The upcoming Democratic National Convention has occasioned so many glances at the last time Chicago hosted the event, that one might assume “1968,” the group exhibition at the Betty Rymer Gallery of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, is just another documentary.
In fact, the show is more telling than that, as it surveys local and national art created in 1968, bringing together works by 39 Americans who were moved by impulses that usually went far beyond events in Chicago.
Only photographs by Alan Koss and a poster design by William Weege treat directly the clash between demonstrators and police that brought infamy to the city. Everyone else addresses larger issues of world peace, civil rights, art-making and the pervasiveness of popular culture.
This suggests to exhibition organizers that protesters and artists of the period shared activist motives. But the works on view by several local artists are oriented toward fantasy, which is to say, escapism. And several artists shown to have a social conscience reacted to the events of 1968 in ways that were untypical of their other work of the time.
Chicago painter Roger Brown, for example, has now created political commentaries for more than two decades. But in 1968 his art had not yet looked to the larger world and was indulging the same sort of hermetic fantasies as the work of Don Baum, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Christina Ramberg, Suellen Rocca and Ray Yoshida.
These so-called Imagists often treated troubling or violent content, yet that is not the same as being an activist. Of the Chicago painters on show only Ed Paschke deals with the political landscape of 1968, and even he adopts popular imagery without editorializing, which allows a stance at once coolly removed and sensational.
Jasper Johns, by contrast, was then as much a mandarin as he is today and scarcely could ever be thought an activist. Where in 1968 Barnett Newman created a freestanding metal piece at once purist and enraged, Johns’ early print featuring the American flag carries no social statement and is only one of his personal meditations on emblems and their function in the making of two-dimensional art.
It’s also a stretch for the curators to compare artists who challenged the notion of art as a commodity with, in the words of wall text from the exhibition, “their activist brothers and sisters on the street.” The former group was engaged in an essentially self-serving activity; the latter was attempting to reach beyond the individual, across national boundaries, to a vast multicultural community.
Whatever effect the “activism” of more conceptual artists had, it registered only within structures of the art world, whereas the social spirit of the ’60s set out to change virtually every institution that influenced how we lived. The thought that Minimal artists, with their ivory-tower aesthetics, had set out to “empower” the people who viewed their art is part of a baseless revisionism that comically misapplies a contemporary buzzword.
Those works on show that are topical and social have a way of letting the heat of the moment carry the artist into peculiar territory. Seymour Rosofsky’s painting, “Vietnam, Chicago, Czechoslovakia,” is by far the silliest in its equation of the eponymous cities as if they were capitals of death and oppression.
Peter Saul was (and is) a master of that sort of overstatement, but in ’68 it had not yet become a label to be stuck on everything, and his mural-size canvas, “Typical Saigon,” retains horror in its comic-book translation.
Two Jimi Hendrix posters remind us that ’68 marked the beginning of an Art Nouveau revival in graphic design that would have been worth further exploration in the show, especially if curators indicated how it shaded into psychedelia and, again, pictorial escapism.
But what is already in “1968” on the whole proves engrossing, even down to the Pop Art strategies of the installation. Anyone who lived through the period will come away with justifiably mixed feelings.
(At 280 S. Columbus Drive, through Sept. 11; a complementary show of new work by students and faculty continues at 847 W. Jackson Blvd., through Sept. 13.)
