Classroom Activities La Chanteuse Visual Arts Language Arts , 1981, Oil on Linen, 26 X 48 Inches
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© 1981 Ed Paschke. 1984.366 through Rudolph and Louise Langer Fund. um of ContemporaryArt. Purchase, Ed Paschke, Classroom Activities La Chanteuse Visual Arts Language Arts , 1981, oil on linen, 26 x 48 inches. Collection of Madison Muse 26 x 48 inches. oil on linen, 1981, , Ed Paschke used photographs of famous and not so famous Instruct the students to use their collages to write a science people that he cut out of magazines and rearranged to make fiction story or the script for a computer game. a collage. At first he painted directly on top of his collages. Ask students to think about the kind of story they might create Later, he used an opaque projector to transfer to canvas a pho- using the “virtual reality” we can now produce on a computer tograph he had manipulated. Ask students to make their own with three-dimensional graphics and characters that morph collage of favorite pop or historical personages. Photocopy the into other beings. Translate those ideas into a computer game collages and let children paint or draw on top of those images or story. just as Ed Paschke did. Look again at La Chanteuse and talk about the ways the image has been altered. Sometimes Paschke For a review of the newest version of The Sims, a video game painted out features. Sometimes he blended the head into the focusing on a suburban family, look at Welcome to the New background and added lines of electric color. Sometimes he Dollhouse by Seth Schiesel, published in the Arts and Leisure drew tattoos or a pattern like the chicken heads in Smooch section of The New York Times, Sunday, May 7, 2006. Teen- III. Provide rubber stamps for images like the two little feet agers are probably already familiar with Tomb Raider: Leg- - in Smooch III. end developed by Crystal Dynamics and published by Eidos Interactive or Dreamfall: The Longest Journey developed by Funcon and published by Aspyr. Social Studies Invite students to investigate how their classmates and fami- lies use media such as television, newspapers, radio, and computers. Engage students in discussion of how cell phones, video, com- puters, and television have changed the way we communicate with one another and think about the world. Ask students to investigate how people communicated a hundred years ago, fifty years ago, even just fifteen years ago. Ed Paschke, Smooch III, 1995, oil on linen, 36 x 40 inches. Collection of Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. Purchase, through Par- tial Gift from Mark Tuttle. 2000.08 © 1995 Estate of Ed Paschke. See Ann Perry Parker’s lesson plan at mmoca.org/mmocacol- lects for more ideas. Ed Paschke The Art: What’s Going on Here? aged by his father who had drawn caricatures in the letters In 1977, as Richard Flood says, “Paschke inaugurated a new As Oliver Sack and Temple Grandin have so eloquently The heads and shoulders of two people float across La Chan- he sent to his family while stationed in Europe after World mode, one which has remained recognizably consistent to demonstrated in their books, people with autism perceive teuse. Except for the tip of a nose and one ear the images War II. While in high school Ed Paschke was both a star ath- the present. In it, the interest in outsiders was taken to its the world very differently than the rest of us. Temple are blurred. In fact, they seem to be disappearing into static lete and a star artist with regular appearances in the school most logical extreme: complete depersonalization. Initially, Grandin has revolutionized the way cattle are slaughtered lines of color. Two ear rings glow like little moons. A bow-tie newspaper. He would continue as artist provocateur, illus- the heads were completely shrouded, the features seemingly because she was able to understand their fears and found tilts at a jaunty angle. There are holes and streaks of paint trating stories for Playboy magazine, until 1981. appliqued onto fabric hoods. The implied physiognomy humane ways to mitigate those fears. where eyes and mouths should be. The color is electric— was classically primitive—a triangular wedge of a nose with acid greens and brilliant turquoise. As a young man, Paschke worked in factories and in a men- extended ovoid shapes for mouth and eyes. Gradually, the Older students might enjoy reading the curious incident tal hospital. In New York he frequented bars and filmed shrouds began to gelatinously merge with flesh and a kind of the dog in the night-time by Mark Haddon, written The open mouth, the tuxedo and the neon color affirm what unusual characters. When he returned to Chicago he con- of ectoplasmic portraiture emerged. (Catalogue essay by from the point of view of an autistic teenager who is try- the title tells us. Chanteuse is a French word that means tinued filming in bars and on the streets. He was interested Richard Flood, Ed Paschke, Selected Works 1967-1981, ing to solve a puzzling murder. a woman singer and in particular a nightclub singer. It is in people living on the fringe, outside the mainstream of The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, 1982, not hard to imagine the close air and artificial lights of a American life. page 20) Helen Keller is another case in point. She firmly believed nightclub or the echoes of the song being sung. But, is this a in the legitimacy of her own reaction to art that she could portrait of real people? Ed Paschke shows us the clothes and Paschke was drawn to Pop art and the work of Andy Warhol Ed Paschke’s last paintings were a return to icons of our neither see nor hear. She believed that each person expe- accessories but flesh and bone are invisible. in particular. Like Warhol, Paschke’s work often was based culture like George Washington and Adolf Hitler. He never riencing art created meaning for him- or herself, and that on photographic images from popular culture. He was as- abandoned his love of paint but he did experiment with what we see, hear, and understand depends upon what we La Chanteuse has the glow of a television screen in a dark- sociated in the late 1960s with the second generation of forms of digital imagery like PHS Colography. bring to the experience. Read What Helen Keller Saw by ened room. If we fiddled with the controls would the image Chicago Imagists who called themselves The Hairy Who Cynthia Ozick in The New Yorker magazine, June 16 & come back together? Do we even care whether this image and whose work relied heavily on expressionistic distortion Looking again at La Chanteuse reinforces the sense of alien- 23, 2003 is in focus? Is it more interesting just as it is? Is the artist of the figure. They abandoned Warhol’s cool banality for ation and distance created by the bombardment of images suggesting that television has changed the way we see the “shock and awe.” we are exposed to every day. Do we even recognize the world world? Have pixels taken over, breaking up our perception we live in or do things only exist blown-up or cropped on a Discussion Questions of reality? Ed Paschke used images he found in pulp magazines for his television screen? paintings. Thugs and showgirls, boxers with broken noses, 1. Start by asking students to describe what they see. Ask, When it was painted in 1981, La Chanteuse looked radical. tattooed circus performers all became his subject. Or rather, Chicago has a reputation for off-beat art that has never “Are these real people? Do they have bodies? Do they have Today it is an anomaly. It appears to be an image created their stylized publicity photos, cut out and reassembled in conformed to either East Coast or West Coast trends. If recognizable eyes and mouths? Did you notice a floating by electric impulses speeding across a television screen. But, collages, became his subject. there is a Chicago/Midwestern style it is surrealism mixed nose and disembodied ear? How does Ed Paschke imply when we look closer we realize La Chanteuse is a traditional with expressionism and a bit of folk art and Dada irrever- people without actually painting them? How much infor- oil painting. He projected those collages onto canvas, sometimes mov- ence. Before The Hairy Who, there was H. C. Wester- mation do we need to “read” an image?” ing the projector to blur parts of the image, leaving other mann and before that figurative artists like Ivan Albright, Today electronic images are everywhere. Yet, we are still parts sharp and clear. He then did a careful painting in black Leon Golub, and June Leaf. 2. Does the painting seem unfocused and as if it flickers? Is drawn to La Chanteuse. The allure of the color and the and white of the projected image, finishing with layers of it the intensity and combination of colors Ed Paschke has brush work would surely be lost if this were a digital print. colored glazes. The result was an exact, highly polished and The first exhibit of The Hairy Who at the Hyde Park Art chosen or the way he has blurred the images? Ed Paschke used his skill as a painter to interpret a new real- much larger version of his collage. Center in 1966 was followed by other group exhibitions ity. He shows us both the strange beauty and the ambiguity These paintings were slick and garish, allowing the viewer of work by young Chicago artists who named themselves 3.