One of the best things about Art Chicago is the opportunity to see the work of internationally famous artists rarely shown here.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Michael Snow, from Toronto, is noted for his avant-garde films but less well-known in Chicago as a prolific artist in many media: drawing, painting, photography, sculpture, books, slide performances, holograms. Snow often takes a humorous approach to the creation of representational art, particularly the way imagery changes nature–and distances the viewer from it. Among several Snow works at Wynick/Tuck Gallery (Booth E204) is Lobsters, a 1974 photographic diptych showing a raw lobster alongside a cooked one; the joke, one guesses, is an implied parallel between the transformative processes of photography and cooking.
Mills was just a child when Rudolf Schwarzkogler died, falling or jumping from his window in Vienna in 1969. Today the most famous “fact” about Schwarzkogler is a lie: that his death followed a performance in which he cut off his penis. The artist did not mutilate himself, but looking at Schwarzkogler’s creepy, even gruesome photographs of his “Aktions”–performances staged to be photographed–at Galerie Krinzinger (Booth B218), it’s not hard to see why the misconception lives on. People clad in bandages, often accompanied by medical equipment of various kinds, suggest a surrealistic vision of surgery gone wrong. Looking more carefully at these strange, hermetic images, one begins to feel the self-abnegating asceticism, the oddly poetic attempt at a purifying ritual, behind them.
