Michael Workman

Bad feelings, bilious public sniping and nonstop drama have rocked the art world over the last few weeks with the well-reported announcements surrounding the shifts in the city's spring art fair schedule. Briefly recapped, the story goes as follows: the longtime producers of the art fair at Navy Pier, Thomas Blackman and Associates (TBA), will move to a tent. Their event, Art Chicago, will happen next year in July instead of May. Appointed by the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority, Pfingsten Publishing, who produces Art Miami and the New York Art Expo, will stage an art fair at the pier in May. Expressions of Culture, Inc. who organize the annual sculpture show SOFA, is miffed at getting passed over by the MPEA in the bidding for the May slot and are looking into putting on their own fair somewhere else. And the MPEA has reportedly filed a lawsuit against TBA for last year's unpaid rent.

What a mess. So, where does all this leave art lovers? Part of the reason this happened has to do with the need for an art fair that connects the city culturally and artistically with the rest of the world. It's essential to Chicago's standing as a world-class city. But separating the wheat from the chaff will take some doing: though Pfingsten was given a multi-year contract for the pier, and Art Chicago has clearly gone into survival mode, even abandoning its River North headquarters, what these two come up with in terms of next year's programming will matter most.

Both, however, are scrambling to find a toehold: Pfingsten has not yet announced any programming plans and TBA hasn't announced where they'll pitch their tents. Pfingsten has hired Ilana Vardy, an Art Chicago alum who "knows where all the skeletons are buried," says Pfingsten spokesman Robert Spaderman. Citing the fact that they've only just received the contract, both Spaderman and Vardy refuse to elaborate on plans for the fair, saying only that they'll take their mandate from the public and international community. That mandate so far includes outreach in the form of free booth space to "qualified cultural institutions," something Art Chicago has always done. And of Art Chicago programming? "We're still finalizing dates," says TBA assistant director Heather Hubbs. Plans for Stray Show also remain uncertain, hinging on finding a location such as last year's warehouse on Kingsbury to stage it in. "I don't know if we'll do it again this year. Tom was really surprised he got it last year," says Hubbs of the Kingsbury space. "Plans were to make it into a parking lot."

Pfingsten has no plans to stage anything like Stray, opting instead to focus on building ties with the city's educational system by offering youth tours at the fair. "Stray Show had a lot of validity, it was very similar to Scope (in New York City) and shows put on in Los Angeles and London." says Vardy. "And I thought the Invitational was very good. But we're not going to pretend like we're the fair for everybody. We're very focused in our niche."

Mexican mayhem

Another Chicago institution with international scope, Pilsen's Mexican Fine Arts Museum, hasn't had any trouble keeping up a quality program. Guanajuato-born artist Marcos Raya's show "Fetishizing the Imaginery" offers up sprawling altars and surrealist doctor's offices of assemblage. Alongside the entrance wall, cabinets, glass cases and desks are stacked high with found objects including anatomy dolls, rolls of beige gauze and a prancing nude holding aloft a huge plastic hypodermic. Portraits of nurses hang on the walls above, wearing skullcaps and surgical masks, some in sunglasses, faces totally obscured. A severed hand lays on a table of test tubes and plastic vials. In his large-scale paintings, Raya often references his own studio. In the show's title image, the artist makes his self-portrait in fedora, jeans and cowboy boots into a collage of real and the imagined: surrounded by video cameras, TV monitors and with the Gehry bandshell looming in the distance, he tools with a laptop. Onscreen is his "The Anguish of Being and Nothingness in the Universe," reproduced in multiples on an easel-bound canvas and in a stack of prints flowing from an inkjet printer. Surrounded by sculptures from the show, two robotic dogs roam the floor. Raya also offers up a series of vitrined skulls that evoke the fetishes used in Day of the Dead ceremonies, outfitted with medical, dental and circuit board parts and designs. Nose cavities are filled with huge drill bolts, surfaces carefully treated with ink and gold foil.

In keeping with the museum's educational mission, a series of paintings by Malaquias Montoya opens this Friday. His silkscreens and paintings, such as the harrowing "Ruth, Snyder, first woman executed, Sing Sing Prison, 1928," evidence an existentialist debt to Francis Bacon.

Death of a painter

Last week, Chicago lost one of its brightest, most revered sons. Leon Golub passed away after surgery at the age of 82. Educated at the University of Chicago and the Art Institute, after serving in the army during World War II Golub lived on the 16th arrondissement in Paris and later moved to New York. From there, he painted excoriating portraits of world leaders such as Richard Nixon and Fidel Castro and employed a figurative style to combine social concerns with acutely psychological depictions of violence. Golub's subject matter followed from his process, achieving a signature style by scraping the surface of his canvases with a meat cleaver. His sense of humor was equally dark. After selling a group of paintings in the 1980s to wealthy collector Charles Saatchi, Golub told interviewer Adrian Searle that he hoped his paintings would "fuck him up."

Marcos Raya, "Fetishizing the Imaginery" and Malaquias Montoya, "Premeditated: Meditations on Capital Punishment" show at the Mexican Fine Arts Museum, 177 North State Street, (312)744-1424. Through July 18.

(2004-08-17)

Also by Michael Workman

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Messinger has long had a special relationship with the Chicago Transit Authority, beginning with a column centered around public transportation that he wrote while working for the Pioneer Press newspaper, Oak Leaves
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Eye Exam
Rich Lehl's canvases are an adventure in fantasies of a gothic banal
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Tip of the Week
As part of its last hurrah, the program marking the rundown to the end of the space as patrons know it includes the far-fetched and thoroughly marvelous "Mt. Baldy Expedition" project
(2004-07-27)

Eye Exam
No clearer statement about the value of arts in our culture has recently been put forth than the 9/11 commission's repeated use of the phrase "lack of imagination"
(2004-07-27)

Tip of the Week
(2004-07-20)

Tip of the Week
(2004-07-13)

There's no place like home
(2004-07-13)

Eye Exam
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Soapbox Studs
(2004-06-22)

Eye Exam
(2004-06-22)

Plasticman
(2004-06-16)

Eye Exam
(2004-06-16)

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