MUSEUMS

HYDE PARKSmart Museum of Art⁄5550 South Greenwood, (773)702-0200. TTHE TRAGICMUSE, painting, prints, sculpture. Something terriblehappens in the world every day, so tragedy is the breadand butter of daily journalism, but as the subject ofAristotle’s “Poetics,” the foundational text of Europeanaesthetics, it well deserves the scholarly attentionwhich University of Chicago professors of art history, aswell as philosophy, English and classical literature have

given it in this special exhibition at the Smart Museum.Focusing on two centuries of Western European art,“The Tragic Muse: Art and Emotion, 1700-1900”attempts to trace changing attitudes towards what wecall tragedy. The highlight is the collection of paintingsthat relate to Shakespearean theater. There are portraitsketches (1785-90) of the actress Sarah Siddons asLady Macbeth by George Romney from the PrincetonUniversity Art Museum. More impressively, there is thelife-sized painting of the tragic actor Philibert Rouvièreas Hamlet, from 1865, by Edouard Manet on loan fromthe National Gallery, and Henry Fuseli’s nearly life-sizeddepiction of “Macbeth Consulting the Vision of theArmed Head” (1793) from the Folger ShakespeareLibrary. Does tragedy look different now than it did toviewers from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?Lacking some kind of comprehensive survey or statisti-cal study, we can only ask how each piece feels to eachone of us. The martyrdom depicted by Fontebassowould have been so much more delightful if done by hispredecessor, Tiepolo, and Anna Lea Merritt’s portrait ofan actress playing Ophelia cries out for the paintings byMillais or Waterhouse. Especially disappointing is the

sculpture, not because the pieces by Rodin or Minneare weak, but because the lighting fails to make thesurface come alive with the forms underneath. Thoseinterested in nineteenth-century tragic sculpture mightdo better to walk a mile south and visit Oak WoodsCemetery, or better yet, Graceland or BohemianNational Cemeteries on the north side of town. All thir-ty-six paintings, prints and sculptures may be repre-senting something tragic, but as the philosopher ofmimesis once wrote in his “Poetics”: “Not to know thata hind has no horns is a less serious matter than topaint it inartistically.” (Chris Miller) Through June 5.

GALLERIES

WEST LOOPAlderman Exhibitions⁄350 North Ogden, 450E. PPAUL COWAN, painting. Nomatter how much white Valspar goes into turningindustrial lofts into blank spaces for high-art contem-plation, the red-wine trail and social-calendar truth isthat most exhibitions are born first as well-lit partieswithout music. For Paul Cowan, sculptor-turned-painterwith a tactical sense of art humor, this ironic dichotomywas enough to build an exhibition around. In “Breakingthe Law,” Cowan’s latest at new West Loop spaceAlderman Exhibitions, the artist made his fun byembellishing his paintings with colorful helium bal-loons. These were stuck floating in gangs at theentrance; in the space, their laces tethered around alump of damp sculptor’s clay; or wedged behindCowan’s quick-drawn paintings, propping them awayfrom the wall. The paintings themselves looked justalong for the ride, each tooting a single note in oil-stickon canvas, silently secondary to the installation as awhole. As expected, the opening’s atmosphere wassomewhere between birthday party and contemplative

art event, but by the end of the night, the punch linesstarted rolling as these balloons wandered and saggedlike drunken guests, leaking helium, and eventuallysank to the floor. As they dropped from behind paint-ings, the canvases fell to their traditional positionsagainst the wall, setting up the rest of the exhibition’sfive-week run with the dull topper, “but seriously,folks…” (Steve Ruiz) Through May 16.

Ebersmoore Gallery⁄213 North Morgan, #3C. !HEIDI NORTON, multimedia,photography. Heidi Norton is the consummate packer,joining experiment with process, conceptual message,reference to art history, and meta-photography, just forstarters, in her enigmatic works, which employ multipleforms (photography, painting and, most recently, sculp-ture and found objects), sometimes separately andsometimes in a mix. No doubt all of this variety isbrought together by the motif in which it is packaged—plants and shrubs. Yet they appear in many guises,evoking disparate moods. As a result, none of theworks in the show is representative of the whole orepitomizes it; each conveys its own meanings. “DeadPalm Burnt by the Sun” is a still-life photograph of arow of objects, including the wildly forlorn desiccatedpalm, on tabletop backed by a white sheet that hasbeen put over the window behind it. The objects areattenuated in rough, even dynamic, elegance; a mutedrange of purple and plum constitutes the palette. Itlooks like a painting, not a photograph trying to simu-late one. However one interprets it, “Dead Palm”makes decay enticingly vital. At Norton’s soft core wefind art for art-play’s sake. (Michael Weinstein) ThroughMay 14.

Rhona Hoffman Gallery⁄118 North Peoria. !HUMA BHABHA, drawings, sculp-ture. Huma Bhabha’s sculptures and collages at RhonaHoffman Gallery seem like untimely ruins of contempo-rary culture. Although best known for her sculptures, it

ART BREAK

Sign LanguageThree new billboards on the South and West Sides of Chicago wordlessly announcethe coming spring. Each billboard frames a shock of fuzzy colors, like AbstractExpressionist paintings in the sky. Artist and art-book publisher Doug Fogelson, who has pre-viously worked on public art commissions, this time wanted to create a direct and immediatepublic action without the restrictive layers of committees and grants. The billboards went upApril 8 and they’ll be viewable for one month.

Fogelson sited his abstractions at busy intersections in the Humboldt Park (at Chicago andSpaulding), McKinley Park (at 35th and Ashland) and Washington Park (at 63rd and State)neighborhoods, places he calls “some very rough zones in the city.” The communities livinghere must too often content with gang violence, drug dealing and a decaying industrial land-scape. Will the billboards ameliorate some of these difficulties? “I have seen art and artistspositively impact communities both directly and indirectly,” Fogelson says, speaking mostlyof his experience with art education in schools. “However, I have no illusions that the effectwill be very substantial here.” As public art, the billboards, like graffiti, subvert the expectedstreetscape. “If this work takes peoples’ minds off the mundane or challenging aspects of lifefor a moment then it succeeds,” says Fogelson.

I asked Fogelson about the imagery that appears on the billboards, which he revealed werethe products of multiple exposures of nature scenes. This isn’t crucial information to the suc-cessful reception of the billboards, for their contexts—as signposts, in the city—energize theartworks. Fogelson explains, “I tend to see an abundance of preachy, obtuse, or ironic workas billboard art and this only reinforced my desire to use abstraction as counterpoint.Hopefully this is not seen just as a weird gift but more as a signifier of something outside theboundaries of consumer culture.” (Jason Foumberg)

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Doug Fogelson’s billboard at 35th and Ashland

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