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 Eye Exam Certain Death
So there I was sitting inside of a giant eight-foot skull pretending to
think about bodily remains and Death's crackly calcified laugh, but I
was completely distracted by swarms of babbling children running in and
out of the thing, this skull with an entrance and an exit. "La
Cabeza," a wild-eyed and multicolored death's head by French artist
Niki de Saint Phalle, is far removed from the mournful aspect that such
a symbol typically represents. Accompanying "La Cabeza" in Garfield
Park are Saint Phalle's trademark goddess figures, the Egyptian deity
Horus, totems and a serpent tree, as well as the Conservatory's
always-pleasing vegetal spectacle. Although excellently crafted and
satisfying in many ways, perhaps Saint Phalle's sculptures are no rival
to the Conservatory's own collection of desert plants, a menagerie of
unwavering poise and manageable sublimity. But I digress--nature's
aesthetics aren't in the purview of this art writer.
For being a skull, "La Cabeza" is curiously teeming with life. The
piece is fully interactive. Children are writhing inside of it, poking
their heads out from between its opalescent teeth and feeding on its
wonder to fuel their fun. Sure, it's a flashy piece of mosaic-work with
layers of texture, perfect for the sensual adventures that get kids
excited about in their world, but "La Cabeza" is also a highly charged
piece of public performance art, most complete when children are
present. To see kids play within a giant skull is to recognize the
naturalness and the strangeness of such an act.
It is possible, however, to look at "La Cabeza" and think nothing
of corporal demise. As a public artwork, it succeeds on many levels.
It's a meeting ground for strangers, it draws attention to one of the
city's oft forgotten treasures (the Conservatory), it's monumental and
it incites spontaneous play. The trend of the proudly whimsical public
artwork, a sort of anti-monument, took hold in Chicago with Jean
Dubuffet's 1984 "Monument with Standing Beast" at the Thompson Center.
Dubuffet's sculpture, like Saint Phalle, grants easy access. It is
architectural but not habitable; once inside, its contours are a good
fit for everyone. With the addition of the Millennium Park sculpture
garden, the public began to openly receive the new message about
communal outdoor art. In "The Bean," our gaze slips and slides where
it otherwise gets cut up on the city's jagged edges. Yet, "The Bean,"
the high-tech water fountain and the explosive band-shell are couched in
the same old voice of well-ordered neo-classical authority. I'm reminded
of a lyric from a dance song where a robot sings, "Everybody have some
fun"; this always freaked me out a good deal, because why would a robot
want me to have a good time and, furthermore, how would it know what
that entailed? In short, today's public sculpture is forthright in its
command for users to enjoy themselves, but its voice is animated by that
ageless smarmy school lady, Mother Obedience. Some of the palm trees in
the Garfield Park Conservatory are the largest of their kind growing in
North America. But outside of the glass and steel shell, they would be
twice as tall. As an expression of beauty is the culmination of so much
self-discipline, and our shared aesthetic experiences are everywhere
maintained, perhaps to be happy is to be tamed.
In Chicago and almost every other Western metropolis, a civic
sculpture usually accompanies a fine piece of government-use
architecture. It is understood that both the buildings and their
attendant sculptures are perfect forms of social engineering--to be
inspired by beauty is to inspire civility. This is best understood when
taken to an extremely rigid end (Saint Phalle's polar opposite), namely
the Mussolini-era architecture of Italy. In the 1920-1940s, fascism
expressed itself, and thus expressed its citizens, in the form of
spatial control.
The essence of triumphant civic architecture is one of the subjects
on hand in Per Kirkeby's exhibition at The Arts Club of Chicago.
World-renowned for his brutalist-style public brick sculptures, we get
instead a smattering of Kirkeby's expressionist-flavored oil paintings
and the cast bronze models for his architecture/sculptures. The Danish
artist keeps a studio in Italy, thus (what I think is) Kirkeby's strong
engagement with ideologically assertive architecture. The small works
(all from 1985-1990) are hand-molded from clay into often roughly
symmetrical four-part chambers with arches, tunnels and rooms that serve
as imagined points of access and control. It is easy enough to project
one's imagination into these forms as if having a physical, spatial
experience. Vision becomes compartmentalized and visual movement is
restricted, bouncing around in the austere architecture reduced in its
severity by the presence of finger-tempered dimples in the cast bronze.
In Kirkeby's paintings, traditional and iconic civic architecture
floats in correspondence with abstract structures in a "workshop" for
their cultural re-education program. Like in a Basquiat painting, the
identifiable, now emblematic figures are realized in accordance with a
formal ideal and perpetuated from a point of internalization--the
architecture now lives inside us. There's a guilty visual satisfaction
to be had in the state-appointed style because, as classical forms,
their familiarity is their appeal.
When not re-working institutional architecture, Kirkeby explores a
more personal aspect of the world. His paintings of grottoes and
landscapes invite a sense of individual interaction with nature, showing
that to be hidden inside the earth is another sort of comfort. Niki de Saint Phalle shows at The Garfield Park Conservatory, 300
North Central Park Ave, (312)746-5100, through October 31. Per Kirkeby
shows at The Arts Club of Chicago, 201 East Ontario, (312)787-3997,
through July 26.
Also by Jason Foumberg Eye Exam
Eye Exam
Eye Exam
Eye Exam
Portrait of the Gallerist
Tip of the Week
Tip of the Week
Portrait of the Artist
Gallery of Gallerists
Tip of the Week
Portrait of the Artist
Tip of the Week
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