Art in Chicago, 1945-1995
The complaints about exclusion seem a bit silly: of course a viewer is going to have different tastes than curator Lynne Warren; of course no one is going to like everything in the show. I doubt Warren does: she seems to have included some artists for their historical importance, as she should have. It would be a shame if discontent with critical judgments makes it harder to mount curated exhibits of local art; I still shudder to recall the hysteria about selection that finally killed off the “Chicago and Vicinity” shows in 1990. Chicago art has no canonical history, and in this postmodern age one isn’t likely to be written; serious observers of the local scene will view the MCA’s show as just another contribution to it, however large and prominent.
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In the more successful pieces, the clutter of forms results in an inspiring energy: paintings leap out, sculptures thrust up. Pieces of the clutter seem to collide almost like gears meshing, exchanging energy. It’s as if the ghost of our boomtown past–one observer wrote of Chicago in the late 19th century that “it grows o’night”–still haunted the art of the last half century. It’s fitting, too, that one of the country’s most industrial cities should spawn an art of materiality rather than transcendence, using such modest substances as wire and acrylic on Plexiglas rather than translucent oils and hand-carved marble.
It’s not only the Imagists whose work can be so described. Diane Simpson’s Ribbed Kimono (1980) is made of corrugated archival board cut and arranged in a geometrical manner that seems to owe more to architecture than to minimalist sculpture or clothing design. Rising from the floor, its various parts almost colliding, it suggests the tensions of a building’s frame, as does Joseph Goto’s steel sculpture Organic Form I (1951). Soaring up over ten feet, it’s organized around long, thin vertical rods; smaller, often pointed rods protrude vertically and horizontally along their length. The piece suggests not only movement upward but more general ideas of momentum, thrust, force.
Roger Brown once said that while pop artists were trying to elevate things like advertising to fine art, he and his Imagist colleagues readily acknowledged advertising to be art. Seen from this perspective, the work of the Imagists represents a sharper break with artistic tradition than the art of such pop figures as Warhol and Lichtenstein. Aiming to transcend its subjects and style, pop is readily assimilable into the high-art tradition, but Brown, Nutt, and others made work that doesn’t pretend to be fundamentally different from a comic book or piece of advertising. In the context of this show, however, earlier work that superficially resembles that of the Hairy Who might be mistakenly assumed to have the same aesthetic.
What’s worse, the sound track for the video is audible throughout a third to a half of the exhibit. Hearing our former mayor order officers to “shoot to maim or cripple” every ten minutes–or, for that matter, hearing Jerry Rubin mouth off about “the menopausal men who run this country”–threatens to wreck any serious viewing of the art. Either the MCA expects its visitors to be plugged into the taped tour, or it thinks that visitors are so desensitized that they don’t know the difference between “shoot to kill” and silence.
