Thomas Chimes at the Art Museum (first review)

Thomas Chimes: Having more fun now, or:
If life hands you a lemon, ignore it

ANDREW MANGRAVITE

As a serious young man grappling with existentialism and The Big Questions of Life, Thomas Chimes created paintings that resembled giant quilts and sported titles like The Inner World and Man in Exile in the Universe. But where was the fun in that?

Then, in the Army Air Force during World War II, Chimes learned how to weld aluminum. When the impulses that had given birth to his “Crucifixion Paintings” waned, he put his new skill to good use and entered into a second major phase: the metal boxes. We are talking, in short, about an artist who, rather than progressing steadily along a single path of development, instead undergoes certain phases, each like a little dying and rebirth.

His boxes are amazingly intricate pieces of work, and anyone who values engineering will probably find these the most rewarding portion of his current show at the Art Museum. The craftsmanship of the boxes is self-evident, but their messages were less so: Chimes was coming more under the influence of dada and surrealism, thus proving that existentialism is not always a fatal affliction. With the boxes, Chimes was able to celebrate counter-cultural heroes like the Marquis de Sade as well as personal favorites like Greta Garbo and John Lennon.

But they all look like Chimes

But there’s always a bit of a kink in the wire. In the Chimes boxes, De Sade, Garbo and Lennon all look a lot like Thomas Chimes. The large Master and Own seems like a not-very-provocative piece of op art, until one uncovers the fragment “Baiting” concealed beneath a plate. So, Master and Own is really Masturbating and Onanism, which is actually “about” auto-eroticism.

At other times, the kicker hides in plain sight. Top Hat is a depiction of Mick Jagger, but unless you saw and remembered his turn as the armor-plated outlaw in the 1970 film Ned Kelly, you would assume it was a depiction of some sort of robot. Chimes certainly seems to having more fun now.

A Pantheon of the famous, the imaginary and the unhappy

The boxes give way to his most famous work, the panel portraits. These are a series of 48 small, predominantly sepia-hued depictions of illustrious figures in the Symbolist movement. Of course Chimes interprets this loosely enough to allow him to include some famous scientists (Michael Faraday, Lord Kelvin), a philosopher (Ludwig Wittgenstein), an actress (Sarah Berhardt), and even an imaginary figure (Doctor I. L. Sandomir, co-founder of the College of Pataphysics). Now Chimes has clearly hit his stride, both technically and philosophically. Boy, is this guy having fun!

Chimes excludes from his pantheon anyone who was too successful, or didn’t suffer enough. Thus Mallarmé, a middle-class schoolteacher, is excluded, as is Picasso, a non-starving genius. Or Chimes may include an “oblique” description of someone. Thus Andre Bréton, the pompous pope of Surrealism and parlor-Communist, who excommunicated Artaud from the movement, is twice depicted symbolically, once by a view of the Luxemburg Gardens and again by a discarded woman’s glove.

Pride of place goes to the Poes, the Artauds and the Oscar Wildes, all of whom met with unhappy ends. Chimes honors their ideas by honoring them. A special place is reserved for Alfred Jarry, the creator of the Ubu plays. Chimes apparently identifies with Jarry, so he depicts him many times: as a young man, as middle-aged (Jarry never lived to be old), as a joker, as a cyclist, as a disintegrating personality.

The science of imaginary solutions

Jarry, through another of literary alter egos, Dr. Faustroll, created the Science of Pataphysics, which is sometimes simplified as “the science of imaginary solutions.” It doesn’t say, “If life hands you lemons, make lemonade.” It says, if life hands you lemons, ignore it. Pataphysics is the comedic face of a worldview whose serious face was Symbolism.

Being more laid back than Pope Bréton, the Symbolists never excommunicated Jarry. He probably wouldn’t have cared if they had, but they liked the guy. They went to see his plays, and celebrated Père Ubu as “The Savage God,” and Jarry co-edited an influential Symbolist art journal L’Ymagier with the movement’s sage, Remy de Gourmont (an odd couple if ever there was one).

Such is Jarry’s hold over Chimes’s imagination that Jarry survives the close of Chimes’s panel portraits period to re-emerge as the star of his latest “white paintings” period. The paintings of this period are large ghostly-looking affairs, done primarily in grays and whites. Some, like Waterfall— apparently painted in response to his separation from his wife of many years— are conventionally beautiful, but all convey a haunting quality not immediately in evidence in the smaller, more somber panel pieces.

Morning, in which Jarry bicycles through a landscape, borne aloft on invisible wheels, is a fine example of these pieces, although atypical in that it features a wider palette of colors.

In the latest stage of White Paintings, we find Chimes setting himself a severe technical challenge. He creates three-inch-by-three-inch paintings that look like embossed tiles. Many of his past and present images— the crucified man, Jarry’s Père Ubu—are on display, and everything’s been reduced to a sort of poetic shorthand—or student’s notes, perhaps?



To read another review by Anne R. Fabbri, click here.