Bradtke`s Art Indebted To Popular Culture

March 30, 1990|By Alan G. Artner, Art critic.

The effects of popular culture on the so-called fine arts are everywhere apparent, though
some of the least damaging have come to painters from film.
Peter Bradtke, a West German artist now living in New York, is one of these painters. His
indebtedness is clear in each of the works at the Hokin Kaufman Gallery, 210 W. Superior St.

Most of the paintings derive in atmosphere from the hard-boiled American genre much
beloved by the French who called it film noir. But the male figures are all self-portraits, and
in the more recent canvases, a cinematically composed photorealist manner coexists with
passages more expressionistic and abstract.
The chief interest of the pictures is this coexistence and the skill with which it has been
worked out. By all rights, it should look more forced than it does, but the naturalness with
which Bradtke combines the two pretty much gives the works their art.
Everything else, but especially the Brobdingnagian scale, speaks more to a species of
professional, eye-catching sign painting of the kind one still occasionally sees outside firstrun movie theaters in Europe. (Through April 21.)
NELSEN VALENTINE (Rosenfield, 212 W. Superior St.): Valentine is a young sky and
landscape painter who here works through some basic modernist points. He reduces his
photo-derived images to elemental shapes rendered only in gray, black and white. These
shapes retain as much a relationship to the verifiable world as do, say, Alfred Stieglitz`s sky
photographs.
But rather than present equivalents for interior states, Valentine stresses the fiction of
representational painting by superimposing rectangles and squares of varnish that emphasize
the canvas surface.
This has a neutral, affectless aspect in the paintings. However, the artist allows a certain
(welcome) sensuousness to creep into his charcoal-and- graphite drawings.
In the end, it`s all a bit elementary, carrying the tone of a lesson and not much else. Of
course, some large undercutting irony may also be at work, but if so, one has to be told, as it
is not at all apparent from this group of pieces that succeeds awfully well in being distant and
voguishly mute.
(Through April 21.)

JERZY DUDA-GRACZ (Gallery 58, 18 E. Huron St.): Art from Eastern Europe continues to
make its way to Chicago, most recently in the form of paintings by Poland`s 49-year-old
Duda-Gracz.
An academic trained in painting, drawing and printmaking, the artist taught for several years
in Cracow and has shown in a great number of exhibitions.
His style has much to do with both caricature and a vein of fantasy known as magic realism.
The combination allows him to convey a certain amount of contemporary social discontent as
myth or allegory.

On the whole, Duda-Gracz is a moral artist who rails at the conditions of existential man.
Images of sickness, deformity and decay are common in his works.
Most curious is a long series of landscapes referring to a prehistoric period of geological
formation. The paintings depict vast, blasted plains populated with figures carrying tattered
banners as if in the wake of some terrible form of destruction. (Through May 18.)

What Ever Happened to Hip?

Somewhere along the line, the counterculture hepcat
outsider came in from the fringe and became a massmarket commodity.
February 22, 2000|MARY McNAMARA | TIMES STAFF WRITER
We've lived with it for so long, it's difficult to say when the reversal began. When Coca-Cola
sent a replica of Ken Kesey's party bus on the road to promote Fruitopia? When the Gap
decided that a bored sneer was the ultimate American look? When Joe Camel first donned a
zoot suit and shades to hang with his jazz-scribbling, joe-swilling buddies?
Or perhaps it was more recently, when William Shatner stood Beatnik-lonely in front of a
mike in a smoky room reciting bastardized lyrics to the Animals' "We Gotta Get Out of This
Place" to promote Priceline.com.

That commercial says it all, demanding that we get out of this place to a world of four-star
hotels and swanky restaurants, a world we can enter through money and the Internet. But, it
hastens to add, we can do this and still be hip, because Shatner is being ironic, see, and irony
is the ultimate hallmark of hip, ergo William Shatner is hip and if William Shatner can be hip,
well then anyone can.
And we all want to be hip, right?
During the last 40 years, Americans have watched as hip moved from a suspicious-looking
counterculture to a consumer-driven mandate. It has become our national currency, our social
deity. Everyone from Tina Brown to Target wants to be hip. At clothing companies, car
companies, cola companies, coffee companies, dot-coms and, of course, in nearly every
conceivable publication, the directive is constant and inarguable--get hip, stay hip and then
get hipper. Hip sells. And, more important, hip buys.
Of course, there is a problem here, or at least a dilemma. Hip, by historical definition, is a
version of life that defies the mainstream, defines the American rebel. That's why we like it.
So anything that shows up at the galleria or on TV, or even on the cover of Rolling Stone is
not hip. Mass production is what hip rebels against--mass production, man, is square.
"We all want to be young, we all want to be unique and cutting edge, and hip has become a
short-hand for that," says David Ulin, an L.A. journalist who has written extensively about
the Beats. "But most of us don't have time to be true iconoclasts, so we settle for a look, for a
style, for buying iconoclastic."

Yet given all the goals we, as a society, could have, we choose hipness. Why not wisdom? Or
serenity? Or usefulness? Even sophistication seems a bit more, well, adult.
Hip, we seem to forget, is more than a synonym for trendy or new. It is a legitimate
documentable counterculture, the product of post-World War I alienation and urban
modernism, the fraternal twin of jazz.
The original hipsters were the hepcats, young black men living in Harlem in the 1930s,
whose lives revolved around bebop. They spoke in slang and dressed sharp, slicked their hair
back and smoked marijuana, then the ultimate demarcation between hep and square. After
World War II, marijuana gave way to heroin and hep became hip, an oblique homage to
opium smokers of the previous century who got their high horizontally, lying "on the hip."
From Bebop Jazzmen to White Intellectuals
By the late 1940s, hipsters could be found in every city, in every color, as Allen Ginsberg
observed, "dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry
fix/angelheaded hipsters burning for the heavenly connection . . ."

Intentionally or not, Ginsberg brought the term "hip" into the vernacular of the intellectual
middle class, where it was nailed to the floor a few months later by then-angry-youngnovelist Norman Mailer in his windy dissertation on hip titled "The White Negro," which
appeared in the journal Dissent. After Jack Kerouac published "On the Road," marrying the
hipster tradition with the predominantly white Beat subculture, what had been an urban
counterculture of the racially and economically disenfranchised found its way into the hearts
and minds of disaffected suburban youth.
Although always self-conscious about its appearance, hip remained risky, dangerous, angry
and genuinely displaced from the mainstream. It was not something parents handed their
children credit cards to buy. It was inextricably bound to the drug culture, as the body count
attests: Charlie Parker, William Burroughs, Lenny Bruce and, later, Hendrix, Joplin,
Morrison, Belushi, Cobain--the truly hip often died young, broke and by overdose. And those
who survived, or thrived, did so in an atmosphere of constant youthful insouciance--late
nights, missed rent, hangovers and withdrawals, social rejection and often questionable
personal hygiene.
When the children of the baby boom came of age and embraced the hip sensibility, morphing
it into various political and social spinoff movements, it was only a matter of time before the
counterculture became the culture. In the '80s, the hippies turned into yuppies with jobs and
stock options, but also with a perpetual desire to know what was the next hip thing so that
they could get it too, in the luxe package, of course.