Jim Nutt noticed doodles, instructions, lists of materials, new works. Artists left them intentionally, and sometimes accidentally, on the backs of finished paintings, inside sculptures. This was 1965, before Nutt and a few other Chicago artists became known as the Hairy Who and started showing their cartoony surrealism around town. “I used to work at the Arts Club (on Ontario Street) and would box up paintings, and when you’re handling a work, as opposed to looking at it on a wall, you relate to it in a different way,” he said. “Say you’re carrying it. So you’re looking at the back, and there can be curious stuff back there.”
For instance, in fall 1965, while taking down a show from Venezuelan sculptor Marisol, Nutt and (future Hairy Who painter) James Falconer noticed that within a large sculpture there was a purse. “Inside that purse were things,” Nutt remembers. “Nothing special, but things no one looking at it in a gallery would ever see. We were delighted by this, and I became interested in what artists would leave just out of sight.”
Jump ahead half a century and there’s a wonderful bit of side business to discover at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s new Jim Nutt show, which ends May 29. Alongside seven of his works, you find a QR code — one of those barcodelike digital squares. Scan it with a smartphone and you’re shown the back of Nutt’s painting. And what the Wilmette-based artist has painted back there, much of the time, is curious.
Buttocks on the back of “Wiggly Woman” (1968). A deep blue frame and the word “Roam” in large letters on the back of, well, “Roam” (2000). A skull and a school-bus yellow frame on the back of “A He Haw” (1969).
Notice the way he’s painted what appears to be an oil drip on the back of “Her Face Fits” (1968). The drip starts small, and seems to flow from the piece of plywood running through the middle of the frame. It’s as if Nutt is playing with dimensions of the canvas the way you might doodle on an envelope while stuck on hold.
“In a way,” Nutt said. “But this has been going on a long time, and to one degree or another, there’s also a finished aspect about those backs — everything is taken care of, if maybe not in the way it is in the front.”
Likewise, MCA curator Lynne Warren doesn’t separate the back of Nutt’s works from the front. “He is a very object-oriented guy. Most artists, for one reason or another, they don’t pay much attention to their backs. They don’t care. But Jim has this idea that a painting is an entire work, as though it were sculpture.”
He’s not alone.
Nutt cites artist H.C. Westermann as an influential burier of the details. Instructions for displaying Westermann’s sculptures — including the robot-looking “Memorial to the Idea of Man If He Was an Idea” (1958), part of a companion exhibit — are found on their bases. On the back of Roger Brown’s “Autobiography in the Shape of Alabama” (1974), also in the MCA, there is a small mailbox; inside are postcards. (To avoid damage, the letters in the gallery are photocopies of the originals).
“Jim, though, is unique to the extent he puts these really detailed instructions on his backs,” Warren said. These instructions range from intricate (the brand of undercoating on the frame of one painting) to a single playful question for handlers on the back of another work: “Are your hands clean? If not, keep them off!!“
He always paints a back, though some are more interesting than others. “Sometimes I am commenting about what is going on in the front,” Nutt said. “And if you looked at the backs from the past 10 years, what’s there is more sparse now. Often just one flat color, with the name of the painting. It’s more functional, more about my materials. But no, that back is as controlled as the front. And always the last thing I do.”
