RECOMMENDED

In the mid-nineteenth century, Scottish mathematician Hugh Blackburn invented the harmonograph, a device that draws elegant abstractions through the movements of two or more pendulums. Blackburn observed that the visual “harmonies” resulting from intervals of ratio in pendulum height correlated to similar steps in the musical scale. University of Chicago musicologist Larry Zbikowski is exploring the visual patterns of movement made by dancers of the waltz, and correlating these patterns both to the musical scores that accompanied the dancing and to states of emotion and consciousness in the brain. These synchronistic models serve as inspiration for Conrad Freiburg, whose virtual universe, erected in the main gallery at the Hyde Park Art Center, is divided into sections matching the seven notes of the Western major scale with sconce-like chimes affixed to the wall. While Freiburg doesn’t claim adherence to any esoteric system, the number seven recurs throughout occult cosmology; in theosophy, for example, the seven-step “septenary” describes the various “energy envelopes” of the soul that exist in subatomic emptiness. Read the rest of this entry »

Henry Fuseli, "Macbeth Consulting the Vision of the Armed Head," 1793. Oil on canvas. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington.

Something terrible happens in the world every day, so tragedy is the bread and butter of daily journalism, but as the subject of Aristotle’s “Poetics,” the foundational text of European aesthetics, it well deserves the scholarly attention which University of Chicago professors of art history, as well as philosophy, English and classical literature have given it in this special exhibition at the Smart Museum. Focusing on two centuries of Western European art, “The Tragic Muse: Art and Emotion, 1700-1900” attempts to trace changing attitudes towards what we call tragedy.

The highlight is the collection of paintings that relate to Shakespearean theater. There are portrait sketches (1785-90) of the actress Sarah Siddons as Lady Macbeth by George Romney from the Princeton University Art Museum. More impressively, there is the life-sized painting of the tragic actor Philibert Rouvière as Hamlet, from 1865, by Edouard Manet on loan from the National Gallery, and Henry Fuseli’s nearly life-sized depiction of “Macbeth Consulting the Vision of the Armed Head” (1793) from the Folger Shakespeare Library. Read the rest of this entry »

3-D digital reconstruction from east wall altar, South Cave, Northern Xiangtangshan, with missing fragments shown in yellow. Image by Jason Salavon and Travis Saul.

By Chris Miller

In 1909, distinguished poet and orientalist Victor Segalen, author of “La Grande Statuaire chinoise,” found himself and a colleague alone with a splendid statue of the Buddha in a remote shrine in China. Despite some damage to the torso, “its profile had retained its nobility, its eyes their gaze, the smile of its mouth its generous sweetness and a kind of irony.” Immediately they knew what they had to do. “This statue, we must have it! We will not leave without it!” Removing an axe from their luggage, Segalen began chopping at the neck. The noise attracted the attention of two locals, who showed Segalen how to apply wedges and wooden blocks to make the work so much easier.

Imagine that process repeated tens of thousands of times in grottos and temples throughout China in the early twentieth century. Plunderers carted off entire shrines, servicing the hot European market for world art. The chopped-off heads, hands, whatever, eventually entered the collections of far-flung museums, including American.

But times have changed. The pioneering scholar of Japanese Buddhist art, Ernest Fenellosa (1853-1908) believed that “we are approaching the time when the art work of all the world of man may be looked upon as one, as infinite variations in a single kind of mental and social effort.” Modern scholars, though, are more likely to agree with Sir Edmund Leach (1910-1989): “Works of art are not just things in themselves, they are objects carrying moral implications. What the moral implication is depends upon where they are.” Read the rest of this entry »

"In The Evening," mixed media on synthetic paper.

Sex and death are implied everywhere in Kim Piotrowski’s show “Beds and Guns.” Taking the eponymous objects as metonymies for overlapping spectrums of ideas—placidity, power, eroticism and violence; birth, decay and mortality—she creates mixed-media works on paper that range in scale and intensity from the intimate to the nearly overwhelming. Piotrowski’s paintings are rooted in Abstract Expressionism, but her innovative experiments with materials and photojournalistic source images make her paintings a thing all their own. The drag of the brush creates whorls and ridges that lend the paintings some of their intense surface action. Some contour lines are sharp; elsewhere, pools of color bubble and slide. Piotrowski’s techniques evince sober control, but their effect is kinetic, occasionally wild.

Working at the edges of representation, Piotrowski renders her subjects abstract but also particularized. Some of her guns appear as sites of emerging violent energy. In “Arm in Arm in Arm,” the weapon rises monstrously from a lava-like morass, all ensconced within a dense and ragged blue halo that radiates brutal strokes of green. Piotrowski’s beds are every bit as lethal—and seductive—as the guns. Read the rest of this entry »

Here Rebecca Warren exhibits two types of sculpture. Medium-sized steel planks with a corroded patina are propped in a vague Constructivist revival style, each adorned with a single pom-pom ball. The steel sculptures are, plainly, a one-line joke, parodies of historical Minimalism. Humor in art can be a great antidote to the junk of life, but these sculptures are jokes about art, as if invented during an art student’s drinking game.

The second type of sculpture presented here is a series of clay piles on pedestals. The formless piles are manhandled and sparsely painted with some colors. There are, unfortunately, about eight of these sculptures, each no different than another (although one clay sculpture, with female parts, is quite good, though not better than Hans Bellmer). Personally, I get a lot of pleasure from abject and “unmonumental” art, but these pieces of shit pack no punch. As pieces of shit go, they don’t stink at all. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Whatever happened to the legacy of Ben Shahn (1898-1969)? In 1954, he represented the United States, along with Willem de Kooning, at the Venice Biennale. In 1956, he delivered the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard (as Igor Stravinsky, Herbert Read  and Robert Frost had done before him). His work entered the collections of major American museums like the Met, MOMA and the AIC. Today it seems like only illustrators still revere his accomplishments; one of them, Sandy Kossin, recently declaring that “his use of line and design made him the icon he became.” His main problem has been with art critics. In 1947, Clement Greenberg wrote, “This art is essentially beside the point as far as ambitious present day painting is concerned, and is much more derivative than it seems at first glance. There is a poverty of culture and resources, a pinchedness, a resignation to the minor, a certain desire for quick acceptance.” Ouch. Even his former friend, the critic Henry McBride, felt that his 1948 painting “Allegory” symbolized the redness of the USSR and recommended deportation. (Perhaps this was why Shahn advised art students to “read everything you can find about art except the reviews.”) Read the rest of this entry »

"Living Room" at Swimming Pool Project Space

By Jason Foumberg

A new breed of curator is emerging: the art collector. It’s almost standard practice for private collections to make their way into public museums by way of vanity exhibitions, even if they sometimes cause controversy, such as the Greek entrepreneur Dakis Joannou’s current collection show at New York’s New Museum. More often than not, though, such shows barely register on the critical radar even though they (seemingly) violate some ethical boundary of public trust.

In Chicago, the city of alternatives, private exhibition spaces in domestic settings abound. This is the reverse of the Joannou conflict—inviting the public into private spaces—but it may mark a relaxing of those taut and fraught lines of art ownership.

On the grand scale, there’s The Richard H. Driehaus Museum in a River North mansion that houses its namesake’s decorative arts collection. On a smaller scale, but more profuse, are the dozens of citywide temporary art spaces found in apartments and homes. A couple of surprising new art spaces, in collectors’ homes, opens the door to a deeper understanding of the collector as curator. Read the rest of this entry »

Jessica Labatte

RECOMMENDED

Curated by Jeff Ward and Shannon Stratton, and featuring the work of seven artists (Todd Chilton, Pete Fagundo, Carrie Gundersdorf, Katy Heinlein, Jessica Labatte, Andrea Myers and Tessa Windt), five of whom are from Chicago, “Ps & Qs” posits what a sociable twenty-first-century Formalism might look like. Including painting, drawing, sculpture and photography, and incorporating several of the materials (fabric, Styrofoam, colored pencil) that an older, more traditional Formalism eschewed, these looser but utterly self-possessed images and objects range from pure abstraction (Gundersdorf) to a more minimalist approach (Labatte) and encompass most things in-between.

First exhibited in Houston, in 2006, three artists (Chilton, Meyers and Heinlein) are holdovers, although all works in this present iteration are new. Curators Ward and Stratton see the examination of contemporary art’s conversation with Formalism as endlessly fruitful and, when asked, they suggested the thesis of the show could support a countless number of new artists and artworks, yielding many more results and fresh insights if ever repeated in the future. Following suit, the Hyde Park Art Center’s version sees Ward and Stratton less concerned with an iron-clad curatorial conceit and how works fit into it, and instead delights in the presence of the work itself.

The title of the exhibition, taken from the etiquette imperative to mind your manners, sets the stage for the pleasant politesse of the works on view; they are gracious, and to some extent gendered, hosts and hostesses, and visitors feel welcomed to enjoy them in the intimate exhibition hall, specifically designed to function on a human scale, with works hung low and arranged in suites of three throughout. The intimacy and focus these circuits foster prevents subtler pieces, such as Fagundo’s sculptures constructed from found wooden end tables and painted Styrofoam, from being overlooked, and is counter balanced by the “a-ha!” moments that abound around every corner. (Thea Liberty Nichols)

Through June 6 at the Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Avenue.

By Rachel Furnari

Matthew Metzger’s paintings address themselves directly to the history of abstraction, but they’re also astonishing and accurate representations of the discarded objects of everyday life. They are about both the lives of things and their renewed vigor on the flat surface of a painting. The opening of his new exhibition at DOVA Temporary, “The Interrogative Remainder,” brought up a number of questions about Metzger’s process, motivations and the importance of 1970s arena rock.

For the most part, your paintings are fanatically illusionistic, reproducing the surfaces and two-dimensional forms of various ordinary objects and ephemera with great skill. And yet you are not interested in the painting “passing” for the object itself. I am tempted to describe your realism as entropic—always undoing its own illusion or betraying its artifice. Can you talk about your paintings’ relationship to the real, to the thing itself? Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

“Parallel Plot,” Matt Saunders’ solo show at the Renaissance Society, features photographic prints and rotoscoped animations by the Berlin-based American artist. Saunders’ process, making use of photography, collage and painting, starts with film stills, Mylar, ink and oil to create prepared negatives for the darkroom. These negatives are in turn used to produce original prints ranging from the very small to the very large. Trained as a painter at Yale, it is not surprising to see that Saunders’ work runs the gamut of painting’s genres: landscape, interiors and portraits are the focus of this artist’s portfolio, though pure abstraction is equally at home in the work presented here. Of particular interest are large-format contact prints made by taking original paintings, taping them down to large sheets of photographic paper, and exposing them to light in the darkroom, resulting in x-ray-like images that compress the painted image and its support into a single layer. Many of the works presented here are altered portraits of actors and actresses who have departed popular memory, appropriate for Saunders’ ghostly images. The subjects refer to the traditions of representational painting and cinema, like Warhol before him. However, Saunders is working toward the opposite end of the Warholian conceptual spectrum: away from endless reproducibility and toward uniqueness; away from the glamour of film and toward the obscurity of history. Beautifully installed and conceptually rich, this show surely warrants a visit. (David Emanuel)

Through April 11 at The Renaissance Society, University of Chicago, 5811 South Ellis, (773)702-8670