Heartland is about mid-western art: its existence, its creators and their motivations, its role and its history, and its place in the larger context of American and global culture. If that sounds like too big an undertaking for one show, you’re right – the Smart Museum show is only a  younger sister, the second iteration of the exhibition which was first installed in the Van Abbe Museum in the Netherlands a year ago this month. Even with two halves and a thick catalog too, attempting to describe anything as complex, geographically expansive, and nuanced as a “mid-western aesthetic” just might be an exercise of well illustrated curatorial over-reaching.

Greely Myatt, Cleave

I might as well address the issue of text, as the written word was so present in this show that it deserves first mention. Beside the many expository didactics and expansive catalog essays, almost every piece in the show included text in some way, whether the handwritten notes of Jeremiah Day, the speech bubbles of Kerry James Marshall, the acrylic tangents of Deb Sokolow, the books and magazines of Design 99, the annotated maps and posters of the Compass Group, the display case documentation of the Detroit Tree of Heaven Woodshop, the post-Katrina environmental guide notes of Marjetica Potrc; or even in the on page cursive titles of Joseph Yoakum, the pointed imagist exhibition posters, or the trippy and spare signage of Whoop Dee Doo.

Marjetica Potrc, House and Modernism Outweighed

Not only does this ubiquitous text element slow down and weigh the show, leaving few moments for the deep breath of visual experience and instead reducing many visual elements to on-site illustrations of written messages, it also projects a skewed view of mid-western art as overly wordy and prosaic. However appropriate text is in the individual installations comprising the show, including so many artists who use text in their work is simply inappropriate in a regional show like Heartland where commonalities will be mistaken for generalities. While it has its place in our history, I don’t consider text as all that uniquely mid-western and certainly don’t see it as the most salient aspect of mid-western art as suggested by its outstanding presence in Heartland.

Carnal Torpor, CalmDome

Other than that the mid-west loves to write on their drawings, what do the Heartland artists here say about mid-western creative expression? For one, we are a people engaged in specific problems. There is little contemplation of the sublime or ephemeral or critically artistic, but many questions of the realities of race, class, poverty, urbanism among agriculture, and the repeating theme of the landscape, the river, the plain, and of narratives within them. Carnal Torpor‘s CalmDome might be the most lofty of the works included, and its about hiding from those realities.

Design 99, Heartland Machine

For fans of Deb Sokolow‘s work (and really, who isn’t?), Heartland provides a healthy dose with Sokolow’s three-wall Dear Trusted Associate. While not very different in content from her recent large installations, it did have some added  physicality, some minor but exciting roughness with her limited materials that I hadn’t noticed in her Spertus piece, The Way in Which Things Operate (speaking of which, check out this bizarre and absolutely awesome video version her cousin made for that one). In the context of the show, Sokolow’s direct references to real businesses and even people grounds the work in Chicago, but suggests a daydream longing for dramatic narrative within a mid-west mostly devoid of spectacle, intrigue, or surprise.

Deb Sokolow, Dear Trusted Associate

The big standout in Heartland is without question Kerry James Marshall’s Dailies, the masterful ink on newsprint drawings of which the Netherland crew got to see all forty but which only a limited selection could be exhibited here in the Smart Museum. Drawing from his Rhythm Mastr series, Marshall presents multiple, weaving narratives with heady dialog instantly translated in a foam of speech bubbles, as if each speaker were a South Side polyglot demon. Marshall is still a powerhouse, and I was thoroughly impressed.

Kerry James Marshall, Dailies (detail)

There were plenty of other works present, including a rare collection of Imagist work, including the grossish and rocky exhibition flyers from the Hairy Who show; the large scale Oprah inspired digital collage by Artur Silva; a very strong double video piece by Julika Rudelius, which left me wondering among other things where and whether I can buy the leather furniture of the powerful; and a room full of curious but extremely poorly lit landscapes by Joseph Yoakum.

Imagists!

If you’re unable to visit the show, or if you want to read the accompanying essays, you can thankfully view the entire Heartland catalog online – however the good people who extended this kindness decided to do so while shitting all over the images by compressing them as much as possible. While a minor slight against every interested party who does not live in or near Chicago or Eindhoven for the sake of selling catalogs to those who do, this choice to digitally deface artwork in preference to the written word speaks volumes about the secondary role the visual side of visual art plays in Heartland.

Peter Friedl, Map (as seen in online catalog; I mean, come the fuck on)

In the end, Heartland just felt a little off, with content too dense and prosaic, and a context that not all the work included fit well into despite their individual quality. I would recommend seeing the show, but only because of the strength of certain artists’ installations, not the success or relevance of the exhibition’s thesis. I give the show itself a:

7.5

Heartland opened October 1st, 2009 and will continue through January 7th, 2010 @ The Smart Museum of Art, 5550 Greenwood Ave.

Going to do this quick and superficially, since I’m supposed to be out the door already. Quick note: the search term “Liu Bolin” is generating more hits for this website than anything other than “Chicago Art Review,” perhaps because his work looks so well on the tiny images of the internet. If you’re interested in the work, his show closes this Saturday at Schneider Gallery.

Yes Men @ Co-Prosperity Sphere

The very reason I need to run out the door, the two famous pranksters themselves will be appearing in our fair city and in our fair Bridgeport to premier their latest work and organize some kind of action to follow their latest film‘s premier at the Music Box Theater. The event begins tonight, Thursday, October 29th @ The Co-Prosperity Sphere,  3219 S Morgan St.

Rob Carter @ ebersmoore

Video installation and photographs from Rob Carter; images depicting and exploring political structures within an urban setting. Show opens Friday, October 30th, 6-9 PM @ ebersmoore (formerly ebersb9), 213 N. Morgan, #3C.

Rob Carter, Stone on Stone

Fall Undergraduate Exhibition @ SAIC’s Sullivan Galleries

Come see the exiting fall class from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago put on their closing exhibition. Over 50 graduates are showing, with a total cost to educate close to that of ten Tomahawk cruise missiles! Reception this Saturday, October 31st from 7-9 PM @ Sullivan Galleries, 33 South State Street, 7th floor.

Tomahawk Cruise Missile

Still digging for more events, so check back tomorrow to see if I’ve added or amended. Happy Halloween, see you at BOO HAUS.

This week’s seven picks from Ryan (well, six, and a bonus from me).

Jonathan Runcio, Untitled

Robert Colescott, Ode to Joy (European Anthem)

Dana Dart-McLean, I am OK

John Copeland, Graceland in the Window

Gianna Commito, Shade

Thomas Bayrle, Condolezza

Brennan McGaffey, KC-135 Ground-Tracking Network

Hump day.

Since Logan Square’s Concertina Gallery is pretty fresh and steaming, I’ll introduce their newest show  by introducing the space itself: as I understand it, Concertina Gallery is the apartment gallery lovechild of directors and SAIC graduate students Katherine Pill and Francesca Wilmott, who, along with co-founder and former resident Corina Kirsch and design help from current resident Caitlin Bauler, are sharpening their curatorial teeth with a series of professional shows within their living space as well as their street-level storefront windows. Having heard that their first show was a success, I dropped by for the opening of their second, a two person exhibition featuring a film installation by Anthea Behm and photography from Aron Gent, titled Australia.

Aron Gent, Australia and Mountainside

Strangely enough, the Concertina directors were able to run into two artists who were using the film Australia, an endearingly surreal but ultimately mediocre 2008 Kidman / Jackman joint from director Baz Luhrmann, who you might remember from his other endearingly surreal but ultimately mediocre films, Moulin Rouge and Romeo & Juliet. While both artists are working with and from the same, very specific source material, the artists worked separately, without knowledge of or intent for a double exhibition. However, the rarity and possible pointlessness of a film like Australia as a source of overlap makes it a pretty good curatorial hinge for both artists work to swing from. Neither artist is dealing directly with the content or themes of the film, only using it as an available corpus to serve their processes.

Aron Gent, California Landscape

For Gent, the film provided a sex scene for his Jennifer project, a serial narrative dealing with pregnancy and abandonment within a west coast landscape. The image Australia captures the entire film’s sex scene through a long-exposure photograph, and is paired by a photograph of a mountainside, where rocky forms suggest concave breasts; and a large wall mounted photograph of a California landscape, with rolling mountains fading to mist. Though the work can’t expected to convey the same content as the entire Jennifer series, the essentials did come through. Themes of sex and time and place, each presented in a drawn out and extended form, effected in me that same feeling of quiet drift as produced by a Less Than Zero, a mid-career Ed Ruscha, or of a strong drink at a high altitude.

Anthea Behm

Behm’s work used Australia to examine the act of observing. In one darkened room, a small monitor rests on the floor with the film playing. A projection in another room shows a video of an unknown woman watching the same film and describing what she is seeing. That these two elements of the piece are in separate rooms makes observing both at once impossible, but in a suitably quiet setting a viewer could watch the film and hear the second viewer’s description of the film at the same time. Experienced in this way, Behm’s second viewer functioned like a disruptive feedback device, an imperfect and voiced mirror to my own internal, unvoiced observations. However as the gallery became louder, and as the reverse-moth social effect brought more people to crowd into the darkened room, the monitor became less important. Instead, the projected film became its own piece, presenting the inadequacy and pointlessness of a human being as vehicle for automatic representation, highlighting the difference between the thing itself and its description.

The irony of me describing this piece is not lost on me.

While both artists’ present different content in their work by very different means, I never felt like they constituted two separate shows. There were three questions at work here, two presented by the artists and a third, presented by the curators, on the measure and nature of overlap necessary to unite artists into a unified group show. We’ve seen plenty of group exhibitions justified by media (works on paper, collages, paintings) or geography (Chicago artists, Baltimore artists), but not so many brought together by source material alone.

I give it a:

7.8

Anthea Behm and Aron Gent‘s Australia opened October 23, 2009 and runs through November 15th, 2009 @ Concertina Gallery.