The Suburban

Across the street from a grocery store parking lot in Oak Park Illinois, a wealthy and wooded suburb of Chicago, is the outpost for a new frontier in contemporary art. The Suburban implodes Hemmingway's now famous description of Oak Park as a place of big lawns and little minds. The Suburban is a tiny cinder block of mammoth ideas.

David Robbins has The Suburban down:

In '97 Brad Killam and Michelle Grabner moved down from Milwaukee - a city without a commercial contemporary art scene and thus one devoid of professional hoops to jump through - to teach in Chicago and raise two boys in suburban Oak Park, an affluent suburb immediately west of the city line. Plunging into their new hometown with their trademark energy and drive, Killam and Grabner quickly gained first-hand experience of its art scene's sorry condition. If they were to improve their odds of living genuinely happy lives as participants in the Chicago art scene, they'd need a way to finesse the flaws in the local set-up. That much was clear. The couple determined to establish some sort of non-commercial exhibition venue that, whatever the particulars of its program, at least felt better.

They did have two specific antecedents in mind: Stephan Dillemuth's Friesenwall project, active in Cologne during the early '90s; and Matt's Gallery, which had been operating in London since '76. Both were ventures that explored the idea that the specialized real estate known as "a gallery" isn't just a place for hanging pictures but is, rather, a context, with that context's definition conforming to whatever happens to be introduced into it. To these influences was added a third, courtesy of yours truly. For some years it had been my own fantasy to open an avant-garde art gallery in a suburban strip mall. I'd voiced that desire in the couple's company more than once, and it was added to the mix of ideas that eventually coalesced in Brad's own eureka moment.

Attached to the garage of the modest Grabner/Killam home in Oak Park was a tiny, eight-by-eight foot room with cinder-block walls, into one of which was set a big window with eight segmented panes of hammered glass. Previously the room had served as a storage shed; Brad saw that, without too much trouble - emptied, cleaned, painted, some inexpensive illumination added - it could be reborn as an exhibition space. Although minuscule, the new venue, dubbed The Suburban, could still provide a power base sufficient to reduce his and Michelle's reliance on the unhealthy Chicago system. In their own backyard, the two had located a place that could be used to invite into their lives the tenor of experience they sought.

An avant-garde gallery in a suburban garage in the Midwest: it felt like a natural development. In fact, since art is fond of money and the suburbs have money, it's curious that there aren't already a lot of artist-run avant-garde galleries scattered throughout America's countless suburban communities. But there aren't. True, the Los Angeles art world has managed to shift things in this direction somewhat (Thomas Solomon's Garage comes to mind, but likely there were other LA garage-galleries predating his venture), if only by virtue of the fact that, in all the sprawl, the distinction between city and suburb is, integrally, blurrier. (The Suburban has more in common with the LA model than with New York's.) LA's example notwithstanding, the art world's habit of identifying artistic experimentalism with urban income and lifestyle diversity is firmly entrenched; the avant-garde's history is principally a history of marginal neighborhoods in large cities - and has been, ever since it emerged as a self-perpetuating cultural artifice at the latter part of the nineteenth century. After more than a century, though, the idea of clustering cool galleries in urban art ghettos is about as original as the cycle of gentrification it's known to spark. It's time to be looking at other, more enticing locales.

Artists are expected to dislike and ridicule suburban life, of course. It's practically a responsibility, a duty, this attitude. Suburbs are too plastic or too dull or too conformist or too...something. Or is it that they're not something enough? I never know. I remember, sometime in the '80s, hearing the hard-core Manhattanite Gary Indiana remark that the suburbs should be burned down. I also remember wondering what in the world he was talking about.

I didn't get what the guy was talking about. I'd been under the impression that artists were people who had a predilection for frontier living, and, well, aren't the suburbs a sort of frontier?

Situating a gallery for experimental, avant-garde-ish art in the garage of an American residence in the suburbs, then, actually constitutes a frontiering act on two levels. The fact that, physically, the suburb represents a new (in America, at least, the mass, middle-class suburb is barely fifty years old) category of landscape - Trees 'n Traffic! - is only the more obvious of the two; the idea that an adventurous, creative American imagination might not automatically loathe or reject that new style of environment is itself imbued with a definite pioneering dimension.

In Brad and Michelle's Suburban project the romance of the olde American frontiering impulse had taken fresh form. By inserting the context of experimental visual culture amid its leafy streets, the suburb's image of itself was challenged, and altered a little bit. At the same time, extending to the 'burbs a gallery of The Suburban's stripe confronted a few of the avant-garde's own self-limiting assumptions. Westward ho, indeed.

2003: The Suburban has reached its fifth season of operation. Presented six or seven times a year in its sixty-four square feet of space are artists known and unknown, American and European, young and old, hailing from places cool and uncool. As with any other gallery, sometimes the shows are good, sometimes less good. When an Important European Artist is exhibiting, one or two of the lieutenants in the Chicago machine make the right move and attend. Everyone's welcome. On clement evenings the openings are held outside, fifty or so well-behaved, friendly, slightly beery people milling about on the lawn. Even in subzero temperatures, Chicago's artworld feels a little warmer.

David Robbins