Slow burn - Carroll Dunham

ON THE OCCASION OF THE FIRST MAJOR SURVEY OF THE WORK OF CARROLL DUNHAM, WHICH RUNS THROUGH FEBRUARY 2, 2003, AT THE NEW MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART IN NEW YORK, ROBERT STORR LOOKS BACK ON THE CAREER OF THIS IDIOSYNCRATIC ARTIST WHO HAS SPENT OVER TWO DECADES "EXPLORING SURREALISM'S MORE ID-ENRICHED RECESSES."

I FIRST SAW A WORK BY CARROLL DUNHAM NEARLY TWENTY YEARS AGO on a wall in Dorothea Rockburne's studio. I was there to rehearse the execution of one of her wall drawings, Neighborhood, for the Museum of Modern Art's 1984 show "A Century of Modern Drawing." The Dunham in question was a smallish painting on paper, and the gnarled pink forms and dense gray ground of the image stood Out in their brooding awkwardness against the expansive white perfection of Rockburne's space. I couldn't place the work aesthetically and had no idea who might have made it, until Rockburne told me that it was by an artist--then in his midthirties and virtually unknown--who had been her assistant and my predecessor as an installation draftsman. This information helped a little, but in the pristine loft the work remained an anomaly. That very fact kept me looking at it, plus the degree to which it tapped into my own divided loyalties between minimal abstraction on the one hand and visceral funk on the other, a combination not uncommon among immigrants from beyond the Hudson, where Dali-, Tanguy- , or Miroesque biomorphs had crosspollinated with indigenous American weirdness but where the exalted seventies of Mies and the Bauhaus also flourished.

However, as I eventually learned, Dunham wasn't from out there. A Connecticut Yankee, he had been growing weirdness of his own, first in Hartford, where he had gone to art school, and afterward right under the noses of New York's Minimalist and Conceptualist elite, whom he had come to know about through Mel Bochner, a visiting artist at Dunham's alma mater, Trinity College, and later through acquaintance with Rockburne, Barry Le Va, and others who had given the '7os its formal rigor and its aura of uncompromising seriousness.

But this was the '8os, and good-bye to all that--at least for the first several years of the decade, when skirmishes between exuberantly overreaching neo-expressionists and theory-intoxicated, style-savvy deconstructionists kept the art world on the run. Dunham was neither of these things. His breakthrough drawings and paintings on plywood and veneer of that time were too intimate and too eccentric to make much of an impression on the larger scene, although artists appear to have picked up on what he was doing or at least on the same set of formal variables (witness Sherrie Levine's mid-'8os plywood-plug abstractions and the wood-grain simulacra of the young Robert Gober.) Only Dunham's contemporary Tishan Hsu--an artist who deserves another look--matched him in the impacted sci-fi hybridities of his work. Yet, by the time Dunham took his solo bow at Baskerville & Watson in 1985 (Artists Space gave him his first one-person show, in 1981), a wobble could already be felt in the widening gyrations of the full-ti lt '8os boogie. With their warping metamorphic body shapes and proliferating rings and other geometric devices--imagine one of Al Held's multicolored '7os or '8os space frames in a shit storm of gloppy off-color asteroids--Dunham's work appeared not only fully formed, and authoritatively deformed, but suddenly, queasily apropos. In that hyperactive moment just before the seven-year '8os binge turned into a long, long hangover, the uncool of Dunham's mixed-up sensibility was coolness itself, a superficially unsightly but subliminally satisfying mix of knowing, disciplined gestural abstraction and a riot of semiotic ambiguities that burlesqued neo-expressionist excess while going it one better. The pictures were mostly quite modest, but the ambition was not--and of course the imagery itself was immodest in its every lurid dimension.

So count Dunham as one of the last of the '8os painters to make a splash, but take note that he slipped in from the wings, belonged to no nameable tendency, and, like the most skillful of character actors, knew how to upstage the leads just as they were finishing their big speeches.

And count him as one of the first '9os artists in the sense that he got the jump on practically everybody when it came to exploring Surrealism's more id-enriched recesses. Everybody on the East Coast, that is, where Surrealism had been cast into outer darkness--or rather squeezed back to its own fetid inner darkness--by '5os and '6os formalism, with occasional outbreaks in the work of Claes Oldenburg, Lee Bontecou, Yayoi Kusama, Paul Thek, and Eccentric Abstractionists Louise Bourgeois and Eva Hesse being the conspicuous exceptions. In that connection it is perhaps unsurprising that the first Dunham I saw in a major collection was at the apartment of modernist collectors extraordinaire Victor and Sally Ganz, just off a hallway where works by Hesse held pride of place.