Sacred Fruitcake, Shattered Mirror

A Review of “Reckless Rolodex” at Gallery 400

by John Thomure

 

A fruitcake sits encased in glass like a sacred relic in a cathedral. It is a fruitcake containing the performance artist Lawrence Steger’s ashes. At the end of any pilgrimage there is always a moment of encounter with a sacred relic, a device of sobering reflection, which brings to mind how you have changed since you first set out on your journey. The air is pregnant with contemplation and mystery. I have been drawn to this sanctuary, “Reckless Rolodex,” in order to view Steger’s dormant archive and his legacy in today’s Chicago art scene.

As an introduction to one of Chicago’s most integral performance artists and organizers, “Reckless Rolodex” elaborates on Steger’s highly unique art practice and elucidates why he has never stopped influencing us, even when we have failed to recognize this fact. The show itself is the fragmented reflection of Lawrence, each work a different spectral aspect. Young Joon Kwak’s Brown Rainbow Eclipse Explosion provides the most apt visual metaphor for the curatorial approach of Lin Hixson, Matthew Goilish, and Caroline Picard. An exploding mirrored disco ball refracting light in all directions; the exhibition refracts the many faces that Lawrence Steger unveiled through his performances.

 

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Young Joon Kwak, Brown Rainbow Eclipse Explosion, 2017. Cast aluminum, welded aluminum rods, resin, glass mirror tiles, acrylic mirrors, epoxy putty, acrylic paint, motor, steel chain and hardware, custom LED light, shadow, 31 x 31 x 31 inches (installation dims variable). Image courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles and Mexico City. Photo: Ruben Diaz.

 

When I first stepped into Gallery 400, the on-campus art space of the University of Illinois-Chicago, my mood was anything but contemplative. Walking into the lobby of the gallery, the theme song from “Jaws” leaks out and pollutes my ear canals, interrupted only by sporadic puncture wounds of piano. I tense up, my teeth grit and grind against each other. The sound gnaws at me as I push onward, and my palms become sweaty. Upon finally passing the threshold of the gallery, the repulsive sonic mire, like a siren song, pulls me to the left. Already deviating from the main exhibition space, I go down an adjacent corridor.

The piano stabs are emanating from two upright mattresses set against each other, flanked by opaque balloons scattered around the floor. I am now staring down Derrick Woods-Marrow’s Gravity Pleasure Switchback. The mattresses’ slumping postures and rough texture give the impression that I am witnessing a moment frozen in time. The specific moment captured by Woods-Marrow is from Steger’s magnum opus The Swans. “OK, let’s do the film sequence: As If Beating a Featherbed Against a Wall.”  This kind of violent absurdism is indicative of Steger’s performances which presented the most violent and depraved aspect of human nature as comical vaudeville. I am asked to add a balloon containing my own breath to the scene, revealing that the audience of balloons bearing witness to these mattresses were ghosts of audiences past.

 

​    Derrick Woods-Marrow, Gravity Pleasure Switchback, 2023. Two mattresses with sound equipment inside. Photo: courtesy Ji Yang, Gallery 400.

 

The next partition contains another reconstruction by John Neff entitled Beaver & Shark. Though not referencing Lawrence’s work directly, instead the work refers to a contemporary of Steger’s: Robert Blanchon . There are white silhouettes, one of the shark “Jaws” from the film poster and the other of Blanchon's body, painted on a tan-ochre wall. Neff’s work is a dual reconstruction of two Blanchon works married together, creating a reflection of a reflection. Blanchon’s practice is reflected through Neff’s concatenation of different works, and by extension, Steger is reflected in Blanchon. When we are looking back at any one artist, we are actually gaining an understanding of an entire scene of artists. The themes of fear, trepidation, and a fluid identity did not solely belong to Steger, but more broadly to the queer art scene in 1990s Chicago.

Returning from my minor pilgrimage and to the main gallery space, Edie Fake’s imposing game board Open Monument. The to-life scale of Fake’s installation transforms the entire gallery space into a game and us the players. The bright colors and graphic shapes merely mask the dire implications. Fake’s gameboard is a welcome shock to the senses, a reminder that Steger’s work was as funny as it was uncomfortable. The sinister prize at the end of Fake’s board game greets us in the form of Betsy Odom’s graphite Wüsthof Knives, presented on a synthetic hide from some indistinct animal. The matte surface of the graphite accentuates the fragile blade edge and emphasizes the contradictions which emerge from fear, violence, and fragility.

 (Above) Betsy Odom, Wüsthof Knives, 2023. Synthetic hide, graphite. Photo courtesy of the artist. (Left) Edie Fake, Open Monument, 2023. Reckless Rolodex opening night. Photo: courtesy Ji Yang, Gallery 400.

 

The combination of the knives on the fur alludes to so many awful possibilities. The summoning of Steger in spirit was further activated by the numerous talks and specifically performance works which accompanied the exhibition. Chicago performance group ATOM-r, a long-standing collaboration between Mark Jeffrey and Judd Morrisey, pushes the fragmented mirror of Steger in their performance I ♥️ the Dead (The Followspot). The performance is a meditation on Lawrence delivered through an abstract interpretation of an Alice Cooper song, originally sung by Steger in 1997 . Jeffreys navigates an ode to Steger through the window of an ipad, playing the part of death, of memory itself. Steger is unraveled in front of us, his different aspects winking in and out of existence as Jeffrey, Morrisey, and Aviva Avnisan put on and pull off various different masks and personas.

As is the case with any pilgrim, the sacred fruitcake was significant because of how much I already knew of Lawrence, his life, and his work. If the reflections of Lawrence had been placed alongside the selections from his archive, would the uninitiated viewer have gotten a clearer picture of how Steger helped to foster the robust art scene we now take for granted? Steger was one of the first in Chicago to organize performances and exhibitions confronting the realities of queer life during the AIDS crisis.  He had collaborated with Ron Athey in one of the most evocative performance works in the late 1980s/early 1990s Incorruptible Flesh.  Yet, Steger’s importance to Chicago is implied when it should have been directly stated. My hope is that this exhibition would be the first step in many other pilgrimages to discover Lawrence Steger.

 

John Thomure is a performance artist and writer currently based in Chicago. His performance and writing practices fixate on local Chicago art history and exploring forgotten or overlooked artists and their archives.

 

 

Footnotes

1.  Goulish, Matthew. A Reckless Rolodex Reading Companion. (Chicago, IL: Cold Cube Press, 2023. 23)

2.  Ibid.

3.  “I ♥️ the Dead,” ATOM-r, Vimeo, last modified February 19, 2023, https://vimeo.com/800287238

4.  Justin Hayford, “All Too Human,” Chicago Reader, February 11, 1999, https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/all-too-human-3/

5.  “About” Ron Athey, ronathey.org, https://www.ronathey.org/about