Chicago has had characters – both architects and buildings – throughout it’s development as a place where things get built, regardless of if people want it or not. Bruce Goff, a transplanted Chicagoan, was a character and produced them. Goff was a child prodigy that started practicing architecture at 12-fucking-years-old and was doing weird things before they were cool i.e. Pre-PoMo; hell, pre-WWII.
The Bachman house was completed in 1947 and landmarked in the 1980s. This single-family home sports a straight-up sheet metal façade that’s closer to a shed than a home. The sharp triangulation and peak of the Bachman House roof volume gets bisected by an even more acute triangle, held up by two symmetrical equilateral ones – architects did love drawing with their triangles! The front and center in-your-face nature of this bungalow only gets weirder by placing it within a typical Chicago neighborhood laden with brick 3-flats and masonry walk-ups. Goff’s fortress (many people compare his work to castles) does not embrace local flavor superficially. Instead, it totally engages with Chicago’s, “build first and ask questions later” attitude to architectural culture. Unfortunately, that approach comes with a disclaimer that the Daley’s and Rahm both espouse: “nothing or no one stands in the way of development.” Meaning not even landmark status can save buildings anymore in Chicago.
Maybe they didn’t get the memo that architects are used to projects never getting built, let alone mostly working in virtual reality, so you can kill a building but you can’t kill architecture.
Featuring work generated rounds of Harkins’ own game, Native American Fax Machine is on view through May 25th at Happy Collaborationists. If these .gif’s are any indication (which they obviously are), this show is definitely worth checking out. Bonus points for contributing to the landline trend! The instructions for your own round of Native American Fax Machine are included below:
A game played with 6 or more players.
Each player selects a card with a noun.
Each player has 3 minutes to draw the noun.
The players move the drawings clockwise.
Players then have 1 minute to copy the drawing.
Players pass the drawings until they have made the same amount of copies as players.
The last person to draw the noun has to guess the original noun on the card.
Composite of “caribou” from the NAFM
.gif of “caribou” from the NAFM
E-Dogz: Zombie Apocalyptic Refuge Center
Something to ease the loss of “Walking Dead”
When the zombie apocalypse goes down, we’ll all have to think on their toes– watching our backs as we hit the roads– escaping the ravenous army of undead relentlessly pursuing our cranial tissues. The living will have to eat too and the mobile kitchen of E-Dogz will be a beacon of nourishment in these end days. Eric “E-Dog” May has teamed up with Rimas Simaitis to equip the food trailer to travel land and sea, feeding the people in these dyer times. The zombie plague actually began generations ago, conjured through black magic by Voodoo priests on island nations during the glory days of the high seas. To honor the zombie resistance of yore, E-Dogz: Zombie Apocalypse Refuge Center will host a tiki party to ward off zombies and serve up doomsday cuisine and circuses. This event may feature, but will not be limited to: Spam nigiri, entomophagy (look it up), flaming cocktails, and/or coconut short wave radios.
TODAY!
Eric May & Rimas Simaitis present:
E-Dogz: Zombie Apocalyptic Refuge Center
May 13th, 5pm– 7pm Gallery 400
in response to Halflifers
While you were busy rubbing up against undergrads who rock BO like its spring Givenchy at the latest apartment opening, What’s the T? was doing rigorous “research” on how the other half lives. The half that attends a monthly live talk show catered by a guest chef in a West Loop winery.
The April 1st Dinner Party featured actually funny stand-up from Brian Babylon and made me fall in love with Peggy Macnamara. The pork chop was bangin’ and the food was totally worth the price of the ticket alone.
Ted Seymour, resident choreographer at Ballet Chicago, danced the opening performance with Ellen Green at the April 1st Dinner Party.
Unsurprisingly, What’s the T? is particularly star-struck by the inclusion of Jordan, the creator of CandidCandace.com and a social columnist for the Trib at the May 6th installment of the live broadcast event.
Writing gossip and being gossip are usually considered mutual exclusive endeavors, but Candace Jordan has managed to work both sides of the column. Jordan was named playboy bunny of the year in 1976 and currently spends her time covering the juiciest events in town. Michael Jordan’s wedding much?
Buy tickets for the May 6th Dinner Party featuring Candace Jordan, Lin Brehmer of WXRT, and Nick Bowling, Associate Director of the Timeline Theatre. Hosted by Elysabeth Alfano at City Winery.
.gif of the week
SNEAK PEEKER
Peep this outtake from Kris Harzinski & Will Haughery’s May 26th exhibition at ACRE.
Telephone Cords Snap Back
Landline aesthics make a comeback
Local fav, Gel Set’s new video for “disconnected” features everyone you’ve ever seen at party and really works the telephone cord trend.
Karthik Pandian’s Rhona Hoffman exhibition has also been trending hard, recently inciting a comment war on New City’s website. The Incomparables Club featured a circle of red telephone cord placed aptly above the desk, which can still be seen in Pandian’s on-going video installation, Reversal in the upstairs gallery.
Gems are few and far between in terms of iconic architecture. Most of the time, our cities are made up of small insignificant cumulative buildings occupying neighborhoods and defining local character. But this building in Lakeview doesn’t HAVE character; it IS a character, an odd-one-out for that matter.
This polarized 3-flat near the EL on Sheffield is shaped by typical Chicago lot restrictions, but not by local vernacular practices, like red bricks or Chicago Windows. This residence looks like it should be in South Beach, not North Lakeview – a conglomerate of White and Grey masonry blocks in alternating horizontal lines; copious amounts of Miami Vice Glass brick; 90s laser-beam graphics on the long elevation; ‘hi-tech’ Kubrick bubble windows; a diagonally cut front entrance; and fucking shark fins on the parapet roof profile. I can’t believe I just described a building like this AND it’s real. It’s odd placement near a major transit point and its non-Chicago skin make it stand out, but not in the way that suggests it got lost in the wrong neighborhood. It’s as if this building is doing it’s own thing and feeling really comfortable, like dancing with it’s eyes closed and pretending no one’s watching.
As an object, this looker is not a place you can hang at, since it’s a private residence. Maybe you can make friends with the inhabitants of this time-and-place machine. Imagine hanging on the asymmetrical rear patio decks on a warm summer night, sipping on your cold fruity drink – if you get blasted enough, it might feel like Miami Beach with your eyes closed…but then the train will pass by and you’ll realize you’re in a fucking spaceship.
Grade A diamond in the rough.
Address: FIND IT YOURSELF!
What the T?!
What happened to G.R. N’Namdi Gallery?
Header image is a detail shot of Karthik Pandian’s piece Quandry, 2013 (Coiled telephone cord, 56 inches diameter) at his recent exhibition, The Incomparables Club, at Rhona Hoffman Gallery.
THIS JUST IN: Music is, indeed, trending. While I did not see the Cave/s in person I was excited by all the hubub around two caves meeting in person. Maybe most of all, this performance sounds amazing: ”Everything we know about Passover we learned at Bobby Conn‘s final residency performance at the Hideout last Tuesday. His full band including Tim Jones fronted brass section was nothing short of a Pesach miracle.” That and more from WHAT’S THE T? (hooray!)
What I found after googling images for “frost giant”
According to Jeriah Hildwine ”the frost giants [have] finally abdicate[d] their annual reign over Chicago” which is good news in an of itself, though he writes primarily about his experience applying to MFAs, getting enrolled or rejecting, choosing this over that. “Like Maximus said in Gladiator,” Hildwine writes, ”‘The choices we make in life echo in eternity.’” And, it turns out, Chicago is a pretty good place to end up.
Anthony Romero continues his on-going series WHAT CAN BE DONE WITH DANCE? and interviews Rebekah Kowal about her book, How to Do Things with Dance: Performing Change in Postwar America, exploring the relationship between social activism and dance choreography.“As of late” Romero writes, ”I have been writing a great deal about strategies and modes of resistance. I have been thinking about the usefulness of dance, of the power of embodied action to simultaneously imagine and enact alternatives to dominant schemas of value that exclude what Judith Butler has referred to as the “ungrievables”. Those whose lives are devalued by social conditions and governmental policies to such an extent that if their life were to extinguish it would go unnoticed.”
Near/Far, 2013. Installation view courtesy of Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art and Misha Kligman
“…transitions—seasonal or otherwise—are unruly. Kansas City artists Nicole Mauser and Caleb Taylor make paintings and collages which illuminate the wild, sometimes dark, often whimsical transitions that happen in the studio. Taylor, who currently has a show up at Sherry Leedy Gallery, presents a series of paintings that, like spring’s arrival, struggle to emerge through the dense fog of the artist’s heavy black brush strokes. But with the collages, Taylor is able to clear out the fog where necessary in order to contrast harsh lines and geometries with soft shadows and dazzling light. Indeed, these compositions read like atmospheric interludes designed for scene transitions in Film Noir flicks like Panique and Kiss Me Deadly.”
April 1972. The second, widely televised demolition of a Pruitt-Igoe building that followed the March 16 demolition. Source: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
“The ghost of Pruitt-Igoe looms large in St. Louis. The 33-building public housing complex, designed by Minoru Yamasaki (who was also the architect of the World Trade Center) and completed in 1954, has long fascinated architectural historians and enthusiasts alike. Designed in accordance with Le Corbusier’s utopian ‘Towers in the Park‘ vision, its demolition began less than twenty years later in 1972 as the site fell prey to dried-up funding, mismanagement, and subsequent decrepitude and crime. According to architectural theorist Charles Jencks writing in 1977, the notorious demise of Pruitt-Igoe, captured on film and televised widely at the time, marked the day that ‘modern architecture died.’”
“If the Chicago art community wants more, more national and international attention and recognition, more major artists staying in Chicago, more opportunities across the board from sales to exhibitions, it’s time that we demanded our major newspapers and magazines step up and make a commitment. It’s time we had an art critic in our newspapers.”
“[Churchill] loved his landscapes and still lives and painted over an estimated 500 in his lifetime. What drew a man of such political power to something like painting? He saw it as the end-all, be-all of anxiety, which I think says a lot coming from someone who nicknamed his own clinical depression.”
All this talk of Churchill reminded me about Orson Welles. I remember my own mother seemed to intensely admire both men, and had various anecdotes about both of them. Here is a very strange clip to that end —
Boston based performance artist Garrett Yahn proved himself to be a grade-a sissy this past Saturday when, during his exhibition and performance “Old Work/New Work” at Happy Collaborationists, he applied women’s makeup to his face for nearly an hour.
Garrett Yahn doing “man stuff”
Yahn’s solo show in collaboration with ACRE and Happy C’s also featured two video works highlighting repetitive manual labor, the artist’s meticulously handwritten CV and a photo of Yahn with the goopy black mascara beard that his performance culminated in. One of the video works starred the artist’s father, who is probably horrified by the fact that his son parades around, wearing mascara in public.
Attendees of the show sheepishly sipped their beer while pretending to “get it.” Afterwards, many returned home to experiment with makeup and ponder the relationship between factory work and male drag.
Blog Roll
They Won’t Roll Themselves
Sometimes life imiates art. Other times art imitates life. But occassionally life kicks arts ass so hard that art gets really embarassed and has to stay home from school for at least a week. Internet gem “You Had One Job” is one of those times.
Girl Don’t be Dumb, because you shouldn’t be. And you can never get enough pink.
Meeting of the minds: Neff & Walker
“Does this cyanotype make me look fat?”
John Neff in Conversation with Hamza Walker at the Renaissance Society
John Neff killed it last night at his opening and artist talk The Renaissance Society. The 58 chronologically titled black and white photographs in the show, produced with a MacGyvered scanner camera were striking and solemn, framed identically and hung on dark gray walls that bisected the gallery.
Neff and Walker’s discussion at the opening nothing short of enlightening. Spanning 16 years of the artists work and evolution, topics discussed ranged from John Cage to instagram and went well over the allotted time, though no one in the packed and captive audience seemed to care. Footage of the conversation will soon be available on the Ren’s vimeo page.
More information on the exhibition can be found here.
Kate Moss commissions portrait
As if there weren’t enough already
Its been reported that the model/badgirl recently commissioned British street artist Bambi to create a painting of Moss for her home in the Cotswolds. Ever humble, Moss simply requested that her portrait be “similar to the iconic ‘Marilyn’ by Andy Warhol.” Since Kate’s country retreat has wall space to spare, What’s the T? has taken the liberty of creating a hypothetical art collection specially curated for the contemporary English Marilyn.
After announcing an in-depth partnership with the City of Chicago during a recent press conference, EXPO Chicago made a puzzling move this week by naming Los Angeles-based Shamim M. Momin as the curator of their IN/SITU program for the 2013 fair. No T, No shade; Momin is obviously qualified, but is the goal of EXPO Chicago ultimately to showcase the city or to become a platform for touring curators? Is there room at the young fair for both?
Erratum
What’s the T? would like to note a clarification concerning this article: EXPO Art Week is meant to be a separate city-wide initiative of arts and culture programming while EXPO CHICAGO is still the International Exposition of Contemporary & Modern Art.
The Weatherman Report
For Chicago IL
Per Kirkeby, Birds Buried in Snow, 1970
On The Street:
Fashion from the line outside the SAIC BFA show
All images taken in the unbelievably long line outside The School of the Art Institute’s 2013 Spring Undergraduate Exhibition Opening Reception last Friday night, unless not.
These things.
Stranger finds himself surrounded by mediocre art, after grueling wait
Onlookers struggle to make sense of SAIC BFA Exhibition
After waiting hours in a line full of respectable adults and “interesting” looking millennials, a lone Chicagoan found himself trapped amongst useless ceramics, twigs, rice and what appeared to be gigantic collaborative finger paintings at the SAIC BFA Exhibition Opening this past friday night.
“All of a sudden I was sitting inside of skinned muppet surrounded by kids who looked like they all got haircuts in the dark,” said the bewildered attendee.
Confused by the plethora of elaborate business cards in a place where absolutely no business could possibly be taking place, the lone outsider struggled to make meaning out of rocks covered with sponges and photographs of morose teenagers.
After spending nearly 20 minutes watching a video of a girl to licking a suspended donut, the visitor left in a hurry, stating angrily “What is this cracked-out corn-maze and and why is everyone drinking La Croix?”
Work by Megan Isaacs (Rebuild), 2013
Header image is a installation shot of “No Show” at the West Pilsen Sculpture Garden.
Following a preview launch at the closing of 24hours/25days at New Capital, Forever and Always, the joint curatorial venture of Billy Joyce and Brook Sinkinson Withrow debuted at their Pilsen location last Friday night with a screening of Dreamgirl by Sarah Condo work and a musical performance by Younger.
Forever and Always curators Joyce and Withrow by Matthew Joynt
While the Forever and Always main focus is on programming (they have a lecture by Willy Smart scheduled for March 5th), the space features an ongoing “exhibition” of artwork as well. Whether or not this is a clever ploy to decorate the curators’ apartment remains unclear.
“Its not like someone is trying to hide that it’s an apartment. The art is just where it is. It’s like a return to not giving a shit.” – unnamed source (Michael Kloss)
Blog Roll
They Won’t Roll Themselves
Can’t get enough irreverent internet in your tumblr digest? Is The Jogging becoming too relevant for your taste? Enter #NYCartlife. Just a couple SAIC to NYC transplants and their NY Advanced Painting analogs posting selfies and bad art history jokes. #thankmelaterorneveritscool
At last weeks opening for #WITH at ACRE Projects, exhibiting artist, Kristina Paabus, introduced What’s the T? to “#SOYEAHDUH” and we are forever grateful. After doing a little researchWTT? learned the blog was created by Wicker Park’s Lisa Frame. Frame is also the creator of “Mugshot-Monday,” which is unfortunately just a bunch of people and their coffee cups.
The legislation furthermore provides this blogger with the perfect context in which to repost the recent Temporary Alliegance flag by h.melt. The installation of the flag pole outside of UIC was concieved by Philip von Zweck and functions as an opportunity for others to exercise freedom of expression.
Artist, Andrew Norman “Norm” Wilson, seeks two interns (see: freaky twins) for the duration of his exhibition at threewalls to water plants and sell bootleg DVD’s in a North Face jacket.
After slamming several prominent galleries, curators and artists in his article “Friends Curating Friends” for New City, local art critic and curmudgeon, Pedro Velez, took to Facebook last week to gloat over his own accomplishments of curating exhibitions and making artists cry while simultaneously chastising more victims.
LVL3 was unharmed.
Velez’s heart failed to grow three sizes that day.
Terry Myers offeres one of the most not-crazy responses to Velez’s article on the illustrious and longwinded Foumberg thread:
What could Nadar have been thinking when he offered his photography studio for his friends to have their first show in Paris? And what about the activities of all of those friends at the Cabaret Voltaire? Not to mention that pointless “Freeze” show in London. Shocking, but thankfully none of these artists had to call themselves curators.
Terry R Myers
February 5 at 1:28pm (7 likes)
Trending:
Couples
All images taken during the opening of the The Couples show at Heaven Gallery last Friday night, unless obviously from @richforever.
Thorne Brandt & Lindsey Regatta
Hornswaggler Arts
LVL3 turns 3.
Gallery finally lives up to its name
LVL3 is turning three(3) years old and to celebrate, curators and co-directors, Vincent Uribe and Allison Kilberg, are showing five artists who have been with them from the beginning: Michael Hunter, Paul Kenneth, Easton Miller, Liz Nielsen, and Kate Steciw.
