By Jason Foumberg

On my daily walk I’ve noticed at least three varieties of kale growing in the city’s traffic islands and sidewalk planters, including the crinkle-textured dinosaur kale, which I know to be tasty when sautéed with lemon juice or cooked in an Italian soup. Chicago’s Department of Transportation tends these medians and planters, rotating the shrubs seasonally to upkeep our “city in a garden” motto. Kale can heartily withstand the colder climate, and so it is used decoratively this late autumn. I may have thought little more about the urban kale except I recently read Barbara Demick’s story in the November 2 issue of the New Yorker about a North Korean woman who survived the famine there in the early 1990s by foraging for weeds in her city’s streets and alleys. Communist leader Kim Jong-il could no longer distribute food to his citizens, so many had to get creative with their meals, such as Mrs. Song, who ate barely edible grass and dandelions every day. Read the rest of this entry »

Poker night

By Bert Stabler

Upon entering the opening reception for the collective InCUBATE’s new exhibition/event at ThreeWalls, “In Search of the Mundane,” the eponymous search proved neither long nor arduous. The first room in the gallery featured a table with chairs, a coffeemaker with mugs and a handwritten description of the evening’s main event, a trivia contest. Along the sides of the main gallery were two rows of chairs, and, at the end, a table for the trivia contest judges. Facing the judges’ table, on the near wall, hung a giant crossword puzzle that InCUBATE members had ordered rush delivery from Sky Mall magazine when they realized they needed to hang something there. The contest started fairly promptly, and I joined up with two strangers in order to display our lackluster knowledge of Cold War history, details in Moby Dick, British portraiture, sci-fi movies and romantic comedies. Oh, and the gallery’s smaller project room featured darts and a dartboard. To be sure, while they might not know the point of staging these events in a art gallery, this seemed to be an art show that average everyday Americans could hardly claim not to “get.”

And that word “everyday” is entirely the point. InCUBATE began in 2007 as a project of four graduate students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago: Ben Schaafsma, Abigail Satinsky, Roman Petruniak and Bryce Dwyer; their name is an acronym standing for Institute for Community Understanding Between Art and The Everyday. (Schaafsma passed away suddenly in 2008, but InCUBATE has continued, recently adding Matthew Joynt as a new fourth member.) Their mundane searching is informed by pragmatist philosophy. They draw inspiration from thinkers who combined theory with practice, such as Chicago’s own Jane Addams and John Dewey, as well as the eclectic Jesuit scholar Michel de Certeau and Allan Kaprow, the artist and writer best known for the so-called “Happenings” with which he was associated in the 1950s. InCUBATE’s place in contemporary art is among the ranks of “relational” artists, for whom the goal is not to generate artifacts or performances, but to facilitate interactive situations. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

It has been twenty-five years since Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant’s book “Subway Art” was first published. Widely regarded as the “graffiti bible,” “Subway Art” documented graffiti art during the 1980s in New York City, primarily in the borough of the Bronx. For its twenty-fifth anniversary, the book is being re-released this year in a special edition that includes more content and larger images. This coincides with the publishing of Cooper’s current book, “Going Postal,” which documents contemporary art disseminated through cities on postal stickers stuck to common urban surfaces. Cooper believes these stickers are an example of how graffiti has “progressed and endured.” “Going Postal” also includes the work of several Chicago-based artists. To celebrate, the Chicago clothing and design company Novem, in conjunction with Upset Magazine, is hosting a book signing by Cooper and a sticker sale. All stickers will be selling for $5 and Cooper will also be selling photographs of her work.

In contemporary art, graffiti still continues to pose a great deal of questions in terms of distinguishing art versus vandalism. Twenty-five years ago Cooper and Chalfant were unable to find a publisher for the book in the United States, but now graffiti is thoroughly assimilated in both fine art and advertising. Cooper and Chalfant’s book helped push the style into the mainstream by publishing a firestorm of written, photographic and video documentation of illegal and ephemeral street art. Martha Cooper is a pioneer and a legend in her field, and her presence in Chicago is not something to be missed. (Sara McCool)

Book launch and signing and sticker sale, May 1, 5pm-10pm, at Novem Life, 1114 N. Ashland

RECOMMENDED

In addition to being an acclaimed venue for public art, Millennium Park has a populist mandate, and the balance between popular appeal and artistic excellence is a difficult one. Chen Wenling’s “Valiant Struggle,” one of four new large-scale sculptures from China introduced into the park, is a critique of an increasingly capitalistic and consumerist Chinese society, but the funhouse aesthetic, especially in the park, reduces the sentiment.

More seriously, the work by Sui Jianguo and Shen Shaomin references international relations and tensions. Jianguo’s “Windy City Dinosaur” is a near-actual-size T-Rex with “Made In China” attached to its stomach that could allude to controversial Chinese toy exports or the many fossil excavations going on in China. Shaomin’s “Kowtow Pump” consists of several oil derricks covered in camouflage and are motorized at different speeds. Kowtow is the act of bowing in respect, and the piece references our continued oil dependence. Seeing it in action is integral but disappointingly it will only run once daily, during tours.

Zhan Wang’s “Jia Shan Shi No. 46” reaches back to tradition and connects to the contemporary without gimmicks. It is a stainless-steel copy of a Chinese scholar stone, which, in its original form, is used for meditation. Wang updates this tradition for twenty-first century China. However, most people seemed more inclined to give it a knock to see if it was hollow than to give it contemplation. Hopefully the artistic message of this and the other sculptures will not be lost on everyone. (Abraham Ritchie)

Through October 11 at Millennium Park, Monroe Street at Michigan Avenue.

In June 1900, more than a century ago, the Armitage station on the Northwestern Elevated, currently known as the Brown Line, first opened its doors to commuters, and up until 2006, when construction began as part of the Brown Line Capacity Expansion Project, not much about the original station had changed. Now, after two years of undergoing a massive re-facing, the Armitage station is nearly complete, and boasting a sleek, modern look. The crowning jewel of this facelift is a photographic installation by Jonathan Gitelson titled “Chicago El Stories” displayed on the station’s back wall by Jonathan Gitelson. A sprawling mosaic comprised of photographic glass tiles that display forty-two footnoted pictures of places around Chicago was inspired by interviews Gitelson conducted atop the old Armitage platform. 

Gitelson, whose photography usually centers on “everyday phenomenon,” was commissioned by the CTA to create a work of public art after his pictures were spotted at a show at a Cultural Center exhibit. “I came up with this idea to do one portrait a day outside the station for a year.” This idea was turned down due to the number of liabilities of having peoples’ pictures displayed in public places, so he began thinking about how he could tell a person’s story without actually showing them. “The [second] proposal basically was: I want to interview people on the site that’s being torn down about their memories, or life, or whatever here in town. And then I’d go to the location where the story took place and take a picture of the setting, and then print part of the story…so you know it’s like part personal history, part city history.” The proposal was accepted, and he spent three months, from February to April 2007, on the platform asking commuters to spin a story about a place in Chicago that was important to them.

Sporting multiple layers, a hat and a beard to ward against the bitter cold, Gitelson—armed with a recorder, a sketch of the piece and an official letter from the city (to prove that he wasn’t thieving identities)—spent five or six days every week gathering interviews. Though Gitelson loves meeting and talking to new people, he explains, “It’s hard just going up to people and being like, ‘Hey my name is Jon. Tell me your story.’…At first I didn’t know how to ask the question right. I would say, ‘Tell me about a place you like in Chicago,’ and like the first fifty people I interviewed all said Millennium Park… So that was one thing, figuring out how to get people to open up.”

Another problem was timing interviews with only eight minutes between trains. “Basically after a train passed, the first person up would be the person I’d have to get. Otherwise, if I waited a few minutes, someone would start telling me a story and then their train would come, and I had to get them to sign a release so they’d be running for the train and I’d be running after with their release.” In the end, he conducted more than 400 interviews, which were whittled to 100 from which the final forty-two were chosen.

Each interview had to be cut due to the limitation of physical space beneath the pictures, but Gitelson decided that wasn’t enough. “I thought the people’s voices would be really important. Reading something and hearing something are very different. Sometimes you can just see someone from hearing their voice even if you’ve never met them.” So, he created a Web site (www.chicagoelstories.com) with the interviews in full. Clicking on a picture will play the story behind it. “The whole time there was this idea of having two components: public art in terms of physical public art, and public art in terms of online public art.” This innovative approach allows the work to reach a wider audience than just Brown Line commuters. “What I’m trying to do, in an ideal world, is have people either go through the station and then be interested in seeing the Web site, or have people see the Web site and be interested in going to the station,” but people can certainly take their time. Adrift in cyberspace or in person, “Chicago EL Stories” should remain a vibrant landmark for at least the next hundred years.

Check out Gitelson’s “Chicago El Stories” at the Brown Line Armitage station, 944 West Armitage.

Artropolis, with five art-related fairs running contiguously this weekend at The Merchandise Mart and hundreds of related events on-site and around town, is a colossus. We asked our critics to pick a few easy-to-overlook highlights.

Ready-to-Wear Collections, Fall/Winter 08/09 Trend Overview

As we are (finally) experiencing the first taste of spring, even the most weathered Chicagoans are apt to cringe at the notion of looking forward to fall. To do so is almost an admission of defeat—that we do not get to savor the joy of finally packing away our coats and scarves and enjoying our city as it begins to emerge from winter’s deep freeze. Fashion, however, operates on a remarkably less sentimental time schedule. Spring lines hit the runways before the first snowflakes strike the ground, fall lines before we have been assured that winter is actually over.

In case you missed the fall/winter 08/09 runway shows, not all is lost. Fashion Group International of Chicago, Inc., lead by FGI Creative Director Mary Lou Luther, is giving a trend overview of ready-to-wear fashions. This presentation will take the form of a “close-up and high-fidelity video presentation” that promises to be a concise overview of what is hot and what is not in apparel, accessories, beauty products, color and fabrics. (Kristin Brockman)

At the Next Talk Shop, Merchandise Mart 7^th floor, on Sunday, April 27 at 1pm.

Around the Coyote’s Video Lounge curated by LiveBox

With the rise of Internet culture, some critics have speculated that video art is a dying medium. There is no doubt that technology has made the medium more democratic, and it is almost impossible to buy a computer without a video camera built in (a fact that becomes quite apparent when one searches for even the most banal subjects on YouTube). With technology readily available at little cost, there have been an increasing number of artists and comparatively less galleries.

The Artist Project seeks to present the work of unrepresented artists to the community. A small part of this program, Around the Coyote’s Video Lounge, curated by LiveBox Gallery, Inc., focuses on video work by young artists, seeking to combat the notion that video is seeing its decline.

The program consists of recent work by a handful of artists: Julia Oldham, Robyn Voshardt and Sven Humphrey, Tim Geers, Fabienne Gautier, Blake Carrington, Chie Yamayoshi, Pierre St. Jacques, Ellen Lake, Christopher Bruchansky, Elizabeth Riley and Marlo Bodzick. Tackling topics ranging from the performance of mating dances to United States’ involvement in the Middle East, the work shown here intends to present a cross-section of video art you haven’t seen. Kristin Brockman)

Preview night April 24, continues through April 28, The Artist Project, Merchandise Mart, 8th Floor.

Temporary Public Sculpture Park

In an effort to democratize Art Chicago, whose main event carries a hefty one-day fee of $20, this year’s organizers have put together a temporary public sculpture exhibit for the plebes on the first floor of the Mart and outside along its perimeter. This is a felicitous decision for a city whose fondness for public works of art is indicated by affectionate nicknames like The Bean (Anish Kapoor’s “Cloud Gate”), Da Picasso and Snoopy in a Blender (Jean Dubuffet’s “Monument with Standing Beast”). The artist Jaume Plensa­—of Millennium Park’s Crown Fountain fame, arguably the most democratic artwork in the city—will welcome the crowds with “Sho,” an enormous steel-mesh head located in the lobby. The selection continues with a number of large abstract forms, including a recent example of John McCracken’s irresistible “2001” monoliths; Sophia Vari’s soft bronze geometry; and local talent Josh Graber’s “Emanate,” an aluminum meditation on the confluence of industrial materials and organic patterns. Three massive Botero sculptures begin a populist, figurative theme that continues in the work of Dietrich Kling, whose bronze figure of a seated man evokes the texture of rough-hewn wood and an uncertain, problematic interest in primitivism. Despite the predominantly safe choices, there are several conceptually driven pieces that push the boundaries of medium specificity: Manuel Neri’s nude “Mujer Pegada” (Woman Hit) manages to be both a bronze sculpture and an abstract expressionist painting with layers of splattered paint tossed against the female body, a physical materialization of Barbara Kruger’s famous feminist summary of the violence of looking, “Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face.” Alan Rath has created one of his signature “machine-beings” in the conceptual installation, “Voyeur III,” an anthropomorphic video sculpture whose monitor “eyes” register not only the anxiety of surveillance, but the ambivalence of our increasingly undifferentiated relation to technology and electronics. The exhibit is a gratifying antidote to the exclusivity of preview parties and private collections, but it raises broader questions about the city’s propensity .panem et circenses. (Rachel Furnari)

Merchandise Mart, 1^st floor and perimeter.

Artropolis runs at The Merchandise Mart Friday-Monday

By Jason Foumberg

Community-based actions and collaborations are distinct traits of Chicago art’s scene. As the new form of public art, bearing no resemblance to the hulking steel monsters that preside in our municipal plazas, they include practices fermented in the grassroots political era of the 1960s and continue today under the banner of pedagogy, which is a strangely academic term for something that involves many beyond the ivory tower. Social sculpture became the key phrase in the 1960s, initiated by German artist Joseph Beuys, to provide the theoretical groundwork for an art form centered on people and actions, not materials and aesthetics. The art of inclusion swiftly took hold in Chicago with the help of several key figures, and many today teach at our universities, for socially engaged art often features an educational effort. One trailblazer in this arena was Michael Piazza, who, for close to thirty years until his death in mid-2006, spurred community initiatives in prisons, with the mentally disabled, in parks and on the streets.

The record of Piazza’s varied projects, spanning decades, is currently collected and on view at the College of DuPage, and the legacy of his actions and collaborations ripple through the lives of his friends, collaborators and students. In one of his workshops, at the juvenile detention center, Piazza helped the participants explore their newfound bound way of life in conceptual terms, beyond painting or drawing. For instance, the sculpture “Lot” from 1995 is a round poker table with handcuffs drilled around the perimeter standing in for the prison poker players. Such objects were exhibited in the first-ever art reception held in the detention center and attended by the public. “Lot” helped the prisoners think through what exactly constitutes the notion of fun while incarcerated, and it also presented outsiders, or the public, with an idea of what “community” meant on the inside.

Piazza’s collaborators did not always take the form of his family, friends or fellow artists. Jim Duignan, co-curator of the retrospective exhibition, called Piazza’s life and art “a seamless, uninterrupted action.” For Piazza, living in Logan Square also meant making art there, which meant connecting with the neighborhood’s residents, some of whom were in the juvenile prison where he vitalized the art programming. He inspired the idea that living can be artful by simple creativity, such as creating a connection where none had previously existed. This could include initiating conversation and making introductions, or a festival in the park. Most of the art objects on view also push this notion of readymade objects that simply need to be brought together. Collage and assemblage are the results of this process, a literal fusion of art and life.

Piazza’s longtime colleagues, including Duignan, Bertha Husband, Brian Dortmund (all co-curators of the exhibit) and wife Laura Piazza came to loathe the term “collaboration,” sensing that it was a misused idea among artists. From then on they would refer to their projects as “log-rolling,” an activity that required the same amount of balance from all workers in order to keep afloat. It was around this time that Piazza took part in founding Axe Street Arena, a gallery and social space at the Milwaukee, Diversey and Kimball intersection. This served as home base for Piazza’s projects—which he would probably never term “his” projects, but rather the community’s—including an exhibition for graffiti artists that brought together many of the city’s taggers, most of whom were familiar to each other only by their tags, not faces. Axe Street Arena is remembered as a hotbed for the new type of social sculpture. In 1998, nine years after Axe Street closed, the newly formed collaborative art group Temporary Services, now based in Rogers Park at Mess Hall, kicked off their exhibition program with a memorial to Piazza and company’s old Logan Square space.

It seemed Piazza was always a sort of revolutionary of the disenfranchised, giving voice to those who many would rather never hear from, such as prisoners and graffiti artists, and those who have no platform. One project was simply making a copy machine available to people producing zines and other DIY literary ventures. The cost of copying was their only overhead, and so Piazza erased that burden. Duignan explained that through these communal interactions, Piazza was breeding the type of city he wanted to live in; like an underground alderman, he picked up the community’s interests and facilitated their progression into shapely, lovely things.

Piazza’s subjects—gangs, prisoners, graffiti—may seem beyond repair, and his projects may seem counterproductive to the practice of “art.” But it was exactly this quality of stroking against the grain that turned on other like-minded artists, and in the end produced more and more self-motivated individuals. Much of his writing and his legacy deal with overthrowing the deathly trappings of consumer capitalism, and in this way he was a theorist of punk attitudes, and a composer of mute voices. In Piazza’s own words: “It is best to listen to the many voices that until now have been silenced.”

The Work of Michael Piazza shows at the Gahlberg Gallery at the College of DuPage, 425 Fawell, Glen Ellyn, (630)942-2321, through April 19.