A few weeks ago, Chicago Art Magazine ran an article asking the question, “Are apartment galleries illegal?” The article summarized the troubles The Green Lantern apartment gallery ran into, and documented the issues the City of Chicago has with mixing businesses with residences. A follow-up article dove a little deeper into licensing issues and indicated the City is unfamiliar with the term “apartment gallery.”

The commentators, at the end of the post, voiced disappointment and frustration. One even accused the City of malevolence toward artists and musicians. Since I have some thoughts on the topic, I was going to chime in, but felt I didn’t want to get into a flame war. I’d rather do that here.

While it can be disheartening that the rules can make it difficult or even impossible to legally operate an apartment gallery, it certainly was not born out of some sort of plot to hurt anybody. Instead, the laws governing businesses have two main objectives. One is to protect nearby residents from disruptive activities and the other is safety.

As for combining business activities and residential living, there are many problems that can happen here. Certainly, a steady flow of customers in and out of a business can get on neighbor’s nerves. The increase in vehicle traffic and parking puts a strain on a residential area. In the case of apartment galleries, the openings which tend to be big parties, certainly disturb the peace.

Of course, it shouldn’t be hard to understand the safety issues. There are fire codes to protect patrons. Generally, these are more stringent than residential codes. Though there are occupancy rates for residences, they are a little stricter for businesses. Fire suppression systems are still optional for most type of residential buildings, yet businesses are required to have fire extinguishers and in many cases, sprinkler systems. Also, security for residents is a concern. While taping the hallway door open makes it easy for art patrons to freely come and go during openings, it also allows access for any nut job that has other reasons for entering the building.

These are just a few of the reasons any municipality would want to regulate mixing home and business and since it’s hard to address every single type of business, the laws are kind of a one size fits all. Except for the opening parties, I can see where one might be upset when the regulators clamp down on an apartment gallery. After all, there isn’t that much activity that would differentiate the gallery from the apartment.

So what should apartment gallerists do? Well, one tactic would be to convince the City to make an exception for apartment galleries. Demonstrate to those in charge the differences between a quiet gallery and a busy store and that most of the laws are in place to regulate the busy store. Educate them on the cultural impact of the gallery on the quality of life in the City and the reputation of the City as a global city. Find a way to protect the interests of residents while allowing a business to thrive.

The other tactic would be to embrace the outlaw nature of the apartment gallery. There already is a thriving underground restaurant scene. It’s an easy way for restaurateurs to build a reputation and gain some experience before opening up a public place. These renegade food services have been chronicled in the local media and seem to operate with impunity. The apartment gallery can be the new speakeasy. — Well, maybe that’s a little overboard.

I do know that generally these laws are passively enforced. A complaint has to be filed before a business is shut down, and often times more than once. That means if the activities of the apartment gallery don’t get out of hand, they are usually left alone. Besides, how long should one expect to run a gallery out of his or her home before either taking the step to operating a stand alone space or get out of the biz altogether. By the time the law catches up with the gallery owner, he or she has gone legit or is ready to throw in the towel. If there is a healthy “art apartment” scene, someone else will step in and keep up the tradition.

Back in 1984, as part of the issue that coincided with the Navy Pier art fair, Chicago Magazine published 4 photographs of 159 Chicago artists. The photo essay, "Artists by Number." was a roll call of important artists in Chicago at that time. Do you recognize any of the names or faces? I’m sure you do…or maybe not!? How many of these artists would be included in a 2010 version?

As this week marks the 30th anniversary of the original Navy Pier art fair in Chicago, we thought it would be fun to take a look back.

Chicago Magazine, May 1984
Artists by Number
A Once-in-a-Lifetime Group Portrait of More than 150 Chicago Artists
by David Jackson
Photography by Toni Soluri

Click for larger image.

1-Arturo Cubacub; 2-Buzz Spector; 3-Mary Ahrendt; 4-Alice Lauffer; 5-Anita David; 6-Susan Sensemann; 7-Corey M. Postiglione; 8-Tim Hurley; 9- Paulo Colombo; 10-Charlotte Rollman Shay; 11-Fern Shaffer; 12-Othello Anderson; 13-Agnes McGregor; 14-Arthur Lerner; 15-Herbert Davidson; 16-Thomas H. Kapsalis; 17-Gordon Powell; 18-David Bower (behind 45); 19-Dennis Wojtkiewicz (behind 12); 20-Jerry Allison (behind 7); 21-Ben Benson; 22-Charles A Heinrich; 23-Richard Wetzel; 24-George Klauba (behind 14); 25-Hiram Nuñez; 26-Kerig Pope; 27-Robert Donley (behind 15); 28-Michelle Fire (behind 6); 29-Jeff Colby; 30-Dan Ziembo; 31-Philip Hanson; 32-Linda Lee; 33-Ted Stanuga (behind 21); 34-Dennis Kowalski (behind 47); 35-Estelle Kenney; 36-Kennet Hempel; 37-Derek Webster; 38-Nancy Steinmeyer; 39-Robert Amft; 40-Olivia Petrides; 41-Judy Geichman; 42-Christine Rojek (behind 40); 43-David Simons; 44-Ruth Aizuss Migdal (behind 46); 45-Terry Karpowicz; 46-Diane Christiansen; 47-Linda King; 48-Vincent Dunn; 49-Tom Robinson; 50-Roy Schnackenberg.

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51-Norma Topa Gross; 52-Barbara Rossi; 53-Edward Larson; 54-Evelyn Statsinger; 55-Sylvia Birch Halperin; 56-Julie Richman; 57-Margaret Lanterman; 58-Susanne Doremus; 59-Carol Smith Block; 60-Nancy Plotkin; 61-Claire Zeisler;; 62-Stephen Luecking; 63-Karl Wirsum; 64-Bonnie Hartenstein; 65-Diane Simpson; 66-Irene Siegel; 67-Joan Lyon; 68-Stanley Edwards; 69-George Waite; 70-Judy Gordon; 71-Tony Phillips; 72-Jan Sullivan; 73-Paul Crisanti; 74-Susan Bloch (behind 65); 76-Kim Mosley; 77-Jeanette Pasin Sloan; 78-Bruce White; 79-Jim Nutt (behind 68); 80-Suellen Rocca; 81-Ellen Kamerling; 82-Mary Anne Davis; 83-Paul Martin; 84-Michael Miller; 85-Theodore Halkin (in front of 96); 86-Gladys Nilsson; 87-Virginio Ferrari; 88-Antonia Contro; 89-Don A. DuBroff; 90-Marcia Weese; 91-Ralph Arnold; 92-Paul LaMantia (behind 79); 93-Roger Brown; 94-Christian Ramberg; 95-George Cohen; 96-Dean Snyder; 97-Ken Holder; 98-Jane Stevens; 99-Dan Yarbrough; 100-Tom Scarff.

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101-Hollis Sigler (behind 102); 102-Claire Prussian; 103-Tom Palazzolo; 104-Susan Michod; 105-L. J. Douglas; 106-Eleanor Spiess-Ferris (behind 120); 107-William Conger; 108-Joan Taxay-Weinger; 109-Frank J. Morreale; 110-Richard Kelley; 111-Mark Jackson; 112-Carol Haliday McQueen; 113-Nina Beall; 114-Steven Heyman; 115-Gary Justis; 116-Wesley Kimler; 117-Thelma Heagstedt; 119-Barbara Blades; 120-Edith Altman; 121-Phyllis Bramson; 122-Nancy Boswell-Mayer; 123-Matt Straub; 124-lorraine Peltz; 125-Harold L. Gregor; 126-Mary Min; 127-Joel Oppenheimer; 128-Michelle Stone (behind 107); 129-Alfred P. Maurice; 130-Richard Loving; 131-Sandra Jorgensen (behind 126); 132-larry Salomon; 133-Dennis L. Mitchell; 134-Steve Stratakos (behind 123); 135-Cameron Zebrun (behind 116); 136-Gaylen Gerber; 137-Susan Mitchell; 138-Gail Simpson; 139-Carl Kock; 140-Dean Langworthy; 141-Roger Machin & Spot; 142-Leslie Wolfe; 143-Fred Gude; 144-Robert McCauley (behind 130); 145-Bill Cass; 146-Don Baum; 147-Michael Zieve; 148-Deven K. Golden; 149-Arnaldo Roche Rabell; 150-Robert Lostutter.

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151-Richard Hunt; 152-Joseph Hilton; 153-Ed Paschke; 154-Peter Hurley; 155-Neraldo de la Paz; 156-Will Northerner; 157-Kenneth Shorr; 158-Maryrose Carroll; 159-Kathleen King; Robert Appel (behind 159)

Photographer Tony Soluri stood on top of a rickety wooden ladder at the Zolla/Lieberman Gallery, waving a camera, shouting instructions, and trying to get a better view. The people Soluri was yelling, 50 or so Chicago-based painters and sculptors, stood in a loose pack in front of him, each holding a numbered card as if waiting for service in a deli. "Number forty-four, " cried Soluri, "I can’t see your face!" The artist holding number 44, Ruth Migdal, looked at her card, then moved her face. "That’s good. Now, one-oh-three, can you step to the left? OK, now ho-o-old it!"

Deciding whom to include in the portrait was an intricate and worrisome task for Robert Post, Chicago’s art director. He contacted various galleries and asked them to give him a list of the painters and sculptors they thought important. Curators, collectors, and critics added names. As word got out, some artists even called to add themselves. Still, it was inevitable that some people would be left out. Some invitations never made it through the mail. And some people showed up uninvited. Fame is a tricky thing. It doesn’t always work out the way you planned.

For most of the 150 or so artists at the photo session, it was a reunion. "It’s a small community, really,’ said Estelle Kenney. "We overlap at parties and openings all the time. i know nearly everyone here. And I’m on good terms with a quarter of them. I think that’s extraordinary."

When they weren’t being photographed, the subjects stood in cocktail party-size groups talking about very normal things. "Artists are normal," explained Joel Oppenheimer. "When we get together, it’s mostly lifestyle talk. Vacations. Cars. You know—food."

Judy Gordon and Ben Benson were talking pasta salad "I use Neapolitan macaroni," said Benson. "It keeps its shape. Rigatoni tends to go flat." He pressed his fingers together. "But this neapolitan stuff is wonderful."

Two conversations down, Tom Palazolo was recalling a childhood snack. "My grandfather was Sicilian," he said, "so there was always a bowl of olive oil in the kitchen. Ehen he wanted to keep me quiet he’d tear off a hunk of bread and dip it in the olive oil. It was wonderful. Like a Sicilian pacifier."

As they talked, some of the artists milled toward the center room, where the photographs were being taken. The artists had been divided, first come first served, into groups of 50 or so. Each group’s picture took about half an hour. Soluri’s two assistants were corralling people for the third shot. Michelle Stone watched. "Artists are funny," she said. "They all look so shy."

Paulo Colombo stood by himself. If you looked closely, you could see that his socks had a leopard-skin pattern.

Edith Altman was peering at the number of the person next to her, Phyllis Bramson. "I’m into numbers," announced Altman. "I have 120. You have 121. And over there are 105 and104. It’s random, but maybe not. Last year I was at a whooping crane watcher’s convention—I don’t know why, but I was there—and I found that there’s often a hidden order beneath the movements of cranes, and all things. And this group: Is it ordered or is it chance?"

Nearby, Agnes McGregor was studying her number—13. "Can you play this number in the lottery?" she asked. "I think maybe it’s lucky."

Un unidentified person in red sneakers, probably a friend of the arts, piped up behind her: "Well, you know sometimes you win," he sang. "And there are times you loose. And sometimes luck as we know it today comes out and smiles on you."

Wesley Kimler, Gary Justis, and Matt Straub hovered on the edge of the group. All three wore black leather jackets and alarmed-looking hair. They were deciding what to do. "Let’s jostle our way to the front," said one.

"Uh-uh. They won’t like that."
"They won’t like us."
"Let’s stand in neat rows then."
"Like bowling pins."
"It’s our fascist heritage."

Anita David stood at the front, with her friend Olivia Petrides. "Oooh, lets pose!" giggled David. "Here comes the picture! Let’s lose ten pounds! Quick, let’s fix our teeth!"

A little to the left, Michelle Fire was wearing a blue Hawaiian shirt. She had plastic starfish on her ears. When the photographer strained to see her number, Fire winked.

Most people smiled or coughed or looked bemused. Then the flashcube popped, and it was done. "Now we’re famous," said Frank Morreale. "What happens next?"

"Everything will change," said Lorraine Peltz, guiding him to the bar. "The way you dress, the way you think, even the way you do your hair. Everything will change."

“Think about this: we go to the doctor’s office and an hour or so later we’re still reading two-year-old magazines. Despite the wasted time and the fact that it’s going to cost you, you still patiently wait and at the appropriate time remove your clothes, lean back, and completely submit. We submit in a lot of places in our lives. If you can’t submit to art, to hell with you.” – James Turrell¹

Submission is a Key Aspect of Artistic Experience

One of the thorniest issues with which we must contend in the creation and contemplation of art is the problem of our response to the idea of submission. Submission: to willingly – or under duress – relinquish some determinative capacity within the self, giving it over to the authority of another, be it person, circumstance or paradigm. Submission: to recognize – again, either voluntarily or under duress – the power and prevalence of some significant structure over the personal sovereignty of impulse and will one might normally conceptualize as private and essentially personal.

As a cognitive activity, submission is integral to the full experience of any art, whether in making or viewing. While our initial relationship to works of art may indeed be an intuitive, pre-cognitive movement within us², the deep appreciation of art assumes an intellectual and logistical commitment that is indistinguishable from submission. Any profound knowledge of a work of art, any honest apprehension of its reality, requires significant humility.

If we merely apply our perceptive powers to an artwork and enforce our will upon it, squeezing from it some hackneyed, free-associative, piece-meal interpretation, we limit the potential of any work of art to our own whims. An active knowledge of art is full of pressure, full of change, and these forces hail from outside our own conceptualizations. Knowing art is a challenge to us, an acknowledgement of an energy or evocation to which we come and seek a perspective on what and who and how we are. Making, contemplating, or knowing art all come at the cost of a willing submission.

Yet many who are drawn to art either as makers or viewers are likely to reject the very concept of submission. This is a fundamental paradox of the artistic mind since their artistic endeavors invariably function within that frame of reference. Most artists describe their artistic impulse as something they must follow and have to get out, something about which they greatly obsess, something around which they orient their lives and for which they make sacrifices. They speak of time management, studio discipline and creative practice. When they do not make time for their work, choosing jobs and entertainments over the creative unction, they experience psychological and emotional punishment for their failure to obey the impulses that drive their creative minds. This is the very language of submission. The way we talk about our work is indicative of the reality beneath our talk of self-expression and the transgression of taboos: that submitting is integral to the making and understanding of art.

Authority, Autonomy, and the Jurisdiction of the Self

There are many forms of submission in the world and many levels at which it is manifested. Obvious outward examples are the basics of traffic laws, the various monetary systems we use, and structures of language to which we subscribe. More deeply embedded are the vagaries of social interaction; even those who reject broadly accepted normative structures and average social contracts subscribe and submit to their counter-cultural equivalents. We accept the formats of reading and writing in our given culture with very little grievance. It is surprising that most people fail to question these two extremely influential structures given how strongly tied they are to our ability to know (and the manner in which we know) anything at all. The vast majority of us, even those wishing to pursue alternative lifestyles and practices, espouse countless norms that range from meaningless social conventions to deeply rooted mores. Furthermore, and on a much more precognitive level, we each submit to our body’s requirements for food, drink and sleep and its shifting saturations of dopamine, serotonin, adrenaline and other hormones. Additionally, we have to take the time to learn our bodies, experience what they can and cannot do, grasp these propensities, and shape (or fail to shape) them according to the predispositions of various parts. From top to bottom, from our conscious awareness to our involuntary movements, we are submitting.

Intellectual growth is an area where our willingness to submit is fundamental to development. It is obvious that to know anything one must admit ignorance, submit to knowledge, accept information, and earnestly investigate to discern and parse the nuances of that material. The result of this procedure is an increasing assuredness in the growing knowledge and awareness, even when total certainty is not the goal. Why then is the concept of submission met with so much resistance?

The issue is not one of mere dogmatism alone, since traffic laws are certainly just as dogmatic as the rules espoused by institutionalized religions, for example. The difference is the jurisdiction claimed by each. Your eternal soul does not go to hell simply because you run a red light or commit some social miscue; you pay some cash or feel some embarrassment and move on. Citizens do not have the authority to claim an autonomy that allows them to consistently reject traffic laws or use fake money. When they do, they are punished in more or less effective ways. Most people view the benefits of giving over specific areas of their self-jurisdiction to the state as worth it in that it affords much in terms of stability and security.

Yet government authority does not constrain the self so much as certain outward actions of the self. Religions and other systems of morality and ethical conduct do, on the other hand, challenge the autonomy of the self by claiming jurisdiction over the thoughts, feelings, conduct, choices, and perspectives of the individual. Nearly all human beings submit themselves to strictures of morality that impinge upon and shape the expressive possibilities of their inner selves. My contention in this essay is that the art is at least as beneficial and necessary as these are and that we may gain a great deal from a conscious awareness of our acquiescence to it. Are we willing to let go of ourselves?

The question of authority in the context of the desire for autonomy is a point on which art pivots. Often seen as the realm of singular, private expression, art is also often dogmatic and strongly ideological, making broad, absolutist statements about the world. Therefore artworks tend to claim a kind of purview of both inward (toward the maker) and outward (toward the viewer) realms. To read art at all the viewer has to be willing to go with it; to really grasp the work the viewer must become a student of it and its context. The very nature of artworks is a demand for submission. This authoritative stance makes art inherently problematic for those who disdain submission.

Furthermore, artists inherently function in a context of submission. In the course of art-making an artist becomes a filter and an inflector, accumulating outside knowledge, skills, and experiences – about the body, historical contexts, socio-cultural modes and legacies, the technical means of expression – and subsuming, transmuting, then transmitting them back out into the universe. A large portion of an artist’s education is given over to this progression. The process by no means results in the outpouring of original or new material – far from it. Instead, it amounts to the funneling and arrangement of information and meanings and evocations present in and available to conscious entities. We begin to understand the truth of submission when we realize that we do not know or create via some singular, special fountain within ourselves that is divorced from the rest of reality, but rather we manifest these things in our own individuality as a conduit through which they flow and are altered by our uniqueness and specificity. This reality of our existence as conduits is the birthright of all consciousness. Through this I know that my artwork is not my own entirely original conception. It is a projection of the vast web of intersubjectivity out of which I come, to which I have been exposed, and part of which I have the privilege to re-present. In giving up any claim to pure originality I gain the joy of essential, necessary participation. This is the amazing, profound gift of conscious submission: knowing finally that I am not separate but am made for relationship, community, integration, and continuity. I find my greatest personal expression in acknowledging this relational truth.

In this conception, the artist’s personality, interests, and facture are not the locus of creative activity; rather, they are the conduits through which a weight of understanding passes. To submit to the lessons of history, to study, to investigate, to find and thus to inform our actions with what is beyond the limits of the self – these are the things that lead to the great, meaningful expressions. This perspective results in the realization that what we need for a life in art is necessarily not inherent within us.

The relatively recent Post-Enlightenment conceit that frames the individual self as source, justifier, means, and meaning for all of life is at the center of the problem. It is not a mistake that individualistic rationalism manifested in other such philosophical arenas as existential nihilism and the denial of the possibility of true communication between entities. Once the self is seen as the central authority, seen as taking no substantive or meaningful understanding from anyone or anything else, seen as without fundamental conceptual or ideational legacies, we lose the ability to grasp common ground. Any commonality (community, relation, shared intersubjectivity) is a priori ridiculous to autonomous entities. This leads the way to intolerance; if I am the originator and arbiter of my values, meaning, and ideas why should I bother with any truly pluralistic understanding of others’ perspectives? Contrary to widespread common opinion, ideological or religious dogmatism is not the core of intolerance or inhumanity, a sense of the self as essentially autonomous and self-justifying is.

Once I sense my own contingency, however, my worldview changes. Once I know that I am a conduit, a passageway, my attitude shifts. Once I realize that all things are in relation, I must acknowledge those around me. Once I grasp the reality that there are limitations to what I know, I can work to align myself to the vast array of knowing and consciousness around me. The sooner I realize my own intellectual, physical, and creative contingency, the sooner I will understand that nothing can be what it is without the contexts in which it lives, moves, and has being. This leads me to realize that what I am is not because of my own self-sufficiency in anything, but rather because of my embedded-ness within a multivalent medium of subjective realities. There is a sense in which I must – amid the realities of any truth and faith I personally affirm – submit in some way to every human being who has ever lived in order to operate in any way at all. They have participated in manifesting the world just as much as I. This decentralized matrix of authority and knowledge may be the very definition of a transcendent human consciousness in which we all participate, to which we all submit in the course of being.

What Submission Brings: Experience, Knowledge, Understanding, and Identification

The preceding paragraphs make several axioms apparent: submission to life leads to experience, submission to experience leads to knowledge; submission to knowledge leads to understanding; submission to understanding leads to identification. Identification amounts to the apprehension and appreciation of what is behind the work of art, as opposed to the mere identification of its constituents; it enfolds a sounding of what is before, within, and beyond the work³. In each case, submission is the essential antecedent and therefore founds the most important activities embedded in viewing art.

The four products of submission mentioned above are key to both the activity of the artist while creating the work and to the action of the viewer in seeing the work. We have covered much of submissive making already, so let us turn to viewing. Encouraging submissive viewing could be said to be the initial and primary goal of any artwork. That is, if the artwork is assumed to convey messages or narratives, it must first be constructed in such a way so as to elicit intentional cognition regarding the work in the mind of the viewer via his or her eye. Here enter the interwoven histories of meaning and value, of techniques and materials, of visual languages and evocative imagery. Just as submission to information is the key to knowledge and subsequent understanding, so submission to the dynamics of visual communication, of cultural expression, of the shorthand in bodily gesture, and of the structure of narrative are key to presenting information worth viewers’ submission. It is certainly plausible that some of the societal reticence toward aesthetic submission is due, at least in part, to the failure of artists to use the tools available to them to construct artwork that either invites engagement or requests submission.

If a work of art is well-made, evocative, and resonates with the deep subjectivities and multifaceted potentialities of human understanding – anything from classic meta-themes and values to the banal, small-yet-redeeming realities of day-to-day existence – I, as a viewer, will be called to submit to the contemplation of things beyond myself. However, if I reject the submission, I will be offended by the work because it is, by its very form, attempting to call me away from my infatuation with myself. It is calling me to submit to a higher, broader, less singular perspective. I will reject the work out of a need to justify and maintain my own viewpoint, my own orientation to myself as the center of my universe. As a lover of the singular, autonomous self, I will feel attacked by any artwork created for the expression of any value that seems to claim supremacy to the self – my self.

Yet we must recognize that to fully appreciate art – any art – one must be ready to move down that path from experience to identification, aiming toward an identification of not only of visual languages, cultural conditions, and historical legacies, but also of the person behind the expression. Seeing is a relational activity, and in it we move from identification of formal or conceptual elements to identification with the human condition generally and other individuals specifically. To dismiss any work out of hand is to misunderstand the procedure of seeing in art. Even worse, it is to misunderstand the reality of other people as such.

Similarly, the artist mistakes the procedure of making when he views the self as the instigation, means, and end of an artwork. This perspective results in a representation primarily of the self. The self, the ego, the personality, can only reflect itself. When we artists focus on ourselves we drown in murky circular logic. Likewise, when viewers refuse to stretch themselves, refuse to make themselves vulnerable to the power of images, objects, and ideas, they deny themselves great avenues of understanding and enjoyment. When viewers are so closed that they look only for themselves in a work of art, to the rejection of all else, they lose a chance to experience the sort of cathartic epiphanies that only art can offer. Pulling on the thread a good work of art offers is one of the best ways to get past ourselves and go to a place we could never have imagined, learn things we might never have considered, and become more than we thought possible.

Conclusion

In the end, submission to artworks is something that cannot be expressly measured nor fully related between individuals. To be sure, we are subjective and elaborately so, embedded as we are in so great an overlapping stratification of physical and metaphysical realities. Perhaps it may be too much to expect that submission to experience, to understanding, and to identification might be embraced (or recognized as part and parcel of what artists are doing every day) in a sufficiently broad and meaningful way. Yet one can certainly hope that each of us might find the strength to let go of ourselves long enough to appreciate and truly know works of art – to know consciousness and being, even – so that they might reveal an evocative, transformative reality to us. Ultimately, we must submit to them in order to reap their fruits.

This is a call for experience, knowledge, understanding, and identification. This is a call for openness, for evocation, and for resonance.

This is a call for submission.

¹Turrell, James, Quoted by Elaine King. Into the Light: A Conversation with James Turrell. Sculpture, November 2002. Volume 21, Number 9. Page 29. ↩
²See the works of Rudolf Arnheim and George Santayana for more on this contention. ↩
³“Before, within, and beyond” could be said to correspond respectively to context (historical legacy and presentation, as they apply to meaning), formal realities (media, subject matter, manner, as they inflect meaning), and implications (application, interpretation of potential meaning). ↩

I remember Gail as a slight and frail figure with very long dark curls and a shy, enigmatic expression that made her seem as though she was trying to peer beyond the substance of things. This certainly was true of her art: I witnessed her drawings as she built them up slowly, first as points and dots that were connected by thin and nervous constellations of lines that barely impressed themselves. Gradually a numinous face or figure would appear from the cloud of lines. I always was arrested by the profundity of their expressions and the listening glint that she often carefully placed in their eyes.

She joined our printmaking group at the Evanston Art Center in the mid 1990’s. I was struck by her quiet and intense working methods, and how memorable her images were compared to the works of thousands of artists I had seen as an art student in New York City and later as an art critic in Chicago. Like Giacometti and Morandi here was someone who imbedded an intense stillness of mood; she could freeze a moment of complete sincerity into each of her images. There were depths her work had, especially in how her shadowed figures mysteriously transmuted themselves to paper. Time stood still.

Many remember her as kind, generous, self effacing, and thoughtful of others. She certainly was all these things. Yet I also recall the artist and friend whose delicate line work fused the matter of her life onto paper much like the faint handwriting of Emily Dickinson’s poems bore the tides of deep and uncanny feelings onto tiny slips of paper. One year Gail sent me a card made from pearlescent paper that was folded to look like a small Japanese screen. On it was printed the Dickinson poem:

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet never in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

Truly Gail was this otherworldly bird. Her deep feeling was her gift – in her being, in her heart, in her art.

Drawing 10 x 7.5

Grandfather (detail) 22 x 12

Eden’s Grandmother 36 x 16

Eden drawing 8 x 5

Roof of a House etching 3 x 4.5

Madeleines etching 3 x 4.5

Beyond etching 3 x 4.5

etching 3 x 4.5

Amsterdam – Lewis etching 3 x 4.5

Pears etching

Eden drawing 39 x 23

Eden drawing 47 x 34

Violin etching

There is an interesting article in this week’s Chicago Reader: The Endangered Coyote: After a disappointing benefit, the Around the Coyote arts org contemplates extinction by Deanna Isaacs (here) which states that the 20-year-old organization is in dire need of money and will probably face extinction. I say what’s the big deal if Chicago loses ATC? I was part of one of their fall exhibitions many years back but always thought the ATC was full of mediocre artists with mediocre work…at best. So I would like to ask a question to all artists, curators, etc. that have been or still are associated with ATC: How have you benefited from ATC and what has ATC done for the Chicago art scene?

All quotes by Robert Henri and found in The Art Spirit.

“The object, which is back of every true work of art, is the attainment of a state of being, a state of high functioning, a more than ordinary moment of existence. In such moments activity is inevitable, and whether this activity is with brush, pen, chisel, or tongue, its result is but a by-product of the state, a trace, the footprint of the state.”

Robert Henri’s seminal text, The Art Spirit, is a book with which most 2D artists become familiarized if they spend much time engaged with art making. I find that now, after a few years of full time teaching, Henri’s words resonate even more with me. I return to the book again and again, grazing through it or lending it out to eager students. At moments of reflection I am always amazed at how much of what I have been declaring in my classes is often a nearly verbatim expression of Henri’s solid, axiomatic, quotable dialogue. I suppose I should not be surprised, though, given the fact that The Art Spirit has been lodged in my consciousness for so many years.

Yet there is always something new to see.

Most recently I have returned to Henri armed with a new appreciation for the subjectivity artists necessarily carry with them. I was raised with the notion that the subjective – as opposed to the objective – is an inferior, inherently false position. As I have moved through the major theory of the last one hundred years, met people from all over the world, made bodies of work, taught tentative students to tap their innate abilities, read widely outside of art, and – most importantly – actually lived life with an awareness of my living it, I found that it is the subjectivity of individuals that is certain, not their grasp of an objective, baseline reality.

Of course, that is the difference: the objective is meant to imply some outside, universalized, and dominating conception, an irreducible foundation upon which all things rest, while the subjective relates to what we individually, specifically experience of being. The subjective participates in a continuum of dawning objective horizons but is always related to the individual, to the contingencies of conceit, limitation, and capacity that frame existence.

Reality looks very different to a man than it does to a goldfish. Why? After all, they live in the same universe. The difference is that their multivalent, trans-contextual matrices of sensation, knowledge, and instinct dominate them, so much so that the subjective experiences of each trump any objective grasp either might have. One might even suggest that the very attempt to lock down a clear view of objective reality is, in its very motivation and conceptual action, inherently subjective, too. All knowledge is subjective, in a sense, and all knowing is the result of a state of interaction between the complex intersubjectivities of billions of people both currently alive and long since dead. Participating in that web of subjectivity helps us come to a realization of an underlying matrix: a vast array of being within which our physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual lives play out.

None of the above short explication of subjectivity makes truth any less a part of our lives or eliminates some reasonable certainty from our experiences. It does, however, shift the focus from the stolid notion that human beings exist in a fundamentally graspable and entirely knowable reality to one in which an infinite arena of physical and metaphysical potentiality interfaces with our own accumulated sensation, thought, and expectation to elicit an experience of being in our consciousness. The first is a binary world of black and white. The second is a shifting, multifaceted latticework of grays where strands of context unite and cluster together in trends and interference patterns. The first is a simple view of the world, one that makes existence easily and clearly – but only rudimentarily – understood. It is a view of the world that makes it easy for its adherents to moralize their preferences; we know where that overreaction leads. The second is a view of complexity and relationship, one which may be seen as a declaration of the absence of transcendent truth and grounding. Often its proponents claim a chaotic, cacophonous view of the world in which nothing can be known and no truth claimed at all; this, too, is an overreaction.

Questions arise from this tension. Don’t most religions assert contact with an objective, absolute truth that mandates their moral (social, political, etc) attitudes? What about the supernatural or spirituality in general? What about the ultimate ontological Object, God? Some might question how a Christian such as myself could claim this kind of position, one that, in a way, seeks to displace objectivity. Don’t Christians profess some binary, black and white, fundamentalist worldview? The answer is simple: God Himself, as I understand Him, conceals and a reveals. He works via proxies. Thus the mystery of the unfolding universe is, to me, a dramatic validation of the primacy of subjective experience. We simply do not have direct access to the objective bedrock of reality. Yet I do posit that God has revealed this deep reality through poetic yet diluted pictures, the cloudy murk of disinterested history, the diversions of surrogate agents, the discursive brilliance of natural law, the awe-inspiring sweeps of cosmic time, and specific, strategic interventions of love, meaning, and value. All of this manifests – literally incarnates – in the subjectivity of real people who live and move and have their being in a world they both inherit and create.

Therefore subjectivity is the first order context of our finite existence, not a substrate of it. Subjectivity is the realm of humankind, not a stepchild to true reality. Some people – particularly artists and poets and thinkers – recognize this, which is why they do not have to resort to crutches of pseudo-objectivity in order to feel stable in the world; they know we are not stable. We are contingent, finite, frail. We exist as a vapor in a cycle far beyond ourselves, and it is through our subjective sensations of our own time and experience that we touch on that universal state of all human consciousness. Thinkers like Henri stimulate us to consider these things; they charge our innate creativity and will to engage with a vital excitement: what we do and how we do it matter.

“There is no art without contemplation.”

The Art Spirit certainly presents the aforementioned view regarding what artists do and how they do it. It is a perspective that embraces the subjectivity of individuals while exhorting them to take on the responsibility to be meaning-makers, foundation-builders, culture-formers, being-translators. Henri knew that subjectivity does not automatically equate with randomness, illogic, crudity, thoughtlessness, or ambiguity – much the contrary. His is a way toward responsiveness, flexibility, and nuance apart from resorting to inanity or insanity. Henri’s writing advocates a historically-conscious, community-induced, individually-pursued experience of awareness in the world. He pushes us to dive into that array of grays and ride the threads of context in a voyage of surprise.

“The real artist’s work is a surprise to himself…When the artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressing creature. He becomes interesting to other people. He disturbs, upsets, enlightens, and he opens ways for better understanding.”

While Henri’s words help us to recognize that everything is possible, they also show us that this does not mean everything is equally valid, interesting, or worthy. He provides us with a subjective context for grasping this truth, a context that requires real thoughtful reflection. Henri makes statements that must not be read as dogmatic principles but rather as strategies for practice. If taken too lightly or left unapplied, the very same words could lead people down a path to vapidity. It is their cross-contextual implementation that brings the facets of their truths to bear.

Texts such as The Art Spirit (as well as others like Hawthorne on Painting or Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space) should never be used to disqualify other working methods or conceptual approaches. Neither should they be used to pigeonhole one’s own work or orientation. They are ciphers by which we can contact what we really hope to do. They are modes of access – methodologies of understanding – whereby we can gain entry to the deep avenues of knowing and being that others have discovered in the past. As we travel these various paths, we gain insight into ourselves, insight into the spirit that fires a life in art. This articulation is a good thing, something generous and open, never defensive, never grasping. Good thinking – such as Robert Henri’s – is like the sun: powerful, self-evidently necessary, undeniable, yet available to all and vast in scope and potential.

“You will never draw the sense of a thing unless you are feeling it at the time you work.”

Consider that statement: it is a treatise on subjectivity and engagement. To feel the thing, to be involved with it as personally and as relationally as you are with your own sight and taste and hearing, is to claim one’s own presence in the world and translate that through an intuitive use of skills to draw out relational realities for others to palpate. This is not merely appealing to a limited objectivity, not merely mechanical duplication or doltish execution; this is the expansive subjectivity of humans in the midst of being. This truth is what informs Henri when he proclaims, “I am interested in art as a means of living a life; not as a means of making a living… What we need is more sense of the wonder of life and less of the business of making a picture.”

“The object isn’t to make art, it’s to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.”

Henri’s truisms aim artists away from limited objectivity and a product orientation in their work, freeing them to pursue a resonant subjectivity that both validates and challenges their experiences. In calling us to seek out history and context, Henri challenges us. In proving the value of our personal artistic action and aesthetic frame of reference, he validates our subjectivities. His work and words are a tremendous gift, because they show artists how to be nuanced, ambiguous, and expansive without becoming negligent, inconsequential, or indeterminately vague. It is as he says:

“The man who has honesty, integrity, the love of inquiry, the desire to see beyond, is ready to appreciate good art.”

Let us all be so ready.

Buy Robert Henri’s The Art Spirit here:

Preview and read extensive excerpts of the text here:

A while back, a friend and I were discussing music that had been overplayed over the years and had determined that some of it should be locked up in a vault; to be released at a later date when it might be fresh again. We both agreed that the Beatles should be vaulted.

Well, the same is true of the art world. There are aspects of it that, due to ubiquitous, do not have any impact anymore or have lost their importance. It’s not necessarily that they are bad. It’s just that they have been played out to the point of being a cliché. By placing them in a vault, we can make room for something new and make them appear to be fresh when we’re ready to release them from the art world time capsule again.

I’m listing what I’d like to put in the vault for future rediscovery. This is by no means an exhaustive list and does not reflect a hatred toward anything, just that these subjects have lost some of their importance due to overexposure.

Andy Warhol — He set the art world on its ear when he hit the scene, but his repeating images and colorized black and white prints became old 30 years ago. His stuff has appeared on every kind of object you can think of and mimicked by graphic designers for so long that his work is as about as interesting as a section of sidewalk. Time to put him in the vault and by the way, he can take the Velvet Underground with him.

Keith Harring — A one-trick pony to begin with, his Barrel of Monkeys-looking figures have adorned marketing material for fund raising events for the last 25 years. To the vault with ye!

Jackson Pollack — Often imitated by lazy designers, splatter paint is used to break up the monotony of long hallways, and bolts of fabric. It’s no longer exciting to view one of his paintings. I can get more out of observing the sparkles when I grind my fists into my eyeballs. By the way Jack, there is no smoking in the vault.

Jerry Saltz — On the one hand he brings to attention many of the ills of the art world, which is good. On the other hand, he embraces many of the goofy stunts that pass for conceptual art. I believe he does this to be around young artists. By doing so, they keep him young. He’s a vampire! Throw him in the vault so he can’t suck the life out of any more recent grad students!

Video installations that have a TV set on the floor of a gallery — I don’t want to bend over and look at a loop of nonsensical imagery coming from a monitor on the floor. Make a film and have a proper screening in a theater, for crying out loud! Take your blabbing heads and pretty girls with paper maché animal heads dancing through the forest and stuff them in the vault. Besides, CRTs are so last century.

Well, anyway that’s a start. What are your contributions for The Vault?

In June of 2006 I spent three days in Philadelphia visiting the Andrew Wyeth Retrospective, dubbed “Memory and Magic,” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The trip was many things for me, and brought out many thoughts, but I have to say that what I loved most was seeing a life lived in painting. I took that profound reality away from those few days. It was a heartening, enlightening, and inspiring experience.

I was always convinced while looking at reproductions of his work that Wyeth’s pieces would be fragile, flimsy, or of eggshell delicacy. I was wrong about this. I understood what tempera painting was, and I realized its technical strength, but I think the muted colors the painter used and the different scale of surface texture it afforded didn’t translate well from the reproductions to my mind. Seeing the works in person lets you know just how robust they are. The build-up on their surfaces and the huge range of textures he created really make the case for him. In spite of their intensely scrutinized and detailed passages, they are truly muscled paintings. And that stalwartness seems to shift onto his watercolors, dry brushes, and drawings in a very interesting way, because it’s not just the materials he used, it’s the integrity of his hand – how his hand firmly rendered a form, sensed the play of light, or whimsically laid in a wash – that really gives solidity and visual backbone to the works overall. It’s also really interesting to note how un-precious some of his handling is, particularly with drawings and smaller paintings. What I mean is that they are very much worked (ripped, scumbled, collaged [believe it or not], rubbed, scraped, etc) with a great deal of forcefulness. Wyeth didn’t paint like a convalescent dabbing his forehead with a tissue; this is real painting.

One of the things that constantly amazed me throughout the exhibition is how this guy was able to keep making powerhouse moves in the context of so much reserve. It’s really pretty astounding. The paintings resonate with point and counterpoint, content and subject, the pictured and the implied, and a lively interplay between those dualities. He could make a 10 foot painting cruise with lines of force, bring massive tonal fields into and out of each other, while at the same time create moments of focus that live in an entirely different timeframe in terms of how the eye reads them. This means that the paintings consistently have 2 or 3 (sometimes more) time signatures within the picture plane. It seems counterintuitive to think of Andrew Wyeth as having an affinity with Abstract Expressionism, but the fact is that his work declares how well-versed he was in a modernist design aesthetic; perhaps more than many of the AbExers actually were. And so many times his brushwork, the way he constructed compositional relationships, and how he used interpolation of colors is precisely related to the best of the high abstractionists. A great deal of that relation is shown in how the facture of illusion was so deftly connected to the designed arrangement of shapes and intervals on the picture plane itself. There’s a pinching and pressing, ease and expansion that happens to the eye as it travels around the best of his works.

I’d even venture to say that Wyeth was one of the absolute best abstract painters of the last 100 years. I mean abstract in terms of his composition and design, but also in terms of his intention, his conception of the meaning and content of his paintings. It’s all about association, intuition, emotion, sensitivity, consideration, intimacy, contemplation and identification. His willingness to go in deep – and his commitment to keep at it for decade after decade – created a fullness of investigation that is really satisfying.

But beyond the formal issues is the metaphoric arena that he was aiming to create. He talked (in interviews recorded for the PMA show) about engaging in a reverie of memory and connection, and he often does this in idiosyncratic ways. He was willing to make points, take a stand or two (or four), but do it all without didactic vehemence. He didn’t have to prove anything to anyone, and that made him willing to fully represent both his own flights of fancy and his most existential musings on the primacy of BEING. And the truth is that he was proving something with his work. He was proving the effect that concentrated, emotive, transformational representation can have on people who are open to its very unique modes of experience. I think that his project was really about identification. It was a story of who and what he identified with in his life: the marginalized individual, the poetic yet banal object, and the pictorially evocative stillness of the soul lost in its own universe of perception. Every one of the elements he built his career on painting – thresholds, vessels, margins, stillness, light – are all about avenues for identification, for himself and for viewers. Wyeth’s dedication to the primacy of subjectivity, humble individuality, and sympathetic observance of particular (and peculiar) experiences is a legacy he has left for all time.

Post Script

The Philadelphia Museum of Art retrospective occurred while Wyeth was still alive. It garnered a great many responses, but one that stood out was the ArtNEWS cover story on the artist (see it here: http://www.artnews.com/issues/article.asp?art_id=1904). The piece featured critics Robert Storr and Dave Hickey holding forth, vehemently denigrating Wyeth’s work.

At the time, the people who seemingly missed the aim and intensity of Wyeth’s project mystified me. Passing Wyeth’s work off as merely dingy sentimentality is tantamount to a complete misunderstanding what painting as a form is, why human beings make art, and how the experience of making a work transforms it into a container where we can pour our very humanity. The willful dissembling continued after his death (See the New York Times obituary, here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/17/arts/design/17deba.html).

But maybe I can understand the reaction now. Wyeth’s work was quietly challenging, its stillness both conservative and undeniably radical, holding a certain ground in spite of the shifting world. Wyeth’s consideration calls viewers to reflect on things in a similar way; perhaps that’s the greatest confrontation embedded in the work. A sly, knowing, ironic, slick work simply can’t operate that way. I think Wyeth knew this, and so opted to retain his so-called muddy palette, so-called kitsch subject matter, so-called anti-modernist aesthetic in order to maintain the sincerity of the view he’d claimed. Let’s add fortitude of constitution to that lengthy list of accolades we ascribe to this great painter and submit to his leading when we see his works. Contemplation, consideration, identification – all great virtues, all offering lasting rewards – not least of which is appreciation: thanks, Andrew.

Eleven years ago, I read the Chicago Reader article “Kimler’s Complaint.” At the time, I only had a vague notion of how the Chicago art scene worked. I knew there was a lot of conceptual work out there. I frequently read New Art Examiner, with all of its pseudo-sociology. I was also aware of the trend toward mimicking outsider art, which seemed to grow in popularity in the ’90s. However, I still thought that the Imagists and abstract artists that ruled the day in the ’80s still held sway and that the reason why the art scene in Chicago was lame, was that it never fully recovered from the art market crash.

I had no idea what really happened, behind the scene. I was busy puttering around in the minor art league in this city, showing in storefront galleries, Around the Coyote and in bars, hoping that someday I would be called up to the Majors. I had become ignorant of what really made the Chicago art world run. Not ever having any real connection to it, it’s no suprise that I didn’t fully grasp what Wesley Kimler was saying.

In recent years, I’ve become more in tune with what is going on in Chicago. I’ve also noticed that “Kimler’s Complaint” is referenced every now and then, so I decided to re-read this article. Now that I have a better understanding of the Chicago art world, I can more fully appreciate what Wesley Kimler was saying. He blasts the takeover of the Chicago art world by academia. He names names and calls people out. After reading it, I realize that nothing really has changed in Chicago since then and doesn’t look like it will. The institutions will still crank out artists that will dabble in conceptual nonsense for a few years, then go on to teach or sell real estate. There will always be more of them.

It’s now obvious that “Kimler’s Complaint” was never answered. Maybe it’s time to escalate this matter.

Read the Chicago Reader article:
http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/kimlers-complaint/Content?oid=896646

One of the first artists whose work I fell in love with was Richard Diebenkorn, a master of methodology as artistic project. His art, encapsulated in three distinct multi-year missions, has been a consistent source of inspiration and visual joy for me. I am especially fond of the late works on paper that were experiments adjacent to (and often studies for) his monumental Ocean Park series.

Two that stand out to me in particular are Untitled (Ocean Park), from 1986 (Livingston, The Art of Richard Diebenkorn, 246), and Untitled (Ocean Park) from 1983). In these works I find evidence of the greatest and most subtle expressions of his apparent overarching mission: that of presenting “tension beneath calm” (Livingston, 46); the notational exploration of spatial and planar devices as embodied in shimmering chromatic fields and a multivalence of linear structures. Often these smaller works take on much different configurations than their larger counterparts, sliding into languid horizontals and somehow more insistent, immediate colors. Extended trapezoidal forms in pale blue and alizarin force themselves out of the picture plane with their sharp linearity, even as they suggest the distilled landscape so well. Here and there on the shifting glades, Diebenkorn’s trademark pentimente asserts itself, his sometimes-clumsy lines rising and falling from the varied surface of the painting.

Diebenkorn had an insight into something about the experience of seeing that Mondrian and Matisse also knew; that our perception of space is informed by some sort of precognitive two-dimensional formatting. That is, we have the same basic conception of space as adults that we have as children, in spite of our learned grasp of perspective. Diebenkorn’s work is almost a synthesis of these two disparate viewpoints, cajoled and congealed onto the painted surface, leaving us moving forward and backward, up and down, in and out of the picture plane/space. This reflexive figure/ground relationship is a fundamental aspect of Diebenkorn’s work. To me these works read as many late Monet paintings do: as a bounce between an idea of surface artifice and illusory space. In Monet’s water lilies, the fore of the work (and its lilies) seem to be frontal, lying on the surface, while the background (and its lilies) peels away into a traditional perspectival issuance of space (see Leo Steinberg’s treatment of Monet in Other Criteria, 235-239).

With Diebenkorn, the procedure is not so linear. The fact is that basically any surface location may read in either manner – and that is the joy of his abstraction. This abstraction is more tactile and varied than Mondrian, more deftly realized than Matisse and more surprising than Monet… it is easy to see why Diebenkorn was such a remarkable artist.

His singularity of achievement and personal style remain distinct many years after his death. His work cannot be as easily pigeonholed – nor as easily psychoanalyzed – as that of many of his contemporaries, partly because the derivation of his ideas is marked with a clarity and matter-of-factness. He looked, saw, and reacted. The artist’s painterly reactivity to visual schematics continues to serve as an example of a most proper ratio between intuition and studied action. His tireless activity and singleness of mind is an example to all artists who would tread a path toward true discovery. He is the patron saint of infinite variety within a system, and his dedication was rewarded with a body of work that displays it to the nth degree. If only we all could be so fortunate.