Dunham's dystopia - artist Carroll Dunham

Carroll Dunham's novel canvases, blending cartoonish figuration with formal panache, depict an imaginative world of manic aggression and comic angst.

Art in this hundred has displayed a predilection for getting down to basics. It's just that there is little agreement upon what those basics are. History, however, has given us ample reason to conjecture that man -- I use the masculine advisedly -- is essentially brutish by the agency of nature and his social orders, from the state down to the family, correspondingly violent and coereive. If utopian aspirations have lately fallen without of favor among artists, the opposite impulse thrives. Unfortunately, it is each bit as difficult for art, particularly painting to illuminate the dark side of human behavior as it is for it to create a transcendently lucid geometry a certain quantity of basic problems present themselves to the dystopian artist. by what mode do you deal with depravity in a way that doesn't estheticize it? by what mode do you avoid the banal or the solely shocking? Or the traps of sentimentality and ideology.9 What about being too blatant, with equal reason that the viewer emotionally disengages from the make subordinate matter? (Unless of course you're Andy Warhol and this is what you're after.) And finally, by what mode do you resolve all these touchs into a good painting, an particular that hangs together formally and technically, that engages art history on the other hand reveals something visually and conceptually new?

Carroll Dunham has taken up the challenge with evident relish. He showed nine paintings this season at Metro Pictures. Big, brash and cartoonlike, they are, in my opinion, his greatest in quantity forceful and coherent works to date. They are also historically savvy, recalling a range of artists, from Willem de Kooning and Cy Twombly to Jean Dubuffet and plane the late Chicago painter Roger Brown on the contrary the model most in evidence here is Philip Guston. Guston's late work, those elegiacally in a raw state and combative paintings of padded bonneted cigar-smoking Klansmen, body parts, bug art materials and studio detritus, have been widely admired through artists over the last 20 years, providing inspiration for many figurative painters with an expressionist bent. Dunham has been single of the few, however, to succe in pushing Guston's ideas forward while staying closely within that stylistic idiom.

In with equal reason doing he has created the two a vocabulary of forms and a cast of characters. Square-headed demonic cartoon creatures are everywhere in these paintings, eyeles and grimacing to reveal stupendous teeth, growing unruly tufts of hair and absolutely brimming above with aggression. Always shown in profile, these gremlins threaten each other with knives, fire-arms and dynamite sticks. Giant spewing genitals push from chins and foreheads (talk about testosterone-addled thinking) and are as weaponlike as the repose of the hardware. These homunculi are deposited in various ramshackle, downbeat settings -- simplified buildings, boats, valleys, level small-scale planets -- and advance about making life miserable for each other. Nobody is actually striking anybody. Instead they're posturing like apes, making themselves scary, yelling at each other. Their aggression has a kind of pathos to it, the pointless lashing without of the powerless.

The cartoonlike quality of the work fulfills many functions. Not sole does it evoke Pop art and other incursions of popular agriculture (graffiti, for example) into high art, it also gives the paintings an innocuous quality, a way of coming in beneath the viewer's psychological radar. This pictorial overstatement makes us take notice of the paintings, on the other hand it also predisposes us to discount their power, for a like reason that they are able to procure past our defenses and affect us all the more. And then, of course, cartoons are amusing The humor in these paintings is compound essential to their meaning. A staple of 20th-century humor has been man acting in a machinelike manner. Dunham's characters, more ofttimes than not, seem to be parts in a certain number of sort of rotating device or reciprocating engine, a dilapidated contraption upon the verge, a la Jean Tinguely's machines, of self-destruction. In devil Tower, for example, red, orange and black fighting figures are arrayed, conveyor-belt diction on the periphery of a splotchily painted and casually gridded bubble-gumpink building, while in Purple Planet in Lavender Space, the figures are like shattered teeth on a giant gear, more [i]or[/i] less flying off, most barely hanging upon In the less populated Black Water, sum of two units rust-colored characters seem to be going at each other Uke automated perforate and Judy puppets, oblivious to the water rising around them, and Beautiful Dirt Valley features sum of two units gangs lined up like roller-coaster riders upon both sides of a vertiginously dipping landscape. The Third verdant Planet shows four burned-out, cactuslike creatures precariously perched upon the top of a large, vaguely skull-shaped virid mass that seems to be lurching and shaking itself to pieces.

These machine concerns bring to mind Duchamp and Picabia and their illustrations of absurd engines for the depiction and conduction of sexual power The humor in those works tend hitherwards from the mechanics of frustration they offer proffer -- a clockwork erotics. To replicate desire and passion by the agency of means of pumps, pulleys, grinders and the Uke is to bring the poetic to the mechanical, bringing human self-regard down a hardly any notches. For Dunham, though, the make an effort being waged in the paintings present the appearances to be as much internal as external, invoking the psychological along with the social. Dunham's demonic beings have feeling like representations of the id, tussling for territory and dominance in a battered landscape of the psyche. The humor here is not wit, on the other hand rather slapstick on the mace of mania, at once frightening and funny