The Sneaky Sublime

Strangeness is overused as a selling point in contemporary art. There’s no real reason that “strange” should equate with “good,” and anyway most of what gets called strange trades on century-old surrealist tricks (jarring juxtaposition, biomorphic distortion, sexual kink) that are no longer strange at all. Every once in a while, though, something comes along for which no other word really suffices—something whose strangeness is not a strategy or a goal but the by-product of following a certain line of thought. Something whose strangeness creeps up on you, as it must have done on the artist as she worked, and changes the way you look at things.

The Christina Ramberg retrospective now at the Art Institute of Chicago is full of flawlessly constructed, often beautiful, deeply strange pictures. The painting on the catalog cover is a case in point: it pictures a raised hand whose graceful fingers curl into what is almost but not quite a fist, while a shiny black ribbon (or maybe it’s a lock of hair) circles the wrist and crisscrosses the palm, capturing the three middle fingers but not the thumb or pinkie.

It might at first seem a parody of stuffy old art: the hand occupies roughly the space of a portrait head (wrist as neck, palm as chin, knuckles as crown), and Ramberg took care to add hand-painted trompe l’oeil sheen to the matte black frame that surrounds the panel. But the picture’s stony color scheme asserts gravitas, as does its implacable surface, produced by repeatedly sanding down acrylic paint on a Masonite panel. There is not an errant stroke or stray dab or bungled gradient.

At some level this is a picture about control, power, and choices. The title is Bound Hand, but it’s clear that all the fingers could wriggle free if they wanted to. Absent the black ribbon, they might clench into a symbol of political resistance or open into benign greeting. The ribbon itself has the look of an accessory—something desired rather than imposed, despite (or perhaps because of) its being a bit constricting. (More on this later.) Painted in 1973, the year Ramberg turned twenty-seven, Bound Hand exudes an almost inexplicable authority: it knows what it is about.

Ramberg was not yet fifty when she died in 1995 of the neurodegenerative disorder Pick’s disease. She had spent her entire career in Chicago, and her reputation has remained largely local until now. This lively, wise, ambitious exhibition should fix that. The eighty or so paintings assembled by the curators Thea Liberty Nichols and Mark Pascale (most from private collections and rarely seen in public) represent about two thirds of her lifetime production. They start with pocket-size panels of cartoonish hair, done when she was still an undergraduate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, then meander through a decade and a half of tightly elegant, morphologically inventive torsos and stray limbs before winding up with unanticipated abstractions and—of all things—quilts, made at the end of her working life.

Augmenting and informing these are drawings, prints, and generous samplings of Ramberg’s archive—graph paper notebooks filled with tidy line drawings and commentary in well-behaved script; scrapbooks of comic book and magazine clippings; 35mm slides of things she observed in the world; even a reinstallation of her “Doll Wall” hoard of flea market finds (a red devil in black briefs, a very Raggedy Andy, a plastic hula dancer, and hundreds more).

Some of these materials have the effect of normalizing her more exotic imagery—a slide, for example, of ordinary string wrapped around ordinary fingers suggests a homely one-handed cat’s cradle—and give insight into her process of distillation, of transforming the unremarkable into adamantine forms and relationships that hold you in place.

Photos of Ramberg show a tall woman with oversize 1970s glasses and a modest demeanor, smiling at the camera, surrounded by friends. The catalog makes clear that she was hardworking, considerate, responsible, and beloved by her community. An essay by Lorri Gunn Wirsum ends simply, “She was the best friend anyone could ever have.”

That doll wall, however, remains disconcerting. Pascale, who knew and worked with Ramberg, describes it as “a collection of friends,” but pinning friends like butterflies to your living room wall requires a mix of affection and ruthlessness that Nabokov might recognize.

To the degree Ramberg’s name rings bells in the larger art world, it is as a “Chicago Imagist”—a clumsy term, which she hated, for the cohort of offbeat figurative artists that emerged from the School of the Art Institute in the 1960s. A decade earlier the Chicago “Monster Roster” (most famously Leon Golub, Nancy Spero, and H.C. Westermann) had defied the dominance of abstraction and chosen instead to channel existential dread and moral fretfulness into things with faces. Ray Yoshida, who joined the faculty in 1959, took a lighter, more eclectic approach, and students followed him, embracing the vernacular visual world of low-end comics, yard sale castoffs, and the space-filling urgency of what was then called “outsider art.” (A recent exhibition at David Nolan Gallery in New York showed the close stylistic and attitudinal affinities between Ramberg and Yoshida.)

Ramberg was a sophomore at the school in 1966 when the first “Hairy Who” show—a group exhibition of six recent graduates—took place. The title, characteristically, was a joke. (During a planning session one participant, confused over the name of a local art critic, had asked, “Harry who?”) The moniker stuck, however, eventually extending beyond the original group to denote a sensibility that valued absurdist ingenuity, finely finished surfaces, and drawing as a generative force.

These artists didn’t outsource fabrication as Andy Warhol or Donald Judd were doing. Sol LeWitt’s 1967 conceptualist assertion that execution is “a perfunctory affair” might have been a message from another planet. The drawings and paintings of Hairy Who artists like Jim Nutt, Karl Wirsum, or Gladys Nilsson are effervescent with the satisfaction of making things by hand.

The energy, openness, and irreverence of that moment come through in a works-on-paper show, “Four Chicago Artists,” accompanying the Ramberg retrospective at the Art Institute.^* Barbara Rossi’s series Male of Sorrows is an extended riff on the museum’s fifteenth-century woodcut of the bloodied Christ, hands raised, standing before the instruments of his torture. Rossi, who once planned to be a nun, dissolves the woodcut’s stiff angularity into squiggles, blobs, and necrotic anatomical details spelled out in sinuous etched line and jewel-toned inks. She printed the images on paper but also on satin, stitching over the lines to make Christ minicomforters. The original print is brutal and exquisite; the update is monstrous and decorative.

From the coasts, the perception was of an art that was imaginative, amiable, and tame: psychedelia without the drugs, Peter Saul without the rage, Westermann without the PTSD. The word “whimsy” seemed to be lurking just around the corner, and apart from a brief flurry of attention concurrent with 1980s East Village goofy figuration, New York paid little heed.

Estate of Christina Ramberg/Art Institute of Chicago

Corset/Urns, 1970

Estate of Christina Ramberg/Collection of Chuck and Kathy Harper

Black ‘N Blue Jacket, 1981

Estate of Christina Ramberg/Courtesy of Corbett vs. Dempsey

Untitled #123, 1986

But Chicago artists had their own thing going. They hung out together, exhibited together, taught together (mainly at their alma mater), had families together. The year she received her BFA, Ramberg married her classmate Philip Hanson; their son was born in 1975. Collaborative “exquisite corpse” drawings by Ramberg, Hanson, and Evelyn Statsinger (in which each artist draws one section without seeing what the other artists have done) are so harmonious, they seem to defy the disruptive-juncture point of the exercise.

From the beginning, though, Ramberg was up to something different. She wrote of being “bamboozled” with admiration for Nutt and Wirsum but recognized her own work as “something more austere.” Hair (1968), shown in her undergraduate thesis exhibition, consists of sixteen small panels, each depicting a coiffure being patted or stroked. In a few the action seems natural—pulling hair to either side of a part or gathering it for a ponytail—though it’s unclear exactly whose hands are at work, and the hair itself is often implausible. In one panel a black mane gives way to what looks like the fur of a curly-coated retriever; in another, a dollop of black curls sits atop 1940s waves like caviar on blini.

This is quirky, no doubt, but also disciplined: we can see there are constants and variables. (Initially she displayed the panels on a shelf so viewers could rearrange them at will.) Her flat cartoonish line seems chosen less for its humor or down-market frisson than for its efficiency and clarity.

An untitled painting from the following year depicts four pretty knots of hair seated like pastries in pleated paper—a bun pun, perhaps, but also a shrewd study of the convention whereby a dark shape interrupted by light zigzags is understood as shiny hair. The arrangement is trippy, but she is citing the real world: one of her 35mm slides shows a shop window scattered with similar hairpieces, and a scrapbook page includes cutout comic book heads and a mail-order wig ad whose offerings constitute a master class in how squiggled highlights can articulate nonsensical bulges, slopes, and valleys.

In the eight panels of Corset/Urns (1970), she applied her lustrous-hair trick to invented shapes. All are symmetrical, bulgy at the top, and cinched in the middle, but their proportions vary to suggest everything from a Mae West bustier to champagne corks and trophy cups. Parted from anything that might contain a follicle, the hair highlights ripple across their surfaces like light on water in a squall.

Ramberg then began filling those corsets with female midriffs pestered by intruders: in Shady Lacy (1971) a finger-shaped lock of hair insinuates itself into a filigree waistband; in Probed Cinch (1971) white fabric bunches up under a glossy black girdle while somebody’s hand reaches in to assist or scratch an itch.

The subject in Waiting Lady (1972) is more seriously put upon. Though doubled over to accommodate the horizontal panel, she still doesn’t fit. Her legs disappear off the bottom, her head off the side, and her arms—raised at an awkward angle behind her back—off the top. It’s a position that is almost impossible to hold without external restraint.

Bondage is the trussed-up elephant in the room of more than a few Ramberg compositions. There are shiny straps like the one in Bound Hand, female figures forced into awkward poses, heads swaddled like mummies, lots of spicy undergarments. And indeed her archive included pages from Frederick’s of Hollywood catalogs and BDSM magazines like the quaintly named Aggressive Gals. In her diary she expressed misgivings about collecting “photos of bound women,” as well as misgivings about misgivings—the classic quandary of progressive women striving to be both sexually honest and politically responsible.

This period of her art has been hailed as forthrightly erotic (like many Chicago artists, she sold illustrations to the locally based Playboy) and also as a critique of the societal and psychological bondage of patriarchy. Was she courting the male gaze or owning it? Or—most unthinkable of all—was the male gaze not actually the point?

In the diptych Loose Beauty (1973), a black brassiere, angular and aggressive as a paper airplane, faces a bottom in black panties. One points left, the other juts right. Disrupting this standoff, a piece of lace-trimmed black satin squirrels out from the bra, while another piece flies back between the thighs, reaching out toward its twin. The negative space between them is a character in itself.

Female bodies in fancy underwear with misbehaving bits of silk can be expected to read as sexy and transgressive, but Loose Beauty is also funny and stately and extravagantly refined. The detail of Ramberg’s lace can rival Van Eyck’s, while the flesh (if we can call it that) is smooth and hard and bloodless—less like the model in a life drawing class than a mannequin in a shop window.

Erotica depends on implicit action: a narrative into which viewers can imaginatively insert themselves and their organs. But Ramberg’s images—even that airborne bit of satin—are sublimely static. She may point toward the wildest and sneakiest of human impulses, but her manner is inevitably one of equipoise. The lines of those mummy-wrapped heads are as stoic as the tourniquet section in a scouting manual.

On the subject of corsets she wrote: “Containing, restraining, reforming, hurting, compressing, binding, transforming a lumpy shape into a clean smooth line.” If discipline and constraint in the BDSM sense shade some of her works, they are in a more general sense the essential tools of her art. It was, after all, the clean, smooth graphic representation of hair rather than the messy frizz of hair itself that grabbed her attention. It’s not the story line that’s captivating, it’s the picture.

By the mid-Seventies that too too solid mannequin flesh had melted away, replaced with abridged hominids—headless, broad-shouldered, and narrow-waisted, with vestigial arms and indeterminate genitals. Shiny wrappings are interspersed with wiry netting that sometimes unravels into short curly hairs. In the next round of paintings the netting disappears, exposing something like rounded metal rods where you might expect a clavicle or an oblique, as if the body were clothing that had partly slipped off its hanger.

She began pushing anthropomorphism to its limits with paintings of origami-like structures, all starched planes and sharp creases, balanced balletically on their points. The paintings called Chairbacks (1976) picture crazed wood slats, broken and dazzled with fitful wood grain yet somehow reminiscent of shoulders, rib cages, and cinched girdles.

In 1980 she was painting portraits of shoulder-padded, wasp-waisted power suits—a look Joan Collins had not yet made famous on Dynasty—with nobody home; the lapels open onto darkness. Two years later she called the corset/urn shapes back into service, but now with abs buttressed by metal-work stomachers or the horizontally barred cuirasses of samurai armor.

These manifold inventions—the chairbacks and power suits, the netting and wire hangers—came together in balky, fecund union in the most cacophonous paintings of her career. Sedimentary Disturbance (1980) is one quarter lady’s jacket, one quarter torn net stocking, and half wood slats, with the bonus—a miniature version of the jacket—descending neckline-first from between the thighs. In Hearing (1981), a similarly mismatched wardrobe gives birth to a neatly pressed job interview outfit—shoes, trousers, and collared shirt, presenting in breech position.

Given that Ramberg was a mother, it’s easy to see these as investigations of the gendered weirdness of childbirth, though they are just as obviously investigations of size relationships, fragmentation, and topology. What they resemble most closely, though, is a batch of unfinished projects laid on a dressmaker’s dummy.

From ancient Greece to contemporary identity art, the human body has been deemed an appropriate subject for serious art. Clothing not so much. Though drapery studies were once an essential part of an artist’s academic training (to the lasting satisfaction of old master drawing enthusiasts), clothing has been the servant of strategy, there to dramatize an action, symbolize a persona, or fix a subject in time. For really eternal messages, it may be dispensed with altogether.

Ramberg, however, took clothes seriously—not just as symbolic pointers but as tangible structures with which we all have intimate experience. Her painted bellies and bottoms are generic, but their clothing is always particular: we know its texture, its pattern, its elasticity, the weight and character of its fall. Her diaries and notebooks are filled with observations on garments real and imaginary. Her slides record draped gravestones and a close-up of Christ’s loincloth in an early Renaissance crucifixion.

Unlike those academically trained masters of drapery, Ramberg was an accomplished seamstress. Given that she was more than six feet tall in a pre-WNBA, pre-Internet-shopping era, sewing her own clothes might have been simple expediency, but her interest was clearly as much conceptual as sartorial. Those satin straps and netting chart the meetings of insides and outsides, covering and exposure, constriction and release. She understood (as those of us who can barely fix a loose button cannot) how structured fabric moves between two dimensions and three, between floppy stasis and embodied motion.

One of my favorite drawings shows four scenes of a woman wrangling a formless bundle of fabric, her face and arms enveloped in its folds. She might be pulling on an awkward garment or doing battle with a duvet cover. It’s the kind of uncomfortable dream image that you wake from to find yourself facedown in the pillow, yet Ramberg’s terse felt-pen line and interlocking parts endow the struggling figure with homey heroism.

Time and again, her drawings and paintings take dimensional things apart into segments like a tailor’s paper pattern. Paul Klee famously described a line as a dot that went for a walk, and many Hairy Who artists clearly enjoyed taking their lines for a run. Ramberg took hers for a fitting.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that when she hit a dry spell in the early Eighties, she turned to needle and thread. For years she had quilted as a pastime while conducting her serious art on paper and Masonite. Now she started quilting for the wall, abandoning the basic thing-in-a-frame structure she had spent her career perfecting.

The “art quilt,” as Anna Katz points out in an insightful catalog essay, was an awkward kind of object in the art–craft hierarchy. Though quilts were recognized as important precursors to abstract geometric painting and were regularly cited in feminist art as metonyms for the unheralded labor of women, these acknowledgments showed how quilts could serve art, rather than be art. Faith Ringgold’s quilts are largely painted; Rossi’s satin Male of Sorrows is at heart a puffy print. “Ramberg’s contribution to the elevation of quilts,” Katz writes, “was to actually make quilts, as opposed to appropriating them towards painting’s ends.”

Japanese Showcase (1984) is built in a four-by-five grid, using striped kimono remnants Ramberg had bought in Kyoto. Each cell of the grid is composed to produce an illusion of a square floating on a chunky black X (actually an arrangement of triangles around the central square). In one sense she was doing what she had always done—recontextualizing things built for another purpose and playing with ambiguity about whether a particular shape is in or on another. But there was a crucial difference: these were not citations of things in the world, they were things in themselves.

Working with, rather than on, her materials meant her choices were necessarily more constrained. She could select fabrics but could not mix her own hues. And a seam is governed by complex physical stresses that a drawn line can blithely ignore. As is often the case, these limitations brought a certain liberation: “Quiltmaking was the perfect activity for me at that moment,” Ramberg said, “because I did not have to think about content.”

There, of course, was the hitch, since content is what we use to distinguish art from other kinds of objects. While she did exhibit her quilts, together with her former student Rebecca Shore, it was at a gallery best known for self-taught artists. Japanese Showcase is a lovely thing to look at and clearly the product of refined skill, but it doesn’t leave you curious or unsettled the way that, say, Bound Hand does.

Ramberg was too thoughtful an artist not to have been aware of this difference, which suggests a willful recalibration, a choice to double down on different kinds of labor and decision-making from those she deployed in painting. She had always admired what she described in her diary as “the less flashy insights of hard quiet workers.”

She returned to painting in 1986 but abandoned her pristine planes of sanded Masonite in favor of the tactile surface of canvas. Color, pattern, and satiny highlights are also gone. In their place white lines, brushy and uneven, push through fields of gray and black, laying out symmetrical lattices of interpenetrating orbs, cones, and funnels.

Figurative only to the extent that “figure” connotes both the human body and a mathematical construction, these new structures might be cousins to Hilma af Klint’s cosmological diagrams or Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus ballet costumes. The new paintings baffled many of her Chicago peers (and, judging from comments at the exhibition preview, continue to do so). To me, however, they seem the natural outcome of years spent teasing out underlying structures from surface attractions, of tricking two dimensions into accommodating three, of “transforming a lumpy shape into a clean smooth line.”

“Christina Ramberg” closes with the last completed work of her career—a tall, mesmerizing quilt. Untitled [V] (1989) has no grid or repeating pattern, showing instead three connected structures that are lighter than the fabrics surrounding them. Horizontal stripes (those kimono fabrics again) variegate the bodies of these forms, while their vertical edges are gracefully serrated, like a pagoda whose builders lost count and just kept going. The image might be seen as two towers and a portico, or even as abstracted figures—a seated queen, perhaps, with standing attendants.

Untitled [V] is enigmatic, absorbing, and moving. The fact that it is the final work of a forty-three-year-old artist of extraordinary achievement and promise certainly enters in, but it also comes down to the composition and its visible facture, its combination of grandeur and tenderness.

Up close you can see that the whole composition has been built from the bottom up, in narrow horizontal strips one above the other, akin to the way some 3D printers work. Each strip was fitted precisely with the necessary changes in fabric to do its part in creating the image. In reproduction it may look like striped shapes on a dark background, but every edge is both a rupture and a suture. The result is coherent and the opposite of seamless. Nothing is independent. Those towers (or whatever they are) can only be themselves by being tugged in all directions—a situation both obvious and profound.

In May 1979 Ramberg mused in her diary:

How much of my time is spent thinking about style, fashion, clothing, decorating, fabrics, pattern, quilting…. So what if those are ungrand concerns, “feminine” concerns…. the visual statements that have moved me—many of them—were made from small ideas, unpretentious ones that were big after all.

Maybe the strangeness of Ramberg’s art is a reflection not of her, but of our own atrophied notions of what art is about.