"In the Carpet Shop," from The Sausage Photographs, 1979. Chromogenic print.

RECOMMENDED

Swiss collaborative duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss excel at multiplying mundane elements to create captivating visual summations. The Art Institute of Chicago exhibits three early projects in which the pair plays with materials and imagined environments, demonstrating a subtle humor and unfettered enthusiasm for the acts of looking, experimenting and questioning.

Their first joint undertaking, 1979′s “The Sausage Photographs,” is a photographed series of ten miniature tableaux that use bizarre materials culled from a “typical Swiss-German refrigerator,” which apparently includes processed meats, Styrofoam and cardboard packaging, cigarette butts, parsley, stray bottle caps and peanut shells. Staged in an apartment where bedsheets become mountains and scrawled lines within a soot-lined oven stand in for ancient cave markings, these theatrical scenes communicate a whimsical fascination with make-believe and child-like play. Read the rest of this entry »

A show featuring a paint-by-numbers portrait of Lyndon B. Johnson and a framed needlepoint-esque image proclaiming “NO FAT CHICKS”— perhaps more than even just your average conceptual art—conceptual art such as Ryan Duggan’s begs the criticism, posed by Gilles Deleuze, “It is difficult to understand what existence adds to the concept when all it does is double like with like.” Certainly, almost fifty years after Warhol’s Brillo boxes and Ruscha’s Spam container paintings, Duggan’s screenprinted image of a Flamin’ Hot Cheetos bag (titled “Hot Garbage”) seems intended as homage rather than experiment. Marcel Duchamp’s first prankster gestures are of course reaching the century mark. Indeed, work like Duggan’s would seem to fly the flag of the empty gesture—like Diogenes rolling his empty tub through the streets while the rest of Athens’ citizens prepared for war, uselessness qua uselessness is one definition of the sacred. But, unlike with Diogenes and Duchamp, this uselessness is not framed as truly having a purpose; another piece in the show, “Contradictory Statement,” features intermittently flickering lights framing a sign stating “ADVERTISING DOESN’T WORK.” Thumbing its nose at the uncanny cachet of 1990s mannequin sculptures by artists like Charles Ray and the Chapman brothers, Duggan’s self-portrait mannequin pissing on a grave with a headstone marked “YOU” relies on how ineffectual such a presumably provocative gesture has become. But, despite everyone being over everything, the small framed image (also echoing Ruscha) stating “The End” in classic Hollywood script implies that both the optimism and anguish in Duggan’s deliberately pathetic work may consist in nothing being ever truly over. (Bert Stabler)

Through February 25 at Johalla Projects, 1561 North Milwaukee.

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 »

Harvey Moon's machine

By Jason Foumberg

Like zombies and cancer, sometimes machines are positioned to reflect the troubles of modern life. I’m not talking about coffee makers but atom colliders. Real or fictionalized, machines (and zombies and cancers) are human-born, but left to their own devices, can become automata that produce malevolent acts, and so they are perfect vehicles for artists, or anyone, to embody the fears and conflicts of our age. There is the fear of losing control, and the fear of destruction. While machines are good at destructing themselves or other things, they mostly excel at being perfect. The fear, then, lies in mechanization. If everything were to become mechanized, then humans, too.

What, then, of drawing machines? One drawing machine, built by Harvey Moon, is currently on display in a vacant storefront window in the old Carson’s downtown building, and several by Mark Porter were recently working up a frenzy at Fill in the Blank Gallery. Both machines make drawings. Moon’s machine reproduces, on a large sheet of paper, a photograph that he chooses using a micron pen. Moon programmed the machine to work day and night for the next three months. The little machine works quickly but the image is very large. It lowers a small metal arm to move itself around the sheet of paper. Read the rest of this entry »

Andrea Zittel, "A-Z Cellular Compartment Units," 2001. Collection Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, gift of Marshall Fields by exchange.

RECOMMENDED

“Without You I’m Nothing” is at once an impressive survey of contemporary work and an unsettling spectacle. To be reminded of one’s role as a viewer is, here, frequently to be indicted, whether as part of a culture of waste or sexualized violence or as a consumer in a marketplace of art that no radical stab at gift economy can disturb.

The south room of the MCA’s main floor features art highlighting audience “engagement” (like Michelangelo Pistoletto’s “Turkish Bath,” wherein a mirror locates the audience in relation to an odalisque) while the north room’s pieces require viewer “activation” (floor tiles, for instance, or a collection of rubber stamps with which to play).

Much of the work is explicitly political, either in the accessible sense of Adrian Piper’s lecture on racial labeling or as an artifact of activism, like Olafur Eliasson’s monofrequency light designed to shine from boutique windows as a provocative advertisement for an Ethiopian nonprofit. Here, however, Piper’s overturned table and Eliasson’s yolky light glare from competing corners of a show that dilutes itself by accumulation. As empty as these vast warehouse rooms feel, physically, within seconds the sensation of the show is one of thumbing through a hefty art-history textbook. Read the rest of this entry »

Leeza Meksin

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Although the six artists in “Tomboy” are lesbians (according to the catalogue essay), the artworks in the exhibition don’t depict graphically charged lesbian imagery (there’s no pornography or strap-on dildos). Instead, the artworks are androgynous. They aren’t dogmatic or overtly political, but rather sing with visual self-assurance, and that’s a crowning achievement for art. “Tomboy” seems to be more about social attributes and characteristics than about the core of a person’s identity, more about clothing than vaginas.

The term “tomboy” doesn’t necessarily equate with lesbianism. A woman who acts like a man, and who loves other women, is better described as a butch lesbian, the opposite of a femme. Usage of the pejorative “tomboy” dates back to the mid-1500s, three centuries before the word “lesbian” was ever used to mean woman/woman love. Where “butch lesbianism” concerns sex, “tomboy” concerns gender-flipping, and a straight woman can be a tomboy—she may enjoy male-coded activities like football, fixing car engines, wearing suits and spitting on the sidewalk. This stringent terminology is the side effect of decades-long battles over identity politics and civil rights. Read the rest of this entry »

Zach Taylor & Aaron Williams, " Assembly 1," 2010

RECOMMENDED

Zach Taylor and Aaron Williams have completely different ways of communicating. Taylor’s language is couched in the mechanical world, yet concerns itself with a journey rather than the mode of transport, a distance covered emotionally which is then embellished, infused with ulterior definition and given greater resonance by the straight-edged precision of text woven in by Williams.

The bulk of “Finished” is collaborative in just this way, image and word shaping each other, and where these two aspects seamlessly fuse is where the art really kicks and communicates something, though perhaps not always decipherable—sort of like this review—for how ultimately internalized it feels. I almost have mixed feelings about the show because it’s so good to look at that I was distracted from interpretation. The work was resilient to associations—despite the nostalgic imagery of Jiminy Cricket and the Land O’ Lakes mascot—so initially I could only admire the way paint was perfectly calibrated on canvas, the technique employed and the sheer physicality that occupied the gallery. Read the rest of this entry »

Adonis Flores, "Sieve/Tamiz, 2005," Digital print. Courtesy of the artist and Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam.

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In 1996 guitarist Ry Cooder traveled to Havana, assembling a group of aging Cuban musicians to record the hit album that would be called Buena Vista Social Club, introducing many Americans to the unique sultry swing of old-school Cuban nightclub music. But judging from this exhibition, a similarly unique enchanting style of visual art has not been cultivated by the National Council of Fine Arts and the Wifredo Lam Center (which also sponsors the International Havana Art Biennial). It’s more like what you would expect a hundred miles north, in Art Miami, only a bit less outrageous, more provincial, and twenty to forty years behind the times. Rather than a contemporary Cuban style, the themes and devices of mainstream contemporary art have been applied to Cuban subjects. So much of this exhibition feels like a trip to Havana and the surrounding countryside—with photographs of quirky peasants, decaying sugar refineries and weathered doors. Even more so, the blurry, damp-but-dynamic cityscape paintings of Luis Enrique Camejo share a real affection for a time and place. A homeboy affection is emphatically proclaimed by Roberto Fabelo’s installation called “Damned Trips”—in which a collection of well-worn suitcases are impaled by a twelve-foot dagger suspended from the ceiling. Velasco and Arellano have photo-manipulated the iconic Plaza de la Revolución into a series of images where the towering Marti Memorial is subjected to some rather severe weather conditions and finally partially submerged by the sea. This is all more than just a little nostalgic and is augmented by many works on that overworked twentieth-century theme of modern man lost in the maze of his own high-tech civilization. Read the rest of this entry »

Conrad Bakker, "Untitled Project: SELF HELP"

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Many stories, such as tales of time travel and apocalyptic visions, center on the dilemma of the self-fulfilling prophecy. In varying shades of reverence, so too does the archive of futurism now on display at Green Lantern Gallery. Curated by Abigail Satinsky, “Future Shock” is a collection of blueprints for utopia (and coping mechanisms for dystopia) that correspond to Alvin Toffler’s 1970 bestseller of the same name. Visitors are immediately greeted by Randall Szott’s stacked copies of “Future Shock,” acquired at sundry thrift stores, color-coded to represent a progressively increasing bar chart and reflected in a floor mirror à la Robert Smithson. In an alcove further back in the gallery, one can watch Orson Welles’ absurd yet chilling documentary based on Toffler’s book—a pulpier inversion of the overlapping flashbacks in Citizen Kane. Read the rest of this entry »

Joseph Yoakum, "Pleasure and Club House on Lake Placid near Sebring Florida on Indian Prairie Canal," 1964, ink and colored pencil on paper

By Jason Foumberg

In the 1990s, a huge range of contemporary art was categorized into some simple themes. There was a quick consensus that “the body” and “identity,” “memory” and “home” defined the queries and struggles of our contemporary era, as if the big world was so complex—and overburdened by art theory—that we needed to recompose ourselves using these basic building blocks of human life. These efforts at categorization promoted some excellent art works. In the “home” or “place” thematic category, Rachel Whiteread’s 1993 “House” and Gregor Schneider’s “Totes Haus ur” (1985-2003, in various iterations) defined a new genre of residential manipulation, with roots stretching back to Gordon Matta-Clark’s 1974 “Splitting” of a suburban home right in half, although Whiteread’s and Schneider’s large-scale installations were more of an effort to reconstruct the single-family home rather than destroy it.

The symbolism of the single-family home is resurging amid the American real estate bust, and a particular derivation is on view today in Chicago galleries. Where Whiteread and Schneider (and a host of others, including Do Ho Suh) investigated the site-specific qualities of “home,” the houses of today are generic and reduced to icons in the style drawn by children: a square with a triangle roof. As symbols, these houses are reductions to a universal essence of “home”; they speak about the safety of familiar objects, the comfort of domestic rituals and the fantasy of contained happiness. Read the rest of this entry »