Which artist or celebrity would you most like to see speak at the SAIC graduation ceremony in May? Email your answers to editors@fnewsmagazine.com and we’ll publish the best ones.

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by Nick Briz

If you haven’t seen it yet, last night the Simpson’s aired quite the controversial opener. The producers thought it would be exciting to ask the famed British graffiti artist, Banksy, to design an opening title sequence. What they received in the mail was a story board which heavily criticized Fox and the Simpsons. The sequence starts out as usual, except for an occasional Banksy tag on the billboards and walls. In the end the music goes grim and we pan out to reveal ridiculously atrocious working conditions in the Simpsons’ outsourced animation studios in South Korea, which includes overworked pandas dragging crates of Bart Simpson dolls stuffed with dead rats over to the shipping boxes being sealed with a licking tongue from a dead dolphin’s head… for real. The brutal opener has everyone asking, “Is Fox OK with this?” In the last shot we zoom out of the horrible sweat shop to reveal it was all inside the 20th Century Fox logo (which is covered in barbed wire). Anyone’s initial read on the intro would be a clear criticism of the company, but producer Al Jean explained that it was all approved by Fox. He said in an interview with the New York Times today that the imagery was “fanciful” and “far-fetched” — “obviously, the animation to do this was pricey. I couldn’t have just snuck it by Fox. I’ll just say it’s a place where edgy comedy can really thrive, as long as it’s funny, which I think this was. None of it’s personal. This is what made ‘The Simpsons’ what it is.” This makes things extremely problematic and confusing. Based on his work, I would imagine Banksy’s concept was a critique – but what of the studio’s implementation? Is this “edgy comedy,” have they subverted subversion?

I’m posting multiple links because these things always get pulled from youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AA8gEokOhU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haNyA0WSaP8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haNyA0WSaP8

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Photograph from "A Procession of Them" - Eugene Richards

by Amanda Aldinger

Photojournalist Eugene Richards has brought his haunting visual expose of the deeply inhumane treatment of mentally ill patients at institutions in Mexico, Argentina, Armenia, Hungary, Paraguay, and Kosovo to the loop in his exhibit, “A Procession of Them: The Plight of the Mentally Disabled” at Roosevelt’s Gage Gallery.

A volunteer for the Mental Disability Rights International, Richards’ photographs documents his travels to various mental institutions humans chained up like animals in dirty, decrepit cells; patients living in their own excrement; and a complete and utter abandonment of regard for basic human rights.

Richards brazenly captures a series of horrific images whose reality seems incomprehensible, despite photographic evidence to the contrary. Although difficult to view, his exhibition bravely calls attention to a problem clearly rampant in certain areas of the world – inciting a necessary awareness and bringing a rarely discussed issue into central focus.

Small and intimate, Roosevelt’s Gage Gallery is the perfect space for this exhibit.  The plain and unpretentious space allows the photographs to speak for themselves.

The exhibit is on display until May 14 – the Gage Gallery is open from 9-5, Monday – Friday.

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tagged in: Artists · Museums

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By Andrea Berggren

SAIC officials confirmed that three members of the SAIC community were in Haiti at the time of the earthquake which devastated that country in January. Flores “Flo” McGarrell was killed; Susan Frame, assistant director of the Sharp instructional shops and Marilyn Houlberg, professor emertitus of Liberal Arts and Art History are now safely back in the U.S.

McGarrell and Frame were in Haiti working for Fanal Otantik Sant D’A Jakmel (FOSAJ), a non-profit arts organization located in Jacmel, and had obtained a grant to develop a wood shop for the organization. The shop would exist to train local artists in artistic practices & trade skills. McGarrell is believed to have been trapped in the rubble of the Piece of Mind Hotel, which collapsed during the quake.

McGarrell came to Chicago to attend graduate school at SAIC in 2002 and graduated in 2004 from the department of Art & Technology and become a member of the SAIC faculty. He had been living in Haiti over the past year, serving as the Director of FOSAJ.

Frame was visiting Haiti at the time of the quake as a consultant to oversee the development of the wood shop and is the Assistant Director of the Instructional Shops at SAIC.

In response to the news of the disaster, SAIC president Wellington Reiter issued a statement where he indicated that he had spoken to both Frame and McGarrell’s parents and recalled the work that McGarrell did as an artist and philanthropist.

“In August, the blog of PBS’ Art:21 series published images and an interview from a studio visit with Flo, who said, ‘I seem to be an artist-person who has only a little separation between art and life—if you will please excuse the cliché. Specifically, I attack whatever I am working on with an obsessive compulsion that we creative types are often afflicted with. It doesn’t stop no matter where I am, regardless of whatever else I am doing.’

Flo specialized in what he called “agrisculptures” or home-scale, sustainable food production systems made with secondhand or found materials. He brought his enthusiasm and passion for sustainability and art to Jacmel by leading permaculture workshops and by constructing a rain barrel shower sculpture, a bicycle-powered washing machine, and a parabolic solar oven for the art center.

SAIC Alumni Relations has created wiki pages to keep members of our community updated regarding SAIC faculty, staff, students, alumni, and their families who may have been affected by the disaster and to post information about how we can support relief efforts at http://my.saic.edu.”

Houlberg was safely evacuated by International SOS and is back in Chicago. She was in Haiti curating pathbreaking exhibitions.

Click here to see Flo McGarrell’s instructions for growing organic food: http://www.instructables.com/id/Grow-organic-food-without-spending-$/

Click here to see his Flickr page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gowithflo/sets/72157603820551756/

Top: Flo in Haiti, Courtesy Art21, from “Inside the Artist’s Studio: Flo McGarrell” by Georgia Kotresos, August 28, 2009
Bottom two images: I Heart Agrisculpture Exhibition, Courtesy AVA Gallery

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tagged in: Alumni · Faculty · News · Obituary

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Theatre ZARKO unleashes it’s premiere season

by Emile Ferris

The puppet by very nature is a tough customer, a perpetrator, an instigator and a mocker. A liminal non-human status makes it a natural affront to the established order. Perhaps this is why puppetry has so often found itself relegated to the outer strata of the theatrical universe.

Yet, as evidenced by the growing popularity and renown of such groups as Red Moon Theater, puppetry may be on the ascent. In step with such a renaissance, Evanston’s fledgling Theatre Zarko challenges any assumptions regarding the marginality of puppetry.

“I dreamed that my sister found a toy in the grass and brought it to me. I played with it for a while until a cloud blackened out the sun. My hands turned into birds and flew into a tree…”

So begins Theatre Zarko’s premiere production, “The Sublime Beauty of Hands,” which confronts the devastation caused by land mines while also exploring the dualistic nature of the human creativity from which such horrors originate.

Puppeteer Michael Montenegro cites as his impetus for making “Sublime,” an eight year “milieu of constant war.” Denied any visual documentation of the terrors in Iraq and Afghanistan, and aware that our soldiers were coming back deeply traumatized, Montenegro found himself preoccupied by dream images. In response he created a symbolist performance that could address both the human cost of war as well as the profound visual deprivation of a nation kept in the dark regarding its actions.

“I am always struck by the voiceless nature of the real victims of any war,” says Montenegro, “and that perhaps their only voice becomes the nightmares of the perpetrators.” In “Sublime” it is this dark world of bad dreams that shrouds both victim and assailant.

As the performance initiates, masked female actors speak lines of poetry their identities obscured as if in a painting by Magritte, their sinuous hands moving like magnificent, vulnerable birds.

“Hands are at the center of creativity…” said Montenegro, “exquisitely beautiful in their ability to express everything that takes part within the heart.” The human hand in this production is emblematic of both creativity and cruelty, as well as the complexity that results when these two uniquely human attributes combine.

Hence in “Sublime Beauty” a toy-maker designs explosives and employing Montenegro’s stark and resonant choreography -the inevitable horror is realized in the loss of a child’s hands.

In a post-performance discussion, troupe-members Jason Tucker and Laura Montenegro decried the heinous practice of making land mines that “are bright yellow and look attractive like toys.”

Sites such as Unicef’s “Impact of Armed Conflict on Children” substantiate the performers’ claims and reveal startling figures. Since May 1995 children have made up about half the victims of the 50,000 – 100,000 anti-personal mines laid in Rwanda. Naturally curious, children are likely to pick up strange objects, such as the infamous toy-like ‘butterfly’ mines that Soviet forces spread by the millions in Afghanistan.

Michael Montenegro says he’s “intrigued by the neutrality of creativity. A creative person must choose how to use her/his gifts… DaVinci made this extraordinary painting, the Mona Lisa, and at the same time designed weapons… using his tremendous gifts towards opposite ends.”

In the final and possibly most haunting movement of “The Sublime Beauty of Hands,” Montenegro speaks to the effort to replace shattered limbs with prosthetics.

“I quietly mock the hubris of human beings attempting to replace a hand with a mechanical device.” Although he says that he accepts that this is well-intentioned, he grieves “the lack of struggle to prevent the loss of those things that are irreplaceable.”

Although Theatre Zarko’s comedic second act, “Klown Kantos,” comprised of a series of stand alone puppetry performances, is whimsical and engaging, it is not without social commentary.

Despite the fact that “Meat,” an entirely puppet-acted piece, is set in a butcher shop and is comical, it could easily be understood as promotional of vegetarianism.

In another piece in the second act entitled “Calvin” Montenegro displays remarkable ability as he performs with a headless twin puppet that is attached to his body. According to the puppeteer, this piece illustrates the “trials and tribulations of dealing with other people.”

Michael Montenegro’s genius is not simply in his ability to organize his troupe or conceive an impressive production or craft and perform his puppets. His genius is squarely centered in his employment of the inherent symbolism of puppetry in order to examine difficult issues. When Montenegro is asked to call to mind a historic example of puppetry’s social relevance, he says, “in the old circus, a clown would race terrified around the ring with a wire attached to his back. At the end of the wire was attached a skeleton. So what he was afraid of, what he was running away from was attached to him. This is on the surface a simple visual joke. But of course it is a very good nonverbal commentary on our lives.”