Dennis Congdon
CURATED BY STANLEY WHITNEY
Dennis Congdon JUNE 1 - JULY 6, 2013 c
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
CUE FELLOWS
Gregory Amenoff Theodore S. Berger Sanford Biggers Thomas G. Devine Thomas K.Y. Hsu Vivian Kuan Corina Larkin Joyce E. Robinson Jan Rothschild Brian D. Starer
Polly Apfelbaum Theodore S. Berger, Chair Ian Cooper William Corbett Michelle Grabner Eleanor Heartney Deborah Kass Corina Larkin Jonathan Lethem Rossana Martinez Juan Sรกnchez Irving Sandler, Senior Fellow Carolyn Somers
CURATORIAL ADVISORY COUNCIL Gregory Amenoff Lynn Crawford Paddy Johnson Trenton Doyle Hancock Pablo Helguera Sharon Lockhart Andrea Zittel
Lilly Wei
STAFF Jeremy Adams, Executive Director Beatrice Wolert-Weese, Associate Director Jessica Gildea, Associate Director of Programs Sara Lotty, Development Coordinator Mesha Bhansali, Office & Programs Assistant
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OUR MISSION
CUE Art Foundation is a dynamic visual arts center dedicated to creating essential career and educational opportunities for emerging artists of all ages. Through exhibitions, studio residencies, arts education, and public programs, CUE provides artists and audiences with sustaining and meaningful experiences and resources.
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/BIO
DENNIS CONGDON
Dennis Congdon received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and his MFA from the Yale School of Art. He travelled in Italy and France in 1982 returning to Rome two years later as a recipient of a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. He has painted in Chicago, teaching at the School of the Art Institute and in Philadelphia, teaching at Tyler School of Art. Since 1986 he has been on the faculty of the RISD Painting Department. Congdon received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002, and has shown his work nationally throughout his career. This exhibition marks his first solo show in New York City.
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/STATEMENT
Painting Poussin after the Brillo boxes Using stencil templates made as mine are is predicated on a lost original. The original drawing is there in reference, but lost now and irretrievable. The drawing precedes the painting and functions as an armature might for a sculptor in clay or a sinopia for a fresco painter. But rather than be entirely underneath I have used the stencil to put the painting's armature or sinopia on top. In our world of billboards and pop-ups, we view things fast and slow and images have a wide variety of claim on our memory. So much does not stay with us, so much is lost and irretrievable. But one day I remember like it was yesterday. We drove down from Naples to Pompeii and spent the day looking at wall paintings in the villas of the city. We decided to drive up Vesuvius before we left and in our beat-up van we spiraled up and up and bit by bit, band by band, we left everything fertile and green behind. At the top we walked out into the ash cone which I remember to have been smoking. In an unearthly collection of gray colors we wandered around circling slowly in an Antonioni film. One's own past work is like any landscape in that it is different every time you go there. Looking back on my most unplanned and unruly project in a world of billboards and pop-ups I think I could say that where Cezanne wanted to paint Poussin after Nature, I can say I want to paint Poussin after the Brillo boxes.
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/BIO
STANLEY WHITNEY
American painter Stanley Whitney was born in 1946 in Philadelphia and has been exhibiting his work since 1970. He received a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and his MFA from Yale University. His work has been shown at museums including the American Academy of Art and Letters, New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; the NelsonAtkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. In Europe, solo gallery exhibitions have been mounted in such cities as Berlin, Brussels, Vienna and Rome. He lives and works in New York and is represented by Team Gallery.Â
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/STATEMENT
I am very pleased to introduce Dennis Congdon to CUE. Dennis is a very special, talented and deserving painter who I have known for more than 30 years. Over that time, we have had numerous conversations about painting, the history of painting, painting technique, as well as how one goes about the teaching of painting. Dennis and I were professors together at Tyler School of Art before he became a vital part of the RISD Painting Department. Dennis is a rare individual who has been able to be an outstanding art educator while maintaining a cutting edge studio practice. The series of paintings that Dennis will be showing at CUE are part of an ongoing series that began when he was a fellow at the American Academy in Rome many years ago. His work deals with Rome as a modern city as well an ancient metropolis. The paintings occupy both of these spaces, contemporary and ancient. Having lived in Rome myself for five years, I have a real sense of what Dennis is involved with Rome being a city where past and present are so intertwined they are inseparable. Looking at these paintings, you see both the color and the heat of Rome. You see the weather, the landscape, the old, the new. You see the things sticking out of the ground, you see the vegetation. In these paintings you bump into the surprise of ancient Rome everywhere. It moves from the street to the buildings. In one painting, he has pieces of stacks of ancient columns, and in another you see fragments of faces, fragments of painting, exotic plants, there is a hand. In some places it’s just a color or a mark. But in all the paintings, they are packed with information and layered just like Rome. We see Dennis has a great skill as a draftsman. New Rome is built on top of Ancient Rome. In one painting he has what appears to be a random stacking of paintings. This imagery could refer to Rome or it could refer to the end of the year studio clean up in an art school of the Western World. There is brightness, a freshness, a humor in the work that is just Dennis Congdon. Yet, there is a seriousness, a dedication, a work ethic and great knowledge. I think people will find the work very inspiring and joyous, as well as intellectual and fun to look at. As Dennis says, he wants to paint Poussin after the Brillo boxes. And he does.
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Dennis Congdon
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Afrodite, 2006. Oil and enamel on canvas 64"x 58"
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Untitled, 2006. Oil and enamel on panel 48� x 40�
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Eclipse, 2007 Oil and enamel on canvas 64” x 58”
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Linea Negra, 2006 Oil and enamel on canvas 87” x 74”
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Untitled, 2007 Oil and enamel in canvas 36” x 36” Collection of Kiki MacGinnis, Seattle
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Untitled (pile), 2006 Oil and enamel on canvas 87� x 74
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Pile, 2000 Oil and acrylic on canvas 87”x 74” Collection of the Museum of Art, the Rhode Island School of Design, Jesse Metcalf Fund (Acq#2000.17)
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Red Billboard, 2006 Oil and enamel on canvas 65” x 58”
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Untitled, 2006 Oil and enamel on canvas 36” x 36”
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Sean Paul Gallegos Weapon of Mass Consumption: AK-47, 2012 Nike Air Force 1 sneakers, laces, thread. 11” x 2.5” x 24”
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Ignis fatuus/Midden, 2013 (work in progress) Photograph courtesy of Rosa Congdon
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Ignis fatuus, 2013 Flashe and enamel on canvas 94” x 107”
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Stencil details (Midden template) Rag paper 22� x 28� each
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Drawing for Afrodite (dishabille) [now lost], 2013 Ink, charcoal, and pencil on rag paper 94� x 107�
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Visuvi, 2013 Flashe and enamel on canvas 94” x 107”
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Midden, 2013 Flashe and enamel on canvas 94” x 107”
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Dennis Congdon By Jennifer Coates
“For the modern man can be creative only insofar as he is historical; in other words, all creation is forbidden him except that which has its source in his own freedom; and consequently, everything is denied him except the freedom to make history by making himself.” -MIRCEA ELIADE, THE MYTH OF THE ETERNAL RETURN, OR COSMOS AND HISTORY Decaying remnants of Roman civilization appear in imaginary, post-apocalyptic landscapes in Dennis Congdon’s recent large-scale paintings. Recalling the Surrealist works of de Chirico or the Neoclassical period of Picasso, columns, capitals and busts abound in simplified settings where the history of art survives but humans don’t appear to. Congdon collects and archives in paint the sculptural and architectural elements of Ancient Rome. He then performs the devotional act of depiction upon these emblems of cultural decline, arranging them in piles or dispersing them in confectionary-colored worlds in a linear manner that at times recall Saturday morning cartoons. The four paintings for this show (each of which measure 94” x 107”) are patched together from stencils Congdon has made to enlarge his drawings. After cutting out holes and slashes in pieces of paper where the drawn lines were, the negative images become positive again as he paints them in. The stencils are then discarded, as the main event evolves on canvas: lines, dashes and dots assemble into coherence through this indirect process, as stenciled areas are puzzled together into fields of fragments. This process brings 25
Dennis Congdon
attention to the flux of marks scattered throughout, the distribution of which can at times flatten the images and push them into the realm of playful artifice. Congdon uses a combination of flashe and enamel paints to create a matte surface, giving the works an almost screen-like feel, making the scenes feel far away. His subject, objects carved into stone that merge with the landscape emphasizes the idea that the natural world and the human-made world are not separate, they exist in one unruly hybrid. In Ignis fatuus (2013), pieces of colored architectural columns are arranged in a wobblylooking tower in the center of the canvas, with attendant Roman debris lying around it. The title is taken from an Emily Dickinson poem and refers to a phosphorescent light that hovers in swampy ground at night, possibly caused by rotting organic matter. In Congdon’s swamp, seafoam greens, acrid blues and rusty oranges abound, as flora appears to be growing between the ruins, creeping around as though it might one day take over. As there are no people in the scene, only their dilapidated constructions, one wonders if the human race is the rotting organic matter causing light. The absence of figures in all of these works brings attention to the fact that without the human presence to cultivate our environments, nature will begin its task of reclaiming the vestiges of civilization almost at once. However, Roman sculpture would fare pretty well if humans were not around, probably lasting hundreds of thousands of years, if not longer. In Midden (2013), a Hanna-Barbera palette of pink, orange, yellow and blue, reigns, suffusing and re-animating a landscape of ancient detritus. Midden is an archeological term for a dump that contains waste products and artifacts of day-to-day human life. Again we see the man-made scraps from a long dead culture strewn about, interspersed with plant matter. The composition of this painting is less hierarchical, with the surface almost entirely covered with pictorial information, some left in a linear state, some fleshed out only slightly. Our contemporary experience of the Classical world is as a dismantled but somehow still-living society: ruins can co-exist with the buildings and bustle of the present, as in contemporary Rome. One can look out onto the Forum as modern life whizzes by and behold a vaguely organized maze of partially identifiable ancient objects, rubble, and vegetation. In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon recounts how Poggius, a servant of the Pope in 15th century Rome, having climbed the Capitoline Hill to view the Forum with a friend was moved to observe, “The public and private edifices, that 26
were founded for eternity, lie prostrate, naked, and broken, like the limbs of a mighty giant; and the ruin is the more visible, from the stupendous relics that have survived the injuries of time and fortune.” In Congdon’s imaginary vision, these ruins are in further disarray, as in the aftermath of a natural disaster, and they are bathed in a haze of cartoon colors, passing them through the filter of American pop culture. The incompleteness of the ruin encourages a collaging of past and present. Based on the remnants, it is possible to reconstruct in our minds the way things could have appeared centuries ago. Sigmund Freud, in Civilization and its Discontents, described Rome as a city that mirrored the multi-dimensionality of the unconscious mind, with its collision of architectural, sculptural and painted remains from different time periods. “Now let us, by a flight of imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity with a similarly long and copious past—an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest ones.” For Freud, remembrance had a double meaning of both recalling and reassembling, or putting the members back together. Congdon engages this process of re-membrance. Afrodite (dishabille) (2013), depicts the large head of a female statue from antiquity, lying on its side, dominating the landscape. Deshabille means unclothed in French, and a quarter of the mass of the goddess’s head has been cut away, leaving a smooth tabletop surface on which a conglomeration of quasistructural, organ-like fragments rests like a still life, leaning precariously against each other. Their strange fleshy pink color, the same pink that covers the cut-away surface area of the statue’s inside, suggests that they are perhaps the brains, the inner life of the relic. The head of Afrodite (dishabille) could function as the protagonist of this exhibit: the artist substitute, with brain uncloaked, revealing a jumble that fuses wreckage and a mess of children’s toys. In Visuvi (2013), Congdon re-visits his motif of a mountain of canvases, some empty, some seen from the back, some with little daubs, some with imagery. Named after the stillactive volcano outside Naples, it recalls Philip Guston’s paintings of paintings: caricatures of the artists’ output that are anthropomorphized, in possession of their own identities. Congdon has made a landscape from human endeavors, a monument to the efforts of the artist, which are themselves, monuments to the culture the artist is immersed in. The paintings, piled up like forgotten garbage, are a reminder that all things pass. 27
Dennis Congdon
Landscapes are a product of the human interaction with nature. Any given landscape is defined by the events that unfolded there and in order to fully comprehend it, many periods in time must be superimposed upon each other, as though time is not linear. A series of thens and nows must blend in a disorderly mix, as the past is not really distinct from the present. Dennis Congdon situates himself within the arc of history, in an acknowledgement that humans cannot exist outside it, making “then” into “now” and vice versa. The events of the recent and long-distant past contaminate and inform our every move: the end of the Classical era inflects our art and culture today just as the end of all other civilizations foreshadows the end of our own.
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Jennifer Coates is an artist and writer living in New York City. She has had solo shows at Feigen Contemporary and Kevin Bruk Gallery and has been in numerous group shows in New York and around the United States. She has written reviews of contemporary art exhibits for Time Out New York, Art in America and The Brooklyn Rail. She currently teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design. Mentor Raphael Rubinstein is a New York-based poet and art critic whose books include Polychrome Profusion: Selected Art Criticism 1990-2002 (Hard Press Editions) and The Afterglow of Minor Pop Masterpieces (Make Now). In 2006, he edited the anthology Critical Mess: Art Critics on the State of their Practice (Hard Press Editions). His book of micro-narratives In Search of the Miraculous: 50 Episodes from the Annals of Contemporary Art has been translated into French (Editions Grèges). From 1997 to 2007 he was a senior editor at Art in America, where he continues to be a contributing editor. He is currently professor of Critical Studies at the University of Houston School of Art. In 2002, the French government presented him with the award of Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters. In 2010, his blog The Silo won a Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers grant. This essay was written as part of the Young Art Critics Mentoring Program, a partnership between AICA USA (US section of International Association of Art Critics) and CUE Art Foundation, which pairs emerging writers with AICA mentors to produce original essays on a specific exhibiting artist. Please visit aicausa.org for further information on AICA USA, or cueartfoundation.org to learn how to participate in this program. Any quotes are from interviews with the author unless otherwise specified. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior consent from the author. Lilly Wei is AICA’s Coordinator for the program this season. For additional arts-related writing, please visit on-verge.org
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