"*" "Starting in the mid-1960s for twenty years, a group of artists shared a moment in Chicago." "*" "What becomes of such a moment?" "Where does it go?" "The story of 20th Century American Art is already written." "It is not a story about Chicago." "Yet Chicago was home to the Imagists." "History is messy, confusing." "Often it's depicted as a straight line placing one charismatic innovator after another." "Isn't it more like a web?" "A web of energies and artifacts, individuals and ensembles, a moment intricately connected to other such moments radiating outward?" "It's easy enough to tell the story of a line, but a web?" ""Come into my parlor,"" "said the spider to the fly." "*" "*" "* Your head is like a yoyo," "* Your neck is like the string, *" "* Your body's like camembert" "* Oozing from its skin, yeah." "* Your fanny's like two sperm whales *" "* Floating down the Seine," "* Your voice is like a long fart *" "* That's music to your brain, yeah. **" "The Chicago Imagists included a few dozen artists who began working in the 1960s and continued into the 21st century." "A handful have enjoyed major retrospectives and critical attention, but many are unknown to the general public." "They are perhaps most widely appreciated by other artists, who view them as a secret source of inspiration." "Nine, eight, ignition sequence, start." "Everything invented in the 1960s could be co-opted immediately." "There was no problem co-opting like, uh, Op Art hippy art, anything, but the Hairy Who couldn't be co-opted." "And I was waiting and hoping it would be co-opted, but it was, it had embraced insanity and psychosis." "And you don't necessarily sell toothbrushes with that." "There are artificial, sexual, bizarre umm, situations where there's, you know, sex organs everywhere of all kinds being pointed at and like outlined and sprouting out of places..." "It is very promiscuous." "I would still be too embarrassed to do stuff Jim Nutt does... or did?" "You know what I mean..." "Yeah, but, I mean it's totally okay." "But, I, it's admirable." "Those guys can draw like motherfuckers!" "The lines have synergy." "I mean the lines vibrate." "When I went into Ed's studio and I saw a work like Red Sweeney, it was like, my gosh." "This is what it must be like to mainline a drug because it was like wooo." "And very powerful." "Yeah the way I've been drawing trees for uh twenty years now is directly stolen from Roger Brown." "I feel terrible about it, but there's something about, maybe it's the amount of time when you live in Chicago and you look up and you think "tree" you know and you look down again" "and think "What am I doing with my life?"" "It just, there's something he captured, that sense of treeness or something." "Six of the Imagists who referred to themselves as the Hairy Who broke onto the scene in 1966." "They relied on a lurid, pop sensibility and an explosive use of color." "They shared a love of comics, commercial signs and outcast objects." "And like the Surrealists, they were fascinated with the darker and weirder recesses of the human psyche." "Ok, this is May 21st, 1971." "My name is Karl Wirsum and uh, I was born here in Chicago on September 27th, 1939." "*" "Maxwell Street." "When I was in high school I went there not for the flea market so much but for the street musicians." "They would, you know, get a harmonica and start playing." "*" "That aspect of being delivered into this other environment, you know, which being a white, middle class kid not getting this kind of really this new experience and uh, it was quite a moving kind of situation." "*" "I think I, uh, took this kind of personal identity with the blues musicians." "And thought of myself that doing my art was somehow analogous to the blues." "And versus pop music." "One of my first Plexiglas pieces was a portrait of Howlin' Wolf." "*You're gonna make me go upstairs in the morning*" "*I'm gonna bring back down my clothes I'm gonna quit ya**" "I gave him one of those tea strainers that was the microphone and he had a hot dog for a mouth." "*" "Junior "Messin' with the Kid" Wells where I used some glitter and immersed it in a Liquitex emulsion there." "It adds this reflective component to it." "*" "AHHHHHHHH" "*" "*" "I think I was always, particularly when I started out confused, that you know expression has something to do with thick pain." "And it can, but it doesn't have to." "In a sense, Karl's work really clarified that for me." "I came across his work just at the right time, or something like that." "It really helped me focus." "I played a lot of pinballs when I was a kid." "So the look of the vertical panel with the lights coming through of the paint on the reverse side of the glass," "I just liked it." "I wanted to use it." "Another thing you would see painting on windows, you know, as advertisements, sometimes low on the bottom of a store front." "It's a surface and a feel, you can't mimic it." "If you're interested in it, then use it." "The paintings end up being sort of what they are without my really having any firm grip on, you know, what generated them." "I mean, I don't think that I started a, you know, like a painting or something and said "Well, what about a sawed off leg..."" "Yeah, that wasn't the starting point." "But it evolved into something like that." "That's where it becomes difficult to," "I mean, I just think, I'm rationalizing if I start trying to analyze what they're about." "And I think that would be misleading." "There's no system at work here." "Here's somebody who really likes to make paintings." "You can sort of see in his works." "And I think he's careful about everything he makes." "And that care appeals to me a lot." "I don't know if he would think the same thing, but" "I was really interested in Flemish painting because of the crispness and the clarity." "I kind of think in some ways that Jim Nutt might also be interested really in Flemish painting or the early Netherlandish painting because it's that crispness." "Even though they'll be completely grotesque, there's something so beautiful about them." "And about the way the body's handled in this kind of exquisite way." "It's so strange, but it's so exquisite." "It's like some other world." "And again, this impulse to grotesque and to caricature to sexuality, but these kind of otherworldly beings that are spotted, that are diseased, that exploit or exaggerate their gender, their interactions with the world." "There's no clear way to read or decode these paintings, and take away some sort of set or pat meaning." "You need to have Jim Nutt if you're talking about portraiture and who's doing something really unique with portraiture." "It was in 1974." "Jim Nutt had a retrospective at the Whitney Museum." "And I came to New York and I saw that show you know, it was like wow." "If you looked at a Nutt work" "I mean, you felt that you were looking at a Jim Nutt." "The intensity of it." "They showed the Plexiglas paintings." "They were painted from the back." "Very strong and bright images." "So I was really moved by it because I always loved Surrealism." "I always loved Dada." "But I started to learn that, when I became curious about Nutt's work, about you know, the Chicago Imagists." "There weren't that many place going back into the mid-60s where there were walls available." "Gallery scene was very minimal." "Not too many commercial galleries." "For young artists there really wasn't a scene." "The Hyde Park Art Center was basically the only real opening." "We started exhibiting around '64 at the Hyde Park Art Center." "Located seven miles south of downtown," "Hyde Park was home to the University of Chicago, a magnet for the city's intellectual elite and a hotbed of cultural non-conformity." "In 1893, the World's Columbian Exposition catapulted the Chicago neighborhood onto the international stage." "The Hyde Park Art Center gained momentum in the 1950s through the vision of a maverick curator, Don Baum." "My idea about the Hyde Park Art Center was that it would be a place where artists who had no previous exhibiting experience could show." "I always felt my role was to permit!" "I first got interested in the Hyde Park Art Center because of Don Baum's amazing series of shows." "They were not high concept." "There was an animal, vegetable and mineral." "Really?" "Yeah, three separate." "All the paintings had to be about animals, then vegetables and minerals." "I remember I was in the vegetable series, for sure, I think the mineral series as well, but they had these great openings!" "The art world in Chicago, or probably any other major city, is so complex because it's made up of not only artists, but of people who are involved in other ways!" "Museum people, critics, dealers and I always was interested in the whole mechanism." "How the components of the art world all functioned." "Don knew a lot of people, collectors he was a very sociable person." "He just encouraged them to get interested." "And he made it possible, he made a nice environment for them to get interested." "The opening days were wonderful." "We didn't know where to look first at the people who attended or the art on the walls." "In today's terms, you wouldn't even think of it as an art gallery." "It was a car showroom at some point and it had little tiles on the floor and the lighting were those big round opaque glass globes that hung from the ceiling." "I mean that was it." "Don Baum was a fireworks display going off all the time." "Everything was just right." "Here was the freedom to do what they wanted to do." "There was a little bit of money." "There was a period in which this kind of flamboyance was right on the noise!" "It was really exciting to be in these shows." "But after being in a number of them, you know, over a year or two years you sort of wanted to have more." "In any case, we came up with the idea of a show, with say, five artists and then each artist could have five to seven pieces then you'd have a bigger impact." "Your chances of getting reviewed would be better than if you just had one piece in, you know, these group shows." "Went to Don, explained our idea and he said, "Yeah I like it."" "He liked the idea and myself, Jim Falconer, Suellen Rocca, Art Green, Gladys Nilsson we became the basis of the Hairy Who." "And Don, knowing me, said, you know," ""Why don't you throw in Karl Wirsum into this?"" "I remember the planning that took place." "Gladys and Jim lived in a basement apartment." "Gladys painted clouds on the ceiling." "I don't know how Karl would have thought about... it was his first time he had really met all of us." "So he was walking into a room that he hardly knew anybody." "And, uh, Jim and Karl and Art have such amazing senses of humor." "Actually I remember a period of time listening to Art Green read through the back of magazine ads." "Turtle wax." "Mercedes 190, like stepping into a fine wallet." "I mean, it was just the words, the nomenclature that would be whipping through." "Nibs, little candies with their pibs." "Enjoy lobster with a French touch at Froggy's French Cafe." "You're listening to Art and Artists with Harry Bouras." "We were discussing Harry Bouras." "He had a program on the radio." "Squashed into it and, you know, one, and-ddd the brushwork is all over the place and it's all." "We were going on about Harry and his sensitive descriptions..." "That guy's undeniably a painter." "Kept bringing up allusions to Harry and I was in the dark here." "I didn't know who they were talking about." "Just the old thing here upon which a lot of the decorative, heavy impasto has been laid..." "Finally I, God, they keep bringing this Harry up, who the heck is he?" "So I said," "Karl said," ""Harry who?"" "Harry Who!" "Harry who?" "When I asked that question they said, "Whoa!" "That'll be it!"" "And then we altered it of course to H-A-I-R-Y." "Hairy Who popped up and everything just kind of followed through." "You couldn't shut the valve after the Hairy Who popped up." "*" "*" "As planned, the press took notice." "The artists returned to their studios and cranked up the heat." "*" "*" "In those early cartoons, no matter what they were everything moved." "The air moved." "Everything moved." "There was no static situation at all." "Olive Oil, she'd be walking along, everything was stretching and moving and so on." "I became so fascinated by that, that that really segued into my work." "*" "Watercolors got denser and denser with people occupying them." "Limbs became intertwined so that it was more," "I was thinking I was weaving." "*" "You can just look at a Gladys Nilsson watercolor and go," ""How does she do this?"" "with such, you know, rigor and watercolor is a completely unforgiving medium and you don't see a bunch of mistakes." "*" "I was already interested in the idea of these little images sort of an iconic image, I guess that's what you would call it." "Something that immediately had a bunch of associations with." "There was a magazine advertisement of different places you could visit all over the world, but they were sort of like iconic in that, you know, a palm tree in a bit of an island so you could immediately recognize, you know," "it was kind of, uh, a little icon for a certain kind of place." "Suellen's work, the canvas is used to put things on." "Like a ledger." "But the diagrams and the lists aren't specific." "They don't relate to business practice, but they relate to, uh, kind of an emotional necessity or an emotional story." "If you asked ten people no one will add it up the same." "From the beginning, the Hairy Who paid homage to the beloved form of the comic book by publishing their own comics for each of their Hyde Park Art Center shows in 1966, '67 and '68." "Cheaply printed comic book with a sort of processed four color with Ben-Day dots and all that." "It was really thought of as a catalogue in the comic book form and so it was sort of mixing the two things in this interest in comics." "During that time period was a big deal, looking at the comics." "As we aged, I think there was still a connection to it as a primal kind of art making." "It retained that kind of presence, the magic and I never kind of said, "Oh, I'm too old for that kind of thing."" "When I was in school, comics were seen as a stand in for the ubiquity and empty headedness of popular culture." "And to try to use the cartoon language to express something other than that was unusual, if not, completely unheard of." "Both Karl Wirsum and Jim Nutt were the two artists" "I thought of who actually did come closest to that." "Like they seemed to look at comics and see it as having something that could viably express something about human life and not just be a way of saying "Look aren't we a stupid nation of, you know, empty headed consumers?"" "That's what really appealed to me most, I think, about their work." "*" "*" "*" "Franz Schulze when that first Hairy Who hit gave a huge big important review." "In the second show we decided to go a little bit further." "*" "The Hairy Who grew increasingly ambitious and aggressive in the installation of their shows." "We had rolls and rolls of all this flowered linoleum which we put up on all the walls." "Cases filled with our thrift store finds." "Chewing up this kind of colored gum and..." "Kind of screwed up our teeth for a year there." "*" "Really, an, uh, early installation." "*" "*" "The week before the third Hairy Who opening." "Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated." "We just decided that it would be inappropriate, you know, to have an opening." "That was crazy." "All those assassinations of the 60s..." "On to Chicago and let's win there!" "Made one grateful, not for escape, but for any legitimate reason to have a good time." "To make up for canceling the opening, the Hairy Who planned a closing party for their third and final show." "It wasn't an anodyne to those terrible events, but it was welcome." "The Hairy Who were not activist they're active on their own behalf." "Good at, through their hijinx and all, promoting what they did and you know allowing themselves and other people to kind of enjoy, join in on the fun." "Meanwhile, all this stuff was happening in Chicago and around the world." "Chicago actually was pretty repressive in the '60s." "There was more friction here and the convention in '68..." "You know, there's more friction and there's more animosity here." "We're nominating Hubert Humphrey." "Anything we can do to discourage that..." "You know, in the art world, it's sort of polite, you know, but it's the format of this city, you know, has in built in it a lot resentment to, at that time, creativity, period." "But I wanted to do paintings that would express the urgency of the situation." "And I felt that the situation was urgent." "I didn't even need a war to think the situation was urgent." "I came pre-equipped with an urgent situation." "*" "Good evening." "Following the attack," "U.S. representatives in Saigon met with the representatives of the south Vietnamese government..." "Mr. Robert Strange McNamara." "His middle name I thought was just great." "And Time Magazine had a whole issue on McNamara and there was an article called "The Design and the Dilemma."" "It showed McNamara sitting in his office and he's pondering." "And it said underneath it, his mantra was," ""Examine the facts, consider the options, apply the logic."" "You know, that's how we got into this mess." "So, he was a very logical man." "And so I put him in this big painting, had all these structures and chimneys and belching weird smoke and my idea was I wanted to put him in an irrational situation he couldn't figure out." "I did a bunch of paintings of McNamara in his quandary, in his natural quandary." "Well, in terms of The Second City, we started in 1959 when McCarthyism was holding sway and people did not do comedy." "What they did was mother-in-law jokes." "They'd go out on stage and say, "Eisenhower."" "Whoo!" "It was like sex, you know?" "I know, I know what we do, we-eee make people laugh!" "You're entertainers." "We're comedians." "Why didn't you tell me?" "I didn't think about it." "Go ahead, make me laugh." "Right now?" "This instant." "This instant." "With the world coming to an end?" "We were part of a revolution, late 50s, early 60s... where a period of oppression was leaving and the period of experimentation was starting." "I used to think about how The Beatles came along." "Here's a group." "And group action seemed to be in the air." "There were other groups forming a lot of music groups, in this country and all over." "And I kind of aligned that to the way the Imagists, either they thought about that or was just something that was kind of a natural choice." "The Chicago Imagists included an unusally high number of women in their ranks, unlike the art scenes in New York and Los Angeles at the time." "*" "And there was one review that went on to describe the work and they said, "And Gladys Nilsson, the most feminine of the work,"." "And that shocked me!" "Thinking, "Feminine?" "My work is feminine?"" "*" "Amongst all of us in Chicago, gender was never an issue." "It was, how good is your work?" "*" "We did meet R. Crumb." "One of the things that differentiated us from that, they were all seemed heavily into the drug scene there, which wasn't quite, uh, we weren't into that aspect of the, you know, Haight-Ashbury, kind of situation there." "I think that separated us in a different kind of way." "So we met him once, and I think that was only connection we really had." "It's like we all existed in a little bubble." "And probably a few glasses of the Hyde Park Art Center punch, was as bad as it got." "People have a stereotype, a stereotype of what the artist is like or the musician, or the whatever but the artist." "And they all think, like, you're all alcoholic, drug users that screw around left and right, that, you know, and I mean it's." "No." "No." "I mean, my husband looks like a banker and I don't know what I look like." "Very conservative group, as opposed to New York." "I read a little bit of the biography of Larry Rivers and those guys were insane!" "They were into sex and drugs and all kinds of things." "There was never a whiff of that stuff, you know." "I knew these medical students had LSD, was legal then." "And they offered me some." "And I said, "I'll ask my priest." And I went to the priest." "Who didn't know what it was." "And he looked it up and said." ""Don't take that." "You'll see God and you have to wait to see God."" "So I didn't take LSD." "I'm sure they didn't either." "I don't think Karl could've." "*" "Reactions to the Hairy Who exhibitions were immediate and strong." "Some people loved them." "Some people hated them." "*" "That was really exciting." "Walking into the Hyde Park Art Center and looking around and thinking," ""Wow, something is happening here!"" "I remember one memorable phrase that got repeated a lot was, uh, Chicago was producing art that was greasy kids' stuff." "*" "In a funny way, Hairy Who did represent a certain threat to certain kinds of people." "And it did represent, a certain type of edge or ugliness that people didn't really want in their art." "There was a sense that, uh, what we were doing, or what a number of the artists were doing was slumming." "They were, uh, embracing popular culture in all its varied and most vulgar forms." "We wanted to make it like an ordinary thing, but bring in all bleh bleh bleh vulgarities into the art world in some way as well." "The art of the comic book, the art of pinball machine art." "Oh, uh, tabloid newspapers carnival, freakshow, all of that." "You know, in this half century, I've listened to people go on and on and on and on and on about art." "You know, and in ways I can hardly believe." "That they suck all the pleasure out of it." "They do." "And it's terrible." "They have a lot to answer for." "*" "*" "*" "Quite honestly, everybody had that second city mentality." "There was a small market." "The collector market was even smaller." "Don managed to convince everybody that they weren't competing with each other." "They were competing against the world." "Chicago's young collectors, already actively buying Modern and Surrealist art, began to acquire the Hairy Who and curators of the major museums took notice." "Collecting was not then what it is now, happily." "We were attracted to the Surrealists." "Ahhh, and then when I became involved with the Hyde Park Art Center, the, uh, Chicago artists." "Gladys' work is strange and interesting and certainly Jim's was." "The mystery of it." "The courage of it to do the kind of thing they were doing." "Look at the Roger Brown and then look at the Joseph Yoakum." "We had someone come over to our house one day." "He said, "Oh, you collect art!" "Do you mind if I look around?"" "So he looked around and we sat down at dinner and he said, "You collect unusual art."" "And I said, "We do?" "What's usual art?"" "*" "The Chicago Imagists would create that feeling." "Some of it is very tough." "And you're questioning, "How do one live with this?" "And why would you want to?"" "*" "They go beyond and I like that." "That that's more adventurous." "More dangerous I guess." "What I think I found in this art was to give me permission to, not everything about me is perfect, beautiful or desirable." "Uh, and I think being drawn to these works is a way of giving myself permission to express a wider variety of myself." "Intrigued by the wild goings-on at the Hyde Park Art Center," "Chicago's newly established, Museum of Contemporary Art invited Don Baum and his posse of artists to present a group exhibition." "Tellingly, the show was called." "'Chicago needs Famous Artists.'"" "The installation tricked out the museum's basement with a furnace, wood paneling and a ping pong table." "*" "*" "The Chicago Imagists were caught in a web of associations, allegiances, influences and legacies." "Conventional histories can sometimes reduce complex circumstances to mere strands." "Like extracting just a single thread from a spider web." "*" "The Chicago Imagists were inspired by Surrealism, a movement that began in Europe in the early 20th century." "Painters like Giorgio de Chirico and Max Ernst explored the nature of dreams, the unconscious and the uncanny." "I was reading a book on de Chirico and he was writing about a metaphysical art." "And as I read it, the chill went up and down my spine and never been the same." "It's just one of those moments." "*" "The basis for all the Imagists is drawing." "Because all of them are interested in change." "All of them are interested in variation and morphology." "The only way that really happens, for somewho who, for people who are such control freaks, is through graphic endeavor." "And drawing is that graphic endeavor." "And not academic drawing." "Like drawing is getting into your mind, you know?" "And I think that's what Picasso and, uh, the Surrealists..." "And it's Surrealism, isn't it?" "Isn't it related to Surrealism?" "I think a lot too of like the genetic engineering thing." "In the past, artists have had models to draw from." "And that perhaps in the future, that the artists will do models for the humans that will come out of this genetic engineering kind of thing." "So a lot of my things I think in terms of possible people that may be made in the future or something like that." "*" "The Imagists were not the first Chicago artists to pick up on Surrealism's legacy." "In the 1940s, Gertrude Abercrombie and Ivan Albright made paintings with surrealist leanings." "That sort of indigenous Surrealism, that really was here that everyone felt but never really expressed." "Chicago was, and always will be a Surrealist town." "And that interest in what's going on in the inner mind which is something you cannot see in New York abstraction because you dream in images." "In the 1950s, the Monster Roster, a group of figurative painters, further cemented Chicago's connection to Surrealism." "Their works all reflected the angst of the post World War II era." "Think of the Monsters of the Midway, the old Chicago Bears, how are the Monsters doing in Chicago art?" "And that's how that term began." "I tried carpentry, you know for a living, in Chicago, I tried it." "You know, it wasn't enough, goddamn it." "It drove me crazy." "Craftsmanship is only, you know, to serve a purpose, quality of idea, first." "*" "I don't know whether this is art or not." "I don't know at all." "I don't even think it is and I don't really care anymore." "Westermann was a very strong influence for all of us, in terms of that idea, the handmade object where you took it from start to finish." "If, you know, you pick up a Westermann, you start discovering things in all sorts of places." "This is my manhood." "You know, my work." "Mhmmm." "You take that away from me and I'm nothing." "I mean you tell me I gotta be a slob and I'd just soon as shoot myself." "If I have to be a hack like ten million tradesmen in this country, I'd rather be dead." "When Leon Golub wrote that article in 1955 called "The Critique of Abstract Expression"" "he specifically talked about the lack of the human figure in much of the avant garde New York art that he was talking about." "And there was a clear sense, you could argue that New York was abstraction and Chicago was figural." "New York was large scale and painterly" "Chicago was small scale and tight and fastidious." "For the time being, abstract painting was the dominant force in American art." "*" "A few years later, a different figurative art movement pulled off a successful coup d'Ã©tat in New York." "Pop art." "*" "*" "We were all aware of what was going on in New York." "Content came back." "I think I was interested in Pop art, its interest in popular culture." "The ice cream cone and the tire with color cascading down in it." "I was encouraged by the Pop artists." "People like Lichtenstein and Warhol." "They paint nice pictures." "All the same, it's easy stuff." "In contrast to Pop art," "I think what we were thinking about more was this very personalized unique object kind of thing." "Both the work in Chicago and in New York was very much about popular culture but the New York work tried to be very objective and impersonal and the work here was very subjective, very personal." "I mean, when Karl uses comic book like imagery, it wasn't like he was taking a pose as," ""Oh, how interesting comic books are!"" "He loved comic books!" "*" "So I say, New York was cool and we were hot." "And it was very subjective and the things we, we painted and drew, were really were parts of our lives, were autobiographical." "People will talk about our work that we saw it as an alternative to what was going on in New York and it really wasn't." "It was the only thing that we could do." "And there's a difference." "In other words, it may have been an alternative to what was going on in New York, but it wasn't done with the intention of being an alternative." "Don Baum continued to pluck young artists, fresh out of school, for group exhibitions." "Just like he had, the Hairy Who." "Following that model, two more groups of Imagist artists were assembled for shows at the Hyde Park Art Center." "The Nonplussed Some and the False Image." "Provoking." "I wanted to be, provoke people in a fairly confrontational, aggressive, direct way." "To reach people's nervous systems." "It's like some sort of a street fight or something." "Anything that's nearby, anything you can use, uh, it's fair, you know." "Most of my work has always been urban." "Mostly been nocturnal." "I still see it operating in that vein." "When I was in Chicago, I was twenty years old, basically when I was being an assistant with Ed." "And we would go into bars where women would be dancing and they'd be pregnant and they'd be tattooed." "*" "Started with fat ladies." "Uh..." "I used to be real intrigued with uh... women who were overweight." "Oh, this guy." "Well no, she's called Pony, the Pony Woman." "This is actually like horsehide." "Three legs, two groins." "This is the sausage man from, uh, freaks." "So I'm both, sympathetic to and curious about these people and this stigmata." "You know, what does this do to your life?" "So a few of these, have been literally been uh, utilized as source material for a painting." "Years ago, I did a series of paintings that were about women." "And they were sorta show business oriented." "And these things I, probably have their origins in there was a kinda seedy strip joint" "on the North Side of Chicago that I used to go to occasionally and they had on the walls all these black and white blown up publicity shots sort of '50s cheesecake shots of these strippers who were all black and white pictures." "Maybe three foot by two foot." "And it was like an exhibition around the exterior of this space." "And, uh, I think that had a lot to do with inspiring these pictures and these series." "Which lasted probably a couple years." "Some of these paintings began to look like uh, they were perhaps not..." "quite female..." "Some looked like they were a guy in drag..." "Uh... transvestite kinda things." "Whatever." "But they always began with the intention of painting a woman." "Some of them just got sidetracked along the way." "Craft, is really kinda double edged." "And I've always enjoyed the aspect of coming across it in work like, you know, the Chicago kind of Imagists." "Because, uh, it can be a tool." "It can be a tool that you can communicate to people that the attention to detail that you're kind of displaying to a certain degree in an image or an object is just a metaphor for the attention and detail that" "you're giving to them, the viewer." "Working on Plexiglas had been many days and days and days of just sitting there quietly, working like a surgeon or something or a watchmaker," "I think, was an image that came mind a lot 'cause it was a lot of very close eye strain kinda work." "*" "I'm not exactly sure how I got involved." "I just became very disenchanted with two dimensional surfaces like canvas or paper." "Plexiglas flattens out, when you put a flat color onto it, it makes it absolutely flat which is one of the charms, having that kind of advertising printing influence." "Working on the back of Plexiglas is a way to completely erase any kind of sign of your own hand." "Color that's put on there has no brush strokes." "It has no texture." "It has no human quality whatsoever." "Ed Flood married Sarah Canright, who was also a student at the Art Institute of Chicago." "It just came to me one day, about breaking down images." "And so the first year's work that was moving away from imagery was lines." "And they basically existed in fields." "And the lines were clearly a broken or an exploded image." "Lines that would go from green to yellow, or orange to yellow tended to really accentuate the kind of hysteria of the paintings." "They were hard to look at." "The use of yellow in a light field dazzled." "We were always involved with skill." "I mean, we were, and it was natural." "I mean this is not some imposed idea." "It made me personally happy." "It made Edward personally happy, to master what it was that we were doing." "*" "Well that whole business uh, with the Hyde Park Art Center was beginning around that time." "Don wanted to continue the excitement." "He had been very pleased with the way the Hairy Who show had gone and thought that there were more people out there working." "Utilizing a similar model to the Hairy Who, artist-curator Don Baum assembled a second exhibition group, dubbed the Nonplussed Some." "In 1968 and '69 the Nonplussed Some invaded the Hyde Park Art Center introducing other key figures to the Imagists ranks." "Edward and Ed Paschke and myself." "Richard Wetzel, Robert Guinan and then, um, one show, Don showed with us." "I think that the Hairy Who had a look and we weren't as coherent." "Edward's work was one thing." "Paschke's was another." "And mine was another." "I had some very pale paintings and I remember one hanging next to a Paschke, which was outrageously colored and um, just going, "Oh my Lord, you can't even see mine!"" "And it didn't detract from the vitality, but it was a very different story." "Before meeting Don Baum, these artists had developed shared sensibilities while students at the School of the Art Institute." "Sort of opened up every possibility in the world, the painting teacher I had was the, uh, German fellow, Mr. Wieghardt." "And I liked his class as well although it was like oil and water as far as I was concerned." "He was a confirmed Abstractionist and Expressionist." "And I tried my best to be an Expressionist." "I would work myself up and try to paint something then the signing which I felt was very important." "I, you know, kinda wind my arm up." "ART GREEN!" "It's just like, stupid." "But there was a guy, Irv Nickel." "He painted next to me." "And he was an interesting fellow." "He always wore Bermuda shorts with sorta suspenders to hold his socks up, black socks, and oxfords." "And he was himself." "And he would be painting this abstract painting and, but he was a train nut." "He was a guy who'd chase trains." "*" "Out of this abstract painting would come a Union Pacific 264, serial number 60408." "And he'd be talking about it." "Well this is an engine that used to to be owned by Union Pacific, but now it's in, used in Mexico." "Good engine, its boiler blew up in 1947, but..." "*" "Mr. Wieghardt'd come by, says, "What are you doing?" "!" "You, dummkopfe!" "Paint it out or get out!"" "Poor Irv." "Oh sorry, I must of lost my train of thought, you know." "There were also professors with sympathetic approaches." "Ray Yoshida was such an important influence on me as a student." "He would have a way of seeing beyond what you were already doing and what the possibilities were for your development." "At the same time that I was a student, my teacher Ray Yoshida had a collection of primitive objects and found objects." "Ummm, when I first saw his collection, it was like, I was like just very impressed." "I just saw the need to go out and do the same kind of thing myself." "And that collecting is a thing that makes an environment for yourself that's a very personal kind of environment." "And, also, just the process of collecting makes you aware, visually." "I guess we are collectors, all, in some way or another." "Collecting postcards, or collecting interesting photographs you might see in magazines and periodicals." "A lot of people just collect and just keep it in a mental storehouse." "It's important in a funny way." "It's like stimuli and source material." "Ray had a unique way of actually drawing out an individual's subject matter." "You know, so that they could isolate unique qualities... that they perhaps didn't even consider important or didn't even consider... or weren't aware of, period." "So that they became emblems of their personality." "And, it's something that you could see in pretty much all the related Imagists', Chicago Imagists', work." "Is that interest in, uh, sort of excavating your ideas to find and discarding things and to find the core that you can build as your own unique experience." "You did feel that he actually was... looking at your soul and looking at his own soul." "And not just looking at the paint and how you mix the colors or how the, you know, put a little turpentine into this and that... and, you know, to not, it wasn't about that." "As one grows as an art student or artist, one realizes there is form that's better than other form or stronger, or richer or more appropriate than another form." "A form that evokes the sensations you're trying to convey." "I think childhood experiences are always in an artist's work forever." "The kinds of things that I remember... are being... are very fearful." "I was a child." "Everything seemed very mysterious to me." "I grew up in the south." "I was brought up in a very fundamentalist religion." "And, as a child, you're subjected to hellfire, brimstone sermons." "Every Sunday, and revival meetings during the summer, it's a very scary kind of way to grow up." "And I used to have nightmares and, uh, things about the end of the world and the beginning of the" "the fire that burns the earth starting over the horizon." "And things and I used to see sometimes on car trips at night see glowing lights of cities in the distance and I would think," ""Maybe that's the end of the world."" "That led to kind of the presentation that I developed for showing the skyline of the city or showing the horizon line because I felt that it was a strong visual image." "Like the silhouette with glowing light behind it and that kind of thing." "It was like a very strong and immediately read image." "*" "Roger Brown, I suppose, was, uh, I guess a type of Pop artist who was kind of rooted in a landscape tradition rather than an urban tradition, although there were many references to the urban." "*" "And there's also, I just thought, something very magic about his work it was genuinely a sort of magic world in a way." "And I very much responded to it." "*" "It's hard to say exactly what all the things are that influence me, but the kind of things I began to think about were theaters and the experience of going to the movies." "Not only the movie itself, but the experience of being in a movie theater and the kind of darkness and the glowing lights it's a kind of mystery that's natural to, that kind of situation." "You take all the Chicago buildings in the neighborhood because they were built in the, you know, from the 1880s to the, say, 1910s so they're all basically the same, but there are little things that change about them," "like the little entrance way or the little cornice on the top or, you know, this one has a pointed roof and this one has a stepped roof or this one goes square and then has little notches on the corners." "*" "The paintings I did mostly of the city, and especially the early ones of like street corners and neighborhoods," "They're sort of like close-ups of the neighborhoods I lived in and my sort of close experience of the things that were directly around me." "I remember going to the Board of Trade building and looking at the lobby where the capitals and all they're made like drapery and then I started using those kinds of things over and over again." "Like stone that's carved like drapes... prosceniums of theaters and things." "*" "I wonder, if instead of thinking that Chicago's architecture is rational that we could think that, in fact, it has a kind of crazy exorbitant desire to make these buildings." "To push." "To push the envelope." "To make them really tall." "And really extreme." "You know, Roger Brown somehow gets to that I think." "You know, with his Hancock Tower images." "You could say that there's somethings really queer about Chicago art in the structural sense as opposed to the gay or lesbian sense." "That it really is not normative." "*" "I can remember sitting in my mother's room watching her get dressed for public appearances." "And I remember being stunned by how her undergarment transformed her body." "How it pushed up her breasts and slendered her waist." "Watching my mother get dressed I used to think this is what men want women to look like." "She's transforming herself into the type of body men want." "I thought it was fascinating." "In some ways I thought it was awful." "Since her father was an army lieutenant," "Christina Ramberg grew up on bases in Japan, Germany, Tennessee and Virginia." "She enrolled at the School of the Art Institute in 1967 and in 1968, married fellow student Philip Hanson." "We shared, you know, Maxwell Street." "Sort of a sifting through of the, you know, the debris of the city in a way." "I mean it all, everything came out onto the curb and it was sort of a challenge to see what you could find." "I've been getting ideas for larger paintings, which would show the body from the back." "These ideas were prodded by a comic book romance we found at Maxwell Street." "On my wall I put up pages from the medical scrap book, which Phil can't bear to look at." "The diseased skins and the organs being operated on, all very beautiful." "The nameless organs being sewn, cut, tied are all painted so carefully smoothly, carressedly." "The series is important to the artist." "It allowed them to think of the variations that could exist in something." "And then attach themselves to them." "You know, closer, you would see these possiblities and then you could see what you could do with them." "What if you suppress that part a little bit and emphasize this part but within the same set of rules?" "*" "*" "My paintings could be very pornographic." "Hands feeling, caressing, masturbating the body about which Olaf always said fiendishly," ""We know what those are about Chris."" "Transparencies, lace sections, shiny undergarments cloth wrapped hands, tight fetish like garments." "Sofa like background." "How about implications of rape?" "Tattooed hands, gloved hands, man's tie binding girl's waist." "And I think Christina's work is fabulous." "And in many ways she makes the statement in this quiet power whereas I've had some difficulty with some forms of, so called, feminist imagery." "On Ellen Lanyon's recommendation I went to a joint meeting of WEB" " West East Bag - and SAIC's feminists to discuss the question:" "Is there a women's imagery?" "The purpose of the meeting was misrepresented." "I came to hear a feminist speak." "Instead I found myself in the midst of a rally for radical political action." "*" "I think that good art has no sex, color or religion." "I don't believe there is a women's imagery." "The real cause of women's liberation in art should be to do something with getting women to change their self-image." "*" "Kathleen Blackshear and Whitney Halstead were two professors who taught most of the Imagists at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago." "Both had a deep appreciation of art from cultures around the world." "They sent their students on pilgrimages to dark corners of the nearby Field Museum of Natural History." "The importance of the Field Museum, and this was the Field Museum you don't see today, was these large cases." "You would see this great range which some object could be made all together, but no explanation." "It was kind of a spooky place." "Some of the masks and things in the dark made your hair stand on end." "And that's what they were supposed to do!" "The Imagists' teachers also introduced them to the philosophy of French artist, Jean Dubuffet." "The Dubuffet lecture "Anticultural Positions."" "Those people weren't making lesser things they were just making, speaking sometimes another language." "In a lecture at the Arts Club of Chicago in 1951," "Dubuffet shared his concept of "Art Brut"" "or what later became known as Outsider, Intuitive or Self" " Taught Art." "*" "There were so many self-taught artists working in the city at the time that Roger and other artists were maturing as artists that were doing such exceptional bodies of work." "They were not Sunday painters by any means." "They were really serious studio artists." "For instance, Joseph Yoakum doing perhaps a drawing a day, every day for ten years." "*" "Roger and others would go to visit the artist Joseph Yoakum on the South Side probably, often on Sunday afternoons after going to Maxwell Street." "And they could explore his work, which he was very generous about and talk to an artist who was African American, Creek Cherokee, born in 1892, traveled the globe, served in World War I." "And then started drawing under what he called the force of a dream when he was 72." "It expanded the idea of studio." "It expanded the idea of art and being an artist." "*" "I liked the contradiction of using feathers with Plexiglas." "And hair." "It was kind of a new way of making a line." "I didn't think it could be only defined as feminist art." "I thought, this is another way of making a painting." "*" "I feel like I've gone through my life on my eyeballs." "Rolling along on my eyeballs." "And I don't know how else to do it." "To be an artist without being a seeker." "For your eyes." "*" "The final grouping was the Marriage Chicago Style." "Marriage Chicago Style was members of the Nonplussed Some as well as the Hairy Who." "And I was the new kid." "Sarah Canright and Ed Flood." "Ed Paschke and Suellen." "And Karl Wirsum and myself." "That one was a big Hollywood production in a way of going to the church of Barbara Rossi's." "The invitation to the show was of a wedding invitation." "We wore ice skates because this marriage was on thin ice." "Doing this kind of hockey motif we had a paintbrush that was shaped like a hockey stick." "And then we added a year later, the marriage thing had so aged us so, kind of stressed us." "We celebrated our 50th anniversary as artists." "And we all dressed up as old people." "*" "Phyllis Kind began working as a gallerist in Chicago in 1967." "By the 1970s, she had assembled an impressive roster featuring the Imagists, and became the most significant force supporting Imagist art." "It's sort of like a pet shop, you know," "I'm not just interested in selling paintings." "I want to place them in the most visible places and the most important places." "*" "Imagist artists entered the 1970s on a tear." "Their heyday lasted a decade, from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s." "A series of wide ranging exhibitions took Imagist art to locations far from Chicago." "Walter Hopps put Jim Nutt into the Venice Biennale in 1972." "And in 1974, there was a show in Brazil, called Made in Chicago." "*" "The Made in Chicago tour proceeded across Latin America." "*" "*" "From 1967 through 1979, many of the Chicago Imagists were featured in the Whitney Biennial, the premier showcase of American artists." "And Jim Nutt received a solo show at the Whitney in 1974." "*" "You know in retrospect, I sort of have a feeling that it was a terrible mistake for all of us to be in the same gallery." "On the other hand, there wasn't a lot to pick from." "She was a very aggressive advocate, in the process she made a lot of enemies and a lot of friends." "And made a lot of friends into enemies." "*" "I had an argument with the great and wonderful, sweet Walter Hopps." "Walter Hopps was instrumental in building the Los Angeles art scene through his Ferus Gallery and as the director of the Pasadena Art Museum." "This led to a career at prominent museums in Washington D.C. and Houston where Hopps continued to promote new scenes and curated internationally touring shows." "He said he's going to do a show in SÃ£o Paulo called Chicago Imagists and I said, "No you're not."" "*" "The appellation Chicago Imagery was always offensive to me because they're not a group, they're all individuals and I won't have it." "I won't have it." "He said, "Phyllis, none of the Pop artists, none of them, wanted to be called Pop." "It has to happen." "You show the work in context, group context and within ten years, you'll be able to take off, one at a time."" "*" "*" "Seeing these artists grouped together by these influential curators too I think then, they were imprinted with the notion that they are a group and they have such strong interrelationships." "But when I look at the works, they're very disparate artists and each of them was doing a really different thing." "Yet somehow those differences were overlooked in a strange way where people, when you say the Hairy Who or the Imagists, something pops up in people's minds, which I'm not sure exactly what it is." "But it's very cohesive." "When you look at figures like Roger Brown, and compare him with Jim Nutt, they couldn't be more different." "Phyllis Kind Gallery." "It was great for me." "I mean, it was amazing to be among all those people, but, at the same time, people came to the gallery to see the Imagists." "And if someone's going to do a show, if a curator came to a show, they were coming to do an Imagists show." "And I was not part of that so in some ways, when people asked me to be a part of a group," "I would always say no because I didn't want to be..." "I knew, I could see what could happen, you know." "It's not..." "It was good and it was bad." "It was helpful to a lot of people's careers, maybe also maybe not so great for some others 'cause they get shoved into the back and not seen as individuals." "To see them not as a group anymore" "I think I always saw them as individuals it was actually kind of pounded in my head that they were not a group." "If there was an Imagist moment" "I think it was because of the style and it began with enormous energy." "And then for reasons that I think have to do with the commercial, the collecting, the patronage, became a sort of self-defining prison house." "I liked all that work." "I just resisted that it all had to be put in the same basket." "The Imagists hadn't fit the cool mood of Pop art in the 1960s." "They also didn't conform to any of the ideas of the Minimalists and Conceptual artists that shaped much of the dominant New York art scene in the 1970s and '80s." "Fantastic, intuitive, surrealist-oriented art was the stuff of the past, completely unhip." "When I was a young art student and I came here, the disdain for Surrealism was total on the part of people who were fully incorporated into the combination of the New York and European, kind of up-to-date art" "that like, we were supposed to get on board with as art students." "Like people would literally say, "Are you a Surrealist?"" "And it was not cool." "You know, I think with Phyllis Kind, a flamboyant, fascinating dealer who was associated with a very specific set of artists that probably wasn't the best way to build a legacy." "By '74, '75, I noticed through associations I had with artists that the Imagists were bad." "They were the enemy." "They had become so entrenched so quickly into the Chicago art scene that they did define it." "But I became very involved with this much heralded long defunct gallery, N.A.M.E. Gallery, which was set up really in opposition to the dominance of figurative painting and the Imagists, in specific." "At the same time they were being ignored by New Yorkers, the Imagists were ironically cast in the role of mainstream in their hometown." "For all of their abrasive, lewd tendencies, they were seen as conservative, old fashioned." "Young artists took arms against them." "Here in Chicago, most "pictorial" art is reduced to that infectious manifestation of visual gonorrhea, most clearly typified by the Hairy Who and its many offpsring." "In the 1980s, a new strain of figurative art sprouted up in New York introuducing art stars such as Jean-Michel Basquiat," "David Sally and Julian Schnabel." "This work was characterized by postmodern mix of visual languages, including expressionist and graphic elements, ironic images and graffiti." "At a time when New York was again embracing image-based painting, the Chicago Imagists were still held at arm's length by the art establishment." "There was something about the Chicago artists that was hard to assimilate." "Those images were really powerful and particular, you know, and that goes back to the Surrealists." "And they were harder to assimilate under categories that were easily communicable within the art press or within the gallery setting or even in the museums." "And I think that's so much of where their pleasure lies, but I think it also meant, in New York, they sort of don't translate." "Phyllis Kind moved the bulk of her gallery to New York in 1975." "She brought some of her Chicago artists along and had success showing Jim Nutt, Roger Brown and Ed Paschke." "Over time, she shifted her focus to work by self-taught artists like Henry Darger and in the end, she dropped the Imagist artists altogether." "You do what you have to do when you have to do it." "*" "Without Phyllis Kind, the Imagists lost their platform and their momentum." "They had been packaged and sent worldwide as a cohesive regional group, but the myth of the Chicago." "Imagist movement became increasingly untenable." "For two decades, the Imagists had their moment." "Their work was lauded, cited, reproduced, mimicked." "Museums showed them." "They had collectors in London and Paris." "Admirers around the world." "Where does all that energy go?" "What happens to all the thousands of paintings?" "Will the artists be more than footnotes in the art history textbooks of the future?" "*" "Hairy..." "Who?" "*" "*" "Good morning." "How are you?" "The Imagist artists continued making new work, unfazed by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune." "And slowly, but surely, they were discovered by younger artists, hungry for alternatives to the status quo." "It's very rare to go to an exhibition and see five artists, you've never heard of these works, and you walk away with remembering sort of, forty years later." "When I first saw the exhibition "Who Chicago?"," "I was a student at St. Martens, first year painting student." "It was at the Camden Art Center and so I was very interested in the subject of the Imagists." "Quite hard subject, like with Ed Paschke." "I saw Ed Paschke's work before I saw Gerhard Richter's work." "And so that kind of technique of the blur, as it were," "I always associated with Ed Paschke, not with Richter." "You talk about the Chicago Imagists," "I'm not sure I acually see Chicago in their work really." "I mean, if you're from Chicago you probably do, but I think that's a good thing." "It's not really important to me that they're from Chicago," "I think the reason why their work is of interest to others is because it kind of transcends that, that place." "Place, kind of in a way, place represents many places." "To other people." "I felt that, uh, their subjects and the way they made art, for me, was a way in for me as well, to explore my own history" "I suppose, and my own interests in the present as well." "I called the Art Institute when class registration started." "I asked, "Is Jim Nutt still available?"" "And the person laughed and she said "Oh yeah."" "And I said, "Well, what do you mean, does he still got places his class?"" "And she said, "Yeah, are you sure you want to take him?"" "And I said, "Yeah, I definitely want to take him."" "She said, "Alright!"" "And I thought, "Well okay..."" "So apparently he had already gotten a reputation for being somewhat tough." "Yeah I took him for two semesters." "I took, it sounds like I'm taking a medication or something." "I had to take Jim Nutt for a whole year." "*" "In comics, you have to be aware of your peripheral vision when you're looking at an image and how after you read one image then when you come to the next one, that other one is still lingering there." "I try to stay aware of that both, as part of the narrative and as part of the composition." "I'm always aware of how the pictures are relating to each other and even how they might connect to make a second image or how the angles of the composition will add up to something else." "*" "I'm sure that a lot of that was due to having both Jim and Ray as instructors." "Rossi was really amazing I thought." "Before every day started, she had like a show and tell time." "And it was like, bring something from the world, outside world, that has spoken to you within this week." "It wasn't 'til later that I realized that what she was saying is "You're out in the world every day, and what is speaking to you as an individual?" "Why is that important and how is it affecting your art?"" "That really stuck with me." "I think what the whole idea of Chicago group was that find out who you are, and then you just like go "fuck you!"" "I'm standing by that." "Right?" "I guess." "It took me a long time to do that." "The way they engaged with popular culture and sort of comics, it wasn't, stuff that I've seen before was sort of Pop art, and New York Pop art." "You know, where it seemed, like they were engaging with it, as though popular culture was this prop." "And sort of engaging with popular culture in a way, not truly engaging with it." "And then seeing the Chicago Imagists, how they sort of learned the language, and studied it and respected it you know the composition of comics and that sort of thing and then used it in their own subjective or personal way" "to make new work, was just amazing!" "And to see someone who respected that comics as art, as a social language, was really amazing." "I get excited about people I'm excited about." "And they would be a lot of the Hairy Who." "These artists transformed themselves over and over and over and broadened their possibilities through their whole lives." "And the people you love, you steal from!" "When I went back to Chicago, I noticed, let's say in the 80s, that like cool conceptual people had come to run the Chicago art world." "I didn't really understand, how come they all hated, the Chicago Imagists." "That was like a horrible legacy like if you said it" "And then I was telling David that I had this revelation last time I was home that I realized that, that's like if your parents wear ugly Hopi jewelry, and you're really embarrassed by your parents." "And so you reject them." "That was that generation." "And then, really smart conceptual German people come to visit you and they go." ""Oh, I see your family wears Hopi jewelry." "That's very interesting." "Aby Warburg liked the Hopis." And then you're like yes, yes." "Hopi jewelry." "And you like take it back on." "It's classic you know." "After the heyday I guess, people would say of the Chicago Imagists, which was sometime probably the early to mid-80s, which was probably the, people might've argued, the golden age of Chicago Imagist painting, but after that," "it's like, those artists, when you look at that work you put it next to anything else, you know, it's still as good as anything else that was being done." "I never recognized this crisis, in painting that people keep talking about, bringing up." "What I do recognize is that from time to time the interest, the critical interest, in the art world, seems to focus its attention more completely on one area or another, but it doesn't in any way erase the activity of what other people are doing," "especially when they're doing good work." "So it's like, in the end, the good work is the good work." "You take an artist like Ed Paschke, it's like he's never not been an important artist in Chicago, you know?" "It doesn't matter what else was going on he's never not been important too." "So it's always this and that, rather than one thing or another." "And so I'm not one of those people who frets about the possibilities of things or the endings of things," "because I just know that good work will out." "You know, if you will, it always does." "It's kind of based on a little bit of the idea of this piggy goes to market and that little rhyme there, that little kid rhyme." "So it's a little bit like this piggy is coming from the market I guess so rather than getting a pig roast, it'll be some sort of arm of human or something" "that they'll roast up and turn on a spit." "Have a little, the three little pigs will have their little roasting." "This particular stick here, I've been using this for" "I don't know how long now, maybe, it's hard to keep track after years of working, but it goes back to the 70s." "So you'll have to do the math on that." "The way I work is so built on all this archaeological aspect of my own sketchbook and things so I just have more material to work with and more ideas to kind of free associate to." "So that part has improved, certainly for me." "So a piece can take a long time, from the initial light bulb starting point effect." "It's like finding a packet of seeds that..." "You'll have the visual tomato on the end, package there to tell you what's in the seed packet so you have a little idea of what it might be, but it may just turn out to be something very very different." "So a lot of times, I like to have a longer gestation period to a piece from the seed to the final kind of vegetable product." "*" "No time to be cute, just execute." "I mean it does relate to a sports headline, but it's more mental." "They always say in terms of sports you need that linkage to the motivation and kind of sticking to it and the pain part." "The endorphins are probably kinda really charging' up greatly." "*" "The Imagists should be and need to be contextualized within a much broader spectrum of Pop art internationally." "I don't know that an artist like Andy Warhol for example has the same ability to leave us feeling shocked and unresolved today to the way that say, Nutt or Ramberg do." "The humor, the grotesque, the ribald, the caricature the overt sexuality, the potency of that transcends the limits of a Chicago story transcends the limits of these monikers that were applied." "False Image, Nonplussed Some, Hairy Who." "It's a much bigger story than those labels would permit." "*" "*" "*" "What becomes of a moment like the Imagist moment?" "Maybe it has its time, runs its course?" "Maybe it is forgotten." "Maybe it is rediscovered, excavated, re-evaluated." "Maybe it yields surprises, produces yet another moment." "Or maybe for those involved it has always been something else," "a point of departure, the beginning of what comes next."