Michael Workman

Patrons somehow not fully sated with seeing art at the pier last week have one last remaining reason to meander through crowds of gaping tourists in the blazing heat: Navy Pier Walk. Situated among the lemonade and spicy glazed popcorn stands of Gateway Park and Dock Street along the pier's southern promenade are some 28-odd works by approximately fifteen artists from around the world. Teenage couples walk arm-in-arm, barefoot children squeal with delight, stomping through the streams running off a fountain in the middle of the park, the spot where many of this sculpture show's prized selections are staged. Animals are big this year: there's a two-headed rubber ducky, a barrel-bodied pig, a tin chicken. Stuff that's definitely going to entertain the kids, but there are also a few serious twists. Three concrete coffins with steel handles tucked away in the picnic park near the pier's northeastern end resemble water or waste-processing casks. One lid sits slightly askew, while plaques mounted to the concrete sidewalk pronounce the names of outdated office equipment. Prayer booths (designated by a clasped pair of hands at the top of the booth) lure in patrons who can kneel on a bench while their prayers are taped by a recording device inside.

Director Joe Tabet and New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl (pronounced sheld-ALL), who Tabet tapped as juror for this annual summer show, are to blame for it all. Flash back to December: the two are meeting at the Moonstruck Diner in New York to discuss this year's available artistic choices and the daunting logistics of the show's shipping and installation. People trickle in off the street, grousing over menus. Each table in the diner's decked out in red and green "Season's Greetings" placemats under glass. Tabet slides into a corner booth and Schjeldahl, a gray-haired man in an orange and brown wool jacket and trim moustache, sits across from him. A knife squeaks against a ceramic plate.

Though it's his last year as director, in the three years this former stockbroker's been aboard, Tabet's ambition has always been to change what's seen as a show made flaccid by sloppy thought into a powerhouse of temporary sculpture. Much of his best effort at accomplishing this goal involves the participation of Schjeldahl. And the critic's personal philosophy--that art thrives under the direction of a strong and steady hand--was a major factor in the decision to invite him aboard as juror. Rising up through the ranks, he spent several years at the Village Voice before finally landing his current post at the New Yorker. Completely self-educated, Schjeldahl started out working for a news daily as a reporter, an experience that convinced him feature writing was a better outlet for his talents.

Tabet hands across a couple of catalogs from past Navy Pier Walk shows and Schjeldahl starts thumbing through, gazing intently. "Awful," he gasps, leafing past full-color images of sculpture shows curated by his colleagues, L.A. Times critic David Pagel and Las Vegas-based writer Dave Hickey. "Hickey's a philosopher. And I'm just a critic," he remarks. Colleague or not, each page of Hickey's catalog provokes a fresh lament. "Oh, can we have a moratorium on abstraction, just for this one?" Shaking his head, Schjeldahl opines on how abstract sculpture can't succeed because it has no necessary scale. "We're sensitive to gradations of scale. Unless it's next to a tall building, it looks small." he says, pointing out how, for the viewer, anything over 7 feet looks gigantic. "In the early days, when the show was run by sculptors, everything had to be over 10 feet." says Tabet. "Let's be happy we're not doing that anymore," Schjeldahl quips. They haven't. Hardly anything in this year's show has been dictated by scale though, with few exceptions, most works fit the human-scale format.

Both have their favorites, bantering a few names back and forth. It's then that British sculptor Richard Deacon comes up. His five-part "Infinity" sculpture series, at the southeast end of Gateway Park, ranks as a composite of the type of concise thought that characterizes this year's show. Each section, a congerie of what look like abraded silver pop-tabs, are piled across from one another in a formation that diffuses reflected sunlight into a glow at the center of the arrangement aswim with dust motes. It's a place in the show that tests the significance of memory-making, of joy and lighthearted amusements, of fleeting things that somehow last forever.

Navy Pier Walk 2004 is on display at Navy Pier, 600 East Grand, (312)595-7437, through fall.

(2004-05-12)

Also by Michael Workman

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