Don Baum: Domus
I must show that the house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories, and dreams of mankind. The binding principle in this integration is the daydream. Past, present, and future give the house different dynamisms, which often interfere, at times opposing, at others, stimulating one another. In the life of a man, the house thrusts aside contingencies, its councils of continuity are unceasing. Without it, man would be a dispersed being.... Life begins well, it begins enclosed, protected, all warm in the bosom of the house.
Gaston Bachelard
The Poetics of Space
Part of the fascination of Don Baum's house sculptures undoubtedly lies in their ability to excite unspoken or unconscious fantasies about the kinds of security the house can provide. In a fast-changing society where geographical mobility is the norm, in a world of jet travel, company transfers, commuter relationships, families uprooted and often dismembered, the image of the house and the safety and continuity it implies hold an enormous emotional appeal. Satisfying some primal longing-for the artist, perhaps, as well as for the viewer-Baum's symbolic edifices release and nourish the daydreams of which the philosopher writes, dreams of the contentment made impossible by the cold realities of our modern, frequently peripatetic lives.
Although Baum's first house sculptures were immediately inspired by the shelters built by lndochinese "boat people" in 1979, the true origins of the series-material, formal, and psychological-are deeply embedded in the artist's own life and work. Born in Michigan's forested Upper Peninsula in 1922, Baum left the small town of Escanaba for the larger world as soon as he came of age, but still returns regularly to the places of his youth . It was in fact during a summer visit to the northern Great Lakes that Baum read Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's engrossing ethnological account of Montaillou, which revealed and reinforced his own concerns for the symbolic significance of the house. Already aware of the implications of the house as more than just physical shelter, Baum discovered in Ladurie's analysis of a fourteenth-century French village the social, genealogical, and mystical concept of the domus.
For the heretical inhabitants of this tiny hamlet in the Pyrenees, whose testimony before the Catholic Inquisition provided Ladurie with his primary material, domus meant both family and house. In addition to the actual structure of wood, stone, or dried mud that protected a nuclear family, its relatives, servants, and domestic animals, domus signified a social unit and, beyond that, a lineage which endured through time. The domus also represented a moral entity, comprised as it was of individuals who tended to be of one mind vis-a-vis the religious issues that led many of Montaillou's denizens to trial, prison, or a fiery demise at the stake. A nexus of alliances-conjugal, familial, economic, political, and spiritual-the house had a fate or fortune of its own, and when death entered the domus, survivors took pains to preserve that fortune for future generations:
In Montaillou the house had its "star," its "luck," in which the dead still had a share.... Star and luck were protected by keeping in the house bits of fingernail and hair belonging to the deceased head of the family. Hair and nails, which went on growing after death, were regarded as bearers of especially intense vital energy. Through this ritual the house "was imbued with certain magic qualities belonging to the deceased, " and could subsequently convey those qualities to other people belonging to the same line .
The house is therefore also a reliquary, a point of contact between the living and the dead and, as Baum has observed, the first safety as well as the ultimate tomb. His initial ruminations on the domus of Montaillou, which occurred at a time when he was surrounded by the rustic and run-down shacks of hunters and fishermen in the Upper Peninsula, led to a group of diminutive cabins such as Domus 1: Au Train (1979), constructed of wood slats, sticks, gravel paper, and driftwood collected along the shores of Lake Superior. Sometimes raised on stilts and thatched with feathers, these primitivistic "dwellings" were entirely congruent with Baum's previous artistic preoccupations. His wall-mounted sculptural reliefs from the sixties-Cartouche (1963), for example, or Ganymede (circa 1965,)-exhibit the same appreciation for found objects, weathered and worn, the same interest in organic materials manipulated to aesthetic and symbolic ends. A bizarre and somewhat horrifying untitled assemblage of circa 1965 provided an intriguing precedent for feathered works like Deliverance (1980): the earlier piece consisted of an open wooden box with a stuffed deer's head protruding through the plumage of pheasants and owls.
As a container for the remains of a once living being, that untitled assemblage also suggested the artist's fascination with the reliquary, which was to re-emerge in a more overt fashion in sculptures such as Au Train Lake House and the cage-like Reptile House (both 1982). These houses or porticoes, distinguished by their open form from the secretive cabins, contain surrogate body parts-a pair of driftwood "legs" and a straw boot or "foot," respectively. The artist has spoken of the impact of votive objects and precious reliquaries he had seen in Europe in the early fifties while visiting Gothic and Romanesque cathedrals and church treasuries; and in Spain, in particular, he was intrigued by miniature wax limbs available for purchase in religious shops as potential offerings to the church .
But his interest in the paraphernalia of devotional observance predates his experiences abroad, and extends into the motivations that underlie the spectacle of religious expression. Roman Catholicism, with its ancient mysteries and dramatic rituals, had always seemed especially exotic and captivating to Baum, who attended the more austere Presbyterian services while growing up in Escanaba. He recalls the town's population being about half Scandinavian Protestant at the time, half French- and Irish-Catholic, with very large Catholic churches and schools:
Many of my friends were Catholic, and I remember going to midnight mass when I was in high school.... I was very interested in that.... Later, I think these same kinds of feelings surfaced, for example in Spain, and also in Italy and in France, where I suddenly felt very convinced ... not that Jesus lives or anything of that sort, but of the ... needs people have-have had-(for a) higher power, and that, as a result . . . you see this kind of incredible creativity.
During a trip to Haiti in 1982, Baum encountered a variant of Catholicism, absorbed and transformed by African religion in the rituals of Voodoo. Colorful linoleum houses such as Bagi I and Zobop (both 1982) continue the reliquary theme, but their Creole titles bear witness to the artist's inquiry into another culture and its peculiar belief system: a glossary of Voodoo terms defines bagi as a room with an altar to a supernatural being or loa, zobop as a member of a secret society of sorcerers. Other allusions to Voodoo are found in the titlesof HouseforDutchLoa ("Dutch" because of the windmill that decorates one facade) and Loa Racine (both 1982). The beautiful Kabrit Maro (1983), so visually and tactually appealing, sheathed in black-and-white goatskin, refers to the sacrificial goat, ritually slaughtered in Haiti to feed and strengthen Voodoo spirits.
Underlying Baum's references to such practices is an anthropological inquisitiveness concerning all forms of superstition, which parallels his wide-ranging interest in religious and artistic expression of every kind. He was undoubtedly struck by Voodoo initiation rites that require novices to be enclosed for one week in a room called the djbvo. There the Voodoo priest takes hair from various parts of the neophytes' bodies, and nail parings from their left hands and feet. Possession of these relics guarantees the priest control over the initiates' SOUIS. The notion, cherished also in Montaillou, that such bodily remnants bear some kind of mystical power informs Baum's Hairflow houses (1982), which sport tails or switches of human hair. Constructed of recycled color floor tile, perched on short stilts or feet, the houses seem to spurt hair from little spigots in an active, even sexual way.
Although the house as metaphor for the human body has not been an overriding concern in Baum's oeuvre, the sexual implications of Holster House I, for instance, and The House That Jack (both 1981), are immediately apparent. The latter piece, a windowed wooden hut on legs, boasts a wooden "phallus," strategically placed, which declares its gender to the world. More ambiguous though equally suggestive, Holster House I, with its toy pistol, may also be seen as male; alternatively of course, the house can be read as a female receptacle accommodating the removable gun. A foot-shaped stocking stretcher incorporated into the structure of the house adds a subtle note of fetishism to the ensemble. The object restates, in a distilled and symbolic fashion, the theme Baum addressed in the late 1960s in a disturbing series of coupling doll sculptures such as Clint and Clara and the well-known, horrific Mr. and Mrs. Ballin (both 1969). The conflation of sex and death in the latter piece recurs, albeit less conspicuously, in Reposoir, a house sculpture the artist had cast in bronze in an edition of three in 1986. Here a homey Lincoln-log cabin takes on sexual as well as reliquary connotations by virtue of a great bone protruding through its open door. The title, Creole for the "tree or any other place where a loa is supposed to live, may also be a punning reference, albeit indirect, to the artist's own name.
Certain of Baum's houses have memorial associations without directly resembling reliquaries. Woven into the fabric of the construction itself may be material reminiscent of a departed friend or of a time or place whose personal significance to the artist must remain obscure from the spectator's point of view. Examples include Near Aledo (1980), built of flotsam Baum collected near the small western Illinois town where his late friend, the painter Gertrude Abercrombie, had spent her childhood, and Chinatown (1980), made from crushed tin cans picked up in Chicago's Chinatown on evenings out with artist Miyoko Ito. The translucent and ethereal Studio for M, a poignant memorial to Ito created after her death in 1983, echoes the mystery, poetic light, and structural clarity of her own airy, tightly composed abstract paintings.
Memory is a critical element in Baum's house sculptures, a fact early acknowledged in Childhood I and Childhood III (both 1983). The images carved into or cut out of the walls of these structures-a horse-drawn coach and a stag in a forest, respectively-reminded the artist of stories he had known as a boy. By this time, the houses begin to take on a pictorial quality, but the imagery is always a function of their materials, never merely applied. Supplanting nature with culture, instead of driftwood and bone Baum introduced game boards from chess or Chinese checkers, yardsticks, signs, puzzle parts model train tracks, and pictures made from wood-burning kits, all purchased from second-hand shops the artist loves to haunt. Like the Surrealists who have always inspired him, Baum maintains a keen appreciation for the poetic charge that may at any moment emanate from an object, encountered by chance, when memories or emotions are vaguely stimulated. Andre Breton and Alberto Giacometti scavenged the Paris flea markets for mysterious objects that awakened unconscious responses. Baum and other Chicago artists have combed Salvation Army stores and the stalls of Maxwell Street market for cast-off items that become valued collectibles in their eyes. And when Baum incorporates an old game piece, for example, or a remnant of a ouija board in Curtain (1984), a wave of recognition and nostalgia can overwhelm the viewer, who is transported in memory back to the long-forgotten pleasures of youth.
It is important to note that most of these houses rest on breadboard bases. Discovered in thrift shops like Baum's other building materials, the breadboards reinforce the domestic resonance of the house imagery, bringing to mind the homely rituals of kneading, slicing, and serving bread. A basic source of nourishment, bread can also have mystical or sacramental significance, and in fact Baum's first use of the breadboard was in association with the body of Christ: in a provocative assemblage of 1964 titled The Vamp, a broken crucifix with a baby doll's limbs and a skull for a head hangs pitifully impaled on a breadboard gibbet. The artist traces his fascination with the crucifix to a childhood gift of an Easter egg decorated with an image of the martyred Savior. Whether Baum was conscious of the egg at the time as a symbol of resurrection and eternal life is not clear; nor were the eucharistic implications of displaying a Christ crucified on a breadboard necessarily foremost on his mind when he created The Vamp. But Baum's intuitive approach has always permitted meaning to enter the work with or without conscious effort; he is convinced that choices artists make are never arbitrary but always, somehow, psychologically determined . In returning to the breadboard repeatedly as a presentation surface for the house fifteen years after The Vamp, he reiterated the object's usefulness-and not merely as a support. Shifting the board's orientation from vertical to horizontal, he transformed a sacrifice into an offering, a grim vision of death into an affirmation of life.
The house becomes a repository for accumulated memories, souvenirs of travels real or imagined. Motifs like train tracks or the painted sailing ship in Around the World (1984) conjure up journeys to faraway places. One thinks of Joseph Cornell's romantic shadow boxes, such as The Caliph of Bagdad (circa 1954), with their exotic birds, map fragments, foreign postage stamps, and collaged clippings describing European hotels. But the differences between Cornell's vitrines and Baum's houses are more instructive than the similarities. Because Cornell never travelled far'from his home in Flushing, New York, his dreamy assemblages represent flights of fancy, voyages of desire never realized. Baum, on the other hand, propelled by an insatiable curiosity, has travelled the world. Moreover, there have been times of uncertainty and transition in his life when he has lived in hotels. The house to him thus holds the attraction of a solid and secure base of operations, a place to which one can always return.
The opposite holds true for H.C. Westermann in Mad House (1958), which has been described as "an allegory on [the] sexual frustration.... rejection, fear, insecurity, and even hatred that can come with the dissolution of a relationship. Westermann's house, not quite forty inches in height, is built of wood and embellished with signs and symbols of separation and its attendant anxiety: disembodied limbs and facial features, peepholes, escape hatches, a door sealed shut and inscribed "keep out. Although Westermann's example is often invoked in discussions of Baum's domus sculptures, Mad House demonstrates the essential disparity in the two artists' attitudes and approaches to the house form. Westermann's structures, whether asylums, cages, or torture chambers, stand for entrapment rather than protection; they promise no comfort but comment instead on the trials and vicissitudes of existence. As a kind of antidote to the menacing unpredictability of life, Westermann offers absolutely rigorous control of his medium, the finest craftsmanship, perfection in every polished detail.
For Baum, however, construction techniques are more simply a means to an end than an aspect of content itself. Likewise, sculptural issues are overshadowed in his work by a concern for meaning; formal relationships, while certainly considered, are always secondary to the artist's preoccupation with the potential for emotive or psychological impact. When he introduces an aperture in the facade of a house, for instance, it is not to contrast mass and space, solid and void, but to excite voyeuristic desires. The plastic aspects of the domus are thus almost incidental; their three-dimensionality can be seen as the end result of a long process which began in the late forties when Baum, then a painter, sought to enrich the surfaces of his canvases through collage, then moved to wall-mounted relief, and finally to freestanding constructions.
In a sense Baum's actual process of building a house is a kind of journey, involving movement around the object in time and space, a parallax reenacted by the viewer who attempts to grasp the anecdotal relationships established among borrowed and juxtaposed images. Only suggested in earlier works, pictorial narrative is strongest in the most recent group of houses, the delightful series begun in 1986 in which the artist makes use of recycled paint-by-number pictures, again, salvaged from resale shops. In A Fine Romance (1986), he cut up and reassembled picturesque views evoking both a European grand tour and a New England idyll-on the exterior of the house, a Dutch waterfront with moored boats, a formal park with statuary; a mill on a stream, ducks taking flight. An inset of pink roses suggestively adorns the doorway to the house, while inside, the walls are embellished with woodsy scenes, collie dogs, boys fishing-the stuff of dentist-office decor or cheap motel-room art. Baum's astonishing transformation of such hackneyed images into a beautiful and truly romantic object recurs in touchingly lyrical works like Sundew Effect (1986), made of floral-designed linoleum, and the diminutive NightMusic (1987), which began as a painting of swans on black velvet-the ultimate in kitsch-and ended as visual poetry, darkly sensuous as a verse by Baudelaire.
The travelog quality of houses like A Fine Romance and Around the World and the quasi-narrative aspects of Ten Commandments (1986) or The Apparition (1988) bring to mind a curious and unexpected analogy in the work of the fifteenth-century Flemish painter Hans Memling. The lovely and precious Ursula Shrine (1489), housed in the Hospital of St. John in Bruges, takes the form of a miniature Gothic church, about three feet tall, painted on all sides with scenes from the life of the virtuous princess of Brittany. A walk around the shrine reveals Memling's visual account of Ursula's pilgrimage to Rome, via Cologne and Basel, accompanied by her betrothed and eleven thousand virgins, and their return voyage along the Rhine which ended with Ursula's martyrdom by the Huns. Although by no means a direct model for Baum's paint-by-number houses, Memling's unique object nevertheless provides an obvious parallel, combining painting, sculpture, and architectural references in the service of a unifying narrative. Through his travels, Baum has first-hand knowledge of the shrine; his fondness for it, and his special love for Northern Renaissance art in general, date to the late forties and early fifties when he studied art history at the University of Chicago.
Some of his paint-by-number constructions incorporate famous art-historical icons such as Gainsborough's Blue Boy and Leonardo's Mona Lisa. For many, of course, the mass-produced and mass-marketed painting kits that reproduce such cliched tableaux, further depleting them of their original significance, represent the utter debasement of art. Similarly, the cloying, sentimental landscapes and biblical and patriotic scenes appeal to false emotions and exhausted concepts of nature, religion, and country. Baum's achievement resides in his ability, through disruptive montage techniques, to turn our disdain for such banal material into wonder:truncated, turned sideways or upside down, mixed and matched according to color, pattern, and theme, the paintings are transfigured; abstract passages of considerable visual interest emerge, images cropped and adjoined assume startling new meanings. The astounding and provocative Wedding (1986) provides a rich example. On its pedimented entrance facade, Christ and La Gioconda are halved and united in a single androgynous being, whose ambiguous gender echoes the problematic nature of the earlier Holster House. The horses, deer, and elk that appear elsewhere on the exterior of The Wedding may introduce an oblique comment on the animal aspects of human sexuality; inside is a riot of floral decoration. Slightly scandalous, the object is an evocative dreamwork offered up for the scrutiny of psychoanalysis.
In House of Nine Lives (1986), on the other hand, Baum's joking propensities come forward to deliver a witty surprise. The exterior of the structure is dominated by paint-by-number nudes in pasty pink, someone's anemic ideal of feminine beauty. The nudes'vapid sensuality pales even further next to lusty still life elements including ripe red apples, an opulent poppy bouquet, a glass of rosy claret. Curiosity in this case is not a fatal flaw but a necessary requirement to understanding the punning play of words and images: a peek through the door reveals an interior adorned with frolicking paint-by-number kittens. The "cat-house" decor insults the demure demoiselles on the outside, whose domicile is thus unmasked as a house of ill repute. By this time, the house for Baum has become a vehicle for any kind of content, rather like a blank canvas, the locus of unlimited possibilities.
Baum's spirited and sometimes naughty humor and penchant for vernacular culture played a key role in his initial tongue-in-cheek adaptations of paint-by-number pictures. His discovery of what has proved to be a veritable payload of source material outside the artistic mainstream should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Chicago-style aesthetics. In 1975, describing an already entrenched attitude among the Chicago Imagists, Baum wrote of "the seminal nature of vulgarity" and the important inspiration provided by ... non-art "art". Clearly, however, the motivations underlying his appropriation, cannibalization, and remarkable redemption of one of the lowest forms of handicraft are complex. His attentiveness to kitsch is compatible with his vehement rejection of everything pretentious, pompous, and highminded. Still, he remains aware of the almost contemptible triteness of the subjects of paint-by-number pictures, marketed under titles like 11005-A Autumn in the Hills . At the center of his project, there is an empathetic feeling for those anonymous, non-professional "artists" whose investment of time and labor in this humble pursuit might inspire sheer indifference in anyone less generously human than Baum himself. After handling the paintings over several years, he has even been able to distinguish among the different hands that created them, and has characterized them as poignantly earnest in their pride of accomplishment.
His unique position in the history of Chicago art, as a proponent of outsider art, an influential teacher, curator, and administrator, has at times tended to overshadow Baum's own artistic production which, transcending locale, has become consistently richer and more evocative through the years. Then, too, his frank embrace of intuitive procedures and his declared "nonintellectual" approach have often obscured the true complexity of his enterprise . Engaged by art history, ethnology, language, literature, psychoanalysis, every form of creative expression, and above all by people themselves and their endless idiosyncracies, Baum brings a high quotient of intellect to his unconsciously generated images. And the domus series, dependent on the artist's serious reflection over time on the processes of signification, cross-cultural themes and superstitions, and the psychological ramifications of the house, represents only one aspect of his exceptional achievement. In the domus, Baum has found an auspicious personal symbol: it preserves his memories, protects his daydreams. And we are the fortunate inheritors of its magical contents.
Sue Taylor