Thoughts on the Chicago Art Scene After 3 months as Seen Through the Paintings of Emmett Kerrigan

by Erik Wennermark

As someone who has lived in Chicago for, well, 3 months now, I have been trying to wrap my head around the sense of comparative inferiority that seems to pervade any discussion of the local visual art scene. So far I have heard grievous lamentations about the lack of critical engagement, the lack of venues willing (and able) to publish such transcendent critical exegesis of the work that is produced and displayed locally, hand-wringing about an over-conservative collector base, teeth-gnashing about some weird thing called an apartment gallery—which may be the art crit equivalent of my personal blog that 4 people read, 5 if you include my mom—and well, a bunch of other stuff. As I said, it’s only been 3 months, and I do not feel at all qualified to dissect any of these complaints or psychoanalyze each phobia, but as someone who moved to Chicago from the deep-South backwater of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, I can comfortably say: what ya’ll bitchin’ about?

While I gather that this inferiority complex has been intact for some time—the charmingly hopeful “Second City” appellation seems to be an indication—at least half the issues I have heard belabored via podcast or conversation seem to have little do with Chicago specifically and really are much larger issues of the world economy, the globalization of the market, and the unfortunate demise of professionalization of media in general and criticism in particular. I do, however, think an interesting question related to this ongoing existential wrangling is its prospective impact on the work being made and shown in the city.

The show I spent the most time with this week was Emmett Kerrigan at Linda Warren Gallery, and it seems like an appropriate metaphor to illuminate some of these (real or imagined) failings of Chicago as an art center.  Kerrigan, an early/mid-career Chicago artist, makes big, goopy paintings of Midwestern landscape—of these, the large “South Commercial” is the goopiest—you can actually smell the paint from a foot away—that seem awash with the contradiction, confusion, and downright insecurity that I have experienced in the larger “scene.” But, while perhaps lacking some conceptual polish, they are attractive, thoughtful, and accomplished works. They are also very confectionery.

“Yellow Farmhouse” is the most obviously cakelike—it is a chocolate layer cake topped with a marzipan farmhouse. The painting (along with the rest of the work in the show) lacks any sort of horizon; the stacked images retain all the intensity of color pumped straight from the tube—mixing, muting, modifying: these are not concerns. The paint is slathered on with a palette knife and smoothed over the canvas, or looks like it was, pastry like, applied with a piping bag. The extreme flatness complicates dimensionality—is the layered cake below the house a representation of strata, or a barren field creating foreground?  The power lines—a reoccurring means of deciphering space within each painting—seem to indicate the latter. This is an important distinction indicating the artist’s marriage to the fundamental reality of the image.

“Hwy 90-2” has a similarly incomplete wish to escape from pure representation and expose the under-earthly.  The painting appears to have been recreated from a photograph taken while driving down the highway, yet there is no sense of movement. The fronted concrete highway barrier could just as easily represent building blocks on top of which the toy trains and Lego farmhouses rest in the non-delineated distance.  Yet like most of these paintings it is caught between desires.  Kerrigan seems to be wondering: Shall I paint quasi-industrial realist landscapes, fantastic steam-punky dreamscapes, Candyland fantasies, or formal minimalist reflections on line and plane? This strikes me as a polite, Midwestern quandary. By refusing to assertively declare intent, what could be a substantial conversation is lost in platitudes. By trying to please everyone, no one is really all that happy.

Of the steam-punkiness, “Cline Ave” is the best representation, while also shading towards Kerrigan’s apparent desire for a more purely formal take on his subjects.  Kerrigan has a technique of removing the paint—or, so I was told though I’m not sure if I believe it, creating the lack of paint by building up the corresponding areas—as a way to represent the power lines that string across his landscapes.  “Cline Ave” is the only painting that has these anti-paint furrows positioned vertically through the picture plane. Power lines, of course, don’t run in straight vertical lines.  This is a departure from the purely representational to the purely formal. The simple 45-degree shift of one 4” line brings with it a multitude of possibility and opens up many new avenues of discourse within the work. The painting also shows a number of almost Super Mario looking tubes and pipes, adding to the sense that this image is not really Cline Ave, but a manifestation of the artist’s experience of Cline Ave leveled with a desire to formally deconstruct the space into component parts.

If New York is rough and tumble 1970’s minimalism and LA is pretty twinkling swimming pools, Kerrigan’s Chicago is a touch overwhelmed on both sides. In trying to split the difference, some chances for meaningful communication are lost. If the paintings are to be about geometry in a 2-dimensional space, the space is overwhelmed, and literally turned sculptural, by the gratuitous—and somewhat insulting in these trying economic times—application of literally dozens of tubes of lush oil paint. If they are iconic representations of the industrial Midwest, why do they look so damn much like gingerbread?  None of this is to say that the paintings need to only do one thing and cannot be enriched by these multitude contradictions; it’s just to say that they seem to lack confidence in their desires.  In short, I’m not sure the paintings know what they want to do.  This is also not to say that they are “bad.”  They are luscious, visceral pieces that I have spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about, and I’m not sure how much more I could ask of such work.

No, Chicago is not New York or L.A., but that was part of the reason I moved here. I’m tired of New York and L.A. (I lived in one for 5 years and have spent enough time in the other to know I don’t want to live there). To my mind there are plenty of venues for art here, some major institutional support, and a couple decent places to read about what shows are around. Sure there could be more—and believe me I wish there were, or at least that they paid better, or at all. That said, I have very much enjoyed my short time here and have felt quite welcome to participate in these ongoing discussions (something I would be much less able to do in NYC or L.A.). I’m just left to wonder if by choosing to identify what-they-are on the basis of what-they-are-not Chicago and its artists might find that an identity formed by comparison is one bound to neurosis. A stickiness of thought that strangles original moves in favor of coastal ones, and results ultimately in a self-fulfilling acceptance of middleness. But hey, I’m new here, what the hell do I know. These rose-tinted glasses may turn blue come January.