Friday, January 30, 2009

The Suburban

by Michelle Grabner

Originally printed in Phonebook 2007/2008


A few days ago three Austrian artists who were visiting Chicago came out to Oak Park to see The Suburban’s summer exhibitions by Minneapolis-based artist, Joe Smith, and St. Louis-based artist Michael Byron. They also viewed The John Riepenhoff Experience, a small white box that is currently tied high up on the trunk of the maple tree in the yard adjacent to The Suburban spaces. This white box with a hole to stick your head in is an extension of John Riepenhoff’s Milwaukee Wisconsin’s Green Gallery. Its summer show hosts an exhibition by Paul Dreucke.


The first thing the Austrian artists said after finding me in my house making muffins with my two-year old daughter, is that the gallery is hard to recognize. And they are right. The Suburban is as much an idea and an attitude as it is a physical exhibition space. It is comprised of three pale yellow buildings on the corner lot at Lake Street and Harvey Avenue in the Chicago first-ring suburb of Oak Park. It is a unique Chicago suburb because one hundred years ago Frank Lloyd Wright chose this leafy location to set-up his home and studio.


The reason The Suburban is hard to recognize is that from the outside it doesn’t look like what an art exhibition space should look like. It is also located in a suburb, typically a site void of cultural imagination. So when an avant-garde exhibition space sets up a practice in a suburb it is difficult to recognize from the sidewalk. Of course the Austrians also pointed out that we have no proper signage. And again, they are correct. But the yellow stucco four square house, the unkempt garden, the N55 LAND pod and the pair of tombstones by New York artist Gabe Fowler inscribed THEM and US residing in the yard is its own, more accurate, type of signage given the definition of The Suburban. Most simply put, it is purely a pro-artists exhibition space. The Suburban is not interested in sales, curators, critics, or collectors. Its values are more closely aligned with the activities of the studio, the site where artists make decisions, experiment, and take risks. The Suburban hopes to offer an exhibition platform for these activities minus the pressures of the commercial or curatorial distribution system. Sales, press, and attracting a curator’s eye are not The Suburban’s goal. It is a space offered to artists who reside outside of Chicago with the opportunity to explore an idea in front of an intimate, mostly local, albeit art literate, audience.


To date The Suburban has worked with nearly one hundred artists. The Suburban has been supporting artists’ projects and good ideas for nine years. And because it is tethered to a family household with three children, it operates on a timeline and economy different from most alternative or institutional spaces. The Suburban is driven by my own curiosity and deep-seated desire to be continuously confronted with artistic thinking as it is committed to a protraction of studio practice. The Suburban is as much fueled by institutional critique as it is pragmatically concerned with the proximity of my children(‘s) with public schools.


An essay written a few years back by Peter Ribic, my oldest child, insightfully sums up The Suburban this way:


One of the first things my Advanced Placement European History teacher, who I have grown to thoroughly respect, said to us, came in a class discussion about the children of historical figures. “I want each of you to go home and thank your parents for not being artists,” she said. “The children of artists are the ones who lose their minds, fall into madness or commit suicide, and I wouldn’t want any of you to turn out that way.”


Her commentary was obviously striking: I am not only the child of two artists, but I am constantly surrounded by art and its supplementary activities (its viewing, selling, and making). The nucleus of this part of my life lies in the tiny yellow building formerly attached to my garage. My parents call it The Suburban.


The Suburban is a social perculiarity that I have not yet learned to cope with. Since its conception in my preteens, The Suburban has created a varying array of effects on my life, the majority being positive. I have dissected my entire record collection with a British artist named Simon, I have shared fruity nonalcoholic drinks with my friend Sam at a fully functional tiki-bar-cum-art-installation, and developed to some degree, an understanding of what constitutes contemporary art.


However, life within intimate proximity to an art gallery is not entirely beneficial for a self-conscious teenager and his ten-year old brother. While awkwardness does arise when sharing a house with half-a-dozen large, unshaven Scandinavians, the major difficulty of living with The Suburban is explaining the idea and function of it to the more traditionally “suburban” mothers of my friends.


“Were your parents throwing a party at your house on Saturday?”


“Yes, it was an art opening.” 


At this point I try to convince her that The Suburban is a serious pursuit of my parents, and that is has a “real” significance in the art world. What this significance is I do not know.


Among my peers, The Suburban has brought me neither recognizable fame, (I can’t imagine “My garage is also an art gallery” would serve as a successful pick-up line) nor overwhelming scorn. My general rule is to discuss the gallery and its work only with close friends or those who question what “The Suburban” means on our household’s telet answering machine prompt. My reasoning for this is simple; debates about the artistic merit of a fictional Swedish Citizen Recruitment Center are not something I enjoy taking part in, let alone fully understand.


Because of The Suburban and my parents’ choice of career and life style, I have seen and learned to appreciate art on levels unknown to my peers. From Marfa, Texas, to Budapest, I have traveled the world to see it. I have eaten bratwurst in my yard with those who make it. I have traded my bedroom away for weeks to Englishmen for duty-free tubes of Toblerone chocolate. For this uncommon exposure, it should have been the request of my history teacher to come home and thank my parents for becoming artists.


Michelle Grabner is a artist, critic, and professor in the Painting and Drawing Department at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She lives and works in Oak Park, IL where she runs The Suburban. Her work is represented by Rocket, London; Southfirst, Brooklyn; and the Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago. Her writing is published in X-tra, Artforum, Artlies and other art publications.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Featured Listing: The San Francisco Center for the Book

The San Francisco Center for the Book
300 De Haro Street
San Francisco, CA 94104
t: 415.565.0545
e: info@sfcb.org

The San Francisco Center for the Book is devoted to teaching the many arts and crafts that go into making books by hand. We introduce and foster the joys of books and bookmaking—their history,artistry, continuing presence in our culture and their enduring importance as a medium of self-expression. We provide both a home for Bay Area book artists and a place where the wider community can discover book arts. Everyone is welcome here, experienced practitioners and newcomers alike. Our scores of workshops foster learning at all levels:from introductory classes to yearlong courses, from traditional bookbinding to cutting-edge printing techniques to experimental book forms. There’s always an exhibition up at the Center, designed to inform and delight visitors. Free public programs abound, too, from poetry readings, to book signings to gallery talks. We hope you’ll visit us. But if you can’t, you can still share the excitement by browsing our Book Pix pages, our Workshops or our Online Gallery. Welcome!


Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Re: The Chicago Underground Library

By Nell Taylor

 

Collecting ephemera is an act of city beautification. Cities look their best in detail. I could describe Chicago as a large midwestern area on Lake Michigan populated by sports fans and colorful politicians and composed of a series of communities linked together by common streets and not much else. There are some tall buildings that have become relatively less tall in the last couple of years. You would know this is Chicago.

 

Creative people seem obsessed with the lack of attention their work receives in this overcrowded stadium-in-a-cornfield; having bought into the myths promulgated by this “big picture” vision of the city, they despair at their own artistic marginalization. They look out over the horizon (—is that Naperville, getting even bigger? And is it coming this way?) for an audience or even just a sounding board, another artist with whom to compare notes and ideas. On the off chance that they find one another, they immediately set about building a bunker, stocking it full of their pooled resources, and disseminating exhibitions and publications of each other’s work to the outside world. They defend their fort, tooth and nail, from interlopers. They spread out. They divide and conquer. They hide themselves so well in these small spaces that the new arrivals seeking out community can’t see the bunkers for the shiny new residential developments and overstuffed shopping carts rising higher and higher into the air.

 

The new crop finds the old myths justified and begin the cycle again.

 

Now say you took the output from all of these art-shelters and lined them up on a shelf; the project documentation, the journals, the handmade books, the zines, catalogs, manifestos, newsletters, magazines, chapbooks, programs. For the sake of argument, include works by those sports fans and news on those colorful politicians, particularly if it was written anonymously in all block-caps and shoved into your hand by a guy with a bullhorn as you walked to work. And force yourself to look at them as if it was your first moment to discover each object; it might not be to your taste, it might seem shoddily assembled; you find it pretentious or simplistic, you don’t agree with the point of view, it’s covered in mold from someone’s basement, the author declares that their dog peed on the very object you hold in your hand (edition 3/50). But there are individuals behind each one and at some point, they have witnessed things you haven’t. And you’ve never lived in their heads (of course not, you’ve been holed up in your bunker). Despite your initial (and often better) judgment, you learn something. And another city starts to emerge.

 

In the course of running the CUL, I have found myself fascinated by the passions ignited in a ten-year old Museum of Science and Industry controversy; moved by a 16 year old stoner’s alternate party documentation and musings on 9/11; reading an entire zine on home-schooling cover to cover that doubles as a critique of the CPS; lost in a series of 25 year old newspapers that are nothing but gorgeous advertisements; and discovering political actions that literally took place outside my door. These ephemeral objects cause me to reconsider my own ideas of the city’s history as all of these details begin to fill in the rich tapestry subsumed by the “Hog Butcher for the World” view of Chicago. Beyond that impersonal historicism, though, I appreciate that these works make me question where I was at that particular time. What I was doing and what I was contributing to that tapestry at that moment.

 

Documenting the creativity of the city is an excellent weapon to use against apathy. To those who complain that the city isn’t what it used to be and that there is nothing to do here anymore, I like the idea of sitting them down in front of a pile of works from our collection and saying: Here are your tools, figure out what you’re going to do about it. It’s not only about documenting the past; it is meant to inspire and to incite people to create new work and to be more active — in the present and for the future.

 

Ephemera presents a holistic view of Chicago’s creative communities by using tiny little details found in the cracks and crevices of our bunkers to help break them down and encourage the kind of collaboration necessary to, as your local street corner waste basket would say, keep Chicago beautiful.

 

Nell Taylor began the Chicago Underground Library

Saturday, January 10, 2009

Phonebook




Because a space heater and good friends can be a million times warmer than central heating and track lighting, Phonebook is an invaluable, yet by no means exhaustive (yet) guide to America's finest alternative artspaces. These are the galleries you are unlikely to find in your average tourist guide, the ones located in basements, in lofts, off of alleys, in suburban back yards. These are the m
ovies Moviefone won't tell you about and the lecture series you won't find among your course guides. These are the places that will remind you why you liked this stuff in the first place.

Find Phonebook here.