Entry #7: Zg Art Party, 4/20/2011

Last week, as a pseudo-sign-off to my Engage Chicago project, I went to Zg gallery after my internship for an early evening art soiree. A friend of Martina's was surprising her husband by bringing him to the gallery to pick out one of Martina's paintings for their home. We had some wine and cheese and I felt like I was finally graduating after of my studying Chicago galleries, museums, and studios. Little sapling artist Sarah was being invited to art parties for grown-ups! I was in.

As a college student who sometimes feels overwhelmed by the possibilities of the professional world, I am very interested in why and how people get to doing the jobs that they do. Call it my Turkelian (yes, I just made that word; I've been reading a lot of Studs Turkel's Working lately) curiosity, but it led me over to gallery owners Meg Sheehy and Myra Casis (and the brie and gouda, let's be honest) to talk about how they came to operate Zg. I first asked about their undergraduate experiences and whether they imagined themselves working in a place like this. Maybe their vision wasn't as specific as a "Z" and "g" appearing atop an artist's Sinai somewhere in rural Illinois...but something like this was always on their radars. They met in college, where Myra was majoring in Studio Art and Business and Meg in Studio Art and maybe something else but I can't remember, so you'll have to live with that horrific cliff hanger! Stop asking about it!

Myra was the one who articulated their mutual realization that it was just not humanly possible to keep up a personal studio practice and also own a gallery. There isn't enough time in the day for both, so they chose the business side--chose to facilitate the sale of other artists' work so that those artists could spend their time worrying about the making and not the selling. (Of course, this is really only a half truth, because as I learned through Martina, a huge part of being a studio artist is constantly marketing yourself even when you feel like just holing up with your paintings.)

Well, we all chatted for a while about the various characters who buy paintings: the locals, the tourists, the crazies who stash Nehrlings under their beds, and the mysterious collector-callers who turn out to be insanely affluent art divas with Rembrandt sketches hanging by their toilets. Not fair. But we all laughed it off and continued to look around at the gallery, talking about how impressive it was that M&M (Meg and Myra, of course) manage to take very disparate styles of art and weave them together in a colorful but seamless collection. And this art conversation resulted in a happy realization for me: looking at galleries and museums is worth nothing if it doesn't bring you some sort of pleasure. And for me, the pleasure is in knowing that there are certain things I will always be blind to, things that other viewers can point out to me and make me appreciate. (And vice versa for them I hope.) Art should be a conversation, and this makes me wish that more people wanted to talk about art like I do. I do! But  Chicagoans are certainly on their way, and I am so happy to live in this cultural reservoir, alive and ENGAGING, if only for the semester. 

Entry #6: Wangechi Mutu Artist Talk, 4/12/2011

Wangechi Mutu in Vogue

On Tuesday evening at 6:00, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) presented a talk by Wangechi Mutu as part of its Visiting Artists Program. Mutu is the last visitor of the program's spring series, so it was up to her to leave the audience with enough artistic satisfaction to last through the summer. I arrived ten minutes early and the auditorium was already nearly filled, save for a few individual seats sprinkled around the room. I slid into the second row and waited. 

As more students and guests drifted into the auditorium, searching for empty spaces, a video played onstage. It was a woman alone in a field, aimlessly whacking a log that would not crack or break. What was she hitting it with? Why did she keep going with such a pointless task? The sun was going down behind her, and it was difficult to make out any features beyond her silhouette.

Finally, around 6:15, a woman emerged to introduce the artist. She described Mutu's work as "grotesquely delicious," and categorized her as part of a "feminist tradition [of artists] using collage to out" things like objectification and sexism. Mutu's materials "come from the trappings of our world," but she uses them to "redirect the focus" and call our realities into question. I was immediately reminded of Barbara Kruger, who takes very simple black and white collage (often images from advertisements) and superimposes forceful, provocative, bold-type words. Mutu's work turns out to be much more technically varied than Kruger's; she works in 2D and 3D with multiple mediums and, usually, much smaller magazine scraps.

When the introduction was over, Wangechi sauntered up to the big wooden podium, deeply but unassumingly cool. She was wearing high-waisted red plaid pants, heels, and a black top. Her afro was just tame enough to look purposeful. She is thirty-nine but doesn't look it; she still has a soft sparkle in her eye, especially evident when she would laugh a little about the things she was saying. She began speaking in a dark honey voice--quiet but assured, serious but not taking herself too seriously. 

The talk started with history. Mutu is from Nairobi, Kenya, and this heritage has strongly influenced her art. At 17, she moved to Wales to attend an international school, and she currently lives and works in Brooklyn. Still, however, she misses Kenya, and that nostalgia appears in her presentation as well as in her art. 

She showed a slide of a map of the British Empire in the early twentieth century, explaining that Kenya "is an invention of the British Empire," so we should look at both the possessor and the possessed. Next, she presented a picture of two African youth victims of Gangrene, a photo "symbolic of violence in the Congo." Each of the children was missing a hand, and Mutu saw this as a representation of her own "obsession with breaking things down in order to understand them." Her process of breaking down is often violent, morbid, or unsettling in some way.

Mutu explained that she uses collage because it is accessible. When she first started living in the city, she could work in collage on her kitchen table. Mutu liked working without having "a critical apparatus" around her; it freed her. (I assume that these days she couldn't claim to be floating in the same happy freedom.) She collects magazines and "rewrites their stories," leaving parts of them out and making other parts more feminine or womanly. To start working, she cuts magazines "voraciously" for weeks at a time, rushing through them while she listens to the radio or NPR. The way she described it sounded automatic, almost trance-like. She removes specific shapes and categorizes them into piles that she will later use. "I decided," she explained, " that [the models] had all lost something in the process of posing." The Gangrene image comes back to mind and we are reminded again of her fascination with breaking down and cutting off parts. Mutu's work, then, emphasizes the fact that we see what advertisers and manufacturers want us to see, not necessarily what is. Parts get left out.

Race seemed to be saddening to Mutu, but also extremely fascinating. She was not "racialized" until she came to the United States; she thought of herself in terms of her nationality, not her skin color. She spoke very powerfully about "the fiction of race," about her thoughts about bodies without skin, about how "if you flayed us all," we would be the same underneath this trivial exterior of epidermis. She created an Alien Series to explore science fiction and aliens--people who look sort of like us, but with slightly different features to frighten us. 

 

In the Alien Series, Mutu wanted to capture the "exotic" allure  of sparkly

 black skin and couple it with very white teeth or other "white" features. 

She also created a photo series mimicking and making fun of so-called "ethnic photography" and what people think Africa is--"the big everything, the big nothing," she called it. In the series, was very easy for her to make up things that people might believe to be authentically African--foreigners who have dark skin and wear banana skirts (even though no tribe has ever actually worn banana skirts). There is a "fiction of tragedy" surrounding Africa, especially in the National Geographic version of Africa. We hold on to that image of the continent, but it is not necessarily a realistic one. 

Even in the midst of all her seriousness, Mutu had light moments of laughter. She talked about her love of shoes, calling them "the pedestal of the female." (I thought this was very interesting in an empowering way, since I've heard professors say you can't be a feminist and wear heels.)  She answered questions about her posing for Vogue (twice), saying that across the world, women read these fashion magazines (she doesn't judge or fault them); they don't all read or have access to Art Forum. If, growing up, she had seen a woman like herself in a magazine that reached her, like Vogue, her mind would have been blown.

Maybe her work, with its severed limbs, its pornographic images, and its medical diagrams of female reproductive organs, "tend[s] to go into the gutter," but those gutter images offer us all a reflection of ourselves. Mutu described it like going to the doctor. Maybe we get fecal samples or urine samples taken--things that come out of us that we are ashamed of--but such things tell us so much information about ourselves. "Newsstands are our fecal matter," and they reveal the fabric of our society.

Mutu showed this famous National Geographic photo by
Kevin Carter as she explained the "fiction of tragedy"
in Africa. Image from Flickr.

Repurposed pornographic imagery from the
Mask Series, which explores both obscenity
and the fascination with the black female body.

Wangechi Mutu was so coolly eloquent that I immediately liked her. I did, however, find myself overwhelmed by the amount of material she presented in this two-hour presentation. Her thought processes seemed to flow together, but she still "has a few too many options under consideration, with mixed results," as one New York Times review puts it. 

Her collage work interests me the most. It is extremely detailed and intricate, and it also manages to be very intimate--a display of her artistic power to repurpose obscene of pornographic images and turn thousands of disparate magazine trimmings into beautiful female bodies. Her most visually appealing works are her multimedia female figures, often missing parts of their limbs. They seamlessly combine ink, color, and collage. (The ink and color parts reminded me of Eric Fischl's watercolors.) But her strongest conceptual works are the ones that deal with race and race fiction. IN these pieces, she implicates the audience in the perpetuation of ethnic "stories," where we see the sad story we are conditioned to see. This storytelling reaches much further than Africa. Such fakery is part of our everyday existence and consumption, and that is the reality that will stay with viewers long after they consider Mutu's art.

Entry #5: Martina Nehrling's Studio, Visited on 4/10/2011

Heretofore I had serious doubts as to whether Chicago was meteorologically capable of producing warmth, but with Sunday came a beatific profusion of sunshine so unexpected that I, alabaster Snow White of the Midwest, was caught outside with nary a Sun Protection Factor. Luckily, an artist friend (my life is posh) lent me a hat for our afternoon in Oak Park viewing her beautiful home and art studio.

During my early artistic life, using Hollywood productions as my guide, I gleaned that the artist can take on one of two forms: 1) the functionally insane artist-genius: sad, alone, and misunderstood (if one of the artists is starving, it will be this one, probably because he or she has spent all of her money on spackling paste or forgotten how to get to the grocery store) or 2) the beautiful but unhinged Femme Fatale or equivalent Don Juan, whose works are tiny clues into the cobwebbed attic of mysteries that is his or her brain. Whichever form they take, artists will always be smeared with paint, pencil, ink, or charcoal to make sure we remember that they are artists. 

That was my view as a thirteen-year-old. In high school, I had a vision of the ideal artist blooming in my brain, borrowing from the words of teenage boys in The Virgin Suicides: "What we have here is a dreamer--someone completely out of touch with reality," someone wandering always in a woozy world of creative visions. At twenty-one, it was finally necessary for me to see a real live artist's studio--time to check my expectations of hidden insanity and hoarded tubes of paint. And I am proud to report that Martina defied my boxed-in classifications of a artist types--that in actuality, artists take on countless different incarnations.

As we walked to Martina's studio, I imagined a young couple looking at houses. The real estate agent turns to the artist half of the couple and says, "And here is the studio and office room, just perfect for you! Isn't it to die for?" But what's more impressive than finding the perfect studio space is making the perfect studio space, one that is uniquely yours, and this is what Martina has done with the garage in her backyard. The studio is just big enough to house materials, canvases, and chairs without being too crowded for an audience or too empty for an individual. (And if you are alone there, all of the rich color also offers a semblance of company. It is quite alluring in its vibrancy.) Entering it is kind of like entering another kid's treehouse, full of trinkets and treasures: It is not some dark, secretive place to recoil from the world, but rather a quiet place to reflect on the world, a place where the owner can either count on solitude or choose to share the personal. I particularly enjoyed the casualness of Martina's studio on this day. As classmates, dogs, and neighbors entered the studio, I felt like I was in the midst of a midday block party, humans and animals invited.

I was full of questions for Martina, first basic ones and then more subjective inquiries. Her paintings have sold from coast to coast and overseas. A huge part of the work of an artist, I discovered, is keeping a website well updated and participating in the local art scene through gallery partnerships and shows. Martina is constantly working on calls for entry and submission packages, an artist is less likely to garner website views, phone calls, emails, and general interest. The paradox, of course, is that in doing these things she doesn't have as much time to spend in her studio doing what she would actually love to be doing more often. But good marketing is vital to success in the art world, and Martina has learned to be a savvy self-marketer. It sounds exhausting to stay up to date on everything and everyone, to constantly keep a foot in the door of the "art world," but it is an imperative part her livelihood. So the myth is debunked: a contemporary artist can hardly survive as a dreamy, detached creative floozy. She needs a very good business plan.

I was also very interested in Martina’s movement into abstract art. I had a lot of questions about the importance of training in observational and realistic drawing and painting to an artist who has chosen to work in the abstract. For artists who primarily become abstract colorists, why should these observational skills even matter? Martina pointed out that at least having the skills gives artists a better understanding of the observational process, maybe a better sense of their place as a recorder of the world. And they then have the option of working that way or going a different route. Furthermore, isn’t any type of art really abstract art in the sense that it is a representation of something and not the real thing? If we think of it like that, abstract artists might in fact be the most "authentic" of all. 

Martina's dog and Martina in front of her latest
painting, Liquefaction

I'm probably reading way into things, but I kept seeing 

lines in things like this rug and Martina's shirt 

and wondering if she picked them because they

reminded her of her own marks subconsciously! 

Huh huh?

Martina drinking iced tea in the backyard.

Martina uses all kinds of old bottles for the drip work on her paintings.
Heres a converted Sriracha!

It was really interesting to see two paintings in progress,
as I was interested in how Martina tackles a big canvas.
From what I hear, the lines sort of move in groups and
the painting direction can be largely spontaneous.

Doggie with painting. Martina expressed that her work has a synesthetic
quality for her--that she sees her visual work as having a a rhythm just like
audible sounds. After hearing this, I am going to try to think of colors in
terms of sounds more often. I like the concept of relating sensory
experiences, or at least not limiting a painting to being just for the eyes.

I never actually asked about this, but I really liked the

sculptural painted piece on the studio wall.

Entry #4: Museum of Contemporary Art, Visited on 4/5/2011

Today I visited the Museum of Contemporary Art, where I saw an exhibition called "I'm Nothing Without You: Art and Its Audience." As the hallway wall explains, the show "explores the continually evolving relationship between artwork and audience," with art from "artists who have increasingly sought new ways to engage with the viewer." The art was divided into two rooms: touchable and untouchable. Together, the "works reflect--and in many cases, anticipated--a more widespread cultural shift toward an increasingly participatory social sphere." Museum visitors could touch, crawl, or walk on the art--or did it only become art when they acted upon it in some way? These were the questions the exhibit raised.

Here I will describe one room, the touchable work. 

The art in this room of the gallery could be touched and acted upon (for the most part), and this touchability helped in "creating opportunities for--or suggesting the possibility of--undefined social interactions, conversations, or collective experiences." Being able to touch and listen to and sit on artwork made me feel a little bit like a kid on a field trip. This was a good feeling, yes, but sometimes I felt a bit embarrassed to crawl into a giant clam shell and listen to ocean sounds with other people around. I think it was partly because I've been so conditioned to think museum=no touching, but partly because I can't experience a piece of art uninhibited when there are guards and families and couples all watching. Having this slight discomfort coupled with a childlike enthusiasm and curiosity for the objects around made the work in the exhibit all the more poignant. For example, the piece called Cornered at the room's entrance reiterated my inability to escape surveillance, even if that surveillance is non-judgmental and protective (in the case of a guard). Good Separation in Soft Blue, on the other hand, fed my desire to escape from the pressures of trying to see everything and understand it, appreciate it, and admire its concept between the shoulders of art-appreciating strangers. I could plop myself down on a mat and escape to sounds, if only for a moment before I realized I was still a participator. The exhibit was all about evoking these dark and light feelings of freedom and imprisonment, nonconformity and conformity, separation/isolation and togetherness. Some of my favorite works:

Good Separation in Soft Blue by
Charles Long, 1995

Cell phones, iPods, and I pads allow us to be near to other people without being near to them, and to be far from other people without being far from them. We can forgo interaction with our immediate surroundings. Just last night in God of Carnage, a wife yelled at her husband for his constant cell phone use--for his apparent belief that "anywhere else is more important than here." We hear this message again and again; we are scolded and made to feel guilty.

Long's Good Separation in Soft Blue manages to point out the tension between our proximity and isolation without putting a  value judgment on it. The piece encourages viewers to sit down on a mat and listen to the music, interacting only with the biomorphic blue headphone holder. But sitting down on the mat and touching that blue figure felt very personal and intimate. The fact that I wasn't speaking to the other people on the mat didn't seem to really matter, because we were all sharing the same experience of listening to the same music and reflecting in the same small square of space. I felt like I was with them in some way. And that blue Dr. Seussian figure made me feel like some small creature, or some small part of ourselves, had also chosen to lie down on that mat and curl up with music and psuedo-solitude. The little blue thing managed to be simultaneously robust and delicate. The larger sphere ended in a thin blue vein connected to the smaller sphere, making that smaller sphere appear like a tiny head, or a piece of fruit about to fall from its vine. It felt alive and vulnerable--any hands could move it, twist it, pull it--and handling made me more aware of all the essential humanity that is still present even when we are using nonhuman technological objects. Long, then, achieves his objective in a very effective and affective piece.

Some visitors started talking to each other, ignoring the art objects. I wonder how often this happens, whether the artist would like it, and whether it just takes a certain level of proximity to make actually talking less awkward than casually ignoring. (I felt weird about not talking to people while were so close to them, but then, I'm this close to strangers all the time without talking. And I did like the music that we were presumably sharing.)

Man Dealing the Four Elements
by Robert Heinecken, 1998

This cutout by Robert Heinecken aims to make us more aware of our position as consumers. Heinecken was "fascinated by the photograph as a cultural object," and in his life-size cutouts of celebrity figures, he satirizes lowbrow culture. In this cutout of Kramer from Seinfeld, Kramer "[flashes] images of the four elements ... as if he is selling stolen watches, implying that virtually anything is up for sale in our consumerist culture." He drives home the point that we are constantly, inescapably bombarded with material things. It still seems, though, like there are certain things that should remain quietly revered and untouched by capitalism--things like nature or the elements--so the fact that Kramer is literally selling me the sky makes me feel at once humored by the ridiculousness of the sculpture but also made uneasy by the ridiculousness of the power of advertising and consumer culture to take over our lives.

The cutout also brought to mind the naivete of the typical American consumer. We see a celebrity holding a product and we immediately choose to believe that, yes, Justin Bieber actually uses Proactiv Acne Solutions! Apparently, fame really can sell us anything.

Villa Deponie by Dan Peterman, 2002

Villa Deponie also aims to make consumers aware of their consumption. It is a house made of lightweight garbage scraps. It was made for an outdoor festival in an Italian town "where a major landfill has been built into a nearby mountain ... lined with the same carpet-like material used in this work." The choice of material really makes this work. It "reverses the usual flow of waste material from home to landfill," suggesting that if the huge amounts of waste we create were more immediately visible to us--not shoved into a landfill we could simply forget or ignore--we might be more responsible for our consumption. We might try to break the cycle of buying and discarding and buying again, try to become better stewards of the earth. Maybe.

Adrian Piper's Cornered (1988) features the artist in a video aimed at the viewer where she self-identifies as black but then questions whether she could "pass" as white. On the wall on either side of the television are birth certificates, one identifying the artist's father as white and the other identifying him as black. Chairs are lined up in a triangle leading very aggressively up to the screen. The table is described as "barricade-like ... suggest[ing] a gesture of defense," but in my mind it seemed less like something the artist might have put up and more like something the viewer might have knocked down while "cornering" the artist. Piper explained that "at some psychological level everything we experience gets stored and affects the way we experience the world in the future," and I think that revelation is one that can be both frightening and irritating. No one likes to think of herself as a number, another drone that has been checked off as black or white, identified only as belonging to a certain number of finite, pre-made categories. But we are all cornered in that way, no matter how special we think we are; we are all recorded and accounted for and it is nearly impossible to rebel from that.

Entry #3: West Loop Gate Gallery District, Visited on 3/23/2011

I started writing, “What an eventful day!” and then I thought to myself, “Sarah, what has happened to you? This sounds like a Mom blog! No clichés!” So I will reformulate that sentiment into something more suspense-thriller, beginning with the moment when I when strips of bright silver pushed through the slats of my blinds to awake me from my slumbers. 8:45! A fog was descending on the Gold Coast, covering the coastal dwellers in shell of hazy white Lake Michigan effluvium. Something was rotten in the state of Illinois, indeed: ye cruel fates seemed to be ignoring the popularly known fact that March twentieth—three days prior to today—marked the official beginning of spring. And yet! Temperatures were dropping to the mid-thirties, babes’ cries rang out in the train stations, and my suede boots slowly assumed a shape not unlike that of an elephant snout crushed by an unapologetic steamroller. It was hump day, all right. Hump day indeed.

 

But, with the help of my good friend Art, the day was spun back into the warm clear light of positivity. I met Martina and our mutual friend/CAP alumnus Giulia Hines for an afternoon of gallery-hopping in the West Loop Gate Gallery District. As you can see from the two pictures above, I was taken by the colorful street art flanking an alley near one of the gallery buildings. The painted wall reads "barriers / vast realities / unconfined / by line," which is interesting since each phrase is boxed in by such harsh, thick black lines that they almost look imprisoned. But it is the issues, the concepts, that are unconfined by their medium, whether that media drawing, a painting, or the side of building on the street. The worn-out posters, with bits of paper peeling off of them, acted as a strange mirror to the galleries next door. Though the galleries are more professional and more kept up, they are still constantly peeling back layers, replacing old shows with new ones. The remnants of change just aren't as visible. 

Above is Giulia at our first gallery, the Thomas McCormick Gallery. The sculpture series was so playful that just looking at it felt freeing. Below are close-ups of the sculpture that's second from the right, a creation by artist Andrea Meyer. This particular sculpture attracted my attention; I find that the buildup of layers--but floppy layers that would be limp on their own--creates a beautiful dynamic between reaching upward and falling downward. It manages to rise and melt at the same time; it is at once liquid and solid. And Martina and I had a great conversation about being here now, and how the experience of being in a particular place at a particular time and trying to absorb it is such a major theme of art. I am constantly grappling with trying to appreciate things as they happen without ruining the present by turning it into a memory already. And I have no clue if this is what the artist intended with the piece at all, at all, but isn't that the absolute beauty of abstract art? That I, in my current state, in my being here now, can take that away from something that might look to someone else like an over-the-top rainbow waterfall? I think yes.

After Thomas McCormick Gallery, we kept moving around to many more. Visiting galleries in this style can be almost like a mini museum trip in the sense that one building can house four or five different galleries. Cross the street and there are four or five more! I've been seeing one or two galleries at a time, but it was much more stimulating to take in so many different galleries in relation to one another—to immediately sense the changes in mood, layout, and style. Martina and Giulia also made the trip was more enjoyable and certainly more educational; group visits make the viewing process a more active conversation in various perspectives and tastes. Also, Martina just knows way more about the gallery scene than I do, so she can give me lots of insights.

Above, Martina and Giulia at the Rhona Hoffman Gallery.


We crossed the street to Three Walls Gallery, where there was a show by artist Ben Russell called "Uh-Oh It's Magic." (Yes, as in this song, which I had heard before, but may I give my highest recommendation that you, reader, watch it just to see the lead singer? 80s pop was truly a magical world.) A record played music while I strolled around looking at what appeared to be very small photographs or gelatin prints of people doing martial arts. The images were each given a large mat and a thin blue frame on a green wall. Martina and I had started talking about the notion of the "white cube" earlier that day. This is the idea that the "best" way to display art is in a cubic room with white walls. I couldn't believe that I'd never even considered it! I started reading about the cube and how some galleries are straying from it. It was so fitting, then, to walk into Three Walls and be able to think about how the green wall worked with the paintings. I wondered, was it possibly giving them too much aid? Making them more exciting than the would be on the cream color of my apartment walls? (Green and blue are my two favorite colors, and so I was immediately more enticed by Three Walls than I might have been if it were Three White Walls.) Is it the job of the gallery to make art as attractive as possible, even if it means that it's shown in a setting vastly different from my living room? So many questions. 


Turns out Ben Russell is a filmmaker. According to the gallery website, his show "gathers together seven instances of sound and image that speak to the varying possibilities of belief and mysticism within a global construct." I never would have known this without the description, so I will not pretend that I understand it fully. It "points towards the persistence of a culturally Western hope/belief in the existence of Magic." I guess magic is meant to be perplexing.

Above, a piece from Ben Russell's show at Three Walls.

Lately I have been working on a self portrait project, which has involved turning small drawings into a much larger portrait with sprawling lines and cross hatches that build up and up. I am fascinated by the transformation of forms in art, like the transformations in the artwork by Caleb Weintraub below, from the Peter Miller Gallery. In the first photo, you can see a two dimensional collage piece, made with graphic printing paper. The seriousness of the figure's face makes the piece seem almost like a jungle Pieta, or at least something very emotional and maternal (Mary Cassat?) In the second photo, we see two children like Hansel and Gretel in a forest, with the same leopard leading them. In the third photo, the same artist has taken his visual lexicon and transformed it into sculpture. And even though the materials are different--string! shag rug! glitter!--the spirit of color, adventure, and fairytale is still present. It excites the viewer in a very different, but I would say equally effective, way. 

The final thing I will mention is Dennis Lee Mitchell. This guy is a crazy rockstar blowtorch pioneer. Yes, he works with a blowtorch to make art with smoke. It was like nothing I'd seen--I thought at first that it was brush and ink, but there were too many fine lines for that. Mitchell's art didn't really make me think or question in the way that other art does, but I really appreciated it simply for its coolness factor. And it really was visually impressive; Mitchell's marks are beautiful, and they manage to go from oh-so-soft to dark and menacing--almost like pieces of a machine, or just like something mechanical, non-human and non-soft--within inches. In the piece below, I can imagine the organic--bird wings, wisps of wind--alongside the darker, manmade things. The blowtorch, for one, is a product of man, but I also see sharper, less natural things in those dark clots that sprinkle the page.

Entry #2: Hyde Park/University of Chicago Area Galleries, Visited on 3/15/2011

Today before seminar, Martina and I went to the Hyde Park Art Center (HPAC) and then to the University of Chicago Renaissance Society. HPAC had a number of different exhibits in their various galleries. On the main floor, there was a show that seemed to Martina and me to be an examination of gender roles through the language and imagery of competitive sports. Most of the pieces were found or constructed sports objects where the artist had added arts and crafts elements. For example, a hockey stick might have been wrapped in a garland; shoulder pads might be laced with pink ribbon. Thus, the pieces were made stereotypically feminine not only through the notion of craft, but also through the utilization of cliche "girly" elements, like pink. One of our favorite pieces was a sports pennant that said "GO BITCHES" in hand-cut letters. Usually, when we see things like jerseys or helmets on display, it is to commend some heroic athletic feat--something that seems almost superhuman. To see these sports objects with frills and lace, then, made a mockery of the silly macho quality of it all in a very subtly smart exhibit.

Upstairs in Gallery 4 of HPAC had an exhibit called "Police and Thieves" that dealt with all the struggles of crime in an urban environment. My favorite piece was a sculpture by Ben Stone called "Neighbor" (2010). According to HPAC-provided information:

"the impish sculpture [...] is based on the popular symbol for crime nicknamed 'Boris the burglar', featured on community watch signs posted in neighborhoods all over the country. The figure is neither menacing nor comforting and raises questions about what constitutes suspicious or acceptable social behavior."

The sculpture was smooth, short, and all black. Its mystery made it alluring; it looked at first like a black traffic cone, then more like a cloaked chess piece sliding into unknown territory. It is this kind of ambiguity that is central to the nature and the language of crime.

At the Renaissance Society, the show was called "The Age of Aquarius." It was, according to the Society's website, meant to address the "lingering cultural fallout of the 1960s." The show included a number of different types of work, including film, 2D and 3D. At the exhibit entrance there was a fantastical smattering of small objects, the kind of things you might keep in a little box for memories (only beautiful enough for an exhibition).



In the main room, there were life-size black and white standing cutouts of a man who seemed to be in various stages of either dancing or climbing stairs, but probably dancing. (Distraught voice: I don't know what this means!) Sandwiching these figures from either side were large black and white 2D pieces. One of them, pictured below, could be a Vietnamese woman or maybe just a woman to represent the generalized "other." She is holding dolls, though one of them seems to be sitting up on its own. Dotted lines that could be viewed as either rays or stitches radiate from the right corner of the painting so that it looks patchy and sewn.





In the other rooms, there were more 3D pieces, one made with string to provide a geometric representation of the sun, another made with peacock feathers. There was also a film piece about a man and a woman who experimented for years with a swinger lifestyle typical of the romanticized group love lifestyle of the 60s.

And art from the University of Chicago Smart Museum, also free, which we visited after seeing the Renaissance Society and eating spinach feta croissants from the Medici Cafe:

Water Lilies No. 34 by Donald Lipski 

Water Lilies No. 34 by Donald Lipski

Great explanation given for Water Lilies

Totem III, Claire Zeisler

Entry #1: Jennifer Norback Gallery, Visited on 3/13/2011

On Saturday afternoon, following a morning of Saint Patrick's Day festivities, I took the 22 bus towards Howard to get to the Aldo Castillo Gallery on North Franklin Street. I had found the gallery on a basic Google search, but despite the prosaic manner of our meeting, I was sure that Aldo Castillo could offer me something appealing: an introduction to Latino art in Chicago. Yet as I walked by the gallery's Google-give address for the third time, searching for an door that wasn't locked and covered in brown butcher paper, I became less and less convinced that this would be my gallery for the day. The most wonderful thing about being alone and without a schedule is that I could flit right over to the next best things, which happened to be another art gallery about a block away. 

This was Jennifer Norback Gallery. The gallery shares a building space with an upscale restaurant; the restaurant is up the stairs and the gallery is down the stairs. 

I had been told that the gallery scene can seem intimidating for a young person. The trick is to remain nonchalantly confident in the face of gallery owners or employees who ignore, snub, or condescend to anyone who doesn't appear to be able or willing to drop $7000 on multicolored smears of oil paint. Independent and assured, then, I walked down the stairs and into the gallery. Unfortunately for me, the gallery floor was quite stealthily raised, about half a foot higher than the floor at the foot of the stairs. I announced my presence with the loud thud of my boots hitting the floor's edge, then attempted to make up for my misstep by gracefully gliding in front of the nearest painting. 

There was a hip, twentysomething woman sitting at the desk wearing a colorful checkered blouse, perfect winged eyeliner, and shiny dark hair. She asked if she could help me with anything, but I told her I was just looking. Here are three different versions of what I think she looked like, from my memory:

There were quite a few different things to look at in the gallery, but the current show (March 4 - April 7) is "Art from Romania," featuring art by Aurel Patrascu, Emilia Persu, and Claudia Lazar. The only unifying elements I saw between these three artists were that they are all Romanian they all work with abstraction in some way (i.e. they are not realists). Other than that, their work is dissimilar. 

Persu's art looks like experimental compositions with shapes, where certain common forms and colors--rounded triangles and gold--can be found amidst mixed media canvases of paint and pencil. It has a childish quality of craftiness and imprecision. The shapes do not come together to create or even suggest anything whole, like a landscape or a group of people. Instead, they are only really suggestive in themselves, and otherwise float about in an abstracted orbit. Persu's work is not as precise as that of Miró, Klee, or Kandinsky. 

Lazar's work seems inspired by Monet's Water Lilies series, perhaps. It has very atmospheric qualities. To me, its swatches of colored marks on a colored backgrounds suggested certain types of skies or bodies of water. 

Patrascu's work--the gallery's favorite for advertising the show--is figurative in a warm, tribal-mythological sort of way. It is not clear exactly what the pieces are supposed to be, whether they are body parts of simply shapes, but they are reminiscent of human or animal bodies. If I didn't know that Patrascu is Romanian, I would be inclined to think she is from the American Southwest. Her color palette--rusty reddish browns, golden yellows, and turquoise blues, among others--reminds me fondly of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Patrascu's imaginative detail and textile-quality patterning is truly impressive, but it wasn't as interesting to me as some of the non-featured work that I found in the back room of the gallery.

Aurel Patrascu

Aurel Patrascu

This was the work of Herbert Murrie, a contemporary abstract expressionist. In a process pioneered by modern greats like Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaller, Murrie pours paint. He doesn't, however, pour it onto canvas, but onto acetate, starting with polymer resin and then layering the resin for a three-dimensional effect. To create further visual excitement, he contrasts airbrushed backgrounds with sharp, crisp foreground shapes. His work looks extremely glossy and sharp, almost like a cut-open geode. I love his work for the fact that I could find a hundred things in just one of his paintings. In this one below, I could show you an eclipsed moon, molten lava, the underside of a caterpillar, a browned marshmallow...

Herbert Murrie

Herbert Murrie

Herbert Murrie, Dying Butterflies

Dying Butterflies detail

The only other thing I have to say about this gallery is that it really illuminated for me the importance of setup and space. In the hallway pictured below, I could barely take in the entirety of a painting without getting dangerously close to hitting the opposite wall. I didn't mind this too much, but I imagine that if I were seriously considering buying some of this art, I would want to be able to see the whole piece from a reasonable distance. A viewer should be able to "take in" a painting without being bombarded by its neighbors, and a cramped gallery space can ruin this option and make very attractive artwork far less appealing. I've begun to consider it much more now that I'm looking for these things, and it's all a game of sales. Placement, lighting, and space are pivotal, but sometimes they seem to be forgotten, either out of ignorance or necessity (i.e. too many pieces for the space). 

back room of the gallery

compared to front room

First gallery visit is now complete, not to mention that now I know the exact location of the famous Gino's East pizzeria and can hopefully visit the area again soon, this time for non-artistic purposes.