1 IN THE ART OF CHANCE SAMUEL BAK PUCKER GALLERY | BOSTON 2 Incrementally, 2017 Oil on canvas 24 x 36” BK2051 3 In View of Events to Come, 2017 Oil on canvas 16 x 20” BK2037 IN THE ART OF CHANCE SAMUEL BAK ALBERT EINSTEIN FAMOUSLY SAID THAT GOD DOES NOT PLAY DICE WITH THE universe. Stephen Hawking replied that not only does God play dice, He sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can’t be seen. Throughout nearly seven decades of artistic production, Samuel Bak has often used dice, within the confines of paper and canvas, as supporting characters. But in this series, they take center stage. He plays with them, deconstructs them, and makes the viewer search for them. He prompts us to ask if there’s more to the laws of the universe than the laws of chance. Dice are hardly new to human civilization. In Hindu mythology, the god Shiva plays dice with his consort, Parvati, and loses. Dice dating back nearly 5,000 years have been excavated in Iran and around the same period Egyptians played a dice game called Senet. The Romans were inveterate gamblers — in all four Gospels Roman soldiers cast lots for Jesus’s clothing at the foot of the cross. Dice were thrown in ancient China and Japan. Our English words — die for one cube, dice for two or more — come from the Latin datum, which means “something given.” In these paintings, Bak considers just what humanity has been given. 4 Humanity doesn’t get to look on from a safe distance. The human form is often absent from Bak’s oeuvre, but here there is at least one figure in each work. In a handful of instances, Lady Fortuna invites us to play, while in the remainder, Chance is a man’s world, and not an easy one. We can start with the landscape. The distant mountains remind us of Mount Sinai, from which Moses descended with the Tablets of the Law — the Hebrews’ compact with God, which appears to have been abrogated. The forests recall the lost Garden of Eden, but also the forest of Ponary in Poland, where Bak’s father and grandparents were executed by Nazis during World War II. Uprooted trees and broken branches stand in for the destruction of a community. There are no villages. The structures — usually made of dice cubes — are ruins, peeling, crumbling, collapsing, melting into an abstract puddle of confusion. If they’re on wheels, they’re either going nowhere or headed straight to the crematorium. Many of the objects in this show, dice or otherwise, are fragmented, strapped together, or suspended by ropes from whatever is above. It’s as if God had repented of his creation, sent out a recall notice, and ordered everything inanimate to be hoisted up and overhauled. Maybe it will come back down brand new, squeaky clean, and infused with logic. Maybe not. We humans are no better off. Body parts are, as is Bak’s tendency, displaced, substituted, and reduced to stone or slats of wood primed for burning. Bak doesn’t just play with dice — he plays with the pips, or indentations, on the die face. Liberated from their home cubes, they take on a life of their own. In half a dozen instances, they pose as the moon, as if in homage to the thirteenth-century medieval Latin poem that begins “O Fortuna, velut luna” (“O Fortuna, just like the moon”). They also reference the Earth. In Above Estimate (page 14), the pips are pear shaped – for Bak, the fruit of Eden is a pear rather than an apple. As if the dice weren’t already loaded enough, now they’re snake-bit. Given Bak’s fondness for puns, it’s surprising the dice don’t show snake eyes. The man in Above Estimate is lifting a large, heavy die, staggering under its weight, and a wooden X bars re-entry to the Garden. In In View of Events to Come (page 3), a fashionably dressed woman with closed eyes holds a suspended pip orb, as if it were a crystal ball. The man opposite her gazes at another fortune-telling orb, but with dice faces fluttering about him like shrouds, or paper about to burst into flame, he probably doesn’t want to know what’s in store. In Promoters (page 31), the pip becomes a balloon in the hand of a man wearing a paper die face like a signboard — as if Fate needed to attract new business. Could this balloon airlift him to safety? Not likely with a pip-formed ball and chain at his feet. Fate giveth, and Fate taketh away. The balloons reappear in Short Message (page 17), where they actually do airlift dice that resemble heavy steel safes. The “1” pip is a porthole from which a hand extends holding a letter-sized piece of paper. Airmail, perhaps, but similar missives are wafting about, so the chances of delivery seem slim. The porthole recurs in Paternal Wisdom (page 5); however, it’s boarded over with a wooden X, precluding escape. Two men are sitting in the ruins of a workshop with a young assistant holding up a “4” die face made of fabric. 5 Paternal Wisdom, 2017 Oil on canvas 36 x 36” BK2055 6 Sheltered, 2017 Oil on canvas 48 x 36” BK2063 7 The older, bearded man is putting a hand through one of the holes, as a disembodied fifth hand bearing a tiny cube extends through another hole. Is this the hand of Fate? The assistant’s legs have turned into wooden slats, with painted socks. Near his feet sit a pair of empty shoes evoking Holocaust survivor Primo Levi’s writing about the importance of shoes in Auschwitz. Behind the older man, a woman holds up a die fragment, wondering if it could be restored. Pips in the form of large wooden circles hang ominously at the right, perhaps waiting recall, perhaps in eternal suspension. The large flat pip becomes a shield in Sheltered (page 6), with a man huddling underneath. One spear has already pierced the shield, just missing his head. More are sure to follow. Overhead we see a pair of familiar Bak motifs: a rainbow fragment recalling God’s promise to Noah to never again destroy humanity, and the stripes suggesting both the Jewish prayer shawl and the uniform of the Nazi death camps. We find a similar scenario in Sleeper (page 13), but here three spears pierce the shield. The man lying underneath, in front of a die stone bunker, could be an eternal sleeper. There’s no refuge in Bak’s game of Chance. The man standing in front of his dice house in Study for Figuring Out (page 14) is scanning a sheet of paper, perhaps learning that the building has been condemned. A stack of books at the lower right decomposes, as chimneys pour out black smoke. The man in the raging inferno of Full Moons (page 21) finds his ghetto house balancing precariously on a large pip orb. Familiar dark smoke pours from chimneys, and a huge wrecking ball that could wreak destruction at any moment is suspended over his head. In Search of a Roof of One’s Own (page 21) is cooler in tone with blues, grays, and yellows, but not more reassuring. The die house teeters on a precipice with a man in hat and coat on the roof carrying a violin case. He knocks on the stone clouds in front of him, as if demanding an explanation from these Tablets of the Law. Yet another chimney belches black smoke. Two chimneys (one is a half candle) stand firm in Before and After (cover), even as the monstrous die they poke through tilts at a 45-degree angle. It could fall on the tiny figure beneath, but having turned his back, he’s reading a newspaper (or scripture?) and seems unconcerned about the die or the hot wax pooling behind him. Danger likewise lurks in Study for Easier Grip (page 10), where a kneeling figure attempts to hoist a stone die aloft.T o what purpose? One slip of the rope, one gesture from an invisible hand above, and he’ll be crushed. The same fate also awaits the man in Tenuous (page 18), who’s pulling on vines trying to extract yet another massive stone die cube from the trees. Is there any escape from this world of Chance? The man in First Step (page 26) is dressed for travel, but has a displaced foot and boot. As a compass and map, he holds a pip in one hand and a deconstructed die in the other, yet it’s hard to imagine he’s going anywhere. In Daylight Astronomy (page 26), set in one of Bak’s menacing forests, a man stands atop a die outcrop and peers at the moon through a telescope, as if seeing were traveling. In Study for a Conversation on How and When (page 10), a man emerges through the ceiling of his die cube, pushing away the manhole cover pip, to find another man standing on a ladder propped against the cube.T he ladder might lead to safety on the ground, but for all we know the man on the ladder is searching for safety inside the cube. One of the 8 five die pips of the roof is a broken life preserver – hardly an encouraging motif. Ladder imagery reappears in In the Book (page 27), which shows yet another ruin, with two men, one of them reading a book.