Hyde Park Art Center, May 10, 3-5

At the NEXT Art Fair yesterday, I listened to a talk on alternative spaces for art given by Allison Peters from Hyde Park Art Center, Jen Bekman, Heather Hubbs from NADA, and Britton Bertran, along with the unexpected and much appreciated addition of a local art collective known as Law Office and founder of FGA (Fucking Good Art), Pedro Velez, who both had some entertaining anecdotes about making art and money (and refusing to make money) in Chicago.

I have this habit of serendipitously arriving at events or meeting people who relate to something taking place about a week ahead in my life — Last weekend, we accidentally drank beer with a guy who worked at the office where Greg would be interviewing this week for a job. This weekend, I found myself listening to a talk that schooled me a little in local alternative art spaces and pointed to the show this next weekend at Hyde Park Art Center, Artists Run Chicago, that harkens back to the now discontinued Stray Show, an annual fair for alternative galleries — I had already been planning on attending this show as my brother’s work once again makes an appearance in Chicago, being represented by local gallery, devening projects + editions.

Overall, NEXT and Artropolis was overwhelming, as it was last year, but I also felt underwhelmed by the work there. It felt loose and haphazard, but also a little more cramped. And frankly, it wasn’t as cool-looking, in general. The art just wasn’t as pretty. I didn’t walk out of there feeling that anything had made a big impression, intellectually or aesthetically.

However, I’m more hopeful about the Hyde Park Art Center show this weekend, so that’s where I’ll be on Sunday!

Carl Heldmann talks with Lou Manfredini

Here’s the follow-up to my photo post about going with my dad to do a taping of HouseSmarts TV to talk about his book Be Your Own House Contractor. House Smarts has updated their website with the segment from my dad’s interview and it’s totally neat!

If you’re in the Chicago area this Sunday, please stop by 3039 West Carroll between 4 and 7 for the opening reception of Christopher Michlig’s  solo exhibition at Devening Projects + Editions.

Chris is my brother-in-law and has gotten really great press over the last year, including a review in Artforum. He will be at the reception, and he’s super nice and articulate about his work. So, go!

Here’s the gallery write-up:

devening projects + editions is pleased to present Christopher Michlig: MAN MAN MAN in his first solo exhibition in Chicago featuring new collages and a sculpture installation. Made from reconstituted fluorescent street posters whose advertised events have passed, the collages in MAN MAN MAN cut away all but one detail of the publicized occasion. The collages produce a constellation of fragmented information that oscillates between direct communication and abstraction. Whereas each individual poster previously conveyed concrete information relevant to a particular event, the new collages collectively insinuate a woolly, indefinite event.

Accompanying the collages is a group of sculptures that dissemble and reform the structures of public communication: kiosks, street signs, etc. Redacted panels atop active supports, toppled signposts, jumbled letterforms, and crumpled paper bases lay bare the potential of these forms to shift the function of language from the communicative to the poetic.

Christopher Michlig is based in Los Angeles and works in a variety media including video. Michlig was featured in the exhibition Half-Life, curated by Thomas Solomon at LACE and Yellow, curated by Lia Trinka-Browner at the Fellows of Contemporary Art in 2008. Michlig was recently part of group exhibitions at devening projects + editions, CSLA Luckman Gallery, Los Angeles and 1000 Eventi Gallery, Milan. Michlig’s solo debut at Jail Gallery, Los Angeles, was reviewed by Jan Tumlir in the May 2008 issue of ARTFORUM.

My dad visited Chicago last week for a TV interview his publisher set up with Lou Manfredini and the producers of House Smarts on HGTV. It was lovely to spend an afternoon and the better part of a day with my dad, since our visits per year are few, and it was really neat to be with him on the set while he was talking about his book, Be Your Own House Contractor, and his website, buildyourownhouse.com on camera. My dad knows his stuff, and he puts a ton of work into updating his website with really valuable information about building your own house, being a general contractor, and estimating costs before building. It’s a field of knowledge that I have yet to put to use in my own life, but when I’m ready, I’ll know just what to read to prepare me for it.

A friend of mine was working on a graduate school project a couple of weeks ago for her project management class, and she called me up to tell me that she had just spent a good deal of time on byoh.com, having found it in google, before she realized that the guy in the website’s photo is my dad, Carl Heldmann, who she’s known since elementary school as “Skip,” his nickname. She was really excited and said that the website saved her a ton of time on her project and it was such a fun coincidence. Reason #reallybignumber why I’ll never stop loving the internet.

Here is my favorite shot from the taping:

Yesterday, walking out the door to the library of all places, the mail carrier handed me a priority pack from my sister containing the book she recently published in conjunction with her Jail gallery show called Of Course and Never. Happy to have something new and anticipated to look at while on the 15 minute train ride to the Harold Washington Library, I was also amused by the coincidence. I had been meaning to go to the library all week and had only just found the time; here was an entire book provided to me that was acting as a primer for my library experience, introducing aesthetic and philosophical ideas to the outing. As you can see from these images, or in larger form on her website, this series of paintings by Wendy consists entirely of images of library book stacks in various states of disarray. “Tomes slump in their shelves, books lie in unintelligible piles on the floor, and periodicals are strewn across aisles, defying the organizing principles that make their contents accessible.”

Of Course and Never is a beautifully-made book and the accompanying text by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer is superb, with thoughtful passages on the nature of books and libraries and a lovely introduction to Wendy’s paintings that gives the reader both a physical sensation of the work outside of reproduction and a literary starting point from which to view the images that follow.

One might think that a book accompanying a gallery show might only be a preview of the show, a kind of souvenir, but the number of paintings in the book is only one less than the show itself; it generously provides 17 handsome color plates. The overall effect of the paintings and the text make it a book worth revisiting often, I can already tell, and while I would be happy to add any volume of my sister’s work to my library (as she is both my sister and an artist whom I admire), I am doubly happy to have this book on my shelf.

More information on the book can be found here. Wendy’s solo exhibition at Jail Gallery will be up until March 14th. Read more about it on her website.

It’s been kind of a crazy week or two in Chicago. The governor of Illinois was, like, kicked out of office. There was a significant fire at Holy Name Cathedral yesterday, a place I was planning on going one of these upcoming Sundays for their intense 3:30 pipe organ performance. The papers finally reported on the pistol-whipping muggings that have been going on in my neighborhood. The Bean, um, has recently been slightly vandalized. And a few other news items that are really much too gruesome for your casual glances, readers.

The Bean must remain perfect, of course, so this is a big deal in Chicago. The Bean (a work actually titled “Cloud Gate” by Anish Kapoor) is one of those weird sculptures that you get SO SICK of in a photographic way, but yet, it still draws even the most homegrown Chicagoans in snapping their lenses. Millenium Park is actually pretty cool. It was one of those things that I didn’t expect when moving back to Chicago. When I left, right after the turn of the century, the park was still under construction. Right now, there’s some free ice skating that I should really take advantage of. In the summertime, there’s free music in the Gehry Pavilion and kids from all areas of the city and beyond are seen running madly through the Crown Fountain (by Jaume Plensa).

But yeah, the poor Bean. I’d be interested to know how often other high profile public art gets vandalized. When I was a teenager in Grand Rapids, MI, we would frequent the lawn of an office building downtown near the Calder sculpture. On that lawn was a Mark di Suvero piece, whose real interest to us was the fact that it was an industrial-sized tire swing (a large tire being held in suspension horizontally, rather than vertically, and cut open) in which two or three teenagers could easy fit. Inside the tire swing, the tire walls were painted yellow, and on top of that yellow paint was a thick layer of Sharpie marker graffiti. It was lovely to us, but had the added effect of being almost invisible to a passerby who might admire the three I-beams that rested into each other to make the tripod from which the tire swung. We also did quite a bit of smoking and littering on Michael Singer’s sculpture by the river. Clearly, this is what public art is for?

I’m really looking forward to visiting this exhibition next week at the Smart Museum:

Aaron Siskind, Chicago, 1949, Gelatin silver print, mounted. Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, Gift of the Illinois Arts Council, 1976.140.

“Aaron Siskind (1903–1991) is best known for his abstract photographs, often of natural forms or architectural features that were manipulated in order to produce unfamiliar images. Siskind minimized the importance of literal representation by carefully distinguishing between a photograph of something—which is a distinct, flat object shaped by the photographer’s perception—and his fully three-dimensional subject or “the thing itself.” This intimate exhibition combines key images from Siskind’s first forays into abstraction with the artist’s own eloquent writings in order to examine the tension inherent in his work: between the artist’s perception and the literal representation of an object.”