Art vs. Commerce: I. Nudes in the Bank
Let’s go to the scoreboard. After last week’s hectic action in Chicago, the results are: Commerce 2, Art 0.
They came in with slides of their work. Sippel builds little wooden houses out of two-by-fours and puts small figures inside that are made of roofing nails and have plaster skulls or heads on them. The outsides are marked in hieroglyphs of Sippel’s invention. Gauntt paints in a menacing new-expressionist manner; the late Francis Bacon was a major influence, Goya another.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Sexual exploitation was the farthest thing from Gauntt’s mind. Except as a theme. Afterward, Gauntt would interpret one of his new paintings for us, Rape of Medusa–“which never, of course, happened, but I was just thinking in terms of the whole act of rape on an evil victim. It still doesn’t justify it.”
In style and mood the paintings Gauntt hung, still wet, in the cases of the LaSalle Bank Building looked very much like the paintings in the slides that had passed inspection a few weeks earlier, except that if one looked closely enough, here a breast and there a penis were now discernible. Gauntt and Sippel had expected someone from management to pass final judgment on the works before they went up. But no one was waiting to meet them but a handyman.
“It’s a conservative building,” said Petersen.
“I personally didn’t feel they were done very well, but one of them had some little tiny skulls on a shelf and on a shelf below was a little white ceramic fertility figure. There was a very large belly and two very large breasts. I think they were grotesque, nightmarish. But satanic is nonsense.
The Tribune wouldn’t accept the ad.
