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Michael R. Taylor, Thomas
Chimes: Adventures in Pataphysics This catalogue, which accompanies the exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (February 27 - May 6, 2007) is the most complete record of the career of the eighty-six year old painter Thomas Chimes. A Philadelphia native, he chose to return to the city following education at the Art Students League in New York and extended travel in Europe. He had notable success in New York in the early 1960s with two solo gallery exhibitions and purchases by the Museum of Modern Art, but according to Taylor, he embraced Marcel Duchamp’s advice to younger artists that they avoid the endemic venality of the New York gallery scene and "go underground, don’t let anyone know that you are working." The catalogue is beautifully-produced, with all of the exhibited work illustrated in full color and extensive supporting illustrations of both comparative and biographical interest. It contains a chronology, exhibition history and bibliography in addition to Taylor’s extended discussion of the work. He organizes Chimes’ diverse production in four chapters devoted to the crucifixion paintings, metal boxes, panel paintings and white paintings, four phases which he says the artist has come to associate with the four stages of alchemy. Taylor is interested not only in teasing out the highly-specific mystical, literary and philosophical references in Chimes’ work, but in linking him to his contemporaries, specifically Andy Warhol, William Anastasi, Cy Twombly, Richard Hamilton, Nancy Spero, Robert Smithson, Gerhard Richter, and Jess. Taylor indicates the pivotal place of Picasso’s Guernica in Chimes’ artistic development. Before engaging with the Picasso, Chimes produced fairly-academic, representational paintings. Guernica turned his interest to modernism. Taylor discusses the subsequent importance of Hans Hoffman’s teaching and the work of the Abstract Expressionists, Nicholas de Stael, Van Gogh and Matisse’s chapel at Vence. These were assimilated in the early and successful paintings of 1961-62 which incorporated a crucifixion motif and culminated in an eighteen-foot-long mural (1965), purchased by the Ringling Museum which organized Chimes’ first retrospective exhibition in 1968. Chimes’ work changed significantly in 1965 with the beginning of his serious involvement with the work of Antonin Arthaud and through him, the work of Alfred Jarry which became a life-long obsession. Part of the interest in Arthaud was biographical, as had been his interest in Van Gogh; Chimes’ ongoing struggle with depression gave him a particular affinity to other artists who suffered psychotic episodes. Arthaud had suggested that much “madness” was, in fact, a superior vision of truths which society found unacceptable; this was clearly an idea which Chimes found seductive. He began to make a series of beautifully-crafted metal box constructions; they incorporated technical skills the artist had learned when training to be an aircraft mechanic during World War II, and contained many specific references to Arthaud as well as explicit sexual references. In 1973 Chimes made another major break when he began a series of forty-eight panel portraits. The initial image was of Jarry from whom the entire series radiates. It would include several other versions of Jarry and an interconnected group of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century writers and artists including Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, Guillaume Apollinaire, James Joyce, and Marcel Duchamp in multiple guises, including that of his female alter ego, Rrose Selavy. The subjects were chosen because Chimes associated them all with Jarry, including a portrait of Chimes’ wife; he justified her inclusion on the grounds that she represented the “Eternal Feminine,” an unconvincing explanation which Taylor does not pursue. All the paintings were based on photographs, often canonical images by well-known photographers including Nadar and Man Ray. They are appropriated images without irony, and their attitude toward photography would seem to be appreciative. Taylor makes extended comparison of them with Gerhard Richter’s contemporaneous 48 Portraits, yet the artists’ use of their source material is sufficiently different to make the comparison labored. A more suitable comparison would surely have been with Joseph Cornell, who created a personal and hermetic symbology that also incorporated photographic and painted portraits. Cornell also dedicated a work to Apollinaire and based another on the same portrait of Rimbaud used by Chimes. Most of Chimes’ portraits are sepia-toned, like old photographs, and each is surrounded by a massive and exquisitely-crafted wooden frame. In 1980 Chimes made another break when he began painting diverse subjects, almost all of them done in shades of white. Most of these extend his interest in Jarry, although the most recent work, a series of 3-inch square paintings, is based on Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. Here, as with the earlier paintings, Taylor explains in great detail the literary and photographic referents. Neither Jarry nor the artists around him are household names, so Taylor’s careful research and thorough explanation is valuable for anyone who wants a detailed understanding of Chimes’ iconography. The title of the catalogue comes from one of Jarry’s works, Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician and Taylor gives a wonderfully-clear synopsis of this difficult and purposely-contradictory work. That said, I believe other aspects of Chimes’ work have been left unexplored. Firstly, those frames on the panel portraits. Taylor devotes a single paragraph to them, quoting Chimes that he was influenced by the broad wooden frames used by Thomas Eakins. Eakins produced some distinctive and very interesting frames; I don’t doubt that they were a source for Chimes. But that does not explain the prominence Chimes’ frames assume; most of them are larger than the portraits they surround, and in their careful use of wood grain and unusual and elegant carpentry, they are just as interesting. The emphasis on the container places them closer to reliquaries, those highly-worked, jewel-incrusted housings for putative fragments of Christ and his followers. But these function within a sect with a single adherent. The use Chimes makes of the earlier artists could also use some inquiry. Chimes chose writers whose work was anarchic, disruptive, and often offensive to bourgeois values. This was as true of their forms as of their subjects. Jarry said "Screw good taste!" Yet Chimes’ portraits of Jarry and his circle are supremely tasteful and formally conservative. He made easel paintings whose subjects were an earlier avant-garde after a decade in which American artists had been questioning every aspect of conventional art: unitary authorship, permanence, the privileging of painting and sculpture, the gallery and museum venues and the elitism of the artworld and its audiences. To say that Chimes’ work is formally conservative is not a judgement of its worth; his near-contemporary, Jasper Johns, also made easel paintings which include subject-matter known only to himself, and they are crucial to the art of their time. But while the spirit of Alfred Jarry could be seen in the happenings of Allan Kaprow, the performances of Carolee Schneeman, Charlotte Moreman, and Nam June Paik, I am just not sure what to make of Jarry’s visage in Chimes’ paintings.
© 2007 Andrea Kirsh and InLiquid.com; image copyright © Philadelphia Museum of Art |
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