Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Steve Tobin at Morton Arboretum






Steve Tobin, who calls himself a “visual philosopher” has done a lot of weird things since he got a Bachelor’s degree in mathematics 30 years ago. He’s blown up barrels of clay, made shelters out of disgarded glass art slides or tank windows, walls out of animal bones, and bronze casts of termite mounds. His bronze cast of the “Trinity Root” in 2005 gained him celebrity for the only art memorial permanently installed in the vicinity of Ground Zero. But since then, rather than casting real tree roots, he has been designing his own, , and now seems to be doing what traditional garden sculptors have done for centuries: make elegant figures that enhance the landscape. And yes, his sculptures are figurative even if they have no sense of mass, flesh, or human character. What they do have is the balance, expression, rhythm, and gesture of classic dance. Or Chinese calligraphy. Indeed, some of his pieces look like they were assembled from Asian logograms that have been drawn by bending and welding enormous steel pipes instead of pulling an ink-filled brush over paper. And their effect is electrifying on the somewhat sterile landscape that holds the extensive conifer collection of the Morton Arboretum in Lisle. Some of the choreography is for solo dancers, others for groups of two or three. One figure arches over the garden path so viewers must walk between its legs, and one, that reaches up to 40 feet high, seems more like a dancing brontosaurus than a human. Which makes this is the quintessential Baroque garden: full of harmonies and happy surprises. As the art critic, Donald Kuspit, has noted, it is completely outside the “insidious, hypocrical irony” that is so endemic to the contemporary artworld. And indeed, with zero art school background, Tobin is more like a crafter who has been inspired by Michelangelo or Rodin rather than a contemporary sculptor. Each of the 14 pieces is a “spontaneous gesture and personal idea, giving it new life, refreshing our sense of its reality and integrity.” And until the Chinese/Japanese/Korean galleries of the Art Institute re-open next September, this outdoor exhibit is the best place to find those qualities in Chicago this Summer.





(deleted passages are high-lited in red, edited version is found here )

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Dirty Dozen

John Santoro


John Santoro





Ben Tinsley - "Furniture Store on Whyte"







McCormick Gallery “Dirty Dozen” through Oct. 24, 2009





We can all admire fine craftsmanship – but that’s the first thing that comes to mind when standing before most of the paintings and sculptures in this survey of 12 contemporary artists at the McCormick Gallery. And shouldn’t painting demand attention to something more important? As Ben Tinsley does in “Furniture Store on Whyte”, a vignette of urban life that is “fixed in an artifice of eternity” (to quote Edward Snow regarding Vermeer). It’s half boarded up and definitely out of business, but unlike those melancholy Hopper scenes of New York, this abandoned little Chicago storefront sings with joy. Every detail is perfectly drawn and measured, especially the calligraphic graffiti that seems to have been applied by a wandering poet rather than gangbanger. Also exceptional in this exhibit are the two suburban cityscapes by John Santoro. No meticulously painted brickwork here – instead, these are meticulous paintings of paint. But they also present places the artist likes to live (his yard, front and back), rather unkempt, but no less timeless than the “10,000 years” mentioned in the titles he gave them. All the other abstract paintings in this exhibit just seem to be about paint.