Posts Tagged ‘Iowa City’

David Dunlap at CUE Art Foundation

Friday, January 8th, 2010
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Notes on David Dunlap at CUE

The CUE Foundation is showing the protean work of Iowa City artist David Dunlap in their Chelsea gallery on west 25th street.  This is an installation by an important and influential artist who has been deserving of larger recognition, at least in the New York art community, for a long while.

For the past four decades artist David Dunlap has been keeping a series of daily notebook journals and sketchbooks–a kind of stream-of-consciousness diary of daily life and reflections on art and the world, which he presents in various formats, each one showcasing a different incarnation of the artist’s ongoing work.

Empty, luminous, dream-like, ungraspable and mysterious:  the current exhibition, Mr. Dunlap’s first solo show in New York City, has as its centerpiece a section of a fifty-foot high plywood house the artist constructed in his back yard in Iowa City.  Inside and around the “house” are numerous hand-made book-cases displaying the many notebooks, sketchbooks and project-scrapbooks that have continued to accumulate like deposits in an ever-expanding coral reef of memories, dreams and doodles.  In the middle of the house is an enigromatic object:  A Device for Detecting the Presence of Martin Luther King, Jr. Along the walls of the exhibition space are displayed individual, framed drawings–many of them small pages pulled from the ubiquitous wire-bound notebooks Mr. Dunlap carries with him, while others are larger-format drawings, often executed with a ball-point pen:  homemade calendars illustrated with abstract doodles and mysterious shapes.  Most any mundane, ordinary event becomes the jumping-0ff point for long, meandering riffs on various fantastic and often funny drawings–abstract patterns that morph into figures and symbols which populate the daily calendar of a life lived with friends and family.  Enigmatic phrases headline and punctuate the sprawling installation of imagery:  Dreaming, He is At Work, Hitler Dream Analysis, Give Us Back Our Flag You Waterboarded, This is Always Finished,  Free Art School!

Egolessness and equanimity are seemingly rare in our world, and this is particularly true in the New York “Art World” where egos are often large and tending towards the loud and self-important.  The spirit of David Dunlap’s work seems to be gently calling us to look beyond our limited view of what art could be about and towards something larger, more wholesome and inclusive–and possibly more fun!–than the self-preoccupation and blustery careerism of much contemporary art.

Equanimity means recognition of our interdependence:  our lives do not unfold in a vacuum, but in a context of relationships.  The poet Allen Ginsberg once wrote, “Art’s not empty if it shows its own emptiness.”   Empty here does not mean nihilistic and despairing, but rather that emptiness is always empty of something:  empty of permanence, continuity and a solid, indestructible, independent self.  Art, like life, is relational, in other words, and the artist’s production arises in interdependence with the environment that the artist works and lives in.  David Dunlap seems to revel in this empty, selfless aspect of his work, often collaborating with others in the seemingly large, rich tapestry of relationships he has cultivated over the course of his life.  “The Men’s Fylfot Cross Correspondence Club” is one such ongoing collaboration of drawings passed between friends, with shapes that mutate and change as each person adds something on to the accumulating imagery, like an ongoing musical jam-session happening on paper.

My only criticism of this exhibition is that it is not nearly large enough to encompass the entire scope of David’s work—indeed, the present (though wonderful) installation is really only a small, modular piece of a much larger, ongoing work in progress.  The largest exhibit of Mr. Dunlap’s work that I have seen to date was at the Des Moines Art Center in 1989, an enormous multi-room installation with wall-paintings, timelines, furniture, and of course the artist’s books.  While browsing through the beautiful, gem-like installation at CUE, I kept imagining what it would be like to fill one of the Whitney Museum’s floors with a full-scale exhibit of Mr. Dunlap’s work, or possibly the expansive Marron Atrium at MoMA.

One of the unfortunate drawbacks of life in the Big Apple is that New York City often has a myopic eye when it comes to appreciating the rich variety of art work that exists in our great country outside the city.  The CUE Foundation and the Reeder Brothers deserve a warm thanks for bringing generous work like this to New York.

Additional Notes from the CUE Press Release:

“His materials of choice come from the everyday – clothes, notebooks, calendars, automobiles, even paint made from mixing walnuts and buckets of water. Yet, while the base components may imply simplicity, they are far from easy to digest. Containing the recordings of thoughts and memories like daily journal entries or logbooks, the work provokes a cryptic sense of voyeurism. Dunlap employs an elaborate and deeply personal symbology in all of his work, linking the seemingly mundane and the profound, the personal and the cultural, the historical and the present. An intimate mythology is generated through his unique lexicon used for documenting his life. Recurring symbols like Martin Luther King, swastikas, dates and flags are found throughout his work, constantly being reworked within new contexts of his own personal documentation. However, Dunlap does not stake sole claim on the work; as with many of the symbols used, all of his work is open to interpretation, redefinition and re-appropriation. Through the resulting installation the viewer is led to question their initial conceptions of these “stock” images, underlining the obstructiveness of readymade thought and ideas.”

Visit Harold’s Sketchbooks at www.haroldgraves.com

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The Enigromaticon: Views of (from) the Studio

Saturday, June 27th, 2009

Funk Hater 5

Here’s a shot from several years ago of the studio floor with my guitar and some of my “Enigromatic” paintings, all piled up in stacks on the floor or hanging “salon style” on the wall.  At the time I was playing the guitar quite a lot and the instrument came to symbolize for me a certain kind of “energy” that I think is necessary to the creative process.

I’m using the term “energy” here because it points to something, in this context anyway, that I think is important for anyone who undertakes a creative activity, whether it is in music or painting, poetry, drama, or anything else.  I don’t really have a particular name for that energy; people from various cultures have depicted it in various ways, it seems.  The guitar is just one representation of it for me; it could just as easily be a flute or a flower, a paintbrush or a palette knife.

The big painting on top of all the little paintings is supposed to be a portrait of Kim Gordon, the bass player for the band called Sonic Youth, only I made her hair dark instead of blonde.  It’s from a photograph that I saw in Spin magazine or Rolling Stone, one of those popular music review mags.  The guitar has become a kind of masculine symbol in some ways, especially the electric guitar; so there’s a potential for an exciting mixture of energies when a woman gets on a stage and plays an electric guitar.

In another sense, the guitar is just a neutral object like any other; it’s “potential” to manifest as a symbol of creative power is really empty, that is to say, it does not exist in and of itself.  It’s because of this empty quality that objects are able to become repositories of meaning, which gets back to one of my favorite phrases of Allen Ginsberg’s that I like to quote, “Art’s not empty if it shows it’s own emptiness.”

I’d also like to do a portrait of Tina Weymouth, the bass player for the Talking Heads.  Her playing was such an important element to that band; she brought a certain kind of funkiness into the mix that would not have been there if someone else had been trying to do the same thing, I think.

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Starting in 1992 I began a series of small paintings that were based directly on imagery in my personal sketchbooks.  I carried these sketchbooks with me just about everywhere; I still do.  Some of the paintings derived from my books are very abstract, almost “minimalist” in their imagery, and some are figurative.  Many of them were painted in a single sitting, while others have been revised and worked over a period of months and even years.  I often would use a deliberately quick way of rendering the image, in keeping with the spirit of the sketchbook:  there’s a freshness and spontaneity to a quickly drawn sketch that often gets lost when someone tries to “translate” that “energy” into another medium, such as paint.  So the small panels and the fast-drying acrylic paints were a kind of device for trying to find some of that freshness in the act of painting.

Studio Floor 2

The first series of these small paintings were all 9″ x 12″; partly because that size stretcher bar was easily obtainable, but also because the proportions happened to match the size of the room that I was living in at the time.  So the small paintings ended up becoming another personal symbol of sorts.

When I moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn in 1994, I had a larger room to work in.  So I continued the 9″ x 12″ series but also “expanded” into a new series of 12″ x 15″ paintings, to match the proportions of my new space.  These groups of paintings are something that I refer to collectively as “Enigromatica.”

An Enigma is something that is difficult to understand or explain with the rational, left-brain intellect; it can also refer to obscure manners of speech, writing, or cultural expression.  “Roma” is a kind of shorthand for romanticism.  According to the Oxford Dictionary of Art, Romanticism is something too varied in its manifestations to conform to a single definition, but its “keynote was a belief in the value of individual experience.”  Intuition and instinct were important to the so-called Romantic artist.

“Enigromatica,” then, is an amalgamation of two related notions into a single blurb which stands for what I believe is the spirit of my own activity as an artist, or any creative person’s activity by extension.  I didn’t entirely make this up myself, by the way, though maybe I’ve put my own little bit of spin on it.  I first saw the phrase “ENIGROMA” on the cover of a notebook that another artist, David Dunlap had made, when I was studying painting and printmaking in Iowa City as a graduate student.  That brings in another aspect of Enigromatica, which for me is the interdependence of the creative act with other creative activities that are going on:  inspiration, in other words.

Our culture tends to emphasize the individual as the locus of creative genius, and I think there may be something important in that, but there is also the inspiration that one draws from the energy of others:  we pay money to listen to popular musicians like Kim Gordon or Tina Weymouth because they inspire us.  We go to school and study music or art because someone, such as a teacher or another artist, has inspired us with their own interactions with “creative energy”.  I call this entire web of interrelated creative forces “The Enigromaticon.”  It is the Great Web of creative power, a matrix of form and energy that forms the basis of everything in the universe.

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