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Spertus in the News
ART: REVIEWS
By Alan G. Artner
Chicago Tribune art critic
Published July 21, 2006
South African art activist Kendell Geers has created the second temporary work commissioned by the Spertus Museum on the construction barricade for its new building. The barricade is visible to pedestrians and drivers on Michigan Avenue and may best be contemplated from across the street in Grant Park, so it occupies a great location for a challenging kind of public art rarely seen elsewhere in the city.
All of the artists commissioned use text in their work. Geers' painted piece, "BE/LIE/VE," relates to a 2001 work in neon, "BE-LIE-VE," with both addressing the issue of faith by dissecting the same word to reveal that a myth, or lie, is at its center. However, where Geers presented the divided syllables straightforwardly in his neon essay, here he turns the word into a repetitive pattern that becomes a visual abstraction.
All of the letters are boldly printed in white on a black background. They read from left to right in several horizontal rows. But some letters are repeated both in reverse and upside down, while others--oversize pairs of Xs--are added to make a stark pattern from which the word "believe" may only gradually be teased out.
The "lie" at the center of faith, often the agent that makes belief possible, does not, then, emerge as clearly as it did for Geers' audience in 2001. And the presence of giant Xs suggests unknown variables as well as signs indicating multiplication. So this is a much more complex treatment of the word and, by extension, the issue, which makes it appropriate that the piece should be at an educational and cultural institution.
Whether viewers in transit can make sense of it is, of course, something else. But I very much like that the issue is raised publicly, for "to believe" anything important has public consequences, and they are today perhaps greater than ever.
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