IT DOESN’T MATTER WHAT’S OVER YOUR HEAD

Bringing brews to you wherever it’s most comfortable and convenient. The trailer is portable, taking the malt to wherever it is needed. Looking at the blackboard, I wonder what Murica Walking Beer is. It’s pretty cheap.                      

ICE CAT

 

Everybody loves Niki de Saint Phalle’s work. If you have been there, think of the whimsical fountain outside the Pompidou museum in Paris. This one, Ricardo Cat, sits near the entrance  to Laumeier Sculpture Park. Although it’s in the snow, I think it radiates its own heat.

More snow today. Although winters have become milder over my years in this town, there are still data points toward the end of the curve.                    

EYE-CONIC

 

This sculpture was in the background of yesterday’s post. I referred to it as iconic for Laumeier Sculpture Park. It was only later that I realized that this was an opportunity for a really terrible pun.

Odd that there is not a hint of an optic nerve in the back.                       

A QUESTION OF VISION

The roads were passable yesterday so I took my camera out to Laumeier Sculpture Park, a lesser known gem in our area. It has 102 acres / 42 hectares of open fields and hilly wooded trails studded with contemporary art. A piece called Aurelia Roma by Manuel Neri has a protective wrap for the winter. The park’s iconic work, Tony Tasset’s Eye, stares back.

I should acknowledge that this picture was inspired by one that appeared in our local newspaper this week. Although the paper is a shadow of what it once was (Joseph Pulitzer’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch), it has some damn fine photographers.                      

SNIFF

You might think this sculpture at Laumeier was rather obvious - a well-ventilated cabin in the woods, open to every kind of olfactory experience. Those of us with a young person in the household hooked on the book and TV series A Series of Unfortunate Events (like me), might immediately think of the Lucky Smells Saw Mill. You would have to read the explanation, https://www.laumeiersculpturepark.org/tea-makipaa , to find out that it's about dogs. Yeah, I get it, but you would never guess on your own.

OUT OF THE WOODS

Doe, a deer, a female deer?. Not exactly. The photo doesn't show anything for scale, but this is a fiberglass piece in Laumeier Sculpture Park, 12 feet / 3.6 meters high. I'm tall, but I could walk under the belly. It is another invention of Tony Tasset, the sculptor who created the eye in Sunday's post. https://www.laumeiersculpturepark.org/tony-tasset-2015  Good thing it's a herbivore. Except it's fake.              

KIDS VS ART

Back at Laumeier Sculpture Park with Ellie's school field trip. What might be going through their heads? The statue is more-or-less classical, with propeller blades or oars or thick cricket bats sprouting from odd locations. The boy on the right just wants a selfie. Ellie, to the left, looks like she has had all she wants. The next boy is far more interested in his phone (sigh). Appreciation takes time. I'll keep working on our kid.             

MADELEINE MONDAY ON SUNDAY

 

 

 

Monday is April 1, City Daily Photo theme day, so we have to juggle the schedule a bit. Yesterday morning Ellie's school had a field trip to Laumeier Sculpture Park. I went along. It is a 72 acre / 29 hectare wonderland, or I think so. Ellie and a classmate are standing in front of one of its iconic works, but there is much more to experience down the side paths through the woods.            

FALLING MAN

I suppose our town's best known 20th Century visual artist was Ernest Trova, https://etrova.org/home.html. He was, in a sense, a one-trick pony with endless, if creative, variations on a single theme, Falling Man. They are smooth, armless male figures, truncated cleanly at the shoulder like a mannequin. They often pitch forward but sometimes, like here, stand like Egyptian funerary figures. You can look at the web link if you want a precis on the subject. 

The art on display at Laumeier reminds me of the words of the poet Archibald MacLeish that a poem should not mean, but be. The essence here can be a challenge to the viewer.              

SIX TONS OF BALLOON SCULPTURE

As I write this series of posts I wonder more about how much help even receptive viewers need with contemporary sculpture. This piece at Laumeier is called Sugabus, a 2004 work by Robert Chambers. It refers to the arrangement of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms in a molecule of sucrose. Well, and also Cerberus, the terrifying three-headed dog guarding the gates of Hades. Are there three heads? Is there a diet version?             

STATE SURVEILLANCE

Likely the most popular work at Laumeier Sculpture park is Tony Tasset's Eye, https://www.laumeiersculpturepark.org/tony-tasset-2007. The descriptions and interpretations provided by art venues, as in this link, are mostly written by curators. They may speak to the creators' ideas or to scholarship but I wonder how much they resonate with the average viewer. They don't always resonate much with me. Eye creeps me out. Big Brother might be watching you if it could move around.           

THE WAY

One of the two best known works at Laumeier Sculpture park is The Way, completed by Alexander Liberman in 1980. It was constructed from 18 salvaged steel oil tanks, is 65 feet / 20 meters tall, 102 feet / 31 meters wide and 100 feet  30.5 meters deep and weighs 55 US tons (50 metric). The work dominates the central lawn. It is hard to get a sense of scale but for the tiny person at the center left edge.          

LAUMEIER

These pages have had many pictures from Citygarden, our two square block downtown art oasis.  They have rarely featured Laumeier Sculpture Park, a 105 acre / 42.5 hectare haven in the suburbs. https://www.laumeiersculpturepark.org/ . There are 70-something major outdoor works and a couple of buildings with rotating shows. Yesterday was such a perfect spring day that Mrs. C and I went over for a walk.

This is Donald Lipsky's Ball? Ball! Wall? Wall!, a 300 foot / 91.5 meter chain of marine buoys that snakes along a path in the woods, finding its way somewhere between minimalism and surrealism.            

I SEE BEER

A change of scene to the big art fair at Laumeier Sculpture Park. Tony Tasset's Eye must be looking for something other than the beer truck. I'd take a left.          

Qu’ils Mangent de la Brioche

More neon art at Laumeier, this one by David Hutson himself. This was hard to me to read at first because what look like R's to me in the second word are actually N's. This is the original French of the famous words attributed to Marie Antoinette, usually rendered in English as "let them eat cake," the words she supposedly spoke after being told that the peasants had no bread.

There are problems with the story. The word brioche doesn't actually mean cake. It is a very rich bread with lots of egg and butter; it would have been as unaffordable to the masses as cake. However, there is no evidence that Marie spoke these words. They have become part of a legend.

Note the unusual bread slicer in the lower right. It resembles Le Rasoir National, a clever compliment to the words.       

Big Boy

More signs from the neon art exhibit at Laumeier Sculpture Park. I don't  remember these restaurants and signs when I was growing up in the Northeast but I sure do from the time I hit the Midwest. They were sometimes called Bob's Big Boy. No relation but, like this guy, I was a lot heavier back then. (I'm about 70 pounds lighter that at the time of our wedding.)      

This a very old sign. Note the character: cut-away coat, vest and bow tie - formal evening wear. And spats! Now, if only he could do something about his hair and teeth. They give him a baby-like look..                                                                                  

Now All We Need Is Sex And Rock & Roll

More of the neon art exhibit at Laumeier Sculpture Park. I wonder what selection of drugs might be helpful this morning. We won the House but lost our much-admired senator, Claire McCaskill, to a young man who has spent his first two years in political office making a shambles of the Missouri attorney general's office.

At least there won't be any horrible legislation passed by Congress in the next two years.     

Freezer Fresh

Those are two words I don't expect to see together. If you buy frozen salmon at the supermarket, is it fresh?

This is from the current indoor exhibit at Laumeier Sculpture Park. It is about the restored old neon signs and neon sculpture of David Hutson. I suppose the big sign is about ice cream, although it's hard to be sure. It's certainly not acceptable by today's standards.The small sign in the back is part of Hutson's expression of Claes Oldenburg's artistic philosophy.        

Madeleine Monday

There was an event Saturday evening at Laumeier Sculpture Park called Light The Way. The reference is to the monumental structure at the end of the park's great lawn. It was mostly for children: lawn games, crafts, face painting and so on.

Ellie had a great time. The adults did not. It was cold. The lines at the food and beer trucks were awful. There was a least a half-hour long line for face painting; we were fortunate to talk her out of that.

The kid was happy to pose with  Tony Tasset's Eye. Her Nepalese leopard hat added a certain touch. I didn't know which picture I preferred so I used both. Below, she is enclosed in the arms of Niki de Saint Phalle's Ricardo Cat.  

       

Triangle, Sphere

Back at Laumeier for a bit. I really need to shoot some new material but I really need to go to work today. (It occurs to me that I am the oldest of four siblings and the only one who hasn't retired.)

This is a bit of clever geometry -  Mark di Suvero's Bonibus, which feels like a Calder made of steel beams rather than floating, amorphous planes. And then there is the all-seeing eye. Can you hide from it in the woods behind?