By William Conger
No one talks about regionalism in contemporary art anymore. Nowadays new art is either international or it isn’t art. That conclusion is suggested by curatorial jet setting, the plethora of international art fairs, and the money obsessed art world. It’s facilitated by globalization in all of its forms. The art world is flat and regionalism is dead. Coincidentally, modernism has always favored mainstream discourse enabling the inevitable next step while marginalizing disruptive ideas and practices that are not good-naturedly ironic and therefore fundamentally supportive of the status quo. Truly disruptive critiques are unwelcome provincialisms.
Chicago style regionalism, with its full-bodied blend of surreal narratives, formalist obsessions, and cranky pathos, attained a grudging degree of mainstream acceptance through the Imagists and their circle in the 1970s. Even the long neglected abstractionists earned some credibility when Donald Kuspit, for example, linked them to what he called the “Madness of Art in Chicago” by which he meant a type of irrational narrative abstraction. Soon, however, a new generation of Chicago artists together with new curatorial advocates eschewed the city’s regionalist imagists and abstractionists as being overly idiosyncratic and provincial. They turned to Duchamp and international conceptualism. They favored art for ideas, not for aesthetics.
I don’t know if New York critic Saul Ostrow coined the term “Perverse Formalism” but he’s aptly applied it to marginalized postwar European artists like Manzoni (who canned his own excrement) and Fontana (who slit his monochrome paintings). Rather than being incidental to modernism or being “anecdotal glyphs” as Ostrow summarizes their critics, these artists, he says, offered something expansive, not reductive, to modernism; in short, a “perverse formalism.”
Ostrow’s Perverse Formalism also applies to Chicago style art in a more inclusive way than any other term. So I borrow it here. It evokes a type of deliberate misconduct or willful disobedience, extremist interest in bodily function and taboo erotica, a hyper-alertness to physicality. Chicago Style art is not metaphysical or transcendent. It is all flesh and blood under duress (to paraphrase critic James Yood). I think this perversity, as intentional disobedience toward mainstream modernism, is evident in all the best Chicago art of all styles and genres. It extends through the generations of Chicago artists from the 1920s to the present. Chicago artists are modernism’s antagonists.
Some observers like to describe current Chicago scene as divided between artists who are deeply committed to a sense of place and other artists who are committed to a broad internationalist post-aesthetic mainstream. The current division is a deja-vu experience for those who recall the bogus distinction between imagists and abstractionists a generation ago. As early as 1971, some years before anyone invented a conflict, the city’s most ardent critic, Dennis Adrian, wrote that Chicago abstract and imagist artists were united by shared interest in “complex organic form.” The new division is also bogus art-politics. Superficial quibbles notwithstanding; Chicago art is united by allegiance to formal perversity. By this I mean - taking a cue from Ostrow - an art of deliberate misconduct or deviant critiquing of mainstream modernism. Formal perversity in art opens debate and broadens discourse respecting what art is and whether it can exist. It does not aim to further art but to taunt its continuing false prohibitions, whatever they may be.
Jeanne Dunning, a Chicago-based conceptual artist of international status does intellectually demanding art that may seem very far removed from the accessible, gritty hometown painting/collage/poems by equally renowned artist Tony Fitzpatrick. But the underlying formal perversity -- the Chicago Style disobedience that permeates and joins their art - reveals the extraordinary transformative threat they pose to homogenized mainstream modernism.
In 2006 Dunning created a performance/installation titled Tomato Piece. She gathered people of both sexes into a makeshift arena (as the pure white cube of art?) and invited them to pummel each other with hundreds of ripe tomatoes. Here was a seemingly lighthearted opportunity for sexually charged, playful gender warfare. In fact, it was an excitingly taboo event of hedonist excess unmasking the fearful metaphor of a bloody random massacre in the formal arena of high art. Dunning’s work exposes the compulsion for chaos, for the formless, that is the scarcely recognized secret essential to new art.
In 2006 Tony Fitzpatrick completed his second volume of The Wonder: Portraits of a Remembered City. He made a series of small painted collages, each one incorporating Chicago ephemera: matchbook covers, old tickets, pinup ads, and the like, circled around his tightly outlined street-smart images nudes, dogs, birds, and donkeys and enlivened more by flowers, circles, musical notation, abstract patterns, and his poems. Fitzpatrick’s burlesque urban dramas entice vicarious transgression and promise artificial freedom. For Fitzpatrick the city’s natural state is defiant. Fractious perversity is the best opposition to a grid of flat mediocrity and stasis.
Dunning’s and Fitzpatrick’s art is representative of sincere and internationally influential regionalism because it complicates the discourses and practices of new art. Their art’s disruptive content that is deeply rooted in a longstanding, richly amplified Chicago Style of formal perversity.