Jackie Ferrara, "Stacked Pyramid," 1972

After a year that’s been rich in lively shows and discussion about the relevance and legacy of Minimalism—the Gerard Byrne show and accompanying panels at the Renaissance Society, for one—this fall’s big Minimalism-then-and-now show at the MCA is a bit of a theoretical letdown. The first major show by chief curator Michael Darling, who joined the MCA last summer, “The Language of Less (Then and Now)” betrays a serious anxiety about the inaccessibility of Minimalism that seems out of place in a museum city like Chicago. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

During the 1980s, artists who produced anxious or enigmatic objects gave up the responsibility to be serious, or at least they shed some of the trappings of the high seriousness characterized by Minimalism. Dan Gunn’s “Patchwork Plateau,” on view at the MCA, is an object resembling a room-dividing screen and is placed on its side. It has many attributes whose ambiguity could be unsettling, except that it is painted a cheerful shade of green. Many of the parts of “Patchwork Plateau”—the name must refer to its table-like orientation, although the geographical connotations linger—seem to be found and not found at the same time. Read the rest of this entry »

James Goggin

By Laura Fox

“In a way, this position is my first job,” James Goggin tells me, referring to his transition last August from running his own design studio in London to becoming the director of design, publications and digital media at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Goggin’s approach to design is transgressive; he explores ideas across supposed boundaries, like museum departments and mediums ranging from print and digital to spatial and architectural. With other past roles as a magazine art director, university visiting critic, lecturer and even writer, Goggin’s expansive mindset dovetails neatly with the new models for audience engagement and institutional innovation currently pursued by the MCA. We talked about his role in further extending the MCA’s reach into the city.

One of the main reasons Madeleine Grynsztejn recruited you to the MCA was to create a new visual identity. What’s happened so far?  

This new identity isn’t window dressing. I didn’t want to just produce a new logo, color, or different font. We’re spending the year talking to every department, asking such questions as how do the databases work, how does the point of sales system in the store work, how does ticketing work. We have to know how everything functions before we can design a new identity. And, much of that is logistical rather than aesthetic design. It might not be something that’s tangibly visible as design to the public, but it can be seen in the overall visitor experience.

The release of the new identity will coincide with the culmination of Michael Darling’s curatorial planning, the restructuring of the building and galleries, new people arriving, and all of the programming started by Madeleine Grynsztejn more than three years ago. As a designer, I want to be working with the overall context—here, it’s the city of Chicago and our links with the community. Read the rest of this entry »

"WEAR THE BRACELET," 2008.

By Laura Fox

Mark Bradford’s mural-scale “Helter Skelter I” fills nearly an entire wall in his retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Complex, competing layers of images, colors, textures and materials are lacerated by overlapping networks of arterial lines streaming endlessly across its expanse. I attempt to follow one line across the plane, trying to absorb particulars despite its nearly hyperbolic immensity. Starting with the faded, upside-down text scrap “King,” the remnant of a merchant poster that Bradford found on the streets in his south Los Angeles neighborhood, my eyes travel to the layers of bubbling silver paper, bright day-glo colors and a half-submerged image of a woman’s face. My singular line disappears, merging with the larger system, so I jump from passageways to smaller alleys navigating my way through Bradford’s landscape.

Bradford’s art seems to welcome these intimate interactions. Although composed on canvas, none of his works are stretched or mounted onto a backing board. Instead, they adhere unceremoniously to the wall; the left-hand corners of “Helter Skelter I” even curl up, implying the limited temporality of its constructed surface. Read the rest of this entry »

Heads rolled when the Museum of Contemporary Art closed their running series “Mash Flob: Turning Flash Mob Inside Out” on April 19 with a slightly dangerous game spearheaded by Industry of the Ordinary, the Chicago-based performance art group of Mathew Wilson and Adam Brooks.

Based on the origins of soccer or, to the British-born artists, football, the game involved kicking around rubber molds of the artists’ heads.

“Back in Mayan times, supposedly after battles, tribes would take the heads of their slain victims and use them as rudimentary balls,” said Brooks. “So we decided what we would do is have a game with both of our heads.”

The artists said they have a long history with creating art that deals with soccer and were fascinated by its violent origins. “It has this rather disturbing, possibly apocryphal history of kicking heads around,” Wilson said.

Despite the wind and persistent mist that left the tiled sidewalk and steps outside the museum slick and wet, around twenty people volunteered to play “football.” Another twenty-five or so gathered on the museum’s steps to watch the scuffle from above, where Brooks and Wilson, decked out in army-green parkas emblazoned with “Industry of the Ordinary,” presided over the melee. Read the rest of this entry »

Installation view, "Lowlands," Glasgow International 2010.

RECOMMENDED

There is some fine situational irony in Scottish artist Susan Philipsz appropriating the words from the international worker’s hymn “We have been naught, we shall be all” as sound art at a time when working people in the Midwest are being stripped of their pensions and health benefits, and labor union participation is at an all-time low. The new “We Shall Be All” and an earlier work, “Internationale,” play in the halls of the MCA, and a companion piece, titled “Pledge,” plays at Jane Addams Hull House, a landmark of Chicago’s working-class history. Chicago’s rich radical labor history might be better known and valued outside the country in places like Philipsz’s own industrial working-class city of Glasgow and elsewhere around the world where Chicago’s Haymarket affair is celebrated on International Worker’s Day (May Day) every May first. Read the rest of this entry »

"Lippy," 1968

RECOMMENDED

The current Jim Nutt retrospective traces the artist’s decades-long preoccupation with female faces. These personages are not drawn from specific sitters—here they are called “imaginary portraits.” The matriline evolves from violent and violated amputees in the late 1960s (perhaps the victims and/or instigators of feminism) to subdued bust portraits of women who look as if they’re evaluating themselves, alone, in a mirror.

It is well known that the Hairy Who artists, Jim Nutt among them, culled source material and inspiration from comics—but so did Willem de Kooning, a collector of much early twentieth-century comic art. The female personage was the only subject of de Kooning’s for a long while, and although he later moved on to fully non-objective paintings, Nutt has varied little since closing the Hairy Who chapter. Both Nutt and de Kooning have achieved an expressive potential through the often-generic format of a cartoonish woman’s head. Nutt’s long, sustained experimentation with female faces grants viewers an opportunity to witness the slow procession of his creative output. Many pencil drawings in the show are interspersed among the paintings, which are supposed to reveal the artist’s precise process. But what painter doesn’t have working drawings lying around the studio? Nutt’s message reaches fever pitch when rendered in exacting, glossy and complex paint. Read the rest of this entry »

Enrique Chagoya, "Return to Goya No. 9," 2010

By Julia V. Hendrickson

Comic and cartoon artists work quietly but profusely in Chicago, drawn, perhaps, to the functionality of its gridded streets, city blocks like frames on a page. Comic book and specialty bookstores like Quimby’s and Challengers flourish because there is an audience for experimental narratives and a vibrant community surrounding comic art. In reaction to such public interest, January brings a flurry of exhibitions related to comic and sequential narrative art.

For those interested in historical context, the Block Museum in Evanston offers a small but superb collection of prints in “The Satirical Edge,” with work from the 1950s to the present, all using graphic comic and cartoon imagery for socio-political commentary. The majority of this collection features a group of artists, the “Outlaw Printmakers,” who were part of a 2004 exhibition at Big Cat Gallery in New York. Most striking are Tom Huck’s series of small-town narratives depicted in large, hypnotically intricate woodcuts. A handful of R. Crumb comic books from the early 1970s are the only direct connection to comics, but the influence of comic art is evident in works like Richard Mock’s bug-eyed linocuts and Enrique Chagoya’s collaged accordion book.

Chagoya’s newer work is also prominently displayed, and includes an etching from his latest edition, a dancing, demon-chased Obama, a subtle revision of Goya’s “Los Caprichos.” The Block aptly compliments the “Satirical Edge” with a concurrent exhibition of prints by eighteenth-century caricaturist and political cartoonist Thomas Rowlandson. Read the rest of this entry »

Lilli Carré: Untitled, 2010, screen print, 8 x 8 inches. Photo by Angee Leonnard.

Top 5 People and Places We’ll Miss
Kathryn Hixson
David Weinberg Gallery
Rowley Kennerk Gallery
Green Lantern Gallery
James Garrett Faulkner
—Jason Foumberg

Top 5 Solo Exhibitions
Edra Soto/Ebersmoore Gallery
Philip Hanson/Corbett vs. Dempsey
Lilli Carré/Spudnik Press
Gladys Nilsson/Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art
Ian Weaver/Packer Schopf Gallery
—Jason Foumberg

Top 5 Public Art Projects
Ray Noland’s “Run Blago Run”
Pop-Up galleries in the Loop
Nomadic Studio/DePaul University Art Museum
Hui-min Tsen’s tours of the Chicago Pedway
Marwen
—Jason Foumberg Read the rest of this entry »

Andrea Zittel, "A-Z Cellular Compartment Units," 2001. Collection Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, gift of Marshall Fields by exchange.

RECOMMENDED

“Without You I’m Nothing” is at once an impressive survey of contemporary work and an unsettling spectacle. To be reminded of one’s role as a viewer is, here, frequently to be indicted, whether as part of a culture of waste or sexualized violence or as a consumer in a marketplace of art that no radical stab at gift economy can disturb.

The south room of the MCA’s main floor features art highlighting audience “engagement” (like Michelangelo Pistoletto’s “Turkish Bath,” wherein a mirror locates the audience in relation to an odalisque) while the north room’s pieces require viewer “activation” (floor tiles, for instance, or a collection of rubber stamps with which to play).

Much of the work is explicitly political, either in the accessible sense of Adrian Piper’s lecture on racial labeling or as an artifact of activism, like Olafur Eliasson’s monofrequency light designed to shine from boutique windows as a provocative advertisement for an Ethiopian nonprofit. Here, however, Piper’s overturned table and Eliasson’s yolky light glare from competing corners of a show that dilutes itself by accumulation. As empty as these vast warehouse rooms feel, physically, within seconds the sensation of the show is one of thumbing through a hefty art-history textbook. Read the rest of this entry »