The effects of our bad-news economy are starting to kick in, and it’s not just the deadwood that’s falling. This week, one of the largest and liveliest art spaces in the West Loop, Flatfile Galleries, announced that its current shows will be its last. It closes March 27.
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Aurinko opened Flatfile in 2000, in rented quarters at 119 N. Peoria, as a launching pad for emerging photographers. It was a serve-yourself setup: she installed lots of the wide, low file cabinets for which the gallery is named, filled each drawer with a portfolio of work by one of her artists, and encouraged visitors to browse at their own speed through hundreds of pictures, like so many customers at Nordstrom Rack. That worked, and in 2002 Aurinko moved Flatfile to a larger space across the street, adding established photographers like Barbara Crane and Lucien Clergue to her roster. Two years later she expanded again, adding contemporary art in all media to the mix, and moved Flatfile into its current five-gallery, two-story, 8,000-square-foot home, in a building she and her husband had rehabbed at 217 N. Carpenter. There her innovative programming and events—including Wafaa Bilal’s 2007 installation, Domestic Tension, where anyone on the Internet could shoot him with a paintball gun—attracted international press coverage.
In retrospect, Aurinko says, she can see that there’s been a gradual change in the way people shop for art. In Flatfile’s early years, most of the work sold at the openings. “At the end of the night, there’d be a bunch of red dots on the wall.” Then there was a shift, and only a few things would sell right away. People would come back once or twice, bringing others to look before buying. And then “they were coming back four or five times, bringing the neighbor, the husband, the decorator,” Aurinko says. “Now, no one’s making what I call chewing-gum-at-the-checkout-counter decisions. No one’s saying, ‘Oh my God, I love it! I have to have it!’”
Unzip and Scoot Over
What’s more, it’s probably not just print journalism but text itself that’s going away. Text on a screen is an anachronism—a code operating at symbolic remove, on equipment capable of delivering something much closer to the real thing. When it’s gone, we’ll be a mostly oral society again, driven by the immediacy of sound and image. I hope I’m wrong about that.v
