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C h i c a g o A r t i s t s
’
N e w s
A p u b l i c a t i o n o f t h e C h i c a g o A r t i s t s ’ C o a l i t i o n I S S N 0 8 9 0 - 5 9 0 8 V o l u m e
X X X I V
, N u m b e r
1 1
, D e c e m b e r
2 0 0 7
The
Bey
Method
By Nathaniel McLin
Dawoud Bey does not romanticize the subjects of his pho-tographs. Rather, his pictures capture his subjects in momentsof personal decision, elevating them into monumental icons. A professor of photography at Columbia College, Chicago, Beycomposes compelling pictorial spaces that draw viewers into the personal narratives of those whom he photographs.Bey holds a MFA from Yale University, and has work inthe permanent collections of over twenty museums around theworld. This year
Aperture
magazine published his latest book,
Class Pictures
, and will mount a traveling exhibition of the photographs that will tour museums throughout the country.Following
Class Pictures
, the Addison Gallery of AmericanArt will open “Do You See What I See: Representing the Black Subject,” a historical survey of the photographic image of black males.Having grown up in New York’s Harlem and Queens,Bey was influenced by the documentary photography of the1969 Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition “Harlem on MyMind,” a showcase of African-American photographers. He wasimpressed by the truthfulness of documentary photography incapturing, without romanticism or sentimentality, the dignity of the everyday African American people, who were then widelyregarded as outcasts from society. Bey’s own photographic trib-ute to Harlem’s everyday citizens, “Harlem USA,” opened at theStudio Museum of Harlem in 1979.The subjects comprised in Bey’s
Class Pictures
, as in hisother photographs, are suppressed outsiders: noble Harlem resi-dents, defiant white and multiracial teenagers, and immigrants.Bey affords them a prestige that celebrates their otherness andsimultaneously draws the viewer intimately into his subject’s psychological performance space.Bey began taking pictures of young people in 1992 for the Artist Collective in Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford,Connecticut. He shot serialized images of young people to com- pare their mercurial changes, frame by frame. In 2003, he wasinvolved in a residency project at the David and Alfred SmartMuseum of Art at the University of Chicago. This project sawthe addition of confessional elements to his photos, with Beysoliciting text or audio commentary from his youthful subjects,who commented on the state of their lives in all their difficulty, joy, and complexity.Bey employs a compelling method in achieving his remark-able photos. After his work for the Artist Collective, Bey beganto move from a documentary style to creating a photographicformat analogous to the Baroque realism of painter MichelangeloMerisi da Caravaggio (1571 - 1610). Bey’s experiments with theunusual 20 x 24 Polaroid camera used for creating large-scale photographs allowed him to produce very stable and detailed prints of any size. Empowered with this resource to create muse-um quality pictures as stable as Rembrandt’s portraits gave Beythe confidence to pursue creation of Classical art photography.In this sense, Caravaggio was an influence on his work. In a private interview, Bey remarked on this influence. “I am a lover of Caravaggio’s shadows,” he said, “and am very interested inhow the interplay of dark and light also helps to animate and push the subject forward into the space of the viewer by addingdimensionality to the flat surface.”Like Caravaggio, Bey modulates contrasting light and dark areas to remind our motor senses of the relation of light andshadow to the sense of three-dimensional volume as objectsappear in life. Bey’s methods are thus not an exact translationof Caravaggio’s sculptural tactility. Rather, his is an analogousmethod in the photographic medium in which the viewer’smemory fills in depth and spatial relationships.Another of Caravaggio’s techniques used by Bey is to illu-minate one side of the face of his subjects, leaving the other sideof the face darkened, or even masked in shadow. This methodendows the figures appearing within the photo with a sense of depth and mystery.In his photos, Bey treats fore-, middle-, and backgroundsdistinctively. Generally, he obscures the background, keepingit slightly out of focus, thus forcing our eyes to linger in thespace where his subjects pose and perform – the middle groundof the picture plane. Bey thus takes advantage of a power that
KENNETH
If it wasn’t for school I don’t know where I’d be. One of my friends justdied recently—shot in the back of the head. He was walking down thestreet, him and a couple of friends of his. He was going back to meet hisfather ‘cause his father was coming to pick him up. And then, everybodystarted running; he was the only one who got hit by the bullet. At firstI really couldn’t believe it, ‘cause, like, in the neighborhood we stay inhis whole family used to live around there, and he was like one of themain people that I actually spent time with. We used to go to the beachtogether, play basketball. He was a nice kid; all the adults in the neighbor-hood thought he was nice. It just makes me feel sad, you know, I wish Icould have my friend back. That’s why I try to keep my mind focused onother, positive stuff, such as school, making sure I do all my homework,so I can get the best grades I can get. I want to start my own recordlabel, probably, and like open different types of stores and invest in, um...like neighborhoods I’ve lived in and everything: have new buildings builtso there’ll be less homeless, get people up off the streets.
Dawoud Bey, Kenneth, 2003. Photo courtesy of the artist.
contniued on page 13.
D e c e m b e r 2 0 0 7
C h i c a g o A r t i s t s ’ N e w s
D e c e m b e r 2 0 0 7
C h i c a g o A r t i s t s ’ N e w s
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2007
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2
C h i c a g o A r t i s t s ’ N e w s
D e c e m b e r 2 0 0 7
POPSICLE TO JOIN BEAN …
MillenniumPark
, home of Anish Kapoor’s
Bean
, or “Cloud Gate,”and
Crown Fountain
, will soon sport another installa-tion this winter, the
Popsicle
– a 95-foot-long multicol-ored wall of ice, with abstract patterns and shards of ice jutting out, by artist
Gordon Halloran
of
Vancouver
, a Nov. 1
Chicago Tribune
article said.From a distance, the 13-foot-tall sheets of
brilliantly
hued ice will look like a
giant
contemporary art piece.Close up, pigments interact with the
crystal
ice struc-tures, changing as parts of the wall evaporate, melt andfreeze again.“
Paintings Below Zero
,” will open Feb. 1 and willremain on display through the month. It will be keptmostly frozen by chilled
glycol
running through alumi-num panels that make up the core of the wall. Pigmentedsheets of ice, created offsite and changed periodically,will be suspended from the metal panels. As the surfaceevaporates, pigments will migrate to the exterior, alteringthe crystal structure and creating new patterns.City officials estimate that the exhibit, organized bythe
Department of Cultural Affairs
, will cost “a fewhundred thousand dollars.” Several private and publicentities will fund the project. The city says its portion of the funding and the state’s will come from the hotel tax.Halloran will also create a painting on the park’s icerink using an ice-cleaning machine. After the show, thewall will be broken apart, taken away and left to melt.
GEHRY MIT TROUBLE …
The
MassachusettsInstitute of Technology
filed a negligence suit againstrenowned architect
Frank Gehry
on Halloween, claim-ing that flaws in his design of the
$300 million StataCenter
in
Cambridge
, one of the most celebratedworks of recent architecture, caused
leaks, cracks, mold
growth and drainage
back-ups
, according to the Nov. 6
Globe
.The suit alleged MIT paid
Los Angeles
-based GehryPartners
$15 million
to design the Stata Center, and soonafter its 2004 completion, the center’s outdoor amphithe-ater began to crack due to drainage problems.Gehry Partners did not respond to the Globe’s con-tact attempts. A MIT spokesman declined comment, cit-ing the pending lawsuit.An executive at the construction company,
NewJersey
-based
Skanska USA Building Inc.
, blamedGehry for the problems and said he ignored warningsabout the flaws from Skanska and a consulting company prior to construction. “This is not a construction issue,never has been,” said
Paul Hewins
, executive vice presi-dent and area general manager of Skanska USA.“It really is a disaster,” said former
BostonUniversity
president
John Silbe
r, who sharply criticizesthe Stata Center’s design in a new book,
Architecture of the Absurd: How ‘Genius
’
Disfigured a Practical Art
.Gehry is not the first famous architect to be sued over his designs.
I. M. Pei and Partners
, of
Hancock Tower
fame, were sued after glass panes popped out during theTower’s 1970s construction, crashing onto the street. It became “The Plywood Skyscraper” when the glass wastemporarily replaced with wood.
Robert Campbell
, anarchitect and critic for the
Globe
, said it is
inevitable
thatthere will be
problems
in
any unconventional
buildinglike the Stata Center, with its roofs colliding at different,odd angles.
GEHRY CELEBRATION …
Bilbao, Spain
,celebrated the
10th anniversary
of its
Frank Gehry-
designed
Guggenheim Museum
, which helped trans-form the industrial city into a cultural capital, with theinauguration of a massive new outdoor work of art inOctober, according to artknowledgenews.com.The “
Red Arches
,” a huge metal structure over
LaSalve
bridge next to the museum, designed by
French
artist
Daniel Buren
, joins two other permanent worksat the Guggenheim – “
Puppy
,” a dog in flowers by
Jeff Koons
which “guards” the museum, and a
giant spider
by the French artist
Louise Bourgeois
.As part of its 10th anniversary celebrations, themuseum is also showing a retrospective of US artuntil April 12 called “Art In The USA: 300 Yearsof Innovation” that features some 200 works from120 artists.
FLUSHING FURY …
A
toilet
that
flushes
tothe sound of
Italy’snational anthem
was
seized
by
police
innorthern Italy,
igniting
a big patriotic
debate
,according to the
BBC
on Nov. 6.The offending
naughtynecessary
, the creation of artists Eleonora Chiari andSandra Goldschmied wason display at the
BolzanoMuseum of Modern Art
.Prosecutors say the
Fratelli d’Italia
anthemis a national emblem and
protected
from
ridicule
. Defense lawyers for the muse-um argued that while it has patriotic and sentimentalvalue, the anthem is not a national symbol.The prosecution claimed that playing the anthemwhile flushing a crapper is an offence to the nation. Theycited a decree issued this year by the former governmentof
Silvio Berlusconi,
a role-model if there ever was one,defining the national anthem as an emblem and propertyof the state.After a judgment, arguments would begin over whether this marks a precedent or is just a flash in the pan, the BBC report said.
SHOULD’VE WAITED ‘TIL HALLOWEEN …
A man threw a bucket of red paint into
Rome’s TreviFountain
on Oct. 19, coloring the waters of the
18th-century
monument
bright blood-red
in front of a crowdof astonished tourists and locals, the
Associated Press
reported. The bizarre act of vandalism was apparentlyinspired by the
Futurists
of the early 20th century. Theman, wearing a beret and a light-colored jacket, disap- peared into the crowd. The fountain started spurting red,a spectacle tourists immediately began photographing.Police arrived and technicians restored a clear flow.The monument has been a tourist spot since
Fellini’s
1960 film “
La Dolce Vita
,” which featured actress
AnitaEkberg
seductively splashing in the fountain, the NewYork Times said. Experts said the baroque fountain was
not permanently
damaged.The news agency ANSA reported a
box
was foundnearby containing leaflets by an
unknown
group claim-ing responsibility, “
FTM Futurist Action 2007
.” Theleaflets said the group aims to
battle
against “everythingand everyone with a spirit of healthy violence” and to turnthis “grey bourgeois society into a triumph of color.” Thered paint symbolized the
Rome Film Festival
’s red carpet,and was meant to protest
expenses
incurred at the event.
SUPPER ON WEB …
On Oct. 27 officials in
Milan,Italy
, posted on the Web a high-resolution image of
Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Last Supper.”
At
16 billionpixels
, this image is 1,600 times
finer
than those takenwith a 10 mega-pixel digital camera, the
HoustonChronicle
reported.The high resolution will allow experts to examinedetails of the 15th century wall painting that they other-wise could not – including traces of drawings Leonardo put down before painting.This image allows viewers to look at details asthough they were
inches
from the artwork, in contrast toregular photographs, which become grainy as you zoomin, said curator
Alberto Artioli
. “You can also note thestate of degradation the painting is in.”
DYLAN IN DEUTCHLAND …
An exhibitionof artworks by musician
Bob Dylan
opened at the
Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz
museum Oct. 28 in
Chemnitz
, an eastern
German
city, the
Associated Press
reported.“The Drawn Blank Series” has 170 colored versionsof pictorial motifs, including variations of previously published drawings and sketches.Dylan produced the drawings between 1989 and1992, and published them in a book. Curator
IngridMoessinger
had 332 of the works specially reprinted and painted, and Dylan then selected 170 works for display.
PEOPLE NEWS …
Chicago Gallery News
founder
Natalie van Straaten
announced her retirement Oct.31, after 25 years as editor and publisher. Employee of five years
Virginia “Ginny” Berg
bought the magazine, becoming publisher Nov. 1. Van Straaten, foundingexecutive director of the
Art Dealers Association of Chicago
(CADA), also retired from that position after 20years, to be replaced by
Lynne Remington
. Remingtonworked with CADA on projects for 11 years, and was thefounding project director for the annual
Vision
program.
Catherine Edelman
, of the photography gallery at 300W. Superior by the same name, was elected presidentof CADA on Oct. 25, replacing outgoing 2004 - 2007 president
Roy Boyd
.
Chicago Gallery News
began inthe early 1980s during the time the
River North
gallerydistrict was starting …
Oak Park
artist, CAC Member, and owner of
Art Gecko
gallery
Lisa Nordstrom
was selectedfrom hundreds of entries worldwide to be one of 39artists in “Red BullArt of Can Chicago,”which was at the
River East ArtCenter
, Nov. 9-18. Nordstrom designedtwo fully functional pieces out of RedBull energy drink cans: a miniatureshopping bag called“Ready to Go,” andsuitcase entitled“Traveling Light.”
GALLERY, MUSEUM, VENUE AND SHOWNEWS …
The
Museum of Contemporary Art
on Oct.29 named as its next director
Madeleine Grynsztejn
,a former
Art Institute
curator for 20th-Century paint-ing and sculpture with knowledge of the area art scene,according to the
Chicago Tribune
. Upon her Marcharrival, Grynsztejn will be the
first woman
and sev-enth person to lead the 40-year-old MCA. Currentlyshe is senior curator of painting and sculpture at the
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
, where shehas worked since Sept. 2000. She will succeed
RobertFitzpatrick
, stepping down next year after a decade atthe helm of the MCA.
DON’T MISS …
McCord Gallery
, 9602 W. Creek Rd., Palos Park, 708-671-0648, “
Holiday Shoppe
,”group show, closes Dec. 21 …
FLATFILEgalleries
,217 N. Carpenter, 312-491-1190, “
New Dialect
,” groupshow with
Robert McGuire
, photography,
MichaelGeorge
&
Craig Hansen
, paintings;
Man Bartlett
,“
Entry Point
,” drawings; “
Flora/Fauna
,” group showwith
Marco Ambrosi
,
Jozef Sumicrast
,
Gail Kaplan
,
Barbara Levy Kipper
and
Beth Moon
, photographyand sculpture;
Natalia Ivancevich
, “
White Forest
,”installation, closes Dec. 22 …
KN Gallery
, 875 N.Michigan, Ste. 2515, 312-640-5550,
Fernando Botero
,“
Fernando Botero’s 75th Birthday
,” paintings, pastelsand sculptures, closes Dec. 29 …
Chicago Art SourceGallery
, 1871 N. Clybourn, 2nd fl., 773-248-3100,
Marc Hauser, “Sinners, Story Tellers & Socialites-40Years of Photography,”
photography, closes Dec. 31.
an opinionated look at what’s happening . . .
By Shag
3
PROBLEMS COPING
in the
art world
? Feel
ripped-off
or
short-shrifted
? Betrayed?
Screwed
?
Hate
Shag? Or did some-thing
positive
happen for a
change
? What do you think about thecurrent state of
art news
sorta good
,
bad
or
really ugly
?
TELLSHAG – E-mail
your comments to
shag@caconline.org
, writing
“art news comment”
in the subject line.
“Ready to Go” and “Traveling Light,”by Lisa Nordstrom.Puppy (1992-95), by Jeff Koons, Courtesy Guggenheim MuseumBilbao.Italian Prosecutors saythe Italian national anthemshould not be ridiculed.The waters of Trevi Fountain ran red with paint.
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