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<\/div><\/div>Artist and curator Don Baum had been teaching at Chicago\u2019s Hyde Park Art Center for close to a decade when he started exhibiting the work of under-represented Chicago artists. It was the early 1960s and Baum\u2019s exhibitions \u2013 a mix of group shows, with themes including\u00a0‘Animal’,\u00a0‘Vegetable’, and\u00a0‘Mineral’\u00a0\u2013 were put together on a shoestring, the focus being on the community that surrounded the artists, as well as the work itself.
\n
\nThe Hairy Who (and\/or The Monster Roster, Nonplussed Some and Chicago Imagists, as they were also known) was founded as a group \u2013 and as an exhibition title \u2013 when Baum offered Jim Nutt, Gladys Nilsson, Suellen Rocca, James Falconer, Art Green and Karl Wirsum a show at the Art Center in 1966. Their work was both aesthetically and thematically in opposition to the New York School, and while those artists were delving further into abstraction and although satirical, nonetheless glossy, escapist Pop; the Hairy Who, and their Chicago contemporaries, were engaging with the grotesque, hysterical and at times psychotic nature of life in post-war America.
\n
\nFor the Art Center exhibition,\u00a0The Hairy Who<\/em>\u00a0\u2013\u00a0and later their 1969 exhibition,\u00a0Don Baum says \u2018Chicago Needs Famous Artists\u2019<\/em>\u00a0at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago \u2013 the artists covered the walls with a flower-patterned linoleum, with the express intention of having their audience experience the work in visually complex circumstances. For Fondazione Prada\u2019s newly opened exhibition,\u00a0Famous Artists from Chicago<\/em>, the curator \u2013 and the Fondazione\u2019s Artistic Director \u2013 Germano Celant mirrored the original setting.
\n
\nOn entering the gallery, you are met with a secondary route through to a room that has been built within the gallery walls, in which the group\u2019s work is shown as a collective entity. A mass of wobbly, naked, fuzzy bodies; psychedelic stagings of suburbia; elaborate, flaming dreamscapes; and graphic expressions of delusion and dare; beyond the collective introduction, the exhibition peels off into individual sections, in considerably more ordered, traditional gallery settings. In doing so, each artist is given their moment at centre-stage, but the calm belies what was the strength of The Hairy Who: their focus on collective, noisy social commentary.
\n
\nIn an interview for the accompanying exhibition publication, Germano Celant spoke of how: \u201cThey did not passively accept reality like mechanical recorders in the manner of Warhol, but rather explored contemporary society with malice and irony.\u201d He continues, \u201c\u2026 they created visual subversions that contemplated the destruction of the body, and the ambiguity of existence leading to inhuman transformations. They focus solely on a moral argument, but attempt[ed] to push forward, awake and aware\u2026\u201d
\n
\nIn the surrounding galleries, above and adjacent to\u00a0Famous Artists from Chicago<\/em>, Celant curated concurrent exhibitions of the work of Leon Golub and H. C. Westermann, both of whom lived and worked in Chicago after the second world war. Westermann, born in 1922, studied applied arts at the School of the Art Institute, Chicago, after serving in the U. S. Army as a Marine. Initially stationed in the South Pacific, and later in Korea, through his work Westermann recorded his traumatic experiences and anti-war politics. Working predominately in wood, in which he carved parts and images of boats, as well as assemblages and hallucinatory narratives, the forms in his work, as they are described in Celant\u2019s essay in the exhibition catalogue: \u201coscillate between humour and ambiguity\u201d. \u201cOn one hand, between a diving airplane and an atomic bomb, a penetrating penis and a figure with arms open in a gesture of surrender; and on the other, between a collapsing building and a book immersed in a void, heralding the end of the world and a return to the life of a savage.\u201d
\n
\nAs is the case in\u00a0Famous<\/em>, the interior architecture of the Fondazione is utilised here, too. Westermann\u2019s larger, sculptural works \u2013\u00a0in wood, metal and enamel \u2013 form a sort-of army, or front, defending the more revealing narrative works in wood and on paper, which are mostly hidden on entry. His practice embodies both a criticality of the brutality of war and its motivations, and a nostalgia for the fantastical stories of old Hollywood; and Westermann\u2019s titles speak to that. They include,\u00a0A Piece for the Museum of Shattered Dreams<\/em>, Swingin\u2019 Red King and the Silver Queen<\/em>, Coffin for a Crooked Man<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Where Angels Fear to Tread<\/em>; and while his work is known for its craftsmanship, Westermann qualified in an interview with gallery director Martin Freedman and art critic Dennis Adrian in 1966, that: \u201cTo me craftsmanship is very secondary, actually\u201d. \u201cAs I said, I like quality, but I like quality of ideas first, quality in politics, or quality in business. What the hell\u2019s the difference?\u201d
\n
\nGolub\u2019s concerns were rooted in his experience of American imperialism, but not limited to the conflicts the U.S had been involved with. He was equally interested in those that had gone unnoticed, developing timelines of concurrent wars and conflicts through his lifetime, and proving the interchangeability of the global paramilitary condition. In his installation works \u2013 where he manipulated and altered images of conflict, and presented them on layered photographic transparencies \u2013\u00a0Golub spliced recognised historical narratives, from the tragedies of the antiquity to the first televised war.
\n
\nAt the close of the second world war, figurative, expressionist practice was conflated with Socialist Realism and, particularly in the U.S, an aesthetic was sought that would assert the concepts of individual freedom and personal enterprise (i.e. The American Dream). This saw the onset of New Abstraction and Pop, and a so-called \u201cdepoliticised radical practice\u201d. But Golub, as Celant describes: \u201cAvoid[ed] the whisper in order to denounce loudly the terrible and dark situation in which the world itself.\u201d And with H. C. Westermann, The Hairy Who, and countless other artists working outside of the New York School, he avoided the futile and the frivolous.
\n
\nAlthough, \u201cI would dare to claim that despite the apparent pessimism or negativity of the subject matter, in the reportage, retains a residual optimism\u201d, as Golub said in 1996. \u201cIt\u2019s in the very freedom to tell. In the freedom to make and exhibit these paintings.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n
\nThe Hairy Who (and\/or The Monster Roster, Nonplussed Some and Chicago Imagists, as they were also known) was founded as a group \u2013 and as an exhibition title \u2013 when Baum offered Jim Nutt, Gladys Nilsson, Suellen Rocca, James Falconer, Art Green and Karl Wirsum a show at the Art Center in 1966. Their work was both aesthetically and thematically in opposition to the New York School, and while those artists were delving further into abstraction and although satirical, nonetheless glossy, escapist Pop; the Hairy Who, and their Chicago contemporaries, were engaging with the grotesque, hysterical and at times psychotic nature of life in post-war America.
\n
\nFor the Art Center exhibition,\u00a0The Hairy Who<\/em>\u00a0\u2013\u00a0and later their 1969 exhibition,\u00a0Don Baum says \u2018Chicago Needs Famous Artists\u2019<\/em>\u00a0at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago \u2013 the artists covered the walls with a flower-patterned linoleum, with the express intention of having their audience experience the work in visually complex circumstances. For Fondazione Prada\u2019s newly opened exhibition,\u00a0Famous Artists from Chicago<\/em>, the curator \u2013 and the Fondazione\u2019s Artistic Director \u2013 Germano Celant mirrored the original setting.
\n
\nOn entering the gallery, you are met with a secondary route through to a room that has been built within the gallery walls, in which the group\u2019s work is shown as a collective entity. A mass of wobbly, naked, fuzzy bodies; psychedelic stagings of suburbia; elaborate, flaming dreamscapes; and graphic expressions of delusion and dare; beyond the collective introduction, the exhibition peels off into individual sections, in considerably more ordered, traditional gallery settings. In doing so, each artist is given their moment at centre-stage, but the calm belies what was the strength of The Hairy Who: their focus on collective, noisy social commentary.
\n
\nIn an interview for the accompanying exhibition publication, Germano Celant spoke of how: \u201cThey did not passively accept reality like mechanical recorders in the manner of Warhol, but rather explored contemporary society with malice and irony.\u201d He continues, \u201c\u2026 they created visual subversions that contemplated the destruction of the body, and the ambiguity of existence leading to inhuman transformations. They focus solely on a moral argument, but attempt[ed] to push forward, awake and aware\u2026\u201d
\n
\nIn the surrounding galleries, above and adjacent to\u00a0Famous Artists from Chicago<\/em>, Celant curated concurrent exhibitions of the work of Leon Golub and H. C. Westermann, both of whom lived and worked in Chicago after the second world war. Westermann, born in 1922, studied applied arts at the School of the Art Institute, Chicago, after serving in the U. S. Army as a Marine. Initially stationed in the South Pacific, and later in Korea, through his work Westermann recorded his traumatic experiences and anti-war politics. Working predominately in wood, in which he carved parts and images of boats, as well as assemblages and hallucinatory narratives, the forms in his work, as they are described in Celant\u2019s essay in the exhibition catalogue: \u201coscillate between humour and ambiguity\u201d. \u201cOn one hand, between a diving airplane and an atomic bomb, a penetrating penis and a figure with arms open in a gesture of surrender; and on the other, between a collapsing building and a book immersed in a void, heralding the end of the world and a return to the life of a savage.\u201d
\n
\nAs is the case in\u00a0Famous<\/em>, the interior architecture of the Fondazione is utilised here, too. Westermann\u2019s larger, sculptural works \u2013\u00a0in wood, metal and enamel \u2013 form a sort-of army, or front, defending the more revealing narrative works in wood and on paper, which are mostly hidden on entry. His practice embodies both a criticality of the brutality of war and its motivations, and a nostalgia for the fantastical stories of old Hollywood; and Westermann\u2019s titles speak to that. They include,\u00a0A Piece for the Museum of Shattered Dreams<\/em>, Swingin\u2019 Red King and the Silver Queen<\/em>, Coffin for a Crooked Man<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Where Angels Fear to Tread<\/em>; and while his work is known for its craftsmanship, Westermann qualified in an interview with gallery director Martin Freedman and art critic Dennis Adrian in 1966, that: \u201cTo me craftsmanship is very secondary, actually\u201d. \u201cAs I said, I like quality, but I like quality of ideas first, quality in politics, or quality in business. What the hell\u2019s the difference?\u201d
\n
\nGolub\u2019s concerns were rooted in his experience of American imperialism, but not limited to the conflicts the U.S had been involved with. He was equally interested in those that had gone unnoticed, developing timelines of concurrent wars and conflicts through his lifetime, and proving the interchangeability of the global paramilitary condition. In his installation works \u2013 where he manipulated and altered images of conflict, and presented them on layered photographic transparencies \u2013\u00a0Golub spliced recognised historical narratives, from the tragedies of the antiquity to the first televised war.
\n
\nAt the close of the second world war, figurative, expressionist practice was conflated with Socialist Realism and, particularly in the U.S, an aesthetic was sought that would assert the concepts of individual freedom and personal enterprise (i.e. The American Dream). This saw the onset of New Abstraction and Pop, and a so-called \u201cdepoliticised radical practice\u201d. But Golub, as Celant describes: \u201cAvoid[ed] the whisper in order to denounce loudly the terrible and dark situation in which the world itself.\u201d And with H. C. Westermann, The Hairy Who, and countless other artists working outside of the New York School, he avoided the futile and the frivolous.
\n
\nAlthough, \u201cI would dare to claim that despite the apparent pessimism or negativity of the subject matter, in the reportage, retains a residual optimism\u201d, as Golub said in 1996. \u201cIt\u2019s in the very freedom to tell. In the freedom to make and exhibit these paintings.\u201d<\/p>\n
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