Artist Robert Blanchon died in 1999, at the age of 33. Several years before he told me, “A lot of my work questions whether I exist at all.”
“Because his work is intelligent, he doesn’t want the viewer to find a simple answer in it,” Neimanas says. “You have to look at it and think about it. It’s beautiful, it’s witty, it’s directed, but it doesn’t conclude.”
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When the School of the Art Institute asked him to teach two courses in early 1998, he became an adviser to graduate sculpture students. His reputation preceded him. When performance artist Murray McKay asked another student about advisers, she told him to take Blanchon, “a visiting artist from LA. He’s gay, he’s cute, he’s witty, he’s HIV positive–you’ll love him.” And McKay did. “I knew I could put anything on the table and we could talk about it and I’d feel comfortable. I’ve lost a lot of friends to AIDS, and a lot of my work had to do with HIV and AIDS, but I wasn’t admitting it to myself.”
An SAIC graduate, DeGrandis never studied with Blanchon, though she recalls their first meeting. “He came into the office where I was working as a student assistant and mentioned something about how awful I was dressed. He was always a bit snide, which was one of the things I liked about him. He wasn’t afraid to tell you what he thought.” But she also found him a bit of a mystery. While working on the exhibit, “I was hearing all these stories about Robert, but every time the story would get unwoven.” She began doubting whether some of the works she was looking for even existed, and in fact Blanchon did an entire catalog, Never Realized, documenting works that were never made. He also sent out invitations to events that didn’t occur. He once invited top figures in the Chicago art world to a nonexistent symposium celebrating the anniversary of conceptualism.
Just as Blanchon often mixed personal concerns with forms borrowed from conceptual and minimalist art, he tried to get his students to connect their personal and aesthetic lives. Ellen Shershow recalls that Blanchon “had this great way of bringing the personal into your work, without it becoming this flaky ego-building thing.” She says they’d discuss intimate details from her sex life, “but then he had this very easy way of saying, ‘Now let’s see what this means in the context of your work.’ Work that is based on personal anecdote can become boring very quickly; he had a way of bringing these personal things about yourself back on a more intellectual level, analyzing what your work could be.” She noticed that he turned advising into a conversation. “Some advisers say, ‘I see x, and to me x means y.’ Robert would help lead you to a conclusion, but would let you come to it on your own.”
“How he approached the class was so different from anything I’ve ever learned before,” says Jen Talbot. “He took apart all the crap I’ve learned for years and years in art schools and offered a perspective on how things really happen in the art world. Before that an instructor had never discussed what it was like being represented by a gallery. I think I kind of learned, don’t trust the things you read, do not trust anybody.”
“I remember one day he came in and was like, ‘I just saw this stretch limo outside.’ I had seen it too. It was long and white with two little heart-shaped windows in the back–a honeymoon limo. People were stopping, and I was mesmerized as well. Robert asked, ‘What does it say when I’m more intrigued by this white limo than by some of the art that I see?’ I started thinking about making art that was as intriguing as that stretch limousine but that also held up under the art world’s scrutiny. I thought about creating something that the public would be fascinated by on a mainstream level but would still have integrity.”
