Michael Workman

Playboy magazine has long held an iron grip on the identity of Chicagoans, with the traditional argument about its success divided among two distinct camps--though only one side ever really gets heard. First is that the popular imagination of the "girl next door," every man's favorite centerfold gal, has helped for decades to shepherd tongue-wagging droves of hardworking stiffs obediently through life to their graves. Women are little better than toys for men, like DVD players or cruise missiles. Playboy's major success, goes this argument, may only be having long championed mainstream fantasies of mediocrity rendered in all the afterglow of domestic prosperity. Impulse control: horny males go to work in the morning, come home at night to the supine wife and die happy. And why not? A pious few may wag their tongues in a different way (and here's the second argument), but it's still just wagging. After all, beneath her apron the girl next door has all the naked beauty of a Botticelli. Read the questionnaire and the message comes through loud and clear: women have all the intelligence and integrity required of admiration equal to men... as well as other, equally impressive qualities. And Playboy put its word where its mouth was: in a magazine world dominated by political neutrality, Playboy unabashedly used its pages to champion women's rights, sexual freedom and civil liberties. Yes, the girl next door, or any girl for that matter, was a force to be reckoned with.

And reckon with Playboy's legacy the Hyde Park Art Center will. It's a pretty tall order. Given the diddling, often pathetic and wildly pandering tastes demonstrated by the majority of our local art and cultural institutions, this show flirts in a dangerous way with spectacular insignificance. But common cause can be found in the fight against a ceaseless self-loathing impulse to inveigh against art. And the Hyde Park Art Center, of course, has a proven history of working past the high gates of the Midwestern art world's bunker mentality toward a wider public: if nothing else, by their absence this show may offer an informative look back at the field of corpses who have opposed creative freedom.

Displayed from Playboy's fifty-year-old corporate collection are works by such artists as Robert Lostutter, Seymour Rosofsky, Phyllis Bramson and Ed Paschke. Not active much of late, these took art to a wider world , harnessing Playboy's formidable influence by filling the magazine's pages with imagery that came to form the grass roots of groups such as the Hairy Who, Nonplussed Some and, in time, the New Conceptualists. The latter handily cast down their forbears and found a secure place in the bosom of the universities as the magazine slowly outstripped its Chicago identity. "I Read it For the Art: Chicago, Creativity and Playboy" makes the Art Center's nod to that history under Playboy's internationalist umbrella seem now like a cry for help. No comparable outlet exists today and the local promise of the university-as-haven has born the bitter fruit of a too-comfortable population of artists, aloof to all but established approaches for making and presenting art. In this environment, even the lustiest of single-minded fantasies will no longer do.

Still life with cupcake wrapper

Among the range of positive qualities that Laura Letinsky's still lifes have to recommend them, her interjection of psychologically abject elements should register high on the barometer. Dirty dishes and discarded candy wrappers are posed alongside, for instance, the bowls of fruit more that make up the more traditional still-life image. Even more radical are the exceptions of traditional historical cues in her photographs.

Take her C-print "Untitled #77" depicting a tabletop, bare but for piles of strewn crumbs and metallic cupcake wrappers. What to make of this evidence of a previous abundance? Precisely that: nothing remains to be pictured but what remains of an apparently consumed or perhaps squandered abundance. Her "Untitled #35" depicts a blue china plate with three pears, some scraped and withered, alongside candy fruit, made of jelly and coated with a sugary skin. Stains and scrapes cover the wooden table on which all appear, a single shaft of sunlight illuminating the arrangement. In the bottom-right-hand corner of the image, a lonely metal pop-can tab lies in the shadow, dully aglow with reflected light. At once enervating and attractive in their simplicity, the ostensible goal of Letinsky's photographs remains a melancholy embrace of visual sentiment.

"I Read it For the Art: Chicago, Creativity and Playboy" shows at the Hyde Park Art Center, 5307 South Hyde Park, (773)324-5520, through April 24. Laura Letinsky shows at the Renaissance Society, University of Chicago, Cobb Hall, 5811 South Ellis, (773)702-8670, through April 19.

(2004-03-03)

Also by Michael Workman

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Careers are made and broken in Fiona Macdonald's "Museum Emotions," a video broken into ten ten-minute clips depicting art world machinations at work
(2004-03-02)

Tip of the Week
Though the adjective "colorful" isn't always used as a compliment, the title of this show at the Pilsen neighborhood's Fleur Gallery is meant in only the most positive light
(2004-02-25)

Eye Exam
"Inner Positive," at the West Loop's Klein Art Works, opens an array of joy, concentration, longing, serenity and decisive action that's a pleasure to view
(2004-02-25)

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Those planning to visit London artist Nathaniel Rackowe's installation at the Garden Fresh space should bring their dancing shoes
(2004-02-18)

The pulpit of poetry
(2004-02-18)

Eye Exam
(2004-02-18)

Tuman's
(2004-02-11)

Eye Exam
(2004-02-11)

Let's get it on
(2004-02-11)

Tip of the Week
(2004-02-03)

Eye Exam
(2004-02-03)

Eye Exam
(2004-01-28)

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