Now in its tenth year, Thomas Blackman’s Art Chicago, one of the world’s largest international art fairs, is presenting the work of over 3,000 artists this weekend. In addition to modernist masters like Picasso and famous contemporaries like Gerhard Richter, the expo includes lesser-knowns with growing reputations whose work is rarely seen in Chicago.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Until then Jankowski had also been a musician, but, bored by scored music, he preferred improvisation–“open dialogue between the musicians. I like dealing with people.” This attitude carried over into his videos. For example, for his Shame Window, people on the street were invited to sit in the window of his storefront studio displaying signs naming things they felt ashamed of.
New Yorker Spencer Finch works in a variety of media, and Artforum recently called one of his pieces “conceptually elegant.” The same can be said of Blue (Sky Over Los Alamos 5/5/00), installed in the entranceway of the Ultimo boutique at 114 E. Oak, in which lightbulbs are arranged to mirror the molecular structure of the pigment he matched to the sky over the city where the atom bomb was created.
But Carnwath says viewers needn’t be aware of any of this. “If you know the whole formation of an artist’s mind, it limits how much you bring. Television has made people expect to be told what’s happening in front of them, and now museums are like that with acoustiguides. If people need to have things explained, their knees are not going to grow weak with an epiphany-type experience.” (Other Carnwath works can be found at booths B136 and D129.)
