Albeit largely monochromatic, there’s a lot to enjoy in the fanatically perverse visuals issuing from the unholy twenty-year legacy of Scandinavian black metal. There are the band logos, which incorporate traditional Nordic and Celtic design elements with expressionistic lightning cracks and blood splatters; there’s the album art, featuring epic landscapes, cryptic pagan diagrams and shadowy photos of musicians made up in ghostly black-and-white “corpsepaint,” contorted rapturously under the weight of medieval accessories.
Meanwhile, on the “good” end of the taste spectrum, but drained of ferocity, is Canadian anthropologist and metal fan Sam Dunn’s inoffensive 2005 documentary “Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey,” which opens with a film countdown from ten to nine to eight to seven to 666, and just gets cuter from there. Padding out celebrity interviews (on such topics as the origin of the devil salute) with crowd shots, light cultural history and a helpful genre genealogy, the whole metal enterprise comes across as an endearing subculture hellbent on communal empowerment and highly marketable as a themed gastropub concept, as anyone who has waited in line at Kuma’s can testify.
Terence Hannum, longtime Chicago artist (now transplanted to Baltimore) and half of the experimental black metal duo Locrian, lands somewhere between these extremes with his latest show at the Cultural Center. While sculptor Banks Violette celebrated the infamous black metal legacy of church arson with a huge replica of a torched sanctuary in the 2005 Whitney Biennial, Hannum has focused for this exhibit on quiet oil paintings of silhouetted concert crowds with one-word titles connoting traditional rituals (“Mass,” “Assumption,” “Descent,” “Coronation”)—competent easel-scale panels which don’t quite match up to the similar but more elegant and impersonal gouaches he presented earlier this year at Western Exhibitions. There’s also a selection of framed originals for Hannum’s zine, “Threshold,” featuring tasteful, equally modest compositions of black acrylic and laser-cut vellum. His strongest work remains his audio: in the sound piece “Knell,” an elevator installation featuring bells recorded on various metal albums, and his video, “Halo,” in which a murky scene of headbanging is visible through a black pentagonal frame, to the accompaniment of haunting harmonics composed by his wife and musical collaborator.
Even if this work doesn’t speak to the dedicated Satanist, the viewer walking in off the street will hopefully be intrigued enough to delve further into the output of a prolific creator, as well as to attend his upcoming artist’s talk and performance at the Randolph Cafe on October 13 at 6pm, and/or the opening on October 14 from 5:30pm-7:30pm. (Bert Stabler)
Through December 28 at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 East Washington
The Roots of Pride: A Review of Jerry Pritikin at The Chicago Center for Photojournalism The show “When Then Was Now” gives a glimpse of early LGBTQ+ life in San Francisco—Harvey Milk became mayor and gay activism was gaining momentum. Pritikin, a legend of reportage, takes us back to a time before AIDS reared its ugly head and shows us how the movement looked all those decades ago.
Fleeing Desperation: A Review of Ada Trillo at Chicago Center for Photojournalism In this heartbreaking yet visually beautiful exhibition, Ada Trillo implicates herself within her subjects to shine a light on both the hope and the hopelessness of their lives. If you are not moved by these images, surely your heart is made of stone.
Home Is Where the Family Is: A Review of Chicago Chiquito at Bridgeport Art Center This small but significant exhibition shows the history of Chicago Chiquito, or little Chicago, the nickname given to La Hacienda, a small town in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico. Its families have migrated north to find work for over one hundred years.
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