The Chicago Problem: An Open Letter in Response to Pedro Velez

Pedro,

The title of your Newcity article "Friends Curating Friends" contains the kernel of your most recent complaint.[1]

And you'd have your readers believe that the aforementioned piece is, in metaphor, nothing but a mirror held to Chicago's art world. That's fair enough, I suppose, because you're a critic. In any case, the reaction to a looking-glass bespeaks the nature of the person who stands before it.[2]

Having written that, rather than contest your action I'd like to turn your mirror just enough to allow you to reflect upon yourself and the profession that you practice.[3]

In fact, let's look together. For if it's the case that a curator has some ability to determine what is shown within an exhibition space, it's also true that critics have some ability to determine what appears in press. It follows: If "friends curating friends" is a phenomenon which merits attention, "friends covering friends" must too be an issue of import.

Well, how do you fare when your own work is subject to such scrutiny? Do we find that you've tended to praise certain parties regularly? blame certain parties regularly? About whom do we learn that you've been silent? Why?

Were I to stop here I think that you'd get the gist of it. Every complaint which you've made about the state of curatorial practice in Chicago applies equally well to the state of critical practice in Chicago. For example: "It’s not enough to have good intentions...one must do the legwork, conduct full-blown research and exploit untapped local resources. There is no excuse to not do so."[4]

Again, Pedro, what would we find if we employed your own heuristics and interviewed Chicago gallery owners in an effort to determine the amount of "legwork" which supports your criticism? You named the galleries Julius Caesar and Peregrine Program in your recent Newcity article: How often would their proprietors report having seen you under their shared roof?

It's no small point whether your local readership is upset with you for practicing art criticism--or criticizing art programs of which you have little practical experience.



"Little practical experience" describes well most of the authors of Chicago's arts coverage over the last five years. But, while you've railed against the "eternal puberty" which characterizes our alternative spaces, you've staunchly defended our critics--you know, your friends.[5]

It's now ironic that you were an invited speaker when many of us gathered together in one of Chicago's alternative spaces for the expressed purpose of discussing "crisis-free criticism" two years ago.[6]

What did we hear from you in that place? that there are no problems in art criticism in Chicago. Even earlier, in 2010, you used artnet.com to inform an international audience that Chicago was "well served" by the criticism published in a local, student newspaper.[7]

How is it possible to reconcile the standard which you've applied to critics with the standard which you've applied to curators?



I really like many of our young writers; I've no doubt that there are talents developing here. Whether they stay is another matter altogether. And to pretend that the loss of their predecessors is of no consequence is absurd. We have precious little memory of past events left alive in this city. In fact, twenty-five percent of the whole population of Chicago has been lost since 1970.[8]

Our criticism and attendant dialogue face this threefold challenge in development: (a) people need to travel miles in order to see spaces such as Julius Caesar and Peregrine Program; (b) people need to make such pilgrimages regularly; and, (c) people with such experience need to find a way to stay here, and participate in whatever conversations are ongoing.

Most of us fall into a rut. And if the reason that we see the same things again-and-again is that we're bound to do so by our ties of friendship, the consequence is that our opinions, our prejudices, are ever more firmly reinforced.

We have no shortage of people with ideas about art; but if few people look at art then where do those ideas about art originate? From where do your ideas come, Pedro?

Over the course of the last several weeks I've met, informally, with artists, publishers, and staff from various organizations in the city. My aim has been to better understand what it might be possible to do with my archive of Chicago art photography. I'd like to bring the project to some tangible conclusion, whether in the form of a book or exhibition. This series of meetings related to my own practice seems good to mention here because everyone involved has gotten the same spiel from me: a show of such images, derived from locations across the city, over time, might provide an occasion both for new names to be learned and also for familiar names to be understood in a new way. I think that's important. Performance and other time-sensitive, audience-involved, site-specific works typically are lost to history after the opening night; and studio visits don't provide a substitute for the missing experience. The documentary practice itself has made obvious that most visual art events are not well-attended.

That's "The Chicago Problem" in a word: audience. The competition for audience here is fierce. Our art schools produce more artists, and our artists produce more works of art, than we have interested curators, gallerists, collectors, and critics to engage. So efforts are made, ever more frequently, to combine artwork with food, and drink, and music, in order to appeal to a broader audience.

Or it's begun to dawn upon people that the easiest way to make money in the art world is not by showing and selling art, but rather by selling things to artists, e.g., residencies, webinars, and certificates. Because "striking it rich" is as rare in the field of culture as it was anywhere in the Gold Rush, it's safer to make money supplying other people as they risk the long odds.

We've probably got six commercial galleries relevant to a serious career (Kavi, Shane, Monique, and you can name the other three as you like) and six MFA programs disgorging new graduates every year.[9]

It's inevitable that non-traditional arrangements evolve to keep our annual raft of hopefuls afloat--if only long enough to drift away to one coast or another. If there isn't money, or fame, or even much good lighting to sustain the effort here, maybe friendship isn't the worst thing?



I thought that we had some bond of friendship, or at least some collegial understanding, when I spoke to you and Robin in a tavern on January 25, 2013.[10]

I'd just finished driving the two of you around town: we'd gone from opening to opening, and I'd made introductions, sharing names and history all along the way. However grim my own persona, whatever additional difficulties followed from Robin's article on MDW, I wanted, I really wanted, to try to bridge the gaps between groups--rather than burn any remaining bridges.[11]

You argued with me about Chicago. You told me that Chicago was no different than any other city in America.

In response I gave to you what I gave to Shannon Stratton, Mike Nourse, Dana DeGiulio, Annie Heckman, and others in the prior weeks: a sketch of "The Chicago Problem" in which spatial distribution of phenomena, role of institutional connectivity, bottom-heavy proportions, lack of record, and friendship figured prominently.[12]

You took that, Pedro, and you ran with it--for the purpose of throwing it at our curators and our alternative spaces on February 5, 2013, in your "Friends Curating Friends" article at Newcity. Why, for the love of God, why did you do it? And why do you persist in repeating on-line that any subsequent upset has stemmed from your honesty and good work as a critic? Where do you expect the discussion to go at this point?

Paul.

[1] http://art.newcity.com/2013/02/05/eye-exam-friends-curating-friends/

[2] See: Myth of Narcissus and Oscar Wilde's use of Shakespeare's character Caliban from "The Tempest," in Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray" appended preface.

[3] Xenophon's Simonides.

[4] Ibid.

[5] http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/reviews/velez/2010-chicago-review1-13-11_detail.asp?picnum=19

[6] http://paulgermanos.blogspot.com/2011/03/editorial-winter-experiment-monique.html
Above: Group membership, love of the familiar, constellation of practices, etc., treated in addition to the "Crisis-Free Arts Criticism" discussion.

[7] http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/reviews/velez/2010-chicago-review1-13-11.asp
Above: "Academic art writing--criticism, theory and opinion--is well served in the city. Whitney Stoepel and Ania Szremski collaborate with F News Magazine..."

[8] http://www.census.gov/history/www/through_the_decades/fast_facts/1970_fast_facts.html

[9] http://blogs.artinfo.com/truestories/2012/11/11/self-ostracism-in-chicago-a-photo-essay/
Above: It's noteworthy that Michael Workman identified "student and post-graduate populations," as one of the city's strengths.

[10] http://www.flickr.com/photos/73059802@N00/8416843387/

[11] http://www.artfagcity.com/2012/11/14/smallness-and-sameness-at-chicagos-mdw-fair/

[12] http://neotericart.com/2011/12/05/art-criticism-in-chicago-dazed-and-confused-a-review-of-the-panel-discussion-at-the-school-of-the-art-institute-on-november-22-2011-by-diane-thodos/#comment-3122
Above: An outline of "The Chicago Problem" on-line in 2011.

Editorial: After Minimalism in Chicago the Summer of 2011

Early in the calendar year, on the ninth day of January, 2011, Gerard Byrne's "A thing is a hole in a thing it is not" opened to the public at The University of Chicago's Renaissance Society.[1]


Above: Gerard Byrne's "A thing is a hole in a thing it is not"

There, the art historical moment which seemed to be addressed by Byrne's exhibition was yet more clearly defined by the first words of Hamza Walker's companion essay: "In the decade spanning 1958 to 1968, developments in American visual art moved at a fast clip. In the wake of a triumphal Abstract Expressionism came Pop Art, Minimalism and Conceptual Art."[2]

Minimalism particularly was the explicit subject of "A thing is a hole in a thing it is not," whether one might argue that Byrne's carefully orchestrated reenactments of new-media history effectively wound together all three post-AbEx threads cited by Walker, above, in a Postmodern metanarrative.


Above: Gerard Byrne's "A thing is a hole in a thing it is not"

Most relevant to the present undertaking was that one reenactment (described by Walker as being a "vignette" in Byrne's "multi-channel video installation") of "...a 1964 interview with Frank Stella, Donald Judd, and Dan Flavin conducted by Bruce Glaser for WBAI radio, New York."[3]

Following the (1964) interview which interested Byrne and within the decade (1958 to 1968) numbered by Walker: Donald Judd introduced his "stacks" in 1965;[4] Frank Stella introduced his "Protractor" series in 1967.[5]

Outside of Byrne's installation, even here, in a city so strongly associated with provincial attachments to graphic, decorative, and surreal renditions of the human figure, the echoes of Stella and Judd continue to reverberate.[6]

Whether by coincidence or coordination, four months after the close of "A thing is a hole in a thing it is not" the Summer of 2011 has yielded up many works indebted to the Minimalist dialogue.

To her credit, Time Out Chicago's Lauren Weinberg appears to have been the first person, in print, to employ the Minimalist reference. In her review of Kendell Carter at moniquemeloche gallery, Weinberg wrote: "'DJ (2010),' a column of copper-plated Timberland boots anchored to a wall, refers to a Donald Judd sculpture."[7]

 
Above: Kendell Carter's "DJ"

The modular component of Judd's early "stack" works had been the galvanized, or plated, metallic box. Carter simply swapped the boot for the box: maintaining the unit in repetition along a vertical axis, fixed to the gallery wall. The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, at the Smithsonian, in Washington, DC, contains one of Judd's untitled "stacks," from 1969, which exhibits a cupric surface closely approximated by Carter in "DJ."[8]

Maybe like our national psyche, or a now middle-aged male born of the same generation, the hard-edged figure, as exercised by Judd and Stella in the '60s, has, for better and for worse, broken, and softened a bit. But the mode--the rhythm of the unit in repetition--is as strong as ever. Mark, mark, marky, mark: Carter works with a conceptual refrain.[9]

Atop the Art Institute of Chicago's Modern Wing, on the Bluhm Family Terrace, colorful concentric rings are the things repeated. Pae White's "Restless Rainbow,"[10] cut at regular intervals by the Terrace's white picket fence, hearkens back to the semi-circular motif of Frank Stella's "Protractor" series. Not at the Art Institute of Chicago but rather at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, New York, Stella's "Harran II," from 1967, seems good to compare.[11]


Above: Pae White's "Restless Rainbow"

Closer to home, the ninety-degree vertical-to-horizontal transition made by White's supple, polychromatic bands was foreshadowed by Andrea Myers' "Soft Concentrics" in the 2010 exhibition "Ps & Qs," curated by Jeff Ward and Shannon Stratton, at the Hyde Park Art Center.[12]


Above: Andrea Myers' "Soft Concentrics"

And White's curvilinear application of vinyl tape to a glass surface for the expressed purpose of creating a potentially immersive optical effect was prefigured by Carla Arocha and Stephane Schraenen's 2010 installation "As if," found, again, at moniquemeloche gallery.[13]


Above: Carla Arocha and Stephane Schraenen's "As if"

Contemporary with the aforementioned works of Donald Judd and Frank Stella, noteworthy for a high-contrast, curvilinear unit in repetition, and productive of an "op" effect, might be a piece such as the 1963 "Fall" by Bridget Riley, from the Tate Collection.[16]

But it isn't only Pae White's "Restless Rainbow" which in the Summer of 2011 recalls both Op Art and also "Ps & Qs" from 2010 at the HPAC. At threewalls gallery, in "Either/Or/Both," curated, again, by Shannon Stratton,[14] Samantha Bittman's painted textiles rely upon the same formal devices as Todd Chilton's thickly painted black and white canvas from the previous year's Hyde Park show.[15]


Above: One painting from Samantha Bittman's "Zebra" series, at threewalls
 

Above: Todd Chilton's "Buzzy Diamonds" from Hyde Park Art Center

Confounding the effort to tell a good story about the development of abstract art (painting) after the period described by Walker in the second paragraph, above, is the persistence of Expressionism.

The rhetoric of geometry, and all of the "Classical" devices of the Apollonian camp, just go to Hell when confronted with the aggressive, intuitive, asymmetrical brushwork of André Butzer at Rhona Hoffman.[17]


Above: André Butzer's "Nicht Furchten!" from Rhona Hoffman Gallery

It is abstract art. It is on display, over the Summer of 2011, in Chicago. And it is possible to describe the piece (above) as employing, in a painterly manner, a palette of vivid near-primary hues.

But Butzer gives little evidence of having any use for the "triumphal" post-war American stories of either Minimalism or AbEx. Rather, Butzer's oeuvre resembles the offspring of a union between what is cruel in George Grosz and what is dark in Paul Klee. The nightmarish "big black blob" at the center of ("Nicht Furchten!" above) the painting's action reminds one of Wesley Kimler's local position; there isn't much light between Butzer and Kimler. Nevertheless, as a painting, on its own terms, "Nicht Furchten!" works.

"Painterly" less well describes the more "lyrical" non-objective abstract work by Patrick Berran at Thomas Robertello,[18] and Jasmine Justice at 65GRAND.[19] Berran gives the impression of relying heavily (maybe like Helen Frankenthaler) on a stain painting technique: building successive layers of relatively muted color. Justice, in addition to her visible brushwork and washes, shows (occasional) evidence of masking--among other means, not being committed to any one technique.


Above: Patrick Berran from Thomas Robertello Gallery
 

Above: Jasmine Justice from 65GRAND
 
Where this leads is anyone's guess. But the formal re-engagement is difficult to miss--if only in contradistinction to the partisanship, social activism, and conceptual bent, which have for so many years impoverished our "visual" culture.

Notes:

[1] http://www.renaissancesociety.org/site/Exhibitions/Intro.Gerard-Byrne-A-thing-is-a-hole-in-a-thing-it-is-not.618.html

[2] http://www.renaissancesociety.org/site/Exhibitions/Essay.Gerard-Byrne-A-thing-is-a-hole-in-a-thing-it-is-not.618.html

[3] Ibid.

[4] http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961&workid=7770&searchid=9690&roomid=false&tabview=text&texttype=8
Above: "With the exception of the first of these arrangements, a large galvanized iron ‘stack’ comprising seven five-sided boxes, completed in June 1965 (DSS 65), each ‘stack’ is composed of a minimum of ten units."

See also: http://www.christies.com/LotFinder/lot_details.aspx?intObjectID=5261476

[5] http://www.moma.org/collection/artist.php?artist_id=5640
Above: "The Protractor series (1967–9, with additional works until 1971) is characterized by monumental scale, potentially garish colour juxtapositions and, for the first time, curvilinear forms derived from the drawing tools referred to in the title."

Note: The text above is attributed to Constance W. Glenn, Grove Art Online, 2009, Oxford University Press, and employed on-line by The Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street, New York, NY, at URL listed.

[6] Chicago's connection to the Bauhaus school has been proven much stronger in architecture than in visual art.

See also: http://art.newcity.com/2011/07/25/review-go-figuresmart-museum-of-art/
Above: Jason Foumberg's July 25, 2011, review of "Go Figure" at the Smart Museum of Art.

[7] http://timeoutchicago.com/arts-culture/art-design/14805147/kendell-carter-weaves-references-to-hip-hop-into-abstract-works

[8] http://hirshhorn.si.edu/visit/collection_object.asp?key=32&subkey=8625

[9] http://moniquemeloche.com
Above: "Liberation Summer," featuring Kendell Carter, May 21–July 30, 2011, moniquemeloche gallery, 2154 W. Division, Chicago, IL

Mark, mark, marky, mark:


Compare, also, Carter's offset text ("mark mark," above) to Kay Rosen's "Go Do Good," below:
http://www.chicagogallerynews.com/blog/post/2011/05/24/Go-Do-Good-Chicago!-Kay-Rosene28099s-New-Installation-Unveiled.aspx

[10] http://www.artic.edu/aic/exhibitions/exhibition/paewhite
Above: Pae White, "Restless Rainbow," May 21–September 20, 2011, Bluhm Family Terrace, Art Institute of Chicago

See also, below, it is at best an exaggeration to claim that the city skyline has been wholly obscured by the installation:


[11] http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/show-full/piece/?search=Frank%20Stella&page=1&f=People&cr=1

[12] http://www.hydeparkart.org/exhibitions/2010/02/ps_qs_1.php
Above: "Ps & Qs," featuring Todd Chilton, Pete Fagundo, Carrie Gundersdorf, Katy Heinlein, Jessica Labatte, Andrea Myers and Tessa Windt; curated by Jeff Ward and Shannon Stratton; February 28-June 6, 2010; Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 South Cornell Avenue, Chicago, Il

[13] http://paulgermanos.blogspot.com/2010/09/review-carla-arocha-stephane-schraenen.html
Above: "As if," featuring Carla Arocha & Stephane Schraenen; September 16–November 6, 2010; moniquemeloche gallery, 2154 W. Division, Chicago, IL

[14] http://www.three-walls.org
Above: "Either/Or/Both," featuring Samantha Bittman, Stephanie Brooks, Casey Droege, Michael Milano, Hans Peter Sundquist; curated by Shannon R. Stratton; July 1-30th, 2011, threewalls, 119 N Peoria St # 2D, Chicago, IL

[15] Todd Chilton, September 4-October 2, 2010, Slow Gallery, 2153 W. 21st St, Chicago, IL:


Samantha Bittman, July 1-30th, 2011, threewalls, 119 N Peoria St # 2D, Chicago, IL:


Note: Exhibited in 2011, the bulk of Bittman's work (at threewalls) is contemporary with Chilton's work, i.e., it dates from 2009-2010.

[16] http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961&workid=12600&searchid=9648
Above: "Fall," a painting from 1963, by Bridget Riley, in the Tate Collection

[17] http://www.rhoffmangallery.com
Above: "Never Let Me Go," featuring André Butzer, Folkert de Jong, Lari Pittman, Rona Pondick, Jeni Spota, Nicola Tyson, and John Wesley; curated by Terry R. Myers; May 20-July 29, 2011, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, 118 N Peoria St # 1A, Chicago, IL

[18] http://www.thomasrobertello.com
Above: "One Must Eat the Other," featuring Patrick Berran, May 27-August 14, 2011, Thomas Robertello Gallery, 27 N Morgan St, Chicago, IL

[19] http://www.65grand.com
Above: "You'll Love Them All for Giving You the Swellest Time You've Ever Had!" featuring Jasmine Justice, May 20-June 25, 2011, 65GRAND, 1369 W Grand Ave, Chicago, IL

Related Posts:

http://paulgermanos.blogspot.com/2012/02/editorial-todd-chilton-vis-vis-scott.html "Editorial: Todd Chilton vis-a-vis Scott Stack," February 23, 2012

- Paul Germanos