Photo: Ray Pride

British photographer Martin Parr may be the tallest, yet most unobtrusive figure at Stephen Daiter Gallery Friday night, leaning toward admirers, adding quiet comments. Handed fliers, Parr slides a Sharpie from the pocket of his crisp blue shirt. He has a look a photographer would affect: bemused, unremarkable, with fleeting but deadly accurate awareness. The room is crowded and the dozens of pictures on the walls range across three decades of his career, sampling from the satirical eye that has made him perhaps the most controversial of the Magnum Agency’s members. It’s hard not to type the milling observers the way this quiet man might. There are crackers and crudités and dip, and wittily enough, green gummie soldiers on their bellies on a bright red plate near his “British Food” images: of WHITE SUGAR packet, a wad of chewed gum in a glass ashtray like a kidney in a surgery tray, a bitten donut proffered in front of a homely tweed jacket, clumsily extruded baby bangers ready for a fry-up. Nearby, a man compares his need for a personal trainer to the work of an art restorer. “I just want to be lean and hard.” Read the rest of this entry »

Vintage Victim of Activism, sculpture, from Jogging

By Jason Foumberg

Winter keeps us indoors, and so it’s a good time for contemplation. This past season, there’s been a blooming of art manifestos. When so much feels out of control or beyond the purview of art—job loss, politics as usual, shrinking budgets and attention spans for art—artists take their message back into their own hands, just as they have done for centuries, and address manifestos to the masses. As published online, the Internet is the perfect marriage of medium and message.

In February, photographer and educator Dawoud Bey gave the keynote address to the College Art Association, where he had the ear of art professionals from across the US, and which he later posted on his blog, What’s Going On? The three-thousand-plus-word speech asks a series of questions about the established norms of the art world. Bey’s speeches and blog posts always emit an aura of calm, through which he enacts his activism, but a tone of anger cuts through his present speech. He asks, “Are we ready to rethink the notion of institutional prerogative, privilege, and exclusivity, or is the current institutional climate as insular as ever?”

Bey’s speech strives to empower its audience to build relationships with those who are usually excluded from the arts. “How do we go about making what we do matter not just inside of the institutional space of the college, university, museum or gallery, but outside of it as well?” With equal doses idealism and realism, Bey critiques the institutional systems of exclusion, with an anti-authoritarian, yet sane, message. The fix? “One has to believe that the work of bringing others into the center of the discourse truly matters.”

On Jogging, a new Internet art website, a three-part manifesto was published this January (Jan 2, Jan 5, Jan 13). Although the manifestos are unsigned, the writer(s) frequently use the first person. The anonymity of this manifesto is key to its message, which reasons the imminent disappearance of art objects and physical spaces to exhibit art. Read the rest of this entry »

Ulysses Davis in front of his barber shop/Photo: Roland L. Freeman

By Monica Westin

Ulysses Davis is not an outsider artist.

The Savannah, Georgia-based barber, who died in 1990, very much saw himself as an artist, knowing the value of keeping his collection of sixty years’ worth of carvings together—most of which he created during his downtime at the Savannah Barbershop where he cut hair. The interest in hair shows in Davis’ figural busts, including his most famous grouping of every American president from George Washington to the first George Bush. Davis’ passion for history extends to Nigerian wood-carving traditions. And as clear as it is from Davis’ current retrospective at Intuit that the artist was self-taught, it was that self-awareness of his art that sets him apart from the artists often tagged as “outsiders.” In any case, the collection is worthy of showing at any museum (which it was, in 1980, at the Corcoran Gallery), leading Janet Petry, Intuit’s chair of Exhibits Committee, to point out that the work of Intuit, which champions “intuitive and outsider art,” is something of a catch-22; by trying to mainstream the work of self-taught artists, the institution undermines the very distinction on which it was founded.

Petry points out that “outsider” is no longer a stigma—to the point that both she and Cleo Wilson, executive director of Intuit, are starting to see trained artists of all backgrounds brand themselves as outsiders. Wilson remarks that she’s seen an increase in people calling themselves “outsider artists” trying to donate work to Intuit. “Interesting to see what comes,” she says, casting a wary eye at the prospect of the rising tide of self-proclaimers. But if outsiders cannot dub themselves as such, who does? When I ask Wilson about how new outsider artists are found, she tells me there will always be undiscovered garages somewhere, but she also warns that there are more imposters than before. Where ”outsiderness” was once a fantasy of its insider proponents, its invocation by those who want to be in—or out—is yet another sign of the death of the movement. What began as a sincere interest in promoting the art of under-represented artists has now become a locus for fetishization, and—perhaps more disturbingly—a promotional gimmick. Read the rest of this entry »

Chicago turns a spritely 173 this year, and to celebrate Casey Cortez and Anthony Spina are throwing a party. To help the celebration, the two paired a photographer and DJ from Wicker Park, Pilsen and Wrigleyville to document their own neighborhood. “I want people to walk into this event and discover things about the city and say, ‘Wow, this is my city,’” says Spina. The impetus of the party, it seems, is to shrink Chicago down; to help people understand how close we really are. “You have these dynamic themes going on in the city,” says Cortez, “and a lot of times they don’t interact with each other.” The birthday party is as much a call for collaboration as it is a celebration, and that’s exactly what the pairing of photographers and DJs show. Cortez and Spina talk of how people become comfortable in their neighborhood, and it’s a sentiment echoed by photographer and the party’s Pilsen representative, Kyle LeMere. “We [he and DJ Baby Magdalene] both live on sort of opposite ends of Pilsen, so it was great to show each other parts of our neighborhood we haven’t yet been exposed to.” And what’s a birthday without a cake? Bleeding Heart Bakery will provide, as Cortez puts it, “a 3-D, three-layer Willis Tower/Old Style-can cake.” The party starts at 7pm March 4 at 1837 South Halsted. (Peter Cavanaugh)

Whether you lament over reading Times New Roman or you find yourself searching for the colophon in the back of a book, you should find yourself at Bridgeport’s Co-Prosperity Sphere this Friday night. “TYPEFORCE: The Annual Chicago Show of Emerging Typographic Allstars” has its opening reception at 7pm and continues through March 14. Though the actual practice of typography is anything but new, its importance cannot be ignored. As local artist and contributor Margot Harrington puts it, “It’s just such a building block, a cornerstone of design history. For me, it really is one of the most basic fundamental parts of my background in graphic design.” Though it is held in high regard within the art world, the public has only really just recently re-embraced typography. “There has been a noticeable wave of lettering in popular culture in the last decade,” says Luke Williams, who will be making his Chicago debut. He posits that the availability of such programs as Adobe Illustrator have pushed typography back into the conversation. With around twenty local artists on display, the show is sure to be varied. Between Williams’ “set of vowels that embody a blend of high-class royalty, with whimsical 1960’s Americana themes” and Harrington’s screen-printed ampersands onto collages of vintage books and found paper, there is bound to be something for every fontophile. (Peter Cavanaugh)

By Nate Lee and Jason Foumberg

Art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson’s recently published book “Art Workers” looks into how artists, critics, museum guards and art professionals consolidated in protest, in the 1960s and seventies in New York City, against the Vietnam War. In process, a short-lived Art Worker’s Coalition successfully increased the opportunities for “art workers,” a term that was animated to perform heavy political and cultural work, circa 1968.

Art workers incite action, and challenge the armchair status quo. Provocative techniques abounded, like Piero Manzoni shitting in a can in 1961 and selling it on the art market for its weight in gold. Less cynically, the feminist movement acted as labor unions to push for progress.

Today, the legacy of art-as-work, of art in the service of social good, continues. The publication of a new newspaper, titled Art Work, by the Chicago-based group Temporary Services, celebrates and rallies the community to continue the spirit of the sixties. But this is not a call to radicalism, nor does it promote the gallery-dependent and depraved Manzoni approach. Rather, the art workers ethic concretely targets the assumption that artists are only nourished and edified by their search for eternal beauty, and therefore do not require monetary compensation. The late-sixties ideals are once again galvanizing artists to reassert professionalism in the arts, demand fair compensation and work opportunities, in light of the current economic decline and the bloated art market. The newspaper Art Work is this movement’s updated manifesto. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s that one movie about love that just opened. It’s still too cold for a romantic walk along the lake. There’s always the failsafe of cooking for that special someone. Or there’s that new happening that’s been popping up in various cities: scavenger hunts.

Inside the Art Institute on this Valentine’s Day, about ten teams of two go over their scavenger-hunt clues atop the grand staircase. Ella, one of the hunt’s guides, briefs the participants. She laughs after the word “competition,” and judging from the teams’ expressions, this is one of those “it’s the journey not the destination” events.

At 11am, the teams go in their separate directions as part of the “Naked at the Art Museum Scavenger Hunt.” No one runs and, in fact, Team Wicked Art makes a quick stop at the coat check before heading off to the African collection. Read the rest of this entry »

The Pilsen art walk used to be the only annual studio crawl where artists flung open their doors, gave spectators cheap, free wine and general revelry was had in secret annexed gardens you couldn’t see from the street. The novelty of the art walk is its yearliness, but now it happens every month on Second Fridays.

This particular February night, the Skylark is too packed to sit, so it is a curmudgeon’s refuge to walk into the Chicago Art Department for respite and feel actual unexpected delight. Read the rest of this entry »

The College Art Association’s annual conference rolls into town this week, bringing artists, art historians, curators and critics together in the banquet halls of the Hyatt Regency for a few days of art smarts and cheese platters. Forty-something years ago the conference also convened in a local hotel, around the same time that our own Museum of Contemporary Art was founded. This note, from the archives of the artist Allan Kaprow, surfaces from that era:

“The CAA is a hotel full of aging fags. I was certain it would be raided by the police.”

From then-director of the MCA, Jan van der Marck, sent to Allan Kaprow, on MCA letterhead. Dated January 30, 1968. From the Allan Kaprow Papers, Getty Research Institute, box 12, folder 5.

This Valentine’s Day, Chicago artist Aaron Delehanty has come up with an alternative way to celebrate: The Monster Movie Seminar. As part of his current residency at Ravenwood’s Lill Street Art Center, he and friend Matt Fagan of Brainstorm Comics (who Delehanty calls a “monster movie expert”) present this one-off event of all-things monster, from discussions to movie-clip-viewing to costumes. “It’s more campy than sort of scary,” Delehanty admits of the two-hour, BYOB event, which he calls “an alternative to doing anything traditional or romantic on Valentine’s Day.” Delehanty says with this event he’s trying to bring in an event that’s a little more unconventional than what the “conservative” Lill Street is used to. “In a way we’re bringing something bizarre that wouldn’t [normally] happen at an institute like Lill Street,” he says, “where, like, there are moms who come to classes and stuff.” As for the holiday itself, Delehanty doesn’t hold back. “Valentine’s Day is so fake, and people try to pretend it’s real,” he says. “Monster movies, they’re totally fake and people just enjoy it. So it’s a good alternative. I don’t know if this has made my wife very happy, though.” (Tom Lynch)