Andre Malraux

By Jason Foumberg

Three unique library collections and archives sparked my interest this week. Such collections grow slowly and quietly over the years. Here, two are at least seventy years old and one is a fledgling five. The collections described below are maintained by individuals who clearly gain pleasure from their hoarding, and welcome the public to do the same.

The Imaginary Museum

In a well-known photograph from 1950, the French writer Andre Malraux stands before a small sea of images spread before him on his office carpet. His “imaginary museum” remixed the history of art as a virtual collage, one that could be re-ordered at will. “An art book is a museum without walls,” said Malraux, and this statement is writ large, like a rule, on the entry wall of the eighth floor of the Harold Washington Library, in the visual and performing arts division. A visitor to the library’s Picture Collection, located on this floor, could easily recreate Malraux’s style of temporary exhibition. The Picture Collection contains an estimated million-and-a-half images clipped and filed by category. There are over 10,000 subject headings organized alphabetically, for searching or browsing, and the images can be checked out like a book, taken home and pored over. Read the rest of this entry »

Christopher Wool, untitled, 2009, enamel on linen

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An art show can be like a radio station, bringing together work that seems surprising for a second, and then you realize, sure, people who like Billy Squier might also like Blind Melon. This can also be true for the oeuvre of a single artist, as in the case of star painter Christopher Wool. He made his name in the 1980s as a macho answer to text artists like Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer, doing large black-on-white paintings that applied a catchy formalist brutality to conceptual art by making gridded-out all-caps stencil poetry from words like “FOOL” and “RIOT,” and phrases such as “FUCK EM IF THEY CANT TAKE A JOKE” and “HOLE IN YOUR FUCKIN HEAD” (for me these always evoked the ethos and logo of the LA punk band Fear, a word he also put on canvas). But his monochromatic vision extended also into grainy gritty photographs, messy layered screenprints, and scribbly gestural paintings, using at turns rolled, dripped, or sprayed paint, sometimes smeared with turpenoid or “erased” with white paint. Wool demonstrated that he was capable of mining the legacy of Twombly, Rauschenberg and Warhol, as well as Weiner, Nauman and Johns, his offhand yet high-priced gestures leveling all postwar art with the cast-off indifference of a photocopier. Wool’s new exhibition, “Sound On Sound,” at Corbett vs. Dempsey is in conjunction with the release by gallery co-owner John Corbett’s record label of a forty-plus-year-old recording by jazz musician Joe McPhee, and in the show’s catalog we see a ventilator-masked Wool at work on his monumental canvases, displaying his own ability to present a performative persona á la Jackson Pollock’s 1949 Life magazine profile. So while he may have moved from punk into jazz, Wool’s recent collaborations with young Turk painter Josh Smith prove he has lost no cred. And while the density of his surfaces has increased with the blueness of his chip, his swagger has lost no insouciance. (Bert Stabler)

Through November 27 at Corbett vs. Dempsey, 1120 North Ashland.

David Maisel, "Lake Project 6," 2001, c-print

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No two approaches to landscape photography are in greater contrast than Kim Keever’s color images of garishly illuminated misty, craggy “nature” scenes that he painstakingly constructs in a 200-gallon tank filled with water, and David Maisel’s large-format black-and-white and color aerial shots of the land as it has been scarred by industrial civilization. As it turns out, Keever’s contrivances are deceptively realistic, whereas Maisel’s straight shots often border on abstractions, especially his “Lake Project” series, in which he documents Owens Lake, in California, which was devastated in the construction of the Los Angeles aqueduct in 1926. In his most arresting shot, “Lake Project 6,” Maisel captures, from high above, the desertified lake bed, broken up into multicolored segments; his image would warm the heart of a passionate abstractionist were it not for its filthy and scarred traces of all-too-obvious human spoliation. As different as they are, Keever and Maisel unite on the postmodern dictum that “nature is dead”—the viewer is left to choose among hells. (Michael Weinstein)

Through December 4 at Carrie Secrist Gallery, 835 West Washington.

Song Dong, "Stamping the Water," 1996

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One of the essential elements of life and a universal symbol, water takes on a multitude of meanings, as the three photo-artists—two Chinese and one from India—demonstrate exquisitely in this thought-provoking show. Attracted by water’s purifying and healing powers, Song Dong transcended his grief over his father’s death by making a large stamp of the Chinese character for water and then plunging into a Tibetan lake with it, shooting color performance photos of himself impressing the stamp on the water in a devotional exercise filled with thrashing and splashing. Not to be outdone, Wang Wei snapped himself in color with his head immersed in a large glass bowl as he contorted his face in the gruesome expressions of a drowning man. In a reminder of from whence we came and still remain, Reena Kallat shows us twenty-five different women elegantly knitting the blood-red letters of the sentence, “OUR BODIES ARE MOLDED RIVERS.” (Michael Weinstein)

Through November 24 at Walsh Gallery, 118 North Peoria.

Anna Cerniglia and alderman Proco "Joe" Moreno/Photo: Kristen Lee Stokes

By Jason Foumberg

On an afternoon this past March, First Ward alderman Proco “Joe” Moreno sat to have his portrait painted by artist Layne Jackson, which was hung in the exhibition “50 Aldermen/50 Artists” at Johalla Projects in Wicker Park. The exhibition began as a fun experiment, and then by necessity became a huge organizational effort, and somehow over 800 people attended the opening as it received major media coverage. Now, several months later, the show’s legs are getting some exercise. It turns out that Alderman Moreno was a good choice for the live portrait-painting session. The youngest-serving alderman of a ward that includes Wicker Park, and appointed by Mayor Daley to his seat, Moreno is emerging as a supporter of local art and culture.

The portrait session initiated a unique relationship between Alderman Moreno and Johalla Projects proprietor Anna Cerniglia. “How do I keep you in Wicker Park?” the alderman asked Cerniglia. The neighborhood has a dense history as a burgeoning arts district in Chicago, but recently the area has been inhospitable to its sustained existence. Around the Coyote vacated the Flat Iron Arts Building in an effort to save itself, and several art galleries were sniffed out by the city’s permit hunters. “Everybody was running from Wicker Park,” says Cerniglia, even as she established her gallery on the second floor above Earwax Cafe. Read the rest of this entry »

"Food For the Moon," 2010, oil and acrylic on canvas

There’s a lot of excess baggage that comes with being a young female painter who makes paintings of her dogs. Just ask Raychael Stine. A 2010 graduate of the University of Illinois at Chicago’s MFA program, Stine is sometimes asked if she does commissions—“I have a Chihuahua too! Can you paint him?” When she was an undergrad at UT Dallas, Stine was referred to as “The girl who paints her dogs.” Even more vexing is the persistent assumption that Stine’s representational approach to painting is something she has yet to “outgrow,” as if it were not, in fact, a tactic she has consciously chosen for its ability to encapsulate emotionally inchoate and often covertly personal subjects within forms that have themselves been cast off as degraded, subservient, less-than. Read the rest of this entry »

David Hyatt, "El Diario De Anna Frank – Migrant Camp," 2004

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In this comprehensive photo-documentary on the migration of Mexicans to the United States—seen from both sides of the border—curator Rod Slemmons succeeds in deconstructing the stereotypes pervading the current immigration debate. Bringing together ten U.S. and Mexican photographers, the exhibition takes us from a Mexican town where only women and children remain to do all the work, through the high-tech border-control apparatus, up the perilous paths taken by those who get through, down to the depths of the drug trade, and finally to destinations like West Liberty, Iowa and Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood where thriving communities take root. The nuance, subtlety, ironies and power of Slemmons’ approach is encapsulated in Michael Hyatt’s black-and-white shot of a Coca-Cola bottle and a dog-eared copy of “The Diary of Anne Frank” abandoned in the desert by an anonymous seeker for a better life. (Michael Weinstein)

Through December 22 at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, 600 South Michigan.

Moyra Davey, "Copperhead #13," 1990. Courtesy of the artist and Murray Guy Gallery, New York

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The four photo-artists on display here who were nominated for this year’s Grange Prize—an award presented annually to a photographer from Canada or a partner country (this year the United States)—all focus on everyday objects that they manipulate and/or re-contextualize to produce aesthetic effects beyond the mundane. Although the winner will be announced on November 3, Canadian Moyra Davey’s series of macro-photos of severely distressed Lincoln-head pennies that she gathered on the streets of New York City are particularly alluring because they pack the one-two punch of alerting us to the involved textured patterns that result from weathering, while throwing us into a reflection on the tattered legacy of Honest Abe. Although scarred and pocked, Lincoln is still present—in varying degrees of decay—as a figure of strength and dignity in five of Davey’s six images; but in the last, the copper has corroded to the point that the face has degraded into a shattered skull. (Michael Weinstein)

Through December 22 at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, 600 South Michigan.

"Carnival Barker - “Forty tons ‘lephan’s!'", 1933

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Perhaps the most powerful art made by Walter Krawiec (1889-1982) were the cartoons drawn for the front page of the Polish Daily News in the 1930s and 1940s, as Chicago’s Polish community read about their homeland crushed by competing totalitarian armies. Nothing could be more tragic, and his dynamic line and compositions were equal to the task. But those abilities did not vanish when he directed attention to less ponderous events, and the main events that interested him took place beside the big tops of the many traveling circuses that passed through Chicago. “Forty tons of elephants” the barkers from Cole Bros., Hagenbeck Wallace, or Russell Bros. circuses would shout. Read the rest of this entry »

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Europe’s Large Hadron Collider recently knocked Fermilab out of the number-one slot for having the largest particle accelerator in the world. Its job? To smash different types of particles into one another at about the speed of light in hopes of finding out what type of stuff the universe is made of. The notion that the tiniest imagined particle could hold the key to the entirety of our vast universe is related to the telescoping attention artist Jeff Zimmermann pays to everything from the reflective foil of a Fritos’ bag in the gutter to the individual faces that orbit the popping, well-designed tableaus of his large-scale murals. Read the rest of this entry »