Bean sculptor reflects pride on Chicagoans

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Updated: August 3, 2011 10:22PM

You probably didn’t see “Source Code,” the time-travel thriller that opened in April — I wouldn’t have either, but my older son is a David Bowie fan, and the movie was directed by Bowie’s son, Duncan Jones.

I might have still resisted, but the Bowie connection also inspired the kid to drag us to see “Moon” — Jones’ first picture — and it was OK, a little plodding, but thought-provoking and not entirely stupid, which is about all I ask of a movie.

“Source Code” made no sense at all, if you thought about it, but was fast-paced enough that reflection was not required, and I enjoyed it just for Jake Gyllenhaal’s decent-guy-in-a-jam performance and the swooping, lovely aerial shots of Chicago.

The movie ends at Anish Kapoor’s Bean sculpture at Millennium Park and that moment represented, to me, the formal shift away from the Picasso in Daley Plaza as the obligatory you-are-in-Chicago movie scene, to the vastly-more-aesthetic mirrored Bean.

Maybe now Picasso’s rusty baboon can begin to recede into the subchambers of civic subconscious, along with the white fiberglass Dubuffet in front of the Thompson Center, the Tinkertoy Miro and all the other clunky examples of big name 1970s dreck art that Chicago has been saddled with for the past 45 years and must endure for another 45, or so, until someone gets the fortitude to put them into storage, alongside all those fusty Victorian bronzes celebrating “Steadfastness.”

Am I the first person to point out how seamlessly — no pun intended — the Bean conquered Chicago’s heart? Does anybody not like it? Were there complaints of any kind?

Talk among yourselves while I check . . .

Yes, it was late — Millennium Park opened in July 2004, the Bean still hadn’t been buffed properly. And yes, some griped that it was too close to the Gehry bandshell, though that complaint seems to have faded.

And yes, the official name was instantly batted away, even before the 110-ton sculpture was finished — “Cloud Gate” was seen as both too airy and too specific, part twee dreamcatcher, part Watergate conspiracy.

But nobody held the airy name against it. Like a child with a beloved doll, Chicagoans called it what they wanted to call it.

Reading the coverage of the Bean’s premiere, I must credit colleague Richard Roeper for calling it exactly right in 2004 when he predicted: “Anish Kapoor’s masterpiece might well replace the Picasso as Chicago’s most identifiable sculpture.”

Bingo. The city embracing the sculpture gives us a proprietary interest in the sculptor too (who, unlike Picasso, actually stepped foot here) and Kapoor has again offered a vision of the future worthy of contemplation. While Chicago rolled at the feet of Chinese premiere Hu Jintao when he visited in January, Kapoor this week canceled plans to exhibit his work at the new National Museum of China in Beijing, in protest of the Chinese government’s imprisonment of fellow artist Ai Weiwei.

Americans tend to view any opposition by us to the Chinese state crushing human rights as an echo of Jimmy Carter fecklessness, an embarrassing relic of the late 1970s, like a lime green leisure suit in the closet.

That seems a puzzling, pre-emptive capitulation from a once-proud people.

Perhaps because Kapoor is an artist, perhaps because he was born in Bombay and lives in London, he does not seem to have gotten the memo about our already being conquered by the Chinese behemoth, and is mounting his own small and symbolic protest.

To put a bright spin on it, our passivity may be protective — there is no need to clash with the Communist state, because its own people will undo it, eventually. And they do inch in our direction, though, judging by Monday’s Republican debate, some here seem ready to rush over to meet them — seriously, three top Republican points were 1) lower wages by destroying unions 2) crush dissent, or at least non-mainstream groups such as gays and Muslims and 3) gut the environment by abolishing the EPA. Let’s see: low wages; no dissent; lots of pollution. The Republicans are trying to turn us into Communist China.

I’m with Anish Kapoor on this one. Maybe we can’t stop ourselves from buying their pants. Maybe we can’t stop them from pirating our music and movies. But that doesn’t mean we have to race off to Beijing and perform like dancing dogs at their art museum. We loved the Bean before — and I hope Kapoor has stopped sniffing at the de facto name; the public has an artistic sense, too, and sometimes you need to defer to it. Given its creator’s politics, we should love the Bean even more; it represents a kind of courage we once had, and might yet have again.