Michael Workman

This past weekend prompted pangs of despondency during a visit to the not-for-profit Gallery 312's clearance sale, held in a room in a building at 845 West Fulton Market where it has lived since being displaced from its original home at 312 North May Street. Plans to build out one of the building's downstairs retail spaces for use as the gallery's new exhibition center went south after they learned that the permits for the building were not in order as they had believed before moving in. A few weeks after opening doors at the new location, the police simply showed up and shut them down.

They've been unable to reopen since. And so passes another significant Chicago art space into history. It's hard to let this particular gallery go, an art space whose address was the same as the city's area code, and a space which at times came close to serving as a barometer for the radical changes in the local art culture. It was a phenomenon manifested by a sensibility imparted it from the "alternative" movement, a dissenting art movement that seeks to pick up where museums and commercial galleries leave off, while reaching into the same limited pool of resources required to survive. Director Paul Brenner, a slight, effete man, while having no particular business acumen to speak of, certainly strove to provide a place for this phenomenon to grow unabated, which it did, and for the militant strains it bore to eventually infest and consume its will to live, which it finally has. It's somehow appropriate, since "alternative" now signals an ever-more-clumsy calumny with those cultural evils that it sought to disrupt: careerism and rank financial opportunism that centers, these days, on the art student, eagerly plundered by alternatives for both cash and cache.

So it goes. Yet, memories persist of 312 as the first art space I ever went to with a band performing, of a space willing to accommodate art needing extraordinary measures to install and exhibit, and of conceptual work that revealed the current taint of art culture's narcissism with all the honesty of a patient at group therapy. But there was something more to it than that. Wandering through the stacks of discarded office equipment, plastic vitrines and serving saucers that are the detritus of the old operation, a few framed posters leaned against a back wall: one of them from a Harry Callahan show at 312 from March 1995, back when that boldest of this city's documentary photographers was still with us. Signed, they remained stacked in the corner unnoticed while flat files, televisions and fax machines were carted off. I sprang for one and couldn't help but hope that somebody, anybody would notice the rest.

Vision 10

Basking in the glow of summer makes it difficult to draw anyone indoors long enough to view art. In a move to counter this, every year at this time the Chicago Art Dealer's Association organizes Vision, a coordinated effort that involves the city's two main gallery districts. Aside from the exhibitions opening at all the CADA member galleries, there are lectures, panel discussions and an opening-night walking tour that always draws out art enthusiasts in droves. It's a roster meant to appeal to a broad range of tastes: those with an intellectual curiosity about art, for instance, should check out Zolla Lieberman Gallery on July 16 when they'll host a discussion with Sun-Times critic Margaret Hawkins on "Beauty Truth and the Making of Art." Or stop into the West Loop's Flatfile Galleries on July 20 for "The Critical Eye," a walking tour with Newcity's own photography critic Michael Weinstein. Are you a collector wondering what happens to your work when it's lent out for shows? On July 20, Marx-Saunders Gallery will host "Sharing Collections," a discussion about the experience of collectors who lent glass work to the Block Museum's current exhibition, "Sculpting in Glass." Artists will find something useful at this year's Vision as well: a portfolio review and Q-and-A session at Carrie Secrist will offer a glimpse behind the workings of the gallery-selection process. Centered as usual in River North, patrons can walk from Roy Boyd Gallery to Andrew Bae to Carl Hammer and Catherine Edelman Gallery then jaunt over to the West Loop for more. It's a noble attempt to work you up into an attention span longer than the usual milliseconds, and this year marks ten years of Vision. More information and a complete list of programming is available online at www.chicagoartdealers.org or by calling (312)649-0065.

(2005-07-19)

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