Inside the "Knowledge Box" by Ken Isaacs

By Jason Foumberg

It’s telling that no paintings are included in “Learning Modern,” an exhibition conceived to honor and update the twentieth century’s greatest artistic project. Modernism bloomed on canvas, its essences distilled via paint. But any office worker in downtown Chicago knows that Modernism also found expression in concrete, steel and glass. Despite its force and thrust, Modernism was (and remains) people friendly. It’s interactive. By inhabiting Modernist structures we carry its legacy, and we can barely ignore it; we can, however, shelve a crackly old canvas out of view. The persistence, and insistence, of Modern architecture may be one reason why painting was excluded from “Learning Modern.” Another reason may be that Wellington Reiter is an architect and urban planner, and the current president of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where “Learning Modern” is held. For Reiter, renewed attention to architecture and design signals a reorientation of the artist’s role in the world. Whereas painters work in private, their coded dialogue trained toward other painters, architects and designers mold human activity. Being relevant is back in style. It’s an ideal even the classical Modernists would abide. Read the rest of this entry »

"So Long Maryanne," 2002-2004

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If the mini-retrospective at The Arts Club of Chicago is a good indicator, painter Elizabeth Murray had an oddly uneven career for someone so successful. Most bad art is an acquired taste, like coffee or cigars, that a novice will not instinctively enjoy. If a respected friend praises it beyond measure, though, you may come to know that your mind can veto your gut, that sometimes pain beds with pleasure.

Murray is not like that. Her paintings are deliberate but unrewarding. It has been said that she resuscitated the Modernist tradition by pushing abstraction beyond its feasible end. Some artists played that game by courting the stark monochrome, but Murray turned abstraction into an absurd jumble. Her canvases are intentionally broken and warped, but they are not funny. She placed these shaped canvases into inconsequential groups. The clashes aren’t productive or transcendent. As transcendence is denied, no brute reality or subtle ambivalence is offered in its place. This is to say nothing of her colors, which are tepid and muddy. They are neither abject nor garish. Matte and glossy finishes of the same color are applied as if without difference, side by side. Since I do regularly enjoying painting, I searched the faulty canvases for clues to their existence. They are not ironic. They are not ‘so bad that they are good.’ They are not poignantly jarring, nor nihilistic, nor innovative, nor provisional, nor pleasant. Read the rest of this entry »

Jason Lazarus

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Death made the rounds this summer, feeding a national pastime of voyeurism with almost weekly sacrifices of major and minor celebrities. And Death continues to be very much on the scene in the newest photography exhibition to open in the Modern Wing. The impressive show features three talented artists: the unabashed Zoe Strauss with her straightforward documentary look at urbanism; the recondite Berlin-based Wolfgang Ploger with his abstractions of Internet searches; and Jason Lazarus, who may well be Chicago’s most incisively witty photographer.

Lazarus presents a collection of castaway snapshots collected over a number of years from flea markets. But he presents their backsides only, each with personally scrawled messages, as mothers are wont to do. The intentional refusal of the photographs’ image side may frustrate a viewer at first, but with a little patience it rewards with a form of tactile, open-source concrete poetry rivaling Found Magazine or a Joseph Grigely installation. Like little tombstones, the fading versos memorialize the fleeting physical interaction of handwriting. Read the rest of this entry »

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Marsden Hartley once said of the American Southwest, where he painted often, “I like the country very well for it is big and clean and true, and there is nothing dirty standing between one and the sunlight.” Dan Attoe’s current work dissects the romantic ideal behind this rather quaint seventy-year-old utterance and uncovers something unpleasant along the way.

In the small gallery at Western Exhibitions, Hartley comes to mind in a large drawing by Attoe, “Monument Valley.” Here, the barren Arizona landscape is rendered in thick red watercolor. Unlike Hartley’s picturesque Modernist landscapes, though, an interstate bisects the otherwise placid space and, most distinctly, a penis/man/talisman hangs under the sun. Read the rest of this entry »

Untitled, 1934-36

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In 1961, at the age of 49, Tony Smith was seriously injured in an automobile accident, and during his long recovery he began toying with simple cardboard constructions that would eventually be fabricated in steel and make him an icon of monumental Minimalist sculpture. But before then, he was a teacher, painter, architect and New York art-world groupie, and this exhibition gathers some of the small abstract paintings that he made in the 1930s and 1940s. Are they any good? Well, yes they are—and you can see that jazzy, rhythmic, aggressive sense of form that would eventually be found in his geometric sculpture (he denied being a “Minimalist”). Without those famous sculptures, though, these paintings would probably have never made it to a gallery on Michigan Avenue. Some of them seem like art-school projects in positive/negative space—while others are just homages to the art heroes of his day: Picasso, Jean Arp, Stuart Davis and Marsden Hartley. This doesn’t make them any less enjoyable, but perhaps these quiet studies are only interesting retroactively as we celebrate his large sculptures that abuse the public spaces into which they were placed. (Chris Miller)

Through October 31 at Valerie Carberry Gallery, Hancock Tower.

RECOMMENDED

We are often told to expect the unexpected; artist Trevor Reese creates it. Reese, from Brooklyn, exhibits nine small installations in a series of new work at Believe Inn, the final show in this summer-only art space. He says he aims to “create instances when the familiar generates hopeful opportunities and reverie.” Reese’s pieces are refined kitsch that manipulate found objects into surprising new objects. Taking everyday stuff such as turntables, images from books, and sticks, Reese changes their appearance and function. With movable parts, many make use of the fourth dimension. One wall-bound sculpture consists of fake-wood paneling with a pasted landscape scene atop it. A small circle rotates on the surface, slowly spinning the landscape in and out of alignment. For just a split second it appears normal, then the landscape cycles around again like the earth’s seasonal rotation or a time machine. (Shiloh Aderhold)

Through October 31 at Believe Inn, 2043 N. Winchester.

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Boasting one of the most comprehensive collections of Robert Motherwell’s graphic works in the world, the Walker Art Center is an important resource not only for Motherwell’s editioned prints but for the study of the New York School painter’s entire oeuvre, which spanned hundreds of lithographs, screenprints, collages, drawings and artist’s books and, of course, iconic paintings. This representative sampling of more than forty works on view in “Robert Motherwell: An Attitude Toward Reality,” an exhibition organized by the Walker and drawn exclusively from its own holdings, provides a well-focused overview of the artist’s career with a particular focus on his prints, drawings and collage works.

Motherwell’s study of psychoanalysis, psychic automatism, Carl Jung’s theories of unconscious creativity and the principles of Zen Buddhism, among numerous other areas of interest, led him to view abstraction and reality as a spectrum. The artist plumbed the material world and the subconscious alike for inspiration, extracting key gestures from both that helped him hone in on an individual style. Motherwell’s series of spare red pencil automatic drawings is but one example of how he used automatism to unearth a core gestural vocabulary from “the preconscious” mind, while another, more uncompromising approach to automatic techniques is seen in his exquisite “Lyric Suite” from 1965, a series of several hundred ink-on-Japanese-paper drawings executed one after the other without pause or subsequent alteration. Motherwell’s incorporation of bohemian detritus into collages and lithographs enabled him to tap into another type of reality, the sheet music, cigarette packages and wine labels he favored providing a fundamentally different yet equally powerful vehicle of self-expression. Read the rest of this entry »

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It happens to the best of postmodern photographers; at a certain age they give up cultural play and go for introspective new-age spirituality. At the tender age of 32, Melanie Schiff, who gained repute for her sportive performance shots, has made the great mid-life transition, presenting us with color images of landscapes and concrete and rock formations that—it must be said—favor blasted and graffiti-laden subjects that serve as “mirrors” of her soul, which has decidedly not yet passed into bucolic serenity. The viewer is the beneficiary of Schiff’s discontent and is treated to such delights as a view through a derelict underpass scrawled with fading aerosol tags and bathed in the red of dried blood. Rest assured, however, there is the hot light of a gray sky beckoning in the distance—the boulevard of broken dreams, leading to a clouded peace. (Michael Weinstein)

Through October 24 at Kavi Gupta Gallery, 835 W. Washington

RECOMMENDED

Addicted for a good while to placing girls’ and dolls’ clothing and accessories on photo-sensitive paper and coming up with glowing and pristine black-and-white negative impressions of her subjects, Karen Savage now has taken the step of scanning the little dresses and blouses directly into the computer and producing color images of the garb that exude a new sensibility of worn and faded childhood memories. Poignant and piquant, rather than fantastical, Savage’s scanned studies awaken flashbacks of going through old and forgotten garments stowed in boxes in the attic or the backs of closets, as when we see, in her banner work, a blouse embroidered in aqua patterns that must once have been ironed and shiny white, but is now wrinkled and dappled with blotches of tan, yellow and red—the stained traces of the spills and scrapes of outrageous childhood. (Michael Weinstein)

Through October 10 at Packer Schopf Gallery, 942 W. Lake.

Jeffrey Grauel

By Justin Natale

“I guarantee you, somebody will get lost.” It is Saturday evening and, as I stand on the platform at the Belmont station, a CTA employee with a sense of humor boisterously informs people of re-routed station arrivals. Trains of all colors and directions converge on just one platform. It shouldn’t be so difficult, but as I look around, hedging my bets on who I believe most likely to take the wrong train, the dual meanings of ‘get lost’ seem, for the first time, equally accessible.

Somewhere between a four-course meal and the Belmont disarray was “GroupSOLO,” at Swimming Pool Project Space, a rotation of four exhibitions within a single gallery, each lasting just one hour. In between acts the curtain did not drop and the house lights did not dim. Two preparators employed by the Art Institute of Chicago, Aza Quinn-Brauner and Daniel Baird, brought their gear in full view. Any notion of the pristine white -cube gallery—though it barely exists in the blue-painted Pool—was totally dismantled. If you’ve ever shown art in any type of gallery at any point in your career, you know that it always seems to come down to the last minute. In “GroupSOLO,” there were four of these. Read the rest of this entry »