CHICAGO’S EMOTIONAL REALISTS
THE STRENGTH AND CONVICTION of Funk is its peculiar seductiveness, its capacity to excite while at the same time repelling us. Such art flatters and then violates us. No doubt a society like today’s that offends, then deadens, our sensitivity to each other, deserves a punch in the gut. And no doubt Chicago Funk is obsessive—about sex, aggression, physical and psychological pain and whatever ecstasy may be gained through their transcendence. But where obsession in reality can trap us in evasions, in Funk it expresses the voyeurism and brutality we fastidiously hide within ourselves.
Funk’s lumpy, varicose limbs, droopy, deformed breasts and gargantuan genitals in sadistic fantasies and sexist fixations take us beyond supposed vulgarity to matters of humanity and inhumanity. Despite a critical shunning of Funk’s significance, except as a regional oddity, such work can be placed in the broader contexts of American culture and human needs, desires and fears, as well as the culture of its hometown. What Funk needs instead of an apology is an acknowledgement that doesn’t get too entangled in its Chicago roots to unite it, if not with the art historical mainstream, with a cultural context that might have been ignored. In such a treatment content, from which this specific sensibility emerges, cannot be overlooked.
Although Funk has been seen as entertaining—in the sense of comics or striptease; freakish, like carnival sideshows; flashy, like a cheap whore; and sexy in a naughty, yet amusing, way—it is also vulnerable and poignant. Funk may be brazen, but it is also guilt-ridden; it is rambunctious and depressing, frank and mysterious, outgoing and repressed, childish and mature. An alternate term for Funk art, and in some ways perhaps a more appropriate label, is imagism, which suggests the importance of symbolism over representation. Where Funk implies dejection, unseemliness, and sexiness (funky music is raunchy, grinding, primal), the concept of imagism encourages us to discover the underlying purposes of funkiness.
In Fantastic Images: Chicago Art Since 1945 Franz Schulze chronicles an imagist history dating from the late ’40s with students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, including the long-time emigré Leon Golub. Schulze sees June Leaf, although she was not enrolled at the SAIC, as another charter member. What integrated them esthetically? A penchant for agonized fantasies and expressionistic emotionalism that belonged to an anti materialistic consciousness. Such a foundation and such interests could have produced a stilted art if the artists had restrained their deepest sentiments; a bathetic one if they were undisciplined; or a nonsensically violent one if they could not temper it with insight. At its worst Chicago’s imagist strain suffers from one or all of these ills.
But the better work comes closer to accomplishing what seemed to be an underlying intention of the Art Institute group—to connect with the magical, the enigmatic, the unadulterated content of our hearts and minds. No easy task, and one that could easily drown itself in excess. Imagist art has been accused of mindlessness or intellectual feebleness, particularly its most potent representatives over the past decade. Perhaps this accounts for the lack of serious critical response. But an art that does strive for a certain truth, despite its inelegant, romantic, offbeat look, cannot simply be maligned as unintelligent. Imagism inquires into meanings beyond the practical, the everyday, the obvious.
Psychoanalysis fascinated these artists 30 years ago, and some of them were analyzed, hoping to free their art as well as themselves. This involvement emphasizes the concern with primacy of feeling and, especially, with yearnings not for resolutions of conflicts or even reasons for them, but rather for pure, essential feeling purged of shame. As imagism has aged, it seems to want to bare ever more of the disorders, demons and lusts of humanity, for the sexuality and violence in the work of its younger artists have grown more explicit.
Comparing Golub’s The Courtesan, 1948–49, and Karl Wirsum’s Split Beaver Broad, 1971, explains the change. In the older artist’s oil painting an emaciated couple with glaring eyes stands bared to the crotch. The woman, profiled and slightly hunched, holds a wine glass in front of her agitated but oblivious companion. Her arm, bent and scrawny, touches his as she extends only her hand while staring at his neck. He neither refuses nor acknowledges her presence or offering; instead he gazes forward, pained and entranced, and keeps his arms close to his body as if trying to hug himself. Detached from one another emotionally, the figures are nevertheless bound through a frenzy activated by the cramped space, the closeness of their flesh. The deceptive stillness dissolves as paint swirls through and explodes on their bodies. Sexuality, though feared and frustrated, is passionately present.
Wirsum’s larger-than-life-sized crayon and ink on cardboard construction of a woman maintains but refocuses the intensity of Golub’s piece. With a squared head, football shoulders, huge breasts shaped like rocket cones, a tiny waist, open arms, spread legs and high heels, Wirsum’s creation looks like a mechanical monster that can perform extraordinary feats or a toy designed to satisfy sinister fantasies. Where The Courtesan evokes anxiety, Split Beaver Broad oozes menace. Unlike Golub’s figures, whose constraint implies a sexuality obedient to the mind or will, Wirsum’s woman fiercely exhibits herself. The patterns—which resemble Southwest Indian designs—vibrate, covering her body, face and hair like tattoos or warpaint. She seems charged with sexual energy. But the fingers are clawlike, the eyes angry, the hair jagged. Her arms are not stretched in order to embrace, but rather to grab and rip, like a grizzly; and her legs are spread as a challenge, not an invitation. She seems frozen in a movement from a primeval dance celebrating fertility and war. Although a symmetry of decoration controls the work’s violence, and although the figure is only a flat, dehumanized object—a “broad” as flimsy and ordinary as cardboard itself—Wirsum replaces the suppression and anguish of The Courtesan with a glorified and horrific look at untempered lust. What remains the same in both works is a need, becoming more vociferous as the world grows more deaf, to recover feeling.
Some will contend that the younger imagists are sarcastic and tongue-in-cheek, whereas the older work seems less ambiguously sincere. In general, this view holds some truth, but it has contributed to a superficial treatment of the newer artists. Certainly Split Beaver Broad cannot be misconstrued as somber or heartfelt in any tender or intimate way. On one level, the woman is ridiculous—an outlandish joke demeaned by her own sexuality. This situation is at once funny, pathetic and provocative. In fact, since the late 1960s imagism has become an art of provocation, and though it may make us laugh, the chuckles don’t last long, for an art of provocation is ultimately irritating and not amusing.
H.C. Westermann is an older Chicagoan, now living in Connecticut, whose ironic humor, sexual punning, and beautiful craftsmanship coincide with that of the new imagists. In the ’50s, when the Art Institute group of the ’40s was maturing and diversifying, and when Schulze proposed the sobriquet Monster Roster to describe the vehemently expressionistic bent of some of them, Westermann was creating a cooler, more cutting art that was nonetheless emotion-packed. For instance, in He-Whore, 1957, a cylindrical block of laminated plywood is carved to indicate a human figure and head, with bells at the top to suggest a phallus. The motif is repeated in the chrome-plated brass form that hangs between the “legs” and teases us to stroke or pull it and, again, in a tongue that sticks out, taunting us. On one hand He-Whore is deadpan, like a sexually attractive man who unconsciously flaunts his wares, thus making an ass of himself and inciting snide laughter. On the other, the work guffaws at us and mocks a still-puritanical society that represses sexuality so that an Elvis Presley, who achieved stardom in the late ’50s, came to symbolize pacified, but threatening, urges. He-Whore, like Presley, serves as an icon of conflict.
When, in the early to mid 1960s, the Pop artists were creating icons of a different order—sleek, unromantic, straightforward advertisements of a society awed by money and its power—a new strain of Chicago artists was developing equally potent but less rational images that, like Westermann’s, treated cultural binds—such as the desire for fulfillment and the denial of it. Pop depicts a cultural acceptance of commercialism, whereas Chicago’s Funk imagism rebels against it. Both arts exaggerate, but Pop aggrandizes the gluttony of advertising, and imagism coarsens it.
Even Tom Wesselman, who produced a funkier, more sexualized Pop than any other New York artist except Art Institute-trained Claes Oldenburg—whose dowdy, tumescent images recall a Chicago sensibility—invests his “Great American Nudes” with a comfortableness, enjoyment, and expansiveness unknown in imagism. Ensconced in luridly plush surroundings and erotically posed, his women luxuriate in their nudity. Anonymous and enticing, partially because of this very impersonality, their appeal parallels that of fantasized one-night stands; Wesselman titillates through distance.
Imagism, however, discourages remoteness and outrages as much as it arouses. Where Pop insulted art-world expectations and esthetic standards, Funk offended, and continues to offend, norms of decency. Wirsum’s Armpits, 1963, is just such a piece. Here a woman in a form-fitting sleeveless dress grins with the wide mouth and bared teeth seen in toothpaste ads. Voluminous hair could sell shampoo. So far she seems commercially sound. But her arms are raised behind her head, revealing unshaved armpits. What could cater less to the sterile cleanliness that advertising propounds and that society inflicts on our bodies? What shames a “well-groomed” American woman more than hairy armpits or legs? Armpits forces us to think of body hair, pubic hair, indeed, of unexposed areas of our outer and inner selves. Wirsum even attaches fur to the underarms, increasing their sensuousness—and our ambivalence toward them.
Unlike Wesselman, Wirsum invokes dis-ease. His woman stands before an explosive, jagged-edged form, emblematic of her vitality and her dangerousness. She is hardly relaxed: neither are we when viewing her. As with He-Whore, we can laugh at an image that also ridicules us and our own embarrassed respectability.
The background of Armpits resembles formal devices in comics, but its emotional import strikes us more than its compositional use. For Pop the visual clarity and directness of comics seemed to override any concern with content—heroes, villains, monsters, sex, violence. New York and Chicago both understood the uncluttered emotion of comics, but New Yorkers used it in a more authoritarian fashion. Ultimately, Pop undermined emotion. Witness Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, who formalized, abstracted and depersonalized the conventions and characters of comics. Pop’s dispassion became Minimalism’s composure.
Chicago artists, however, invented their own peculiar personages who packed the punch of political cartoons. Nutt’s Sleep Walker, 1970, with rippling biceps, sharp elbows and an erection that pushes into his stomach, wrinkling it, is specific and personal. Wearing a checked undershirt and shorts that bare short, knobby, hairy legs, he stands like a conquering hero on what could be smooth, female buttocks or giant labia. Phallic protuberances jut at him from the painting’s border, as if he were dreaming of his own potency but were insecure about it and afraid of his own virility.
From the mid-’60s on Chicago imagism understands a cultural rationale and affection for comics. Comics activate and (vicariously) satisfy basic needs that are ignored or deflected in everyday life. Hence, they deal in passion, romance, brutality—in an abundance of emotion.
The delight in such display colors the work of younger imagists, beginning with shows arranged by the exhibition director Don Baum at the Hyde Park Art Center, a gallery-workshop-school serving the University of Chicago community. Baum and several of the instructors at the SAIC, encouraged students—including Nilsson, Nutt and Wirsum—in their imagist orientation. In the mid-1960s the “Hairy Who”—James Falconer, Art Green, Suellen Rocca and the three artists just mentioned—exhibited several times at the South Side Art Center and with the aid of advocate criticism emerged as the golden boys and girls of the Chicago art world.
Other Institute-trained artists used images, but their work captured fantasies which were less particularized, less harsh, less crude. Two such artists, Cynthia Carlson (B.F.A., 1965) and David Sharpe (M.F.A., 1968), left Chicago for New York and produced abstract work which, however, has never manifested Minimalist tendencies. Indeed, both have created paintings packed with forms and colors, and their work has been adamantly visual and even tactile—sensational if not voluptuous. Sharpe’s earlier biomorphic forms, which had Chicago critics reminiscing about Kandinsky and Miró, have given way to shapes and markings suggestive of boundless panoramas. Carlson, who while still attached to the image crowded her canvases with myriad elements, now builds thick, creamy surfaces which rely on pattern for impact. Though both she and Sharpe design works of sensory primacy—as do the Funk imagists, who also partake of a visual immediacy—often they also fix on orderly, though not rigid, compositions. This (ironic?) interest in design and structural discipline is characteristic of imagism.
Self-named (according to Schulze) as a joking reference to the local artist and art-world personality Harry Bouras, the Hairy Who became the first of several groups of artists (occasionally overlapping) to identify themselves with punning and Surrealistic epithets. Hairy Who, for instance, betrays a childlike playfulness and curiosity (Hairy who? hairy what? hairy where?) about adults’ bodies—an interest, for that matter, also apparent in Wirsum’s Armpits. With the burgeoning of these groups, together with other artists of a similar esthetic, imagism asserted itself as a more vital and distinct sensibility. Needless to say, some of these individuals have fallen from art-world grace while others have established themselves as mature and even charismatic artists (whether or not their work appeals to one’s taste).
It has been said that the sleazy side of city life has influenced these imagists, but what about Chicago in particular has filtered into their outlook? No doubt the historical and cultural ambience of a locale inform the perceptions of its inhabitants.1 A few years ago Chicago acquired a new title—The City That Works. Interesting: the double meaning, though simplistic, recalls the Funk imagists’ layered plays on words in their titles—Nilsson’s Blewboy Heeman, Nutt’s I’m da Vicious Roomer, Christina Ramberg’s Shady Lacey. Anyway, Mayor Daley liked the slogan, for it suited his ethos: more streetlights must be hung, curbs repaired, potholes filled, garbage hauled.
Daley made sure that the machine worked, but Chicago works in other ways too. An industrial city, its lakefront dwellings and expensive downtown offices convey little about the city’s core. Certainly Chicago has its high culture, and its elegance. But the city hasn’t a reputation for chic, sophistication, or art: its writers have displayed more earthiness and humor than sensuousness or class, while its artists, as early as 1902, have left for friendlier territory.2
Steel mills, loading docks, auto assemblies, and machine and electrical plants tell us that Chicago is a proletarian city with unrefined tastes. Visitors may see the luxurious furnishings displayed on Michigan Avenue or in the Loop, and even Sears and Wards bow to the bland rather than the tacky. But in other areas of the city a plastic, shiny, baubled furniture evoking tawdry motel rooms is more readily available; this is the stylistic look of much imagism. In many working-class sections low, drab, one-, two-, and three-flat dwellings sprawl for blocks. The dreary but tidy aura of these neighborhoods appears in certain imagist work, particularly Roger Brown’s cityscapes and Ramberg’s headless, corsetted women.
Factory labor connotes sweat, a dogged purposefulness, and a decency rooted in America’s faith in the benefits of work. The imagists’ smooth surfaces, clean edges, precise forms, and love of detail and decoration signal just such a belief. These artists fill space densely, whether concentrating on the image itself—like Lostutter with his tiny, delicate delineations of feathers on the heads of his birdmen—or completing a background with apparently gratuitous markings—like Phil Hanson. The imagists seem unable to let up, as if enough is never enough, or as if, as in a factory, more work can always be done.
Though imagism conforms to bourgeois work ethics—and some of Nutt’s characters even sweat, more because of the artist’s joy in physiological realities than because of their peculiar labors—this art slams through proletarian depression and morality and gropes toward freedom.
Yet other factors inhibit it. Daley’s machine may have “worked,” but in so doing it was controlling, even tyrannical. Vote fraud, political favors, the “police riot” at the 1968 Democratic convention: Daley never waived his not-always-benign omnipotence. Like a parent who, feeling impotent or insecure in him/herself, infringes on the spirit of a child, Daley acted as a repressive agent. One thinks of the bound figures that consistently appear in imagist work: for instance, Lostutter’s men who seem sheathed in satin and Ramberg’s ladies in their skintight lingerie.
Any constrained person will try to break out, very likely with a rebellious act. Sexual activity is frequently used to reduce anger and release pent emotions, and, despite a supposed revolution in mores, sexuality remains a bugaboo. Chicago imagism strains at the very bondage it depicts through its extravagant sexuality. Indeed Lostutter’s men and Ramberg’s women are extremely erotic.
Daley spoke in a semiliterate and consequently funny fashion, as do his cronies, who still run Chicago, and as indeed do many working-class people. Easily parodied because “da” replaces “the,” this Chicago dialect appears in some imagist titles: Nutt’s Da Creepy Lady and the previously mentioned I’m da Vicious Roomer. Malapropisms and misspellings also recur as unconscious tributes to an ignorance devoid of innocence.
Such “Chicagoese” has also been attributed to gangsters, though more in caricature than in fact. Chicago’s gangland killings, however, were hardly comical. Their number and brutality gave Chicago a violent image which it has yet to live down in Europe. Gangs alone are not responsible; the city’s history is replete with murders: “The Murder Castle” of 1893, where visitors to the Columbian Exposition were housed (the owner advertised for boarders) and then done away with in soundproof, asbestos-panelled rooms, on operating tables or on an apparatus resembling a rack, or in a crematory or vat of corrosive acids; the cold-blooded 1924 killing of a twelve-year-old boy by Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two wealthy young Hyde Park men; the last decade’s Richard Speck stabbings of a group of student nurses, plus the police killings, or assassinations, of the Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark; the recent separate and unwarranted shootings of Chicago youths by police. Underscoring this roster of brutality was the stench of the slaughtered animals at the Chicago Union Stock Yards, opened in 1865 and closed in 1971.
That imagist paintings portray mutilation, torture and destruction is indicative of psychological turmoil, and a chaotic, self-destructive society—more specifically of Chicago’s checkered past and present. In Nutt’s Toot-Toot, Woo-Woo, 1968, a woman with limbs severed to mid-thigh holds a piece of flesh ripped from her own forearm or leg. Blood drips from the torn skin. His She’s Hit, 1967, depicts another ghastly but ludicrous scene. A woman with one shoulder hacked off and various parts of her malformed body wrenched away stands bowlegged on a spongy cushion. Bandaids cover wounds; stitches mark areas of larger injuries; a cast covers one arm; a scissors handle sticks out of the other; safety pins pierce her chest. An unseen crowd seems to be throwing daggers at her, this scapegoat or effigy.
Lostutter’s images are equally forceful, but more subtle. The splendor and decorum of his men soften the grisly implications of truncated bodies, which seem imprisoned in impossibly smooth skin or sewn into creamy, fleshlike suits. Bound arms and blinded eyes suggest helplessness, as if these figures were victims.
In contrast to the poignant and powerful struggling of Lostutter’s men, Paschke’s Hangwoman, 1971, exudes brash terror. Posed in a come-on contrapposto, with one index finger pointing down and the other at the viewer, she threatens us with a hellish demise. The background glows with the red of flame or blood. Garters, dark stockings, and a black undergarment with red stripes around the waist and down the sides lend an erotic air, implying cultural connections between sex and punishment (adultery, homosexuality and other “uncommon” practices have long been “crimes”) and the more global and spiritual/literary relationship between sex and death. Large breasts sagging from a lean chest and a hooded head emphasize the bizarre, the elusive, the mysterious, all of which seem malevolent.
Brown, in his scenes of sinking skyscrapers, offers subdued versions of mass destruction. Even Winter Breath, 1976–77, where clouds or smog swirl around high-rises as if to engulf them, like smoke from a fire, invokes tragedy.
Criminal record aside, Chicago is a tough town often distinguished by chutzpah and idiosyncrasy: its motto “I Will” has been more than justified throughout the city’s history. Five years after the fire of 1871 destroyed three and one-half square miles of commercial and residential property, the city prospered more than it had at any time since its incorporation in 1833. Built on swamps and wild onion patches, Chicago later filled in part of Lake Michigan in order to extend itself eastward. Daley had the Chicago River dyed green every St. Patrick’s Day, and he saw to it that Loop parades featuring sundry ethnic and community groups were frequently staged.
Chicago exudes a weird brand of gaiety that borders on the grating rather than the joyful. Many art-world parties suffer from an undercurrent of gossip, a prying into intimate business and sexual activities. Other irritants are screeching elevated trains and subways that scream (not just roar) beneath the city. Not to mention the long winters, whose bitter winds, subzero temperatures, icy dangers and ugly slush never fade from locals’ minds: winters are discussed throughout the year.
Imagism shares Chicago’s own deliberateness, its freedom to do what it seems fit, its disregard for difficulty or convention. Imagism, as must be clear from examples already discussed, does not shilly-shally. Its felicity—bright colors, blatant eroticism, obscene humor—is its intrusiveness, its capacity for absorption in painful and offensive subjects, its dependence on distress. Like the clamor of Chicago itself, imagism is hard to ignore, and it produces content heated by sex and antagonism.
While imagism scorns the everyday with wild fantasies, it simultaneously relies on it in order to divulge its mysteries. This is not unlike the native Chicago painter Ivan Albright, who, in the ’20s and ’30s, began his magical disfigurements of reality. Painting every detail with more exactitude than a Photo-Realist, he created works, darkly glittering like rotting food, that told more about the soul than the surface of a place or person. Although the SAIC group of the 1940s rejected any link with Albright, it shared his desire for essences and attunement with the surreal and fantastic. His distorting but ultimately truthful realism conveys the eeriness of the mundane, just as work by the younger imagists does.
In effect, the Funk imagists could also be called emotional realists who masquerade appearances in order to unveil them. In imagism nothing is unrecognizable, just altered; and as costuming yourself for a ball may reveal hidden qualities or intensify underrated ones, either through the ensemble itself or its effect on your personality, so the unexpected arises in imagism. Ultimately, a spirited and well-conceived disguise is no disguise at all, but rather an assertion of freedom and a reflection of truth. Imagism’s emotional realism vanquishes modernity’s belief that everyday life is only practical, for it investigates the exoticism of reality.
Although his work seems very different, Georges Seurat in the 1880s also focused on the everyday, stylizing his subjects into myths or rituals. Seurat’s Parisian bourgeoisie and performers became symbols of a culture rather than actors in it, so that, like the Symbolist poets from whom he received critical support, Seurat transcended the banal by projecting his personality onto it. Surely Paschke’s strippers, Ramberg’s semi clothed torsos, or Wirsum’s robot women function similarly. Seurat and the Symbolists didn’t subjectify the world through interpretation. Rather they represented ideas suggested by reality. So too with the imagists, whose architectonic perfectionism is as integral to their work as Seurat’s is to his. In the monumental La Grande Jatte—which hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago—the joylessness and detachment seen in stilled forms and stiff poses implies a rigidity akin to cultural rigor mortis. Of course, death as a theme pervades Symbolist poetry, as part of the decadent spirit that was a Symbolist constant. Not a sign of moral degeneration, decadence may be viewed instead as a declining faith in the present and a disbelief in optimistic progressiveness. Symbolists felt they were sinking into an abyss whose gloom could be communicated through an art that personalized universal problems.
If Funk imagism often amuses us with implicit death images, its decadence is as serious as Seurat’s. Humor is merely a more cynical approach to the fin-de-siècle malaise that became a chronic cultural disorder. Like Seurat, the imagists pursue urban unattractiveness by making the dismal or commonplace striking. Yet in their eyes, as in those of the Symbolist precursor Charles Baudelaire, the ugly and the beautiful are equal—the terms are even nullified.
But humor takes the Funk imagists a step further, because it catches us off guard. Where Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal outraged readers who struggled with its unequivocal eroticism and its excruciating moral honesty, imagism at first defuses such elements. In fact, imagist humor—like that developed by Chicago’s Second City nightclub comedians such as Bob Newhart, Mike Nichols and Elaine May—weakens our defenses against culturally, if not personally, incriminating content. In the paintings and the shticks reality is shown to be a macabre, embarrassing, and aggravating process. We laugh because we identify with a character, situation, or emotional tone, in order to relieve our fear that they’re hitting too close to home. Either way, we’re schlemiels.
Second City vignettes and imagist art aggrandize the everyday. The butt of a joke may be denigrated, but it is also elevated through a concentrated, and new, perspective. It undergoes a transformation and begs to be taken seriously. Thus, imagism also ennobles its array of outcasts and aliens. “Monsters” like Lostutter’s hybrids, Paschke’s pimps and Nutt’s slatterns acquire heroic stature.3 Portrayed singly and lavished with craftsmanlike care, the subjects assume a surreal or squalid grandeur and a jarring potency unmarred even by humor. If anything, Nutt’s and Wirsum’s incongruities maximize the latter effect.
A society depleted of gods or flesh and blood “deities” still craves images of power—if not the power of love, then at least of cruelty. Imagism understands that deviants, whether gods, heroes or monsters, possess supranormal (which is also abnormal) awareness, and that they instill some of this feeling in us. Such a role may have nothing to do with the spiritual or the humane. Then again, society martyrs Frankenstein’s monster for his depth of feeling. No one wants to befriend a monster, and we suffer too as the insensitive world inflicts its inhumanity on him. Where Frankenstein’s monster succumbs to the social order, imagism’s funky monsters strike at it with iconoclastic vengeance. Here too, however, we can side with the monsters if we fight against esthetic and cultural norms imposed upon us.
Tempting as it is, we cannot make a case for imagism’s casting women in any more monstrous a role than men. The problem is that while in Chicago Funk both sexes point a finger at society’s lack of feeling, they also support respective stereotypes. As if sensuality activated fear, women are often sexual monsters. This is hardly different from the 19th-century iconography of writers and artists who portrayed women with the attributes of sphinxes, snakes, or vampires (Golub knew Gustave Moreau’s sphinx paintings). The breasts on Wirsum’s women are not sumptuous, but rigid, like those on a stone sphinx. Paschke’s Hangwoman suggests a vampire’s bloodlust. Even Nilsson, whose work is lighter, gives her women serpentine or spidery arms.
In Nutt’s Running Wild, 1969, a woman with a hook for a hand rips a phallus as tall as she is. While we might see this as a woman avenging herself, it is also an image of fear. If women were to get out of control—run wild—they would feel free to tear into men and ruin their power. Priapism in Chicago imagist work is not, as in primitive art, a sign of fertility. Imagism may not be secretive about sexuality, but its exaggerations speak of insecurity and conflicts rather than potency or voluptuousness. Outsized genitals, which occur in much erotic art, here serve as a cover for terror and inferiority. Where other cultures have worshipped the phallus as something divine, ours “worships” it as an instrument of personal and cultural power. Any spiritual significance has disappeared; the bigger the penis, the “bigger” the man.
Thus imagism also caters to macho ideals. Yet its concern with genitalia and breasts is clearly like a child’s—the child who sees the size of his/her parents’ whatevers and is awed or frightened. Indeed the child and the macho individual share the same fear: will they achieve their sexual potential? Obviously, doubts plague everyone now and then. Adolescents (and some adults uneasy about their sexuality) exorcise them with bravado or scatological humor, and in a similar way imagism is an emotionally adolescent, even regressive, art. Intensifying at a time when post-war babies were entering their teens, gaining buying power, and thereby creating a youth market and culture, Funk imagism reflects America’s youth consciousness.
Sex and violence are also associated with rock music. Rowdy crowds attend concerts just as often as do the Woodstock variety. Indeed, on the rock circuit Chicago is known as home of the raunchiest audiences. Loudness transgresses comfort and demands attention. Stars purvey belligerence and sexuality. Both they and the music set standards that are anti-taste and anti-culture. Even when co-opted by money, rock acts retain a fuck-you stance: to “rock” (someone) is the same as to “jazz”—i.e. to fuck. The names Chicago artists gave themselves sound like the names of rock groups: the Hairy Who, the Non-Plussed Some, the False Image.4 And imagist work supplies an anti-esthetic in the same way that rock does.
Even imagism’s sadomasochism confirms our diminution of feeling. If pain is preferable to numbness, then Chicago art is sexually arousing. Following in the footsteps of Western erotic art, its bound, gagged, and variously tortured bodies proclaim that pain must accompany pleasure and that anguish is transcendent. Funk imagist art has been called irrational: indeed, rapture as a slave to pain is the ultimate irrationality. Such art gets under our skin while simultaneously forcing us to keep our distance and making us voyeurs. Ramberg, typically, zeroes in on breasts, midriffs, hips and upper thighs, all constricted by undergarments; we seem to be staring into a neighbor’s boudoir with high-powered binoculars. Nilsson depicts cartoonlike orgies where tiny, spindly-armed creatures hang from the breasts of big women, odd couples fondle each other, and thin phallic legs and arms intertwine.
Clothing that emphasizes the body by clinging to it or baring it resembles that worn in pinups. Masturbatory turn-ons, pinups excite us but offer no tangible pleasure. They remind us of what we lack: an ideally sexual body or a partner to banish the need for autoeroticism. Pinups are emblems of guilt, obsession, compulsion, and dissatisfaction as well as sexuality. Yet in our culture sexuality seems to include all of the above.
Erotic art in the East does not seem so depressing, degrading, or apprehensive. Cultures that have accepted and enjoyed sex don’t produce images that shout for attention or portray human beings as monsters. Yet imagism’s focus on the figure, no matter how grotesque, denotes a real humanity. Lostutter’s bird-men are more than, as well as less than, human. So are Paschke’s societal rejects, Nutt’s doll-like mongrels, and Ramberg’s severe mannequins. In so being, however, they’re no different from the reality and potential of us all. In one Bugs Bunny cartoon the loudmouthed rabbit tries to ingratiate himself with a freakish companion by saying, “Monsters must lead the most interesting lives.” Chicago’s Funk imagism affirms this view by exposing our own strengths and weaknesses—our own monstrosities—that make everyday life more generally vivid than we might have imagined.
—Joanna Frueh
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NOTES
1. Paul Shepard, “Place in American Culture,” The North American Review, Fall 1977, p. 26: (regarding the Hudson River School) “Habitat is . . . a structured surround in which the developing individual makes tenacious affiliations . . . something extremely important to the individual is going on between the complex structure of those particular pieces and the emerging, maturing self, a process of macro-micro correlation, mostly unconscious, essential to the growth of personal identity.”
2. Consider this statement in the Chicago art publication Brush and Pencil, March 1902, p. 337. “Chicago educates more artists than any other city in America, but it does not encourage them to stay here. As a consequence there is a constant migration of artists, and generally the best of them, to other localities, where they are better appreciated.”
3. The emotive intensity of the ’50s Monster Roster has altered to accommodate the actual depiction of monstrous beings.
4. Franz Schulze notes this in Fantastic Images: Chicago Art Since 1945, Chicago, 1972, p. 5.
