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Life Patterns: Reconstructing Symbolism:
Yello Gallery
"Life Patterns" may prove to be among the best exhibitions, and, strangely, one of the shortest yet at Yello Gallery in Chicago. What makes it one of Yello Gallery's better showings is that it is lively, colorful, engaging, direct and unpretentious -- "Life Patterns." The opening was packed until closing, and stirred animated interest among viewers. This is an exhibition it would have been well to extend during the upcoming "Around The Coyote" art festival. Only the subtitle seems a misnomer. Six of the artists are Chicagoans, and a seventh, Lee Nading, is an alumnus of the Art Institute of Chicago.
The eye discerns basic forms in an instant, and only then goes on to confirm identity through details. A general, fundamental apperception makes us distinguish peregrine from pigeon, and the goal of camouflage is to break up a readable pattern visually, to disorient with details. Greg Kumpin's stainless steel constructions de-camouflage each instinctively felt essence from the material which inspires his creations. His sculpture abstracts the idealized forms and motions of his themes -- it is an art which seeks to capture dance, where others might only detail the dancers. Much like Plato's archetypes, or the mathematical perceptions of relationships -- "+," or "Pi(r.squared)" -- the qualities he expresses through his abstractions can travel from person to person, and culture to culture. His choice of stainless steel as a medium is felicitous: it focuses the eye on form, on weight and balance, and the steel's polish itself evokes the silvery, subliminal abstractions of the mind. Kumpin began his career as a professional photographer and subsequentially turned to metal sculpture. He was born in Legnica, Poland, in 1962, but his art exhibits strong affinities with art movements such as Suprematism and Constructivism, which began in the pre-Revolutionary Russian avant-garde. His "Eclipse," in which a central disk is enhaloed with flattened rings, evokes a dynamic balance -- a perception, and principle, as fundamental to planetary systems as it is to subatomic patterns. As with much of Kumpin's art, it is a work rooted not so much in our physical and native sensory perceptions, as in what we know and intuit: Einstein's "psychical entities." With no overt sensory experience of cosmos or quantum states, nor of Plato's archetypes, the modern mind nonetheless incorporates their typologies and operations -- as primal and symbolic beliefs. It is this stripping of reality to essence or archetype which gives Kumpin's stainless steel constructions a kinship with, and an advance upon the art of such as Aleksander Rodchenko, Kasimir Malevich, Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner. Kumpin's art shows there is still much to explore in this approach. Art critic, Sam Hunter, noted of a 1920 Rodchenko sculpture ("Suspended Construction in Space"): "...his stripped-down, nonreferential constructions... might well seem at home in an exhibition of the Minimalist sculptures produced by New York artists in the 1970s." (Modern Art, H.N.Abrams: 1985). Kumpin's pieces such as "Ballet" or "Ritual Dancer" show a consistent, organic, and personal evolution from such early experimentation. Unlike the New York Minimalists' belated mining of an imported ferment, the only import in Kumpin's art is the artist himself. Seeing Kumpin's art, and seeing it in light of legacies in Suprematism and Constructivism, one pauses to consider how much American Modernism has owed to the domestication of revolutionary Russian art; just as Modernism's counterfoil owed much to Mexican Muralism. Kumpin's art is authentic.
Greg Kumpin has seven pieces in "Life Patterns" at Yello Gallery. "King" is another particularly satisfying sculpture. Again, in "King" the viewer responds to a basic patterning, one which coheres as a unity and which exhibits a dynamic balance among its particular visual elements -- a relationship captured in steel, self-contained and so primal as to transfer readily to multiple interpretations. Given the title, "King," one does indeed discern the abstracted symbols of kingship -- crown and scepter; but it equally lends itself to a stark awareness of toothed, pointed cogwheel or crown in hierarchy over smoother, subordinate surfaces. It is elemental... for society as well as physics. Interestingly, Rodchenko and many of the Suprematists proved mastery in photography, as well as film and stage design. Upon seeing Greg Kumpin's stainless steel constructions, one wishes a creative curator could bring together the artist's photography and sculpture and thus allow the viewer to investigate any relationship which might emerge. There might well be some underlying affinity, much like the strong association between music and mathematics, which would shed light on the creative process. Lee Nading is the first artist on the South wall at Yello Gallery and it is his work which most closely 'reconstructs symbolism.' Lee Nading notes that his "art work has become increasingly symbolistic over a period of two decades, paralleling my deepening concern, and use of man versus nature themes. The labeling of my evolved style as 'Primism' points to an overall reduction to elemental forms." Lee Nading is a alumnus of the Art Institute of Chicago (BFA, 1964) and Indiana University/Bloomington (MFA, 1968), but since the 1960s has pursued a prescient and individual direction in his art. Nading has, in essence, made art into a way of life, rather than a production of objects for vicarious living. Those who would ask the price of his art, will not follow its value. Nading's art is a participation, not an objectification. And, since the 1970s, his vision has been joined by others seeking more for art than commodities at market. Lee Nading's art is difficult for the reviewer, because it does not allow one to stand apart, but demands a self-evaluation and introspective questioning from each viewer. None are exempt. But the artist's vision quest has been vindicated by societal response over these past decades, and swelled by kindred spirits (one thinks of Roden Carter, Lynne Hull, R. Murray Schaffer, David T. Hanson, Krzysztof Wodiczko, another Chicagoan -- Fern Shaffer... ).
Art critic, Suzi Gablik, in The Reenchantment of Art noted of artist, Roden Crater: "the artist does not own the experience; instead, he puts us in front of the thing itself, so it becomes our experience -- we get inside the landscape and can develop our own effective ties with it." It is perhaps this aspect of Nading's art which at first is so difficult for the gallery-conditioned viewer: a viewer who expects commodified objects to acquire and 'consume.' Gablik, in responding to Michael David Levin's The Opening of Vision clarified the new dilemma in such art: "Historically the model we have in place is inherited from the Renaissance, which created the spectator who is outside the picture and separate from what he sees." Gablik notes, in a conclusion which encapsulates the process of Nading's art as well: "the vision we need to develop is not one that observes and reports, that objectifies and enframes, but one released from these reifying tendencies and rooted instead in a responsiveness that ultimately expresses itself in action." Earthworks artists such as Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer, or the more flamboyant Christo have decommodified art, but too often with no purpose other than the artist's public gratification. And just what constitutes the essence of Nading's art? An attempt to revert the 'man versus nature' orientation of post-Rationalist Modernity to what Gablik saw as "a consciousness beyond the limited, materialistic view of the world promulgated by mainstream science." Nading is well in accord with Gablik's postulate that "the word 'ecological' will become the equivalent of the word 'metaphysical,' as the task of restoring awareness of our symbiotic relationship with nature becomes the most pressing spiritual and political need of our time." Lee Nading's art, as noted in his hundred-page logbook, seeks "to call attention to the need to spiritualize the environmental movement."
The artist's log, "Trail of Sacred Sites," which records his pilgrimage extending from 1989 through 1990, documents both the small totems he has placed "in front of 'controversial' environmental sites (power plants, toxic dumps, wilderness victories, inspiration vistas, etc)"; and further, "at sites that are sacred for their historic, natural, or social significance." Nading had developed his direction throughout a long gestation: between 1983 through 1986 he received national recognition for his "Trail of Rising and Falling Birds," (described by Lucy Lippard in The Village Voice) during which, at over 180 locations through the U.S., the artist painted bird pictographs on highway surfaces and interred ceramic totems at significant locales. Nading chose the bird as emblemizing the human spirit. In June 1987, the series culminated in his half-mile long painting, "The Great Mystery," sponsored by the Santa Fe Center for Contemporary Art in New Mexico. After publishing his "Primist Creed (1989)," Nading began the "Trail of Sacred Sites," currently documented at Yello Gallery's "Life Patterns" exhibition. The four totems involved in Lee Nading's art project, the "Ecodice Tablets," represent the ancient division of the natural elements into "Earth," "Water," "Fire," and "Air." Well over 700 of the stoneware totems have been buried at selected sites. Interestingly, the artist buried totems at the Braidwood, Illinois, Nuclear Power plant facility solely on the basis of the evident destruction done by previous strip mining for coal. (The ComEd plant now drains water for cooling from the flooded coal pits.) Initially unaware of the nuclear facility, he only later learned how intuition guided the artist's hand. Nading's art draws upon a different power. As Brad Loudenback of The New Art Examiner noted in January 1985, "At the Fermi National Park outside of Chicago, he painted his 'Jinx on the World's Largest Particle Accelerator' and soon afterwards received letters of concern and protest from 'learned physicists.'" Nading saw the reaction as a tribute to "visually symbolized slogans, which produce the deepest response and are remembered the longest." Another point which is at first perplexing is that many of Nading's sites are 'man-made,' not locales many associate with 'Nature.' C. S. Lewis, in The Abolition of Man (a description, not a prescription), offered a point which underlies Nading's assertion that "all history belongs to all people because there is only one saga of humankind." C. S. Lewis declared: "We reduce things to mere Nature in order that we may 'conquer' them. We are always conquering Nature, because 'Nature' is the name for what we have, to some extent, conquered. The price of conquest is to treat a thing as mere Nature." And Lewis, foreseeing consequences, goes on to warn: "The real objection is that if man chooses to treat himself as raw material, raw material he will be: not raw material to be manipulated, as he fondly imagined, by himself, but by mere appetite, that is, mere Nature...." Nading's art, whether he so intended it, or even fully realizes it, succeeds again and again in revealing that 'man versus nature' includes a diminished humanity versus a victimized humanity as well. Certainly, Nading's vision quest, through his art, gathers in sites such as the 1879 mass grave at Wounded Knee; a female Civil War POW grave at Andersonville, Georgia; The Art Institute of Chicago -- as well as Mammoth Cave; the Cumberland Gap; the Susquehana and other rivers, canyons and desolate wilds we more comfortingly project as 'Nature.'
Nading's art, while very contemporary and not necessarily to a common taste, is serious and continually innovating. It is interesting to see an artist of such stature at Yello Gallery, if even for so short a visit. Nading's art is a living refutation of Ortega y Gasset's declaration that "to actually worry about the dying man is not the concern of aesthetics." His is an art which is lived and which stirs the viewer into enlivenment. The essence of Nading's art centers on man in nature, as a part of nature, and on hope for a future. The end of Nading's "Trail of Sacred Sites" is, as C.S.Lewis hoped -- "to imagine a new Natural Philosophy, continually conscious that the 'natural object' produced by analysis and abstraction is not reality but only a view, and always correcting the abstraction..." In the end, one pauses to reflect: Spirituality? Perhaps... Metaphysics? In a manner of speaking, yes... At the close of this, The Twentieth Century, both Kumpin and Nading are as much about the art of our times, as the Sistine Chapel was for Michaelangelo and Western Christendom. Both Kumpin and Nading, starting at perhaps opposite ends of art, seek to unveil what the great Augustine termed an ordo amoris. an ordinate condition of the affections where each object is accorded the kind and degree of love appropriate to it, for time and beyond. Kumpin and Nading, though very different, are two artists who most fulfill the exhibition's subtitle, for while Kumpin's art casts an eye to within the human, and Nading directs out into the world, both have established their own iconography in art. Greg Kumpin's work may be viewed after this exhibition at The New Content Gallery, 3012 North Lincoln Avenue, Chicago (Tel.773/ 528-8467). While not exhibiting or on the road, Lee Nading maintains his studio in rural Indiana and may be contacted at GREA Books, P.O.Box 1805, Bloomington, Indiana 47402 (Tel. 812/ 336-8206). Nading does offer four-piece sets of his stoneware "Ecodice" tablets. The tablets, a designated issue, are such as he buries at his chosen sites for posterity to find. A full set can be had for two hundred dollars and furthers his Primist Art project. Donagrandi, Fydryck, Macaluso and Merrigmen in PART TWO --G. Jurek Polanski Jurek Polanski has previously written and art edited for Strong Coffee in Chicago. He's also well known and respected among the Chicago museums and galleries. Jurek is currently a Visual Arts Correspondent for ArtScope.net. |
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