RECOMMENDED

British photographer Sarah Pickering has devoted herself to documenting in color and black-and-white the sites where first responders train for disasters and civil disorders in environments constructed for the purpose of simulating the dangers that they might have to confront in the real world. Pickering has a special taste for shooting modest rooms that have been set on fire for her and controlled explosions and gas clouds in the fields, but her premier endeavor is her series on Denton, England, a stage-set microcosm of a mid-size city existing only to be the scene of riot training for SWAT teams. When Pickering is around, Denton is depopulated, but signs remain of what the police are meant to control; a barricade of shopping carts, tires and construction boards blocks off an alley framed by dismal working-class flats that are simply facades. Although she has a socially critical intent, Pickering’s images turn out to be politically neutral; those who support the state will be happy that the security forces are sharpening their skills, and opponents of the ruling order will detect the mechanisms of malign power. (Michael Weinstein)

Through May 23 at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, 600 S. Michigan.

RECOMMENDED

A foreclosed home is not a pretty sight after its owners have been dispossessed. At least that is the message of Chicago-based German photographers Beate Geissler and Oliver Sann who have undertaken the task of shooting the interiors of scores of houses that have gone on the block with deadpan straight-on documentary eyes. Geissler and Sann show us gutted rooms and hallways in which there is often some trace of lives left behind, like the remains of a photo-collage of fashion models on a bare wall above an electric plug stuck into a wall socket from which the cord has been severed. As a result of their uncompromising documentary approach, Geissler and Sann evoke neither nostalgia nor a sense of beauty, but simply a realization of what the wear and tear of life do to home sweet home, once the façade is stripped away and we are left with the clump of insulation that has worked its way through a hole in the ceiling. (Michael Weinstein)

Through May 23 at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, 600 S. Michigan.

Václav Chochola, "Lamp," 1947

RECOMMENDED

From 1967 through 2002, Chicago’s Baruch Gallery played a unique role as the only space outside Czechoslovakia that specialized in showcasing that country’s rich photographic tradition. In putting images from the Baruch collection’s deep reserves on public display at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, curator Karen Irvine has performed a service by exposing the Czech modernist tradition’s variety, ranging from the grandmaster Jan Sudek’s emotive studies of cityscapes and intimate landscapes, through Jaroslav Rossler’s cubist abstractions, to Jan Saudek’s kinky and decadent surrealistic scenarios shot in his basement studio during the Communist era. Spanning the period between the first world war and the early post-Communist years, the images here by nine of the most important Czech photographers will convince the viewer of the pertinence of the widespread critical judgment that mid-twentieth century photography was dominated by France, Germany, the United States and Czechoslovakia. Look at Sudek’s deep and clouded study of a strand of trees in the mist and you will know why Anne Baruch embraced and loved the Czech tradition for its “poetic modernism.” (Michael Weinstein)

Through March 28 at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, 600 S. Michigan.

Štepán Grygar, Street (Prague), 2002.

RECOMMENDED

Tenaciously resistant to postmodern cultural play, the six contemporary Prague-based Czech photographers who have been brought together here by curators Karel Cisar and Karen Irvine continue their country’s poetic modernist tradition with evocative black-and-white and color images of ordinary objects, moody spaces and mild constructivist angle shots that exude worn, tired and poignant emotions that are mirrored in their subjects. Although the curators advise  that the show “represents a small, very specific slice of photography in the  Czech Republic today,” it remains that such works are rarely being made elsewhere at the present time and are a throwback to the golden age of Czech photography between the two world wars. The restrained mundane sensibility, in which decay is never so rife as to resemble ruins, is most perfectly captured in Marketa Othova’s study of a shiny tiled floor littered with a few dispersed scraps of foam board that appear to have fallen from the ceiling, signaling disrepair that has not come anywhere near the brink of destruction. While the world outside Western Europe forges ahead with bold experiments, these artists look backwards and are frozen into pillars of the past. (Michael Weinstein)

Through March 28 at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, 600 S. Michigan.

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 »

RECOMMENDED

Infiltrating Chicago gallery spaces with their full-fledged, cutting-edge work that constitutes a genuine avant-garde and blows away domestic products, Chinese photographers now bid fair to take over the city in this show in which a battalion of shooters presents the manifold perspectives that mix and match in the metropolis of Shanghai. Grappling with the destruction of old Shanghai and the disappearance of traditional lifestyles, and the eruption of a postmodern cityscape and its accompanying consumer culture, the contributors are uniformly visual social critics, probing into the glitzy decadence of middle-class high-rise existence, commenting mordantly on the lives of those still trying to cling to the past, and spoofing real estate ads, among any number of other skeptical moves. These artists are not political activists, and one suspects that their cultural approach is deeply rooted in their psyches rather than being a result of a dictatorial regime’s censorship. The banner image in the show is Yong Fudong’s large-format staged color portrait of the “First Intellectual,” a man with wildly tousled hair who stands in the middle of a wide avenue dressed in a business suit and holding a briefcase in one hand and a large brick in other; blood drips from his face and his eyes and lips are agape with bewildered astonishment, indeed panic. A consummate conceptual artist, Fudong explains the image best—the First Intellectual has been wounded, but he cannot decide whether to throw his brick at society or smash it in his own face. Would that the West were so deep and sophisticated, but perhaps senility has set in and ambivalence has taken flight. (Michael Weinstein)

Through December 23 at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, 600 S. Michigan.

RECOMMENDED

Among the works of the six emerging photographers here, representing the Museum’s Midwest Photographers Project, Brian Ulrich’s color images of abandoned shopping emporia attract the eye immediately by virtue of the stark impenetrability of their subjects. Casualties of the economic recession, Ulrich’s stores, which were intended by their owners to be friendly and accessible, now appear to be fortresses, wastelands, or—on the inside—inert dioramas. To the defenders of capitalism who are wont to praise its proclivities for “creative destruction,” Ulrich’s exquisitely composed deadpan yet emotionally charged studies respond with a reminder of the system’s excess, waste and spoliation. Having advanced in this series, “Dark, Stores, Ghost Boxes and Dead Malls,” to a higher level of aesthetic sensitivity, Ulrich unites cultural criticism and redemption of the ruins in “Dixie Square Mall,” where the gutted shopping center at dusk takes on a post-apocalyptic guise. (Michael Weinstein)

Through September 13 at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, 600 S. Michigan Ave.

RECOMMENDED

In an unsparing onslaught of photographic social criticism, curator Natasha Egan offers us ten artists with messages questioning the depredations of modern civilization whose images never fail to be beautiful. Top honors for deadly wit go to Dionisio Gonzalez, who confects color panoramic images of shots of rude shanties in Sao Paulo, Brazil intermixed with bits of that city’s postmodern architecture to create an impossible street in which the wealthy and the wretched come cheek to jowl. On a more metaphysical plane, Liset Castillo takes on the age-old commentary on vanity, constructing sand-castle cities in her backyard, shooting them, destroying them, and then shooting the ruins that she has wrought. On the museum’s top floor, Christina Seely reaches the acme of irony by providing us with a world map showing where the mega-carbon footprints are, and then serving up scintillating large-format color photos of the cities that produce climate change taken from afar at night, gleaming with unearthly brilliance. Postmodernists always try to have it both ways. (Michael Weinstein)

Through July 5 at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, 600 S. Michigan.

By Jason Foumberg

Our eyes, so careful to speak the mind’s intelligence, can easily regress to bestial instincts. They slim to a predatory shape, scan and hone. The café-set call it people-watching, but really it’s just a form of animal intelligence. When you walk down a busy sidewalk and set your eyes on another, then look away, then look again, away, and eyes brush past each other, it’s like dogs tracking fear, sex, competitors. The optic nerve stabs through the brain’s pearly pith, darting straight for the primitive core. Yes, it’s base, but even the most refined prepared meal satisfies the gurgling stomach.

It’s with these eyes that I went looking for art with my teeth bared, and found Michael Wolf. The Museum of Contemporary Photography, which recently opened an exhibition by the German artist, paints him as a jet-setting photographer of serious architecture who could respectfully represent our city to itself. The work in the show tells another story. Wolf got caught up with what’s inside the buildings—people, alone, unaware that they’re being photographed, making dinner, working on a computer, languishing in their solitude. It’s as if Wolf were combing the beach for beautiful seashells, and dug his snout into something meaty. He discovered that buildings are the decorative shells within which people take off their clothes, lie down and sleep. Welcome to the big city, Michael.

Now, it’s the unwritten rule of living in proximity to so many people, fishbowl style, that you don’t look at them and they don’t look at you. The point is hammered home in Hitchcock’s “Rear Window,” where the hero has a hobby of spying on his neighbors with a telephoto lens, and assumes he witnesses a murder. Wolf is very aware that he’s enjoying the same pastime. In one grid of windows Wolf sees someone watching this very same film on a big-screen TV. By staging this act of recognition, Wolf hopes to undercut any criticism of scopophilia—the joy of peeping. It’s as if his creepy intrusion is undercut by an awareness of it, but self-consciousness is no excuse for animal desires.

A dog can understand you, in its own way, simply by smelling you. Bypassing any sort of refinement, if they have any, dogs go straight for the ass, which seems to be the ID spout. Humans, too, pick up traits about others in a glance or even using periphery vision. How do you choose which stranger to sit next to on the train? The decision is made in a split-second. Threat level or even date-ability is calculated. “Hell is other people,” said Sartre; but then why the hell do we care what other people look like when they think they’re not being looked at—as in Wolf’s photographs?

These drooling eyes hit the road for other toothsome sport. At the Suburban in Oak Park, author Jonathan Safran Foer’s friend, Sam Messer, exhibited portraits of the writer. Expressionist profiles of Safran Foer were punctuated with scribbles about the sitter’s receding hair, dry skin and an intellectually couth but self-deprecating ‘look’ that made him seem twenty-five years older than he really is. There was no sport to be found here.

“There is even something absolutely inhuman about the face,” wrote philosophers Deleuze and Guattari in teaching us about faciality, or face perception, one of the few instincts attributed to humans (it is said that there are no true human instincts, or actions that we follow irresistibly). Such inhuman faces are to be found in Iv Toshain’s drawings at Dan Devening’s gallery. Here, beautiful people—the idea of which is questioned by the artist—have horrific devils grafted onto their faces. Toshain uses transparencies on top of drawings, effectively having the demons and beasts emerge X-Ray-like from the smooth skin and groomed hair. I prefer not to see these images as commentaries on beauty or ugliness as manufactured by fashion magazines, for beauty and ugliness need as few words as possible to make their strongest statement, but rather these are illustrations (in that they’re not realistic), like anatomical charts or Freud’s funny little drawings of the ego, of the primeval tar pits and genetic cesspools that distance humans only several degrees from hirsute wolves. It’s kind of scary.

Michael Wolf shows at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, 600 S. Michigan, through January 31. Iv Toshain shows at Dan Devening Projects + Editions, 3039 W. Carroll, through January 4.