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Garden of earthly delights
(by Tim Woodcock - October 01, 2008)
‘What’s wrong with having an element of delight in your work?” asks Bill Christman as a tour of his studio and backyard sculpture garden in the Skinker-DeBaliviere neighborhood comes an end.
It is hard to categorize Christman’s work: bric-a-brac sculptures; meticulously painted signs celebrating figures of another era, such as Bob Dylan and Hank Aaron; giant totemic heads. Many people who know Christman know him through his carefully crafted venues — Beatnik’s Bob, a timewarped venue within City Museum — and Joe’s Café, the venue in the front part of his studio that feels more like a speakeasy than a café.
It would be forcing the point to say they are part of an aesthetic whole, but there’s certainly a sense of delight rippling through all these creations.
Christman confesses that many of his artistic impulses go back to childhood, but the resulting art often exhibits a knowing take on nostalgia and a dark sense of humor.
As a child growing up in the 1950s in Clayton, he explored the wreckage of the African-American section of the city as it was torn down to make way for new housing. That was where he and his friends built forts and created clubs for themselves — in reality, these were dens to smoke illicit cigarettes and set off firecrackers, and the forts were decorated with an assemblage of found objects.
Christman points to other touchstones from later in his youth: a high-school trip to Washington, D.C., and New York, which exposed him to the bohemian high life of Greenwich Village. Then there was a spell living in an apartment in Gaslight Square, St. Louis’ own slice of bohemia. Both places were “against the grain” and valued “the handmade look,” he says.
Christman spent many years as a commercial sign painter, but it was his association with Bob Cassilly of City Museum fame that gave him the financial underpinnings to be able to pursue his art full-time. Beatnik Bob’s provides a small but steady stream of income. And occasionally, though there seems to be no pattern as to where or when, Christman says, he sells a piece of art.
Found objects form the basis of much of what Christman does — and for Christman, it seems, the more absurd and the more outsize the better. Hence a wooden sculpture of a Wagnerian heroine warbling a high note inside the studio; a vintage mobile home that sits on stilts outside; a giant ketchup bottle, which he tells people is a Sputnik spaceship that happened to have landed in his backyard; and then there’s a figure called Big John, who comes from Carmi,Ill.-area grocery stores, who is so large that his blue pants stand up outside the front of Christman’s property, while the top half is out back.
Christman describes his work as being like editorial cartoons without the punchline. The viewer is left to fill in the gaps to make the joke. But it is possible to take this idea more literally: a walk through Christman’s backyard with its proliferation of goofy, exaggerated objects really is like a cartoon come to life.
Christman’s reputation is such that people will call him up to see if he wants to pick through the float decorations from yesteryear’s parades or to go through the remains of a shuttered factory. But sometimes he is just an eagle-eyed Dumpster diver. In one corner of the yard sits a rusty lawnchair, remarkable only in its junkiness. But then he reveals its origins: it was the porch chair of Howard Nemerov, a Washington University professor and former poet laureate of the United States. Knowing its significance, he claimed the discarded chair from the alley.
Given that even a spacious studio and sculpture garden can become overfull, why does he pick up one object and leave another? “The objects speak to me, ” he says.
‘Strange Gods’
On Oct. 4 and 5 Christman will open up his studio and backyard sculpture garden to show some of his most recent works in an exhibit called Strange Gods. It is Christman’s first solo show for 15 years.
Christman says that the two-day open house is preferable to the typical “stiff” Friday night gallery opening, where only a fraction of the people are there to look at the work closely.
The gods on display range from household gods that can fit comfortably on a shelf to imposing outdoor totems that cast very long shadows.
Inside, there’s a kitchen god, a whimsical sculpture made from various kitchen implements; another is a memorial to John Hartford, St. Louis’ bowler-hatted folk musician, known for playing the fiddle while clogging. The sculpture combines a photo of Hartford as a young boy with a bowler hat.
Outside, in various stages of completion, are the big gods — the ones whose wrath you wouldn’t want to provoke. Perhaps the most eye-catching is a giant head with a cigarette hanging out his mouth, made from strips of wood. He seems to evoke James Dean cool, yet also the majesty of an Easter Island statue.
“Twentieth-century man is very disconnected from most of the gods of history,” Christman says. Instead we worship fleeting things like celebrity, wealth and technology, he says.
In case this all sounds too pious, you should know that many of the larger sculptures are designed to become part of a future nine-hole mini golf course.
It won’t be a regular course, though. It will be filled with Rube Goldberg-type contraptions and players will be invited to clamber through the sculptures. Some holes will require pool cues instead of putters; on other holes, the balls will be beach balls. Christman he wants the experience to be a great equalizer: It’ll be a course in which a 10-year-old child can beat an expert golfer.
Many of the details of the course will be worked out as Christman builds. After climbing up into a tree-house type structure, the location of one of the holes, via a ladder, he wonders what the best way down will be. Perhaps a fireman’s pole? That’s a detail to be dealt with later.
While a certain degree of planning is required, Christman also keeps his options open because you never know what strange discarded object might be awaiting you around the next corner.
But he has got the final hole — the one where you don’t get your ball back — worked out. Starting on a 10-foot platform the ball will be knocked along a conveyor belt, through a zig-zag of tubing, before running down a sloping xylophone, sounding out a musical scale as it goes.
Delightful.
• Christman Studios, 6014 Kingsbury Ave., will be open to the public 2 to 6 p.m. Oct. 4 and 5 and from 4 to 9 p.m. Oct. 11, during the Skinker-DeBaliviere Centennial Celebration. The studio will be open for gospel brunch with bluegrass musician Joe West from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Oct. 5. The cost is $20. Call 862-2541 for information.
What ever happened to Joe's Cafe?
Who is Joe?
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