Chicago was born Judith Cohen in 1939 in Chicago, Illinois to parents Arthur and Mary Cohen. At an early age she showed an interest in art, which was encouraged by her parents who registered her for art classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She eventually enrolled at UCLA where the changing social landscape there would greatly influence the art she would come to create. In 1961 she married Jerry Gerowitz, whose surname she went by until 1970. Her husband unexpectedly died in a car crash in 1963, which prompted Chicago to continue to use his name. In a 1970 ad for Art Forum, Chicago under went another personal and professional transformation by unveiling her new self-given name taken from her home city, Chicago. The advertisement doubled as an announcement of her name change and also for an exhibition at California State College at Fullerton. This re-naming process marked a new period in Chicago’s life, which embraced the feminist movement and many of the community based tactics that came with it.

The trajectory of the show considers a ten year span in which Chicago underwent various personal and artistic changes. While in graduate school Chicago was famously criticized by a male professor for producing images that were too “womb and breast like,” which can be seen in pieces such as Mother Superette. She responded to this criticism by creating work for both her graduate thesis and work she would eventually produce for Rolf Nelson Gallery, which deviated from these forms. As the wall text notes, “she focused on painted sculptures in keeping with more geometric forms of East coast minimalism, incorporating the slick surfaces and lush colors that would come to define California’s Finish Fetish style.” Chicago would continue to use this approach to her art making process by repressing the more feminized imagery she had been inclined to make earlier in her career while adopting different approaches to her work. In many of the pieces from this era, a juxtaposition between non-traditional materials and practices can be seen. Chicago received training through an auto body school to study car painting techniques, which at the time was still considered to be a male-dominated space. She also learned to cast fiberglass and mastered the use of a variety of power tools in an effort to both inhabit these male spaces while also adding to her repertoire as an artist. These works were addressing her experiences as woman while simultaneously responding to the cultural and social realities of this time.

Chicago’s 2011 piece Birth Hood for example, which is a recreation of the 1964 original, illustrates the two worlds she was inhabiting at this time. The sculpture uses a car hood that was fabricated by Chicago. She then used auto body paint to create lush colors and biomorphic shapes that incorporated her own imagery and many of the car culture trends in L.A. at this time. This piece as well as many others featured in the exhibition showcases the development of the L.A. Finish Fetish moment. This art movement was occurring directly along side second wave feminism and consciousness-raising groups as well as the emergent car and counter culture.

Although Chicago’s work always contained female imagery within it, the shift from the late 1960s to the 1970s is striking. These later works would lay the foundation for The Dinner Party and can be seen in many of the paintings, drawings and performances from this era. By Chicago taking up China painting in 1972 for example, speaks to both her ingenious approach to non-traditional art practices while also embracing the more feminized elements to her work. Chicago’s 1973 Into the Darkness drawing features several petal-like layers varying in color from pink to green amidst a darkened center. Chicago would go onto create a series of related drawings, lithographs and paintings, which reflected this imagery and seemed to directly respond to the female form, while also gesturing towards the work of Georgia O’Keefe.

While I enjoyed the show overall, two things were missing for me. The first was an acknowledgment of the kind of privileged space Chicago inhabited at this time, despite the overt sexism she faced in male-dominated art and social spaces. The second missing factor was the lack of a dialogue her work had with many female artists of color who were emerging at this same time. Despite these shortcomings, “Chicago in L.A.” is an exciting representation of feminist art from this era, and is helping to expose the next generation of artists to Chicago’s work.

By Anni Irish

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Image courtesy of FiveMyles

Featuring: Pamela Council, Patrice Renee Washington, Sara Jimenez, Sondra Perry

Re: Purpose
April 12 – May 4, 2014
FiveMyles
558 St. Johns place
Brooklyn
fivemyles.org

The post Re: Purpose at FiveMyles appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

IJ: Your work also seems to reference a pagan ideology that predates Judeo-Christianity. Niki de Saint Phalle comes to mind.  All the circles remind me of the ancient idea of continuity. From an Occidental standpoint, people tend to think of life and death as separate. It’s actually more of a life-death-life cycle.
EF: It’s a wheel, definitely. Circles are the most perfect shape. It’s in way more related to a feminine depiction, but it can also be very cosmic, celestial.  We can talk about what a mandala is and how it functions as a tool for journeying. I hope that these function as portals or stimuli for having that sort of experience.

IJ: They also remind me of Persian rugs. There’s this intense labor that goes into them and there’s so much complexity. At first you look at them and it seems as though the patterns are repeating and that there’s symmetry—but there’s always something a little bit off. There’s an idea in a lot of rug making, that the rug maker leaves a few flaws. Not necessarily a flaw, but…
EF: There’s an acknowledgement that a human being can’t create a perfect thing. That, that’s only done by a divine source, so they intentionally make something off or leave one part undone.

IJ: The funny thing is that nature often leaves things off, too! The idea of perfection is so elusive because the world is so deeply imperfect.
EF: Right. Well, it’s very important to me that these things look like a human being made them, that they’re not machine made, and that my individual hand is present. These are objects that need to be seen in person.

IJ: That’s important, since the visual experience is often taken for granted.
EF: It’s very important to be making objects that really need to be experienced in person, and to be making tactile things that actually exist in the real world.

IJ: There’s this overwhelming power to your work, because it commands your attention; it’s very celebratory and ritualistic.
EF: Well, that reminds of this text, Heaven and Hell, by Aldous Huxley. He basically talks about visionary experience first through mescaline and then through art. He talks a lot about precious materials like gems and gold and why human beings value those things. It’s because they’re precious and rare, but if you think back to the ancient world, these materials were the most brilliant and shiny and colorful things. They were thought of as being keys to some sort of heavenly or otherworldly realm. Rhinestones are obviously thought of as the poor man’s diamond, but because of the way they reflect light and the brilliant nature and color of the gems, it stimulates the eye in a similar way, and it’s riffing with stained glass windows.

IJ: I was actually going to say that these pieces look very much like stained glass windows. And stained glass windows were intentionally created to evoke this transcendental experience for people through the use of translucency and the way in which the light played or refracted.
EF: Exactly. Beauty is obviously important in this work and in my personal relationship to thinking about the power that beauty can have in a way that isn’t just superficial. Yet I’m taking the most superficial materials and trying to make them really serious.

IJ: It’s almost subversive to be thinking about beauty at this point, just because it’s been shunned so much. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that American culture is so largely based on both Protestantism and pragmatism. This pervasive push towards pragmatism attempts to eliminate anything that isn’t seen as the essential core.
EF: So, I’m working with rhinestones on denim and studs on leather, which is a form of embellishment. It’s decoration and you could say it’s almost superfluous in terms of the added adornment of bedazzling or studding your jacket. And maybe that’s why it’s perceived to be trashy in a way, too.

IJ: But, I think that that’s very essential to the roots of culture and civilization in general. Adornment has existed from the beginning.
EF: Of course, it’s a way of identifying you and your tribe, and what tribe you belong to—as well as what your values are and who you are as a person.

IJ: What were you trying to achieve in your current solo show at Jeff Bailey?
EF: I’ve been working with these materials for quite a long time. In this body of work I was trying to really narrow my focus, through making up these rules for myself, like limiting the palette in a very direct way, and also playing a lot with the negative space in the forms. The negative space in the forms becomes as important as each of the additive parts of the painting. They each have a mandala shape, where there’s a central point that emanates outwards, and even if it’s not symmetrical on four points, it’s reflective in its symmetry. They’re all, some more so than others, relating to traditional tapestry, rug work, or mosaic work.

Evie Falci, Ipos, 2013. Studs on pleather. 48 x 36 in.

IJ: This dialogue with crafts traditions also makes the work feminist, the same way that the feminists tried to remove themselves from the male tradition of painting in the seventies.
EF: Oh, yeah! Pattern is obviously very important in this work and its relationship to textiles and getting out of the heroic traditional type masculine painting.

IJ: There’s definitely a dialogue with AbEx in that the scale is bodily, and it reminds me of walking up to a Rothko. What you’re doing is similar to the way that the feminists in the past, like Lee Bontecou would subvert canvas by creating these intensely strong vacuums and voids.
EF: Oh, she’s my home girl! Love her!

IJ: And what you’re doing with the denim and the leather, I think that that’s such a conscious decision. There’s this celebration of femininity through the use of adornment and referencing these crafts traditions, and I feel that that’s really important because a lot of women are shying away from Feminism right now.
EF: Oh, well, God. How could you argue with what feminism is, and if you’re like “I’m not a feminist,” then you’re giving power to the people who have slandered that term and made it a dirty word.

IJ: The women who are rejecting feminism now, don’t seem to realize that they wouldn’t even have a platform to speak from it wasn’t for the feminists of the past who laid out the grunt work.
EF: People don’t have a memory of what it was like at an earlier time, and they take it for granted, this world that we are in now, except that there’s still such a divide. That’s why I want to make such aggressively feminine, aggressively beautiful paintings. At the same time, I don’t want to make vagina art! I don’t know—maybe these are cosmic pussies?!

IJ: There is still such a tendency in so much of the art world to downplay the importance of work that is feminine.
EF: Well, there was the pattern and decoration movement in the eighties, and this work is tied to that as well. Textiles and patterning are also associated with women’s work and feminine work. In the text, Ornament and Crime, Adolf Loos, is not specifically talking about women but you could read it this way too. He’s mostly talking about “savages” from Papua New Guinea who are involved with tattooing, piercing, and decorating their everyday objects. He claims that civilized people shouldn’t need to do that, and he fetishizes straight lines and unadorned surfaces. It’s a text that makes the case for modernism and imperialism.

IJ: Modernism has always struck me as coming out of an ascetic Puritanism.
EF: Totally, and this work is very anti that as well, being “more is more is more!”

IJ: It’s very problematic to me, the way that previous generations looked at abstraction with such unquestioning faith and idealism.
EF: That it’s a universal language that can be read by all?

IJ: Yeah, or even that’s it’s removed from the corporeal filth of actual existence.
EF: In a way, I do believe that abstraction can function that way, and maybe because these materials are so populist, that there’s already a very open point of entry for engaging with this stuff. That’s why I love outsider art and ancient art because it comes from such a place of fervent desire and an undeniable need to make, that I find lacking in a lot of work.

IJ: A lot of work almost begs permission for aligning itself with an academic dogma. So many artists still talk about demystifying art, and I feel like that may have been interesting twenty years ago, but it’s no longer relevant, because our ideas have progressed and our conception of the world has become more pluralistic and complex. I almost feel like we need to bring the magician back!
EF: Hey, I’m here!

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In her series of photos Women of Allah and The Book of the Kings, she tackles the delicate subject of her cultural heritage – a certain emotional and intellectual commitment in which Iranian women make to honour their great civilization, while at the same time rebelling against that tradition. We see a similar kind of attitude in Marjane Satrapi’s work, primarily in her book and subsequent film Persepolis. Her paintings are dark and expressionistic, but extremely sophisticated. Neshat takes a different approach, imposing a more severe, black and white approach to the world where she came from. Her stance is even more traditional or nostalgic, as she left Iran at the age of 17 for the United States, and as such has maintained a complicated relationship to her native country.

Neshat combines in her images a mixture of slick western imagery with the letters in Farsi. She is aware of her rich tradition, but she never blatantly speaks of her anxiety nor makes an overtly political commentary. As she remembers ancient battlefields, warriors enraptured in the games of chess and strategy, and soldiers with their hearts pierced and bleeding, we are made highly aware of her outlook in this contemporary moment. Neshat is acutely aware of the fact that Iran is composed of different nations and various religions. As she depicts ancient rites of the Zoroastrians, we feel that she is close to that Tower of Silence where the dead bodies go to rest. The profound questions in regards to life and death are always at the center of her work. Her understanding of the complexities of this diverse international life are what keep her work at the forefront, positioning her amongst an elite group of contemporary artists.

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