Designed to represent an automated book-production facility, “Living Book” is a collaboration by Plural (the graphic design duo Jeremiah Chiu and Renata Graw) and Jonathan Krohn of The Center for Book Technology. The exhibition uses custom software designed by Michael Bingaman to capture images via an overhead camera, which are projected on a wall. Viewers may use an accompanying keyboard to make text appear over the projected images. In theory, a nearby printer would print out a page of the resulting text and images every sixty seconds for five hours a day, five days a week. However, a sound concept doesn’t always lead to flawless execution.

On a recent Saturday, the camera and keyboard were working with the images projected against the blank white wall, but the printer spat out blank page after blank page. A gallery attendant had to refill the paper tray just to demonstrate how the exhibit was intended to work. Read the rest of this entry »

It is tempting to take the temperature of today’s cultural climate by sticking a finger in the cold past. How do we compare to those who triumphed before us? Is the past our tradition, our culture? But the things that grow in shadows are strange, and there is no darker shadow than the one cast from someone else’s departed golden age.

The New Art Examiner, an art-criticism newspaper and then a magazine published in Chicago from 1973 to 2002, has recently been collected into an edited anthology called “The Essential New Art Examiner,” which contains thirty-seven selections from its roller-coaster run through Chicago’s contemporary art landscape and insightful reflections from five of the publication’s editors. This King James version of the New Art Examiner condenses the battles of the old guard into a doctrine of Chicago’s signature art styles and controversies. Read the rest of this entry »

Marco and Martine. photo by Jessica Williams.

By Jason Foumberg

Golden Age, Chicago’s only venue dedicated to selling artists’ books and printed matter, is closing this November. Artists Marco Kane Braunschweiler and Martine Syms opened the shop in Pilsen in 2007, with a focus on affordable art publications by emerging artists, and moved to the West Loop in January 2010, where they hosted exhibition, lecture and performance programs among their well-stocked tables and shelves of printed projects from international artists. Golden Age also had a publishing arm, producing ten titles from emerging American artists, and they participated in events such as the NY Art Book Fair. Golden Age was more than a traditional shop with unusual product; it was also a place where people hung out, browsed books, and chatted with the always-enthusiastic owners, Marco and Martine, about new ideas and trends in contemporary art. But “Golden Age is completely over,” they told me. “We will not resuscitate the brand under any conditions. It’s a done deal.” Read the rest of this entry »

By Regan Golden-McNerney

One of my favorite characters in American literature is Pearl, the rambunctious daughter of Hester Prynne and Reverend Dimmesdale in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter.” Pearl is as lustrous and elusive as her namesake; she is alternately demonic and angelic as she flits through the forest taunting her mother and dancing in the sparkling sunshine. Many “Pearls” are uncovered by the artists and authors in “Girls! Girls! Girls!”—a collection of eight essays on the figure of the girl in contemporary art. This book draws attention to the transformative, almost chimerical, power of girls. As the two editors, Lori Waxman and Catherine Grant, explain in their introduction, the girl, nearing the end of adolescence, can be a potent symbol of the fluidity of gender identity and also expand cultural definitions of the feminine. Read the rest of this entry »

By Jason Foumberg

A self-identified “second-generation collector” admitted, “I have never heard of a small artist group that’s having something [an exhibition] where anybody’s reached out to me.” This was in the MCA’s auditorium at a well-attended panel discussion on Chicago’s local art scene in November. The collector, who was seated in the audience, chose to respond to the topic of how emerging artists can connect with emerging collectors. The collector, who presumably lives in Chicago, admitted to not shopping locally (and only at art fairs) because artists don’t invite him to their exhibitions. As a caveat, he bluntly told the audience, “What we see [in Chicago] is generally not appealing.”

Most artists need collectors if they’re expecting to be career artists, but this collector did not toss out calling cards to the hundreds in attendance, nor identify his name. It’s likely that this collector, and many others, enjoy the prestige of collecting art, yet collectors are not public figures. (The highest echelon of philanthropy is the “anonymous” donor). If you are an artist in Chicago you can probably name fifty fellow artists, twenty art galleries, and maybe one art collector. This collector revealed a double-edged secret: collectors don’t need artists.

“Each and every month commit to identifying a minimum of fifty potential collectors and make at least one sale,” writes Katharine T. Carter in her new book, “Accelerating on the Curves: The Artist’s Roadmap to Success.” Her other advice for an artist to maintain good collector relations is to host an annual holiday cocktail party at your studio, send a glass of champagne to a collector’s table if you spot them at a restaurant, always thank them for a sale with a handwritten note, and update them with news about your current exhibitions. This last bit mirrors the complaint of the unidentified Chicago collector. Carter’s words of wisdom are not, in fact, unrealistic, but how does an artist who is not represented by a gallery connect with collectors in the first place? “Get creative,” she says. Collectors are not just museum aristocrats, but also your dentist, accountant, realtor, or friend who is an interior designer. These folks, who don’t shop at art galleries, have the power to purchase your art if they only knew you were an artist, she writes. Read the rest of this entry »

Andre Malraux

By Jason Foumberg

Three unique library collections and archives sparked my interest this week. Such collections grow slowly and quietly over the years. Here, two are at least seventy years old and one is a fledgling five. The collections described below are maintained by individuals who clearly gain pleasure from their hoarding, and welcome the public to do the same.

The Imaginary Museum

In a well-known photograph from 1950, the French writer Andre Malraux stands before a small sea of images spread before him on his office carpet. His “imaginary museum” remixed the history of art as a virtual collage, one that could be re-ordered at will. “An art book is a museum without walls,” said Malraux, and this statement is writ large, like a rule, on the entry wall of the eighth floor of the Harold Washington Library, in the visual and performing arts division. A visitor to the library’s Picture Collection, located on this floor, could easily recreate Malraux’s style of temporary exhibition. The Picture Collection contains an estimated million-and-a-half images clipped and filed by category. There are over 10,000 subject headings organized alphabetically, for searching or browsing, and the images can be checked out like a book, taken home and pored over. Read the rest of this entry »

Chicago’s Front Forty Press debuts its new artist-profile series of affordable paperback books with the work of Mark McGinnis, an American artist and designer whose work has appeared in Business Week, The New York Times and in solo shows in Chicago and Los Angeles. McGinnis combines printmaking with drawing and graphic design to create an iconography that satirizes and distorts current political and social issues. There’s an image of a globe stuffed inside an oven; the silhouette of a man pouring machine guns from a gas can; an illustration of the trunks of two Republican elephants twisting into the heads of the snakes in the Caduceus; an image of a jack-in-the-box toy, and in the place of the clown, a bomb. While the images are uncluttered and simplistic (most are black-and-white, or employ few colors), the social commentary is conspicuous and multilayered, often digging at several raw issues simultaneously.

Each book in Front Forty Press’ series will include an interview with the artist by art critic Victor Cassidy. “The Front Forty books are [founder] Doug Fogelson’s labor of love,” Cassidy says. “Since many of his ideas and interests are not those of the general population, the books sell to a small readership.” It also includes an essay by art historian Carlo Vinti, who will examine and discuss every aspect of the artist, including their life, technique, inspiration and personal social and political interests. The books also serve to round out the reader’s comprehension of the art, and complement the masterful works sandwiched in the pages. Front Forty Press’ “Profiles Series, Issue No. 1: Mark McGinnis,” is available at front40press.com. (Naomi Huffman)

It’s a gallery! It’s a performance space! It’s a bookstore! It’s a café! The revived Green Lantern Gallery, temporarily housed at Chicago and Maplewood in Ukrainian Village, permanent location TBD, is aiming to be Chicago’s answer to Gertrude Stein’s living room. It’s an expanded vision of the original Green Lantern Gallery, which director Caroline Picard once ran out of her apartment. When the city shut it down due to an ordinance against such ventures, it left Picard with a choice: go big or go home (no pun intended). She’s going big. The new dream is a joint collaboration with featherproof books, another independent press interested in books that cross the boundaries between visual art and literature. “It’s like a high-school mega crush,” featherproof’s Zach Dodson says of the relationship between the presses. Picard recounts their fateful meeting at the NEXT art fair as a “marathon… of gossip and story-swapping and big-bang idea speculation.”

Under the umbrella of Lantern Projects, the space will feature a bookstore/café/bar up front, a performance space downstairs, an art gallery upstairs. Four year-long artists-in-residence (but don’t worry, City Hall—they won’t literally reside there!) will double as baristas, while the folks at Green Lantern and featherproof will toil away in their attached shared office space. The goal is interdisciplinary dialogue and artistic community. “We hope to break open current systems in order to supply alternative dynamisms: messy, vibrant and innovative collaborations between artists, audiences, mediums and ideas,” Picard says. The temporary headquarters opens up today, June 1, but “it won’t be the end-all-be-all” space of her vision just yet. For Picard, it’s “one step at a time, I say.” (Rachel Sugar)

Gregory Battcock archive

By Jason Foumberg

There’s a common grievance that Chicago is a desert of contemporary art collecting, but I’ve always been skeptical of that perspective, as it’s a little too simplistic and predictable to constantly pine over, and be disappointed by, the lack of wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am class of dealers and buyers here. An alternative exists. Private collecting is not always about purchasing major paintings for mansion walls. Smaller stuff, like handmade books and drawings, are easier to collect, and not-so-obvious items, such as correspondence, snapshots, clippings and scrapbooks—what is usually termed “ephemera”—when combined provide a thrillingly unique approach to an artist’s life. Imagine that after you die your shoeboxes full of letters, your sketchbooks and junk drawers are preserved in total, as an archive, to better understand how you lived, worked and related to your community. Your souvenirs would be evidence of your life. No one wants to simply disappear.

Two current exhibitions reveal why archives matter. At Rowley Kennerk Gallery, artist Joseph Grigely shows in six vitrines the residue of critic and artist Gregory Battcock’s life (1937-80), and at the newly opened Public Collectors Study Center, artist Marc Fischer shows eleven artist books by Don Celender (1931-2005). Although both Battcock and Celender had a presence in the New York art scene, and both sought to have lasting importance on the cultural life of American art (each earned a PhD and published regularly), their legacies are scattered and buried, just waiting for the right person to pick up the pieces. Read the rest of this entry »

Dutes Miller could pass for a young AA Bronson. If you’ve met either, you know I’m not just talking about their beards—although at face value their look-alike beards, cascading and unfettered, bespeak a similar naturalness and charm. Bronson helped found General Idea but disbanded the group after its two other members died of AIDS fifteen years ago. During its run, General Idea gave a public face to the then-taboo gay lifestyle. Now, forty years after Stonewall, and after increased assimilation, what is the most beneficial image for the gay art movement?

The beard, worn like a badge, persists. Yes, it may be just a fashion, but it also signifies solidarity and self-made freedom. Ever image-conscious, gays who sport a beard of a certain length knowingly join a rank. A beard seems to say: my body is unconstrained, and my inhibitions are not secret. For his first solo exhibition in Chicago, Dutes Miller presents forthright and honest images of the body—the gay man’s body—from beard to balls. Miller’s husband and sometimes collaborator Stan Shellabarger (they had an exhibition together in 2007) also makes body-centric art, often in ritualistic endurance performances. Together, they make dual-portrait keepsakes, and in Basel they dug two graves joined by an underground tunnel through which they held hands. Such bittersweet gestures straightforwardly engage Bronson’s art practice—the way he tempers things with preemptive morning, his flair for banal male nudity, often combining political and emotional pitches. In fact, Bronson had an exhibition of his late work in 2001 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Chicago, just as Miller and Shellabarger were settling into their new home in the city.

Miller’s solo exhibition is a bit different than the collaborative efforts with his husband. For one thing, he uses paint (Shellabarger doesn’t), and his themes are hardcore gay rather than domestic. Miller admits there’s a good amount of “decorum” in his collaborative art, but the current show is laced with glossy porn, shit smears, a meat hook—dangerous sort of imagery, but real. “Sex is messy,” says Dutes. This is more Bruce LaBruce than AA Bronson, although if it weren’t for either trailblazer, would Miller be as candid as he is in this show? The images are celebratory: a cock is the body of a muscled wrestler, arms pumping in triumph; paint flows expressively like an ejaculation; there’s a pulpit in the middle of the gallery; one picture, titled “Smell It,” features a bouquet of anal flowers.

Thirty-six collages made from porn are hung in a grid on one gallery wall. The cut-up technique, like a good Picasso nude from his surrealist phase, over-saturates the bodies with sex. Assholes, like flying discs, populate one scene. Another compounds flesh on flesh, hair on hair, cocks on faces. One guy is remade to sport four dicks, but Miller also deforms his face, giving the fantasy a dark twist. Appropriating porn into one’s art may just be a way of prolonging masturbation. Miller’s gay scrap-booking technique is shared by another Western Exhibitions gallery artist, John Parot. Both ask viewers to see desire as distinct from shame. (Jason Foumberg)

Dutes Miller shows at Western Exhibitions, 119 N. Peoria, through August 1.