Designed and executed by Magdalena Abakanowicz. Brun Rouge, 1970/73. Gift of Dr. Anne Baruch in memory of George Overton.

The Art Institute’s newly reopened textile galleries present “Contemporary Fiber Art: A Selection from the Permanent Collection,” but the show’s use of the term “contemporary” refers only to a range of dates rather than a practice, or the making of thought-provoking and forward-thinking fiber arts. This might be due to the fact that out of the sixty-one works on display, more than half are traditionally woven, and the abstract works seem like decoration. Contemporary fiber art does more than just root itself in tradition; it uses that tradition as material to address vital issues such as gender, race and labor.

One of the hurdles for early fiber arts being considered fine art was that it was thought to be utilitarian or decorative. For instance, Lyn Inall’s 1993 quilt, “Denim Cubes,” pieces together denim bits from commercially produced jeans complete with their original seams and buttons to depict a geometry of stacked blocks. This work does little to investigate quilting as a potential method for critiquing who wears denim, and why, and how. Instead, the denim quilt is a neatly constructed object composed of reused excess fabric, which is the traditional nature of quilts. It’s an unfortunate piece for display while a work by renowned quilter Faith Ringgold remains in storage. Read the rest of this entry »

"Urbis Paganus IV.9.I. (Posterity title)," 2009, Mixed media on matte board. Courtesy of Greene Naftali Gallery, New York

RECOMMENDED

“Third Mind,” a mid-career survey of LA-based artist Richard Hawkins’ art work, opened this October at the Art Institute of Chicago, and will travel in early spring to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. The exhibition reveals Hawkins’ breadth and variety of media, including drawing, collage, assemblage, inkjet prints and painting. Two abstract paintings, “Pink Feather” and “Bad Medicine,” are collages of used clothes and towels covered in thick swaths of color. Each canvas dawns a feather protruding from their sides reminiscent of Joan Miró’s “Man, Women, and Bull” of 1935 in the Art Institute’s collection.

Hawkins’ works deals insightfully with male queerness by representing its negotiation with a system that encourages both its assimilation and its exploitation in media imagery. Hawkins moves through various cultural examples, from John Wayne Gacy (a painting by the incarcerated killer sent to Hawkins is shown in the museum’s library), to male heavy-metal icons, to native peoples in various states of cultural loss, to the puritanically censored sexuality within classical sculpture. In this task the methods of his collage, bluntly combining handwritten text, abstract mark-making and printed images, serve him well. The slipshod quality of magazine cutouts brazenly paperclipped to their destination affects a directness that reads as the unmitigated activity of an individual, thereby reclaiming the subject matter as the act of an actual human being. Read the rest of this entry »

Sadamasa Motonaga

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When progressive young postwar Japanese artists followed their American colleagues into the brave new world of Abstract Expressionist painting, they were only expanding upon a tradition that had been putting expressive shapes, lines, colors and textures on the surfaces of pots for over a thousand years. The Gutai Group, founded in 1954, encouraged experimentation with materials and methods. As their manifesto declares, one member worked a large surface “in a single moment by firing a small, hand-made cannon filled with paint by means of an acetylene gas explosion.” The manifesto turns much more traditional when it declares, “We tried to combine human creative ability with the characteristics of the material in order to concretize the abstract space.” Despite their avant-garde mission of “creating a world that has never been,” the results, at least demonstrated by the two Gutai members in this exhibition, display the precise balance demanded by traditional Japanese aesthetics instead of exposing the self-destructive absurdity of the modern world. Read the rest of this entry »

Not everyone can yank their windows off the wall to have them rinsed and refurbished, but then again, not everyone has Marc Chagall’s stunning stained glass shimmering cobalt blue in their foyers.

After a five-year sabbatical, with labor and love from dozens of curators and conservators, the famed windows have returned to their home at the Art Institute of Chicago.

On Thursday night, Mayor Daley and his wife Maggie joined the granddaughter of Marc Chagall along with Art Institute directors and trustees, for a celebration of the artist, the people who brought his work to life, and those who continue their legacy today.

The cleaner, clearer “America Windows” express, in Mayor Daley’s words, the “true spirit of Marc Chagall.” Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Mumbai-based artist Jitish Kallat’s site-specific installation on the Art Institute’s Grand Staircase considers the events of September 11, 2001 in light of September 11, 1893, when Hindu monk Swami Vivekananda’s landmark speech about global religious tolerance was delivered at the First World Parliament of Religions, held in conjunction with the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, just feet away inside the museum’s auditorium. The force of visual impact in the artist’s installation keeps its commentary on the regression of religious tolerance and the global rise of fanaticism from feeling secondhand or pious. Kallat converts the entirety of Vivekananda’s speech into a permanent LED display that takes up both rises of the Grand Staircase, a site previously mined by artist Daniel Buren. It’s surprising how strongly Kallat’s piece resonates with the permanent collection objects surrounding it; the text reflects off the windows of the Buddhist art gallery on the first floor and draws attention to the great divide between this tradition and the Impressionists on the other side of the stairs. Kallat’s choice to reference the events of 9/11 with the colors of the Department of Homeland Security’s alert system is an easy symbolic gesture of terror’s infection on speech that’s nonetheless usefully confrontational. (Monica Westin)

Through January 2 at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 South Michigan.

Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004). World's Fair, Brussels, Belgium. 1958. Gelatin silver print, 11 15/16 x 8 1/8" (30.3 x 20.7 cm). Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris. ©2010 Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photos, courtesy Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris.

RECOMMENDED

One of the top-ten photographers of the twentieth century, Henri Cartier-Bresson was the founder of and set the standard for modern photojournalism, snapping, with his handheld 35mm camera the “decisive moment” of an ongoing event on the fly, and depicting it with concentrated, concentric and dynamic composition. In this extravagant and overwhelming exhibition of 300 of Cartier-Bresson’s black-and-white images, endless instantaneous juxtapositions abound, yet the treasure of the show is his 1960 photo-documentary of working life in New York’s Bankers Trust Company. Here, with access granted to him in a closed organizational space, Cartier-Bresson had the ease to pre-meditate shots and showed that with time on his side he could capture the sense of the bank, from an executive with his nose in the air and a cigarette sprouting from his lips, through a deadly bored manager slumped in his chair, and secretaries and office boys more-or-less diligently about their business, to blue-collar grunt workers sustaining the infra-structure. The decisive moment can be piercing; the photo-documentary of a master is telling—anybody who has ever worked in a bureaucracy will immediately relate to Cartier-Bresson’s slices of life. (Michael Weinstein)

Through October 3 at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 South Michigan.

Robert Gober, "Double Sink," 1984. Promised Gift of the Donna and Howard Stone Collection, 2010.

By Regan Golden

If you have been to a Friday night opening at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, or a lecture at the Museum of Contemporary Art on a Saturday afternoon, chances are you have seen Howard and Donna Stone there chatting with artists, curators and students alike. This month, an unusual confluence of events highlights the role that the Stones play as supporters of contemporary art practice in Chicago.

With little pomp or publicity, each year the Stone Summer Theory Institute, sponsored by the couple, draws scholars from around the world to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in hopes of answering sweeping questions about art, such as 2008’s theme “What is an image?” or 2009’s “What do artist’s know?” Art history is the main fare, but visiting scholars also include scientists, political theorists and philosophers. The topic for this year’s schedule of seminars and lectures is “Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic,” and one of the main speakers is critic and historian Hal Foster, who developed his theory of the “anti-aesthetic” in contemporary art in the 1980s.

One example of Foster’s “anti-aesthetic” is now on view in the Modern Wing of the Art Institute, Robert Gober’s “Double Sink,” a 1984 sculpture owned by the Stones. “Double Sink” reexamines Marcel Duchamp’s modern-art icon, a urinal titled “Fountain,” 1917. In a reversal of Duchamp’s “Fountain,” Gober’s “Double Sink” is handmade, even though its white enamel paint and large institutional scale makes it appear mass-produced or as fit for a kitchen as an art museum. Early criticisms of Gober in the 1990s cast his art as against modernism, but Hal Foster argued that, on the contrary, one had to deconstruct modernist ideas in order to recoup their cultural significance. This is just a taste of the discussions that will take place this week at the Theory Institute, with Hal Foster giving a keynote speech. Read the rest of this entry »

Gage Building: Horizontal Ornament from the Facade., 1898-1899

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It’s hard not to romanticize the life of iconic Modern architect Louis Sullivan. Arriving in Chicago with nothing but extraordinary intellect, will power and desire, he quickly rose to the top of his profession, and almost as quickly sank to the bottom. It would be especially difficult for Chicagoans, who can regularly see and love his work, not to weep as he begs money off his famous protégé, Frank Lloyd Wright, or is reduced to designing decorative floor plates for a manufacturer of cast-iron stoves. He had a dream for a new, vibrant, democratic kind of American art and architecture, and that dream turned out to be a brief interlude between the dreary banalities of Neo-Classicism and the cool, elite severities of International Modernism. Read the rest of this entry »

Yvette Dostatni

RECOMMENDED

Playing off William Eggleston’s blockbuster show at the Art Institute, the Black Market gallery has brought in Yvette Dostatni and Alexandra Dietz to show us what Eggleston’s warmhearted and folksy democratic vision looks like in our present bizarre circumstances. If Eggleston were dead, he would be turning over in his grave from Dietz’s color photo-documentary of twenty-somethings at swingers’ clubs in pursuit of pleasure, if you can call it that. One look at a nubile young lady dressed for B&D and sporting a fierce pained expression will dispel any doubts that 2010 is not the year of the pleasure palace. Dostatni, who shoots in black-and-white, is somehow drawn to Chicago’s ubiquitous conventions, where she finds, among other strange things, Abraham Lincoln imitators whom she duly records in a group portrait in which a squat fellow sticking his tongue out is flanked by a beefy chap who cannot contain his mirth and a severe gentleman who has succeeded in plying to his persona and remaining in character. The cat is out of the bag and the toothpaste out of the tube in today’s American phantasmagoria. (Michael Weinstein)

Through May 31 at Black Market, 1026 N. Milwaukee.

RECOMMENDED

On the roof of the Art Institute’s Modern Wing, two jet engines lie naked under the sky.

For the installation “Untitled (Alliance),” British artist Roger Hiorns (born 1975) chose two Pratt and Whitney TF33 P9 turbofans and, with curator James Rondeau, placed them atop the Bluhm Family Terrace. Boeing provided major funding for the installation.

In the works for which Hiorns is better known, he’s been able to exercise complete authority over an environment or object, e.g., “Seizure” from 2008, wherein a London residence was filled with a chemical solution that precipitated blue crystal on every available surface. Here and now, rather than receiving an additional covering, the two jet engines have been mostly flayed of aluminum skin, their systems of control revealed.

Given the museum’s large collection of designed objects, the jet engines could bespeak the golden age of modern industrial design—but they don’t. Rather, on the terrace, the disintegrating engines confront the surrounding downtown architecture in an uncomfortable way: they are remainders of the horror when jet engines collide with buildings, and the ubiquitous corruption that results. Read the rest of this entry »