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THE BIG DIG: KARL WIRSUM • SKETCHBOOK 1966
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Opening reception for Hairy Who at the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, February 25, 1966 (photo by Bill Arsenault)
Dateline, Chicago, 1966
Karl Wirsum joins Jim Nutt, Gladys Nilsson, Suellen Rocca, Art Green, and Jim Falconer for an exhibition at the Hyde Park Art Center (HPAC) under the group moniker Hairy Who. In the span of one sketchbook, by means of an image diary, we are transported from six weeks before that landmark show to three months in its wake. Ideas hatched and probed in the home studio/laboratory – secret experiments of the notorious Dr. Worse-Some. By that time, Wirsum had established himself as an artist to watch. He’d graduated from the School of the Art Institute in 1961, and two years later, age 22, he mounted an ambitious solo debut at the short-lived Sedgwick Street Gallery in Old Town. In a curatorial nod to classic Surrealist installations, the gallery’s rooms were painted black and each work was illuminated dramatically by a little lamp above it. Richard Wetzel, who co-directed the space, recalls the show: “It included paintings and a number of drawings in various media. Among the paintings were several that featured double portraits of women, some of them Siamese twins. The one that excited me most presaged his later work; it portrayed a strangely distorted woman facing us with a bicycle horn attached to her waist. When you squeezed its bulb, she coughed. The title was: ‘I Had Tubercular Leprosy…PLEASE?’ The show flier reproduced a drawing of a stylized horse vomiting an array of geometric shapes and objects. Its title was: ‘The Horse, He’s Sick.’”
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Karl Wirsum is presented with the Higher Culturalization for Everyone Award (a plastic gorilla) from Richard Wetzel in front of Sedgwick Street Gallery, Chicago, on the occasion of Wirsum's one-person exhibition, 1963 (photo by Bill Arsenault)
At Sedgwick Street Gallery, Wirsum also participated in group exhibitions alongside future Imagists Wetzel and Ed Paschke. He had paintings in Eye On Chicago and The Sunken City Rises (both in 1964), independently produced round-ups at Illinois Institute of Technology that also included Nutt and Nilsson. Wirsum’s classic portrait of blues singer Howlin’ Wolf, “No Dogs Aloud,” was included in the Animal segment of Don Baum’s Three Kingdoms: Animal, Mineral, Vegetable at HPAC. People were already paying attention to this irreverent young painter. By the end of 1965, Baum had agreed to the first of a series of smaller group exhibitions, suggesting they add Wirsum to the original quintet proposed by Nutt and Falconer. Hairy Who was slated to open. February 25, 1966. It would take Wirsum and his new comrades to a whole other level of local visibility and now stands as one of the landmark events in Chicago art history. But in the months leading up to this exhibition, Wirsum was busy up in Wrigleyville, working on drawings and paintings. He had established a personal working methodology centered on sketchbooks – drawing in them on a daily basis, he moved between several, often trying out variations on a single image in two or three places simultaneously. And luckily for posterity he dated all of them. This leaves us an unusually precise map of his activities, especially the development of particular images. Some of the drawings were quite finished in and of themselves. Miraculous compositions, he began removing them from the sketchbooks to sell or exhibit at an early stage, a process that has continued for the last five decades.
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Ray Siemanowski, Karl Wirsum and Lorri Gunn at Hairy Who reception, HPAC (photo by Bill Arsenault)
In this beautiful sketchbook, we find a number of now-iconic Wirsum images. There are drawings for “Drink Hearingade Made with Your Earplug in mind,” which was reverse-painted on glass, a material the limitations of which were revealed when the inevitable happened and Wirsum and his girlfriend Lorri Gunn knocked the piece over and shattered it. (In a nod to Duchamp, the artist fixed it with a screw and piece of painted wood, as he'd seen shop owners do with broken windows; Wirsum began reverse-painting on Plexiglas instead.) The phrase makes its way into “Hearing Ade Quiz,” a Wirsum page in the first Hairy Who comic book, and other sketches for his spread in that publication – Siamese twins, a dog face reminiscent of a Pacific Northwest Native American mask (or totem), and a girl with a comb – are refined into final shape. What is interesting but confusing at first is that some drawings appear to be sketches for paintings that are in the first Hairy Who exhibition. How, logically, could there be a drawing on January 6 for “Son of Sol Moscot,” which appears in the show six weeks later, moreover given that the painting was completed in 1965? Or “First Quarter of Moon Dog,” a sketch for which appears on January 10? Or several images related to “Spawning a Yawn with a Yellow Awning On” that were made after the Hairy Who show was already hanging? It turns out that what had always seemed like a unidirectional process leading from sketches through variations to a final image and a painting was in fact more complex, recursive even, involving the gradual evolution of an image, a related painting, then more sketches, perhaps another painting, and so on.
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Lorri Gunn and Karl Wirsum with Chicago mayoral candidate John L. Waner at Wirsum's solo show C.A. Doctor, Dell Gallery, 1967 (photo by Bill Arsenault)
The inverted tape-dispenser/eyeglasses of “Sol Moscot,” the dog-in-hat images, and the awnings were all intended to appear in series, as variations on a theme, the way Wirsum’s twin women images had some years earlier; only the awnings – a disintegrating face drawn from medical skin disease photographs set against a vibratory palette of optical patterns inspired by the striped fabric awnings of game and attraction booths at Riverview, the legendary amusement park that closed in 1967 – made their way into multiple manifestations, one of which was shown at the Whitney’s Annual Exhibition in 1967, illustrated in its catalog, and reproduced in the Time magazine review. As you move through these daredevil drawings, they transform and sometimes merge. On March 29th the hat-dog of February 9th somehow makes its way onto the face of the kite that appears as a woman’s viscera, a reference to renaissance anatomical etchings like those of Jacopo Berengario da Carpi. Another hat-dog image grafts onto a human portrait, like the dog had turned into a necktie and sprouted a Stetson-topped fellow. There are drawings that don’t end up as paintings, too, like the canine lady Wirsum invented on February 16, his last entry in this sketchbook before the Hairy Who show opened and the hellhounds of Chicago Imagism were unleashed.
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Sketchbook, 1966
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Plates
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Wirsum spread in The Portable Hairy Who! comic (bottom panel, right page by Suellen Rocca), signed for artist Dominick Di Meo on the night of the opening
Q/A with Karl Wirsum
By John Corbett and Jim DempseyJohn Corbett: Was work in a sketchbook always part of your practice?
Karl Wirsum: Yes. The sketchbooks are about how I experience life.
JC: Do you remember when it started?
KW: When I was child in grade school, I always had a sketch book around.
JC: Did you think about your sketchbooks as repositories of finished drawings or strictly as points along the way to paintings?
KW: The sketchbooks are how I refine the drawings for finished paintings or drawings. They are not the finished product.
JC: Do you remember when you started dating your sketchbook drawings so exactly?
KW: I began dating them in the 60s and 70s because Picasso did but then stopped because I had too many sketches to date. Recently I started dating them again.
JC: Were the sketchbook drawings primarily about the transformation of an image?It seems like there’s a lot of experimentation with how one image can morph into another.
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KW: That is a fairly accurate description. Other experiences and ideas come into play and help me make the transformations for myself.
JC: You clearly moved back and forth between different sketchbooks at the same time. Was this done systematically or according to which sketchbook came to hand? What was the effect of shuttling between different sketchbooks?
KW: It was so I could see the images at the same time as I sketched a new image from them.
Jim Dempsey: Was there a moment when you knew you were ready to jump from a sketch to a painting?
KW: My mind would be seeing different images and be in different places. but once it was focused on one place I knew it was ready to be a painting.
JC: We’ve noticed that there were drawings related to several of the paintings that were part of the first Hairy Who show that crop up in this sketchbook after the show has opened. This suggests that you were working on the same image later, maybe with additional paintings in mind. Is that right? Did you sometimes work backwards from paintings to sketches, or did they always terminate in a painting?
KW: I never worked backwards always from sketches or drawings to paintings but I would sometimes work on a series of related paintings from my sketchbook drawings. But I would reverse (change) focus on a new painting. A sketch often used more than one idea and so I would use those ideas for different paintings.
[interview taken and transcribed late June, 2020, by Ruby Wirsum]
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Untitled, January 5, 1966, colored pencil, graphite, and ball-point pen on sketchbook paper, 14 x 11 inches
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Drink Hear Ing Ade, 1966, acrylic on glass, decals, tape, and painted wood frame, 11 x 9 1/4 x 1 3/4 inches, private collection (photo by Jeremy Lawson, courtesy of the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College)
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Karl Wirsum, Drink Hearingade Made with Your Earplug in mind, 1966, acrylic on glass, tape measure, decals, metal hardware, and painted wood frame, 22 x 20 1/2 x 3/4 inches, private collection (photo by Jeremy Lawson, courtesy of the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College)
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