The Essential New Art Examiner

The ‘Madness’ of Chicago Art

T H E G U E R R I L L A G I R L S    Speakeasy   193 GUERRILLA GIRL #7 I’M A GUERRILLA GIRL AND I THINK THAT THE ART WORLD IS PERFECT AND I WOULD NEVER THINK OF COMPLAINING ABOUT ANY OF THE WONDERFUL PEOPLE IN IT. AFTER ALL, WOMEN ARTISTS MAKE FULLY ONE WHOLE THIRD OF WHAT MALE ARTISTS MAKE, SO WHAT’S THERE TO BE MAD ABOUT? I MEAN, IT’S NOT NICE TO GET ANGRY, NICE GIRLS DON’T GET ANGRY. I WOULDN’T DREAM OF GETTING ANGRY. THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR TAKING TIME OUT OF YOUR BUSY DAY TO LISTEN TO THIS. D onald K uspit The ‘Madness’ of Chicago Art May 1986 As I begin to write about the “Chicagoness” of Chicago art—as though it is possible to give an essence to what has a vigorously diverse existence—I am in dread of incurring Franz Schulze’s wrath. Schulze took Russell Bowman to task for arguing that “the central concept of the Chicago Imagists was that commonplace imagery, and vernacular, kitschy imagery in particular, could be sources for intensely personal expressions ” (NAE, October 1984). Schulze retorted: “That characterization hardly fits Chicago art of the period 1945 to 1965. Campoli, Petlin and Statsinger were either indifferent or consciously hostile to kitsch and the vernacular, preferring to explore themes more nearly mythic or universal in intent” (NAE, December 1984). Schulze will no doubt feel I am guilty of even greater misapprehension of Chicago art than Bowman—of overlooking even more of the details of its history. For in a calculated attempt to avoid all the clichés about it, the redundant, hackneyed, Procrustean terms in which Chicago art has come to be discussed—“prodigal funk,” “retardataire and provincial pastiche of Pop and Surrealism,” “exacerbated figuration,” “monster roster”—I want to change the terms of the discussion by locating Chicago art in a larger context of understanding than is customary. It is in fact the largest context: I want to understand its place, function, and “philosophy” in modern art as a whole. Such an enterprise is no doubt filled with the pitfalls (pratfalls?) of overgeneralization—although it promises to end the usually defensive character of discussions of Chicago art (or else put it more on the defense than ever). But it seems the only way of breaking the stranglehold imposed by the conventional categorization of Chicago art, which has D O N A L D K U S P I T    The ‘Madness’ of Chicago Art   195 unexpectedly made it seem banal by too vigorously insisting upon its way-outness. (For wayoutness is the most habitual, banal characteristic of modern art.) I believe Chicago art has a truly extraordinary position within what Harold Rosenberg called the “tradition of the new.” I would like to generate a fresh respect for Chicago art, create a new perspective from which it can be appreciated. It is an important innovative art; but the implications of its novelty for modern art as a whole have not been spelled out. Critics have been too busy defending its right to its “difference ” to examine the full meaning of that difference. For me Chicago art is a special demonstration of the troubled character of modern art—more particularly, of two problems that have shaped it from the start. First, its profound dissatisfaction with and distrust of all modes of articulation, which keeps it restlessly on the move inventing novel modes of articulation, all of which remain haunted by the aura of inarticulateness, that is, by the suspicion that they are futile as articulations of reality and subtly inarticulate or confused in themselves. Another way to state this is to say that the most serious modern art has always thought of itself not only as art but as anti-art, the viper which grows within its bosom—yet that is what makes modern art “modern.” For anti-art expresses the “nihilistic” relationship of art to the modern world. That is, its devaluation or deprecation of itself in the very act of making itself is its internalization of its “inferior” status in the modern scientific world, an implicit acknowledgement of its doubtful reason for existing in this world. In overt anti-art, we see art banalizing itself into another dumbly “positive” material fact of the modern world in the very act of asserting its triumph over—negation of—that world...