Never a City So Real - Alex Kotlowitz [35]
Not long ago, Guinan invited me to join him and Loeb during one of Loeb’s periodic visits to Chicago. Guinan lives on the city’s North Side in a three-flat. He and his wife live on the first floor; he rents the second, and he uses the third landing as his studio. The three of us walked to a nearby coffee shop. Loeb has kept a kind of video journal of Guinan, filming his lectures, filming his interviews, filming interviews with Guinan’s subjects. The unspoken assumption is that someday someone might be interested in it.
Guinan’s neglect seems to hit Loeb harder than it does Guinan himself. At one point in our conversation, Loeb recounts an encounter with the curator of a Chicago museum. “She said Bob had no impact on Chicago,” he tells me, indignant at the slight. To which Guinan replies, “She’s right, I haven’t.” But Loeb won’t let it go. He tells me the story of how in the mid-1990s, the city’s Cultural Center was planning an exhibition of Guinan’s work, how exciting that was, and then how it all fell through. Loeb says he was never completely clear about the reason why. Maybe it was the money needed to ship Guinan’s work back to Chicago from Paris. Maybe it was the fact that the Democratic Convention was to be held in the city that year, and barflies, naked piano players, and reclining prostitutes weren’t exactly the image the city wanted to put forth. Or maybe they just lost interest. Loeb, who’s dressed in a safari shirt, appears agitated. “Were you disappointed?” I ask Guinan, giving him an opening. “No,” he replies. Loeb then tells me about a Chicago art dealer who once said of Guinan’s paintings, “Who wants to look at these? These are the people who want to mug you.” To which Guinan sighs.
The International Herald Tribune once suggested that the reason Guinan’s work is viewed with some suspicion in America and more specifically in Chicago “may be motivated by the idea that his art is burdened with a social message.” When I ask him about this charge, Guinan responds as he often does, by telling a story that at first blush seems to have nothing to do with the matter at hand. In the early 1960s, he recounts, he’d been invited to a black storefront church on the West Side where the small congregation planned to honor the church’s pianist, Spencer Randolph. Guinan knew Randolph from the taverns where he’d play at night. During the ceremony, the minister told a story about a boy who saw a lightning bug. The boy wondered why the lightning bug lit up like that, so he asked his father. His father, who wasn’t an educated man, could only think to reply, “It’s just something in him.” Then the minister went on. “People ask us why we sing, why we shout, why we fall out? It’s just something in us.” Days later, I realize that Guinan was really talking about himself. It’s just something in him.
An admirer says, “He’s so intuitive, everything’s so obvious to him. It’s all inside him.” I once asked Guinan why he chooses the subjects he does. “I wish I could say something like the people in these bars are more honest, more down-to-earth, that they don’t put on any airs. But it’s not necessarily true. . . . In the end, you see, all it is is someone for people to look at.” He’s being somewhat disingenuous, but his point his clear: His work—unlike, say Courbet’s—is not meant as a social statement.
Guinan is attracted to the unvarnished