By Jason Foumberg

It’s not a mystery why Liam Gillick is so well liked. The British-born artist embodies a freewheeling creative pursuit: at turns he is an installation artist, graphic designer, writer, thinker, filmmaker, collaborator and anything else he feels like doing. Meanwhile, he’s wrapped all these various activities into a professional and successful career. Also, he dresses like a gentleman but isn’t afraid to use a lot of color in his sculptures, both of which can be pretty disarming—who doesn’t appreciate a colorful gentleman?

But it’s also not a mystery why Gillick is so disliked. Visitors to the MCA, where Gillick’s show recently opened, “run the risk of being completely alienated” by the art, writes Monica LaBelle in a recent review. “Prepare to be totally confused,” warns her  headline. Such responses exemplify the fear that black magic runs the art world, transforming bullshit into billionaires, with Gillick as its posterboy. Why are his Minimalist-flavored plexiglass cubes better than any others? (And I think they are more CB2 than Ikea.) LaBelle advises visitors to “do their homework” on Gillick before they attend the show, which means watching his lectures on YouTube. But LaBelle never followed her own advice. Her public declaration is final: Gillick is alienating and confusing.

Gillick’s problem isn’t merely his critical reception, but also, and mostly, his presentation. Oddly, viewing a Gillick exhibition doesn’t seem to be the best way to understand the fullness of his artistic position. Since he’s so multifaceted, the exhibition is just one component among many others. In 2004 the MCA presented a show by German artist Kai Althoff who, like Gillick, dips his hands in many creative jars. The show was full of art, objects, ephemera and music, and it dramatized the artist’s life and scene in a way that I was surprised a museum exhibition could. So, what happened here? In Gillick’s exhibition visitors find out he is a writer with many books published, and this is a major part of his practice. These books are arranged, covers closed, beneath glass in a case, and totally inaccessible. They are not digitized and available for viewing nearby. This may explain, in part, a viewer’s frustration with the art. Read the rest of this entry »

The Seychelles sheath-tailed bat

As studio artists, Jenny Kendler and Molly Schafer felt limited in the amount of time and money they could spare to champion “the magical and natural world” that they both care deeply about. Through their previous collaborations they learned that activism sometimes works better outside the gallery system. “We found there exists enormous gaps between artists and activists,” Kendler says. It’s not only awareness campaigns, but also, and mostly, money that makes a tangible contribution to activist projects. One-hundred percent of the profits from the Endangered Species Print Project are contributed to specific foundations and research groups.

Kendler and Schafer began by researching the population of the Seychelles Sheath-Tailed Bat, numbering a dangerously low thirty-seven. Accordingly, they created a print depicting the bat in an edition of just thirty-seven. Through their project Kendler and Schafer have been able to work directly with organizations such as the Nature Protection Trust of Seychelles, Project Golden Frog and The Marmot Recovery Foundation. These organizations, composed of scientists and researchers, many times are the sole entity working to preserve a species, and as a result none of the groups the women contacted have ignored their requests. In addition to contributing funds, Kendler and Schafer have been able to compile reliable, current statistics on these species in a single source: their website. Read the rest of this entry »

Szu-Han Ho and Jesse Vogler

RECOMMENDED

For “Exhibition 2.10242009,” directors Daniel Baird, Jamie Keesling and Bret Schneider called upon eight artists to prepare site-specific interventions into the live/work space. This past August, the partners resurrected the apartment gallery formerly known as COMA, or California Occidental Museum of Art. Truly an artist-run space, Mvsevm also holds a concert series, titled Home Listening, and plan to launch a publication for print and web called How Moving.

Joe Cruz’s installation demands the most real estate at Mvsevm. Ravenous taxidermal squirrels pounce onto a burlap sack of ill-gotten fruit cinched by a bird in ten milliseconds; the time it takes for a synapse to fire. Cruz describes the piece as an allegory on the immediate failure of utopia; the polyphony of enterprising wildlife. The fruit mountain bears signage referencing the United Fruit Company, a neo-colonialist empire importing fruit from third-world countries throughout the twentieth-century, eventually becoming the Chiquita Brands International.

A pair of conjoined ceiling fans, titled “Foreclosure,” meets the goals of the exhibition most precisely, as prepared by North Room, a moniker for collaborations between Szu Han Ho and Jesse Vogler. The piece is part of an ongoing series, Home Improvements, a series of domestic sculptures made from household appliances. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Spatially, Medicine Cabinet occupies a grand total of Bridgeport resident Chris Smith’s bathroom medicine cabinet. Given the amount of available space, exhibiting artists are rather limited from the get-go, though Jesse Mclean finds an interesting solution by converting the usually reflective veneer of the gallery space (i.e., the cabinet’s mirror) into a white surface on which she projects a short video loop featuring every type of garishly “serene” imagery imaginable including: a wild horse charging through a meadow of wildflowers, a pair of logs quietly burning and a meandering mountain brook. The images promote an all-too-easy sense of calm; the same sense of calm the pharmaceutical advertisements from which they are loosely derived attempt to cultivate in order to hawk their products; but, as the accompanying audio track reminds us, such products “may cause” anything but calm.

A host of voices recite medical side effects ranging from the mild: stomachache and abdominal pain, to the penultimately severe: blindness, rounded out by the ultimate side effect: death. Cumulatively, “Side Effects” is a restatement of the now infamous dictum uttered by Mick Jagger, which once tore at the designed surface of the pharmaceutical industry more than forty years ago: though we may go “running” to the medicine cabinet “for the shelter of mommy’s little helper,” we should obviously read the warning label before ingesting such potentially dangerous substances. But things are different today, and many harbor at least some skepticism regarding pharmaceutical marketing campaigns in the wake of hundreds of deaths directly linked to the premature market availability of drugs like Fen-Phen and Vioxx; drugs made available in a push for quicker profit before the full scope of their side effects could be completely determined. The skepticism this work posits would seem so pervasive as to prompt an eye-roll were the images and voices not so charming and sarcastically funny. (Nate Lee)

Through November at Medicine Cabinet, 3216 S. Morgan, apartment 4R

RECOMMENDED

Renowned in Chicago for his century-old plan to create a “city beautiful” here, pioneer urban planner Daniel Burnham was commissioned by Washington to do the same in 1904 for its newly acquired Asian trophy, the capital of the Philippines, Manila. Expecting to find Burnham’s legacy of a park and stately public buildings “obliterated” by progress and regress, photographer Tim Long saw in 2008 that the edifices had been preserved and were still being used for their appointed or similar purposes, adding an American early-modernist colonial architectural touch to a bustling megalopolis replete with shiny skyscrapers and motley slums. Long’s lush color shots of such structures as the Department of Tourism, City Hall, the main post office and Philippine Normal University, among a bevy of others, are straightforward architectural photography. The gems of this exhibit are his studies of the teeming, checkered, colorful and perpetually dilapidated dense concentrations of shanties and ramshackle flats in the ‘hoods that were undreamt of in Burnham’s vision. In that context, the artifacts of the American imperial project come off as anachronistic presences—contrapuntal elements in a polymorphous cityscape. (Michael Weinstein)

Through January 10 at City Gallery, 806 N. Michigan.

RECOMMENDED

In New York in the 1960s, Roy Lichtenstein turned dynamic Constructivist abstractions and the vitalistic paint drips of Abstract Expressionism into flat, print-ready graphics, and the Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto sought to eliminate artistic hierarchies by combining classical art objects with rag scraps and other common detritus. By the 1980s, graphic paint drips were on every day-glo bandanna, graffiti artists had gallery shows, and urban decay was a stock backdrop for Hollywood movies and punk album covers. Thaddeus Kellstadt’s post-everything installation at Second Bedroom, appropriately titled “After Effects,” uses a cheerful palette to comment bemusedly on the anti-grandiose ethos in contemporary object-making. The wall of his installation room features a lovely blue and pinkish-orange painting of a cracked brick wall, and a torn-out phone booth constructed from paint and cardboard. A dead plant made from plaster, wire and a disassembled plastic pot-leaf necklace swoons on the floor, and in a corner behind and above the door one discovers a drop-ceiling tile punctured by a rainbow forest of pencils. Outside the room, and across the nature-culture divide, is a set of six small paintings of leafless trees whose twigs are shimmering streaks across a simple sky made strange by Kellstadt’s intuitive use of color. There may be no possibility of epic poetry after the advent of steam power, to paraphrase Karl Marx, but Kellstadt’s work implies that sifting through the ruins of modernity doesn’t need to bum us out. (Bert Stabler)

Through November at Second Bedroom, 3216 S. Morgan St, apartment 4R

RECOMMENDED

John Delk’s work documents a specific project of accumulation and erasure that often relies on information gathered from various communications: headlines, newspaper photos, internet message boards, and binary code. In his art, he reworks these materials in ways that tend to collapse the original intentions of the textual or photographic artifact and instill in them something of the missing aura of mechanical reproduction. “Crier” is a chalkboard that is daily erased and reinscribed with posts Delk finds on the internet on specific subjects chosen for the piece. Each day, a new illegible pattern emerges, invoking Twombly to mask the internet’s massive accretion of knowledge and hearsay. “Stream” follows the same pattern, consisting of a twenty-inch hanging scroll hand-typed with run-together headlines from the last five years. It is a formal poem of sorts that records the traces of global events while rejecting their unified, narrative meaning. Other objects in the exhibition act as artifacts, such as “Fragment,” a laser-etched horse jaw presented in a plexi-fronted wooden case.  Even this piece comes with a certain amount of mystery and it is this deliberate inscrutability that marks the objecthood of Delk’s conceptually driven art. (Rachel Furnari)

Through December 5 at Thomas Robertello Gallery, 939 W. Randolph.

RECOMMENDED

When discussing “outsider” artists, the temptation is to rely on quirky biography as a predominant critical device. Never having been one to avoid temptation: James Castle was born deaf in rural Idaho, in 1900, to a poor family of farmers. He apparently never wanted to learn to sign or read lips. Instead, with no formal training, Castle surmounted the obstacles of his birth and circumstance and found his speech and life’s mission through the language of making pictures. Maudlin, but true.

None of this is particularly important when looking at the art except perhaps the deafness and the isolation—he was forced into a supremely inventive use of odd materials; Castle was like an art MacGyver, using soot and spit, the dye off wet crepe paper, ice-cream cartons, and really whatever he could get his hands on to make his drawings and constructions. Castle used what he had. As for the deafness, how often does one find Chuck Close or David Hockney’s disabilities dissected in reviews?

The work, even that of an “outsider,” should speak for itself, and in Castle’s case it does. His drawings possess great range and sophistication. He knew perspective, he knew line—Castle just knew how to draw. What makes him a great artist is his ability to subvert these techniques to his own unexpected ends. It is enough to look at the heads of his figures—composed of landscapes, light sockets, or even chairs—to be aware of the inventive mind and keen eye of a man who was an artist, outside, inside or anywhere else. (Erik Wennermark)

Through January 3 at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan.

RECOMMENDED

Google anything about Japanese prints and eventually you will end up at Floatingworld.com, an internet art dealer based right here in Chicago, which has just opened an amazing 8,200-square-foot display space in Lincoln Park. (That’s four times larger than the Buckingham Japanese print gallery at the Art Institute). It’s a simple, beautiful space, something like an upscale storefront restaurant, and perfect for the delectation of a genre that’s meant to be tasty and pleasing. The first entrée is a retrospective of Yozo Hamaguchi (1909-2000), an artist best known for his perfection of the laborious mezzotint technique that had all but disappeared in the twentieth-century. His monochrome kitchen table still-lifes from the 1950s feel like Japanese variants on  Giorgio Morandi, but as he further explored his medium, his work got smaller, more colorful, and ever more precious, to the point where he was making a new kind of graphic jewelry. And despite spending his adult life in Paris and San Francisco, his later work feels ever more Japanese—i.e., more natural and evanescent. Happily, the gallery displays these prints outside the protective but annoying glass frames that are so necessary in public museums. This exhibition also includes the metal plates that were used in the printing process. In the shrinking world of art galleries, this ambitious new space, with its large public exhibitions, is bucking the trend, and let’s hope it’s not as evanescent as the aesthetic it will display. (Chris Miller)

Through November 30 at Floating World Gallery, 858 W. Armitage, #148.

RECOMMENDED

The best-laid plans of city planners often go haywire, as this expertly curated exhibit, which traces the history of Chicago’s cityscape in five large eight-sided panels with photographs from a century of changing times and informative text, demonstrates. As we are shown, Daniel Burnham famously issued a Plan of Chicago in 1909 that envisioned a “beautiful city” that materialized only in part as other plans serving other interests successively offered up slums, el tracks, high-rise public housing projects rising out of intentional demolition of neighborhoods, expressways, O’Hare Airport, and the latest “Climate Action” for going green. Although each panel is worth a long look and a close read, “Remaking the South Side: 1946”—by razing communities and putting up projects—is the most telling. The text asks: “What did the planners imagine?” It answers: “Order out of chaos.” A shot of a thriving South Side commercial street in 1941 shows that they must have been blind. (Michael Weinstein)

Through 2010 at Chicago Architecture Foundation, 224 S. Michigan.