detail from Dana DeGiulio's installation at Devening Projects

By Jason Foumberg

In a 2003 interview, Jackie Winsor reminisced about New York City in the late 1960s: “The art world at the time was a tiny place. You could see every exhibition you wanted in about an hour and a half.” Although it smacks with a little nostalgia for simpler times in big New York, Winsor’s recollection seems to have its benefits. If everything is visible all at once, then there’s a shared vocabulary.

To put this another way, in a smart animation by Rob Bryanton he illustrates how to conceive, in layman’s terms, of the tenth dimension. Starting simply, he depicts the second dimension as an ant walking on a flat newspaper, and then rolls up the paper so that the ant can walk across the entire rolled up surface, and that’s the third. In the Chicago dimension, we are a little bit Winsor and a little Bryanton. Loopholes through space and time are just small flourishes of the hand. In this case it’s easy to see Lucas Samaras’ arrangement of magic knives, on view at the MCA, through the collection of sacrificial knives of the Northwest Coast Indians, on view at the Field Museum—although these two sets of objects have never met. Read the rest of this entry »

Andrea Zittel, "A-Z Cellular Compartment Units," 2001. Collection Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, gift of Marshall Fields by exchange.

RECOMMENDED

“Without You I’m Nothing” is at once an impressive survey of contemporary work and an unsettling spectacle. To be reminded of one’s role as a viewer is, here, frequently to be indicted, whether as part of a culture of waste or sexualized violence or as a consumer in a marketplace of art that no radical stab at gift economy can disturb.

The south room of the MCA’s main floor features art highlighting audience “engagement” (like Michelangelo Pistoletto’s “Turkish Bath,” wherein a mirror locates the audience in relation to an odalisque) while the north room’s pieces require viewer “activation” (floor tiles, for instance, or a collection of rubber stamps with which to play).

Much of the work is explicitly political, either in the accessible sense of Adrian Piper’s lecture on racial labeling or as an artifact of activism, like Olafur Eliasson’s monofrequency light designed to shine from boutique windows as a provocative advertisement for an Ethiopian nonprofit. Here, however, Piper’s overturned table and Eliasson’s yolky light glare from competing corners of a show that dilutes itself by accumulation. As empty as these vast warehouse rooms feel, physically, within seconds the sensation of the show is one of thumbing through a hefty art-history textbook. Read the rest of this entry »

Miguel Tio, “Portrait of Brigid Marlin”

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The Vienna School of Fantastic Realism, founded in 1946 by students of Albert Paris-Gütersloh, is one of the many living traditions of world art that’s never made it to Chicago. Maybe that’s because Vienna is as quintessentially aristocratic as Chicago is blue-collar. Or perhaps this less-irrational variant of Surrealism has been deemed tangential to that narrative of modern art so important to local cultural leaders. But now, one offshoot of the school is covering the endless white walls of the Murphy Hill Gallery.

Begun as the “Inscape Group” in 1961 by “a group of artists from England, dissatisfied with the way the art world was going,” they soon connected themselves to the aims and methods of Ernst Fuchs (born 1930), a prominent founder of the Vienna school. It was American-born Brigid Marlin (born 1936) who went to Fuchs in 1966 and brought back his meticulous “mische” technique of tempera and layered glazes. Thirty years later, she founded the Society for the Art of the Imagination for the “promotion of imaginative art around the world,” and now she and seventy other international visionary artists are showing their work in Chicago. Read the rest of this entry »

By Jason Foumberg

The closing of summer marked the end of ACRE’s inaugural season of artist residencies in rural Wisconsin. The ripening of autumn, though, brings ACRE’s residents back into the city for a yearlong exhibition program at the ACRE home base, a storefront gallery in Pilsen. Of the many local, national and international residency programs that swell with artists each summer, like Ox-Bow, Ragdale and Skowhegan, few offer solo exhibition opportunities for their participants. For ACRE, the exhibition component is part of a package deal, and built into the program’s name: Artists’ Cooperative Residency and Exhibitions.

Directors Emily Green and Nicholas Wylie founded ACRE on the premise that shared experiences and resources can help build an artistic community, and they’ve professionalized the experience. Residents must apply for a spot in the program, and applications are reviewed by a panel of art professors and curators (this year included Tricia Van Eck, Jason Lazarus, Lorelei Stewart, Anthony Elms and Steve Reinke). The exhibition component is another layer of professionalism. For many of the emerging artists who attend the summer sessions, this will be their first solo show. ACRE provides a clean, white-walled space and is partnering with other local galleries for the solo shows, including Mess Hall, Johalla Projects, No Coast/Roxaboxen, The Hills Esthetic Center and others. Read the rest of this entry »

As days shorten, streets turn cold, and skies turn even grayer, Joseph Spangler (born 1976) returns to Chicago for an exhibition of his new work and new life as a young father in Portland, Oregon. His earlier Chicago work was all about our big, blue-collar, rust-belt city, and some of his rather grim, stark, lonely cityscapes are included in this exhibition. They all have that strong sense of design that got him picked up by a Michigan Avenue gallery a few years after he graduated from SAIC in 2000, but Chicago urban landscape is a crowded genre, with many talented practitioners over the last century who have found more to love about our sophisticated, bustling metropolis than he has. His new genre, scenes of family life, is also crowded—but nowadays it’s crowded with the kind of sentimental photo-realism that might make a demanding viewer more than just a little nauseous. Spangler has gone in a different direction, breaking up his canvas into a grid of small, color-filled squares, producing the rich, sensual effect of a mosaic or tapestry. Indeed, Spangler’s strong, angular designs would translate quite well into other mediums and, perhaps, like June Wayne, whose narrative tapestries are now on display at the Art Institute, he should collaborate with the weaving ateliers of Paris. This is not to say that his designs are not also effective as oil paintings. They celebrate the healthy/hopeful/normal instead of the demented/hopeless/weird side of the human condition, and that’s a bit unusual for a Chicago painter. Is that why he moved to Portland? (Chris Miller)

Through December 4 at Galleries Maurice Sternberg, 875 North Michigan.

RECOMMENDED

Gallery 400’s exhibition of new work from Steve Reinke and collaborators Dani Leventhal, John Marriott, Jessie Mott and James Richards manages to be both sardonically funny as well as often unexpectedly and profoundly confrontational. Centered around an hour-long suite of Reinke’s new video work, which mixes moral interrogation with humor, ironic voiceovers and Beckettesque failures (my favorite: “cartoon for those who have a certain fondness for ideas, but are tired of thinking”); but it’s the work in other media that’s ultimately the most moving. Neon, needlepoint and mixed-media collages reference Bruce Nauman in a way that’s thought-provoking and unaffected; a study of Peanuts cartoons as repeated objects echoes a message of futility that F. Scott Fitzgerald once articulated as the combination of seeing that things are hopeless but being determined to make them otherwise. Detournement finds its strongest application in “Guernica,” which combines a doodled copy of Picasso’s painting in gel medium with a found photograph of a vulnerable, half-naked young man in a sailor hat in front of a poster reproduction of the painting. Solo work by Reinke’s collaborators is less moving but still wry examinations of sex and death from a more comfortably ironic viewpoint. (Monica Westin)

Through December 18 at Gallery 400, University of Illinois at Chicago, 400 South Peoria.

Leeza Meksin

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Although the six artists in “Tomboy” are lesbians (according to the catalogue essay), the artworks in the exhibition don’t depict graphically charged lesbian imagery (there’s no pornography or strap-on dildos). Instead, the artworks are androgynous. They aren’t dogmatic or overtly political, but rather sing with visual self-assurance, and that’s a crowning achievement for art. “Tomboy” seems to be more about social attributes and characteristics than about the core of a person’s identity, more about clothing than vaginas.

The term “tomboy” doesn’t necessarily equate with lesbianism. A woman who acts like a man, and who loves other women, is better described as a butch lesbian, the opposite of a femme. Usage of the pejorative “tomboy” dates back to the mid-1500s, three centuries before the word “lesbian” was ever used to mean woman/woman love. Where “butch lesbianism” concerns sex, “tomboy” concerns gender-flipping, and a straight woman can be a tomboy—she may enjoy male-coded activities like football, fixing car engines, wearing suits and spitting on the sidewalk. This stringent terminology is the side effect of decades-long battles over identity politics and civil rights. Read the rest of this entry »

Designed and executed by Magdalena Abakanowicz. Brun Rouge, 1970/73. Gift of Dr. Anne Baruch in memory of George Overton.

The Art Institute’s newly reopened textile galleries present “Contemporary Fiber Art: A Selection from the Permanent Collection,” but the show’s use of the term “contemporary” refers only to a range of dates rather than a practice, or the making of thought-provoking and forward-thinking fiber arts. This might be due to the fact that out of the sixty-one works on display, more than half are traditionally woven, and the abstract works seem like decoration. Contemporary fiber art does more than just root itself in tradition; it uses that tradition as material to address vital issues such as gender, race and labor.

One of the hurdles for early fiber arts being considered fine art was that it was thought to be utilitarian or decorative. For instance, Lyn Inall’s 1993 quilt, “Denim Cubes,” pieces together denim bits from commercially produced jeans complete with their original seams and buttons to depict a geometry of stacked blocks. This work does little to investigate quilting as a potential method for critiquing who wears denim, and why, and how. Instead, the denim quilt is a neatly constructed object composed of reused excess fabric, which is the traditional nature of quilts. It’s an unfortunate piece for display while a work by renowned quilter Faith Ringgold remains in storage. Read the rest of this entry »

Robin Dluzen, detail from "Tower Support Grids (Chicago)," 2010, duct tape and silicone caulk on insulation board

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Ethereal can mean delicate, insubstantial, or otherworldly. In “Light and Air” at the Chicago Artists’ Coalition Gallery, each artist’s work reflects upon the different facets “ethereal.” Connie Wolfe’s abstract hand-cut ink-jet prints suspended just inches off the wall appear fragile and delicate like wisps of rising smoke. Robin Dluzen’s paintings of water towers and telephone lines are surprisingly insubstantial despite their subject matter and their materials—mainly caulk and duct tape. Zach Mory’s remarkably intricate graphite drawings describe imagined worlds of exploding stars and ribbons of pattern. Despite the different materials and imagery used by each artist, the stylistic similarities of these works make this show cohesive. Recent group exhibitions at CAC gallery have lacked this level of coherence, but this show is a pleasing exception. The level of detail in Mory’s graphite drawings and the labor intensity of Wolfe’s cut prints contribute greatly to the coherence and quality of the exhibition. Read the rest of this entry »

Kathryn Hixson

By Jason Foumberg

“If the only facts we can believe in are the fact that we live and the fact that we die, and if, after disease and natural disaster, the most likely cause of death is murder by our fellow human beings, and if the social contract that staves off mutual murder is our most controllable defense against death, and if death is the most feared fact of our lives, then Bruce Nauman’s art is about the fear of death.”

These are Kathryn Hixson’s words from 1994, which appeared in the New Art Examiner, in an essay about Bruce Nauman. Fifteen years later Hixson returned to Nauman as the subject for her PhD dissertation, focusing on the artist’s use of his body as a carrier of meaning. As an art critic, Hixson, who died on November 7, exemplified what art critics do: we write to feel our way through the world. Writing is both an excuse and justification to see art, digest it, demand better of it, and to organize its mess, and since art is a catchall for intellectual and emotional pursuits, then its study naturally opens the doors to political diatribes, moral wonderings, existential musing and self-discovery. Hixson’s struggle with her own wavering health, and her later triumph over disease and full return to her profession, ran parallel to her sustained exploration of Nauman’s body-themed sculptures, films and performances. Hixson troubled the idea of the ‘disinterested’ critic; she cared for the well-being of the arts, and it was her passion and experience that built her body of knowledge. Read the rest of this entry »