Robert Blanchon's “Untitled (aroma/1981),” and “Untitled (drawing horse)”

By Jason Foumberg

In 1998, one year before he died at age 33 of AIDS in Chicago, the artist Robert Blanchon created “Untitled (drawing horse),” a replica of the type of benches that students use in a drawing class, but made entirely of glass panes. Blanchon probably enjoyed the fact that, in order to use the bench properly, an artist had to keep their legs spread wide open in front of their art, like a perpetual flirtation. Indeed, sex and the body were the subjects of much of Blanchon’s art, but as “Untitled (drawing horse)” sits today in Golden gallery, on loan from the Blanchon Estate, the glass bench is present like a ghost, its sitter palpably absent.

Here, the drawing horse faces fifty-five ad clippings from gay sex magazines, pinned to a wall. There are not ads for escorts or dates but from companies selling poppers (a sex drug), dick cream, cock rings, a chest-hair wig and other sexual enhancements—even one from the Tom of Finland studio where men could commission portraits. This collection of clippings is another Blanchon artwork, “Untitled (aroma/1981),” from 1995. (The “1981” in the artwork’s title references the year that HIV first started to reveal itself.) In addition to this collection being an archive of back-page gay graphic design and desire in a pre-AIDS era, it is also a dynamic object. Originally, Blanchon photographed and re-printed these clippings, but he did not complete the crucial final step in the hand-developing process, which is to dip the reproductions in a fixative bath. Therefore, the reproductions, once hung in a gallery, are intended to fade and disappear rather quickly and perceptibly during their exhibition. Likely the original magazines would fade anyway, being printed on cheap paper or newsprint, but Blanchon was aiding their demise. Read the rest of this entry »

Uta Barth, "... and to draw a bright white line with light (Untitled 11.3)," 2011. Inkjet print

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A conjurer of visual effects in the quiet setting of her Los Angeles home as it interfaces with her yard outside through its windows, Uta Barth has explored the eye’s exhaustion by taking repeated photos of a tree, the liminal state of dusk in one of her rooms and, most recently, the play of ribbons of light on a curtain. In her latest body of work, “…and to draw a bright white line with light,” Barth has dropped any pretension to representation and has crimped and spread the curtain to make the light-line undulate with wavelike rhythms, broadening and narrowing against an off-white nearly monochromatic background. The result is a series of hypnotic images that deploy abstraction to put us into reveries that concentrate attention on the simultaneity of stillness and irregular movement. By giving herself over to abstraction, Barth beckons us to a psychedelic experience in the most faded of colors. (Michael Weinstein)

Through August 14 at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 South Michigan.

Mark Mulroney, "Like the Blood," 2011. Acrylic on panel

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The mainstream thread of recent art comics, inaugurated by Art Spiegelman’s  Raw magazine in the 1980s, is known for an emo horn-rimmed literary confessionalism that has resulted in the McSweeney’s publishing phenomenon and Michael Chabon’s “Kavalier and Clay.” The obscene “primal father” figure, however, is that of 1960s underground comics, exemplified by R.Crumb on the comics side, and Peter Saul on the fine art side: explosive and expulsive horror vacuii images that picked obsessively at the scabs of racial, gender and religious anxieties that confused and frustrated the angry white men of the counterculture. In the art world of late, Kara Walker and Sue Williams turned this illustrational language against itself, while Paul McCarthy and John Currin elevated violent machismo to a transcendent onanistic level. In comics, Johnny Ryan and Michael Kupperman are creating absurdist provocations with greater self-awareness than their knuckle-dragging ancestors. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

The impulse to sort and classify William J. O’Brien’s 100 vessels, urns, plates, masks, heads, fragments and geometric constructions in his current exhibition should be suppressed, at least momentarily, for the power of this display is in its collective glut, as a chorus of many shouting, horrible and sick faces and visceral sculptures, raw or glazed, in densely textured and richly colored patinas. After this exhibition, the 100 sculptures will be removed to their respective homes and propped onto shelves or pedestals like the good trophies that they are, but for now, these goblins of taste are presented buffet-style like the feast of some pagan ceremony.

The mostly ceramic sculptures tickle the line between natural-history-museum artifacts and Tiki mug souvenirs, not as a critique of ethnographic cultural consumerism and exoticism but as a way for O’Brien to articulate a spectrum of symbols on the cusp of original feeling and mainstream sentiment, like a parade organized by James Ensor. The crowd of objects expresses a dynamic psychology: there are things buried and prematurely unearthed; there are freshly bundled and hoarded piles of waste; there are plenty of finger-sized orifices. Most importantly, the urns, vessels, heads and totems burn with internal tension, reliquaries of ashen and neutered desire. Like Freud’s tchotchke shelf, some things seem grotesque because they are so familiar. (Jason Foumberg)

Through June 26 at the Renaissance Society, 5811 South Ellis, Cobb Hall 418, University of Chicago, (773)702-8670.

Robert Frank, "A Monument to Electricity + Photography," 1976. Photo Lithograph

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With a flood of 123 black-and-white and color, and large and small format images by fifty-six photographers (mostly American, with a smattering of Europeans and Asians, some renowned and some less known) covering the last eighty years, this visual torrent of an exhibition that celebrates and criticizes by turns modern industrial infrastructure is in need of one of the dams that pop up here and there on the walls. Given the lack of conceptual focus, viewers are advised to cut through the thickets of telephone poles and powerlines, and to hone in on particular shots, many of which are striking and worthy of long looks, and to pay particular attention to distinctive styles rather than subjects. A photographic eye will put one on an expressway directly to Robert Frank’s multi-photo color collage of those ubiquitous poles (festooned with photos of his dog), the segments of which are out of alignment. Frank’s “Monument to Electricity + Photography” is witty and wise, and is inadvertently a metaphor for the show. (Michael Weinstein)

Through July 17 at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, 600 South Michigan.

The tiny, compacted thumbnail images on the gallery guide are more engaging, for the most part, than their on-the-wall counterparts. Shrunk, rendered dense, these multicolored works take on a vigor and a depth that, in person, they lack. Surfaces are more of a concern for New Yorker Patrick Berran than dimensionality—often dull, bone dry, marked with washed-out effects at the edges of a color field. A prime example here is number 7 on the guide, blue on bruised purple, with finger marks visible in the outer layer of paint.  There is a kind of compacting at play here, too, a collapse of image into facade.  Sparse paintings hung in a sparse space, the effect here is mixed. While some pieces seem to reference—or to seize and re-present—more traditional forms (clouding a landscape, pushing into a floral study), pieces like the one marked by the gallery as number 10 offer nothing to grasp yet lack visceral force as well.

The one piece in the show which looks better in person than in printed thumbnail is also the one piece with radically engaged depth, number 9, a work more reminiscent of photography than painting. Set against a black background, peach and orange and yellow-toned shapes intersect and recede, an effect I found entrancing. But what this piece, like so much abstract expressionist photography work, offers is precisely what the other paintings in this exhibition deprive us of—form and depth and motion, even the titillation of narrative suggestion. It is a curious juxtaposition. And while number 9 offers a refreshing break from the bone-dry surfaces of Berran’s other works, they are not strengthened by the contrast, leaving the show off-balance and largely unsatisfying. (Spencer Dew)

Through August 14 at Thomas Robertello Gallery, 27 North Morgan.

“Lady of the House – Venus”

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Among Chicago Imagist painters, Seymour Rosofsky (1924-1981) was both the most classically trained and the most puzzling.

A second generation, blue-collar Jewish kid from Chicago, Seymour’s talent was recognized early and he ended up studying oil painting with Boris Anisfeld at the Art Institute. He picked up that Russian’s dreamy, decorative style, which might be called classical but was hardly naturalistic. As Anisfeld once said “I always see a thing first in color and I paint what I feel, not what I see.” Rosofsky also became an art-museum junkie, both in Chicago and Paris, drawing from a variety of primitive, post-impressionist, surrealist and expressionist art. But when he put it all together, it was all about himself. There’s a musty, cluttered, claustrophobic feeling about his work, with the viewer often placed in the role of the therapist puzzled by the highly emotional, confused world of a patient who feels trapped in a female-dominated, family-centered life. Read the rest of this entry »

Andy Warhol, "Self-Portrait," 1986, Polaroid Polacolor print. Collection of Helyn and Ralph Goldenberg.

By Jason Foumberg

A pilgrimage to view all the Andy Warhol exhibitions around Chicago this summer will take you from tourist-laden Streeterville to tree-lined Hyde Park to the suburban flatlands of Glen Ellyn. There was no citywide master plan to the coordinated showing of Warhol’s works (unlike the recent thematic, “The Soviet Experience”), but the concurrence evidences the artist’s durable popularity. Warhol is a go-to name brand that bodes well for museums and sits well with the public. The three exhibitions, though, focus on his later work, from the mid-1970s through the 1980s, well after the Marilyns and soup cans. Unlike last year’s “Andy Warhol: The Last Decade,” presented by the Milwaukee Art Museum, which surveyed the artist’s uneven career in the 1980s, the current exhibitions do well to hone in on smaller bodies of specific work, such as his documentary street photography and the shadow paintings series. These boutique exhibitions refine Warhol’s over-prolific output to pointed theses, revealing that, although everything and anything could be the subject of a Warhol artwork, he is enjoyably digested in small doses rather than a glut of a retrospective. Read the rest of this entry »

Santiago Talavera

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The mantra of “Nulla dies sine linea” (“Not one day without a line”) has inspired and motivated artists and writers for centuries as a reminder that an artist’s skill and a successful work of art must come from daily practice. Pliny the Elder penned the Latin proverb in ancient Rome, Anthony Trollope advised the phrase to aspiring writers in the nineteenth century and Whistler inscribed a drawing in his diary with the same line as a personal reminder.

At the Instituto Cervantes, Madrid-based gallerist Blanca Soto brings together twenty-three artists from Spain on the premise of this proverb, attempting to elevate the “underestimated art” of drawing and showcase contemporary Spanish works on paper. For such grandiose aims, the net cast is not very wide, for over half of the artists also happen to be represented by Galería Blanca Soto. “Nulla Dies Sine Linea” has a curatorial premise that is vague and flimsy, at best. The long halls and small gallery of the Spanish cultural center and language school are crowded with an overwhelming number of drawings that have little in common but an amateur hand and a questionable lineage from graphic street art. The drawings on display encompass a range from over the last decade, and strangely, Soto has chosen early, less confident works from artists like Sofía Jack who have matured more gracefully than is evident from this exhibition.

However, amidst the fray, conscientious diligence does make an appearance. Read the rest of this entry »

Jno Cook, "Readings from the Book," 1993

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Two absorbing retrospectives of two important but overlooked artists is more than worth the drive to Valparaiso. In Jno Cook’s 1990 kinetic sculpture, “A Slackening of Creation,” a title borrowed from Pliny, a da Vinci-esque model of a Copernican solar system revs itself up, with a furiously spinning globe swinging on a counterweighted arm around a blazing 1000-watt light bulb. As Cook puts it, the piece “condenses 30 billion years to 3 minutes,” with the globe decelerating, the arm slowing, and the bulb fading to darkness—all atop an antique surveying tripod, before starting back up again. “Readings From the Book,” a 1993 Cook contraption, features a skull with a moving jaw, posed in perusal of Janson’s “Art History” textbook, opened to a chapter on the Renaissance and reciting aloud a list of overheard art sales pitches, such as, “The work is selling like crazy in Europe,” and “There was a show on PBS about this.” Cook’s ingenious photographic machines include the 1978 “Half-frame Motordrive Camera,” which Cook positioned directly over his bed and set to shoot flash pictures once per hour; four prints of contact sheets are on view as well, in which he and his wife’s bed fits perfectly into the half-sized field of view, and their cycles of presence and absence duly recorded. Read the rest of this entry »