By Jason Foumberg

While you were out for the summer, I took a message. Here’s what you may have missed.

Eleanor Coen, 1916-2010

Deaths in the Family
The West Side gallery Corbett vs. Dempsey reported two deaths via email this summer. Eleanor Coen, wife of artist Max Kahn, experimented with and popularized lithography in Chicago with her contemporaries in the 1930s and 1940s. She graduated from SAIC and later taught there, and continued her printmaking career into the 1950s. She had a solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1946. The gallery also announced the passing of James Garrett Faulkner, an artist, teacher and art collector. Faulkner also taught at SAIC and collected the work of Imagist and self-taught artists. Both Coen and Faulkner are represented by the gallery, which sells work by established (and sometimes forgotten) Chicago-based artists. This fall, John Corbett and Jim Dempsey (of the gallery’s namesake) will curate an exhibition about Ray Yoshida’s art legacy in the Chicago community. Yoshida died in January 2009. Read the rest of this entry »

In Latham Zearfoss’ 2008 video “Self Control,” an animated silhouette formed by a pair of hands, “the spirit of… past and future utopias,” appears in the multicolored bars of a test screen, announcing its intention “to guide you to the new subjectivity, a place of great trust and sensuality.” This magical optimism of communitarian queerness, a theme throughout his work, has an intriguing dissonance with an assertion made in another video: “The personal is NOT political!” This is a call-and-response chant led by Anil Ramayya, a speaker on behalf of the collective Feel Tank at “Pilot TV,” a 2004 event focusing on radical video and “queer feminist trespass” held over a space of four days in 2004 and documented in Zearfoss’ 2006 documentary, co-directed with Dylan Mira: “A Call and an Offering.” Ramayya’s statement presumably had some ironic intention, but it’s hard to escape the suspicion that the “spirit’s” promises, particularly in a video focused on themes of trust and danger, also connote emotional distance. Read the rest of this entry »

Anna Krachey, "Bonobo"

RECOMMENDED

Under the broad umbrella of falsely representational art, seven artists from Austin, Chicago and New York are situated within the tidy, manicured apartment rooms of The Exhibition Agency. Housed in the same space as the short-lived Concertina Gallery, Corinna Kirsch’s newest curatorial project brings together a pleasant array of sculpture, photography, painting, video and sound, many of which reuse functional materials in slyly unexpected ways.

The show’s title comes from a line in a Wallace Stevens poem, “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle” (1918), and serves as Kirsch’s link between the works. With the title she proposes that representative art is an overused, “crumpled thing,” but that these seven artists in particular have uniquely attempted to grapple with creating new methods of representing reality. The strangest and most compelling revisions of representation in this exhibition can be seen in the work of Anna Krachey and Christopher Bradley. Krachey’s visceral, sexualized photographs, “Bonobo” and “Floral Market,” depict fleshy objects obscured by a crumpled, semi-transparent plastic film. Bradley, with “Stupid #2,” has created an absurd sculpture of precariously placed paint rollers and beer bottles, grounded by a man’s right shoe. A constant stream of water shoots from the center of the piece into a cooler filled with empty beer bottles on the floor. Amidst these functional objects, the shoe enables us to see a human representation, and thus it becomes—crudely—a portrait of a man taking a piss in the middle of the room. (Julia V. Hendrickson)

Through September 25 at The Exhibition Agency, 2351 North Milwaukee, second floor

Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004). World's Fair, Brussels, Belgium. 1958. Gelatin silver print, 11 15/16 x 8 1/8" (30.3 x 20.7 cm). Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris. ©2010 Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photos, courtesy Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris.

RECOMMENDED

One of the top-ten photographers of the twentieth century, Henri Cartier-Bresson was the founder of and set the standard for modern photojournalism, snapping, with his handheld 35mm camera the “decisive moment” of an ongoing event on the fly, and depicting it with concentrated, concentric and dynamic composition. In this extravagant and overwhelming exhibition of 300 of Cartier-Bresson’s black-and-white images, endless instantaneous juxtapositions abound, yet the treasure of the show is his 1960 photo-documentary of working life in New York’s Bankers Trust Company. Here, with access granted to him in a closed organizational space, Cartier-Bresson had the ease to pre-meditate shots and showed that with time on his side he could capture the sense of the bank, from an executive with his nose in the air and a cigarette sprouting from his lips, through a deadly bored manager slumped in his chair, and secretaries and office boys more-or-less diligently about their business, to blue-collar grunt workers sustaining the infra-structure. The decisive moment can be piercing; the photo-documentary of a master is telling—anybody who has ever worked in a bureaucracy will immediately relate to Cartier-Bresson’s slices of life. (Michael Weinstein)

Through October 3 at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 South Michigan.

"Sky Net"

RECOMMENDED

Self-proclaimed “weather geek” and inveterate “storm chaser,” photographer David Mayhew pursues “weather events” in the SUV that he has turned into a “storm center” and that serves as his base of operations as he mounts forays to shoot the sublimity of cataclysmic skies in gleaming digital color. Although Mayhew mainly sticks to the straight photographic path, he is not above succumbing to the temptation to tweak his images in the computer to heighten contrast; it is his way of depicting the “perfect storm” that never quite arrives to transport us into awe. Filled with bold contrasts of exotic colors, Mayhew’s images arrest attention and transfix it. You will see why Mayhew contracted his addiction in his signature shot of a night sky, showing every variation of the purple scale, ripped apart by sinuous, jagged and branching white lightning bolts enacting a drama over a panoramic Chicago skyline dominated by the Willis Tower and dotted with glowing office lights radiating orange, yellow and glaring white flashes. (Michael Weinstein)

Through September 26 at Jackson Junge Gallery, 1389 North Milwaukee.

Pawn Works/Photo by Nicholas Marzullo

By Emma Ramsay

The Pawn Works Sticker Club is not a response to Art-o-mat, the converted cigarette-vending machines—including one in the Cultural Center—that distribute small-scale art in exchange for five dollars from more than 400 artists, and have operated since 1997. Nicholas Marzullo, owner of the West Side’s Pawn Works gallery and creator of the Pawn Works Sticker Club, instead aligns his vending machines with his own history as a lifelong street- and graffiti-art aficionado.

Seeking a way to easily and creatively promote his favorite artists, many of whom do not have regular opportunities to exhibit in traditional venues, Marzullo immediately turned to sticker art. Read the rest of this entry »

"La Vendedora," Valles City, Mexico. 35mm slide projection

RECOMMENDED

Traveling from the U.S. border south to Oaxaca on a mission to shoot portraits of the Mexican people, Chicago photographer Joe Compean was guided by his uncle’s dictum: “Shove a camera in a Mexican’s face and they’ll wipe their smile off and look dead into the lens; that’s the Mexican look.” Although Compean sought to find and capture that look, his clear and lustrous color slide projections, one of them stereoscopic, prove that his uncle was dead wrong. Try as they might to be stoical, each of Compean’s subjects betrays intense emotion through the cracks in the facade. In his banner image, a woman tending an open-air dress shop sits cramped and huddled in a chair surrounded by mannequins in open stances with insouciant expressions, whereas she, in stark contrast, radiates worry, distress, discomfort and self-closure. Compean makes it plain that people are emotional beings who can never avoid disclosing their sentiments. (Michael Weinstein)

Through September 12 at 33 Collective Gallery, 1029 West 35th

RECOMMENDED

A man on a mission, Grant Ramsey took his camera to the streets of Nicaraguan cities and towns, snapping informal color shots of everyday life that are uniformly affirmative. Ramsey is out to dispel the victim myth that third-world people live lives of drudgery and desperation; the way he sees it, we are all human-all-too-human, trying to take pleasure as we can in the daily round, whether it be hanging out, trading at the market, stoking a fiery furnace, dancing at the club, or washing clothes as a pig roots around in the dirt and the kids go off in every direction—among other humble scenes too numerous to mention. Is there a danger in presenting the upside of relatively impoverished life? Ramsey, who has a doctorate in philosophy, does not see one, opting for the family-of-man approach, which dignifies our shared vital will to be happy wherever we are. (Michael Weinstein)

Through September 26 at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 East Washington

Chicago’s Front Forty Press debuts its new artist-profile series of affordable paperback books with the work of Mark McGinnis, an American artist and designer whose work has appeared in Business Week, The New York Times and in solo shows in Chicago and Los Angeles. McGinnis combines printmaking with drawing and graphic design to create an iconography that satirizes and distorts current political and social issues. There’s an image of a globe stuffed inside an oven; the silhouette of a man pouring machine guns from a gas can; an illustration of the trunks of two Republican elephants twisting into the heads of the snakes in the Caduceus; an image of a jack-in-the-box toy, and in the place of the clown, a bomb. While the images are uncluttered and simplistic (most are black-and-white, or employ few colors), the social commentary is conspicuous and multilayered, often digging at several raw issues simultaneously.

Each book in Front Forty Press’ series will include an interview with the artist by art critic Victor Cassidy. “The Front Forty books are [founder] Doug Fogelson’s labor of love,” Cassidy says. “Since many of his ideas and interests are not those of the general population, the books sell to a small readership.” It also includes an essay by art historian Carlo Vinti, who will examine and discuss every aspect of the artist, including their life, technique, inspiration and personal social and political interests. The books also serve to round out the reader’s comprehension of the art, and complement the masterful works sandwiched in the pages. Front Forty Press’ “Profiles Series, Issue No. 1: Mark McGinnis,” is available at front40press.com. (Naomi Huffman)

Abdi's painting

By Jason Foumberg

The lecture, “What not to paint and how not to paint it,” was cancelled. Art critic Barry Schwabsky was there, present behind the microphone, but he wasn’t going to deliver this lecture, not tonight. Schwabsky, who writes from London for Artforum and The Nation, baited me into the audience with the frisky lecture title and then switched it at the last moment for something about painting and Plato’s cave, a philosophy that’s been tossed around since Greek antiquity and which lives happily, if safely, in today’s grad-school seminars. Schwabsky left his courage in London, and I left the lecture shortly thereafter.

I wasn’t planning to revisit Schwabsky’s non-lecture but his misfire stirred in my memory while I watched a crash landing into the rules of painting, this time on a primetime televised art critique, on “Work of Art”—just another failed attempt to marry the art world and television. On episode eight, guest judge Ryan McGinness and artist contestant Abdi went head to head. Abdi defended his painting by deferring to that old story about Plato’s cave, although he misattributed it to Socrates. A forgivable accident, to be sure. Not buying it, McGinness got his blazer in a bunch. Abdi was getting a pretty negative review from the judges, and then this happened:

“What things would you like to see in the work,” Abdi asked of his painting, fishing for positive feedback. Read the rest of this entry »