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 »

RECOMMENDED

In her exhibition at the Hyde Park Art Center, “From the Offices of Scientists,” Aspen Mays assembles a set of installations inspired by science office spaces. Reminiscent of a theatrical set, her installations “Jellybean Universe,” “Boom!” and “You’re Next” use office materials such as a dry-erase board and cardboard boxes to re-create a scientist’s office. Looming at the center of her exhibition is a giant 850-pound boulder, “Boulder Desk,” mysteriously at the mercy of a weak desk, behind which an encased sign on the wall reads, “If you think you found a meteorite bring it here and we’ll check it to be sure.” Playful and witty, the installation is a diversion from the process-driven photographs that characterize May’s solo exhibition currently on display at the MCA 12 x 12 gallery.

Meticulous, even obsessive in the methodical approach to her photography, Mays subjects the viewer to the prevailing process in science research by collecting and categorizing information. In “Every Leaf,” the artist attempts to photograph every leaf of a tree, a process that takes Mays nearly nine hours to accomplish. Providing the viewer with a kind of visual index and a display of 900 snapshots recognizing leaves of various sizes and hues. In “Einstein’s Rainbow,” Mays borrows every book on Einstein from the inter-library loan system, nearly 1,500 in all, which the artist organizes by color on in various rainbow arches. In the tremendous magnitude of materials from her study of these subjects, Mays’ scrutiny and categorization provides an overwhelming but moving display on the nature of investigation and a curious attempt at making sense of the wealth of information. (Beatrice Smigasiewicz)

Aspen Mays shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art through February 28, and at the Hyde Park Art Center though April 25.

Top 5 Museum Shows
Olafur Eliasson, Museum of Contemporary Art
Your Pal, Cliff: Selections from the H.C. Westermann Study Collection, Smart Museum
Paul Chan, Renaissance Society
Mary Lou Zelazny, Hyde Park Art Center
James Castle: A Retrospective, Art Institute of Chicago
—Jason Foumberg

Top 5 Gallery Shows
Rob Carter, Ebersmoore Gallery
Big Youth, Corbett vs. Dempsey
Sarah Krepp, Roy Boyd Gallery
Everybody! Visual resistance in feminist health movements, 1969-2009, I Space
Ali Bailey, Golden Gallery
—Jason Foumberg Read the rest of this entry »

By Jason Foumberg

Jin Lee, "Ice 2," 2008. Courtesy devening projects + editions, Chicago

Art is long, but institutional memory is short. In many ways, Chicago’s art history is written as it occurs, in situ, by the people who produce it. Artists toil in their studios, heads-down. Apartment galleries open and close as briskly as the seasons change. We consume one-night-only events by the half-dozen, like so many bottles of free Grolsch beer. Even as new art blogs proliferate, with more scenes being represented than ever before, the snapshot commentary and weekly content often feels dated by week’s end. And yet, paintings aren’t bubblegum summer jams; they’re codified slabs of culture, philosophy and style. We seek dialogue, inspiration and long-term change. In short, we seek longevity, with lasting importance for our work and our peers’—but who has time to write contemporary history while we’re in the midst of making it?

That said, Chicago loves its art history. Outsiders, Imagists, Modernists and firebrands—memorize their precepts and you’re halfway to an MFA degree (however, please don’t leave Chicago once you earn the other half). Our traditions always feel in danger of becoming tinder for the next great fire, so we hand-cobble our history and share the stories orally like a rite of passage. This is to our strength and our detriment. History is our bind. We don’t trash Paschke or cold-shoulder Mies because we’ve worked so hard to carry their legacies. In many global art centers, successive generations of artists break with the past like rebellious teenagers, but Chicagoans do not. Here, innovation comes from influence and education. Doing otherwise, it would feel as if the whole thing could unravel.

As we approach the end of the century’s first decade, it’s time to take census of our situation. Read the rest of this entry »

Scott Hocking, "Ziggurat—East, Summer, Fisher Body Plant #21," 2008, archival digital print.

By Jason Foumberg

The CIA used art—yes, visual art!—as a strategy during the Cold War. Abstract Expressionism at first, then Rauschenberg and Johns, were exported to European venues in a power play of cultural might. What could be more impressive than those giant, domineering canvases oozing self-expression and painterly freedom? With the help of the CIA, Americans won prizes and audiences abroad, including the prestigious Biennale.

If cultural colonialism is what it takes to be heard the world over, then so be it. “Heartland,” an exhibition of contemporary Midwestern art, co-organized by Chicago’s Smart Museum and the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Netherlands, proves the method still viable in 2009. If the scene in Los Angeles can get a retrospective at Paris’ Centre Pompidou, in 2006, then the Dutch can surely claim the Midwest. “Heartland” opened overseas first, and is now on view here. It was an unexpected collaboration, but one that bore fruit. Midwestern art got to strut on the international stage and European artists, in turn, produced art inspired by the Midwestern spirit.

What, exactly, is the contemporary Midwestern aesthetic? Don’t say American Gothic. Don’t draw corn and cows. “Heartland” thankfully plows through these stereotypes. When the topics of farming (Marjetica Potrc) and cow hides (Carol Jackson) inevitably arise, though, the artists cleverly treat them as ready-built canvases upon which to elaborate sociological projects. Otherwise, the curators have taken great care to expand the definition of “the Midwest.” From Minneapolis to Detroit, down the Mississippi to New Orleans (a geography traced by the curators), and in locales rural and urban, the Midwest of today encapsulates America’s complexities: boom and bust, political profiteering and progress, community can-do-ism and unfettered violence, homestead pride and gang turf wars, urban decay and renewal. Maybe more than a little bit of that inventive pioneering spirit does survive. Read the rest of this entry »

Bu Hua, "Savage Grow," 2008

RECOMMENDED

Video programs provide curators with an economical means of packing a lot of content into a relatively small amount of gallery real estate. For audiences, however, the task of watching what may well add up to several continuous hours of video without the ability to pause, rewind or skip can be daunting. Inevitably (or more precisely sometime around the second hour) individual works begin to bleed into one another, and thus any lengthy video program’s success must be judged on the program’s overall thematic flow as well as the strength of each work individually. Luckily, those who take the time to sit through the three-hour endurance test that is “Shanghype!” are apt to feel enriched by the experience rather than drained. Read the rest of this entry »

Nicola Verlato, "Mothers II"

RECOMMENDED

Eschatology is the area of theology that refers to the destiny of the soul after death, and the destiny of humanity at the end of time. From all eras of Western religious art to current Hollywood holocausts, eschatology has manifested visually in numerous explicit tableaux of unambiguous mass carnage. Curated by Front Forty Press, the show now at Hyde Park Art Center purports to provide visions of the end times, both apocalyptic and redemptive. But, as with other exhibitions attempting this theme (such as the morbid 2008 Torino Triennale, titled “50 Moons of Saturn”), the options available in terms of secular modern imagery appear tragically limited, despite the imminent catastrophes we allegedly face from weapons of mass destruction, nature, credit defaults, what have you.   Nonetheless, the show features some lovely ominous landscapes, including Jean-Pierre Roy’s science-fictionoid oil painting “The Black Damp,” Richard Misrach’s fairly self-descriptive photograph, “Swamp and Pipeline, Geismar, Louisiana,” and, next to it, a drawing by David Opdyke of a field empty save for several air vents emerging from the earth, titled “Undisclosed Location.” A series of chaotic abstract paintings and drawings are splattered throughout, including works by Nina Bovasso, Ricky Allman, Emilio Pere and Andrew Schoultz (who also did a striking mural outside the main gallery), not to mention the poster girl of hard-edged abstract explosions, Julie Mehretu. The figurative pieces and the quieter abstractions were less successful; while they strive for a ravishing atmosphere of hypnotic emotional depth, this is a difficult effect to achieve without risking lurid or precious sentimentality. The “rapture” aspect of the title may have originally denoted the collective millennial redemption of the blessed, or the individual mystical ecstasy expressed in Bernini’s sculpture of St. Teresa, but, maybe even more than the pessimism of Armageddon, salvation imagery requires dramatic content to awaken our reluctant relationship to the cosmos. (Bert Stabler)

Through September 20 at the Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell.

Vincent Dermody, "Chicago Style"

By Jason Foumberg

The Hyde Park Art Center has long positioned itself as a booster for a Chicago Style. In the 1960s the Center hosted the legendary “Hairy Who?” exhibitions and now, seventy years after opening its doors, they’re at it again by defining a moment in the city’s artistic history with the exhibition “Artists Run Chicago.” This huge group show, with ninety artists and about 150 objects, doesn’t promote a single stylistic lineage (like the Imagists or Hairy Who), but rather celebrates the act of participation. Curators Allison Peters Quinn and Britton Bertran have selected thirty-six artist-operated “spaces,” or exhibition venues, and collected them in a single, but very large, gallery. All of the spaces, many now closed, have existed in some form (some for-profit and others not, some nomadic, one inside a bathroom medicine cabinet) in the past ten years. This was one criterion for inclusion, which illuminates a thick decade of art history in Chicago. The most important organizing principal, though, is that each space was initiated by an artist, for artists.

At artist-run venues, the airless white-cube ideal is not always upheld. Often you find yourself in somebody’s front room, or hanging out on their balcony, or sitting on their couch watching video art on their television monitor while a cat rubs its face on your leg. Often the show is open for a single night, as normal business hours are not kept. Sometimes there are children, a DJ, beer bongs, a dank moldy smell, a long flight of stairs, and stubble in the sink from the proprietor’s recent shave before the opening. Often this context cannot be divorced from the art in the artist-run space. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

After finishing high school in Alabama, Roger Brown enrolled in Bible school, intending to become a preacher. Instead, a figure-drawing class strengthened his interest in art and redirected his course to Chicago. He arrived just in time to help form the group of artists that would come to be known as the Chicago Imagists. The pieces included in “Roger Brown: Early Work” date from 1968—when Brown began his MFA studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago—until 1980, when his critical acclaim was beginning to grow thanks to exhibitions at the Hyde Park Art Center, Phyllis Kind Gallery, and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, among other venues. Read the rest of this entry »

By Jason Foumberg

Mary Lou Zelazny relates an anecdote about the artist Pieter Bruegel, the great chronicler of sixteenth-century life in the Netherlands. Bruegel would often go into town and sketch characters from life, she says. He had to be quick about it, and sneaky. Disguised among the crowd in local dress, he could sketch a peasant woman’s candid weariness or a child’s uninhibited game.

Bruegel may not be the first art-historical reference that comes to mind when looking at Zelazny’s works, which combine a realistic painting technique with collages from popular magazines, but the sentiment about making art discreetly, and rejoicing in the profound oddities of everyday life, holds true. Zelazny is an artist who looks intently at things, but is also open to surprise. “It’s such a big world, and there is so much to see,” she says, as if this moment was her first step into the great big unknown. But it’s not. A retrospective of her paintings from the past twenty-eight years is now on view at the Hyde Park Art Center.

Zelazny is clearly enthralled by the heaps of stuff available to her as an artist. In the art world we call it “influence” or “appropriation” rather than “stealing,” and in her catalogue essay, curator Allison Peters Quinn makes clear the many, many allusions to past and contemporary artists cited in Zelazny’s works. As a viewer it’s a delight to pick up on these references because you know that Zelazny drops them there for you. It’s not inner-circle name-dropping, but it rather reminds me of author Annie Dillard’s reminiscence from her own childhood: she would plant shining pennies in a shrub’s shadow, and then draw arrows on the pavement directing passerby to a chance discovery of luck, but never waited around to witness the encounter; to imagine it was enough excitement.

So too does Zelazny leave little gifts for the viewer to unwrap. She constructs figures and personages from magazine cutouts: product displays from consumer weeklies, recipe illustrations from modern woman monthlies, mechanical wonders from Scientific American, natural wonders for the armchair traveler. Most of the early collages feature faceless people, their features replaced by a thing. But this isn’t to say that Zelzany believes we’re the sum of our shopping expeditions, and she doesn’t moralize about the ceaseless stream of chatterbox media. Instead, an image of a woman’s face saturated by a flock of birds, or gold necklaces whirling eel-like, or an erect cock carefully draped with plaid fabric scraps, are like crisp little poetic stanzas unexpectedly plucked from a sink of dirty dishes. Combined, they create a scenic narrative: of love, of solitude, the tragic and the comic.

The appearance of so much stuff in Zelazny’s works, especially the things of modern life—telephones, car bumpers, the GE logo—are such that they’re records of the past fifty years. Even a close-up picture of cake can be dated to the 1950s-70s; it is simply one of those advertising tropes of middle-class domestic bliss. A trio of candy-colored pills balanced atop a Walkman is more explicit. Zelazny explains that the date-specific imagery comes from dumpster diving at a time when old ladies were tossing their stacks of magazines; it’s simply what was available. Of course, Zelazny does have a choice in the matter, and like Bruegel, she chooses to document a certain feeling, say, the way that we pass through our days, rather than depict specific people and events. (Although, Zelazny did turn to portraiture for a few years, but there she diminished the use of found images for collage.)

The game of art-historical allusions is informative, but it’s the Surrealists that provide a direct route to the heart of Zelazny’s work. Surrealism, birthed in Paris in the nineteen-teens, found a second home in Chicago. Collecting Surrealist art became de rigueur here. Troves of Surrealist art served as points of reference and beget second and third-wave Surrealists and, in part, the Chicago Imagists, many of whom set up at the School of the Art Institute. (And later, collectors donated their Surrealist collections to the Art Institute, thereby preserving the genre.) It’s here that Zelazny attended art school. Salvador Dalí’s “Mae West’s Face which May be Used as a Surrealist Apartment,” a collage-painting created in 1934-35, and accepted by the Art Institute in 1949, could pass for a work by Zelazny.

Surrealist artists might be typecast as dreamers who live in their heads, but historically they’ve been keen to the absurd intricacies of everyday life—a found love letter or shopping list, or a slip of the tongue. These are launch pads to revelation. “Ideas come from living life,” says Zelazny. It’s like the break you take from an intense period of work—only by stepping away, and looking around yourself, do you discover yourself.

Mary Lou Zelazny shows at Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell, through April 12.