of environmentally friendly graffiti.

Street artists often work with stencils, using them to shape spray-painted statements. But a chemical medium dispensed through an aerosol container reeks of toxicity, so Milwaukee-based Jesse Graves, intent on finding a more compatible way to apply his environmentally and politically conscious messages, evolved an alternate means of tagging: mud. The technique is nothing short of ingenious. Simple, cheap, graphically effective and not necessarily illegal, mud stencils, if protected from the elements, can last up to ten years; or, like all dirt, they can be washed off with water. Consistency is key, however, to achieving a bold visual with sharp edges: the mud mixture must be carefully controlled so that it achieves a viscosity akin to peanut butter or feces.

Yes, feces—like the feces sometimes smeared by inmates at Tamms prison on the walls of their cells. Cells where they are held in permanent solitary confinement, bereft of all human contact, for up to twenty-three hours a day, with breaks only for showers and individual exercise. It’s a supermax jail in Southern Illinois originally designed for the short-term punishment of violent inmates from other facilities, but one-third of whose occupants have now been locked up in extreme isolation for over a decade, with no clearly defined standards for transfer in or out. Widely believed to cause permanent physiological and psychological damage, these conditions contravene the Geneva Convention, two United Nations treaties and various other international human-rights accords. Conditions which have led inmates not only to paint their walls with shit in desperate attempts for attention, but also to mutilate themselves, to attempt suicide, and to require—for one in every ten men at Tamms—regular doses of psychotropic medication. All this for up to $90,000 a year per inmate, three to four times the cost of incarceration at other prisons in Illinois.

Tamms Year Ten mud stencil outside Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Photo by Sam Barnett.

What any of this has to do with mud stenciling was revealed this past Saturday as some thirty artists and other activists took to the streets of Chicago armed with six-by-nine-foot cutouts, informational flyers and the resolve to help end torture in Illinois. That was the message they broadcast in mud—END TORTURE IN ILLINOIS—bordered with a broken line in the shape of the state, topped with a star for Tamms, the regional capital of cruel and unusual punishment. They hit locations across the city, from the Art Institute and the Board of Trade to the Logan Square Skate Park, Senator Rickey Hendon’s West Side office, the Lincoln Park Green City Market, the University of Illinois quad, the DePaul Student Center and various sidewalks, boarded-up buildings and underpasses in between.

The campaign was the latest tactical art action by Tamms Year Ten, and one of its most vivid and accessible yet. A coalition of more than seventy groups throughout Illinois, from mental-health alliances to human-rights advocacies and faith-based committees, Tamms Year Ten was founded last year on the occasion of the prison’s tenth anniversary with the goal of urging the governor of Illinois and the Illinois Department of Corrections to either close or convert the prison, following national trends; to establish transparency and standards at the facility; and at the very least to follow the original legislative intent for the supermax, which was only meant for short-term use.

Tamms Year Ten has also worked with Illinois lawmakers to introduce HB2633, which includes provisions for instituting accountability at the prison and prohibiting mentally ill prisoners from being moved there in the first place. The bill, sponsored by Rep. Julie Hamos with twenty-seven co-sponsors, seems like the least the state can do in the face of the grotesque human-rights violations it has been committing for the past decade in the name of law and order. Identical confinement at Guantanamo Bay, whose closure has been ordered by President Obama, has been determined by the Pentagon to be too isolating for prisoner safety. But, according to an editorial that appeared in the Tribune just a few weeks ago, it’s good enough for Illinois residents. Chicago’s newspaper of record fears that the situation at other prisons could get uglier if the IDOC loses its freedom to keep inmates locked up at Tamms indefinitely, despite studies that indicate supermax incarceration increases recidivism and that Tamms has done nothing to reduce violence in other state prisons. Never mind the international consensus that prolonged isolation equals torture—as the Tribune put it, the “worst of the worst” end up there. Read: who cares.

Who cares, indeed? With bold public rallies, calls to lawmakers, intelligent press, ever more studies and reports, meetings with legislators and IDOC officials, and some smart art activism, hopefully a whole lot more people. Mud washes off in the rain—years of being cut off from any social contact, being locked up and treated worse than any animal, doesn’t.

C.J. Pyle, "Flora Dora," pencil and colored pencil on verso of album cover, 2008

RECOMMENDED

When it comes to drawing, a couple of clichés are often evident. The first is that drawing is more immediate than other media and is therefore better at revealing the “essential self.” The second says that self-taught artists hold greater claim to authentic self-expression simply because they are outsiders. When combined, these assumptions form a seductive narrative mythos that can be hard to resist. Such fictions certainly inform the outstanding selection of works in “Primal: Drawing as the Mirror of Self,” but for the most part that selection (consisting mostly of gallery artists) serves to unpack the myths at least as often as it plays to them.

Inspired by the Museum of Modern Art’s 2008 exhibition “Glossolalia: Languages of Drawing,” which sought a common visual language among the seemingly Babel-like incoherency of styles, methods, and approaches in contemporary drawing, “Primal” includes better-known outsider artists like Henry Darger, Bill Traylor and Joseph E. Yoakum (who were also featured in the MoMA show) along with Lee Godie and Frank Jones. It also mixes in a few interesting up-and-comers like Orly Cogan and painter Marc Dennis alongside artists with substantial exhibition histories like Phyllis Bramson, David Sharpe and graphic novelist Chris Ware. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

If you want to go goth, there is nobody better than Dorothy Ann to satisfy your photographic taste for the imagery of seductive doom. Against deep black backgrounds, Dorothy Ann has her models pose so that they suggest the psychological power that will draw any man into a deadly embrace to which he will have to submit; they are illuminated so starkly and exist in such splendid isolation that they will inevitably fixate attention. What could be more attractive than a willowy lady with locks of hair flying wild in the wind, encircled in the frame of a hoop that might serve as the foundation of an equally flowing skirt? Dorothy Ann’s insight is the truth that contrivance is what lies behind the effects that we take for granted as natural; the essence of goth is that death is always already present in what we take to be primitive passion. Female viewers might experience what Dorothy Ann herself claims to feel—wrestling with the thought of mortality. This series, she says, helped her overcome the angst. (Michael Weinstein)

Through June 27 at Gallery 203, 1579 N. Milwaukee

RECOMMENDED

Decidedly discontent with what passes for contemporary civilization, Daniel Everett deploys its archetypal instrument—the computer—to create ominous, gloomy and, in his words, alienating blue-gray and light-gray photographic images of crumpled wads of unintelligibly scrawled paper (pages from his personal journal) in otherwise empty rooms; cubist paper constructions floating like trash in billowing clouds; and straight-looking batteries of surveillance cameras bristling from the tops of light poles. Remember how you have experienced your existence on relentlessly dank days when you let your attention focus on the remnants of failure or the manifestations of merciless and unfeeling institutional discipline, and you will recognize Everett’s despondent sense of life. One of photography’s services is to alert us to our manifold moods; like it or not, what Everett discloses is all too real and disquietingly familiar. (Michael Weinstein)

Through June 14 at Scott Projects, 1542 N. Milwaukee

RECOMMENDED

The “Artists Run Chicago” showcase, which opened at the Hyde Park Art Center last month, shed a reifying light upon a phenomena that nearly all parties involved in the Chicago art world consider second nature—the artist-run space. What the “Artists Run” show at HPAC manages to convey is the immense and varying breadth of sophistication, from the spotlessly clean, to the hopelessly beer-soaked, which such spaces collectively display. Dan Devening’s studio-turned-exhibition space represents the most pristine commercial-like end of the artist-run spectrum. Likewise, Devening lays claim to an attractive reservoir of talent. Recently, he turned over the reins, and responsibilities, of his role as curator (not to mention his last remaining morsel of personal studio space) to gallery assistant Thomas Roach and recent SAIC graduate Xavier Jimenez, who have put together an impressive conglomeration of work from the Devening database.  Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

“From a Position,” like Russian nesting dolls, begins with a single question that leads to another, then another, and so on. Initially questioning the relationship between a piece of art and its subject, the viewer is encouraged to further contemplate artworks’ relationship to the gallery space, other artworks and the position of self-as-viewer.

The exhibition’s relationships are the actual focus; the show’s strength comes less from the individual power of the pieces and more from their play with one another, the gallery and the viewer. Pieces that don’t “play” with others aren’t as compelling; two drawings by Lucy McKenzie, presenting figures without settings, appear detached from the show (in part due to their placement) and retreat rather than engage. The gallery’s four separate areas reinforce the separation and unification of specific pieces. Upon entering, viewers are blocked by Jason Loebs’ “Barricade.” This translucent plexiglass barricade decorated with barricade-centric articles, forces viewers to alter their entry into the galleries. Other pieces are far subtler in manipulating the gallery environment. The syncopated beats in “Nevercage,” a sound piece by Heather Guertin and Zak Prekop, are so slow that, without a visual component, viewers may initially mistake the sounds as belonging to the building’s old pipes. (Or perhaps credit it to the metal facets in Valerie Snobeck’s installation, which is successfully undifferentiated from the gallery space—appropriate for a show that questions context.) The show’s other works, more clearly defined from the gallery surroundings, may also be read as both subjects and backgrounds. Though this twofold reading of artwork is not exclusive to this exhibition, the old Evanston Art Center manse as a venue certainly heightens the effect more than a white cube could. (Patrice Connelly)

Through June 28 at the Evanston Art Center, 2603 Sheridan Rd., Evanston

Max Gaisser (1857-1922), "The Notary Public"

By Chris Miller

Five hundred years ago, a visionary (and successful) businessman such as Eckhart Grohmann might have built a monastery, chapel or temple to enshrine his legacy—and in a way that’s exactly what he did two years ago on the campus of the Milwaukee School of Engineering. Recycling a four-story office building, he added a triumphant tower at the corner, embellished it with mosaics for the floor, murals for the encircling walls, and stained-glass windows for the ceiling of his regal, circular office that sits on top like the captain’s bridge on a ship.

The rest of building, all three floors of it, was filled with 700 artworks that celebrate the passion of his lifetime: good, old-fashioned hard work (especially in factories, like the kind he used to own as former chairman and president of Milwaukee’s Aluminum Casting & Engineering Co. ). Wow! A museum about working people—there’s nothing else like it, Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

With a bevy of his black-and-white street portraits of blind Mexican children now on view at the Cultural Center, we get a chance here to look at what Jed Fielding captures when he encounters sighted young subjects who can respond to the camera at will. Whereas the Mexican series was inevitably voyeuristic, the tables are turned in this one, which was shot in Italy, Spain and Mexico. Especially when the kids are in groups and have leaders, they stand up to Fielding and mug outrageously, admire their expressive friends, or simply ignore the photographic event going down. Feistiness rules the roost, as the leaders glower like fierce protectors, smile with sly superiority, stare down the shooter with intensity, or vogue in masks and seductive poses. Taken together, Fielding’s two shows make the obvious point, which bears reinforcement, that sight is a glorious gift of power. (Michael Weinstein)

Through July 3 at Catherine Edelman Gallery, 300 W. Superior

Robert Mapplethorpe

RECOMMENDED
From William Wegman’s notoriously fey portraits of his beloved Weimaraner dogs and Lucas Samaras’ tiny and decidedly unflattering funky Polaroid self-portraits, through Joel Sternfeld’s biting and luscious color photographs of the (de)humanized American landscape and Candida Hofer’s cold color studies of depopulated institutional interiors, to Robert Mapplethorpe’s signature sculptural yet flowing impressions of body parts, this show throws us back to the heydays of postmodern subversion, criticism and play, when shooters shot out in every conceivable direction. Forget the last decades of the twentieth century, though, and find the treats in the back room in Eugene Von Bruenchenhein’s small black-and-white erotic photos of sultry and voluptuous Marie, particularly the triptych of negative images of her face in which she appears as a wild witch. Von Bruenchenhein shot in the 1940s, when political correctness was not yet ascendant and film noir and the femme fatale reigned supreme. (Michael Weinstein)

Through July 11 at Russell Bowman Art Advisory, 311 W. Superior

The concept for Believe Inn’s current show is Ferris Bueller’s Day Off-as-fetish-object, with three artists contributing drawings inspired by the film. Porous Walker’s pornographic cartoons cover most of the walls and ceiling, featuring men and women with oversized breasts and genitals, and often retail store name tags, handing each other lattés and commenting on one another’s bodies. These are described as “deleted scenes” and delight in their own vulgarity more than most adult audiences could. Timothy Pigott’s drawings of “characters not in the movie” comprise portraits, mostly of sad, middle-aged men looking, for example, for the Ferrari stolen in the movie. Finally, Gabe Levinson’s sketches of “dudes thinking about dudes,” as was described to me, are precisely that, and fairly boring doodles to boot. At the opening, “Ferris Bueller” was playing in the adjoining room as a performance element—far more provocative, unfortunately, than the art it inspired. (Monica Westin)

Through June 21 at Believe Inn, 2043 N. Winchester