Photo: Antone

By Rachel Furnari

When I arrived at Leroy’s, Chicago artist Theaster Gates was recording sound pieces with the Black Monks of Mississippi for his upcoming show at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Leroy turned out to be an actual person and the place turned out to be the converted first floor of his house in Humboldt Park, not the rehearsal space I assumed I was headed to when Gates invited me to watch a mass-choir rehearsal for the opening in Milwaukee. Of course, this wasn’t a rehearsal at all, and my insistent knocking during the recording session brought a Gates collaborator, Dara Epison, to lead me into the makeshift studio. Gates silently handed me headphones and I watched as he led the group with an understated confidence through a series of rhythmic Om chants that somehow blended the traditional low, repetitive hum with the intonations and shifting vocalizations of gospel and the blues. As the group passed the leadership of the chanting back and forth, Gates shifted seamlessly between his roles as the generative force in the collaboration and just another member of the chorus.

Although it was already after 8pm on a school night, it turned out that Gates was hoping to fit our interview in between another interview, for a Loeb Fellowship at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and a dinner at the Illinois Arts Council. On the way to the California Clipper, he apologetically picked up the call from Harvard. While I waited for Gates to return to his cosmopolitan, I had ample time to consider Gates’ recent rise to prominence in the national art scene. Read the rest of this entry »

Work by Eric Fleischauer, who will show at Three Walls Solo this year.

By Jason Foumberg

Sometimes I’m asked to serve as a juror to award artist prizes, grant money, and nominate and select artists for exhibitions. Juries, panels and committees are formed as an alternative to shadowy curatorial processes, dealer politics and critical biases. Instead of top-down conferment, it is hoped that panels parcel out praise in a fair and balanced way, and yet they are not often reported on.

Most recently I served on a daylong panel with four other visual-arts professionals in a large boardroom on the top floor of the Cultural Center. Each year the city of Chicago solicits applications from new and emerging artists in the city and awards small (under $1,000) grants. The artist names their price, submits a project proposal and gives examples of their work. The art is debated among the panelists, like a studio critique. We ask ourselves, is the project feasible? Will it help the artist advance their career?

The Community Arts Assistance Program (CAAP) is one of the few ways that an individual, unaffiliated artist in Chicago can receive funding for whatever project they choose, and even though the CAAP program was victim to significant cuts this year, and its application form looks daunting to fill out, it’s still pretty amazing that government-issued monies exist for artists. The panelists did not decide how much money each artist should receive. Instead, we scored each artist’s work, and the money will be distributed based on how those scores shake out. Read the rest of this entry »

"Portrait (Rembrandt)," 2009

Having gained repute for designing his own software processes to produce images that comment on art history and pop culture, Jason Salavon insists that information technology is, for him, “a means to an end,” although he admits to having “weird nerdy fun” manipulating the computer. His overarching end, says Salavon, is to “distill the complexity of life to make it more understandable.”

In his new digital photographic work on exhibit at Tony Wight Gallery, Salavon presents three works, each of which “averages” a number of different portraits by Rembrandt, Velazquez and van Dyck, respectively; that is, mashing them up into composite images in which the subjects come out etherealized into ghost-like figures bathed in incandescent auras. From normal viewing distance, the subjects are effaced, but on close inspection, the outlines of facial features are visible and a bit ghoulish. Salavon says that his intent was to set up a play between the styles of masters who were contemporaries, leaving it to viewers with a “cynical look” to judge that he has eliminated differences, and the more discerning to notice distinctions

Several years ago, Salavon embarked on a project to catalogue every centerfold from Playboy magazine into single images, one for each decade, as he has done here with the art-historical portraits. In the same body of work he blended seventy-six blowjob scenes, money shots and other pornographia. “Every Playboy Centerfold, the 1980s” recently graced the cover of a new book titled “Art/Porn: A History of Seeing and Touching,” by Kelly Dennis.

Salavon also offers up three digital photographic images of simulated mammal skulls that were generated fully in the computer and represent no creature that has ever walked the earth. As with the composite portraits, the skulls are somewhat monstrous, all of them sporting a fang. Salavon says that he was seized by the conceit of filling in missing branches of the evolutionary tree. Read the rest of this entry »

William Bonnell, "J. Ellis Bonham," March 5, 1825

RECOMMENDED

If the Art Institute had an attic, it would look exactly like Gallery 227, a strange narrow hallway on the second floor that wraps around the brick dome of the Ryerson Library. Until last year, it held temporary exhibitions of architectural drawings and models. In the recent reinstallation of the museum’s permanent collection, architecture and design moved to the Modern Wing, and Gallery 227 now houses the American Folk Art collection—except that not all of it is American, and it’s only “folk” because it defines a period of American art before modern European styles dominated the scene.

For example, there are commercial ceramics from Stratfordshire and Mexico, which are only American in that Americans once collected them. There is a fine set of nested baskets made by a specialist on the New York Stock Exchange as “a release form Wall Street’s pressures.” There is also a perspective view of Roxbury, Massachusetts by John Penniman (1782-1841), a highly skilled former assistant to Gilbert Stuart. If these two are “folk artists,” then who isn’t? So, like an attic, this gallery is full of surprises, including some fine portraits by a local hero of the underground railroad, Sheldon Peck (1797-1868), a professional artist who lived in Lombard, Illinois. And, of course, there’s plenty of old furniture, though not every attic has a transcendent Shaker sewing desk like the one found here. There’s almost enough great wood carving to have a gallery of its own, including a crucifix by one of New Mexico’s famous Santeros, Jose Benito Ortega (1858-1941), and a newly acquired carving by Leslie Bolling (1898-1958), who was almost a star of the Harlem Renaissance. There are also some significant omissions. Where are the toys, dolls, rifles, tools, iron work, and silverware? Hopefully this gallery of surprising stuff will eventually go into permanent rotation. (Chris Miller)

On view at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan. Digital catalogue of art on view in gallery 227: http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/search/citi/gallery%3AGallery+227

RECOMMENDED

One of the most gifted and accomplished street photographers still plying the trade, Susan Aurinko exploits the possibilities of such subjects as multi-layered peeling wall posters and mannequins shot through shop windows to produce intriguing complex images—mainly in traditional black and white—that finely balance the aesthetic power of abstraction with political and cultural meaning. Whereas most wall and window photographers today go for bold color that heightens hype and emotion, Aurinko’s studies are muted and nuanced, making us explore details that escape us in ordinary perception, and impelling us into a meditative mood. Aurinko demonstrates that she can also be thoroughly postmodern with two digital color prints depicting advertising posters of sultry insouciant women that are suffused with reflections from the street. Here she also strikes a balance, this time between her native subtlety and the assertiveness of her medium. Whatever Aurinko does, there is always a play of opposites expressed in layered involvement. (Michael Weinstein)

Through April 15 at the Chicago Photography Center, 3301 N. Lincoln

RECOMMENDED

Perhaps the most iconic photographs ever taken of an artist at work (one could almost say “money shots”) are the 1949 images of Jackson Pollock in Life magazine, viewed through a pane of glass that separates his thread of dripping paint from the upturned camera. Alex Hubbard has made a career of documenting this type of masculine performative gesture, videotaping the (often from above, inverting the Pollock image) pushing, spreading, building, arranging, throwing, tearing, cutting and crumpling of a variety of eye-catching objects, by himself and with occasional assistance, in a sort of moving abstraction that borrows both from the ephemeral abstract film tradition of Stan Brakhage and Paul Sharits, and the more tactile photographic compositions of Man Ray and Aleksandr Rodchenko, as well as the still and moving images of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. (Both the topic of abstract photography and Hubbard’s work received separate essays in Artforum this month, in time for Hubbard’s debut in the Whitney Biennial—such is the fickle synergy of the zeitgeist.) Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Suburbia today may not be the quiet, two-car-garaged perfection it strove to be in the days of “Leave it to Beaver,” but the essence is still there: in the middle ground between rural and urban, the suburbs are protective and stagnant, social and nurturing. The place many of us first called home, suburbia often evokes nostalgia and something else—something it took leaving to finally see. That “something else” is well illustrated in James Olley’s “In Motion,” where garish portraits of children on trampolines and transients on benches cast a scrutinizing lens on the inhabitants of interloping environment. Olley’s subjects are uninhibited and unrepentant, fully inhabiting the spaces in which they exist. Works such as “Victory” rile discomfort in the viewer, pairing camaraderie with hazing in aggressive strokes of black around pink, peach and teal bodies, while others, such as “Left Behind,” halt viewers with an increasingly common figure—the homeless—stranded in such an insular environment.

Previous exhibitions by Olley have featured mutilated portraiture and suburban-style architecture, and his taste for the two blends well into the Technicolor mêlée that is “In Motion.” Vivid and messy yet emotionally cool, Olley’s work awakens a time and space that most of us have long since relegated to the farthest reaches of our urban minds. (Jaime Calder)

Through May 8 at Kay Art Projects Gallery, 215 N. Aberdeen.

RECOMMENDED

Ed Paschke’s legacy has had an incredibly prolific past several years—despite, or perhaps because of, his death in 2004 at the age of 65. Currently, a dual exhibition titled “Ed Paschke’s Women” is being shown at Russell Bowman Art Advisory and Alan Koppel Gallery, both in River North. Simultaneously, at Gagosian Gallery in New York, Paschke’s work is on view in a show curated by Jeff Koons, a former student and studio assistant of Paschke, whose large monographic exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, in 2008, featured a small side exhibition called “Everything’s Here,” which incorporated some works by Paschke.

Perhaps the trend began in 2006 with the excellent “Ed Paschke: A Chicago Icon” held at the Chicago History Museum, featured a partial re-creation of the artist’s studio and a work in progress at the time of his death. It revealed the very traditional approach to oil painting that Paschke took, beginning, as the Old Masters did, with an under-painting of black and white, which lent his figures their juicy volume, followed by an over-working of color, sometimes in slick, thin glazes, and sometimes in sculptural, thick impasto, accounting for the depth that his paintings achieve. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

The intrepid team of writer Linda Rice Lorenzetti and photographer Daniel Lorenzetti has traveled the far reaches and remote spaces of Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East to search out the sites of coffee production, documenting in rich sepia-toned silver-gelatin prints and informative wall text the people and—mostly traditional—practices that provide the raw materials for the proverbial morning cup. Rather than an exercise in coffee hype, the Lorenzettis’ presentation is a carefully balanced reflection in the old-school humanist tradition that combines a gentle critique of imperialism with a celebration of one global slice of the family of man. The Lorenzettis’ aim is to bring us into contact with the individuals at the beginning of the production chain, and they do so admirably. Of all the Lorenzettis’ adventures, the most exciting took them to Yemen, where it all began. They show us a coffee market that has not changed for 800 years and introduce us to a merchant, with a dagger in his belt, holding out a handful of beans as he looks at us with an intense expression that radiates self-possession. (Michael Weinstein)

Through May 9 at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, 2430 N. Cannon Dr.

Editor’s Note: This is a  part of a package of stories about the state of criticism. See the links at the end for the related stories.

Last year, the popular art podcast Bad at Sports shut off the comments section to its weekly website component. Responders got out of hand with insults, and it seemed the negativity far outweighed useful commentary. In those four years of unmoderated feedback, some discussions ran on for more than 200 comments, which in the realm of Web 2.0 equals a successful dialogue. And isn’t the art world always begging for more “dialogue”?

Withstanding the attacks of a belligerent audience is just one challenge of living on the web. The other challenge is content, or how to craft responsible, poetic and meaningful criticism when there’s no overhead, little foresight and no time. Worrying about editorial is “like organizing the kitchen cupboards while some dude bleeds to death in the living room,” writes Kathryn Born, publisher of a new art criticism website, Chicago Art Magazine. “We publish two unedited articles each day. It would be nice to have someone look them over, but we just don’t have the money.”

It may not matter whether or not art criticism is vetted, edited and consciously published. Published criticism means exposure, and exposure means free publicity, or just another line on the resume, as several artists confessed to me. Read the rest of this entry »