• I am very stoked for my theater viewing this weekend.  On Saturday night, I’m off to see The Hypocrites’ version of Oedipus, directed by Artistic Director and sexy beast god of all things theatrically exciting Sean Graney.  Promenade staging, three actors playing all the characters, a punk sensibility, an original music score – of course the Hypocrites will put their indelible, unmistakable stamp on Greek tragedy.  On Sunday night, I’ll be catching Keith Huff’s play Mud People at Mary-Arrchie, directed by my friend, talented hyphenate actor-director Carlo Garcia.  I’m a huge Keith Huff fan, so I’m as excited as Speidi on a plane out of Costa Rica to see what Carlo and the rest of the rockin’ Mary-Arrchie crew have in store for Keith’s play.  And hey, he’s going to be HUGE after A Steady Rain premieres this fall on Broadway with Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig playing Chicago cops (speaking of huge…suspension of disbelief…get your minds out of the gutter, people!), so this is a great time to experience Huff’s writing before all the hype sets in.
• Speaking of hype (and all in a good way), the cast of the touring production of Steppenwolf’s August: Osage County, playing the Oriental Theater (no, not the Steppenwolf Main Stage) February 2-14, 2010, has been announced.  We always knew that Academy Award winner Estelle Parsons, who replaced our very own Tony winner Deanna Dunagan on Broadway, will anchor the tour as matriarch Violet Weston.  What’s great though is that there’s a whole tribe of Chicago actors joining her on the tour:  Shannon Cochran, who co-starred with Michael Shannon in the original off-Broadway production of August author Tracy Letts’ Bug, and last seen in Chicago at Writer’s Theater in The Lion in Winter is taking on the role of eldest daughter Barbara, which catapulted Steppenwolf ensemble member Amy Morton to New York theater stardom and a Tony nomination.  This pairing should be kick-awesome.  Other Chicago actors on the tour include Steve Key (love him) playing Little Charles; Amy Warren (loved her in the Goodman’s Rabbit Hole and Steppenwolf’s When the Messenger Is Hot, still kicking myself for missing her in the original Next Theater production of Adding Machine:  The Musical) as the youngest daughter Karen; Jeff Still as Barbara’s husband, Bill; and Marcus Nelson as the Sheriff.  Go Chicago!
• NEOCON, the big international design convention that Chicago hosts every year at the Merchandise Mart is back next week.  Of course, there will be a slew of hot, hip, artsy events going on all over the place; my email box has been inundated with invitations and announcements for the past several weeks.  I’m going to some of them, but for me there are two unmissable events:  first up, on Monday, the 15th, off the NEOCON beaten track, the Mighty Bearcats and the Object Design League, two groups comprised of really hot, young, rising artists and designers we’ll be seeing a lot of in the near future (including the unassuming, but mega-talented, and blazing hot, metaphorically and otherwise, Steven Haulenbeek) is holding an Opening Night reception for their show ”The Promise of this Moment” at a raw space in Bucktown (2035 W. Wabansia).  I’m not sure what installations and art pieces will be on view, but given the eclectic tastes of the artists who will be exhibiting, I think the show will be out of this world.  Fifteen “you have otherworldly great taste” points to those who make it on Monday night!  On Tuesday, the 16th, I’m off again to the Guerrilla Truck Show at the Fulton Market warehouse district.  I’ve written about it in the past - I think it’s a uniquely fabulous Chicago summer event.  Great weather, great art and design, free booze, hypnotic music, U-Hauls, hey what a combo ha!
• I am off to Sonoma for a reunion with my college girlfriends during the week of June 22.  But I’ve been pinching myself black and blue for a week already (and trying to self-administer some panicky, last minute liposuction- ha!) for getting a French Laundry reservation on the 24th (well actually, my friend Dulce’s husband Greg, who runs Gourmet magazine’s West Coast operations, got it for me, so I didn’t have to go through all the convoluted reservation hoohahs on FL’s website; he has officially joined Francis’s pantheon of deities that shall be unconditionally worshipped on all fours with forehead on the ground!)  I am really, really excited, exhilarated, inspired…name any positive emotion, I got it!  I’ll be sure to post (hopefully with photos) on my French Laundry experience.  In the meantime here’s a couple of interesting blog posts from various kinds of foodies- read them here and here.

Here’s BFF Debra, the lovely Beth, and your culture vulture blogger during the opening night preview party.  It’s free to get into the Modern Wing the entire week till Friday, May 22.  Shame on you if you live in Chicago, or are visiting Chicago, or are even remotely within 5 miles of the city perimeter, and you don’t go to spend a couple of hours in this wonderful place.

The first one was Chicago-born, currently Atlanta-based artist Brian Dettmer’s show, entitled “Adaptations”, at the Packer Schopf Gallery (942 W. Lake St., on view till May 9).  My college bud in the Philippines, artsy Ike, tipped me off on Dettmer’s show through Facebook, which I was pretty grateful for, since with the amount of artistic activity in this city, it’s almost as hard to track what’s going on as it is to figure out who is time-travelling where on Lost.  Dettmer’s sculptural works were painstakingly carved out of old hardbound books, most of them in pretty impressive wave patterns, with collages embedded in them.  I was blown away by the creativity, the detail-orientation, the transformative mindset that Dettmer demonstrated.  The books weren’t just altered, or juxtaposed with other things (as in found art, for example), but they’ve taken on different, morphed personas that didn’t really have anything to do with their original purpose.   It’s a brilliant show.  Although, “World Books”, “Standard Circle”, and “New Books of Knowledge”, created from entire encyclopedia sets, were the obvious centerpieces given their size and detail, I thought the smaller pieces, such as “The Theater”, made from a book about the history of theater and containing black and white collages of all things theatrical,  and “World Science” which mixed up collages of 18^th century scientists and text pages from the science book it was created from, were the most memorable pieces – intricate and meticulous, they also demonstrated the artist’s familiarity with the subject matter of the books.  Realizing this, it led to a tinge of ambivalence with the work, on my part.  Call me old-fashioned, but I’ve always thought that books were meant to be read, and if not read, should be on a bookshelf somewhere, preserved, available for others to avail of.  It’s a respect thing.  Seeing those books mutated into pieces other than what they were supposed to be, regardless of the brilliance of the artistic vision, gave me little pangs of regret and wistfulness.

I’ve always considered Linda Warren Gallery (1052 W. Fulton Market), one of the truly top-tier contemporary art galleries in Chicago, so it’s always a must-stop on any gallery walk.  In 2006, the gallery exhibited one of the most-acclaimed artworks of that year, Conrad Freiburg’s awe-inspiring, gargantuan roller-coaster-like device that paid homage to the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. Linda Warren never shies away from massive, ambitious, damn-it-I’m-here type of artistic visions, so it’s stunning, mind-bending exhibit of young Chicago artist Nicole Gordon’s 21st century re-conceptualization of the seven deadly sins (on view till May 3), is the type of art that I’ve come to expect from this cutting-edge space.  Entitled “Saliglia”, a 14th century mnemonic device that formed a word from the first letters of the Latin words for the seven deadly sins, the works were complex, metaphorical representations of  the meanings and implications of a particular “deadly sin” using modern-day situations.  The piece “Even Now Vegas Yearns” represented ENVY by depicting laborers in an East African diamond mine with some form of a cracked giant egg spewing jewels, a powerful commentary on the irony that resource-rich underdeveloped countries provided the “raw materials”, so to speak, that fueled materialism and conspicuous consumption in the richer countries.  My other favorite piece was “South LA’s Overpass to Hell” which communicated SLOTH with a mind-boggling mix of images:  traffic gridlock, industrial fumes, and a giant man getting pumped (literally) in the ass.  I loved Gordon’s brashness and vigor in the depiction of her themes, in the terrific use of monochromatic shades, and in the selection and juxtaposition of imagery, but I also respected her immensely for her activist, raging passion against  how our indulgent, irresponsible, self-absorbed times were negative impacting the world we lived in, which might not continue in the shape we wanted it to be because of our actions.  Her pieces in this, her first solo exhibition, were highly impressive – I can’t wait to see more from her in the future.

CORRECTION:  Nicole Gardner’s “Saliglia” is not her first solo exhibition; it is her first show at the Linda Warren Gallery.  One of her latest works will be on view at the Gallery’s booth in the upcoming Art Chicago (more on that soon!) beginning May 1.

I love the West Loop art scene, since it’s the perfect confluence of all the great things that mark the other Chicago art districts:  mature and elegant like River North, but without the stuffiness and haughty pretension (I mean, there’s still pretension, but of a less snooty kind, for sure); undeniably contemporary like the West Side but without the studied, put-upon messiness and edginess; and relaxed and accepting like Pilsen but with better booze.  At the top of my list from last Friday’s openings were Sheba Chhachhi’s installations at the Walsh Gallery (118 N. Peoria, 2nd Floor, ongoing until April 25), which blew my mind away.  These post-modern, 2-dimensional “light boxes”, as big as plasma TVs, superimposed various seemingly unrelated images on top of one another, with the top image in a continuous moving loop, to provide commentaries on the current state of Asian culture and the impact of trade, globalization, and technology on the region.  Installed in a dark room with an Indian chant as soundtrack, they’re powerful, heady stuff, and I got to admit, as I told BFF Camela, I felt pretty intellectually one-dimensional in front of them (I’m still pondering the connection of images of Avian bird flu and pilgrimage of Buddhist monks to one another – is there a religious aspect to eating bad chicken?).  Regardless of how maddeningly obtuse they were, visually, the “light boxes” stopped you in your tracks.

Not as intellectually intimidating but no less impressive  were Spencer Finch’s collection of sixty photographs of trees in a foggy forest, with each photograph subtly, almost imperceptibly, tracking the movement of the fog, so you see more of the trees in some photographs, and close to absolute blurs in others, with most of the photographs seemingly indistinct from one another, on view at Rhona Hoffman Gallery (118 N. Peoria, ongoing until May 2).   They were beautifully, painstakingly photographed in haunting black and white, and I just stood there in utter amazement at Finch’s craft, discipline, and artistic vision.  I had to look at many of them twice, thrice, in order to make out the differences in them, which to me successfully drove home Finch’s point of our inability to truly capture the “ephemeral” nature of an image.  I wasn’t too enthralled with the main exhibit at Kavi Gupta Gallery, 835 W. Washington Blvd. (New York artist Angelina Gualdoni’s paintings inspired by ruined, decaying buildings and skyscrapers, which frankly looked like piles of sweaty, smelly clothes on the floor to me) but was thoroughly engaged by the work of Tom Greenwood in the parallel exhibition, “Vaguely Paperly”, curated by Chris Johanson, a collection of works by artists working with paper in various media.  The works on display were comprised of cutout figures superimposed on vaguely faded newspaper clippings and then splattered with paint.  If you looked closely, you would see that the cutout figures, mostly human, some animal, would be reflective, in an expressionistic, stylistic sort of manner, of the news clipping it framed (some of which were tragic or violent).  The pieces captured the way I would visualize images in my head as I read through a newspaper or magazine article.  Fantastic!  The Fulton Market art galleries will be holding their openings tonight, Friday night, so I will have more art chatter next week.

Thank goodness, I was able to extricate myself from the Printers’ Ball melee, and like Alice who tumbled through the looking glass unexpectedly, I serendipitously found myself in the MCA’s current UBS 12 x 12 exhibit area.  The UBS 12 x 12 series showcases emerging Chicago artists from a variety of artistic media, and this month’s featured artist is the brilliant Howard Henry Chen, a young photographer and mixed media artist, who was born in Vietnam but immigrated to the US when he was 3. This exhibit is only running till this Sunday, August 31, so avid blog readers, run in your stilleto heels to the MCA quick or else you will miss one of the most dazzling, most provocative, most interestingly novel and fresh art exhibits you will see in Chicago this year.  In only six pieces, Chen tackles questions of immigration, cultural identity, cultural permeability and eradication, colonization, and racial conflicts.  I liked two pieces the most.  The first one was a collection of thirty Buddhist prayer bowls, which I guess was pretty common in traditional Vietnam, set out in an orderly row, which were either empty or filled with a variety of  things such as foie gras canisters, a box of condoms, dried fish, candy, etc. but which seemed so incongrous when seen inside the bowls. This piece powerfully communicated the (sometimes) clashing influences of a culture and how these influences can be integrated into the culture over time.  The other one which blew me away was a piece which contained three Ho Chi Minh head busts all sealed in vacuum packs with beef stock, “sous vide” style.  My foodie readers know that sous vide is the technique of sealing food in plastic bags while cooking them in low temperatures to maintain their natural freshness. In this piece, Chen wanted us to think hard about cultural assimilation:  how, regardless of where we immigrate, and how much we think we have assimilated/integrated with our new communities, we still carry with us our undeniable cultural roots, identity, biases, and propensities.  Word!

I’d seen pictures of Koons’s works but had never viewed them in a museum or gallery setting.  In the late 1980s and early 1990s (yikes, I’m dating myself, cough, cough), I knew of Jeff Koons primarily through his notorious romance with Ciccolina, real name Ilona Staller, the porn star who was elected to Italy’s parliament, which demonstrated that European politics was wackier than a clown in an Amsterdam coffee shop.  Koons, and Ciccolina, rocked the art world with a series of soft-porn photos which were shown as part of the Venice Biennale, the leading modern art exhibition in the world, in 1990.  Some of these works, as well as later, more sexually-explicit ones, are on view at the MCA as part of the Jeff Koons exhibit, and boy, do they suck (and that’s both literally and figuratively).  I, for one, would rather do backstrokes in my own vomit than stare at a close-up of Ciccolina’s asshole.  Yeah, that’s the kind of “art” that the Ciccolina/Jeff series, called “Made in Heaven” contains.  I mean these photos look like they were taken with a Minolta Instamatic (oops, dating myself again!), and are not in the least bit artistic, erotic, provocative, or intriguing.  Aside from the shock value of seeing the artist having sex or seeing his wife’s various appendages (which shouldn’t be so shocking anymore today with what you can download from the Internet), the “Made in Heaven” photographs are painfully ordinary.

But Jeff Koons’s most head-scratching, most it’s-unbelievable-that-people-paid-for-this works are not even those in the “Made in Heaven” series.  The “New Hoover Deluxe Shampoo Polishers, New Shelton Wet/Dry 10-Gallon Displaced Tripledecker” is made up of never-used, fresh-off-the-factory-floor vacuum cleaners and shampoo polishers in clear containers stacked on top of each other.  And they look like vacuum cleaners and shampoo polishers stacked on top of each other.  In his commentary on the audio tour, Koons says these new appliances evoke “virginity”  and the “pristine nature” of things.  So, should Sears be seen as a modern art gallery too, since a gazillion of these new, “pristine”, “virgin” vacuum cleaners cover the store floors?  The “Baccarat Crystal Set” well, looks like a silver baccarat set that I could get at Pottery Barn.  The “Dolphin” is  an inflatable dolphin figure, with a collection of pots and pans looking like they’re straight out of Williams-Sonoma, hanging below it.  Maybe Jeff Koons has, deep down in his sensitive, creative, expressive artist self, a no-nonsense, practical, department store buyer lurking underneath?  Wow, interesting thought. 

And so it goes on and on in the exhibition, works that make you stop in your tracks, aghast at the balls and guts of an artist for passing these off as art, as well as at the art collectors and art critics who hungrily lap them up and shower them with acclaim.  Koons has the dubious achievement of having sold the most expensive art work ever from a living artist (his stainless steel sculpture “Hanging Heart” was sold for $23.6 million at auction in Sotheby’s New York last November).  My main problem with the works in the exhibit is that most of them don’t really say or evoke anything.  I get it that Koons likes to use existing, everyday objects such as basketballs, and do something different with them, such as half-submerge them in distilled water and encase them in an aquarium, to communicate, uhmmm, what?  They come off really uninteresting, cold, blah, soulless, everyday objects which have not been transformed into something unique, not  allowed to shed their everyday-ness.  Which is so unlike the work of say, Andy Warhol, or even Richard Prince, who also deals in appropriated art.  Prince’s similarly-comprehensive, but marvelously stunning, retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York which I saw last January, was full of art using everyday objects, magazine pictures, etc. which spoke powerfully to the audience, which had interesting insights about mass media, the depiction of women in art, unacknowledged homoeroticism, etc.   While I’m looking at Koon’s famous “Rabbit”, I see a rabbit figure in stainless steel, not a “symbol for resurrection” as Koons’ unbelievably pretentious voiceover says in the audio tour.

I like some pieces, though.  The almost room-sized “Cracked Egg (Magenta)”  is awe-inspiring in scale, detail, and impact.  I think the infamous “Michael Jackson and Bubbles” porcelain figure is witty, eccentric, and spot-on in ridiculing the craziness of celebritydom.  But what I really like a lot is the companion exhibit, “Everything’s Here:  Jeff Koons and his experience of Chicago”, where you could see Paschke’s wonderful “Red Sweeney” or Jim Nutt’s technically dazzling “Summer Salt”.  These works, which were so ahead of their time in terms of technique, subject matter, and subversion of artistic conventions when they were created in the 1970s, still pack quite a punch today.  Timelessness and relevance are the hallmarks of great art; unfortunately I don’t think many of the works in the main exhibition possess them. 

So I went to see Mary-Arrchie Theatre’s production of Beggars in the House of Plenty, John Patrick Shanley’s autobiographical play about dealing with the demons of this childhood and early adulthood, written in a dream-like, surreal manner, over the weekend.  Let’s get this straight- I love Shanley’s works and I thought Doubt was one of the best examples of impactful, thought-provoking theater that I have ever seen.  He deserved his Pulitzer, not just by a yard, but by a continent.  I love Chicago storefront theater and often find it richly rewarding; Mary-Arrchie is one of the most exciting Chicago storefront theaters in the city and deserve many accolades and audiences in the years to come.  I, as a matter of fact, don’t love Beggars in the House of Plenty.  I admire Shanley’s chutzpah in working through his issues with his family in such a public forum as the theater, but I really don’t need to go and pay and see someone’s therapy session (I may be needing one myself soon, and paying for it!).  I am flabbergasted that he thought this self-indulgent exercise was involving dramatic fodder – so he had a bad childhood because his parent’s didn’t give him the same type of attention that they gave his siblings…well, tough. He didn’t have to be a pyromaniac or a drifter or a kleptomaniac as the adolescent Shanley turned out to be.  It’s not like they starved him, or chained him to the basement floor, or left him to be mauled by pitbulls or have his eyes pecked out by birds…hey even Christina Crawford had wirehangers slammed on her head!  I’m also disappointed by the Mary-Arrchie production, with its painted backdrops and somewhat overbaked performances (the always-excellent Daniel Behrendt, I think, comes off best and most truthful as Shanley’s elder brother, Joey).

Another type of dream-like, surreal theater has been on view at the Steppenwolf Upstairs Theatre since March 27, and it’s Sarah Ruhl’s brand of magical realism in Dead Man’s Cellphone, which is closing on July 27.  Sarah Ruhl is one of the hottest young playwrights in the country today, and the most divisive.  She’s a “love her or hate her” kind of commodity.  I’m pretty ambivalent about her actually, and am waiting to see what Victory Gardens does with her off-Broadway success Eurydice next season, before I finally make my judgment as to whether, as TimeOut Chicago theater critic, From the Ledge friend, and Sarah Ruhl non-fan, Kris Vire says, “…the playwright has no clothes”.  Prior to Dead Man’s Cellphone, I’ve seen both The Clean House and Passion Play in their major Goodman Theater productions, and I have had major issues with both.  I thought The Clean House was pretty interesting and eccentric but the ending was so abrupt, and felt so unfinished, that I was convinced there was another intermission coming.  I thought Passion Play was ambitious and very admirable in trying to tie together the passion play as a theatrical form and all kinds of political and socio-cultural issues, but it was chaotic, incomprehensible in parts, and show-offy in others.  I think this whole quality of being an intellectual show-off, with, I hate to say it, a hint of smugness (hey she’s smarter than everyone else in the room and three blocks over) is the one thing that really prevents me from embracing Ruhl’s works.  Ok, I get it.  She can jump from writing authentic sounding Brazilian stand-up jokes (in The Clean House) to a lacerating indictment of organ harvesting in developing countries (in Dead Man’s Cellphone) to detailed portrayals of the Oberramergau passion play in Germany (in, well, Passion Play).  She has a great ear for quirky, stop-in-your-tracks, sometimes laughter-coming-from-the-gut funny dialogue.  She inserts unexpected and memorable character details (the romantic male lead in Dead Man’s Cellphone likes to braid the hair of the women he’s dating) that leave you wanting for more.  But the plays often feel, to me at least, as if they are showcases for how intelligent she is, and for the various little unique tools she has in her creative arsenal, instead of being emotionally honest, engaging portraits of real life.  Watching a Sarah Ruhl play for me has always been like talking to really intelligent Ph.D student who you know will go far in life and career, but he or she just has to live a little and get that real-life exposure that truly makes someone unique and confident.  Unfortunately, like that Ph.D student and his or her over-enthusiastic thesis advisers, Ruhl has critical advocates who are so quick and ready to anoint her as the Second Coming.  Some restraint would be appreciated, as I saw first hand when the Goodman’s main floor cleared out in the middle of the Passion Play performance I attended  For the record, I liked Dead Man’s Cellphone a lot, and thought Marc Grapey’s second act monologue was one of the highlights of this theater going year so far.

Speaking of the Steppenwolf, I’ll be attending the Tony Awards Viewing Party at the Steppenwolf Main Theater next Sunday, June 15, which should be very exciting.  I think August:  Osage County will win 6 of its 7 nominations (Deanna Dunagan and Amy Morton are both nominated for Best Actress in a Play, and unless there’s a tie, only one of them can win.  My money is on Dunagan whose performance as Violet is going down in theater history books), and that, together with the enthusiasm for Chicago Shakespeare’s much deserved Regional Tony award,  will make that Sunday night at the Steppenwolf, sitting amidst many people who love and champion Chicago theater, quite the memorable one.  I’ll definitely be posting on the night, so watch out for it.

On non-theatrical matters, the Guerrilla Truck Show is coming up this Tuesday, June 10, from 6 pm to 9 pm in the area around  Fulton Market and Aberdeen streets in the Fulton Market warehouse district.  It is a terrific way to spend an early summer evening, not only because it showcases the work of many Chicago artists and designers at the back of parked u-hauls, (a very wonderful way of exhibiting art) but also because there is such a fun community of urban dwellers around, appreciating the art and jewelry, engaged in conversation with one anothr, and oh yeah, guzzling some free beer.  I won’t be able to make it this year, but I went last year, and had such a blast so I hope my avid blog leaders would check it out.  Here’s a  couple of pictures from last year’s event, where my friend Eric’s back is visible, but I am nowhere in sight (was I photoshopped out? Or was I busy stumbling around giddily with a couple of glasses of Stella Artois?  Uhmm.)

• AES+F is a Russian artist’s collective, comprised of 4 artists, who was recently acclaimed at the 2007 Venice Biennale, one of the most important contemporary art exhibitions in the world.  There were several pieces from AES+F’s “Last Riot” series at New York’s Claire Oliver Gallery booth in the NEXT Art Fair.  These pieces were like photographs superimposed on computer generated graphics, and featured violent, aggressive portrayals of androgynous teenagers (more the boys than the girls, I thought), in scenes that recalled war, imprisonment, or fighting frenzy.  I thought this was an interesting commentary from the artists’ on the state of mind of adolescents today, and how in many parts of the world, there were kids who were either conscripted into guerilla armies, or were parts of belligerent street-fighting gangs.  I think the pieces really tried to capture this almost primal, violent world that some teenagers live in, and the implication it made on contemporary society as a whole.  I was disturbed, though, by some of the almost subconscious sexual imagery in the pieces:  the androgynous-looking boys all were bare chested; while in some of the pictures, the subjects were straddling each other or were frozen in positions that could be interpreted as sensual.  Interesting and challenging work, but ultimately, I wasn’t sure if I bought into the artists’ world.
• At the booth of the Finnish gallery, Galerie Anhava in Art Chicago, I was very impressed by the wall sculpture made of plexiglass on aluminum by the Icelandic artist Kristjan Gudmunddson, called “Clear View on Top of Grey View”.  These were 4 long strips of windowglass, dimensions 1.5x .08 x 79 inches, in grey, purple, and other colors.  I loved the simplicity and the use of something industrial and workmanlike such as plexiglass to create a sculpture.  I thought it was pretty stunning especially against a white wall backdrop.
• At the Ronmados Gallery from Amsterdam who was participating in NEXT, there were photographs by a really young, but very provocative Dutch photographer, Levi Van Veluw.  The artist photographed himself with various “stuff” (for lack of a better, more artistic sounding term), such as dirt and grass, and ballpoint ink on his face.  I thought the images were very arresting, although jarring (no one expected to see grass and little twigs and shrubs on someone’s face!), but I was really intrigued by the blurring of the artist-subject dynamic in the pieces, as well as the subtle hint of masochism (why would you want to put all that guck on your face, even for the sake of art?) and exhibitionism in the works.
• Another New York gallery which exhibited at NEXT, Black and White Gallery in Chelsea, had works by Isidro Blasco, a Spanish artist who now lives in New York.  These works spliced together photographs mounted on laminated boards which gave the works a dazzling three dimensional quality.  I thought they were fascinating, especially the one of back alleys in Shanghai which were really pieces of photographs of different alleys all put together to form one interconnected landscape view.  I thought the works made you think of the nature of space and whether space was a tangible reality, or something that could be constructed, or as one of the gallery staff said more, ahem, articulately (?), what’s “the nature of space volumetrics” (had to Google that one!).
• As an art lover, but more importantly as a Filipino immigrant, the two pieces that really floored me were those by Michael Arcega, a Filipino artist in San Francisco, in the Marx and Zavattero gallery’s booth at Next.  I very nearly missed this booth, since it was in an aisle that was a little tucked away and closer to the Boffo section of the fair than to the water-cooler pieces (see below).  The first piece was a spectacular video installation called “Loping Honoring” which was a continuous loop of a film of an opera singer singing something called “Loping Honoring” which turned out to be the national anthem of the Philippines, but with the words replaced by words produced when the lyrics were written in a Microsoft Word file and then spell-checked.  Of course this word filter would replace most of the Tagalog words with commonly-accepted English words from its data dictionary.  The impact was so powerful and shattering, articulately communicating the artist’s view of how cultural assimiliation could overlay and then ultimately erode one’s native values and cultural mores.  The second piece was called “Spam/Maps:  Oceania” which re-created a map of the Philippines, the South Pacific islands like Cook islands, and parts of Australia using, hold your breath, Spam meat. Again, the power for me was indescribable, since it brought home very strongly the impact of colonization and the presence of US military bases on this part of the world (Spam was introduced in the Philippines when the country was a US colony, and grew to become a staple of the Filipino breakfast diet, which was pretty ironic since in the US, Spam was, and continues to be, a looked-down upon food product which many people avoid eating- disturbing stuff!).  This work was recently exhibited at San Francisco’s DeYoung Museum in the Collection Connections art series.
• The conversation piece of the NEXT art fair was the installation “Slow and Inevitable Death of American Muscle” by Jonathan Schippers.  Everyone was asking about the crashing cars when I got there on Saturday afternoon, and this was it.  Two Thunderbird cars started apart on Thursday night when Artropolis began, and were programmed to incrementally come towards one another and collide with each other by Monday afternoon, when the fair ended.  I thought it was a little gimmicky, and I wasn’t really sure if there were any new insights being provided by the work, but I did ask my buddy Joel, himself a fine example of American muscle (he’ll skin me alive when he reads this), to take the picture below (on Saturday, the front bumpers were already touching).

Yes, I am very excited about Art Chicago since 180 of the world’s top art galleries, spanning acknowledged international arts cities such as New York, Paris, London, Tokyo, and Berlin, as well as our own sweet home Chicago (represented by fabulous top-tier galleries such as Linda Warren, Perimeter, and moniquemeloche).  But I am so much more excited by the Next Art Fair, organized by Chicago gallery owner Kavi Gupta and New York art critic Christian Viveros-Faune, which is an invitational exhibit of emerging, cutting-edge, mind-expanding art.  In addition to galleries (from cities as diverse as Chicago, New York, Leipzig, Guayaquil, and Krakow, which is reputedly starting to be the center for emerging art in Europe), project spaces, artists collectives and publications are participating (in a section of Next called Goffo).  Sonnenzimmer from my northside neighborhood, which has received good press for its print series, is one of the artist collectives that is participating.  Next will also have Next Talk Shop, a series of panel discussions and lectures.  I am planning to attend the art criticism one that Viveros-Faune is moderating, scheduled for Saturday, the 26^th at 10 am.  I predict Next will be quite the blow-your-socks-off part of Artropolis.

The other art fair I will be spending some time in is The Artist Project, which is the independent artist exhibition.  From 30 artists last year, it has grown to 300 artists this year, including someone I’ve been advocating for, the lovely and talented Sarah Stec.  In this blog post, you can read about the GreasyJoan Halloween event at Sarah’s West Loop loft gallery/work space, and see a sample of her work.  To see some more of her work, check out her website:  http://www.sarahstec.com/.  She does wonderful and imaginative work with cheese cloth and other fabric, and incorporates them into dazzling visual displays such as her “Fog in Trees” series (yes, full disclosure, I own a piece).  To my dear avid blog readers, please stop by Sarah’s booth in the Artist Project, number 8-4107, aisle 4000.  You’ll be floored by the work, but more so by the unassuming, articulate artist responsible for it.  But check out the rest of the artists booths, because independent artists need to be supported and appreciated.

I’ll be going to the Preview Event for Art Chicago, Next, and The Artist Project on April 24 to support Sarah and the Chicago art community (but I’ll be coming back a lot over the weekend, since I’m sure I will not be able to see everything on the 24^th, plus with booze in the system, art appreciation may tend to become hazy!).   I’ll also be attending the Artropolis/Art Chicago opening party on the 25^th, called A Bowler Hat, at some warehouse space in River West.  Artists will be transforming the raw space (should be quite interesting).  I’ll post coverage of both events on From the Ledge.  Artropolis is one of the great opportunities available to us living in a global city like Chicago- my dear blog readers, don’t squander it, don’t even think twice of going!

Check out the Artropolis website for ticket information.