Chicago Street Art

Another random act of pre-meditated art on the streets of Chicago.  Literally on the street.  These little guys are on many of the crosswalks in the downtown area of Chicago.   This one is on Kinzie and Clark. I wander if they are official or done by a street artist.  I’ll be posting more.

Two Headed Spoon

With video instillations, performance-based work, photography, painting, works on paper, and space filled instillations, the New Approaches: Four Exhibitions of Current Work from recent School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) alumni and current SAIC students was sophisticated and yet unsurprising.  Some of the four exhibitions in the show had obvious themes, like the grouping that dealt with food (or consumption) and We Must Indeed All Hang Together that tries to reconcile the vast and rapid changes in our time.  The other exhibitions seemed less cohesive with some outstanding individual pieces.

The food exhibition had at its center an installation piece with two small dining desks facing each other.  Each desk had a plate and napkin. Spanning the space between the two desks was a long rod with a spoon on each end.  Each spoon was resting in the plate of the facing desks.  The initial and obvious implication of this arrangement is that two people could not eat simultaneously.  A possible interpretation of this set-up is that one person’s consumption can possibly inhibit another’s.  Other works in this exhibit integrate wine and coffee stains into drawings.  Welling Up by Elise Goldstein is “transubstantiated wine on paper”.  The two large and efficiently contour drawings surround areas of red wine.  The wine has an uncanny resemblance to dried blood.  The top piece is an image of a bed in a corner of a room and a dresser with faded crimson wine dripping from the wall into a puddle on the floor. The bottom piece is the bottom half of a nude female shin deep in the dried wine.  The contrast of the simple line drawings mingled with the various red shades is striking.  The two drawings together evoke a feminine right-of-passage.  This may be obvious, however the red being dried wine gives it other dimensions, possibly religions, or maybe the more simplistic alcohol induced indescresions.

"Conterfeit Crochet" by Setphanie Syjuco

In what seemed to be the largest of the exhibits We Must Indeed All Hang Together, a reference to Benjamin Franklin’s response to John Hancock after signing the Declaration of Independence, had more socio-political work.  The outsourced, reworked, crochet luxury items titled The Counterfeit Crochet Project by Stephanie Syjuco is reflective of our current situation.  Each knockoff piece in theinstallation, a Louis Vuitton belt, Channel purse, Burberry scarf, etc., was crocheted by different individuals through collaboration.  Using outsource and counterfeiting as an art form to illustrate the desire for luxury goods the drives people in the developing world to produce and the developed world to consume such items at a possible cost to both.  Luke Stettner’s piece Untitled, a mirror sculpture, more literally touches on reflection.  The box has five mirrored sides and one glass side allowing the viewer to peer in.  Inside there is a photograph in the middle of a second piece of glass.  The photo seems to be floating, both reflected and the real.  The illusion shows the viewer the concrete and the reflection, with the viewer as part of the mirage.  In the modern cultural dominated by multi-stream media, what is real, what is a reflection of what is real, and what is not real is not always clear, which can make it difficult to see ourselves.

"Untitled" by Luke Stettner

Other pieces that stood out in their own right were Hesitations by Emily Hermant and both Mindscape photographs by Hyounsang Yoo.  Hesitations, a large instillation of thread strung up and down on nails resembled a rawrshack test or visual representation of a sound wave.  The sheer size, meticulousness, and blending of lines was magnificent.  The vibration of the contours gives the viewer the sense of a southing roar. The Mindscape photographs were equally as comforting and rhythmic.  The digital prints are photos of landscape, similar to what’s seen from a moving car along the flat Midwest. The color had a muted quality with a soothing tone.  The anywhereness and nowhereness of these two photos are relatable and direct without being boring.  They border on abstract without abstracting the photographed forms.  The viewer becomes engaged without being complicated.

While two of the little exhibitions within the larger had solid continuity, the over all exhibition seemed more difficult to grasp and hard to walk through.  The space on the seventh floor of the former Carson Pirie Scott building is great for an exhibition, though this particular show seemed to have a complicated layout.  Worth going to for a few gems, but again, no real surprises, this is not necessarily a bad thing since all the work was solid.

 “New Approaches: Four Exhibitions of Current Work” at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Sullivan Galleries at 33 S. State Street, 7^th floor in Chicago will show through this Saturday, September 26.

Dimitre, Sears Lit BW 4883 - Giclee Print

Eating lunch everyday around Clark and Whacker along the river I notice large works of art bolted to the wall that divides lower Whacker from the river walk.  There is no explanation of the work except the work descriptions and artist bios.  Not until I searched on the internet did I find a description for this very diverse, interesting, and hidden exhibition.

All the pieces are portraits representing a face of Chicago.  The work runs the standard contemporary gamut of two-dimensional art with photography, painting, drawing, printing, mixed-media, digital art, and a very unique piece created by a typewriter.  Most of the work stands on its own and works well in the grouping, though without the exhibition description, it is difficult to understand that all the images represent Chicago.  There is one obvious exception.  Dimitre’s giclee print of a lamppost illuminating the Sears Tower (no known as Willis Tower).  This black and white photograph captures the top of the iconic building in front of a plain background, excluding the tops of the surrounding skyscrapers.  The only other objects are streetlamps that almost dwarf the solitary monument, once the tallest building in the world and still the tallest in the United States.  It appears lonely and small. It stands in the light of one of the street lights and as I backed away, the distance gave way to a silhouette of a person in the light.  Anthropomorphizing the tower, it seems even lonelier, like an enigmatic ghost. This is a Chicago I can relate too.  The city is at once gigantic and small, iconic and lonely, and with illumination only seems more vague.

There are other images that stand out. Nathan Veach’s image made with what I think is a broken typewriter and Rebecca Byrne’s painting The Pit Broker.  Veach’s portrait is of Chicago icon Casimir Pulaski, though I don’t know how many Chicagoans recognize his countenance.  Admittedly I did not.  This work appears teadeous to make, but was executed with great care and planning.  Though fantastic as a stand alone piece, as a series of similarly created images, it would be even more impressive.  It stands out because it is so different.  It almost doesn’t belong despite fitting the theme.  The Pit Broker immediately called to mind brokers often seen around the Chicago Board of Trade because of the red jacket and “CAB” badge.  It also somehow captures the stoic intensity traders are stereotypically supposed to have.  Formally it’s thick paint and minimal dynamic color.  It is eye-catching and possibly over simplistic.

It is good to know Chicago is exhibiting local artists in some of its public space, however hidden.  Hopefully it will continue.

This exhibition can be found on the south bank of the Chicago River along lower Whacker between State Street and LaSalle.  More information can be found at the City of Chicago’s Riverwalk website or by click here.

Prof. Elkins began with a very brief history of art education, starting with atelier Method, he went through the French Academy, the Bauhaus, and finally the nameless post-war era. Describing the different educational theories and styles tinged with humor and candor.  Going through each of the different levels of art education from art high schools to the Ph.D., Prof. Elkins compared schools in Asia, Europe, and North America.  He stated that art education is rife with polar conflict between teaching skill and fostering concepts.  This lack of agreement means there is a lack of standards from the first year programs to the newly minted Ph.D programs in Europe and the United States.  The more seasoned MFA, still considered a terminal degree in the U.S., has such a poor description, that he seemed embarrassed to point that he poked fun at it.  Prof. Elkins wants to make sure the inevitability of the Ph.D. programs doesn’t follow the same fate.  Drafted in the 1970s the knowledge of the “MFA Description and Purpose” existence is almost nill.  It is an extremely nebulous and very brief description and in Prof. Elkins’s opinion has little meaning.  Prof. Elkins presentation was about an hour, and he succinctly put his questions and concerns into context.  He seems to be extremely knowledgeable; he should be he as a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Chicago and has written several books on art education.  He wasn’t pompous at all.  He laced his lecture with an accessible humor that equally appeals to artists and non-artists.

His aim over the next week is to work through some of the art education conflicts issues and better understand what art education means, and what standards can be put in place. Though he didn’t think the development of an fine art Ph.D. necessary, he stated that it was inevitable and wanted to make sure these programs were developed thoughtfully. It’s a tall order, but it needs to be done, or at least discussed.

Prof. James Elkins gave the School of the Art Institute’s Stone Summer Theory Institute opening lecture today at the Art Institute of Chicago. An overview of all the lectures that will occur over the next week, the title of today’s lecture was What Do Artists Know?, which also happens to be the title of the whole lecture series that runs from today, September 20 through Saturday, September 26.  The series will discuss, debate, and attempt to define art education.