Where the Wild Things Were

Is there—was there ever—a Chicago esthetic? Surveying work from the 50 years following World War II, a recent show at the city’s Museum of Contemporary Art presented a complex history of movements, groups and individual talents in the nation’s third-largest art center.

through repeated visits to the ethnographic collections of the Field Museum of Natural History and through its in-class use of some 90,000 lecture slides that encompassed images from every corner of the globe.

At the height of the Imagist era, other practices also continued to flourish. Examples in the show included the early, exquisitely detailed still lifes of David Sharpe (who later—in New York, ironically—became a stylized figure painter), the suggestively intertwined “tubes” of Frank Piatek and the abstract canvas “Carnival” (1960) of Ruth Duckworth. Also extremely sensuous—though, strictly speaking, Imagists—are the large fiber tapestries of Claire Zeisler. A pioneer in turning textile design and weaving from craft to art, Zeisler started her career late—with a first one-person show at age 50. Yet as a skilled practitioner who was also a passionate collector (with holdings ranging from early American to Native American and purchased at roadside stands), she opened the way for a second generation of Chicago fiber artists headed by Anne Wilson.

The Imagists, who were known (then viewed as the antithesis of all things Chicago) had their rare advocates in Dennis Kowalski, who created geometric installations and site-specific editions, and Ed Flood, whose work on murals, and Paul Brach, a founder (in 1973) of the artists’ cooperative N.A.M.E.

Gallery and longtime MCA security chief, who gave a 1979 performance at the museum that consisted of standing guard over his $100 shoe.

In the middle of this section I had the job of turning a corner to confront a weird, quasi-Imagist painting that used to hang in my own Chicago living room. Sorry Wrong Number (1975) is a pseudo-psychic canvas by Paul Lamantia in his signature style—a series of glows, it depicts—how can I put this delicately—two scaly, stitched-skin, pendulous breasts and a penis.

In a TV in the space nearby, a video by Tom Palazzolo, a WTTW filmmaker, shows a character holds a telephone receiver to its featureless, vastly overstated “head”; the other, squatting, prods that bulbous growth with a cardboard shaft that protrudes from its anus.

Paschke, who has helped make such imagery common fare in Chicago, once famously remarked that if he had not been an artist he would have been a professional Melodrama side, this statement gets to the heart of the Imagist mystique. Their art arises in a mental no-man’s-land, where all the boundaries—between humor and horror, hysteria (Wirsum), bondage (Bamberger), masturbation (Nutt), other people’s windows (Brown), organ-centered male sexual fantasies (Ross), fetish dolls, and animals (Paschke)—can, for once be exuberantly shown.

The titles of the last two sections of the show, “Pluralism” (1977-1985) and “Un)assigned Identities, 1986-1995,” were a tactic admission that, for better or for worse, Chicago has produced no single movement in the last 20 years that seizes the imagination with the force of the Monster Roster or the Hairy Who—nations, the former a group of global pluralism, played out against the lingering legacy of Imagism. An attempt at counter-Imagist abstraction began to emerge as early as 1971 when a handful of abstract painters—only one of whom, Vera Klement, was included in WTTW’s selections—exhibited their work at the “The Five.” In 1981, Ito, Piatek, Loving and William Conger (the last represented here by a typically exquisite and sharp-edged, multicolored stripe against a dark background) formed a collective called the “Allusive Abstractionists.” Obviously, not everyone has the Schulz-Baum gift for nomenclature.

Imagist-related artists of this period include the painters Richard Hull, who has made small figurative paintings of finely composed of swirls, in houses with a dreamlike geometry of jumbled planes; Jim Lutes, who places distorted figures in more-or-less recognizable settings; and Barbara Grad, whose dissociative, bruise-toned canvases often feature free-floating limbs and disembodied heads. Warnek participated in a 1981 try at recapturing the old Imagist high jinks with a show called “Blue Light/Planet Picasso.” This neo-Happening, held in the loft of Jim Brinsfield and Darrinka Novitovic, featured New Wave music and a performance featuring a man in a gorilla suit. Like “Hairy Who II,” it was partially reconstructed in “Art in Chicago”—but to disadvantageous effect.