New York Times

Green goes on to note that Gavlak’s home is “stunningly spare”:

Ms. Gavlak’s personal effects are in one of two walk-in closets; artwork is in the other. Like a good saloniste, she eats breakfast on a tray in bed and then slides it underneath the dust ruffle. Her kitchen is as clean and uncluttered as that of a model apartment in a new condominium. (Home gallerists as a whole are not given to the display of random tchotchkes; further, they know how to hide their hair brushes and the Verizon bill).

This description made me laugh. Although no two apartment galleries are alike (therein lies the true beauty of the form), if you visit a domestic art space in Chicago you’re apt to see freely trafficking pets (and kids), overstuffed bookshelves, and cozy kitchens where something yummy-smelling always seems to be bubbling on the stove. Whereas Gavlak has transformed her entire home into an exactingly considered art installation (a tactic that I admittedly find compelling) many (though certainly not all) of the domestic art spaces I’ve visited in Chicago favor an alternative tactic: one that embraces the unabashedly lived-in.

I found the Times article to be an especially interesting and somewhat ironic read, given that it appeared during the same week that we ran a series of essays on domestic art spaces here at Bad at Sports (an extension of a writing project initiated by the apartment gallery project Floor Length and Tux. To read the full complement of writings, available in downloadable .pdf form, click over to the FLAT website here). Because Chicago artists have been using their homes as project and exhibition spaces for a long time, the apartment gallery scene here has pretty much lost its initial novelty–nowadays most proprietors of domestic art spaces seem to be more concerned with the unglamorous, gritty reality of the how-do-we-keep-this- thing-going side of things.  Chicago’s thriving network of apartment galleries proves that domestic art spaces are not just about showcasing one’s beautifully appointed home (although hell, if you have one, by all means show it off!). Instead, they argue that art and life are messily inextricable. As Caroline Picard, director of Green Lantern Gallery and Press, puts it in her essay, On the matter of public space : or my apartment gallery is an arctic explorer,

“Any Chicagoan who’s hip to the jive knows that an apartment gallery poses a unique set of problems. Someone actually lives there—sleeps and cooks and poos there—and yet the obligatory neutral space of the gallery must remain white-walled, spacious, antiseptic.”

Yet as Picard and others have discovered, domestic galleries can be made all the more provocative–and an unexpectedly powerful showcase for art–when the curtain of separation between the private domain and public exhibition space is allowed to fall away, exposing the nest of domestic entanglements–food preparation, bills, correspondence, pets and children–the sorts of domestic realities that inevitably frame both the production and display of art, whether we want to admit it or not.

Carroll Dunham at He Said She Said in Oak Park, IL

The best apartment gallerists also know, as Jennifer Breckner argued in her essay On Hosting, that a successful apartment gallery requires a skilled and gracious host; a person who knows how to make strangers feel welcome and not like a foreign body who doesn’t belong there. Breckner writes,

…for a new visitor entering an apartment gallery that tries to mimic the pristine controlled exhibition space, the body feels doubly unwanted as one enters both a space for contemplation of art and a private, domestic arena that acts as a small, tightly packed social scene as well.  In addition, many apartment gallery owners fail to engage strangers in their space, and may seem indifferent to new visitors, encouraging the idea that these spaces are more for the cultural elite that exist at this ground level than for a variety of new people.

Apartment galleries provide a sense of connection and community among artists and other alienated culture workers, but the question remains: over the long term, do these spaces serve any purpose other than networking on a local level? Numerous contributors to the FLAT project expressed dissatisfaction with the fact that apartment galleries in this city haven’t brokered much in the way of discursive connections beyond the confines of the local. In her essay, Lucia Fabio expressed her dismay with this complex issue in painfully honest, and somewhat melancholic terms. After leaving Chicago (and her much buzzed-about apartment gallery, minidutch) for Los Angeles to care for a close family member, she’s finding the loss of her old identity difficult to come to terms with. “Have I just wasted two years of my life by being part of this microcosm within the little known Chicago art community, just to move to another city to be dismissed?” Fabio wondered.

I don’t have any answers to this question, but I do feel strongly that Chicago’s independent, artist-run domestic art spaces are collectively participating in a grand experiment, one that tests the vitality and sustainability of art in the absence of a viable art market. But in order to mean something, experiments need to feed into theory, and this is where the gears seem to have stuck. The history of domestic art spaces has never been adequately historicized nor theorized in this country. For example: New Republic art critic Jed Perl, who was interviewed for the Times article, admitted that he “was not sure” if there was a history to the types of domestic galleries that Gavlak and others have initiated:

“My impression of many of the hostess/salon running/gallerist types — from Peggy Guggenheim to Holly Solomon — is that they made a fairly clear distinction between home and gallery. Certainly in the secondary market there has always been a strong tradition of people who deal out of their homes, where ‘everything’ is for sale….

As for the East Village-to-today galleries in the home, maybe in spirit it’s related to Happenings and so forth. But isn’t the truth that as soon as the cash flow is strong enough, people prefer to move the business to a separate location? So it’s also–let’s face it– a style born of necessity?”

My own strong suspicion is that there is indeed a rich yet woefully undocumented history here, a history of home-based exhibition spaces that, like so many other areas relegated to “the domestic,” has been pushed aside, dismissed as charming and little else, or otherwise deemed irrelevant. It’s a history that still needs to be written. And it’s a history in which Chicago and its artists have played an essential role.

Got a response to this post? Let us know! Email your comments to  mail@badatsports.com. We’ll feature thoughtful responses to issues generated by our posts in our Letters to the Editors Feature on Saturdays.

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Guest Post by Liz Nielsen

A few thoughts

Erik Brown and Michael Thomas invited me to write down my thoughts regarding the recent spurt of apartment/domestic/project spaces in Chicago with the intent of pushing forth a few waves of constructive criticism that might consequently enable some of these spaces to re-calibrate their homegrown efforts. Now, I run my own space too, the Swimming Pool Project Space in Albany Park, and so I began by looking at my own reflection in the mirror and asking myself why I do what I do, and why I am where I am.

I am a Chicago artist. I have seen my reflection many times but this time I saw something, a stark reality, with more clarity than I had seen in the past.  Louder than ever before I heard a resonating sentence echoing inside my head: If Chicago’s art scene is second or third tier then naturally it produces second or third tier artists.

But if Chicago’s art scene is second or third tier, does it follow that it would naturally produce second or third tier artists? I am better than that.  I know that we are better than that.

So the question becomes: can Chicago raise the bar? Can it rise above the standards set by third tier expectations? Do we ourselves want honorable mentions, or gold medals? The artists who do make it into the top tier usually leave Chicago shortly before or immediately after their success starts to happen. So this leads me to wonder, if Chicago artists want to be gold medal-winners and recipients of national and international recognition, must we leave Chicago?

I’ve been running circles in my mind trying to figure out why we are where we are, and why we don’t, apparently, have the means to get the gold.  We obviously have the energy.  The innumerable independent spaces are one indication of this.  I have come up with several reasons but there is one that I continually spiral back to, and that is that Chicago has very few “parent galleries”, relative to the number of artists. At risk of being cutesy, parent galleries are the commercial venues that give us artist children shelter, that help us with our homework, hang our work on the refrigerator, talk us up like crazy, send us to art camps/residencies, and above all help us grow into the artists that we are capable of becoming. As it stands, hundreds of art students are pumped out of our schools in Chicago every year — and these are great schools — only to be orphaned with nowhere to show, nowhere to go.

So we parent ourselves.

We build our own tree-houses and clubhouses in the backyard or in our living rooms.  We start our own spaces and exhibit our own work. We share our own ideas and show our friends. But to a certain extent, the pragmatic facts of “being an orphan” wear us down: the fact that the challenge of making work increases when we’re also completely responsible for ourselves, for promoting our art, and paying the bills through other means. In the end, these tree-house projects, no matter how exciting and productive in certain instances, don’t bring in much money, and don’t get enough support from the city or its institutions, and eventually most of us run out of gas without even making it onto any sort of global art map.

This leads me to a second point, which might actually be more interesting — and even beautiful in its own way. Money is not the driving force of many of these independent spaces. That outcome has already deemed itself improbable and maybe isn’t even a goal at all. So what is the driving force? For me, the driving force is manifesting a vision, taking risks, and making marks, all in attempt to understand what art is NOW. Part of that is asking, what’s the conversation that’s being had? (And there’s also the question of who’s shaping the conversation — and the related issues of cultural capital, as recent commentators like Anthony Elms have noted.) As an artist, I’m always trying to locate myself in the larger continuum of contemporary art. I do this in a lot of ways, one of which is my experiments at the Swimming Pool. I don’t see them as separate from my own practice as an artist. They are facets of artistic research.

Small spaces often shift their tone from exhibition to exhibition providing more mystery than larger galleries by the mere fact that it is quite difficult to know what to expect. Perhaps they also provide a greater risk of failure. I can’t imagine having a show like Swimming Pool Project Space’s DOGCAT or GroupSolo in a traditional environment. But the taking of risks in these places can help people to shift in their practice and grow in their work. By putting people in different roles, whether as curator or collaborator, it allows them new perspectives on their own work potentially enhancing it.  And in fact, these spaces can be idea generators for any number of people.

But we don’t just want to talk to ourselves. We do want to be part of a larger conversation. So how do we make this happen? How do we artists get the support to bolster us up, to lift us to the next level? I have a few ideas, although each of them involve overcoming certain (smaller) hurdles… I’m just going to throw them out to start the brainstorm.

What does Chicago have? Space. Cheap space. But many of the current gallery spaces are decentralized; other than the West Loop spaces, these small galleries are all over the city. There’s the problem of getting from one to the other. There’s no art shuttle to help us gallery hop.  Even getting from Pilsen to Logan Square in one evening is not easy to do. How can we fix this, or at least accommodate this?

We also need to make art of more value in the minds of many Chicagoans. How do we create a desire for art and identify new collectors? There are plenty of people in Chicago with a lot of money who do not collect art or go to art exhibits. How do we artists get on their radars? Beyond casual viewers, we need sponsorship, patrons, and media attention. Are there ways to foster longer-term relationships between artists and collectors beyond the few big names? Young collectors are a group that I’m really interested in. A lot of work that is shown in so many of these spaces is not expensive and many people could start buying it — people who may not realize they could be collectors at all. A few small sales can keep these spaces running.  Most of us just need a little support, not much.

I’m also interested in the possible unification of small spaces… not as a single unification, because we all know there are too many flavors for that, but a few unifications to create mini-unions that support each other and create change, propelling things forward. A few years ago, I saw a sculpture by Tim Hawkinson. It was made of gears linked together from small to large. When I entered the room, I could see the largest gear, sitting still and as I walked to the back of the room, each gear was connected to the next, all the way down to a tiny, tiny gear.  That gear was tirelessly spinning as fast as it could on high speed. As I was exiting the room, I could see that the big gear had moved.  That tiny gear moved it. What if project spaces were in the habit of working together? What would happen then?

Liz Nielsen is an artist and the director of Swimming Pool Project Space.

Got a response to this post? Let us know! Email your comments to  mail@badatsports.com. We’ll feature thoughtful responses to issues generated by our posts in our Letters to the Editors Feature on Saturdays.

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Guest Post by Jaime Groetsema

Brecht’s Modus Operandi for Writers and Truth-Seekers:

Another trial against apartment gallery documentiers

In the 1966 English translation of Galileo, an interpretation of Galileo Galilee’s life written by Bertolt Brecht in the form of a stage play, Galileo, an important Italian figure who is considered responsible for the development of modern science in the early 17th century, is for Brecht, just an example. Within the play, Brecht highlights the consistency to which Galileo is both challenged and forced to deny the validity of his own astronomical observations by authority figures within the church and those that support the church. But only in the face of his potential execution–he is literally shown the instruments of torture and death–does Galileo publicly renounce his ideas to those figures so that he might live and finish his final work, the Discorsi. In this work he describes two new valuable properties that influenced the creation of modern physics: the strength of materials and the motion of projected objects. The completed Discorsi was taken by an old student from Galileo when he was on house arrest in Italy towards the end of his life. The student, Andrea Sarti smuggled the book into the Netherlands where it could be printed without permission or approval.

But for Brecht, these actions weigh heavily as he responded personally to the fascism of German political powers in the 1930s with his play Galileo. Throughout the play Brecht ultimately defines his hero, truth-seeker Galileo Galilee by way of his actions: his persistence in relaying the truth of his findings; his self-imposed responsibility for society in promoting these truths, and his subsequent detainment as an example of a complex resistance to the oppressive powers of the church’s authority figures. Still responding to the contemporary climate, Brecht goes one step further and makes a call to his contemporaries. In addition to the play, he has written an essay titled Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties[1] that has been published as an appendix to Galileo. In the essay Brecht includes powerful reflections and descriptions of what characteristics one must maintain in order communicate effectively those truths hidden by means of oppression–‘suppressed’ truths–for the sake of bettering humanity (135). He summarizes his requirements thus (his italics): “He must have the courage to write the truth when truth is everywhere opposed; the keenness to recognize it, although it is everywhere concealed; the skill to manipulate it as a weapon; the judgment to select those in whose hands it will be effective; and the cunning to spread the truth among such persons” (133). Brecht in listing these requirements, also expects that a writer with the courage to speak against one’s oppressors must also use that courage to examine one’s own failures, i.e. one must be critical of one’s self and society. He continues to say that those that have the courage to speak truth in the face of an oppressor may not necessarily have the knowledge, or ability, to adequately decode those purposely-hidden truths. Truths, he says, can be obtained only by a careful and concentrated study of both history and economics and he implores writers to be exact in defining these truths and to extract the specifics of truth when vague or abstract generalizations prevail. He continues to say that writers must write to an audience; to any reader that can use the text as a tool or realize the truth through it. These truths must be readable and understood by everyone. Without truth-seekers and truth-tellers oppressors will motivate societies by way of fear to inhabit silence and stagnation.

Brecht’s important transition from ‘courage’ to ‘keenness’ leaves us with some significant evidence (133). For one to appropriately use courage, it is crucial that one must develop a well-considered methodology for study and learning. Only when one uses history and economics as a basis for their knowledge does the ability to find and tell truths develop for effectivity. He stresses the necessity of this development by saying that, “Method is good in all inquiry, but it is possible to make discoveries without using any method–indeed, even without inquiry. But by such a casual procedure one does not come to the kind of presentation of truth which will enable men to act on the basis of that presentation” (137). Without a methodology, one is not able to act on the knowledge that one has, therefore one cannot act with a effective criticism and definitely not with a criticism that will improve the impoverished conditions of one’s society. Similarly, if a writer is uninterested in the prospects of humanity, it is so because this writer is without the knowledge needed to see hidden truths; without the ability to act truly courageously; without the evidence to respond critically to others or one’s self. These differentiations are incredibly important when considering criticism of any kind, yet for essayists dealing with Chicago popular culture, a relevant detail cannot be missed. These critical and acting observers with the knowledge and the ability to dissect truth must necessarily confront and decipher falsehood as well; to critical observers not everything is a truth.

When looking at popular contemporary writings on apartment galleries or alternative spaces in Chicago-specific publications like Proximity, Time Out, and Newcity, one is shown very similar texts. As the ephemerality of these spaces is a consistent concern in this setting, writers have become more like documentiers, cataloging spaces, people, and events for an invisible archive of the future. This condition should not be mistaken as a tactful historicism, as documenting an object does not necessarily clarify its process or meaning. History and documentation are important for understanding complex social movements, yet, when documentation stands in for effective critical writing there remains a severe vacancy in the discourse (or if even a discourse at all) of cultural production. Using Brecht’s text as more than just symbolism, the writers of those pieces do little to decode the truths of a truly suppressed society, let alone be critical of it, themselves, or their publications.

Bibliography

Brecht, Bertolt. Galileo. Translated from the German by Charles Laughton. New York, NY: Grove Press, Inc., 1966.

*****

Jamie Groetsema is an artist and one of the co-founders of The Green Bicycle Organization (thegbo.wikispaces.com). You can read more about the project here.

Editors’ Note: All this week we’re running some of the essays written for Floor Length and Tux’s “Untitled Circus” event this past weekend. A number of essays on Chicago’s thriving domestic/apartment gallery art space scene were solicited from local writers/artists/curators involved in the running of such spaces, and we’re posting some of them here on Bad at Sports as a way to extend the discussion. Please feel free to email us with your comments at mail@badatsports.com, or if you’d like to contact the folks at FLAT directly, you can email Erik at erik@ floorlengthandtux.com.

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Artists Run Chicago, installation shot with Old Gold's Post, 2009 on right

From Holland Cotter’s New York Times review of the New Museum’s The Generational: Younger Than Jesus:

“But my point is that beyond quibbles about choices of individual works, [Younger than Jesus] raises the question of whether any mainstream museum show designed to be a running update exclusively on the work of young artists can rise above being a preapproved market survey. Removed from a larger generational context, can such a survey ever become a story, part of a larger history? (The same question applies to museum exhibitions that leave young artists out of the picture.) I’m asking. It’s a complicated subject. I don’t know the answer.”

I have one possible answer to Cotter’s question: look to exhibitions like Artists Run Chicago, which opened a little over a week ago at Hyde Park Art Center. Artists Run Chicago situates its 100+ works of art within a larger history, one that is as messy and complicated and compelling as any of the many terrific individual works that are on display.

Although the Hyde Park Art Center is definitely not a “mainstream museum,” nor is Artists Run Chicago a generational exhibition, the show does survey a generation of sorts: ten years in the life of Chicago’s alternative art scene as manifested in the countless exhibitions that have taken place in apartments, houses, and cheap storefronts and loft spaces across the city.

The minimum criteria for selection in “Younger than Jesus” was that an artist be under the age of 33. Britton Bertran and Allison Peters Quinn, the curators of Artists Run Chicago, looked not at the age or even the production history of individual artists but focused instead on the (recent) history of a particular kind of exhibition-making that Chicago artists arguably do better than anyone, anywhere, else.

Following a few self-imposed guidelines–in order to be invited to participate in the exhibition, for example, a space had to have been run by artists, to exist in the Chicagoland area, and it needed an exhibition track record of at least eight months between 1999 and 2009–Bertran and Quinn put together an exhibition that reflects the conditions of production within Chicago’s alternative art scene. That scene is itself an ad-hoc, energetic, ever-shifting space of possibility and, let’s face it, struggle. It isn’t easy to run a space, even (and maybe especially) if it’s out of your own home and totally on your dime.

After viewing Artists Run Chicago, it’s hard not to start questioning some of the founding principles upon which sprawling group shows of emerging artists like Younger than Jesus are founded, starting with their tendency to frame artistic practice exclusively in terms of individualistic endeavor.

In this and other ways, Artists Run Chicago undermines simplistic notions of what constitutes a ‘generation.’ Is being part of a generation defined only by the year of your birth, or could it be alternatively circumscribed by who you hung out with and when, who your influences were? How long does a generation last? A decade? Or is as little as eight months enough–whatever time span is required for a group of people to make something that in turn spawns other things: namely, art. Sometimes the lifespan of a space is necessarily short, other times it lives long enough to become something of an elder statesman. Often, a space dies but germinates elsewhere in slightly different form.

Right now, Artists Run Chicago is blissfully short on documentation, which allows for treasure hunt-like wandering about the exhibition and sense of fresh discovery among viewers. For many people, a trip through the show is likely to provoke fond memories and personal anecdotes; for me, it was all new, and yet not once did I feel like an outsider, like someone peering through a window onto a scene that was purposefully cryptic or hipper-than-thou.

A show like this does need some explication, of course; I’m told an exhibition catalogue produced by Threewalls and Green Lantern Press is due in September will be published by Proximity magazine as a broadsheet with a map and timeline. It will include an essay by Dan Gunn along with interviews of the show’s participants. I’m looking forward to connecting what I’ve already seen ‘on the ground’ to everyone else’s stories, and to that larger history.

Ben Wolf (at Normal Projects), Commandering, 2009, found wood and mixed media

Nathan Mason's Margin Gallery, works from "Butter" exhibition, Jan/Feb. 1999

Foreground: Mindy Rose Schwartz at Joymore, Ghost, 2002, resin; background: Nick Black at Joymore, Untitled, 2000 (melted toys)

Swimming Pool Project Space, "If I record this now, I won't forget you in the future".

Sebastian Alvarez at Antena, What if the Earth, 2009, single-channel video

Artists Run Chicago at Hyde Park Art Center

VONZWECK, "Curtain which separated VONZWECK from the rest of my apartment, designed by me, fabricated by Brian Taylor"

Julius Caesar, Audio Tour for Artists Run Chicago, 5 disc players and encumbrances.

Old Gold, Post, 2009 (detail), wood, stain, pencil and permanent marker

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Last Saturday Fabio opened “Mini Fair,” which can be thought of as an eensy weensie, domestically-scaled counterpart to Artists Run Chicago. Fabio was joined by two other Chicago alternative galleries–The Swimming Pool Project Space and Floor Length and Tux (FLAT)–in creating miniature scale-model versions of their own spaces complete with diminutive artworks installed within.

What I find fascinating about the way the miniature is evoked here is how concisely these toy-sized spaces embody all of the qualities for which alternative galleries (in Chicago and elsewhere) are both praised and subtly derided: their smallness of scale; their scrappy, no budget, d.i.y. sensibility; their location within the space of the home and the domestic (and, by extension, ‘the feminine’).

I’m off to Hyde Park Art Center to see Artists Run Chicago. Below, a few images from “Mini Fair.”  Look especially closely at the floor material in FLAT’s space — it’s kitty litter!

Minidutch. Installation by Chris Millar. Model built by Robert Andrew Mueller.

The Swimming Pool Project Space. Installation by Mican Morgan. Model built by Liz Nielsen.

The Swimming Pool Project Space. Installation by Mican Morgan. Model built by Liz Nielsen.

Floor Length and Tux (FLAT), Model built by EC Brown and Catie Olson.

Floor Length and Tux (FLAT), interior detail. Model built by EC Brown and Catie Olson.

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