RECOMMENDED

In artist Kay Rosen’s exhibition at Gallery 400, the play between the visual and verbal structures of language, and the meaning derived, is of primary concern. The exhibition will evolve over the next three months from its current selection of collages and a video to a wall painting and an accompanying essay titled “The Center is a Concept.” Despite its incomplete state, the pieces on view now are intelligent and playful examples of Rosen’s conceptual aesthetic.

In “HIJACKED,” from 2002, Rosen created a collage of book covers using the Kinsey Millhone series by crime thriller author Sue Grafton. Grafton’s covers, ripe for Rosen’s art, make a simple game with words. “L is for Lawless,” is one title; “M is for Malice” is another. As the alphabet plods along, so does Grafton’s series. From this stream, Rosen plucks a few titles and arranges them in a crossword-puzzle style on a wall. Rosen barely more than re-presents these covers because in their current state they are like readymade Rosen pieces, complete with the artist’s signature punning style.

In “W,” from 2003, Rosen appropriates an image from the New York Times on beige card stock with a capitalized W placed on top of the image. One can easily draw conclusions. The photo shows a complete state of decay and destruction. A group of soldiers ascend stairs in a building. The specifics of the image, coupled with the letter W, reference former President George W. Bush and the unending Iraq war that first began in 2003. The letter, now typecast, is no longer a building block for other words. It is a whispered curse. (Britt Julious)

Through November 21 at Gallery 400, 400 S. Peoria St.

Matthew Metzger, "Re-release: Discourse." Acrylic and Oil on Panel.

By Rachel Furnari

“I’m a romantic about everything else in my life, but not about art school,” says Erin Chlaghmo, who begins her MFA program in Fiber and Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) this fall.  Romanticism, though, may be exactly what’s required to assume the burden of debt that comes with a degree that can cost upwards of $40,000 a year for a two- or three-year program. Chlaghmo is one of an increasing number of artists to pursue their graduate degrees in studio-arts without the guarantee of a lucrative career (or even a living wage) to pay off their student loans. Most students have a surprising and unmitigated enthusiasm for their graduate work despite being aware of the low odds for successfully working full-time as an artist—of being chosen out of the 300-plus yearly graduates for a show with one of a few commercial galleries in Chicago—and the attendant financial risks that have been exacerbated by the current economic environment.

In interviews with students from five local studio-art MFA programs—Columbia College, Northwestern, SAIC, the University of Chicago (U of C) and the University of Illinois-Chicago (UIC)—descriptions of access to faculty, visiting artists, financial aid, professional development programs and limited material resources reveal how these artists make use of their programs to create art; to think, to network, to teach and, most importantly, to have a stake in an ongoing, critical conversation about contemporary art—though the quality of this conversation was definitely up for debate. While these schools have their differences, their students and graduates make up an undeniable segment of the contemporary art scene in Chicago and in a real way represent its future. Their institutional alignments, then, are crucial in determining how and in what direction the Chicago scene develops. By identifying those alignments it may be possible to better understand how the energy and creativity of these students might be expended in order to transform contemporary art in Chicago. Can the arts community undo the institutional biases in order to acknowledge the means by which art schools shape the Chicago art environment for practitioners, curators, dealers, audiences and critics? Read the rest of this entry »

Compiled by Jason Foumberg

I asked art fair participants and insiders to make predictions for this year’s fair. At turns grim and hopeful, the responses present a slice of Chicago’s varied interests.

Brian Sholis, Art Critic: I suspect this year’s fair will be a cake of apprehension and worry frosted with taut smiles and outward expressions of hope.

Britton Bertran, Curator and Dealer: Commodity expectations are at their lowest and artists will do whatever they can to be heard in the loudest possible way. But what might be more interesting is when galleries and other enablers (non-artists) start to rear their own heads in protest and anger without repercussions from their own enablers (those that run these fairs). But what are they protesting against?

Carl Baratta, Artist: Everything will be at least competent except the free drinks. They will be perfect. Read the rest of this entry »

Emory Douglas

By Abraham Ritchie

The exhibition “Paper Trail” at Gallery 400 is not a typical art exhibition, and it doesn’t claim to be one. Instead, it recreates the gallery as a gathering place, bringing together ephemera, mostly photographs, newspapers and books, from the late 1960s and early seventies related to various American radical political groups. The hope—now that “hope” is in vogue again—is to have visitors consider solutions to social problems that have existed in Chicago for more than four decades.

What are these persisting problems from four decades ago? Consider Marvin Gaye’s 1970 sonic masterpiece, “What’s Going On.” Gaye sings, “Brother, brother there’s far too many of you dying”—still shamefully true as Chicago closed out 2008 with 507 homicides. “We don’t need to escalate, war is not the answer”—the US continues war on two fronts. “Don’t punish me with brutality”—unbelievably, police brutality is still a problem, a recent shocker being that a CPD officer beat a man handcuffed in a wheelchair.

The problems Gaye immortalized in song are given visual form here in a large group of anonymous and untitled photographs from about forty years ago. They display the visual history from the protest era; concerns about community welfare and livelihood, and efforts to abolish violence. There are images of communities organizing and banding together: a rally for a playground, children playing on bare asphalt and lots of speeches, protests and raised fists. Two images indicate that era’s racial solidarity against “The System” and “The Man.” In one, Black Panther Party co-founder Huey Newton strongly clenches a fellow radical’s hand. The other shows a press conference attended by both whites and blacks, and all are dressed in typical revolutionary gear of black berets and dark sunglasses.

The underground newspapers of the time, Seed and The Black Panther Community News, featured artistic illustrations on their covers, and both are on view here. Whereas the designs for “Seed” were often psychedelic and anonymous, The Black Panther Community News featured work by Emory Douglas, Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party from 1967-1980. Douglas was the subject of a retrospective at LA MOCA’s Pacific Design Center last year, and his images use photocollage techniques, certain elements of Chinese Communist propaganda and the artist’s own hand-drawn illustrations.

One of the most powerful images that Douglas created was a poster for the August 21, 1970, issue of Community News. Headed with the phrase, “We shall survive. Without a doubt,” the image depicts a brilliantly smiling young African-American child wearing glasses and, in place of lenses, are images of the young being educated—we assume in Black Panther community schools. Atop his head is a floppy, zoot-style hat, emanating red rays quoted directly from Chinese revolutionaries. Douglas’ consistent use of Communist propaganda techniques appropriates the galvanizing force of that style. Typically in the Chinese source images, one would see the red rays emanating from behind Mao, the leader, but in his works Douglas links them to the children, granting them agents of change. Douglas’ image posits hope and optimism in stark contrast to an era characterized by violence, racism and uncertainty.

The children depicted in Douglas’ work, and in many other images throughout the exhibition, are an unexpectedly repetitious motif, yet they successfully invoke “the future.” With the election of Barack Obama, it would seem that one of the objectives from the 1960s has been fulfilled, but this exhibition shows us that individuals and communities have the power to affect change, perhaps even more so now that our leader speaks the same language. “Paper Trail” comes at a time to keep the momentum from the election-elation going, and explicitly cites issues of affordable housing, health care and poverty—all these battles need warriors.

“Paper Trail” takes the stance that, above all, education is central to solving these issues, and visitors are presented with a large, well-stocked reading room full of revolutionary and alternative literature. Here you can learn the history not told in school, such as the FBI’s COINTELPRO program, which was aimed at dismantling radical political organizations like the Black Panthers and the Latino Young Lords.

“Paper Trail” fits into an unofficial series of exhibitions that have taken place all over Chicago this past year, marking the fortieth anniversary of the radical sixties. Other exhibitions have focused successfully on the period’s art, such as the DePaul University Museum’s excellent “1968” exhibition and the University of Chicago’s “Looks Like Freedom,” so “Paper Trail” uses an educational strategy in line with AREA’s special issue, “1968/2008” which is available in the reading room. The exhibition’s approach relies on the initiative of the viewer to read the books and study the newspapers, which can be daunting because of the mass of materials on hand. But the creation of an historical continuum, alongside many of Chicago’s alternative organizations behind this exhibition, prompts us to create the future by learning from the past.

“Paper Trail” shows at Gallery 400, 400 S. Peoria, through March 7

RECOMMENDED

“This Shadow is a Bit of Ideology” at Gallery 400 is a wide-ranging group show with ideological content that is also a bit shadowy. Several of the exhibition’s artists use overtly recognizable conceptual strategies, such as Shana Lutker’s serial drawings and etched mirrors, or Matt Hanner’s and Andrew Falkowski’s re-appropriated images of Napoleon, M.A.S.H. and Hogan’s Heroes. But is it politically relevant to know how Hogan’s Heroes shaped the national consciousness? Some bright spots include Karl Ericson’s yarn and mesh shag rug of Louis the XIV. The limply protruding yarn turns the divine right of kings into sensuous kitsch. Deborah Warner’s splattered AbEx parody and embroidered text painting, “monster appetites feed in private,” contains a possible reference to the CIA’s alleged role in promoting Abstract Expressionism abroad as pro-capitalist propaganda. Nearby, Jordan Wolfson’s untitled video shows a slow pan-out from the first Macintosh computer next to freeway with an appropriated narration about Abstract Expressionism as the first true “American art.” These ruminations on art and American-ness culminate in Dave McKenzie’s work, titled “Politics is the Art of Compromise.” McKenzie presents a lone veneered administrative desk with two organized stacks of paper sitting atop it. Each sheet is an acceptance letter for naturalization that has been heavily edited. Blank spaces remain where key words that reflect the values of the United States have been omitted just like so many individuals’ hopes for citizenship. (Dan Gunn)

Through January 24 at Gallery 400, 400 S. Peoria.

Top 5 Exhibitions

Anne Wilson, Rhona Hoffman Gallery

Watercolors by Winslow Homer, Art Institute of Chicago

“Adaptation,” Smart Museum

Chuck Walker, Hyde Park Art Center

Mark Wagner, Western Exhibitions

—Jason Foumberg

Top 5 Art Shows

Jenny Holzer, “Protect, Protect,” Museum of Contemporary Art

Edra Soto, “The Soto-Chacon Show,” Rowland Contemporary Gallery

Alan Lerner, Art on Armitage

“Made in Chicago: Portraits form the Bank of America,” LaSalle Collection/Chicago Cultural Center

“Benin—Kings and Rituals: Court Arts from Nigeria,” Art Institute of Chicago

—Marla Seidell

Top Five Photography Shows

Delilah Montoya, La Llorona Gallery

Jowhara Alsaud, Schneider Gallery

Frederic Chaubin, Chicago Architecture Foundation

Jill Frank, Golden Gallery

Carla Gannis, Kasia Kay Art Projects

—Michael Weinstein

Top 5 Museum Shows

“The Smart Home: Green + Wired,” Museum of Science and Industry

“Chic Chicago,” Chicago History Museum

“The Glass Experience,” Museum of Science and Industry

“Soul Soldiers: African Americans and the Vietnam War,” DuSable Museum

“Nature Unleashed: Inside Natural Disasters,” Field Museum

—Laura Hawbaker

Top 5 Museum Shows

Edward Hopper, Art Institute

“Twisted Into Recognition: Clichés of Jews and Others,” Spertus Museum

“Watercolors by Winslow Homer: The Color of Light,” Art Institute

“Earth From Space,” Museum of Science and Industry

“Benin—Kings and Rituals: Court Arts from Nigeria,” Art Institute

—Dennis Polkow

Top 5 Freshest Art Spaces

Swimming Pool Project Space

Old Gold

Hyde Park Art Center

65 Grand

No Coast

—Jason Foumberg

Top 5 Art Spaces We’ll Miss

Alfedena

Gescheidle

Garden Fresh

Contemporary Art Workshop

32nd & Urban

—Jason Foumberg

Top 5 Contemporary Art Exhibitions about Nature

“Biological Agents” at Gallery 400

Lora Fosberg at Linda Warren Gallery

“The Leaf and the Page,” Illinois State Museum Chicago Gallery

“Future Farmers,” Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum

Claire Sherman, Kavi Gupta Gallery

—Jason Foumberg

Top 5 Art Exhibitions About Food

Maria Tomasula, Zolla/Lieberman Gallery

“Portraying Food in Contemporary Chinese Art,” Walsh Gallery

“Sugarcraft,” Kasia Kay Art Projects Gallery

Pamela Michelle Johnson, Urbanest

Isabelle du Toit, Byron Roche Gallery

—Jason Foumberg

Top 5 Feminist Art Exhibitions

“Ladylike,” Gosia Koscielak Gallery

“Henbane: Dialectics of the Feminine Sublime,” Medicine Park

“Are We There Yet? 40 Years of Feminism,” ARC Gallery

Amelia Falk, ARC Gallery

“A Minyan Without Men,” Woman Made Gallery

—Jason Foumberg

Top 5 Exhibitions/Events at Alt-Art Spaces

“Tomorrow,” Vega Estates

“The Baby,” Knock Knock Gallery

“Pere Portabella’s Masterpiece Vampir-Cuadecuc,” White Light Cinema

Sumi Ink Club and Lucky Dragons, Golden Age

“Zummer Tapez: Jim Trainor,” Roots and Culture

 —Tim Ridlen

“Biological Agents: Artistic Engagements in Our Growing Bio-Culture” is a presentation of the work of three scientifically minded artists. Brandon Ballengee leads groups on biological excursions to gather frogs for study. Frogs are especially susceptible to the effects of pollution, and Ballangee catalogs their resultant genetic deformities. Taking people into their backyard ponds and helping them document the destruction caused by human waste is a political art act in and of itself, but a video in the gallery serves as an insufficient stand-in for the project, along with examples of deformed frogs as proof of a degrading ecology. Performance artist Caitlin Berrigan promotes Hepatitis C awareness by “befriending” her infection, serving it chocolates and tea. The tactic of treating a serious illness with such irreverent levity strips it of stigma and enables free dialog. That is, when someone is around. Berrigan’s jokiness, though, doesn’t amount to much beyond the sympathy invoked by so much self-deprecation. Finally, Natalie Jeremijenko’s contribution suffers from a lack of information. Jeremijenko’s reputation is excellent, but the projects here seemed flat. For example, two aquariums filled with tadpoles hung on the wall with pictures of men placed behind them. While inscrutable in person, the UIC website states that the men are BP executives and that the work is a comment on Lake Michigan water quality. A didactic presentation such as “Biological Agents” needs excitement to breed engagement. Telling a compelling and complete story to go with the data activates the listener, and only Ballengee’s frog works succeeded in doing that. (Dan Gunn)

Through November 22 at Gallery 400, 400 S. Peoria.

Ben Russell is a cinephile. For the time being the itinerant Russell has landed here in Chicago as a professor in the Moving Image program at UIC and curator of Gallery 400’s film-screening program. Russell has lived all over the United States, Australia and Suriname and toured through Europe with film and performance programs. To top it off he has just received a Guggenheim grant to travel to a South American jungle village to shoot an experimental documentary film. His film projects are as diverse as his curatorial endeavors and have included a 16mm flicker film featuring Richard Pryor, a documentary of modern-day trance rituals at noise shows and a remake of the 1895 film “Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory” shot at a construction site in Dubai. He declares an “abiding interest in alternative approaches to documentary and ethnography” in his work despite the varied forms that his films take.

Russell’s curatorial machinations began in early 2003 when he opened the “Magic Lantern” in Providence where he had attended Brown University five years prior. Sensing that cutting-edge film was being drained by overly formalized academic models of presentation, he sought to create an inviting screening environment. “I wanted to bring joy and marvel and magic back to the work, and I quickly realized that I was much more interested in making connections between different kinds of films (experimental, documentary, amateur, etc.) than I was in presenting single-artist programs. To me, thematic programs like ‘The Gun Show’ or ‘The Animal Show, Part Two: Bats Vs. Cats’ offered audiences a way into the work without distilling it or dumbing it down.” The programs for Gallery 400 have followed Russell’s same model with an added attempt to complement the gallery’s current exhibition. In describing his approach to curating, Russell compares it to “making a really good mix-tape” in that he tries to “create enough of a range historically, materially and topically in my programs that the viewer isn’t exhausted by the end.”

This commitment to “other folks who are as geeked out about experimental film/video as I am” comes through in his programs. And with his involvement in supporting Nightingale, a new screening spot on Milwaukee Avenue, Chicago film buffs should be happy to have him here. “Chicago is a great place to be for cinema of all sorts, and it continues to get better and better.” (Dan Gunn)

From her travels in Ethiopia my friend acquired a pocket-sized Christian icon, and she has gifted this to me. It is square-shaped and has carved wooden doors hinged on either side; these open to reveal painted devotional scenes of the Madonna and Child enthroned and a calm-faced crucified Christ. Saints and angels flank both scenes in the traditional style. I will not worship it, but can only place it alongside my Dia de los Muertos paraphernalia and ninety-nine-cent votive saint candles. In my possession, the holy aspect of a sacred object is drained, yet there is still so much left in it to appreciate. There’s the mathematic symmetry of the poses and gestures. An over-stylized drapery fold or a grotesquely mannish Christ baby rendered in familiar gold and blue can prompt an aesthetic devotion not unlike the faith it depicts.

Artist Jeni Spota’s religious-inspired paintings are effective in the same way: they use religion as a vehicle to express ideas extraneous to pure faith. Each painting is set in a valley and centered on the figure of crucified Christ who is surrounded by a massive audience, topped off with Madonna above and a chorus of angels. Like a rule, the scene is always the same, and it varies only slightly, such as the amassing of sinners in Hell or Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers (a perplexing addition). The basic scene or groundwork culls from a sequence in Pasolini’s 1971 film “The Decameron” in which a pupil of the great proto-Renaissance painter Giotto dreams of a perfect composition for his fresco. This scene, and Pasolini’s whole film, is a re-telling of a fourteenth-century text by Boccaccio that describes daily life in Italy during the Renaissance period. To see one of Spota’s paintings, each titled “Giotto’s Dream,” is also to see a film still from Pasolini, which is also to see Boccaccio’s text, which is also to see a portion of the life of Giotto, and then sin and salvation. To see Christianity via Spota’s paintings is to see a shapely myth that has been smoothed by the many hands that passed it through the centuries.

University of Chicago professor W.J.T. Mitchell recently published a book about how pictures, especially religious icons, create reciprocal desire between viewer and picture. Mitchell writes that icons prompt viewers to kiss them, and kissing is just one small step away from eating. Spota’s smallish paintings have been described as “caked” because she uses thick wads of oil-paint-like icing. “Spota paints like a cake decorator,” writes another critic. It’s a fine thing to have fun applying paint in this way, but what of the subject matter beneath the confection? I love to think about Christ rendered as a cake decoration in opposition to the sober wafer form he takes during communion, and surely food plays a huge part in religious festivities, but there’s also something strange about the total aestheticization of God without recompense to inner spirituality. It’s not atheistic but rather fetishistic. Traditionally, the image of God is supposed to move the viewer into religious epiphany, or beyond the world of images. Spota’s images of the crucifixion, like Giotto’s dream of the religious scene, locate holiness in good composition. Those who use images for religious purposes may not require the artist herself to be religious; it’s enough that she knows how to divine form from material.

Artist Andy Roche also questions the relationship between religion and its mode of delivery. “Black Iron Vatican,” the title of Roche’s exhibition, conjures death metal’s conversion of crucifixes, religious pageantry and paraphernalia to a total aesthetic. Sweaty crowds of long-haired teenagers could be mistaken for a tear-stained, testifying mass; music videos could be televangelical sermons. Roche further compounds the similarities by creating bedroom posters of imagery taken from hand-raising believers captured through the fuzz of a TV screen. Some of these posters are hung from metal rods in retail-style slats.

While it’s certainly true that a teenager can buy his or her rebel uniform off the rack from Hot Topic, Roche does not only point to the wholesale commodification of this lifestyle. The video installation “Tetedemort” shows a Passion play in some rural woods interspersed with footage of grave-markers. Filmed with Super 8 and a 1970s-style rock soundtrack, the video expertly re-enacts a vintage feeling. Harolding with Roche, the viewer is treated to an insider’s peek at theatrical death (the Passion play) and a cemetery like an old man’s mouth, filled with nubby-toothed graves. In another video we find Roche performing a Pre-Raphaelite-like new-age bit, screeching en plein air. As if magnifying the sublimated paganism within mainstream religious culture, Roche constructs the stance of the typical adolescent outsider. It’s sad to think that such fervor smoothes over as adulthood begins, but if it doesn’t, it turns the adult into a fundamentalist.

Jeni Spota shows at Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 East Chicago, (312)280-2660, through March 2. Andy Roche shows at Gallery 400, 400 South Peoria, (312)996-6114, through March 8.