Here at imgross we want to give back to the community as much as possible.  In addition to fake-punching hobos to keep them in line, imgross would also like to help local Chicago half-wits track down their lost/stolen house pets.

Buck (Huck?) here was last seen at the intersection of Augusta & Paulina in the West Town neighborhood a few weeks ago.  He is all grey with green eyes and some white spots on his hind legs and will stop in place for remarkably stoic photographs.

If you have information on Buck (Huck?), or any other lost animals please contact us at imgross.org@gmail.com

Never call the number on the poster, they’ll just put you on hold.

If Steve Buscemi was an odor, that’s what I was sitting behind here.

When the sun set on Friday December 9th, Chicago got really cold for the first time this winter. I experienced this unpleasantness while standing outside the Art Institute–underdressed, on an empty stomach, and fixated on a dozen or so upper-level stories of the Aon Center several hundred yards away. Andy Warhol’s film Empire (an 8 hour continuous take of the Empire State Building filmed the night of July 24-25, 1964) was being projected from the Institute’s Bluhm Family Terrace across Millennium Park onto the massive marble “canvas” of the Aon Center to garner publicity for Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph, a new exhibit running through March. Fantastic idea. What a shame that it ended up sucking big time.

The film appeared to start a few minutes after 6:00 when a white square with a faint, vertical, grey stripe down the middle replaced the color bars which were present as I walked up half an hour earlier. It took about 10 good minutes of collective befuddled staring before someone in the group of roughly 15 people gathered under The Nichols Bridgeway actually muttered, “Thats it?” Once it was verbalized everyone started to concede that this was probably not a focus/tracking issue or anything that could be fixed, and to stay and stare at something that was really nothing was borderline insanity, especially in this cold. The projection barely resembled anything, let alone pop-art. The crowd thinned a bit. I blew into my hands to warm them up and tried to eavesdrop on the camera crew’s conversation for some info. It turns out they were just speaking openly about their disdain for the Denver Broncos. Shit. No sign of improvement to this blurry square yet. A total stranger tells me they like my beard. ‘I’ll come back later’, I think to myself–I can’t handle the public right now. Will I come back though? Can I risk missing a rare photographic opportunity because I was hungry? That might come back to haunt me. How awful is it to be haunted by something? Can I suppress a haunting? I’d better stay for another 10 minutes…

7:15 rolled around and I called it quits. This was madness. I walked to the train and enjoyed a good sit on the Brown Line. When I got home, I checked the internet to see if I could get some answers. The Art Institute’s Twitter (@artinstitutechi) had nothing for me. I made some rice.

Hours later, my curiosity got the best of me and I did what any desperate loser does when they seek specific knowledge from the general public–I posted something about it on Facebook. No responses. Damn. Stupid Facebook. I am going to have to drive down there and see for myself. The projection was supposed to go until 2:00AM. It was 12:15. My head told me I was crazy for thinking it would be any different but my heart told me I needed to start doing things like this if I wanted to get shots no other photographer would have. I called myself a pussy and walked out to my car. This is what it takes, I thought on the ride down. This is effort. I knew I was going down there just to cover my ass, though. I couldn’t imagine having a conversation with someone about this in 20 years and having to admit that when the projection got fixed I was back in my apartment eating Munchos. What started as mere curiosity quickly morphed into a serious obsession as I headed downtown and the suspense started to build. The idea of photographing the fixed/updated exhibition consumed me. I badly wanted to see something great. Then, as I approached Michigan Ave. from Monroe St. my heart sank. The Aon Center was dark. Someone, somewhere quietly pulled the plug hoping nobody would notice.

Is it too much to ask for a prestigious entity like the Art Institute to have the stones (or diligence) to come out and tweet, “Empire sucked, we didn’t test it. We’re shutting it down early tonight and we’ll try to work out the kinks and maybe try it sometime down the road. Sorry.”

How hard is it to tweet? It takes 10 seconds and a phone.

A friend told me he watched the news that night and they called the Warhol Aon projection a success! Bah. Typical. Lazy. Most of the Chicago “media” was probably in Denver already or here in town interviewing idiots in their “Bears Dens”, too. No surprise art took a back seat that weekend. Try to find coverage of this event online–it doesn’t exist. There are no photographs from that night, no reviews by the art community, and no statement from the Art Institute. What took place that night was important. It just wasn’t executed correctly. Dissapointing.

And nobody really even told us why.

Kudos to whoever came up with this wacky logo/uni combo, as I have been waiting for an homage to 1970′s Astros’ sheik.  I like the “marlin” part but the M sort of reminds me of those really crappy candy-canes.