From the Dec 2 – Dec 8, 1999 issue

Columns

My Kind of Town

by Eric Fredericksen

This special post-Thanksgiving edition of Culture Wars comes to you from Chicago, the City of Broad Shoulders, where I spent a day making studio visits and giving an informal talk at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Studio visits are scary: You walk blindly into the studios of people you don't know at all, and are expected to spend 45 minutes looking at and talking about whatever stuff happens to be there. This is exactly the kind of thing I've spent my five years as an art critic avoiding: telling someone to their face what I think of their art. It's not that I'm chicken -- well, not entirely that I'm chicken -- it's more that I don't think it's my job to tell artists what they should be doing differently. It's my job to tell you, my lovely readers, what I think artists should be doing -- which is something else entirely.

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As this marked my third visit to a city hosting the big touring Bill Viola retrospective, I decided to finally check out the show of video installations by the guy who practically invented the genre. My response to the dozen dark rooms at the Art Institute showing large screen projections of fire, water, and sleeping people? Boring! A large show of early Ellsworth Kelly drawings, made before he devoted himself exclusively to single-color shaped canvases, was much more fun. Kelly turned everything he saw -- street plans, ancient architecture, window panes, beer bottles -- into abstract compositions. Given the traditional view that abstract art makes no reference to the world outside the picture plane, it was swell to see a canonical abstractionist who, it appears, did nothing but refer to the outside world.

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Hey, did you know you can find out stuff on the World Wide Web? One especially useful website is artsjournal.com, which offers links to current arts news reports and reviews from English-speaking parts of the world, updated daily. Arts Journal is run by occasional P-I correspondent Doug McLennan, who, as both a Seattleite and a Canadian citizen, tends to favor both local arts issues and major Canadian news sources like the Globe and Mail (the smarter parts of the English press also have a big presence). These biases please me, but may fade as the site becomes a larger-scale concern: The website is envisioned as the seed for a cross-platform art-news wire, serving TV, print, radio, and online media. If I were lazier and less conscientious, I could assemble this column solely by boiling down linked articles from this site.

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Like this article, from the November 19 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education (at chronicle.com), by Franz B.M. de Waal, who looks at the history of apes who paint -- a subject that has interested artists and scientists for half a century. Turns out, apes like to make balanced compositions of abstract forms and paint in a calm state of mind. They get angry if someone tries to remove their work before they're finished, but when they're finished, they don't much care what happens to the completed painting. Also, Picasso hung a work by a famous painting ape named Congo in his studio.

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Another site worth a look is artdish.com, a source for local visual art listings and linked forums, letting you discuss First Thursday openings without having to pay the cover charge at the OK Hotel. As with all chat-dominated sites, the quality of this one will depend on the quality (and quantity) of the people it attracts.

Send gossip and complaints to eric@thestranger.com