20th century AD

Art in America, Jan, 1995 by Barry Schwabsky

A little reflection remaind us of how misleading the distinction between trained artists and self-taught "visionaries" or "outsiders" can be. To think of an artist like Alfred jensen, with his eccentric painting-diagrams based on an idiosyncratic understanding of the Mayan calendar, is to realize the permeability of the barrier we tend to place between what is publicly accessible and what is irreducibly arcane. In a different way, the fanatical concentration of an artist such as Myron Stout, with his abstract invocations of primal myth, recalls the fierce necessity of abstention from apparent consensus. It may well be that to make more than ephemerally significant art today requires--even, or especially, of the academically educated artist--a self-imposed autodidacticism. At the very least, there's a need for an infusion of information, however fantastic or unverifiable, tangential to the obvious and acknowledged sources of public discourse. Certain artists willingly turn to sources that are, in the etymological sense of the word, occult--that is, hidden, concealed. We see this in artists like Stout or Jensen, Bruce Conner or Jess. And among the artists taking that risk today I would name the Philadelphian Thomas Chimes.

To place Chimes in Philadelphia could imply an ambivalent desire, on his part, for both nearness to and distance from that international art capital to the northeast. But it would perhaps be more apt to recall the presence in Philadelphia of a venerable and continuing tradition of realist painting, on the one hand, and of the Arensberg Collection with its great hoard of Duchampiana on the other. (It may not be irrelevant to note that in Philadelphia, Chimes and I have been able to lunch in a restaurant housed in the former dwelling of Madame Blavatsky.) Born in 1921 of Greek parentage, Chimes lived and studied in New York through much of the '40s and early '50s, one of the innumerable young artists to breathe the atmosphere of Abstract Expressionism, right down to the obligatory hostile encounter with Jackson Pollock at the Cedar (Chimes still cites Pollock as an influence, though not for his innovation of the allover surface so much as his involvement with Jungian psychology). Chimes returned permanently to his hometown in 1953, though it was exhibitions at New York's Avant-Garde Gallery in the late '50s that really began his public career as an abstract painter, leading to the inclusion of his work in collections such as those of the Museum of Modern Art, the Ringling Museum and the Philadelphia Museum.

By the mid-'60s, Chimes had temporarily abandoned painting in favor of making boxlike wall-mounted objects constructed primarily of metal over a wood core. Their surfaces inscribed with cutout shapes and cryptic emblems, adorned with inset images and useless hardware, these seem to be picture machines of an unidentifiable function. These boxes, with their easy synthesis of Surrealism, Minimalism and Pop and their witty allusiveness, reflect perhaps too easily the manner of their time. They are period pieces. But in the early '70s Chimes married the "objectness" of his metal boxes to an extreme and willfully anachronistic manner that, in retrospect, looks far more interesting. Between 1973 and 1978 Chimes executed a series of 48 small panel portraits of figures prominent in 19th- and early 20th-century culture--Guillaume Apollinaire, Andre Breton, Edgar Allan Poe, Marcel Proust, Arthur Rimbaud, Robert Louis Stevenson, for example. Each was based on a period photograph (never a painting) and painted in nocturnal shades of depressive brown that echo the wide, heavy wooden frames that enclose them (as well as citing the wood panel supports).

It's clear enough that these portraits document an interest in 19th-century Symbolist esthetics, its sources and its early 20th-century offspring such as Surrealism. But a few figures seem anomalous--what, for instance, is Lord Kelvin, the British physicist and mathematician, doing among the poetes maudits?--until one realizes that there is a more specific unifying thread to the group: each figure has some connection, direct or merely speculative, to an individual who reappears in this series in several different guises, the scandalous, enigmatic, and finally pitiful creator of Pere Ubu and Faustroll, Alfred Jarry. (Lord Kelvin, for instance, is a sort of guiding spirit behind Jarry's posthumous mock-scientific masterpiece, Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician.)

But why Jarry? Certainly he is a pivotal figure in the transition from Symbolism to modernism, thanks to his cross-circuiting of art and life, which "pushed systematic absurdity into the realm of hallucination, of violated consciousness," as Roger Shattuck put it.(1) Yet Jarry's influence, while pervasive in modern art, is more easily traced through the careers of provocateurs and theatrical quasi-charlatans from Duchamp and Marinetti through Yves Klein to James Lee Byars, Gino de Dominicis, or even Mike Kelley. In contrast, Chimes is a soberly contemplative, reclusive painter who for once (and this is his virtue) purifies Jarry's heritage of everything puerilely transgressive, domesticating this tradition, as it were. In turning to Jarry, Chimes's portraits may represent a search for origins, an invention of artistic community, but they are hardly idealized and not really nostalgic. Rather they are haunted and mournful, like the "sad, accurate faces of artists" they convey.(2) As Chimes emphasizes, hyle, the ancient Greek word for matter, in mundane usage simply means wood. These images, boxed in by oversized wooden frames, are those of spirits unhappily imprisoned in and distorted by matter.