Study #19

By Jason Foumberg

After his death, in 2006, the artist Robert Heinecken’s ashes were collected in salt shakers, the kind you see in a diner. This was not inconsistent with the artist’s irreverent sense of humor, and his widow, Joyce Neimanas, distributed the salt shakers to more than a hundred friends and relatives. The remaining undistributed salt shakers were placed in possession of the Heinecken Trust, in Chicago, directed by Luke Batten, the artist’s former studio assistant, who gives them away as he sees fit, in consultation with Neimanas, to artists who may not have known Heinecken personally but who find inspiration from his body of work. After receiving one such salt shaker as a memento, photographer Jason Lazarus asked Batten and Neimanas for their blessing to use Heinecken’s cremains in a new photo project, now called “Heinecken Studies.” Lazarus recently debuted the twenty-five prints on his website, and in email and Facebook announcements.

Where some people choose to have their cremains scattered over scenic cliffs, or buried with seedlings, or cast into outer space (such as Timothy Leary’s), Heinecken left no specific last wishes for his bodily remains. The contents of Lazarus’ shaker were brought into the darkroom, dusted over photographic paper and exposed as photograms. Lazarus made the twenty-five prints in succession, in a single sitting, in what he calls an “aesthetic daisy chain,” where each image is a response to the previous one. Unlike a black-and-white darkroom, where red safety lights guide the hand, a darkroom for color exposures must be pitch-black. Lazarus toyed with the color dials, leaving much to chance, and used special flashlights to “burn” the exposures with light—a wink to the cremation process itself. The results are luminous gradations of saturated color, from blood red to sky blue to somber black, with the chalky white bone fragments cast about in little piles. It’s not as grotesque as it sounds; in fact, as a photographic process, it’s quite fun and improvisational, characteristics of art-making that Heinecken himself would approve. Read the rest of this entry »

Upon attending the opening of Richard Rezac’s third solo show at Rhona Hoffman, I remembered how old I am.

Like many of my peers, I consider Rezac’s work inseparable from the mythology of Minimalism, a period of art history we simply did not experience, born too late. While our pilgrimages to Marfa may help us to feel more acquainted with this period, Minimalism is our ornery grandfather whose offspring founded IKEA and gave birth to a breed of infidels with limited concern for geometry. By the time we came to cognition, people weren’t arguing about rectangles anymore. Everyone seemed so worried about AIDS, crack and the Gulf War, that splitting hairs over formalism didn’t seem to make sense anymore. Recently, we found credence in a group of artists dubbed “Unmonumental,” or post-Minimalism part two, precisely because it contaminated the sensibilities of a generation of artists we never fully understood.

Richard Rezac, however, grew up during the height of most monumental of all Minimalism; Carl Andre and Walter De Maria surely became Apollonian idols of the artist as a young man, but his work over the last three decades is not a mere placeholder in this clearly living history. Between works newly installed in the Art Institute’s Modern Wing and the solo show at Rhona Hoffman, Rezac demonstrates an ongoing inquiry into the geometries of environments ranging from Baroque cathedrals to a child’s bedroom.   Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Drawn to the recesses of densely wooded public parks, Jennifer Ray seeks out evidence of male sexual encounters—a spent condom, a pair of briefs, a Styrofoam cup—and shoots the tell-tale details in color, so that they are small, yet obtrusive elements of the larger verdant scene. Eric Bessel takes color portraits of women posed in gestures and sporting expressions that betray distress, bitterness or hostility. Helen Maurene Cooper dolls women up in kitschy costumes, places them against decorative mannerist backgrounds, and snaps them in color as they vogue like fashion models, sometimes tough, sometimes dreamy. Grant Ray puts ordinary objects into compositions suggesting “pseudo-scientific experiments,” as when he goes into the wooded glen, plants an electrical gizmo there, and shoots the scene in color, proving that you can do other things in the park than have sex. You can read the artists’ statements if you want an overdose of cultural theory, but their work boils down to crossing the boundary from the illusory world of normal certitude to the wilderness of the seamy psycho-dramas that surround the islands of sanity that we so painfully attempt to construct. (Michael Weinstein)

Through February 18 at Barbara & Barbara Gallery, 1021 N. Western

Michael Smith

RECOMMENDED

Memories lost and only imperfectly recovered, drenched in pathos and poignancy, permeate Michael Smith’s multiple-exposure black-and-white photographs of the rubble left by the demolition of buildings backgrounded by partially standing edifices (“Deconstruction Series”), and the interiors of his father’s house, blurred and rendered distant by double vision. As visual poetry, Smith’s images concentrate emotion and radiate the age-old wistful theme that everything that is shall pass, as much as we might wish to hold it fast. Nowhere is Smith’s message more deeply projected than in “In the Bedroom, Haunting Memories,” in which the modest room is wreathed in shadows but for a circle of light, in which the faded figure of a boy appears in a clouded mirror over a dresser. For relief from tristesse, look at Jennifer Bisbing’s miniature black-and-white photos of finely etched weeds in Humboldt Park, soaring to the heavens like stately trees; and Julian Gordon’s color macro-studies, cut into squares and then rejoined into “mosaics,” of softly focused bees feasting on lush flowers. (Michael Weinstein)

Through February 20 at Coalition Gallery, 2010 W. Pierce

"Form with Suggested Content"

RECOMMENDED

In the exhibition “Object Lesson,” John Fraser treats his own oeuvre, spanning twenty-something years, like a series of found objects from which to assemble a collage, offering a palimpsest of his career, revisiting past trends and former concerns in linen, mosaic and book-binding fragments. There is a haunting quality to many pieces—puttied-over traces of pulled staples, mottled glue along an eviscerated book spine)—but the show centers around “Form with Suggested Content,” a framed collage featuring a closed envelope. Here we have the unspoken enticement of narrative inherent in a found object, the jarring balance of collage, the shades of bottomless neutral washing from monochrome into subtle color play and, of course, the inlaid envelope itself, waiting for our response.

Fraser’s pieces sometimes pull optical tricks, oscillating positive and negative space. The inner edges of otherwise blank pages float to the foreground in “Westport Island Memory” while in “Composition with Similar Forms I” the sense of the immediately physical fades, leaving work more akin to landscape painting than collage. “(In The) Absense of Rhetoric,” a diptych of aligned canvas panels, achieves tricks through the stitching and asymmetry of affixed pieces of fabric. But this piece, with its weeping pigment and ghostly squares, striped in slate-blue, transfixes also because it is so elusively allusive. Is this a reference to the uniforms of the death camps or swatches of aprons from a lost childhood? The absence, here, of “sense,” of anything like “rhetoric” casts a heavy presence. A quiet painting, it whispers insistently.

“Object Lesson,” as a whole, tantalizes, like an unexpected letter of such promise, such possibility, that one keeps it sealed as long as possible, just to increase the anticipation. (Spencer Dew)

Through March 2 at Roy Boyd Gallery, 739 N. Wells.

Marlene Alt

RECOMMENDED

The catalog essay that accompanies the exhibition “The Object of Nostalgia” opens with a lengthy Oscar Wilde quote, who insists that we must pay for our emotions, and despite post-modernism’s refutation of the sentimental, it is challenging at best to believe that we are personally paying for anything more than the technologies we hold in our hands to distract us from everything outside the purview of a screen.

Which is why this show caught my attention. Perhaps you, too, will disappear from the catastrophe of human existence and return to the bliss of a time when everyone you knew didn’t tweet their minutiae into space. You can remember how it felt to first understand that you had the ability to make a mark; that your hand could control this marvel, this tool called the “pencil.” You can recall the round-edged family photos which always appeared to be drowning in browns, yellows, drab greens and blues, and frequented by hairstyles you hoped would never resurface. Or maybe it’s just me, and because I’ve reflected—maybe longingly at times—on my own youth, I’ve been able to better gauge my adulthood. You can nearly smell the mothballs of your grandmother’s antique hope chest filled with blankets hand-knitted by relatives from the old country. You can experience how moments of perceptual history float up behind your eyes, a virtual “best” and “worst” greatest-hits of your life. Read the rest of this entry »

Malevich at Waymaker Gallery

By Jason Foumberg

My friend half-believes that some of those spam emails with strange, nonsensical texts are coded terrorist communications worming their way through our machines and minds. “I may be able to arrange with these people about the funeral, about all the practical things that are so frightful a burden to the living who have loved the dead,” reads one ominous-sounding email text, accompanied by an ad for erectile-dysfunction medication. A little bit of googling reveals this to be an excerpt from Robert Smythe Hichens’ “The Call of the Blood,” a 1906 romantic novel. Scanning my other spam emails I uncover excerpts from other novels, including “Black Beauty” and “The Beautiful Wretch,” all of which are books in the public domain and free to read in full on websites like Project Gutenberg.

While computer and Internet technology are supposed to be thrilling new mediums for art, culture, society, whatever, it’s often the weird old stuff that tugs most at my attention. The spammers are clearly using excerpts from Victorian literature to sneak their ads into my inbox, and I read them occasionally because they’re funny little doses of highbrow culture that interrupt my day’s usual tasks. Sometimes it’s total nonsense, like freeform Irish Dadaist poetry. “Reef be brewery may try ghoul in or adverbial some.” Strange, but kind of likable. Read the rest of this entry »

Ryan Shultz

“Why have artists chosen to work in a medium that is retrograde at best, and at worst outdated?” This is the question answered by fifty-two MFA candidates or recent graduates, as selected by Sergio Gomez, the in-house curator of the Zhou B. Art Center. Invitations were mailed to over 400 MFA programs in the United States, and 255 artists responded to what might be the first national MFA exhibition devoted exclusively to painting (or, actually, “the embodiment of the idea of painting,” where any materials could be used, as long as paint was among them, and it could be hung on a wall).

This is quite an ambitious project, and unlike most national juried shows, there was no entrance fee. It was funded entirely by sponsors, mostly the industrious Zhou Brothers, who have been very generous to the art community they joined twenty-five years ago, when they moved to Chicago possessing not much more than MFAs from the National Academy of Art and Crafts in Beijing. But an MFA program in a twenty-first century American university is probably quite different. Here, the emphasis is more on art theory than art practice. So, each of the fifty-two paintings on display are accompanied by texts that run the gamut of postmodern art theory, and since both images and texts can be seen online at visualarttoday.com, one might then ask: is this an exhibit that really needs a brick-and-mortar gallery to be seen? Are there any subtle visual relationships that get lost in cyberspace? And, regretfully, I think the answer is no—especially when compared with the vibrant paintings that older, local artists have hung upon the many corridor walls that wind throughout five floors of the Zhou B. Art Center. Except, perhaps, for local MFA Ryan Shultz, whose art theory is as retrograde as his painting: “Painting demands time, pause, reflection—it slows down our techno-pace…and offers a space for contemplation.” More common in this exhibition is a catechism like this one, from Michael Hubbard: “The most effective painting today must involve a rearranging and re-contextualizing of the definitions, qualities and histories of painting.” Hopefully, the next Zhou B national show will focus a bit more on visuality, like the national self-portrait show they’ve been running for six years. What about a national show for landscapes? Or geo-form abstraction? Or—heaven forbid—the human figure? Can’t universities collaborate on their own national MFA shows like they already do with basketball tournaments? (Chris Miller)

“Wet Paint” shows at the Zhou B. Art Center, 1029 W. 35th Street, through February 28.

"Water Castle, Valparaiso, Chile"

RECOMMENDED

If you need your vision lifted in an orgy of magnificent architectural gestures, then Michael Parker will fill the bill with his black-and-white shots of soaring edifices, from inside and out, that would dwarf us were they not presented in the most accessible medium-format ultra-lucid prints. By shooting majestic skyscrapers, monumental public art, ornate ceilings and geyser-like fountains—always forcing our eyes to be raised—and then downsizing them in the prints, Parker allows us to play with the sublime and reduce it to the beautiful, yet still powerful, twists and turns and details. Only once does Parker break with his program; in his misty yet clearly delineated study, “Water Castle, Valparaiso, Chile,” he  gives us an inviting view of the fairy-tale structure that exudes pictorialist beauty and shows us where we must suspect that his heart lies. (Michael Weinstein)

Through February 20 at David Weinberg Gallery, 300 W. Superior

Vanessa Bell, "Virginia Woolf," ca. 1912, oil on paper board. Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA, gift of Ann Safford Mandel, class of 1953.

RECOMMENDED

Intimate portraits of well-loved Bloomsbury-era British artists and writers in their cozy interiors and idyllic exteriors are sure to please. Artists in this remarkable group—Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, Dora Carrington, E.M. Forster—gathered around the creative hub of the sisters Vanessa and Virginia in the Bloomsbury district of London or various country cottages for creative stimulation or conversation about “art, sex or religion” freely (as Woolf said). Carrington’s charming, cartoonish drawings are an unexpected surprise. Crockery, decorative arts and household goods display the good intentions of the Omega Workshop, Roger Fry’s brainchild to create high-quality, handcrafted goods by anonymous artists. However short-lived, the workshop’s principles still inspire. Tantalizing explanations of the group’s romantic relationships may inspire visitors to do some googling of their own. (Kelly Roark)

Through March 14 at the Block Museum of Art, Arts Circle Drive, Northwestern University