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Tony Fitzpatrick:
Max and Gaby's Alphabet
Twenty-six four-color etchings
with aquatint on paper

March 11 - May 13, 2001
Tues: 10 AM-8 PM;
Wed-Sun: 10 AM-5PM.
Free Tuesdays.

Museum of Contemporary Art
220 East Chicago Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60611
Telephone: 312/ 280-2660
http://www.mcachicago.org

'The Child is father of the man,' wrote Wordsworth. There is still something of the child's magpiety about Chicago artist Tony Fitzpatrick: a desire to gather odds and ends, whatever might catch his eye -- bugs and skulls, images from Natural History, the collectables of baseball, selections from literature and pulp fiction... and, especially, Chicago memorabilia. All of it enters into his art and all of it is now shared with children.

Max and Gaby's Alphabet by Tony Fitzpatrick will be featured at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, in that Museum's Robert B. and Beatrice C. Mayer Education Center until May 13, 2001. Twenty-six four-color etchings constitute a contemporary work for childrens' education and delight, and they mark the beginning of a project to involve and to encourage Chicago school children in the arts.

The MCA Education Center, a display room to the left as one enters the front entrance, presents the visitor with three display cases of Fitzpatrick's prints, as well as various artifacts which the artist has gathered through the years: artifacts he draws upon within his art. For the creative mind and the merely curious, this is a revelation in itself: a Nosey Parker, pack-rat genealogy of creative process. Here, art and artifact stand side by side. Artist and 'child within' both may choose whatever strikes the eye.

Ever since the Czech, Jan Komensky (Johannes Amos Comenius (1592-1670)) began his Orbis Pictus in 1658, writing designed for children has grown as a genre. That author never talked down to the young. In Europe, traditionally, the best writers and artists included such works among their serious achievements. Max and Gaby's Alphabet impels a desire to read and to relate that reading to art. And Fitzpatrick makes no concessions to ignorance, or to condescension; not to children nor to their mentors. Within the art of this book, a puzzle is a real puzzle, always and for all. And, every so often, the child perceives its core before more mature and well-conditioned minds do. Artists have often noticed that.

Today, budgets foolishly relegate the arts and humanities -- the liberal arts -- to a periphery, while the servile arts -- professions, immediate, pragmatic consumer skills -- are pushed to the fore. That is a further motivation for this artist. Technology sustains life; art makes it worth sustaining. And Fitzpatrick has made it clear that art is a serious calling, and to be treated as such...

I was lucky. I was brought up very working class. I didn't go to art school. I barely got out of high school. I never thought I'd have a career at this. The fact that I have a career is really more because of a few lucky accidents than anything by design or by intention. Once it became a career, I treated it very seriously. I get here every day at eight o'clock. I work here all day. I don't work on just one thing. I look at it as being a perpetual student. Picasso on his death bed said he was still a student. A good artist will tell you that he's still learning. The hurdle's still there. That glass ceiling you try to break through is still there. It might be a little higher now.

Interview by Adam Langer "Tony Fitzpatrick on
Artistic Integrity and Colossal Pains in the Ass"

Fitzpatrick is smart. And honest. All of which indicates why Max and Gaby's Alphabet is noteworthy and, in part, how it came to be. The art itself reveals why it is fun. And the artist's display of source material adds even more for the visitor.

The MCA cites as Fitzpatrick's inspiration: "children's books, field guides, circus posters, tattoo designs, and folk art," adding "Chicago memorabilia, toys, magic sets, bug specimens, baseball souvenirs." Three display cases document Fitzpatrick's working processes.

At left, on the South Wall, hang painted paper plates and print stampings by children, beginnings inspired by Fitzpatrick and done at the March 11th Family Day Festival in Chicago. Below these and to the side is Display Case I. Here the visitor can compare Fitzpatrick's collected bull skull with his subsequent etchings: Bull #2, Bull #3, Bull #5, and Bull #6 from the series Cabezas de Toros (2000). A more lively natural history is also contained in this group: a carved wooden bird; and books such as Birds of North America by Chandler S. Robbins, Bertel Bruun, Herbert S. Zim (Golden Book: 1983); All the Song Birds by Jack L. Griggs (Harper Perennial: 2000); Frank G. Ashbrook's The Green Book of Birds and America (Whitman Publishing Company: 1961).... These join the artist's own sketchbook. This area doesn't merely gather miscelleneae; it juxtaposes raw inspiration with finished art. And it sheds light on their transformation. Case I contains four-color etching plates (with aquatint) used to print a final Griot's Bird ( 1997). The display notes clarify that each plate, in perfect register, as a laborious process, builds to the artist's finished full color print.

A viewer here is also presented with eclectic diversity of interest. In 1919, the Chicago White Sox played the Cincinnati Reds. That game made history and legends: it led to the film Eight Men Out, and prompted Chicago writer Nelson Algren's Lost Ball Stahouska of the Baldhead A.C.'s. Shoeless Joe Jackson was reputedly offered $10,000 to fix the game. Jackson asked then owner of the White Sox, Charles Comiskey, to be allowed to sit it out... and was denied. And although Jackson scored five runs and 12 hits -- a world series record -- his team lost. Jackson's name was tainted for decades to come. Even today, one hears the child's refrain: "Say it ain't so, Joe." That too comes into Tony Fitzpatrick's art. Fitzpatrick's interests, and art, range further to a Steve Earl CD cover he executed. It includes a photograph by the artist. And among a tin robot and fossil sharks' teeth, one views an etching with aquatint, Vehicle (1999). Fitzpatrick even draws upon the Selected Poems of Garcia Lorca (New Directions: 1955). Not all artists are so catholic in range.

The display cases in this exhibition are next best to being in the artist's own studio. Case II at the West Wall stands below two Fitzpatrick etchings. The case itself seems like a family chest brought down from the attic: Fitzpatrick's Jackson etching, together with a White Sox pennant, a baseball enshrined in a plastic box, Nelson Algren's Man with the Golden Arm (50th Anniversary Edition), five animal skulls, and medals and buttons, mostly of a religious character. There is the Rudik Printing (1999) of Bum Town, Tony Fitzpatrick's book based on his father's life. This all sits alongside a copy of Chicago Murders (Duell, Slan & Pierce: 1945), a copy of Chicago Parks, and Bill Gleason's Daley of Chicago (Simon & Schuster: 1970). Chicago may have been a tough town for the young South-side Chicago artist, but it forged loyalties nonetheless.

Archivists are often perplexed by a creative person's effects. Case III, also at the West Wall, offers a visitor that experience. There is Fitzpatrick's etching The Magic Bag (Gouache, ink, graphite and found objects: 1998), grouped with a "Ready Kilowatt" figure, a Magic Tricks Box, Dunninger's Complete Encyclopedia of Magic (Gramercy Publishing Company: 1987), a voodoo doll, even a copy of Written on the Body: The Tattoo in European and American History by Jane Caplan (Princeton University Press: 2000). This latter actually is no surprise. From 1990 until 1994, Fitzpatrick ran his World Tattoo Gallery in Chicago's South Loop area. In fact, so much of the items on exhibit not only add insight into the art, but form a recurring thread in the artist's biography -- living art. Born in 1958, Fitzpatrick opened his first gallery in his hometown of Villa Park, Illinois. Son of a Catholic family, Tony Fitzpatrick worked as boxer, bartender, cab driver and gas pumper. He gained particular attention with what was to become "Bad Blood: Portraits of Murderers" (1988), first shown in New York's East Village (1985). It caught the attention of film director Jonathan Demme, who bought a number of works. Demme has contributed an essay to the MCA catalogue for Max and Gaby's Alphabet. The MCA exhibition, and the artist book, bring together many threads for the first-time visitor. There are even copies of The Best of American Girlie Magazines (Benedikt Taschen: 1997), Japanese Death Poems (Charles E. Tuttle Company: 1986), and Carl Sandburg's Chicago Poems (Dover: 1994). Fitzpatrick's art assimilates and transforms it all.

But, among this display of the artist's influences, his prints, and other books, Max and Gaby's Alphabet is central. It, and this exhibit, are what he passes on to the heirs of past childhoods. And Fitzpatrick was helped along by his son Max (age eight) and daughter Gabrielle (age six). In this set of etchings, the central element is generally obvious: image, sound, and letter clearly correspond -- from Atomic "A" to a boilerplate rocket's "Z" for Zoom. The surrounding elements drift further into free associations.

For the letter "A," the central element is the traditional model of the atom (albeit no longer 'state-of-the-art' physics). Fitzpatrick juxtaposes with this a jester's cap and a mushroom cloud, organic sprout with mechanic robot head (for adults, perhaps, "Automaton"?); all on the irregular grid which forms a background to all the book etchings. Most motifs are direct and delightful in fancy. "W" places a wasp, who blows wisps from a cigar, as centerpiece, but further surrounds it with wheat, wishbone, "Winky," "Weepy," weather and witch. Here, increasingly frequent captions aid the viewer.

Beyond directness, there are association puzzles. At times, Fitzpatrick, in a nod to historic European convention, resorts to the sound of English words, rather than to their set orthography. "K" as in (!) "Crown," is a case in point. But, as in 'Where's Waldo' strategies, the artist plies a worldly awareness that other possibilities exist. "S" specifically suggests 'starling,' not merely generic bird. Alternatives abound and Fitzpatrick seems to caution the young and old to consider more than immediate response. The artist plies a touch of Andre Breton's Surrealist Automatism here. But what is not obvious, is explained or clued. "Y" -- "Yellow Angel" -- cautions that even the cleverest may not have considered unexpected alternates, unconventionalities or even all improbables. The artist's daughter, Gabrielle, took her father's large green hand and foot creation grasping thunderbolts as "unusual," and thus it later stands in for "U." Gabrielle had found it in the margins of the page for "I."

Tony Fitzpatrick's art draws upon popular comics as well. There is "Green Hornet" in "G," Herriman's Classic "Krazy Kat" and companion mouse "Ignatz" in "K," as well as "X-men" in "X." That selection is telling. At times some of Fitzpatrick's images recall the "Ready Kilowatt" figurine displayed in Case III, or the packaging art of magic sets. His renderings range -- nostalgic commercial styles from the 50s accompany last month's Pop icons. In the past, many middle-class children inherited toys and games from the attics of parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts. Generations were thus bridged by shared childhood items -- Dad's toys were still familiar friends. Only in recent decades has high-paced consumer marketing targeted a playlife of weeks for kiddie 'merchandise.' For family ties and continuities, Fitzpatrick's mix is a wake-up call.

Like the grasping green 'hand-foot' of "I" and "U," images in these etchings reappear and play at different roles. The pink elephant in "S" (for sound) returns as smaller motif in "T," where a tiger stands in boxing gloves (one of Fitzpatrick's earlier professions). A gray elephant stood earlier in "E," there pictured with pinkish feet, harness-seat and hat. Max and Gaby's Alphabet at times seems a Surrealist carnival.

The etching for "F" recalls an early 1970s film, Fisherman, in which something offshore trolls for human catch, using a beached sack of sandwiches as bait. Fitzpatrick's Surrealist Automatisms, like the child's awareness of innate congruities, often strike a conceptual archeology of forms. Historically, the question mark derives from the Latin Quaestio, and evolved from writing "Q" above a small "o" -- common convention in ages past. Whether conscious or not, Fitzpatrick's singular pink "?" with "Q" is an example of the artist's intuitive sense of meaning concealed in form. Max and Gaby's Alphabet reads the mind at innocence, and leads it wisely toward a lettered entrance into modern life. Still, it is not just an artist's book for kids. It provokes and informs us all. Tony Fitzpatrick intended that:

"The public never stops buying art. They never stop supporting art. It's just that you have to make it accessible to them, either financially or just spiritually, just by virtue of welcoming anyone who comes through the door and saying, "You know what? This is a part of your life. Come in here and look at this, enjoy this." That's kind of been my one piece of gospel. I'm not missing any meals."

Op.Cit.

Provokes and informs us all.... In that same interview, Fitzpatrick's current concern with opening up experience to the very young, was echoed in his observation of his own milieu:

... Samuel Beckett, Nelson Algren, A.J. Liebling. I'm more interested by writers. One of the big problems with artists is that they don't read.

Op.Cit.

Both this exhibition and Max and Gaby's Alphabet extend beyond just museums and art circles. They deal with concrete facts of life.

Child Art Initiative

The tragic sculptor, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, often worked with stone salvaged from funerary workshops. Van Gogh himself had to consider working with cheaper materials to economize. In the last two centuries, art has often gone starving. Tony Fitzpatrick's showing here highlights his Child Art Initiative, a charitable endeavour to furnish needed art supplies to underfunded schools. Educational centers supply the wish list -- cheques are made out to deliver art materials to them. It is in character with Fitzpatrick's past concerns, and his art. Those seeking to support this effort may make contributions through the MidTown Bank, 1955 North Damen Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60647, citing the Child Art Initiative, or they may contact Teddy Wrondel at 773/ 486-2052. Tony Fitzpatrick noted over five years ago:

Where do we define our larger place in the community? Do we get out to the schools? Do we talk to the kids? Do we show them what we're doing? Or do we just sit there with the blind arrogance of entitlement.... We should have to define our larger place in the community like anybody else, just like a plumber, just like a cop, just like a fireman, just like somebody who waits tables, just like somebody who washes windows. I always say that's what the art world forgot, but I'm not sure they ever really knew it.

Op.Cit.

Around 1992, Tony Fitzpatrick was invited to make prints at Landfall Press, where he learned etching, which suited his drawing style. He has hosted a radio talk show, acted in Demme's film Philadelphia, and appeared in plays ( he won a Jeff Award in 1990). Among his published books are Dirty Boulevard (Hard Press, Inc.: 1998), The Coming of the Locusts (Sheba Publishing: 1992), and Hard Angels: Collection of Poems and Drawings (Fleischer Ollman Gallery: 1988). He founded Big Cat Press in 1992.

Tony Fitzpatrick will give a reading from his newest work, Bum Town (Tia Chucha Press: 2000), at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago on April 7, 2001 at 8 PM. It will be followed by a performance from Nashville guitarist Pat McLaughlin. Entrance is $10.00 for the general public, and $8.00 for MCA members.

Max and Gaby's Alphabet, twenty-six four-color etchings by Chicago artist Tony Fitzpatrick, together with a selection of Tony Fitzpatrick prints, artist books, artist props and source materials, as well as children's participatory drawings, will be on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, until May 13, 2001, in the Museum's Robert B. and Beatrice C. Mayer Education Center.

There is a 72-page, fully illustrated color catalogue with essays by Jonathan Demme, Lynne Warren, and Mickey Cartin, priced at $20.00 (MCA: 2001).

Further information may be found at http://www.tonyfitzpatrick.com

--G. Jurek Polanski

Jurek Polanski has previously written and art edited for Strong Coffee in Chicago. He's also well known and respected among the Chicago museums and galleries. Jurek is currently a Visual Arts Correspondent for ArtScope.net.

Editorial Note: Tony Fitzpatrick is featured in Art in Chicago: 1945-1995 (Thames and Hudson/Museum of Contemporary Art /Chicago: 1996). An informative interview by Adam Langer, "Tony Fitzpatrick on Artistic Integrity and Colossal Pains in the Ass," appeared in The Madness of Art: A Guide to Living and Working in Chicago (Chicago Review Press: 1996). The Chicago magazine Streetwise features an additional review by John K. Wilson (March 19-25, 2001). "The child is father of the man" is from William Wordsworth's "My Heart Leaps Up" (1807).