Alive !
I encountered the Hairy Who in Chicago at 18 in 2002. Karl Wirsum’s insect mural presided sky high in the Loop. His Screaming Jay Hawkins painting, enshrined at the Art Institute, became a totem as I walked around the city listening to my Nuggets tape: Captain Beefheart and the Electric Prunes, Kim Fowley shrieking about “The Trip” and Hawkins’ “I Hear Voices.” I’d walk til my feet fell off then eat falafel in Wicker Park, drink bottomless cups of coffee at Earwax under vintage circus banners, then pour over underworld amusements at Quimby’s: Kramers Ergot, Paper Rodeo, Found Magazine, books published by Re/Search Press or Autonomedia.
Ruined TAZ
I’d ride my bike in the snow then eat a $5 burrito or dumpster dive Odwalla Bars and Naked Juice from behind the building with the Banksy mural. Then I’d head back to my squalid punk house with the ruined stuffed Taz on the lawn. At Christmas my roommates pinned a High Times centerfold and a single strand of lights to the living room wall then stapled their socks up around it. At my tender age this was the peak of comedy. I’d watch exploitation flicks on VHS or play drums in the basement. My friends and I would dance in ridiculous costumes on Chicagogo, the public access show, then take full advantage of the craft services.
At night I’d see Lozenge, Flying Luttenbachers or Wolf Eyes at the Fireside Bowl or Coughs, PAL, and Service Anxiety at the A-Zone. Cock ESP wore luchador masks and rolled around on the floor of Buddy Space entangled in contact mics. Panicsville made eerie electronic drones inside blank eyed monster masks. A group called Winter Carousel dressed like cardboard cockroaches and played decrepit music boxes.
Why
I’d spend hours at the Intuit Gallery of Outsider and Self-Taught Art. The obsessive drawings and provisional sculptures mirrored the passionate amateurism in the music and writing around me. These moments were the foundation of my art education. 2024 was bookended by two exhibits of artists associated with the Hairy Who— Gladys Nilsson and Christina Ramberg—in my current home, LA. 22 years later I still gravitate toward the flamboyant and raw.
Who?
The Hairy Who were a coterie of artists unified by their tenure at the SAIC who reflected midcentury Chicago in post-Pop tones. They were attuned to comic books and grocery store aesthetics, but drew from regional wellsprings—hand painted signs, handmade dolls, scrappy and grotesque artifacts from Maxwell Street Market, the artists of the Monster Roster—existentialists like Leon Golub, and Ivan Albright’s festering Dorian Grey.
Women
In 1993 Liz Phair called Chicago Guyville, but the women of the early 2000s were ghouls, shredding saxes or performing choreography in the pit, hitting moshing men with their stylish handbags. Part of my attraction to the Hairy Who is the prominence of women within its ranks. While the mid century counterculture was driven by the male gaze, the Chicago Imagist women were dismantling and reassembling figures, making cartoon Frankensteins in sexy lingerie.
Monstress Roster
I saw Gladys Nilsson’s show in February at the Parker Gallery in Griffith Park, a small, sunny house in a residential area. The artist is 84 and still lives and works in Chicago. Her new mixed media drawings are large, bold and buoyant. Nudes with bulbous noses drape across flowering spaces. They entwine pink and ochre limbs across multiple panels. Compositions evoke Botticelli’s “Primavera” by way of Hi and Lois. One of her densely populated older watercolors hung in the basement library. It was luminescent.
Christina Ramberg died in 1995 at age 51. Her retrospective at the Hammer was originally staged at Chicago’s Art Institute in Summer 2024. Ramberg’s gaze is more erotic and severe than Nilsson’s. Flat, fragmented bodies stretch across wine and olive colored canvases. Shrouded faces and bound wrists with blood red nails give way to vast patterned expanses: Dislocation. Jouissance. The exhibit culminates with Ramberg’s quilt work forged from silk kimonos and indigo fabrics acquired in Japan. Striated towers in muted hues evoke the walls of the Palais Ideal, still echoing the body’s scale.
Manifesto
A final room contains Ramberg’s Kodak slides—source material revealed–celebrating many of this blog’s own spiritual antecedents. A reverence for authorless artifacts, scrappy beauty, storytelling through wads and broken grids, seduction by everyday- texture and shape, unexpected chromatic harmony. Trapdoors in plain sight, transmissions from unknown allies: Museum Putty indexes and enshrines these antecedents.