By Anthony Elms

In public events, posters, exhibitions, demonstrations, objects, discussions and presentations, Temporary Services has been responsible for some of the most engaging and chaotic art actions to come out of Chicago in recent memory. Furthermore, they have tried to demonstrate how collaboration is the most active noun in the English language. They refuse to work in commercial galleries, but will work in just about any other venue and location you can conceive of.

For example, on March 19, 2001, Temporary Services’ “The Library Project” opened at their self-run space. On the walls were posters promoting reading; instead of the usual cheap wine or beer there were Dixie cups and jugs of water, and instead of the usual chitchat, the attendees were engrossed with a large table littered with books. While slightly unusual for an exhibition opening, the real work was just beginning. Temporary Services had arranged for more than 100 books to be donated by artists. Most of the books were conventionally produced hardcover or paperbacks and some not so—a book that opened out into a wearable suit, a photo album, a cast book made of concrete. All titles had been given call numbers, and little by little snuck onto shelves throughout Harold Washington Library. As soon as someone tried to borrow a surreptitiously added volume from the library, any librarian who entered the book into the database after discovering the title had no barcode became an unwitting collaborator. And so the project played out over months, one book at a time. Titles not generally collected by the library (because of interest, funds or format, or if collected, relegated to rare-book holdings) became part of the library collection, avoiding red tape, committee selection and concern for cost, preciousness or value. Eventually, a sharp librarian caught on and began collecting the found volumes and cataloging them as one collection. “The Library Project” was generous if cantankerous, fugitive, inquisitive, slapdash, caring, caustic, absurdly fun, intrinsically interactive, but dispersed in a manner that makes it hard to achieve an overarching view. And that in a nutshell describes Temporary Services.

Temporary Services is currently Brett Bloom, Marc Fischer and Salem Collo-Julin. On December 5 at Co-Prosperity Sphere, the group celebrates the release of its book, “Public Phenomena,” an assortment of hundreds of snapshots documenting all sorts of pedestrian creativity from parking-place savers to “fence-eating trees”; as well as the release of two new booklets: one an interview with members of Texas punk band The Dicks, the other a conversation with Austin-based musician and artist Tim Kerr. “Public Phenomena” is printed by Temporary Services’ newly inaugurated publishing imprint and online store Half Letter Press. But the big news is not the new publications, not even the new imprint and store; after all Temporary Services has generated eighty-three booklets or books, most self-published. The big news, and one reason not to miss this event, is that Temporary Services will be celebrating its tenth anniversary. There will be music by The Velcro Lewis Group and others, publications galore, slideshows and in true Temporary Services fashion, food and further surprises.

It would be unethical for me to not mention that I am anything but an impartial observer to Temporary Services’ history. I met Brett and Marc at the University of Chicago. We were all painters at the time (yes, incriminating evidence exists and yes I know where to find it). Sometime around 1996 I met Salem through Brett. In early 1998 when Brett was readying Temporary Services as a storefront at 2890 North Milwaukee, he asked me to be a partner. I gave a resounding “no,” in what remains either one of my brightest or dumbest moves.

It was not long after formation that Temporary Services (TS) moved beyond the original storefront (1998-1999), spilled out into the public sphere, landed for a time in an office space at 202 South State (2000-2001) and then on to the Post Office Box and Web site that act as the only consistent bases for Temporary Services today. One result of this transformation is that the moniker changed from the name of a space for activity to the name of a group of individuals and set of activities.

In light of the upcoming anniversary and book release, it seemed time to reacquaint myself on a base level with three people I see on a fairly regularly basis, ask some basic questions I have not heard them answer for at least four years, and learn how they define their practice today. For example, how did the current group see the change from a situation where one was asked by Brett to contribute projects for the nascent Temporary Services to a group with equal members? All responses to my questions were written together by the group.

“There was a direct conscious decision to make a group and to move away from running an ‘alternative art space.’ We found the limits to this way of working really rapidly. TS could have continued indefinitely in that mode and would have been kind of interesting, but it wasn’t pushing things as far as we wanted.

The move wasn’t hard. We all were working more or less as a group over the course of three or so years and it was easy to make this relationship more formal. Everyone who is involved in the group now had participated in some way since the first exhibition—either as an included artist or someone who helped behind the scenes.

The coherence of a group creates stronger ties and commitments. We have become more like a family with deep responsibilities to one another and to a shared creative endeavor.”

Over the course of this transformation I, like many others, got pulled into Temporary Services’ actions. I organized a project for the Temporary Services storefront, contributed as an artist to several projects initiated by Temporary Services, was the organizing contact for projects that have included Brett, Marc or Salem as individuals at other institutions, collaborated with Marc on projects, disagreed passionately with all of them when given the chance, and in 2003, through the organization WhiteWalls, published the book “Prisoners’ Inventions” in collaboration with Temporary Services. Reflecting back on these events and activities, the best description for my relationship to Temporary Services might be as both active participant and hostile witness. In this I am not alone. During the transition from a storefront to a group, four others passed through TS and dozens more contributed projects, ideas or labor. For a time, membership was fluid, but in 2002 TS solidified into the current trio.

Even as stable stewardship settled, TS didn’t stop collaborating with others, they simply appended the collaborator’s names. Projects would be credited to, for example, Angelo and Temporary Services, Brennan McGaffey with Temporary Services, Biggest Fags Ever (Rob Kelly and Zena Sakowski) and Temporary Services, etc. They have collaborated with other artists, writers, gardeners, actors, performers, passersby, prisoners, academics, activists and the homeless. Naturally, the question arises: What drove the change to keep a consistent roster, and if working with others, list them as additional collaborators rather than TS members?

“We used to insist on Temporary Services being an umbrella for a more or less anonymous group of people. This caused many problems for us and created public misperceptions of the group (which were fueled by ignorance, racism, sexism and, more commonly, unfamiliarity with the way we make art).

One way of being explicitly clear about who was behind Temporary Services was to list our names. It is not because we want recognition as individuals, but to cut out the possibility that someone think that Temporary Services is only one of us while the others are just helpers.

We used to think—in the days when we were apt to call ourselves a collective—that growing the group was healthy for Temporary Services. We learned that this wasn’t necessarily the case and that once you add a few more people, you have to spend a lot more time taking care of the group over the work. At this point, we didn’t take care of the larger group in the ways we take care of each other now—and this means having conversations that can be uncomfortable about the power dynamics and problems we have relating to one another. We had a lot of romantic ideas about collectives and how to make work in groups. Those ideals are still there, but they are tempered by practical considerations and real efforts to keep our group healthy.

Adding additional people to the fold on a per project basis has been a great way for us to get other people included who are perhaps less recognized in the arts (or in some cases are not artists) and to learn how others work while we work with them. It also destabilizes our identity a little, creates a healthy kind of confusion, introduces curators and organizers to people they might not have included otherwise, and keeps the three of us from falling back on solutions that we might be inclined to repeat too often if everything we did drew only upon our own interests, skills and concerns.”

A telling story speaks to their commitment to the ethics of group organization: When Temporary Services was offered free storefront space soon after a mention of the group in a New York Times article, the members decided not to launch Temporary Services Location Mach 3. Rather they invited likeminded individuals to help program a multi-use space, Mess Hall. The space quickly morphed beyond the core group of TS, and beyond TS functioning as the lead organizers. Running since 2003, Mess Hall now counts fifteen “keyholders” who program free workshops, screenings, talks and exhibitions in the Rogers Park storefront. Around this same time, a frantic rhythm settled in for the TS group, and five years later this pace is well entrenched and shows no signs of abating. The three members don’t necessarily all travel to the numerous international Temporary Services exhibitions and events (sometimes due to monetary limitations of the host organizations). All began to reassert their individual practices. Each one at least doubled their individual collaborations with other individuals and groups. To hear them tell it:

“There is definitely an ebb and flow to how we work and whether or not we give all our energy to TS at one time or another. We think we are doing a lot more work now in general and we are all are giving a tremendous amount of time to TS. The demand for TS has increased significantly over the years. TS is limited in the kinds of things it does and the ideas it takes on. We all have concerns that are better addressed when we work by ourselves and in other configurations. The freedom to move back and forth has been a real strength that we have had to develop.

It is also an important outlet for us all to do things that are not TS. As the three of us have moved away from running Mess Hall and Mess Hall has added many new keyholders, this has also created a bit more time for members of Temporary Services to experiment outside of the group, as well as take on more work within the group.”

Still, over the last decade I sometimes have had a sense looking at Temporary Services projects and of thinking, “oh, that’s a Brett project, or that’s a Salem touch, or a Marc approach.” Is this a problem? Do they care if people read the individual personalities into the gestures?

“It isn’t an issue. You might be one of only a handful of people who can see this because we have all known you for so long.

In earlier projects there was a clearer division of labor or authorship and it was more common to see things like essays with an individual author’s name attached. Now most texts are written by all of us together and we only identify individual contributions in things like live interviews where multiple members are talking, or other situations where it gets confusing to use a group identity.

The group has to agree on everything that shows up as TS work, and we all have our hands in TS work. So, while one person brings ideas to the group that may be his/her obsession, we all have to agree on it and we end up working on everything. The degree to which we each work on every aspect varies a great deal based on the time we have or the level of interest. However, our practice is incredibly flexible and accommodating to individual and group concerns and an oscillation between them, and is why we have been able to stick together for so long. We also genuinely like working with each other and the challenges that it brings.”

Having known the individual members for longer than Temporary Services has existed, I continue to argue with Brett, geek-out over music with Marc and laugh about what probably shouldn’t be laughed about with Salem. The major change in my relationship with the group has been the fact that where once I often got contacted by people outside of Chicago asking me to tell them about Temporary Services, the group now works outside of Chicago, and the country, much more than they do in their hometown. Now I often find myself having to ask out-of-town friends to describe Temporary Services’ latest activities to me.

Marc and Salem both still live in Chicago, Brett currently resides downstate. So don’t miss the chance to see them together in the same place and at the same time. For the event at the Co-Prosperity Sphere everyone’s invited, and more to the point, everyone is asked to be involved. “Do-it-yourself motherfuckers.” This phrase, equal parts motivation, threat and promise, is written across a banner TS produced from melted plastic shopping bags. One constant with the group has been calling attention to the creativity that surrounds us everyday, with particular attention to practices that take the right to creativity as a given, and rewrite or trespass on any rules or barriers that seek to limit this fact. Recently they initiated a series, “Temporary Conversations,” where they interview people and groups they admire. This could lead one to interpreting the recent TS projects as more archival, focused on documenting other people and groups. The group made clear this was not a conscious move away from generating their own content toward a more documentary practice.

“We try to do both things and to actually alternate them so we don’t get bored or stuck too much in any one way of doing things. We are generally doing several projects simultaneously and it is hard to get a sense of this from outside the group.

The increased interest in interviewing, and shedding light on the work of others, has been a nice way for us to learn from people who have worked in groups for many more years than we have, as well as to present practices that don’t always get enough attention. For our next booklet we’ll be publishing a long interview with Jean Toche from Guerrilla Art Action Group. Jean is 75 years old, still angry, still fighting the good fight, and still working on the margins. He’s the pissed off kind of artist that we’ll all hopefully be in about forty years. It’s helpful for us to talk to him so we can learn where we might wind up!”

The party for Temporary Services’ tenth anniversary and the release of their book “Public Phenomena” takes place December 5 at Co-Prosperity Sphere, 3219 S. Morgan, at 7:30pm-midnight. $5.

Chicago artist Joseph Grigely has an intensely self-reflexive practice. Using his experiences as a deaf person, Grigley explores the stuff of everyday discourse—words, sounds, sentences—shaped by what the artist calls a “meaningful kind of meaninglessness.” His current exhibition features installations, sound and video works, all dealing with language and the nature of (mis)communication.

In “We’re Bantering Drunkening About What’s Important in Life,” Grigely hangs notes with bits of conversations jotted on them—traces of his “spoken” interactions with friends and strangers. Hung in a grid, the notes imply humor (“We’re in digestive stupor”), reflect some banalities (“We do accept checks”) and bespeak empathy (“She loves you”). Questions, statements and sketches created by Grigely and those with whom he converses create a record of past narratives. While the fragments don’t always reveal connections and shared bonds, they all suggest attempts.

The exhibition’s centerpiece is “St. Cecilia,” a two-channel video installation. Named for the patron saint of music, the videos feature a choir singing three Christmas carols. The catch? In one video, the choir sings lyrics of words based on the common misreadings that come when trying to lip-read these songs. The lyrics “Sleep in heavenly peace” become “Tell me everything please.” Shown next to a video of the choir singing the original words, the installation explores the idea of the productive mistranslation, the idea that everyday disconnects are substantive for their creative possibilities, if not only revealing of difference. Just out of sync enough to be disorientating, the videos make real the simultaneous bigness and subtly of aural and visual disconnects.

Grigely, a professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, says it is important to keep academic critical theory from becoming a “modulating force” in his art. Ultimately, he says, “the art takes its own path.” The most ineffable work in the exhibition does just that, and it is Grigely at his most restrained. Based on a newspaper clipping in which a fisherman defends the merits of ice fishing, the installation “That’s What We Live For” consists of two overturned buckets fabricated out of crystal urethane resembling ice. The buckets are positioned in close proximity as they would be if used by two fishermen. Using absence to suggest corporeal presence, the installation uses space and material in a masterfully emotive way recalling Fred Sandback’s charged spatial constructions.

Grigely shows us that where language seems silent, it is in fact the loudest. His work, because it is about attempts to connect rather than successful bonds, produces a conviviality more real than most overtly ‘relational’ works of the last several decades that strive to connect audiences in real-time. And if we consider that any type of universality could possibly exist within the limits of human experience, Grigely makes visible the collective frustration, absurdity and vulnerability that characterize human discourse—spoken, written or signed. (Jessica Cochran)

Joseph Grigley shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave., through February 22.

The sea. “It’s mesmerizing,” says Helene Steene, an abstract artist who grew up in Sweden. “I’ve seen it during heavy, heavy storms, in shades of wine-colored red to purple.” Steen stares at the water from her seaside bungalow in Paros, Greece, which she bought twenty-four years ago with her then-husband. While they vacationed with Swedish friends on the tiny island, a Greek man bedecked in gold chains insisted they look at a house for sale. “We looked at each other and said, ‘This makes no sense at all.’ But we went home and scraped the money together and bought it.”

Steene’s abstract art paintings, currently on view at Logsdon 1909 Gallery, pay homage to her summer place in Paros. “Aegean Cove” is a series of eight panels that capture the ocean at various times. A close-up view of part of “Aegean Cove VI” shows a wooden slab layered with acrylic, marble dust, sand and oil glazing. Pure pigments and intense dry powders are next, followed by sanded aluminum shapes and blocks. The forms resemble chapel roofs and Greek columns lying sideways. “Aegean Cove” exudes beauty and poetry, energy and movement. It is Greek frescoes and a crashing, soothing, ever-changing ocean.

A section of “Dilion” shows a swath of red splashed with orange and green paint, topped by aluminum shapes. The rich layers of paint produce a depth and vibrancy that command attention. Red is the color of love, Apollo is the god of love, and remnants of Apollo’s temple are found in Dilion on Paros. Moreover, the temple area that honors Asklepios, the god of healing, gave Steene the name for her mixed media show: “My Asklepion.”

Greece is the inspiration for Steene’s exhibit, but Japanese-born artist Kenzo Okada was a strong influence. Steene discovered his work after marrying an American, moving to D.C., and studying art at George Washington University. While wandering around The Phillips Collection museum, she found Okada’s paintings. Struck by the colors, layering, and build-up of different surfaces, she ran to her teacher’s office, and said, “I don’t understand it. What is this?” It was abstract art, and she was hooked. Her love for this art form “has stayed with me through all these years—through fiber, weaving, collage, painting,” she says.

Following a 1987 move to Lexington, Kentucky, Steene worked on her art and raised her children. Then she returned to school. In 2004, she received her MFA from the University of Kentucky and committed to working as a full-time artist. Lexington may be a small, traditional place, but it has a vibrant art scene, she says.

When Steene began her seascape art, she considered painting only in blue. Instead, she put down the opposite color of orange. Then she sanded, scraped, lifted, pulled—and painted blue on top. Her work is indicative of her admiration for Kenzo Okada and her belief in Japanese philosophy. She says, “You have many disharmonies, things that scrape on each other a bit. But ultimately you can make it all come together.” (Sarah Klose)

Helene Steene shows at Logsdon 1909 Gallery, 1909 S. Halsted, (312)666-8966. Saturdays noon-5pm and by appointment: call the artist at (859)684-1716. Through December 6.

At first glance, New York-based media artist Josh Azzarella’s solo show at Kavi Gupta Gallery appears to be a straight landscape show, perhaps in the style of the New Topographics photographers of the 1970s, engaging formalist depictions of mundane details of daily use of the landscape. But a second glance starts to peel back the many layers of these images, unsettling any easy reading of their surfaces.

Azzarella’s present body of work, begun five years ago, takes the material of historical footage and photographs as the starting point for a series of erasures, replacements and re-layerings that remove elements of these documents, creating events without actors—landscapes?—and actors without events—portraits?

In “Untitled #15 (Tank Man), 2006, a man is standing in the middle of a street in a wooded, urban landscape. The nondescript expanse of concrete and line of trees have an eerie familiarity. The viewer slowly begins to realize that this is the famous Tiananmen Square protester who boldly confronted a line of military tanks…without the tanks.

Azzarella has said that one of the motivating forces behind his reworking of historical images is the desire to examine memory, how it is formed and how it reads and re-reads images. “I’m investigating the cathectic energy of the imagery, our collective memory, personal memory and my possibility of manipulating an existing memory or creating a memory where one did not previously exist,” he says. Azzarella’s photographic work did in fact begin in a style very much in the tradition of formalist landscape depiction begun by the Bechers in Germany and continued by such German photographers as Thomas Struth and, at times, Thomas Ruff. However, Azzarella became interested in examining not just the content of an image, but the image itself, and, more specifically, the reception of the image–how an image becomes iconic.

Speaking about “Untitled #20 (Trang Bang),” 2006, a work based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of Nick Ut taken during the conflict in Vietnam, Azzarella asks “What makes this image iconic?…There are several frames, other images of the same event that are more compositionally compelling that have not become iconic.” Nevertheless, something holds our memory to the image. “It becomes a baroque abstraction,” Azzarella says, “but people always recognize the pink of Jackie’s hat.”

Recently, Azzarella has been working with a somewhat different set of images—not the moments of conflict, but moments on the fringes of history. He says that after five years, the difficult imagery has started to get to him. “My head is so full of these horrible images—I can only take so much before it becomes brutal and exhausting.” He wants to explore “less iconic imagery” to deepen his, and our, understanding of how we collectively create memories based on their documentation. (Michelle Tupko)

Josh Azzarella shows at Kavi Gupta Gallery, 835 W. Washington, through November 29.

"Legend (A Portrait of Bob Marley)," 2005. 30-Channel Installation. Courtesy: Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna

By Alicia Eler

It’s pure coincidence that Berlin-based South African artist Candice Breitz is speaking at the Art Institute of Chicago on Election Day (November 4). Really, it is. Perhaps it’s fitting, however, because in her work internationally renowned Breitz discusses the phenomenon of “celebrity” across cultures, the impossible paradox of language as both a connecting and alienating force and the ubiquitous medium of video (and, thusly, video art) as a visual language—all concepts that pop up around the presidential race that the entire world is watching, nervously. After all, politicians are the biggest celebrities. I called the artist at her hotel room in New Orleans before she came to Chicago. Not surprisingly, I interrupted her watching election coverage.

How did you first become interested in the intersections between celebrity, fan culture and video art?

My interest in both video as a medium and celebrity as a matrix comes back to their function as lingua franca within our culture. You don’t need to be an art-world insider to be connected to the culture of video and digital distribution, or to the cult of celebrity. Both are unavoidable quantities. I have always wanted to make work which might in some way be accessible to an audience beyond the immediate art audience, and therefore have ended up speaking in a language which has a certain familiarity to a broad audience, one which does not automatically alienate.

Was there a specific moment that inspired you to start working with these concepts?

It’s hard to pinpoint a particular moment, but when I first left South Africa and moved over to the States—to arrive in Chicago, my port of entry to this country—I found it both ominous and fascinating that the other kids I was meeting, my peers, shared a particular mental archive with me. I had almost nothing in common with the students I was meeting from all over the world in terms of the background of my country, the politics, the history, the growing up experience, but the one thing we had in common was that we had all been consumers of the mass media: we had all listened to a particular Madonna album at a particular moment in time, we had all had a crush on Brad Pitt at a particular moment in time, and so this common ground and strange set of shared memories seemed to me to be worth considering, not to be too easily dismissed. I came to think of the mass media as an opportunity and a vehicle that it might be possible to hijack and reroute as an artist.

On that note, I was reading through the articles on your website, and I was particularly interested in something you said during an interview with Rosanne Alstatt in Kunstbulletin (2001): “The hyper-visualization of difference is used as a tool to promote sameness.” That line really stuck with me. Could you tell me more about that?

For a long period of time we urban creatures were defined by what we produced, what we made, what our jobs were. Increasingly in the post-WWII period, we’ve come to be defined not by what we produce, but by what we consume, what we watch, what we buy, what we hear. There is a certain equation at the heart of the mass media that never goes away: on the one hand what is constantly being sold to us is the promise of individuality, the promise of the possibility to define ourselves as distinct from others, but at the same time mass consumerism insists on homogeneity. Everyone is wearing the same t-shirt or buying the same pair of sneakers, as a gesture of individuality or distinction, but in so doing of course becomes part of a broad tribe of consumers. This tension between wishing to be oneself and to make meaning out of that which you consume, on the one hand, and the pressure, on the other, to conform, to be like others around you, is central to the culture we live in and remains a central obsession in my work—a set of questions that I come at from different angles again and again.

Yeah, I’m thinking about “Karaoke” (2000)—the same song but they’re not native English speakers. I was thinking about that, when people are singing karaoke they’re often not even sure what the words mean, but there’s this feeling of “connectedness.”

Language is supposed to be a transparent quality, a medium that connects people to each other, which serves as a bridge from one person to another. But often language can be exactly the opposite, a quality of exclusion, something that prevents people from participating and being a part of a given moment. In the work you’ve mentioned, karaoke became a metaphor for the language that comes from the outside. Often when people sing karaoke, they sing love songs, songs that are supposed to express something internal, emotions from the inside. But of course the tension is that with karaoke, you’re always receiving language from the outside as you read the scrolling words, language that is precisely not from your heart. So again, the same equation that we discussed earlier returns, the tension between wishing to express something internal which is yours as an individual, as opposed to the need or the inevitability of having to negotiate outside forces, the constant reminder that language ultimately belongs to nobody, language is something which we all share.

"Working Class Hero (A Portrait of John Lennon)," 2006. 25-Channel Installation. Courtesy: Jay Jopling / White Cube

In your artist statement about “The Babel Series” (1999), you say that “the resulting discordant environment owes as much to the new poetics of Dada, Futurism and the Soviet avant-garde as it does to Andy Warhol and MTV.” With Warhol, of course you have the shift in which the art world starts incorporating mass culture icons. And I’m thinking about this now, especially with video art—I was just reading a New York Times article that talked about artists taking bits from the Obama/McCain debates and chopping them up, and it made me think of your work. With that sort of art that’s happening now, do you see any difference between “high art” and “low art”?

I believe there is a direct continuum between YouTube, popular music, Hollywood and what artists are doing. I don’t see my position as an artist as distinct from that of other cultural producers. I want to, or even need to, be a part of that continuum. Which is not to say that this is a big happy-family-continuum, but I think that as an artist, it is as important to be aware of one’s relation to the history of art and the practice of other artists as it is to keep up with the daily newspapers, with YouTube, with new developments in television and popular music.

Speaking of YouTube and the Internet, I was thinking about “Legend,” 2005, in which you went to Jamaica 20 years after Marley’s death and had thirty Jamaicans sing their versions of “Legend” in a professional recording studio; and “Working Class Hero (A Portrait of John Lennon),” 2006, in which, similarly, you recruited fans to re-perform Lennon’s entire first solo album “Plastic Ono Band” (1970). I’m wondering if you see parallels between the process behind your work in pieces like these, and the phenomenon of YouTube fan culture? I’m thinking about the fan/celebrity culture that’s emerging now on YouTube that parallels what Warhol predicted: everyone will have their “15 minutes of fame.” And that’s what’s happening with YouTube. The process behind the Lennon and Marley pieces is similar to what fans of YouTube celebrities do. What do you think about the relations between your work and  YouTube celebrities’ fan culture?
To put it crudely, sometimes when people eat the same food, they shit the same shit. We’re all part of the same zeitgeist, and so it did turn out to be the case that the series of work you’re referring to (my portraits of Bob Marley, John Lennon, Madonna and Michael Jackson) predicted the YouTube format. The first of these works was made in late 2004, early 2005, just before YouTube broke, in that split second before it became a natural part of our landscape. When YouTube came on the scene, people started to ask me if it bothered me that its forms and strategies so closely mirrored my own. In fact for me, that felt like an amazing confirmation. It was incredible to realize that, parallel to what I was doing in my work, there were millions of people out there all looking for similar avenues to place themselves within popular culture. At best, any art reflects its times and what is going on at the time at which it is made, preferably with a critical twist, or such that it becomes legible in a new way.

Candice Breitz speaks at the Art Institute of Chicago’s Price Auditorium (111 S. Michigan Ave) at 12pm on November 4. She urges you to vote before you come to the lecture. At 5pm on November 5, she’ll lecture at her alma mater, the University of Chicago (Cochrane Woods Art Center RM 157).

Supporters extend hands and cell phone cameras toward Barack Obama as he preaches his message of change. An arranged multi-ethnic array of young adults yawn and stare blankly at a rally for the next great chapter in American history. Protesters in Guantanamo-orange jumpsuits, bags over their heads, kneel in a line outside the Federal Courthouse in Denver during the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

In a series of photographs, Joeff Davis, a staff photographer with Creative Loafing media, captures the political idealism, banality and unease in the 2008 presidential campaign. His Hyde Park Art Center exhibition, “Political Frenzy,” provides inconvenient observations that tarnish the sanitized luster of presidential campaigns.

“My photos are a bridge between photojournalism and art,” says Davis, who has covered every presidential election since 1996. “I like to document what’s going on, but also put out a sort of anti-propaganda of the political process. I have a political agenda.”

Not that Davis’ photography is particularly right or left wing. He skewers the way candidates shift through the campaign, dilute messages and “prostitute themselves” as corporate donors fork over hundreds of millions of dollars. Behind the pomp, Davis shows oft-overlooked stories, emotions and demoralization.

Davis’ most affecting images capture police brutality toward protesters during both party’s conventions. The faces of Eric Gidcumb and Clayton McKee are shown with bruises and gashes on their faces after being beaten by police during the Democratic National Convention. Outside the Republican National Convention, a medic treats a woman after police sprayed her in the face with pepper spray. To his knowledge, the photographed protesters were peaceful and were not charged with crimes, Davis says.

“To be fair, a small number of protesters were more violent,” says Davis. “But this was overkill. Political protest is a vital part of democracy.”

Aside from the irony of free speech violations at an event celebrating the democratic process, other images display a campaign of intense passions. Some challenge preconceived notions of Washington celebrity.

A day-old wall mural of Obama is marred by a graffiti swastika, with eyes crossed out. Sarah Palin’s teleprompter bodes of the ever-present threat of Al Qaeda, as another photo of her shows her giving a stiff, right-armed wave. Although usually seen as a genial, commanding figure, former president Bill Clinton scowls with jaw clenched and eyes focused off to the side. In contrast to their official glamour at the Republican convention, Former President George H.W. Bush and his wife Barbara are shown frowning, with age resting in their bored expressions.

“Each photograph has a story lurking under the surface,” says Davis. “People will take what they want away from it.” (Ben Broeren)

Joeff Davis’ “Political Frenzy” shows at the Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 South Cornell, through November 16.

By Lisa Larson-Walker

Doug Ashford is an artist and teacher at the Cooper Union School of Art, in New York. He also is a member of Group Material, an artists’ collective that for thirty years has created work questioning a variety of social themes and activist causes. On Saturday, October 25, Ashford will discuss Group Material’s “Democracy” (1988), a yearlong art project exploring the conflicts and failures within American democracy, as part of the symposium “Disruptions: The political art in now” at the Museum of Contemporary Art. The following is an excerpt from a conversation held in New York.

What changes do you notice within the strategies of activist art, what new methods are used, or what new spaces are being confronted?

I’m interested in the notion of artists’ turn to politics as a way to describe our investment in practices close to the experiences of beauty as an investment in the dialogical, the socially collaborative, the community based, a whole list of the past, probably twenty years. Those practices that are supposedly blending the relationship of art to activism have become seriously formulistic. Art has the potential to speak to aspects of humanity that are hidden and overwhelming. This potential could be overshadowed by the pragmatic needs of the social activist. So in that sense, when her social capital is taken by the status quo, the social activist may have an art form that has become decorative.

Can you think of anything that doesn’t function politically?

No, not if made by humans. Because, all culture happens for a reason, and all the ways that art moves us privately and socially is arranged, not dictated, but arranged through discourse.

Is that the inherent politics of discourse then?

Yeah, discourse is always in struggle. In that sense, I’m sort of a classic seventies cultural studies person, in that I see that the way we are able to describe ourselves as being formed in culture is dictated through power, from power. Not directly, because culture is controlled in so many different ways—by definition it is a political terrain. It doesn’t necessarily mean that political interventions will always change culture, that’s the beauty of it. And that’s why I would always insist to talk about this social turn, from the point of view of an artist’s use of politics to make epiphanies.

It seems like there’s been a big change in the availability of financial support for artists and art collectives since 1988. It’s positive for there to be more capital for these groups to have, but there is a definite way to get good at getting this money, and then maybe that’s why things get so formulaic, which seems to me to be negative. Can you comment on that?

It depends, because we know nothing is free. That’s the great American colloquialism. We know there’s no free lunch. How funding is then directing the thesis or the critique or the feelings or the affect is, from my perspective, is something that has its own culture. The relationship between art institutions and philanthropy, the actual resources they’re able to use, and how that the idea that the philanthropist is then also a cultural figure, is changing through time.

Within this, what do you think about the notion of a cultural capital that progressive political art can bring to a philanthropist? I don’t want to be overly sensational and say that they’re trying to ‘wash away the sins of capitalism’ by making this gesture but…

The idea of the redeemer, or the idea of redemption, often seems to be big in some of the rhetoric that validates the critical rhetoric around collaborative practices. Group Material was always extremely suspicious of this, because we always thought of ourselves as part of the audience. If you think of yourself as part of the audience, the idea of the artist as ethicist saving someone else is structurally a problem if it’s not self-critical.

So then what problems are considered in this reconsideration of Group Material’s “Democracy”?

The problem is that if we import that reorganization of the aesthetic to the political without changing and thinking about its effect, its aesthetic effect, what are the real forms we have as artists? We can’t repeat the formalisms of the past and expect great meanings to emerge. It doesn’t do me any good to have another experience socially in which someone tells me how to be political. Similarly, it’s not going to help for you to say there’s this sublime moment in which we are going to become enveloped by the awe of nature, that’s not going to work anymore. Art is different, and the social context for art is different, so the repetitions are frightening in this sense that they become the backdrop for business as usual, for art as exchange and not revelation.

Doug Ashford will participate in the symposium “Disruptions: The political in art now,” October 25, 11am, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 East Chicago.

The art of Mindy Rose Schwartz helps me understand the city where I live: a landscape of endless avenues and rows of mid-century bungalow homes, bricks bracing for the chill, and corner bars touting an old style—a style not updated in decades but drunk down with pride. As radiators creak on for the first time this season, and the scent of winter’s onset hits the air, the mind is tugged back through some retrograde memories. But that smell isn’t mom’s cooking; it’s just a years’ worth of collected dust burning on the open radiator grill. Sometimes Chicago feels like a city-sized family room.

Macramé is a major component of Mindy Rose Schwartz’s sculptures. Just as knitting had its popular resurgence recently and crossed gender and generational lines, macramé was in full force in the 1960s and 70s. Knotters of the thin white rope proclaimed their medium’s potential to not only decorate a hanging plant, but also wore it as an emblem of the female movement. That is, where the first feminists decried crafts including macramé as pigeonholing femininity, the second wave found pride in so-called women’s work. That so much knotted rope can be tossed between ideologies and interior decoration delights Schwartz, but her work does not take a stance either way. To Schwartz, these forces animate macramé, along with other objects of personal value, and that is a good thing.

“I love to make things,” says Schwartz. She created and teaches a course for art students called Extreme Craft that explores the boundaries of the handmade. Her current exhibition of new sculpture features objects both literally and figuratively transported from her suburban Skokie childhood home. Many flaunt macramé, and some are without. The whole series is on view at Old Gold, an exhibition space in the wood-paneled basement of a Humboldt Park home.

Because Schwartz’s sculptures frequently conjure a suburban, middle-class experience, their presentation in Old Gold’s setting is like a fated love affair. One macramé web occurs on and around a fireplace. Mantles are common exhibition venues (perhaps the domestic curiosity cabinet), and here Schwartz delivers a hulking tangle of material that packs all the personality of Diane Arbus’ photograph of an oversize Christmas tree. Schwartz also creates her own credenza-type display shelves to host an assortment of ghost-like figurines, flowery ornamentation in metal, and mini Constructivist-esque wood assemblages. For Old Gold, she created some intentional pieces of décor such as ceramic owls for the basement’s built-in bar nook.

I asked Schwartz about the state of rawness or roughness—or even intentional ugliness—in her art. “It’s a real part of the world,” she says. “Prettiness and nausea”—they coexist. (Jason Foumberg)

Mindy Rose Schwartz shows at Old Gold, 2022 North Humboldt, basement entrance, through October 19.

We all know how clothing emotes: shoulder pads are bossy, a bonnet is prude and ruffles like to be ravaged. That it’s easy to take a garment’s personality for granted—clothes are often called our second skin, as if our limbs sprouted thread—is cause for reconsidering how an outfit has the possibility to transform its wearer. In the maximalist camp we’ve witnessed drownings in fabric and ornament, and in the minimalist movement we’ve seen refinement pushed to ascetic extremes. (And, of course, there are fat pants for when you just feel like crying on a Friday night.)

Diane Simpson’s sculptures are clothing personages. In her current show, titled “Cover Ups,” the slightly larger-than-life objects are mostly torso-shaped and hollow, emphasizing cavities where a body would normally enter. Forms inspired by vests, aprons, collars, umpire’s padding and an x-ray shield for medical patients aren’t made to be worn, though, and seeing them on pedestals, hanging from the ceiling, and upon stages of Simpson’s own design turns them into purely visual objects.

Simpson’s sense of materials and construction places her sculptures on par with avant-garde fashion design. Yet, where designers have deconstructed fashion to death, Simpson constructs fashion-based forms from the pop culture minefield. “Vest,” from 2006, features patterns as seen on tiles in a New York City subway station. Seventeenth-century aristocratic muffs and imperial bibs, the graceful geometry of 1920s Art Deco, Japanese armor, and 1950s-era matronly socialite garb are plucked as inspiration with equal gusto.

Simpson, who was born and raised in Joliet, now lives and works in Wilmette. She has been showing her art in and around Chicago since the late 1970s. Much of the garment-based work was conceived for a commission at the Racine Art Museum in southeast Wisconsin. In 2007, Simpson built multiple sets for the museum’s storefront windows. Appropriately, the museum is housed in a former department store.

The adjective “architectonic” is often applied to the hard, angular forms that Simpson creates. Garments have served as inspiration for many previous sculptures, but their final forms tended to be less literal. At the core, Simpson is an abstract sculptor who delights in the various associations that a pattern or form may induce in a viewer.

Simpson’s work is often credited with promoting an empowering image of femininity. Given that her aprons and dresses stand upright in bold poses, it’s difficult not imagine the female-associated forms as symbolic. It might be, however, that the angular bodies and boxy, broad-shoulders are byproducts of Simpson’s particular construction process that includes a penchant for symmetry and a taste for rigid materials. The feminine aspect is incidental to the overall formal vision, and perhaps Simpson’s objects are best deemed Female only in contrast to H.C. Westermann’s playful constructions, which, if we need to assign a gender, are henceforth Male. (Jason Foumberg)

Diane Simpson, “Cover Ups,” shows at Alfedena Gallery, 434 W. Ontario, through October 11.

Aviva Alter and Alan Lerner create works of art that examine the human relationship with war and disharmony. In their first collaborative show, “Warning Signs,” this husband-and-wife team reflects on the horrors as well as psychological implications of conflict. Using screen prints, Lerner contrasts images of terror or violence with often-unrelated, irrelevant images in order to raise questions about the nature of the violent act depicted. For Lerner, “making art is an act of resistance,” to quote his role model—the performance artist Anne Hamilton. “Art either represents what I feel about the current state of affairs, as a tool towards social change, or ending war, or altering what’s going on,” he says. Alter, in contrast, uses garments she has sewn and inscribed with thoughtful statements to explore a metaphysical search for meaning in a life infused with both natural and enforced (i.e. war) death. “My work is about how an anxiety-driven world can bring people to the point of settling a situation through some kind of war or holocaust,” she says.

In Lerner’s visually loaded piece, “Killing to Save Lives,” images of mechanical ducks march over the face of a victim of the Hiroshima atomic bombing. “I try to raise questions concerning doubt, responsibility and the clash between our culture and the natural world,” Lerner says. “There’s not a whole lot of talk about the effects of war on the environment and animals.” In Alter’s piece, “How Do You Keep Warm,” a woolen quilt inscribed with the words “Exhale One Last Time” concerns the moment of the last breath, as experienced by Alter, who witnessed her own mother dying from cancer. “It is about looking for meaning and that goes beyond her [her mother’s] life and beyond my own,” Alter says. The woolen, armless military vests that once belonged to Alter’s great uncle, inscribed with the words “Release Longing,” paradoxically infuse comfort and severity. “By cutting off the arms [in the vest], I want to explore what it is you can lose through war, whether it’s an arm, or your mind,” Alter says.

Alter explores the emotional terrain of death and loss while Lerner seeks to remind us of the ultimate responsibility of living in a society driven by a “full-time and permanent state of war.” Mercilessly, Lerner takes a stab at things held dear, such as warplanes, which he mocks in the print showing tree logs flying through the air beholden by the fanciful wings and wheels of an airplane. “I used the images of logs to diffuse that horrific beauty of the warplanes, to make them absurd,” Lerner notes. Throughout “Warning Signs,” the seemingly absurd and incongruent make perfect sense. (Marla Seidell)

Aviva Alter and Alan Lerner show at the Brickton Art Center, 306 Busse Highway, Park Ridge, (847)823-6611, through October 17.