By Jason Foumberg

It was the last place in the world I wanted to be on a sunny autumn afternoon, but the thrill of discovery pulled me into this cavern of moldering garbage. The warehouses of William H. Cooper Co. in West Humboldt Park have no electricity but plenty of running water, dripping from the ceilings and collecting in dank puddles at your feet. Light streams through the urine-tinted windows and cracked skylights to illuminate the wasteland that stretches before you. This is the site of “Two Histories of the World,” a temporary exhibition featuring four artists who were asked to create art from the rotting salvaged objects in the warehouse, which are exhibited on-site among the wreckage from whence they came. The artworks, if you can find them, are quietly subsumed back into the ruinous piles of debris by scavenging shoppers and fresh shipments of junk from newly dying industries. Read the rest of this entry »

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Postmodern wisdom holds that paintings used to be orgasmic—after all, pretty much everyone in those old harmonious oil tableaux used to share identical slackjawed expressions of rapt ecstasy, staring up like nomadic goatherds seeing their first airplane. And then modern art came along and made everything flat and serious and boring. But, while Ryan Travis Christian borrows his melted-plastic cartoon solids from Peter Saul, his soft dreamy atmospheres from Yves Tanguy, and his moire-pattern picture planes from Lari Pittman, the simple gesture of unifying everything with value—black and white, almost no gray—and contrast—hard outlines or uniformly blurred edges—somehow points out the counterintuitive exuberance of Cubism. Picasso, Braque, Christian—the images all look like an early silent film viewed through one of those prismatic lenses used to approximate insect vision. Read the rest of this entry »

Kyle Schlie, "Cutoffs"

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The history of modern-art education, i.e., the attempt to train artists and designers for a distinctly modern world without the unnecessary trappings of tradition, begins with Walter Gropius and the amazing faculty he assembled in 1919 at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Many of the artists who taught there are legendary: Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Gerhard Marcks. And there was a very strong Chicago connection, as its third director, Mies van der Rohe, would eventually run the architecture school at IIT and a Bauhaus instructor, László Moholy-Nagy, would found the New Bauhaus, still open as the IIT Institute of Design. So it seems appropriate to bring together the heirs of those institutions, in both Weimar and Chicago, to “explore the contemporary application of the Bauhaus legacy and ideals.” Read the rest of this entry »

Susan Sensemann as Ino

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One of Chicago’s premier conceptual photographers, Carole Harmel’s latest ingenious series had her taking color portraits of twenty-six of the city’s artists and then having her subjects paint, draw, apply textiles or otherwise grace the prints with their media, with the aim of fitting themselves into Homer’s Odyssey. Read the rest of this entry »

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Cats are cute. That goes without saying. A lot of photographers are partial to shooting them, another no-brainer. The felines are decidedly cute under Mark Steinmetz’ lens, but only to a point; Steinmetz wanders the scruffy, scrubby environs of Athens, Georgia and snaps black-and-white street portraits of his subjects doing their things with their fabled indifference to lowly humanity. An enormous cat sits regally on top of a car, its mouth hugely agape and its teeth sharp as tacks, yawning monstrously. Read the rest of this entry »

Jackie Ferrara, "Stacked Pyramid," 1972

After a year that’s been rich in lively shows and discussion about the relevance and legacy of Minimalism—the Gerard Byrne show and accompanying panels at the Renaissance Society, for one—this fall’s big Minimalism-then-and-now show at the MCA is a bit of a theoretical letdown. The first major show by chief curator Michael Darling, who joined the MCA last summer, “The Language of Less (Then and Now)” betrays a serious anxiety about the inaccessibility of Minimalism that seems out of place in a museum city like Chicago. Read the rest of this entry »

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In a fanciful postmodern project filled with ridiculous pathos, Philip Hartigan appropriated photos of Lucerne, Switzerland, to which he has never been; enlarged them so as to decompose their details; drew over them with softly colored squiggly lines recalling aerosol art, graffiti and tags; printed them at postcard size; joined them to each other so that they fold out like an accordion; and accompanied the resulting work with his diary of a fictitious visit there. Read the rest of this entry »

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The collapse of the market for stippled illustration might have been the best thing that ever happened to William Harrison, even if it took him more than ten years to realize it. Up until the mid-nineties he made photo-realistic drawings of commercial products for companies like McDonald’s and Burger King. But then his fanatically precise technique of rendering objects with little black dots was replaced by computer software, and like so many other workers in a changing economy, he had to reinvent himself. It didn’t happen overnight, but eventually he discovered a talent for portraiture. The results are breathtaking, and it’s not all about the tiny black dots. He has a real feeling for character and design, as well as an uncommon ability to compose small forms over large ones, so although he shows dozens of tiny facial wrinkles, he doesn’t lose the volume of the head. That’s what masters like Jan van Eyck or Dirk Bouts were doing as they celebrated civic and religious life at the dawn of bourgeois civilization, and it’s no less enjoyable when Harrison applies it to the outlaw bikers of our age. Read the rest of this entry »

Whereas Impressionist figure painting is about how people look, Expressionism is about how they feel, and usually, like Edvard Munch’s screamer, they have felt pretty bad, and didn’t get any better as recognizable features were left behind by the Abstract Expressionists of the 1940s. But picking up where Ab-Ex left off, Chicago painter Julia Katz has introduced action figures into the foreground and they seem to be expressing the joy of movement. She began, a few years ago, with kids running and splashing around, and now is inspired by the “rhythmic movement of breath, as well as the idea of yin and yang energies” concurrent with her practice of Yoga and Qi Gong. But are recognizable human figures necessary, or even useful for this inward-turning project? Read the rest of this entry »

Tony Kushner in conversation with Court Theatre artistic director Charles Newell

By Monica Westin

There are few words in either the arts or academia that are used as often, and occasionally mean so little, as “interdisciplinary.” The overwhelming surge in interdisciplinary work over the past decade ranges from a variety of motivations and understandings of what exactly it is and should do. At best, this work combines the expertise of several areas to solve important problems or shed light on complex issues better than any one perspective or discipline could. But there’s often a dubious quality of work claiming to be interdisciplinary—its success can be difficult to judge (the peer review system, for example, falls apart on the academic end of things), methods and standards between disciplines differ, and the broadness of perspective can result in vagueness and inconsistency. In the arts, interdisciplinary work can especially fall into chaos as the perspective and conversations within the various disciplines involved can get muddled and idiolects misunderstood.

The general consensus has recently seemed to be that we ought to work to create more coherent and coordinated work within this type of holistic undertaking, from clearly defined problems to consistent methodologies and narrow focus. Which is why, when I sat down with David Levin, the director of the University of Chicago’s new Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, I was surprised and even disarmed to hear that his approach to running the fellowship program for visiting artists and scholars at the Gray Center (supported through a $1.35 million Mellon grant) is to stay out of their way. “Look,” Levin murmurs, excitedly but gently, as he often begins his sentences, “the thought is that the pairings between scholars and fellows we’ve set up will have a truly transformative effect on both their work, but it will take awhile to know. I’m not going around banging on their doors asking to see what they’ve produced.” Read the rest of this entry »