“You talk about the Chicago imagists,” notes Scottish painter Peter Doig. “I’m not sure that I see Chicago in their work, really. I think if you’re from Chicago you do. . . . The reason why their work is of interest to others is because it transcends that place. That place represents many places to other people.” Coming near the end of Leslie Buchbinder’s new documentary, Hairy Who & The Chicago Imagists, a careful survey of our local art scene from the 50s through the 80s, Doig’s remarks startled me because I’d been watching the entire movie from my own narrow perspective as a longtime Chicagoan. For someone on the other side of the globe, the colorful, wildly surreal works showcased in the movie may not offer much of a picture postcard of “that place”—there are no lakefronts, no gangsters, no pizza. There are nothing but bizarre, uncomfortably personal visions cultivated by hard-working, small-living, plain-speaking, idol-smashing midwesterners. To me, home sweet home.
Of course, people compelled to buy stuff are usually compelled to earn money, and the Chicago school was also characterized by its Protestant work ethic. Despite the unhinged imagery of the Hairy Who, member Gladys Nilsson describes them as a pretty tame group, worlds removed from the pill-popping, dope-smoking New York art scene: “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.” Filmmaker Tom Palazzolo remembers them as “a very conservative group as opposed to New York,” telling a funny, and probably characteristic, anecdote about being offered LSD by some medical students and talking it over with his priest (who told him he should wait for the hereafter to see God). Contemporary cartoonist Chris Ware, who confesses that he stole his distinctive tree-lined horizons from Roger Brown’s eerie, dehumanizing urban-landscape paintings, perfectly articulates this sense of the City That Works (its ass off): “When you live in Chicago, you look up and you think, ‘tree,’ and then you look down again and think, ‘What am I doing with my life?’”
Directed by Leslie Buchbinder
