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 Eye Exam Wicker Park's Fourth Wave
Wicker Park has long been at the center of a struggle between commerce
and hipster culture. Witness the recent last-minute legal wrangling
necessary to save the Double Door from closing to make way for a retail
store. Much of the ink that's spilled covering the tug-of-war between
these two elements frames the tension in terms of the neighborhood's
nightlife, street culture and what seems an ever-stronger push to
gentrify. Occasionally, the culture gets discussed in terms of the small
amount of art that gets made and shown in the area--often more art
cynicism than art criticism. Controversy was manufactured recently about
a billboard for Axe Body Spray on Milwaukee, for instance, and the ad's
graffiti style pointed to as corporate cooptation of an art form.
Questions were even raised as to whether this kind of art should be
painted over by the city's anti-graffiti task force (equal opportunity
destruction). Answer: clearly not, since it's private property and the
space was paid for. Even less palatable speculation followed on whether
or not the billboard was art (no: it's an advertisement), but most
offensive of all was how art got used in this discussion--as art often
gets used in the struggle to reinforce claims of hipness--a phenomenon
Peter Schjeldahl at the New Yorker once termed "bondage-and-discipline."
Wicker Park's art culture has a traceable history. Back in 2003, I
wrote that few spaces survive much longer than five years. That's still
true. In the first wave, the so-called "Uncomfortable Spaces" such as
Beret International and Tough Gallery circa 1990 attempted to offer a
way to view work outside the "white cube" of traditional gallery spaces
in Chicago. The second wave attended the opening of Bodybuilder and
Sportsman Gallery in its original location on Division Street (now in
the West Loop). The third wave came with the opening of The Pond,
Standard Gallery and 1/Quarterly space, which entered into a suicide
pact and all closed at the same time in 2003. But now a fourth wave has
come, along with a new group of spaces: 40000 on Winchester, Booster and
Seven on Marshfield, Artledge on Western and Corbett vs. Dempsey on
Ashland. These first two comprise what seems a representative sample of
this newest wave.
Britton Bertran, a local curator who started 40000 a few months back,
wants to run a pro gallery. It's a handsome storefront, with vinyl
lettering on the windows, clean walls, floors and evenly distributed
track lighting. A lot of work went into getting the place up and running
and, after a first few shows, he's well on his way to getting the
recognition he wants. Up now is "Social D," a show of paintings by
Nathan Redwood. The "D" in the title can refer to anything, we're told,
"Deviance, Destruction, Deconstruction, Decomposition, etcetera." His
images picture fantastical social scenes in a scribble-drawing style,
often verging on psychedelic: in "Untitled (Big Pink)," men with twenty
penises wander through a scene straight out of a hallucinatory Breughel.
In "Untitled (Porn)," a group of naked women are posed like sexy dolls
on a park bench beside a middle-aged man in the ecstatic throes of
listening to guitar music. These paintings aren't for the fainthearted:
they challenge and ridicule society with flashy displays of people at
their gaudy, animalistic worst. It's risky work on display, hedonism
amplified.
Bertran hopes that 40000 will play a part in the formation of a new
art district. Not necessarily so Steph Pavone and Brett Reily, students
soon to graduate from the Art Institute of Chicago Critical and Visual
Studies Program. Both got into running their exhibition space as a way
of showing their friends. Their space, as many such spaces in the
neighborhood have been, brushes off the polish of a traditional gallery
and lets hang out all the silver-painted radiators, the tin-press
ceiling. For them, this space is more a project than a business. They're
currently showing Ryan Swanson's "Adventures in Decadence," a title more
appropriate to Redwood's work than his own: Swanson takes pieces from
found furniture and reassembles them into organic sculptural
installations. As an added bonus for his show at Booster and Seven, he
altered each piece to suit some architectural aspect of the room. His
"Pucker Up," for instance, a sculpture with a red plastic chair joined
to a looming cloth form rises to a peak then descends in a flow of
patterned fabric under a floor grate.
There's much more to say about each of these spaces and the impact of
their revival on the neighborhood, and how they may chart a new course
in its art history. But these two spaces are, importantly, situated at
the polar opposites of professional gallery versus personal experiment.
These two points of view depend on one another in art as well. What's
more, both share something perhaps characteristic of this new wave: the
secret meaning of their names. Both asked that I not reveal the meaning
of the names 40000 and Booster and Seven. Part of the fun? Sure. And a
mystery, with any hope, that makes it all just a little harder to
bondage-and-discipline. Nathan Redwood shows at 40000, 1001 North Winchester,
(773)342-4930, through July 1. Ryan Swanson shows at Booster and Seven,
1048 North Marshfield, Suite 1F, through July 20.
Also by Michael Workman Eye Exam
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