The Art Institute of Chicago

Georgia O’Keeffe: “My New Yorks” Member Reception – Chicago Art Institute – June 24, 2024

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Note to self – next time you go to an event at the Art Institute that features “light bites,” skip everything but the chocolate banana bread.

It stands to reason that trained experts know a lot more than I do about their chosen fields, but that doesn’t mean that all the opinions they serve are easily digested. So, when curator Annie Morse told us that she viewed Georgia O’Keeffe’s Black Cross as, in a way, a self portrait, I had to take it with more than a grain of salt to make it appealing to my uneducated palate. (No amount of salt could have helped the quiche.)

That said, Morse gave an interesting, educational presentation in a nice half-hour package that included, not only photographs of New York from her husband Alfred Stieglitz, but also some mention of and visuals from other artists who Morse saw as influenced by O’Keeffe, including Roger Brown and his famous Leaning Tower of Touhy, housed at the Art Institute.

As for the exhibit itself, it was crowded, so I’ll have to go back to spend more time with it. It’s probably good, so I’ll give it a provisional four brushes for now and salt it away for future reference.

Dan Friedman: Stay Radical – The Art Institute of Chicago – February 2, 2024

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When modernism just isn’t enough, why not radical modernism, of which Friedman was apparently the father. But that was years ago, so I looked up ultraradical to see how far things have gone. The second definition of that involves the complete surgical removal of organs in a body cavity, so I’m glad he didn’t go there. What would that design look like – a blank canvas?

When asked, the security guard standing ten feet away from the door to the Architecture and Design room where the exhibit was housed didn’t know where the exhibit was, so I dared to be great and read the sign next to the door, which informed me.

I liked Friedman’s work, in particular the Gallimaufry and ICA Street Sights posters, Deep Sea Meltdown (a startling replica of my hall closet) and Tornado Fetish (an even more startling replica of my brain in the morning).

Friedman was said to have scavenged streets for materials and displayed them at home, using his apartment as a lab, recycling at its best.

And, just when I thought I had seen it all, I read that he was inspired by the futuristic decor of the Jetsons. If I could have snuck his Asteroid Lamp under my coat, I would have considered it. I wasn’t worried about the security guard noticing.

Salvador Dali Exhibit – The Art Institute of Chicago – March 2, 2023

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Salvador Dali’s paranoiac-critical method is described as the “spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectivity of the associations and interpretations of delirious phenomena.” It sounds like drugs were involved.

I understand the definition about as well as I do the paintings themselves, like that his William Tell is really Vladimir Lenin. And his melting clocks are the “camembert of time”, “symbols for the lack of meaning and fluidity of time in the dream world.” Sounds like Einstein meets Freud meets Nietzsche and results in a Julia Child four-dimensional soufflé with an Oedipus complex.

Cheese is a common theme at the exhibit, as the Venus de Milo in Drawers (not in the sense of pants) is accompanied by the story of Dali’s first meeting Harpo Marx, who at the time was naked in a garden feeding a statue of the Venus de Milo made of cheese (don’t know if it was camembert) to a swan. Sounds like more drugs were involved.

But the painting that grabbed my attention was Mae West’s Face Which May be Used as a Surrealist Apartment, and not just for the missing comma after Face.

The Supreme Court is about decide a case appealed from a 2021 judgement declaring that Andy Warhol had no right to appropriate Lynn Goldsmith’s photo of Prince. If the Andy Warhol Foundation loses, the Mae West painting, which was based on a film ad, may, if permission was not granted at the time, be one of many museum pieces of art to fall like dominos if considered derivative, rather than transformative, a legal distinction unrelated to robots that can change their shapes.

Ray Johnson c/o – The Art Institute of Chicago – February 11, 2022

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Unbeknownst to me, before email took over my life, I apparently was a leading practitioner of mail art, which as far as I can tell, is just a pretentious way to refer to hybrid chain letters, and I easily could have been the icon that Johnson became had I had the foresight to tell people to forward my letters, rather than just throw them out, often without opening.

But maybe it’s not too late to establish my legacy. According to Wikipedia, “The Correspondence School was a network of individuals who were artists by virtue of their willingness to play along and appreciate Johnson’s sense of humor.” I’m not sure how that makes Johnson an artist, though a lot of the art I see does require, often unintentionally, a sense of humor to appreciate. In any event, if my readers would like to consider themselves artists, and elevate me to one, perhaps they could start The Blog School in appreciation of my efforts.

My favorite part of the Johnson exhibit was the stack of boxes, containing who knows what, though I think not Lilibet Snellings, author of Box Girl: My Part Time Job As An Art Installation, as they were too small. Still, I think it would have been more interesting if presented as performance art, with someone unpacking and then repacking the boxes on an Old Faithful-type schedule.

Andy Warhol Exhibit – The Art Institute of Chicago – October 24, 2019

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In 1963, Andy Warhol silkscreened thirty black-and-white images of the Mona Lisa onto a canvas and called it Thirty Are Better Than One. Now part of the Warhol exhibit at The Art Institute, it reminded me of the scene between Ted and the hitchhiker from There’s Something About Mary.

Hitchhiker: You heard of this thing, the 8-Minute Abs?
Ted: Yeah, sure, 8-Minute Abs. . . . the exercise video.
Hitchhiker: Yeah, this is going to blow that right out of the water. Listen to this: 7 Minute Abs. . . . Think about it. You walk into a video store, you see 8-Minute Abs sitting there, there’s 7-Minute Abs right beside it. Which one are you gonna pick, man?
Ted: I would go for the 7.
Hitchhiker: Bingo, man, bingo. 7-Minute Abs. And we guarantee just as good a workout as the 8-minute folk.
Ted: You guarantee it? That’s — how do you do that?
Hitchhiker: If you’re not happy with the first 7 minutes, we’re gonna send you the extra minute free. You see? That’s it. . . .
Ted: . . . . That’s good. Unless, of course, somebody comes up with 6-Minute Abs. Then you’re in trouble, huh?

Irrefutable logic. If someone had dared to silkscreen 31 images of the Mona Lisa, we might be viewing their body of work instead of Warhol’s. James Dean instead of Marlin Brando. Progresso soup instead of Campbell’s.

Among the plethora of Warhol merchandise being sold in The Art Institute gift shop are jigsaw puzzles of his displayed work, including the famous portrait of Mao Tse Tung, which the museum label acknowledges, presented the ironic possibility of subverting a communist icon into a commercial one. I didn’t notice the price tag for the puzzle or whether its directions suggest that it be assembled communally.
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Fittingly, the exhibit is a very large one, evoking Warhol’s credo “Always leave them wanting less.”