Day 23: Here's Lookin' at you, kid!

     So, we are looking at yet another blast from Chicago's statuary past here, and I guarantee you'll all be getting an eye full.  On July 7, 2010, there was an unveiling in Pritzker Park of a very eye-catching piece of work by local sculptor Tony Tasset.  The piece, a 30-foot tall eyeball(which was a representation of Tasset's own) was simply called Eye.  The sculpture was manufactured at a studio in Sparta, Wisconsin and was assembled in Chicago.  At the time of its installation, Tasset had this to say about what he thought of how the piece would be received:   "I've always wanted to make work that people either loved or hated. The worst thing would be a kind of innocuous decorative work that you can just pass by, that doesn't do one thing or another."  Of course when you look at it that way, isn't that what most public art is about? If it was just like art in a museum, nobody would ever stop to look at it, thus abrogating the reason for putting art into the public square in the first place.  One other piece of note, at the same time that he put up Eye, Tasset also placed 156 Banners along State Street that feature sequential images of a Cardinal(think like a flip book), entitled(oddly enough) Cardinal.  The choice of the Cardinal is obvious, as it is the State bird of Illinois.  Unfortunately for all ocular and ornithological enthusiasts, the two installations came down on October 31, 2010. However, they shall all live on in our memories(whether those memories are infamous or not is up for interpretation.)