Art, sculptor Lorado Taft once said, is anything that the average person cannot do well, a thought that caught the ear of Mrs. Potter Palmer, an early backer of the Art Institute of Chicago. ”Speaking of art,” she retorted,
”my husband can spit over a box car.”
That can be dangerous, especially in a windy city. But one duty of art has always been to push the envelope, as the saying goes. That idea came to mind the other day during a walk through the bustling halls of The School of the Art Institute which this year celebrates, with considerable hoopla, the 125th anniversary of its birth in a studio on what was then Dearborn Street.
Now scattered over three buildings, at Columbus Drive and Jackson Boulevard.; 37 and 218 S. Wabash Ave., with outposts in River West and Saugatuck, Mich., the school has become the largest arts employer west of New York, with 344 faculty members, 130 support staffers, 1,667 students and 650 courses. It also has a wonderful assortment of toys.
Where else, in the Midwest, at least, is an artist encouraged to play around with the possibilities of paints, clays, metals, lasers, computers, blowtorches, foundries, kilns, historic clothes, etching presses, optical printers, holography, darkrooms, light forms, sound studios and video synthesizers? Or a roomful of looms?
”Puh-leeze, don`t call us the museum`s school,” a staffer urged a visitor, starting out on a tour. That, as a former U.S. president used to say, would be wrong. The school and museum are separate, but equal, children of a parent institution, The Art Institute of Chicago. The museum oversees the collection, presentation and interpretation of art objects. Education is handled by the school which, as its admissions catalogue notes, does not have ”a football team, senior class rings, pep rallies, Homecoming or Greek Week.”
That`s too bad, but what the school does offer is considerable style and energy, as evidenced by its ample clusters of studios, warrens and other artistic refuges, plus its notice-crammed bulletin boards which last week were hawking everything from shared accommodations to gatherings of feminist filmmakers, installation teams and Afro-American poets influenced by jazz.
So, what else goes on, on an average day?
”No two days are the same around here,” noted Jeanne Long, manager of the school`s Betty Rymer Gallery, as she helped lay out a show of works on paper by 78 of the school`s 7,000 living alumni, a major anniversary effort. Across the hall, Barbara Scharres, director of the school`s Film Center, gathered papers for a meeting.
”We show film art from all over the world,” she said, sitting under movie posters from Hong Kong. ”Any artist is interested in what goes on here, just as anyone in film or video should be interested in what`s on over at the museum.” The center, which draws 60,000 patrons a year, also mounts forums for film studies teachers, such as a recent roundtable on how white teachers can teach black films to black students. (One tip: ”Be culturally aware.”)
Painting and drawing, at the core of the school`s work, remain its largest department. Poking through cubicles that look like sets from ”La Boheme,” one met Rob Lowenthal, of Southfield, Mich., and Joseph Roeder, of Brookfield. Last fall, the pair painted the walls white, a base for splatter, graffiti and pictures of such inspirations as Carl Jung and Vincent Van Gogh. ”You come here and try to slug it out with your own sense of creation,” said Roeder, who often works there through the night. ”It`s kind of a journey into yourself. What`s great about this course is that it`s truly alive. The sights. The sounds. Even the floor.” Added faculty member Ray Yoshida, ”The mess tells you that the space is being used. The order goes into those flat rectangles,” he said, pointing to canvases of paintings-in-progress.
Others, down the hall, are into newer forms.
”Aron likes to involve the class in a larger mythology that I don`t think he can talk about, but which he wants to present to us,” said Michael Meyers, a teacher of time arts, as student performance artist Aron lay naked on a bed frame, buried in dirt, breathing through a hollowed tree root attached to his mouth with clay.
”This piece is a kind of closure,” Meyers went on, noting work by such performance artists as Vito Acconci, Chris Burden and Joseph Beuys. In a previous effort, Vaughn had run through the Loop, sucking on a giant latex nipple which others, running ahead, had fastened to building walls. His current work, Meyers said, had to do with ”man`s personal relationship with nature and, specifically, with dirt.” It also had to do with cold, as Vaughn showed when dug up five hours later, shivering and turned a light blue.
Nearby, in figure studies, a half-dozen sculptors surrounded a nude man, leaning forward on a stool, cupping his chin. They worked in plastilina, a training material used because, unlike clay, it does not dry. ”This is their last project,” said instructor Martha Gannon, ”so they`re given some freedom. They`ve been working real traditionally. Strict poses. Now, I let them choose the pose and the material. It`s a little fun at the end of the semester.”
Not far away, in Frank Piatek`s painting and drawing class, Mayela Alamis, a sophomore from Monterey, Mexico, worked on a pocked, strangely peaceful, reddish block, fronted with clumps of rusted metal. ”This is my favorite class,” she said. ”Frank really pushes you. We started with Venetian paintings. We`re moving now into our own language, which is the purpose of the class. He gives you the basics, then says, `Go on your own.` ” Downstairs, in sculpture, students in welding, awash in heavy-metal music, donned flame-proof doublets, pulled down goggles and turned on torches. ”I love it,” said Elizabeth Rogers, as she worked on a pair of wire fairy wings, to be covered with fabric and worn at Shelter, a Near West Side night club.
Over in light metals, Kara Clark, of Muncie, was fashioning a ring.
”I`ve learned a lot. I`ve taken the class twice,” said Clark, who has made pins, pottery and small sculptures and hopes one day to teach. Not far away, over the clank-clank of an offset press, teacher Sally Alatalo offered a critique of an illustrated book, ”Kelva in the Land of the Dead,” to its author Andrea Summers, of Savannah, Ga. ”We do everything here, color separations, binding, printing and distribution,” Alatalo said. ”We have to make all the decisions. How many to print? Why that many? How to distribute?” It`s seldom been dull since the school was founded, as the Chicago Academy of Design, in late 1866. In the archives department, aging student newspapers are filled with reports of high jinks. No-hands pie-eating contests. Persuading blindfolded students to sing, then filling their mouths from a paintbrush dripping with soapsuds. Forcing male students ”to sit bare- bottom on a seat covered with slush ice.” One time, someone put limberger cheese on the heat register in the girls life class drawing room.
Recently, the school`s attention-getting incidents, notably involving flags and mayoral underwear, have been sparked by student exhibitions. But faculty members also march to their own drummers. As a sideline, Thomas Steger, in sculpture, designs his own headgear. One cap, which he wore last week, has a ridge across its top, like the back of a dinosaur. ”It`s erasers,” he said. Steger also was responsible for mounting halves of a canoe on either side of a department door wall, as if it had crashed through during a high-speed chase.
Elsewhere, anthropologist Marilyn Houlberg has built a collection of Elvis Presley memorabilia, which she loans out to galleries. The fiber department`s Joan Livingstone displays road kills. That includes, says a colleague, ”anything that has been run over.” Fred Nagelbach, the sculpture department`s chair, shaves off his ”winter beard” each summer. ”People think I`m two different people,” he said. Sculpture teacher James Zanzi helps sets up tours of Midwestern lodge halls, grottos, pop architecture, centers of lumber lore and graveyards. ”They contain the history of sculpture,” he said.
There are, at the school, 1,001 other things to mull. Here, an etching class, with students huddling over blocks of steel or copper. There, photography and lithography studios. Halls abound with art educators, art therapists, poets, ceramists, interior architects. ”I saw no point in going anywhere else,” said faculty member Karen Savage, of the printmaking, who arrived, as a student, in the mid-`60s.
”We consider the whole downtown area as our campus,” said First Year Program chair Frank DeBose, taking a break from hanging an exhibition of freshman art works in a school corridor. ”We do excursions to Morton Arboretum and the Chicago Botanical Gardens. But we also encourage students to gather found objects, such as packaging or cast-off paper from the gutter. Then we play God, extending the life of these objects. Part of the program is to break students down, stretch them, make them see things in new ways.”
Three blocks away, in computer imaging, a bank of screens filled with appearing, fading and merging images. ”With a lot of paint software, we do the cut, paste and copy sequences of word processing, but with images and sounds,” noted faculty member Joan Truckenbrod. ”You get images faster, but you have to worry about controlling the computers. They crash,” noted student Ginger Robles, from Detroit, as she wove a portrait of her boyfriend into a montage of hands.
Upstairs, the fashion design department buzzed with end-of-year competitions and fittings for the graduates` Fashion Show, an annual event whose offerings often reflect influences of painting, sculpture, architecture and other fine art disciplines. ”We`re beginning to really prove ourselves as a department,” noted faculty member Andrea Arsenault. ”These students not only sketch. They are complete artists. They`re great pattern-makers and they even make shoes. We are, forgive the pun, a close-knit group.”
In the workroom, students gathered around Ambra, a professional model, who swirled an evening gown of raw silk and woven raffia created by student Bryian Davis. Elsewhere, Yulando McMullen worked material on a dummy. Gary Graham showed sketches, including a travel outfit, prepared for a competition in Paris, that consisted of a jump suit, with an origami-like cape covered with maps. Another series of Graham`s clothes suggested a number of fruits and vegetables, including a woman dressed as a carrot.
”This is not an easy school to get into,” noted its president Tony Jones, who leaves the school in August, after six years, to head London`s Royal Academy of Art. For undergraduates, Jones noted, applications now outnumber admissions 5-to-1. For graduate school, it`s 35-to-1.
”Because the school is so large, with lots of departments, and no boundaries, students can move around. That, I think, excites them, finding new challenges.
”Part of the energy you feel in the studios comes from a very dedicated group of students. Also, the faculty keeps challenging them? Why are you here? What are you doing? How are you going to move this idea forward? What can we do to realize this idea in its most effective form?”
The school, Jones said, could use a dorm. The now-closed Hefner Hall, the former Gold Coast home of school alumnus and magazine sultan Hugh Hefner, proved unsuitable. Without knocking through its wood-paneled walls, which the school declined to do, the mansion, now up for sale at $3 million, had room for only 35 students. Also, it was too far away. Better, Jones said, would be an affordable building on the fringes of the Loop or, perhaps, a moored boat. Aside from that, ”we`re in good shape,” said Jones, in his office where conversations are limited, by passing elevated trains, to 30 seconds per burst. ”It`s a tough climate, with the recession, but we`ve seen no decline in applications. It`s an exciting time.”
