"What Color is my Parachute?" photo by James Prinz

Like many Americans, Shawnee Barton is closing out 2009 without a day job. As an artist, however, her loss of a regular paycheck also meant becoming a full-time art-maker. As welcome as that is, the change presents plenty of problems: with more time to work and fewer resources to make work with, the nature and function of her art-making has had to adapt. In her latest show, “Artist: Unemployed,” Barton addresses the private economics of creativity with work created during her unemployment.

Shawnee’s experiences aren’t uncommon, and much of her latest work has the kind of so-true familiarity of a comic monologue. With such heavy, consequential content to deal with, Shawnee’s humor acts as a psychological buoy without sacrificing the content itself, avoiding outward angst by showing inward critique. “There are many artists out there making work about the economy on a macro level by doing things like taking photographs of foreclosed homes, writing narratives about failing industries, etc,” says Barton. “I chose to address it in a much more personal and therapeutic way because for me the easiest way to tackle big issues in life and art is to bring it down to a personal level and to keep a sense of humor.”

Humor takes on function in most of Barton’s work, adding accessibility to work that has in the past dealt with such difficult and introspective topics as personal identity formation, consumption habits and relationship dynamics. Read the rest of this entry »

Following a recent tendency of postmodern photo-artists to take their conceits to extremes, Gregory Scott piles medium upon medium by taking photographs of interiors and hanging framed videos of himself performing in scenes that he has painted on the walls of the spaces he has shot. Once the meta-photographic novelty has worn off, which takes a while, the viewer is left to fathom any deeper meaning, which is not immediately apparent. In Scott’s most representative photo-work, we are drawn into a museum gallery where we contemplate an ornately framed video in which our (anti-)hero walks back and forth along a rural road, sweeping it, flying a kite, getting out of a taxi, and strolling with a woman, among many other unrelated and mundane activities; then, in medias res, the artist invades the video and tries unsuccessfully to hang a picture over it, and then the road play resumes to no obvious purpose. This is meta-photography spiked with dada—a hyper-elaborate shaggy-dog story. (Michael Weinstein)

Through January 2 at Catherine Edelman Gallery, 300 W. Superior

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It’s not surprising that the strong, simple woodblock prints of Unichi Hiratsuka (1895-1997) would appeal so much to Chicago structural engineer Theodore Van Zelst (1923-2009) whose family just donated his collection to the Art Institute. The artist’s grandfather was an architect, and the sense of gravity weighs heavily on the grandson’s bold depictions of earth and buildings, while the collector innovated the study of soil for its load-bearing potential. Hiratsuka was an innovator as well, being among the founders of Sosaku Hanga and the first teacher of wood block printing at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1935. Sosaku Hanga is the modern version of Japanese woodblock printing that unites design, wood-cutting, and printing into the hands of one skilled artist instead of three. What is lost in delicacy is gained in boldness. But beyond that technical aspect, everything else is open to the widest variety of expression. Many Sosaku Hanga artists rose to prominence in the postwar era for their abstract or neo-primitive designs, but Hiratsuka’s work seems more like a simplified version of the nineteenth-century, with a love of landscapes and occasionally young, naked women. And he lived a very long time—allowing him two almost separate lives, with his last thirty years spent with his daughter in Washington D.C., patronized by presidents and making images of national monuments. His strong, cheerful, extensive oeuvre is something of a monument itself—a monument to a life well spent in the catastrophic twentieth century. (Chris Miller)

Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Ave.

Eaters, 1981

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Promiscuous in her choice of subjects and ever experimenting with photographic techniques, Barbara Crane has represented the culmination of photographic modernism through her six-decade career. In this lavish exhibit honoring her life’s work that began when Chicago was, for a brief moment, the world center of photography, we get to see the dizzying array of the genres that she practiced, from informal street photography through the most disciplined and precise renditions of objects from nature, such as driftwood. Throughout all her myriad projects, Crane has adhered to the rules of respecting her processes and putting her subjects above any indulgence of her own subjective tastes and prejudices, seeking to connect with the world on its terms rather than to impose meaning on it. Among the many series on display here, the most intriguing are experiments that were never widely shown, such as “Wipe Outs,” in which Crane transferred transparencies to Polaroid negatives, producing ghostly, indeed ghastly, portraits that are intensely expressive of emotion. (Michael Weinstein)

Through January 10 at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington

1963

By Bert Stabler

This year marks the centennial of F. T. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto, as many art fans probably know. Somewhat fewer art fans may be counting down to next year’s anniversary of Pope Pius X’s 1910 encyclical, the “Oath Against Modernity,” which, while diametrically opposed to Marinetti in attitude, shares much of his fierce vision of an absolute and triumphant Reason. And, caught between (and somewhat after) these two grand phallic statements of the cultural epoch, we find the colorful, thoughtful, and humane artwork of Corita Kent, also known as Sister Mary Corita.

Kent was born in 1918, and attended Catholic schools in Los Angeles, joining the Order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in 1938. She learned silkscreen printing while in graduate school for art history at the University of Southern California, and won a local art contest in 1952 held by the Los Angeles County Museum with a print titled “The Lord is with Thee.” In her work of this period, she used bold colors and a Picasso-esque appropriation of simplified gestural renderings of sacred illuminations and calligraphy.

1964

She was eventually censured by the Los Angeles Archbishop, in keeping with the aforementioned “Oath Against Modernity,” and was told to stop rendering the human form in a contemporary style. In the 1960s, inspired by the civil rights movement and the progressive statements made in the Second Vatican Council, an expression of liberation theology that ran directly counter to the reactionary approach exemplified by Pius X, Sister Corita began making prints that combined large cropped commercial text, reminiscent of Pop Art, with handwritten quotes from literature, Scripture and politics that expressed her opposition to war, racism and economic inequality. In 1968 she left her order. She ended up leaving the Church, as well as the West Coast. She moved to Boston, where she made much more subdued work, and came to identify herself as a Jungian and a Buddhist. In 1985 one of her prints kicked off a long series of U.S. postage stamps, simply titled “Love”; she died of cancer the next year. Read the rest of this entry »

“Pothole City! It looks like the streets of Chicago in here!” an Art Institute guard jokes to a co-worker stationed inside Monica Bonvicini’s new Focus exhibition. He’s looking down at the cratered surface of a floor that’s been covered with polystyrene foam and plasterboard and then broken (by the museum’s own staff) in numerous places. Titled “Plastered,” the piece has been reconfigured twenty-three times around the globe since it was first shown in 1999. It sits beneath an enormous hanging light sculpture composed of white fluorescent tubes. Blindingly bright, the lights are too painful to stare at directly for more than a few seconds.

Renzo Piano has described his Modern Wing as “a temple of light…a building about light and lightness.” Bonvicini’s installation offers a deconstructive counterpoint to these celebrated ethereal qualities—theoretically, anyway. Just days after the exhibition opened, and the false floor theatrically pre-broken, visitors attempted to aid its deconstruction by stomping new holes in its surface. The rowdy kids jackhammered with their feet while museum guards looked on nervously, unsure if the “rules” for this particular work of interactive art allowed for such behavior or not. (Note that it’s usually the guards, not the viewing public, who must bear the conceptual burdens of artistic “interventions” like these.) The floor soon boasted quite a few more indentations than before, but the detritus was cleaned up in favor of a more groomed messiness. Read the rest of this entry »

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The signs of these times seem to be predominantly distress signals. At Monique Meloche Gallery’s new location in Wicker Park, six artists from various regions of the United States of America weigh in to qualify recession blues in two and three dimensions. Let’s start in the middle, De Moines, where Michael Patterson-Carver renders average Americans voicing now ubiquitous concerns. A place where Boteroesque Iowans gather in watercolor to lobby for healthcare and employment may also be a place ripe with vacant commercial real estate.

Kim Beck dominates the façade of the Division Street location, with monumental signage simply soliciting space. Part of an ongoing project, “Everything Must Go,” is comprised of hand-drawn signage announcing liquidation. Beck turns the lens to the employees pronouncing impending vacancies, affirming that the work is intended to speak to “the more personal repercussions of the economic collapse.” Carrie Schneider seems equally entranced by the ghosts of retail past. “Recession,” the inspiration for “Sign of the Times,” is a self-portrait of the artist as exasperated consumer doing some recession-style window shopping, her torso flaccid, gracing the surface of an empty storefront. (In December, Schneider will address the MCA 12×12 space with “Slowdance,” a short film made in Helsinki.) Read the rest of this entry »

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Jim Lutes’ mid-career retrospective at the Renaissance Society last winter silenced any doubts regarding the painter’s status as one of Chicago’s preeminent living artists. It also showed that Lutes, after producing exceptional work for over twenty years, is only now—owing to an unexpected encounter with egg tempera—reaching the top of his game and continuing to improve. His latest show at Valerie Carberry stands as further evidence of his ascendant arc. The paintings haven’t changed drastically since the retrospective; instead, they intensify the program he began years ago.

It seems there are two distinct types of paintings on display, the divide epitomizing a contention between figuration and abstraction in Lutes’ work, though neither side wins, as even the most earnest photorealism quickly meanders, almost disappearing, into characteristic ribbon-like flourishes. The seemingly pure abstractions, composed entirely of the ribbons, concentrate, or perhaps coagulate, into concentric masses reminiscent of an overburdened body. Read the rest of this entry »

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With Konstantin Grcic, it’s all about probjects. That is, the project-based design of an object. In the first major American exhibition of Grcic’s work, the Art Institute brings together a collection of the designer’s chairs, pens, shelving, tables, silverware, serving ware, stools and fixtures. The collection illustrates the energetic output of the German designer, who reinvents his design approach for each project/object (or probject).

Grcic started out as a cabinetmaker. But his curiosity outgrew the narrow design questions posed by cabinets and perhaps it was because he built so many empty ones that Grcic began dreaming up new things to fill them with. He writes, “We can never speak about objects without imagining people using them.” And how else do you use a cabinet except to fill it with things? Read the rest of this entry »

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Yellowed book pages with grainy black-and-white illustrations from the fictional “Nicholas Frank Biography” hang in Western Exhibitions as a part of Nicholas Frank’s new show, titled “Reality, whatever that is.” These ruthlessly self-referential pages chronicle events from Frank’s past exhibitions and projects, including the Hermetic Gallery in Milwaukee. They adopt the look, feel, syntax and grammar of an art-historical monograph. Frank writes in third person, alternately A) lampooning the self-important style of art writing or B) sincerely analyzing the ideological basis for his artistic output. In order to complete task A he packs in superfluous details including hearsay and quotations from friends, snapshots with captions, self-defeating references to his unknowable emotional states and other private information. Additionally, Frank likes to dangle important concluding thoughts from the last paragraph deliciously just off the page. Read the rest of this entry »