Mike Baur
at the Chicago Cultural Center, through June 30
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Baur refers not only to ancient history but to our own more recent past. Of his many ship shapes he remarks that “most of us got here by boat.” And one inspiration for the series was the detritus from would-be immigrants’ flimsy boats washed up on Florida beaches a few years ago. Baur, who’s 44 and lives in West Chicago, was raised in the rural Ozarks. The first artworks he saw were the 19th-century European oil paintings that hung in his home–his father, serving in World War II, had rescued them from likely destruction in the chaos of a collapsing Germany. His father was a minister, and being raised a Baptist made Baur “anti-organized religion. I don’t even like my own authority–as soon as I make a rule, I break that too.”
Baur’s best works are his most irregular and asymmetrical; they’re organized to cut into and energize the space around them. In Star Side three rods project from a central support: two “feet” extend off to the left, and a long, tillerlike shape reaches to the right. Heavily rusted and displaying a variety of colors, this work has a kind of rudder at the tiller’s end that looks about as functional as the concrete oars. The work’s power comes from its mixture of balance and imbalance, symmetry and asymmetry: only one of the feet touches the base, and while the rods projecting to right and left balance one another, the whole seems a bit askew. It’s real metal, apparently a piece of the real world, but its wildly irregular colors and overall jaggedness suggest an artist’s dream as much as an artifact.
Artists have often presented nature and industry as fundamentally opposed. There are no factories in the mountain paintings of Caspar David Friedrich; when 19th-century American landscape painters included a railroad in their panoramic nature views, it often seemed an intrusion. Many artists today use industrial materials to simulate nature, but generally the results seem far removed from the manufacturing process. Ruppert, however, sees a continuum between natural forces and the heating and molding that shape metal for industrial use, between organic shapes and cast forms. Metal spilling from a mold creates the organic look of Funnel and Screen, and in the lightning series, molded metal and sheared-off tree bark are intimately related. A number of lines in the cast rocks of Glacier Boulders reveal the breaks between the cast sections, but the way they twist through space, following the boulder’s contours, resembles the rhythmic mixture of straight lines and organic twists in the lightning pieces.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): “Star Side” by Mike Baur.
