Krista Wortendyke, from "Crime Unseen"

By Jason Foumberg

During a typically violent summer in Chicago this year, Tony Fitzpatrick wrote an article for Artnet magazine about Chicago’s legacy of crime and murder—among cops and gangsters alike—and he arrived at the moral that “the city gets just as many killers as it deserves.” Fitzpatrick innately understands, as do many artists, that gloom-and-doom tragedies make for great art. Contrary to the common good, some of our greatest art is fueled by conflict, war, irony and struggle. “Reading about the happiness of others is often boring,” writes Charles Baxter in his essay “Regarding Happiness.” Baxter cites Adam and Eve. Before their sin, “they are virtually non-narratable.” It is their sin, and their guilt, that gives their story meaning. Following them, we have the Greek tragedies and Shakespeare, George Carlin and Lars von Trier. Two current exhibitions investigate the delicate topics of happiness and violence: “Crime Unseen” at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, and “The Happiness Project,” a citywide curatorial initiative organized by Tricia Van Eck. Read the rest of this entry »

Poet Cassandra Troyan

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Among a number of functions planned around the release of David Foster Wallace’s highly anticipated unfinished posthumous novel, “The Pale King,” a performance-art event in a gallery space seems likely to bring the most breadth and depth in a tribute to Wallace’s work. “Subtitles IV: Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment” (a reference to the author’s magnum opus “Infinite Jest”), organized and presented by LiveBox at Threewalls gallery this Friday, will be a wide-ranging, open-ended and fittingly intricate response to Wallace’s prose.

“Subtitles,” a series of multimedia and performance projects inspired by literary figures and themes, began with a strict medium guideline; the first, centered around Poe, consisted of one video performance, one audio performance and a reading. “Since then, we’ve expanded and gone beyond this format,” notes Matt Griffin of LiveBox theater, who has curated a number of past events in the “Subtitles” series. Griffin had “secretly wanted to do a Wallace show the entire time,” and in conversation this year with artist and poet Cassandra Troyan, Wallace’s name was finally brought up, and by coincidence “Pale King”’s release date was announced for the same day. Though the immediate impetus for this year’s “Subtitles” is the release of “The Pale King,” performances will encompass a range of Wallace’s work. Read the rest of this entry »

By Gretchen Holmes

It has been far too long since I have seen Ross Moreno’s naked body. If you’re familiar with the artist’s disconcerting blend of “comedy, magic and a little something extra,” you naturally concur. Moreno’s high-concept vaudeville routine, which might begin with a few card tricks or masturbation jokes but always ends in partial nudity and tears, has provoked uncomfortable silence and nervous tittering from Munich to Hong Kong. And this Valentine’s Day, the Chicago-based performer will appear at Club Nutz, a comedy club located in Scott and Tyson Reeder’s kitchen pantry. With the holiday approaching, my prurient desire to watch Moreno burst from the moth-eaten, jock-itching, tear-away suit he’s been performing in for the past seven years seems more urgent than ever. After all, he is my husband, and that tear-away suit is my handiwork.

Indeed, marrying a man who’s built a career performing botched magic tricks that invariably leave him wandering across the stage in thong underwear pays dividends: rather than suffer through another champagne and oysters Valentine’s Day dinner just to get his pants on the floor, I’ll simply catch his show at Club Nutz with the rest of you. Read the rest of this entry »

By Jason Foumberg

It was a staring contest, and we all had a staring problem. Around a square we stood and sat around Marina who sat and stared at us, one by one, in a chair directly facing her. The scene was solemn and serious. Marina always wins the staring contest.

When we weren’t staring at Marina, and she not at us, we stared at each other, each other’s clothes, hair, shoes, tattoos, necks, all over. We also stared at naked women and men performing Marina’s greatest hits, such as naked woman with skeleton, floating naked woman deity, and a doorframe flanked by naked people.

Presiding over her own retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, Marina Abramovic conducts a new performance, whereby she sits at a table and eye stares whoever sits across from her, you, me, whoever. No speaking is allowed once you’ve entered the arena. Just eye interaction. Marina is not naked, as she has been in many of her previous performances, but here wears a long, very long, dress with sleeves. It’s matronly garb compared to her usual nudity, as if she is more mature now, which she is.

Staring straight into the eyes of Marina, or anyone, promises a revelation of the soul, a pure connection of being. Or does it? Marina is no oracle, and surface characteristics are no measure of the mind, psyche, soul, whatever. Asked if she is a masochist, Marina says no. But she has courted the perils of extreme body art performances, including cutting and self-mutilation, hardcore repetition, denial of pleasure and the acceptance of pain, and still she is no masochist. Instead, she is a performer, like an actress whose manners are scripted and secondary to the stuff of daily life. Read the rest of this entry »

"Ask," by Jason Lazarus. A priest forgives sins via text messages.

Everyone knows that a verb is an action word. To paint or to cook, for example. Artistic interpretations thereof are slightly more complex. Is it possible to express “walk” through singing, or exemplify “ask” through texting? Can an action like “invite” be conveyed through a static medium, like a painting? If so, are the unrelated actions tied together? These were some of the questions raised during Industry of the Ordinary’s performance, titled “39 Verbs.”

The Chicago-based art collaborative compiled a list of thirty-nine verbs from the online descriptions of their projects over the past five years. They then invited cultural workers such as artists, curators and critics to create artwork based on the randomly assigned verbs. For one night only, the thirty-nine works, including painting, video, installation and performance, packed into the Packer Schopf Gallery and competed with one another for visitors’ attention, resulting in an over-stimulating environment.

Many pieces invited audience participation, such as Anna Kunz’ Host (esss). Kunz toured the gallery asking participants to wear one of her mixed-media collaged “parasites.” In this way Kunz and the viewers fulfilled host-related roles; Kunz as a hostess bestowing gifts on gallery goers, who in turn become a crowd of hosts. Kunz was personally very pleased with her verb assignment, feeling that it fitted well with her work. Other artists had more difficulty with their assigned verbs.

Jeanne Dunning was first disappointed when she received “Solicit.” It was only through verbalizing her frustration to others that she came up with her concept for her piece. Dunning found that she, as well as the majority of her acquaintances, associated the verb with prostitution. Dunning chose to embrace the association, and solicited sex workers to attend the event and interact with gallery goers in “whatever way made sense to them.” The viewers, informed about the sex workers’ presence without specific introductions, couldn’t help but make their own assumptions about fellow gallery goers. Read the rest of this entry »

Theaster Gates: urban planner, sculptor, coordinator of arts programming (and an established eccentric-in-residence) at University of Chicago, has transformed a small gallery space at the MCA into a site for ritual and musical conversation that combines his two major influences of African-American and Japanese traditions—Gates has long been involved with Japanese sculpture through his own sculpture study and projects.

The space itself is deceptively simple, lined with boards that resemble the tops of wine crates, and it resembles something of a plywood cave, a canvas as well as a finished room that’s both prehistoric and of the moment, in the middle of its own construction; but the gallery is incomplete without the performances—or “temple exercises,” as Gates calls them, that he leads each Tuesday, which combine communal discussion with a kind of blending of different genres of spiritual reflection. The effect, with an appropriate dose of open-mindedness, is refreshingly humane and a reminder that art’s job now seems to be to help us recreate relationships with the real world rather than imagining it differently or presenting different worlds to us.

The most noteworthy element of the show is its relationship with performances by the Black Monks, a group of Baptist-Buddhist musicians Gates jams with, combining
prayer bells, Buddhist chanting, bluegrass, complex spinning, soul, jazz and slave spirituals: an impressive range of genres of music that truly interact and intervene with one another. Their performances, beautifully paced, kaleidoscopic, and truly narrative (often the instruments speak back and forth as though in an improvised conversation), call both religious ritual and Noh theater to mind; and they’re not afraid to linger on notes of interference, discord and atonality.

But while the Black Monks’ music comes to its own logical conclusion after a long, slow groove of mounting tension, other elements of Gates’ project don’t sit together quite as well. While he’s managed to create a true space of exchange between gallery, artist and audience, Gates’ production (it is firmly planted in the world of theater, in the end, more than anything else) doesn’t leave enough room for critical interpretation or new ways of seeing the elements he combines expertly as a curator; and certain moments in his own performance, such as when he paints on the wall with his own hair, feel overly exhibitionist rather than truly engaging in specific cultural traditions.

Gates says on his Web site about his work that “practicing art has become increasingly difficult to separate from the rest of life. It is fuel for contemplation, discussion and performance… the work is no longer limited to a particular material or medium. Relationships are now the root.” “Temple Exercises” embodies this kind of relational aesthetics, even if it errs on the side of stagy. (Monica Westin)

Through February 1 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave. For related performances, see schedule here.

By Alicia Eler

Dresses swish as fast as palm tree leaves in Miami, where the entire art world gathers for the annual spending spree. Alicia Eler’s daily blog clues you in on finds at the fairs, from the established Art Basel Miami Beach (the mother of all the Miami art fairs) to Chicago’s born-and-bred emerging art fair, Bridge. Tips of the day provided by Kansas City-based artist Peregrine Honig.

Monumental Art:

When bigger is better

Should you pull out the big guns at the beginning, or wait till later? Do it now while viewers still have energy and open eyes, because after a week of looking at thousands of booths filled with art, even a Gerhard Richter might start to look like an Andy Warhol soup can.

Sies + Höke Galerie must have had that same thought when they decided to bring Kris Martin’s “For Whom…” (2008), which takes up the entire Düsseldorf-based gallery’s booth at Art Basel Miami Beach. Borrowing from John Donnes’ eponymous line, Martin’s bell swings, hitting hard metaphorically but not literally precisely because of what it lacks: the pendulum. The nearly 100-year-old bronze bell, originally built in 1929, hangs from the top of a 216.54-inch tall steel support. In its original church context, this bell wouldn’t serve its purpose of keeping track of time, signaling a call to prayer or signaling ceremony commencements. In the white-cube context, one watches the bell swing back and forth, hearing only its whistling movements drift through the air. Posing existential questions about our own mortality and the fate of a flawed system that keeps going despite its lack of working parts, Martin’s piece stuns like a Jenny Holzer truism.

Monumental takes on another form at SCOPE’s grown-up carnival land installation “Fun House” by Miami-based collective FriendsWithYou. One merely slips off their shows and enters the giant inflatable bouncy house through a large circle entrance. Jumping up and down releases any stress and channels the oft-forgotten inner child.

Smiles begone, however, once one sees the installation of an oversized horse three-way scene by Gregory de la Haba (Gallery Privee at Bridge Wynwood). As a giant brown male horse stands on its hind legs—his large cock in mid-air, heading toward the vagina of a white female horse who is adorned with a red feather hat and glittery red harness—a second identical white female horse, floating on her backside, flings her mouth toward the brown horse’s membrane. A child-size doll stands nearby, her back to the scene. It’s questionable as to why a horse three-way would happen directly behind an innocent-looking girl, but thankfully she doesn’t notice the spectacle. A steady stream of viewers do, however; crowds gathered around the horses, muttering stunned remarks to one another. At once intriguing and disturbing, this installation provides an unusual foray into the world of horse sex. I suggest keeping your My Little Ponies at home.

Friendlier beasts abound in a wall-size mural by New York-based artist collective Antistrot, conveniently visible onto the exterior of Aqua Wynwood’s warehouse-like façade. Large-scale creatures and characters spew forth cartoon and comic book-flavored pop culture: A wary gorilla peers to his right, a sense of sadness emanating from his with eerily human eyeballs, while a light-brown-skinned Muslim girl, her big brown eyes distant, solemnly carries a neon pink machine gun.

Though all of these pieces are either large in scale or in message, the monumental theme best applies to a portrait of Barack Obama, arguably the most important man alive today. German photographer Martin Schoeller, whose large-scale 2004 portrait “Barack Obama” on display at Hasted + Hunt’s Art Miami booth, honestly captures the now-president-elect while he was still a state senator. Schoeller, who studied under Annie Leibovitz, uses his detailed lens to take crisp, straight-forward, large-scale portraits of celebrities, including Heath Ledger and Justin Timberlake. For example, in the Obama portrait, he illuminates Obama’s glowing brown eyes, and focuses details on the soon-to-be-president’s nose, cheeks and lips, exposing a feeling of gentle honesty that one can sometimes only see through a frozen moment in time.

With Obama peering out from at least one wall of every fair, the German church bell keeps swinging, never tolling. And so we arrive at Peregrine’s Miami tip of the day: German comes in handy. Learn it, especially if you recognize for whom the bell tolls.

detail of Untitled (Walking Book 14, 2201 S. Union, 3rd Floor, Chicago, IL), 2008

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Stan Shellabarger is an artist who walks or, rather, he is a walking artist—that is, walking is his art. He records his walking activities not with pen and map nor strewn breadcrumbs, but by attaching graphite or sandpaper to his soles and making contact with paper laid down in his path. He follows a planned route, albeit a brief one: a staircase, or a stretch of sidewalk. Back-and-forth repetition is key. The resulting paper reveals either a smeary frottage of silvery graphite or a patterned tread of holes, depending on which implement Shellabarger wears on his feet. The paper is proof of contact with the world.

“The passage of a life should show; it should abrade,” writes poet Kay Ryan, who imagines a fictive world wherein the things we touch daily reduce in matter from persistent friction, and paths commonly taken are susceptible to wear from their walkers. The resolution of the poem is, discerningly, “things shouldn’t be so hard.” In Ryan’s tender words, life is too resistant for flesh already so yielding. But the opposite is true; we do grind down our environment. That Ryan wistfully imagines respite from so much exterior gnawing reveals a hypersensitive temperament, one both empathic and self-effacing. Is this the perception—or sensation—of the artist? That life imprints its marks on our bodies? That it would be a relief to push back? This is what historian Stephan Bann calls an “existential trace,” where life is measured by aftereffects, marks, and residues—say, a stain or a footprint. (Jason Foumberg)

Through October 11 at Western Exhibitions, 119 N. Peoria, (312)480-8390.

“There is no death and art can prove it.” At least that’s what Vincent Dermody claims. He should know; he buried himself in 2003 at a solo exhibition whose ceremonial killing made way for the everyday process of living-on as an artist in Chicago. A self-styled latter-day P.T. Barnum, Dermody’s diverse artistic practice is a little bit sideshow and a little bit poetry, held together by the optimism of relentless self-promotion. Chicagoans will have a chance to experience his showmanship first-hand during his two-month residency in the Pedway Open Studio beneath the Cultural Center. To ask him what he’ll actually be doing in the Pedway is to discover just how difficult it is to describe his work for a market that too often demands simple brand-identification.

Dermody emerged on the scene in the late 1990s haphazardly, gaining attention for the exhibitions he curated in his apartment and, later, as an original member of the performance group Lucky Pierre. Concurrently, he was a founding member of Law Office, a curatorial collective well-known for their often corporate-sponsored, intentionally lowbrow installations and events: for “Sex Party,” a bacchanal was organized in a space where four non-artists had been invited to construct their fantasy porn sets; “Midnight,” a curated poker game among hand-selected artists with a $1,000 pot, had a more overt philanthropic dimension. Such casual conceptualism is consistent with Dermody’s emphasis on the overwhelming importance of his public persona (and not the objects he produces) to his artistic practice. In this sense his predecessor could be the late German artist Martin Kippenberger. The amount of press Dermody generates is indicative of his projects’ immediate success and of public favor for relational art, but he has struggled in the past for acknowledgement from local contemporary art institutions and eminences.
Now that he’s finished his MFA at UIC, Dermody is acting as Chicago’s fine-art superhero, taking on every possible media to rescue art from its perceived ivory tower. The Pedway Open Studio promises to enlighten all visitors with tarot-card readings, divine oracle consultations, prophetic poetry and voodoo houseplant sculptures. Dermody will also be debuting his new photography monograph “Everyday Demons,” published by Vice’s former photo-editor and New York scenester Tim Barber. Everything’s for sale. Rachel Furnari)

Pedway Open Studio is located beneath the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 East Washington, (312)744-6630.

By Jason Foumberg

It’s well understood that a good joke needn’t be explained; its punch is packed in the delivery. Building on that, Ross Moreno tells purposefully unfunny jokes—the type that a child might enjoy but are also so deeply unfunny they spark profound bafflement—if you can see past your own wincing. On this particular evening Moreno was telling pirate jokes like it was a kid’s birthday party, but he was also naked, painted green and wearing skimpy thong underwear with a parrot-shaped codpiece, sort oflike a penis puppet. After realizing that Moreno would deliver nothing more than a few lame puns and his grotesque appearance, the crowd began again to take interest in chatter and beer. Moreno, on stilts, hobbled up to the folks, his puppet bulge bouncing at face level, arrrrghed liked a pirate and asked, “What do you call a pirate missing an eye?” Answer: a prate. The pirate marionette dancing at his stilt feet proved a feeble respite from the awkwardness, embarrassment, pity and discomfort that washed over the crowd. Moreno was entertaining because he failed so greatly at being, well, entertaining.

By the time Moreno’s green-painted butt became a nuisance to the art opening/party atmosphere, Justin Cooper pulled out two suitcases, one stuffed with fellow artist Benjamin Bellas and the other with a hundred pounds of glitter confetti. Cooper and Bellas greeted their guests and welcomed them to sit in metal folding chairs that were thrown unwelcomingly into a clashing heap. Cooper then spontaneously fell to the floor and flopped like a fish. Bellas, with handfuls of confetti drawn from deep within his pockets, sprinkled the stuff on the seizuring Cooper as if it were pixie dust. “It’s okay,” he cooed convincingly. Soon enough, it was okay; Cooper rose, and “It’s okay” became a mantra, simultaneously pacifying the violent mime act and uplifting the party spirits once again.

All the while Noelle Allen hung from a metal cord on the ceiling, balanced piñata-like in mid-air by the weight of the keg on the other side of the pulley. Her height, determined by the draining weight of the keg, was directly tied to the crowd’s high. Allen later explained her performance as a gift, pointing to the free beer. Floating above the crowd like a surreal specter, she was also the proud matron of the evening’s energy. She slowly descended and came floor-bound once the crowd was well-oiled to receive the rest of the night’s offerings, including Cooper’s inane recitations, some wrestling and an act involving the dropping of oversize grapefruits blindly from a third-story window.

This multi-ring circus performance was an installment in the ongoing experiment by a collective of seven artists calling themselves I.E. Fresh from a two-week residency, exhibition and performance in Hong Kong, the four Chicago-based members regrouped here for a translation of their experience abroad. The excursion proved mostly to be an adventure in shopping in Hong Kong’s hypertrophied markets. Their current exhibit in Chicago presents varying attempts to overcome the sense of foreignness felt in China’s megalopolis. The results are sometimes sweetly poetic, such as Benjamin Bellas’ chain of electrical adapters and nightlight referencing the distance between him and his wife while away, and how he longed to connect with her. Other works often parody the misalignment of cultures by introducing new relationships to the objects found in the markets. A dried shark fin, standing in for the millions eaten by the bowlful, is paired with a cheapy JAWS sign; an ornate black glass chandelier, smashed at the Hong Kong performance, is here reproduced in pieces; a carved ivory Buddha statuette is seen in Noelle Allen’s vagina through an X-Ray—apparently they are readily available and cheap in Hong Kong.

These parodies, including the improv performances, always seem to involve a small amount of danger, leaving one to ask why would Allen endure hours of hanging from the ceiling. Why would Ross Moreno humiliate himself? Why would these artists put themselves out there, risk (and often achieve) failure, usually in front of an audience? Why court derision? As if enlarging and comfortably inhabiting the unfulfillment that trickles through everyone’s life at some point, the collective bears the burden. Common insecurities and failures are given voice and strut before our eyes. Aspiration, ambition, dreams are stripped and revealed as excess nonsense in a fancy dress. This act couldn’t find a better home than in front of the I-don’t-know-what-to-do-with-my-life-even-though-I-went-to-college generation. Maybe really it is okay, as Bellas and Cooper shouted. Maybe there is room for a hundred pounds of multi-colored glitter confetti in our lives.

Benjamin Bellas, Justin Cooper, Stuart Keller, Clinton King, Noelle Mason, Ross Moreno and Magdalen Wong show as I.E. at Alogon Gallery, 1049 North Paulina #3R, through March 22.