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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Brian Getnick: Art for me is a way of joining thoughts that might not belong together in any other discourse. When you make art, you can actualize these thoughts into forms and create models where they are indisputably united. I like that stubborn insistence.

As far as my family is concerned, I’ll start with Halloween. We would start sewing costumes in early September. There’s a picture of me as an 8-year-old howling at the camera in a green tunic, swim goggles, witch nails and a felt rat sewn to my chest. Obviously, I was rat-man. I almost never wanted to be a recognizable character. When the holiday was over, I would make small figures with fabric and florist’s wire drawn from the world I had inhabited in costume, playing out stories around the house and in the woods. I never wanted the fantasy to end.

LO: What’s your working process?

BG: Play is my process. When I begin working on a performance, I make an object, mask or costume and start activating it by moving inside it or handing it off to a collaborator. For The Pest Horse, a performance I’m doing with Bryatt Bryant this August, I hand him the horse bodies and say, “Give me two performances.” It can be as simple a directive as that. He intuitively knows how to make something come alive and find out how it wants to behave. We record what he comes up with, we try it again, and eventually whittle it down.

LO: Where did you go to school and how did that effect your artistic development?

BG: I got my MFA in the Material Studies Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The department’s philosophy of encouraging the intuitive and pleasurable process of experimenting with materials gave me the breathing room to grow. Five years after getting my MFA, I went back to making plays with figures and costumes. 

LO: What are the ideas in your work?

BG: Memory, control, freedom and the body. In the total sensorial experience of my performance work, I want these subjects to weave in and out of visibility and articulation. My first desire is to mesmerize the audience with how the sculptural bodies that I make come alive, later fall apart, and how they behave in general. What they interpret this interplay to mean is up to them. That is a type of research that I couldn’t get if I simply installed my costumes as static sculpture in a gallery. I could only theorize about what the audience’s response would be. When I first moved to LA, I performed exclusively in queer nightclubs. The audience would shout back, walk away, and participate unexpectedly. No one felt cowed into submission by the pressure to interpret. They came to the club for pleasure and I wanted to give it to them. If they walked away entertained I was happy. If they absorbed some of the nascent content later, that was even better.

LO: You are a performance artist who also creates sculptural objects. How is performance different from making objects conceptually for you as an artist?

BG: My sculptures often take the form of theaters nested inside other things: a hog’s head, a prison, or a decrepit airport, for instance. I think of the theater’s architecture as a body or an extension of the architect’s body, which implies that the audience is being digested by the play. My performances are the inverse; all the fantasy is attached to the body and surrounded by the audience.

LO: What is it like to be observed as a performing artist, and to also be observing the audience?

BG: It feels like a political moment to be the center of attention. I feel that pressure. What am I saying in this arena? What are my values? I think this is why I tend not to perform as myself but as other things and with other people. I’m not interested in presenting a singular representation of selfhood. I’m not interested in the audience reifying me in a cult-like way. I’m interested in showing the audience a system of reorganizing or exploding the self into multiple, independent beings. I also prefer to have the audience mobile and unseated if possible, so that they can choose to see what they want, or to leave.

LO: What kind of reactions and impressions have your performance works engendered from audience members?

BG: My friend told me once that she thought of my performances as “home-school kabuki theater,” and I like that. My work has a lot of absurdist elements, so laughter is one of the first responses I get in galleries. Artists come to galleries prepared to scrutinize forms and analyze their meaning. I get this too. It’s hard to shut off the politic and history-seeking part of my brain, but with performance, the opportunity is to experience art bodily. The analysis is important, but it can happen later, or at certain moments within the total experience.

LO: Why do you think art is important to people and to the world?

BG: Art offers models of ways of being that are at best, deeply, internally researched. This is so important in the era of social media determined identities. I’m speaking here not of all art which, of course, can use social media as a material or a vehicle, but specifically of the fabrication of objects and of live performance. Solid things are derived at a slower rate and that gives you time to fantasize about an audience or ignore the possibility of an audience. I don’t think that can happen when you make things for the web.

LO: What advice would you give an artist who has just arrived in NYC and who is not sure where to begin?

BG: I would say: Consider measuring the energy expended on seeking prestige with the effects that it has on your body and your creative output.  Instead, find a community of people who will support you making your work and find places where you can experiment freely. I live in LA where the rent is low and the pay-off for experimentation and collaboration is very high. What I would suggest to the New York performance artist is to visit LA. I run a performance art journal and platform called Native Strategies with my partner Tanya Rubbak. If you’re a performance artist reading this and are thinking of visiting LA, look us up if you want an orientation. nativestrategiesla@gmail.com

LO: Who are you favorite artists and why? 

BG: There are so many. I love Asher Hartman who is more of an experimental theater director and works closely with an ensemble of perfomers who have worked together for over five years. Hartman tends to collide narratives and switch the identities of his characters in the script. The language he uses is often very dense and chaotic but because of the strength of his ensemble, the abstraction in his narrative(s) become grounded through the obvious humanness of the actor’s relationships. I just saw Glass Bang by Hartman, which is about violence, real estate, and ghosts. I also love Mike Kelly’s Day is Done project. He made this parallel universe of ghosts, vampires, virgins, pagan rituals, and bits and pieces from a pseudo biography all extrapolated from high school yearbook photos. It’s a template for someone like me who starts his process by making objects and then finds the performances inside them. I also have found precedent in his writing for the way I treat subject matter, how it comes in and out of focus in my work. In an Art21 interview he talks about beauty in relationship to a deliberate confusion between different contents: “I think what I make is beautiful … because terms and divisions between terms are confused, and divisions between categories start to slip. That produces what I think of as a sublime effect, or it produces humor. And both things interest me.”

LO: What are your upcoming projects?

BG: I’ve started color-coding my yearly output. What I’m presenting at Station Independent Projects this summer is the culmination of a year’s production of green performances and objects. I realized I was coloring work in 2012 when I was making Memories, a performance in which a big puppet’s limbs and head are controlled by dancers and musicians in blood red costumes.  I decided to research how color resonates for my work by starting this year by consciously choosing a color.

I think of intuition as faith in finding substance in darkness. For the next several years I’ll be coloring that void until I have the complete works of the rainbow.

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