Christina Ramberg

When I went to art school at the start of the 90s, the Chicago Imagists were the academy. Even though the artists who were grouped under that banner resented and rejected the label, as any artist would, they were the monolith with which incoming students at SAIC had to reckon.

The odd stance of this group was an insistence on outsider or naive status combined with a stiff, often anal technique. It made for pictures that often came off as calcified jokes. An even unfunnier, more puritan Surrealism. A studied otherness that almost always felt like a contradiction that could never be squared.

My one memorable experience with any of their work back then was going to the Ed Paschke retrospective on acid. When me and my friends left the museum, passersby grew electrical rays out of their bodies and vibrated like the figures in his paintings. Sober, the same pictures left me cold.

Since seeing the amazing Christina Ramberg retrospective at the Art Institute a few weeks ago, I’ve been trying to formulate why her work grabs me while her friends’, husband’s, and colleagues’, doesn’t.

It has something to do with not trying to be funny, maybe. Her paintings are mysterious and self-contained. The near-absence of faces gives these pictures a distance. They often feel like they have their back to you. There are rarely hands and feet either, but they’re almost all human bodies; or, rather, torsos.

I don’t care much about what statement Ramberg was trying to make politically, but her art is clearly about constriction and control. The way bodies carry whatever it is we are, or fail to do so.

There’s a wall of homemade dolls from Ramberg’s collection in the show. They, along with cut-up comic book frames, are some of the jumping-off points for her paintings. But inspiration and influence doesn’t explain where she ended up. These are uniquely odd images that lodge in the mind without ever explaining or revealing themselves.

Ramberg died young and her last work—quilts and loose abstract paintings—hint at a change of direction she never lived to see to the end. These late things don’t work the way the strictly controlled earlier work does. When I go back to see the show next, I’ll probably stay in the first galleries and skip the last.

It’s not that her last things are bad, it’s just that they don’t cast the same menacing spell.

I talked to Bruce Wagner about his new book and other things.

I have a system

I have a system. It involves numbered notecards and many crates. I start in the basement with the Zs and work backwards to the As. The stairs are the hard part. Even though the crates rarely hold more than fifteen books to maintain alphabetical order, I can only carry three at a time. I load them onto the handtruck upstairs, stacking six, then wheel them teetering down the ramp, into the new space, all the way to the back room.

It’s the future home of Mysteries and Thrillers and also the event space, replacing the old basement that I’m dismantling shelf by shelf.

The crates are practical. They stack and don’t fall apart from repeated use and rough handling, but they’re unforgiving. I have cuts all over my hands from scraping their rough edges. I pour sweat going up the stairs with full stacks and back down with empties.

When a bookcase is empty, I haul it upstairs. The new room is airy and light; totally different than the basement. I think about the millions of words I carry as I work. Some of the authors are factories rather than individuals. James Patterson, Mary Higgins Clark, Clive Cussler, Janet Evanovich, Stuart Woods, and a dozen others have thirty or forty titles each. I stack their paperbacks two deep to save space. Each one’s series has a keyword in its name, like Prey or Girl or Dark. They’re like branding, made to be recognized by repeat reader/customers. When they see the word they know what they’re getting. They keep coming back or else I wouldn’t be hauling these piles.

A few days after I finish with the Mystery room, there’s a play performed in it. A fake author-signing by a pompous self-described thriller writer who sends out his own press-release comparing himself to Fleming and Clancy. I laugh along with the others. It’s cool to see a room that was empty only a week before, now full of people and voices. The blur of multi-colored spines lining the walls is a fitting backdrop. The fact I put all those books there is satisfying in a way I rarely experience.

We keep taking apart the old store, section by section, working mostly back to front. I lose track of time and day. I come home exhausted every evening. It feels like it will go on forever, though I know from the emptying storefront that it will all be over in another couple weeks.

June 3rd I leave town on a weeklong tour. When I return, the old store will be gone and there will only be the new one.

How will I know what to do once there are no more crates to stack and number?

Mallory and I go into Inland Empire.

Flore Medicale

On my way out of town, I leave Dee a birthday present. It’s a painting of a scene from Destroy All Monsters. I make it to Brookline in just under fifteen hours. I know the route so well now entire hours vanish without trace. As long as I have something to listen to, the trip flies by.

I put down my bags in Max’s old room, where I’ll be sleeping, and join my parents in the kitchen for tea. I give my father the stack of old Natalia Ginzburg paperbacks in Italian that I scored for him at Tangible. We talk about this and that. No one wakes up until nearly noon the next day.

We go to the basement and my father points out a shelf full of old books that belonged to my grandmother that he wants me to take back to Chicago and give to the store. They’re worn tomes from the 19th century. The set that catches my eye is three oxblood leather-bound volumes copiously illustrated with colored engravings of flowers.

I top out the box with some of my student art and a couple broken violins and stow it in the trunk of the rental.

The next day a tall Amazon box is sitting on the front porch. I take it inside. That afternoon, I take the bush out of its pot and hold it upright as my father shovels fresh dirt around it in the backyard.

There used to be a swing when they first moved into the house at the end of 1988 but it’s long gone. My painting of it from 1993, when I briefly lived in the house, hangs in the laundry nook.

I make the drive back to Chicago in under fourteen hours. There had been plans to visit friends along the way but they fell through so I decide to just go home.

I see two duos perform on successive nights. Marisa Anderson and Jim White at Constellation, then Gillian Lisée and Jim Becker at the Hideout. Both amazing.

I’m reading something at The Whistler tomorrow. It won’t be the same if you’re not there.