Midwestern Eccentrics

By ROBERT HUGHES

In the middle 1960s, New York critics were apt to brandish the lordly assumption that everything painted west of Manhattan was provincial and therefore insignificant. It had not been dipped in the rolling Jordan of "the mainstream." When the work of California artists refuted this, the position shifted: now there was a New York-Los Angeles axis, but everywhere else I a vacuum. An exhibition is currently on view at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art that attacks this generalization too. "Chicago Imagist Art," a grab bag of work by 28 painters and sculptors, moves to the New York Cultural Center on June 27. It is a messy and often backward show, but it does trace the growth of a resolutely independent attitude to paint, metal and wood and what images can be made from them.

In one sense it is misleading to speak of a Chicago School, for many of the better artists in the show--including Leon Golub, H.C. Westermann and James Nutt--left the Midwest years ago. "Chicago has long been a wholesale supplier of talent to New York," writes Art Critic Franz Schulze, in a briskly readable introduction to the group, entitled "Fantastic Images: Chicago Art Since 1945." He continues:

"Younger artists who might have grown powerful enough to launch a clear-cut Chicago-related school or movement have never stayed here long enough . . . to do so." But those who remained embraced their provincial situation with a kind of fierce pride in the city's hog-butcher materialism. Says Theodore Halkin: "I stay here because of the indifference, not in spite of it. I was never confused about my own idiosyncratic behavior. It's the only thing I've got, for God's sake. Why should I lose it in the turmoil of acceptance in New York?

Who am I then?"

Thesaurus. The show reflects--and is chosen to emphasize--a certain unity of temperament among its members.

The artists display a nearly absolute disregard for the canons and lessons of "classical" modern art. "Maybe it's a perversion, or an alienation, or a toughness," says Painter George Cohen, "or maybe we're just losers. But there is a reluctance to do something just because it's 'right.' " Indeed, as the show repeatedly proves, Chicagoans take more pleasure in doing things that are "wrong": scrambled, left-footed, irretrievably vulgar, offensive in subject matter.

Anti-taste is still an attitude; one can sustain it well or badly. A lot of the work shown here, from Seymour Rosofsky's clumsy paintings to more overtly "aesthetic" objects like Don Baum's lumpen-surrealist assemblages of dolls' limbs or Cosmo Campoli's inert tributes to Brancusi, is a wretched thesaurus of cliches. But subtract them and a deposit of vitality remains.

Not all of it is funk. But all its drive is imagistic, rather than formal: the debate between form and content, a dead issue for years in Manhattan, still goes on in Chicago. Leon Golub, 49, who is in some ways a father figure to Chicago artists, is entirely preoccupied with the human body. His male nudes, gigantic as marble warriors from a ruined Hellenistic pediment, are quite unclassical despite their constant references to antiquity. The surfaces of trunk and limb are gouged, broken and battered: the act of painting the human image becomes an assault. Rhetorical defects plague his work. But its aim--which is to use the human figure as a unique metaphor for a sense of crisis and cultural exhaustion--is large; and at their best, as in Burnt Man IV, 1961, Golub's stiff monsters become monuments of scar tissue, celebrating man's minimal function: to survive.

H.C. Westermann's images are radically different. They are both limpid and mysterious, and this is largely the result of Westermann's loving attention to craft. He manipulates his repertory of boxes, laminations, dovetails, locks, hinges and clamps with unerring finesse. The effect--as in the absurd log-cabin toy tower that rises, with a metal swan flapping from its crenelations, inside the box called Battle of Little Jack's Creek, 1970--is to convince you of the utter reality, the solid presence, of a completely surreal world, pinned and glued at all its joints and present in all its contradictions. He is a folkish artist (the varnished pine boards he uses, and the rigor of their joinery, are virtually illustrations of the American grain). From his constructions emanates a wild, laconic humor that is the obverse of puritan sensibility. But the environment that Westermann's images suggest has also to do with rootlessness: carnival sideshows--he was at one time a professional acrobat--and the miniature theater of penny arcades.

It is on the ground of transience, of irrational shiftlessness, that Wester mann's work has its affinities to that of other artists in the Chicago show. But their work is blacker, nastier and--in contrast to his demonic refinement--exuberantly gross. A work like June Leafs Ascension of Pig Lady, of which Woman-Theater, 1968, is a detail, is as nearly without formal interest as a work of art can be. Lush, coarse and obesely theatrical, it makes Red Grooms look like Mondrian. Gladys Nilsson's punningly titled Baroquen Oats (broken oats? baroque notes?) is a joyful orgy of animal, or at least four-legged, shapes, tumbling over and around one another: the debt to late Dubuffet is obvious, but the sense of an all-American Walpurgisnacht is Nilsson's own.

Perversity. With two other painters, Edward Paschke and Jim Nutt, this imagery of possession enters a horrific level of sour humor. Nutt is the more playful. His drawing appears to derive equally from Dick Tracy strips (the thin, grotesque, saber-edged line) and back-of-the-comic ads for hemorrhoid cures. The result is a mildly purgative vulgarity, harsh and sexy and comic all at once--a visual equivalent to the kind of sub-Burroughs imagery one gets in some Rolling Stones lyrics. Says Nutt: "I don't know what you mean by 'vulgar.' My women are dream women."

Paschke's figures, on the other hand, are repulsively actual. Remarks Critic Schulze: "he projects his motifs, like emasculated wrestlers and deformed mutants, in order to engage and stun his audience, not to edify it." This is, if anything, an understatement. Paschke's art is cold as a fish and, in its handling and sleazy color, twice as slimy. But its sheer perversity of style--which extends even to such innocuous images of gaudy Latin American show biz as Amor, 1970--sticks in the mind (and the craw) like a hook.

Beside Paschke, relatively straightforward Chicago surrealists like Kerig Pope seem serenely traditional. Pope's Two Infants Observing Nature, 1962, with its odd transformations of vegetable, flower and corncob into a glossy wonderland of Popsicle colors, is a confectioner's version of vintage Max Ernst. It could serve as a visual text to Pope's views on Chicago's painting and his own: "The thing that interests us and delights us is the strangeness of the world, its surprises and mysteries, the impossibility of explaining it. I don't go along with science when it looks for ironclad explanations of phenomena. Likewise I resent the counterpart notion in art, that it is a problem-solving activity, that it has only one great direction--'the mainstream'--which moves with a sort of fine, Vatican logic. Much good art, the art that interests me, veers away from any center, and does nothing but explore the perpetual strangeness of the world. It is eccentric, and that's what I think Chicago artists are, even more than surrealist." sbRobert Hughes

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