33 Artists in 3 Acts (28 page)
To the right of
The End of Ange
r is a large, all-black painting called
National Election
(2012), which looks a bit like the bottom of the daybeds except more “fucked up.” It involves several layers of what Johnson calls “abstract expressionist strategies.” The base consists of a dynamic pattern of diagonal strips of burnt wooden flooring that is reminiscent of the broad-brush compositions of Franz Kline. A layer of poured soap echoes Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings and frenzied clusters of lines evoke early Philip Guston. “It’s poetic, a classic ‘action,’ with a romantic notion of the artist, attacking a surface,” says Johnson. Alex Ernst, his assistant, sometimes helps him pour the black soap. “But the gestures are very much mine. I don’t think anyone can do it better,” he says with a brazen, sheepish grin. “I’m very specific.”
Other works in this style tend to go by titles like
Cosmic Slop
(a reference to one of George Clinton’s Funkadelic albums) so I inquire about the title
National Election
. Johnson explains that he saw Barack Obama about a month before making the work when his brother, a Harvard acquaintance of the president, was hosting a fundraiser for his reelection campaign. “I met Obama before he became a senator,” says Johnson. “MCA Chicago was trying to get young black professionals
to join the junior board and they ended up sitting me next to Barack at dinner. I had heard that he was running for Senate but I didn’t believe that someone called Barack
Hussein
Obama had a chance in hell of being elected.” Johnson rolls his eyes. “I even told him so.”
Around the corner is a wall piece made from wooden flooring that has been burned with a branding iron. Titled
House Arrest
(2012), the work is dominated by an all-over pattern of crosshairs, the kind seen when looking through a riflescope. The symbol, which Johnson associates with the logo of the hip-hop band Public Enemy, appears regularly in the artist’s work. Mixed in with the crosshairs are images of palm trees. I suggest that burning images into wood with branding irons refers to how slaves were branded like cattle. “That did not even cross my mind until people mentioned it,” says Johnson earnestly, as if he can’t quite believe it himself.
“Hip-hop has been important to me since I was a kid,” volunteers the artist, who likes the way rappers talk about amplifying their voice with a microphone and insist on their right to be heard. Above all, Johnson loves the hip-hop tradition of bombastic boasting. “It gives you the opportunity to say why you are the most interesting,” he says. “That kind of braggadocio is really important to young men and women . . . and artists.”
One of Johnson’s early self-portraits is a great example of braggadocio or, at least, balls. Titled
Self-portrait in Homage to Barkley Hendricks
(2005), the photograph mimics a 1977 oil painting in which the aforementioned Hendricks stands naked with nothing on except for a white cap, shoes, and socks. In the painting, called
Brilliantly Endowed
, the senior artist holds his left hand down by his groin for comparative purposes. As it happens, Johnson is better endowed than Hendricks, so Johnson’s photo comes across as cocky one-upmanship. “I was a student at the time and Barkley wasn’t well known,” explains Johnson. “It was a big lesson for me about the difference between painting and photography. I made the work without realizing quite how much I was exposing myself.”
Having walked the periphery of the gallery, the artist and I return our gaze to the center of the space. Its high ceiling and giant botanical
garden-style skylight lend splendor to the show’s dark materials. Johnson folds his arms across his chest. “I wouldn’t change a whole lot,” he says. “I usually have trouble in the middle of the room. I’m still learning how my work lives in space. But this feels good.”
Since the Barkley Hendricks piece, Johnson has made self-portraits that better reflect the kind of artist he is.
Self Portrait as the Professor of Astronomy, Miscegenation and Critical Theory at the New Negro Escapist and Athletic Club Center for Graduate Studies
(2008) comically underlines artists’ strange range of knowledges. “When you are taking a photo of yourself, there is no avoiding a conversation with Cindy Sherman,” says Johnson, who sees the art world as an “escapist space” where artists’ roles are “in flux.” The black-and-white photograph features two mirror images of the artist sitting stiffly with a book in his hands, staring soberly through glasses into the distance. A decorative micro-mosaic pattern, like the ones found on Middle Eastern backgammon boards, forms a backdrop. Johnson has said, “the artist functions as a time traveler,” but here he seems to position the artist as someone with a double identity—that of a respectable intellectual and a total crackpot.
Carroll Dunham
Late Trees #5
2012
I
n late October 2012, eight large, framed paintings by Carroll Dunham were delivered to Barbara Gladstone Gallery on West 24th Street. They were unpacked and placed on foam blocks in the back room of the gallery. Two days later, the tail end of Hurricane Sandy, the largest Atlantic tropical storm on record, hit New York City. A storm surge flooded the gallery district of Chelsea for several hours at high tide. Some galleries took in nine feet of water, others a few inches.
Eight days after the storm, I am sitting with Dunham in his Tribeca kitchen. “I took a good look at the possibility that a year of my working life had been wiped out of existence,” he says as he makes tea. “More than ever, I was excited to put these paintings out in the world, so . . .” He stops to cough heavily. “The thought led to a horrible, unfamiliar, amorphous feeling. Van Morrison said a singer has to sing or they get sick. That’s what it felt like . . . soul sickness.”
Where the soul goes, the body follows. The day after the hurricane, Dunham came down with acute bronchitis and, after a visit to the hospital, lay in bed in Connecticut with the heat turned up, watching news of the flooding and blackout, waiting for phone calls from the gallery. His wife, Laurie Simmons, was on holiday in India with their daughter Lena. “I felt like I was a guy in a science fiction story, living alone on a space station, unable to get back to earth because there was no gas,”
says Dunham. Although Gladstone’s staff assured him that with one exception the paintings were unharmed, he was still worried. “I always think that I can see things in my paintings that other people don’t see,” he explains as he treads down the stairs in black socks to his work station, where an open MacBook Air awaits us.
As we take a seat, Dunham explains that, in his delirium, he was deeply disturbed by a coincidence. The “Next Bathers” paintings depict nudes knee-deep in water, while the “Late Trees” feature gnarly trunks topped with lush green leaves caught in extreme winds. “I felt like my paintings caused the storm,” says Dunham, clicking through jpegs of the works. “And it gets even freakier.” The only painting that remained in the studio portrays a fallen tree whose leaves are caught up in debris from a greenhouse-like glass structure. “The relationship between these paintings and reality is really strange,” says the artist, shaking his head slowly in protracted disbelief. “I’m condensing and synthesizing a lot of different things. That’s the nature of art. I’m worried about the environment so it must have seeped into the work.” Dunham has no doubt that global warming is real and Hurricane Sandy is just an “appetizer.” He fears a future in which the earth experiences what he calls “a great winnowing.”
This morning, after swinging by the polling station to vote in the presidential election, Dunham went to the art conservation studio of Christian Scheidemann, whom he describes as “a sort of rock-star restorer who has done a lot of work with strange contemporary art materials.” Dunham was hugely relieved to find nothing at all wrong with the seven canvases in the workshop. Briny water had touched the bottom few inches of the acrylic paintings, leaving a trace of fine sand but no abrasion. Scheidemann’s staff had been able to clean the works with distilled water. Only the frames had to be removed and remade.
Dunham clicks to a jpeg of
Large Bather (Quicksand)
(2006–12), the work that sustained a scratch and doesn’t fit into Scheidemann’s Chelsea workshop. “You know this one. I’ve been painting it, on and off, for six years,” he says of the “icon of fecundity” that I saw evolving on my trips to Connecticut. Since then, the painting has changed almost beyond recognition. The figure’s anus is dead center, as before, but much
smaller. Water still surrounds the left side of her body and land the right, but now the terrain dazzles with dynamic diagonal and vertical arms, legs, and branches. “The scratch is extremely discreet. It’s completely contained within that image of the log,” says Dunham, pointing to a felled trunk with a stumpy phallic protrusion that directs the viewer’s eye drolly toward the woman’s ass. The graphic cluster of her buttocks, vagina, and pubes congeals into a rough-and-ready face, perhaps of a bearded stoner rubbing his eyes with thick fists. Many of the objects within the painting evoke more than one thing. “In for a penny, in for a pound,” says the artist with a chuckle when I praise the work. “An interesting painting never really settles down in your mind.” Dunham’s paintings work remarkably well as jpegs—the result of his concern that they should look good from a hundred feet away.
Dunham has decided that Scheidemann, who is often hailed as a surgeon, will deal with the scratch. “It’s better for me to just keep my hands off,” he declares, as he inadvertently reveals the emotional struggle by sitting on his hands. “My paintings are made of so many layers of transparent paint, with so much overpainting and directionality. It would be very difficult for me, using those techniques, to match it.”
Damage with a relevant backstory can add value, I say. In 1964, for example, one of Andy Warhol’s crazy entourage brought a gun into the Factory and shot through two works that depict the late Marilyn Munroe. The
Shot Marilyn
paintings, as they are now called, are among the most coveted works in Warhol’s oeuvre. So, not only is
Large Bather (Quicksand)
an amazing painting, it has already started to accrue the life of a masterpiece. Dunham seems unsure how to respond. “Far worse things have happened,” he says, “to far more valuable paintings.”
Dunham’s works were not the only ones to make a lucky escape. Francis Alÿs was midway through installing his show at David Zwirner Gallery on 19th Street when the storm struck. His small paintings were laid out evenly on the kind of lightweight tables used by street sellers. “The water went up to five feet in the gallery,” Alÿs told me, “but the tables floated. They moved through space, then landed. It was a bit spooky.”
Jennifer Dalton’s work was not so fortunate. Some drawings from
her “How Do Artists Live?” series were being stored in the basement of Winkleman Gallery on West 27th Street. Although all the artwork had been raised four feet off the ground in preparation for what seemed like the worst possible scenario, the water went up to eight feet. Needless to say, pastel chalk on paper is not water-resistant, and Dalton has decided to remake the works from scratch. A few days ago, I walked along the strip of smaller galleries that are on 27th Street west of Tenth Avenue. The electricity was still out. Dealers were sharing generators to pump the water out of their basements. Museum curators and other friends, wearing white hazmat suits, were hauling works out into the street and quickly ripping off their frames to see if the pieces within could be rescued. The sidewalks were strewn with what looked like wet junk. Mother Nature had thrown everyone together. For a week, Chelsea’s art businesses abandoned cutthroat competition in favor of community feeling.
“Barbara Gladstone and I have been working together for ten years,” says Dunham. “Republicans keep yammering about ‘small business,’ but—bastion of radicals or whatever—you’ll never find a more small-business, family-values kind of place than the New York art scene. As I’ve grown into my work, my sense of self, and my role as an artist, I’ve realized just how much I love art galleries and how intrinsic they are to my ability to do what I do.”
Dunham lifts his finger and tells me that he has yet another answer to a question I’ve asked him several times over the past three years. “Being an artist is a form of radical entrepreneurship,” he says. With a self-mocking tone, he adds, “I have a really cool idea for some paintings that I think some people might need to see.” Some artists are like entrepreneurs who foster invention, while others are like money-market gamblers who trade in derivatives. Unlike many artists, who self-consciously appropriate or recycle, Dunham puts a high premium on innovation. “The goal of making something that looks and feels original is a little retro,” he admits. “I go into a room alone and make things with my hands. I don’t call up a lab. It couldn’t be more ‘ye olde,’” he says. “But a world consisting of nothing but information and transmittable images is not going to honor our physical selves.”