John Schacht

John Schacht, Untitled acrylic and marker on paper, 17.875" x 12", c. 1985. John Schacht (February 12, 1938 – August 10, 2009) was a self-trained, American artist based in the Midwest. His art ranges from biomorphic abstract paintings to folk-inspired, semi-representational drawings to ritual-like performances, altars and assemblages. Critics sometimes relate his work to Chicago Imagism due to shared affinities for fantastical and erotic imagery, Pop art-like psychedelia, and folk-art and vernacular sources.

Life Schacht was born in 1938 on the northwest side of Chicago, and spent his early years there and in Florida.

Schacht was an active member of Chicago's burgeoning 1970s gay community, but remained on the periphery of the city's art scene—neither inside nor completely outside. As a result, he showed his work in wildly different contexts. These ranged from art fairs, businesses, community centers and bars like the Old Town Ale House or La Mere Vipere ) to alternative galleries such as Quantum (1981) and WPA (1982), which was directed by his friend and colleague, Charles Thomas Eaton, to established venues such as the Renaissance Society (1976), and Hyde Park Art Center (1979), which exhibited the nationally known Imagists.

Through the 1970s, Schacht lived in Chicago and Indianapolis, sometimes commuting between them. Schacht's friend, artist Jane Wenger, retrieved and preserved his artwork after his death and manages its archive. They are structured by a wide set of symbols (e.g., stars, eyes, trees, breasts, penises, vaginas), which serve as a personal shorthand to explore the human collective unconscious, gender dichotomies, and sexuality. In 1975, Indianapolis Museum of Art curator Lynn Karn published a limited edition of 300 spiral-bound books of Schacht's line drawings, titled Gods in Search of a Myth, which debuted in an exhibit at the Washington Gallery in Frankfort, Indiana. She conceived the book with Schacht as a collaborative coloring book whose communication viewer/purchasers would complete when they colored in the images. Reviews have described Schacht's drawings as intimate, cartoon-like abstractions of flowing, organic forms and sexual symbols that convey "the contemporary primal self" in a raw style.

Queer expression Later writers have suggested that queerness is both ever-present and repressed in Schacht's work (the most explicit of which was rarely shown in public), citing fugitive S&M elements, embedded genitalia, abstract cowboy figures in chains or leather, and excessive ornamentation. C.C. McKee writes that the visual ornamentation exceeds mere decoration, suggesting a desire to elude and transcend heteronormative constraints through aesthetic means. New Art Examiner critic Michel Segard observed that Schacht's usage of the penis—as a hieroglyph or meme, rather than erotic form (like the later Keith Haring)—and lone males in erotic contexts reveals a closeted tension between expression and repression. Schacht explored similar themes in a ritual performance that was part of a group exhibition at the Renaissance Society (1976), which also featured Edith Altman, Nancy Davidson and Dennis Kowalski. In the performance, a young, jock-strap-clad man was led into a confined cube space by a rope around his neck, suspended from ceiling hooks by a harness, and strapped to the walls by ropes tied around his body; after he went limp, the ropes were cut and he was deposed, laid on the floor, and wrapped in blankets.

Paintings on paper

While still embedded with personal symbols (chairs, teapots, chinoserie, mandalas, and earlier, characteristic forms), Schacht's paintings differ from his drawings in their increased abstraction, intense colors and wider inspirations and imagery. His paintings feature leitmotifs of ceramic vases, Persian textiles, quasi-psychedelic genitalia, cowboy hats and saloon doors in decentralized, rhythmic compositions that Brooklyn Rail critic Diane McClure and others describe as moving between disorder, play, and a sense of the surreal.

Schacht's 1970s paintings include brightly colored, semi-abstract, chaotic still lifes and interiors, stylized portraits of women and 15-foot scroll drawings exploring male and female erotic imagery. The interior still lifes emphasize flattened perspectives and space, rhythmic movement, and a dissolution of the distinction between structure and ornament. The scroll works, painted in golds, silvers, reds and blues, suggest both the spiritual and the erotic. Schacht's later paintings feature morphing organic abstraction and ambiguous character-like forms, painted with curving lines, free-spirited shapes and saturated colors. Critics describe them as displaying spontaneity, impulse and expansion, reigned in by form and intellect; a 1985 series visualized the sensation of sexual play and orgasm through an array of color, ornate design and patterning.