Alison Ruttan (born 1954) is an American interdisciplinary artist whose work investigates human behaviors such as appetite, sexuality and aggression and the degree to which they are governed by biology or social conditioning.Wainwright, Lisa. "Artist Profile: Alison Ruttan," Art LTD, May/June 2015. Retrieved September 19, 2018.Museum of Contemporary Photography. Alison Ruttan, Midwest Photographers Project. Retrieved September 19, 2018.Isé, Claudine. "War Studies,” Alison Ruttan: If All You Have Is a Hammer Everything Looks Like a Nail, Chicago: Chicago Cultural Center, 2015, p. 8–13. She has explored diverse media from animation to photography to installation and drawn on fields from primatology to social theory, creating work that ranges from light-hearted gender critique to sobering meditation on war.Girgenti, Maria. "Portrait of the Artist," New City, March 9, 2015. Retrieved September 26, 2018. Ruttan has exhibited individually at the Chicago Cultural Center, Hyde Park Art Center, Three Arts Club of Chicago and Monique Meloche Gallery, and in group shows at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, The Drawing Center, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Apexart and Minneapolis Institute of Art, among many venues.Chicago Cultural Center. Alison Ruttan: If All You Have Is a Hammer Everything Looks Like a Nail, Chicago: Chicago Cultural Center, 2015, p. 6–7. She has also shown internationally at Directors Lounge (Berlin) and in Canada, the Netherlands, Russia, Spain and the United Kingdom. Her work has been discussed in journals such as Art in America,Grabner, Michelle. "Westward Homes," Art in America, January 2015, p. 39. Flash Art, Art Papers, Sculpture, and New Art Examiner,Erickson, Karl. "Alison Ruttan, Marc Allen Jacobson," New Art Examiner, December 1997. as well as in major newspapers,Cheng, Scarlet. "Animals' Place in Nature at UC Riverside's Sweeney Art Gallery," Los Angeles Times, September 27, 2009.Waxman, Lori. "10 Reason to get excited about the coming art Season," Chicago Tribune, January 2, 2015. Retrieved September 28, 2018. magazines,Saltz, Jerry, "Uncomfortable," Time Out New York, July 31-Aug 7 1997.Wiens, Ann. "It's De-Lovely, It's De-Luscious," Chicago Magazine, August 2002. and television and radio outlets.Andries, Dan. "Artist Alison Ruttan Creates Destruction," WTTW-PBS, Broadcast segment, aired November 6, 2014. Retrieved September 28, 2018.Amer, Robin. "Through Primates. The evolutionary origins of war," Interview by Robin Amer, Art/Work, WBEZ, Chicago, 2011. Retrieved September 28, 2018. In addition to her art career, Ruttan has taught at several Chicago institutions, most notably the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has been based in Chicago with her husband, artist Scott Stack, since 1990.
Life and career Ruttan was born in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1954, but grew up in several places, including Washington D.C., California, and the Philippines, among many.Camper, Fred, "Body Work" Chicago Reader. February 25, 2005, p. 21. Retrieved September 28, 2018.Alamo-Costello, Chester Alamo, "Alison Ruttan: Investigating Instinct and Aggression," COMP Magazine. September 16, 2016. Retrieved September 26, 2018. After completing high school in the Twin Cities, Minnesota-area, Ruttan studied photography at the University of Michigan (BFA, 1976), training that continues to inform her aesthetic. After graduation, she returned to Minneapolis, shifted to painting that mixed figuration and abstraction, and married Scott Stack in 1980. In 1982, their daughter Natalie was born and they moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where they lived until 1990.Strang, Susannah Kite. "Alison Ruttan," Cover and Interview, New Art Examiner, December/January 2000, p. 18–21.
In 1990, Ruttan enrolled in the graduate program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) to study painting. While there, she began creating body-related installations, influenced by work in the school's fiber department, which included Anne Wilson and emphasized conceptualism and materiality. After graduating (MFA, 1992), Ruttan began teaching (Columbia College Chicago, 1993; SAIC, 1994–2001) and gaining notice for conceptual sculpture that she exhibited in Chicago alternative venues, as well as in New York, Minneapolis, and across the Midwest. In the 2000s, she exhibited regularly at the Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago, taught at the University of Chicago (2001–6), and pursued her interest in primatology with an artist residency observing bonobos at the Wild Animal Park in San Diego (2005). In 2006, she returned to SAIC, where she teaches in the Contemporary Practices department. In recent years, Ruttan has exhibited in numerous universities and arts institutions, including the Chicago Cultural Center, Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, and Elmhurst Museum.
Work and reception Unlike most artists, Ruttan's work is unified by its topical focus on understanding human behavior rather than by medium or style.Weinberg/Newton Gallery. "Artist Interview with Alison Ruttan," Conversations, September 11, 2018. Retrieved September 26, 2018. Her inquiries lead her to diverse disciplines (primatology, evolutionary biology, feminism, political science, history) and often-new media that she chooses to best physically manifest the narrative she is structuring. Ruttan describes her process as research-based, immersive and non-hierarchical; her intent is to evoke a viewer's own relationship to a subject rather than elicit a specific response.Chilsen, Liz. "Alison Ruttan at the Chicago Cultural Center | 'When All You Have Is a Hammer, Everything Looks Like A Nail'", Chicago Now. May 2, 2015. Retrieved September 19, 2018. Her practice can be divided into two thematic categories involving human drives, each with distinct bodies of work: 1) Inquiries into food and sex; and 2) Inquiries into aggression and war.
Inquiries into sex and appetite Ruttan's early work explored appetite and desire and their relationship to social norms and excess, employing various media.Mauro, Lucia. "Picassos In Bloom," "Chicago Social", May 2001, p. 87. Critic Susan Snodgrass wrote that her "diverse oeuvre" playfully questioned "the entangled relationship of sexuality, consumption, censorship and taboo."Snodgrass, Susan. "Letter from Chicago," C Magazine, November 1997–January 1998, p. 37. Alan Artner, however, encountered "a plethora of good ideas" whose connection he found elusive.Artner, Alan G. "Ruttan's Ideas Sometimes Get Lost in the Forms," March 17, 1995. Retrieved September 28, 2018. Ruttan first gained widespread attention for her "Dough Girls" (1994–5): bread dough sculptures cast from a mold of a women's bottom and baked in pairs of women's underwear; critics noted in them an amusing, uneasy mingling of "wholesome and abject" associations.Snodgrass, Susan. "Chicago in Brief," C Magazine, Summer 1995, p. 50.Lieberman, Claire. "That Food Thing You Do," "Sculpture", December 2000, p. 48–9.Rooks, Michael, "Out of the Shadow of Ivan Albright," New Art Examiner, July 1997. In works from her "Food" series (1996–98), such as Sweet Potatoe Pie, Ruttan appropriated pornographic images and then strategically obscured them with circular "cut-outs" of gourmet food magazines, creating tantalizing compositions that denied easy comprehension and satisfaction of either drive. Her "Colors" series (1997) employed a similar approach using candy colored, Hans Arp-like silhouettes that created a disorienting, high/low collision of cartoon, abstract art and porn aesthetics.Hackman, Kate, "Making Art That Reads Like a News Bulletin," Review, September 1999, p. 17.
Ruttan extended this work with the droll looped animations bippity Bop and bob bob (2000), which were partly inspired by biological research positing gender-defined, "hardwired" human responses. She stripped pornographic videos down to flat, pulsating, non-explicit biomorphic shapes, then carefully tracked their movement to retain the rhythms and shapes of sex in order to trigger dawning recognition in viewers.Isé, Claudine. [blog.art21.org/2010/05/25/alison-ruttans-the-four-year-war-at-gombe/ "Alison Ruttan's 'The Four Year War at Gombe'"], Art21 Magazine, May 25, 2010. Retrieved September 19, 2018.Koppman, Deborah. "'Peep Show' at The Living Room," "Artweek", May 2000, p. 14.Carter, Jeff, "Alison Ruttan," "Flash Art", Mar/Apr 2001, p. 104–5. The double projection Chromophilia (2001) likewise featured bright, pulsing abstract shapes that resembled paper-doll cutouts or Matisse dancers.Hawkins, Margaret. "Porn-again Creations," Chicago Sun Times, December 14, 2001, Weekend, p. 8.Isaacs, Deanna. "From Department Store to Art Department," Chicago Reader, September 4, 2008. Retrieved September 28, 2018.Harwood, Andrew. "Art Chicago 2003," C Magazine, International Contemporary Art Summer Issue 78, 2002, p. 48. The shapes flickered in and out of recognizable sexual activity—scored to excerpts from The Nutcracker—creating an effect that critic Margaret Hawkins described as "Fantasia meets Fritz the Cat". Others deemed it a clever upending of assumptions about animation, pornography and elite art that deflated the charged cultural and legal discourse around pornography, returning to its basic, sometimes clumsy, originating act.Graham, Bob. "Sneak Peek," San Francisco Chronicle, April 8, 2000. Retrieved September 27, 2018.
With her three-channel video Installation Love Me Not (2001), Ruttan considered the concealed intentions in intimate physical expression.Snodgrass, Susan. "Alison Ruttan at 3Arts and Monique Meloche," Art in America, September 2005, p. 158–9. She captured three different couples tickling one another to exhaustion, heightening the emotional charge as they traded roles of aggressor and victim by shooting close with an encircling camera and manipulating the playback speed.
Inquiries into aggression and war After 9/11, Ruttan's interest shifted to questions about human aggression and rationality, often in comparison to animals. The video work Impersonator (2005) explores George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's notion that human reason is shaped by the specifics of human bodies, and thus, on a continuum with animals rather than separate from them.Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Philosophy in the Flesh: the Embodied Mind & its Challenge to Western Thought, New York: Basic Books, 1999. Retrieved September 27, 2018. Facing videos show a cat pacing the perimeter of a room and a man mimicking the cat; the disparity between the innateness of the cat's actions and the man's mimicry reinforces how embodied behavior is. The video Lapse (2005) projects a large, slow-motion close-up of a man's face as he bursts in rage and then calms in cognition of the act, foregrounding the dislocation between the two emotional states.Artner, Alan. "Alison Ruttan's Mixed Bag of Visual Art Tricks," Chicago Tribune, March 4, 2005, Section C7, p.22. Retrieved September 28, 2018.
Primate works