City watch.

A set of wheels asks `What is art?'

June 18, 2003|By Jon Anderson, Tribune staff reporter.

Hey, kids, don't try to build this bike at home!

Don't take your basic Schwinn street cruiser and turn it into a 7-foot-high, 9-foot-long bicycle decorated with flags, fur, fabrics, photos, mirrors, pinwheels, two blaring radios and a wooden toilet seat.

Instead, go see this art object--once a working bicycle--at a gallery in the River West neighborhood.

The work, titled "Slim's Bike," is now on public display at Intuit, a center for outsider art at 756 N. Milwaukee Ave. It will be there until Aug. 23, yet another milestone in an age-old discussion, "What is art?"

Art, sculptor Lorado Taft once suggested, is anything that the average person cannot do well. That was a thought that caught the ear of Chicago socialite Mrs. Potter Palmer, an early backer of the Art Institute of Chicago.

"Speaking of art," she retorted in 1893, "my husband can spit over a boxcar."

Though that can be dangerous in a windy city, one perennial duty of art is to expand horizons. Looking for fresh ways to define what they see, modern artists have used everything from cannon balls to miles of string and cracked plates.

For James "Slim" Thompson, who died in Detroit in 1998, his studio was his bike.

"He wanted to enliven his community, attract attention and startle people," Jeff Cory, the gallery's director, said of Thompson Friday night, before the show's opening. "He was, um, eccentric," added artist Ben Hernandez.

A man who "did not make friends easily," as Hernandez put it, Thompson was a known character in the Cass Corridor area of Detroit, riding around on a bike he remodeled every winter for 15 years or more.

At 6 feet 9 inches, Thompson was not a man to be missed, even more so as he wheeled his contraption through what artist Chris Turner described as the "artist, musician and weirdo enclave" around Wayne State University.

Turner and Hernandez were the ones who stepped in to rescue the bike five years ago, after Thompson died following a series of strokes. He was, by best estimate, somewhere between 57 and 63 years old.

As often happens with outsider artists--many of whom are eccentrics, isolates, compulsive visionaries or all three--Thompson had lived by himself in a tiny apartment, with no one to take care of his art works.

After his death, someone, possibly his landlord, bundled up his possessions and tossed them into a back alley for disposal. Along with them went the bike, and several smaller bikes, kept in a shed out back.

Then the rains came.

"It took a year to dry the thing out," said Turner, who salvaged the big bike from the garbage pile and stored it in his studio before it attracted the attention of urban ethnographers from Wayne State.

In 1999, Slim's bicycle was exhibited at the Detroit Institute of Arts, as an example of great bicycle decorating. The Intuit exhibition, which will run for 10 weeks, is its second exhibition.

A man whose private life was shrouded in mystery, perhaps wisely so, Thompson once was asked why he had created the bike. "I like the attention," he replied, in the style of bike decorators everywhere.

What makes it art is that he went further than others had gone before.