Achi news desk-
One of Donna Dennis’s architectural installations — a fake tunnel entrance set on the Mad River — so shocked local Ohioans that it was pipe-bombed one morning in August 1981. Part of another structure was seized by the New York bomb squad. , a cabin in City Hall Park, in 1986. Dennis’s works are so faithful to existing infrastructure vocabularies that they defy classification as art objects.
In New York in the 1970s, as painting and sculpture gave way to a gold rush of conceptualism, environments, performance and politics, Ohio-born Dennis, fresh from art school in Minnesota and Paris, tuned into girl groups who raised awareness and devoted herself to her craft. to the bland resemblance of buildings.
First came hotel and subway facades, then houses as a whole – each a combination of building materials and artist, and a little too small to pretend practicality. (For lighting she uses light bulbs, and her doors end at eye level.) Since the 80s she has gone industrial: room-sized lift bridges, stairs, railway platforms, pump houses and roller belts coaster that has increased in complexity as they decrease in number.
This month, the gates are cracking on this rare and challenging oeuvre. Bell art gallery O’Flaherty’s has dramatically darkened its space on Avenue A, and filled it with five Dennis works from the 1970s and 90s, for a show called “Houses and Hotels.” Whatever else they do, these shrines to vernacular architecture, humane, attractive and commanding, make it clear that the godmother of installation art has been unwisely ignored.
“Two Stories with Porch (for Robert Cobuzio)” (1977-79) is a 10-foot-tall rowhouse in the style of suburban New Jersey. From a dark first story window, a VACANCY sign glows green. (A tribute to a late friend of the title.) A wallpapered room lit by a ceiling bulb can be seen upstairs. As your eyes adjust in the darkness, unlit details fade in: a coat of aluminum paint on the cornice, a staircase through the curtain, traces of mortar among stones in the foundation.
Two tourist cabins from 1976 and 1986, inspired by a 1930 Walker Evans photograph, are also charmingly detailed, with patched screen porches and a handmade folding cradle inside one. But at the size of a chicken coop, as they vibrate in the dark they are also unsettling.
“I’m in love with the facts,” Dennis explained last month in her New York studio, her long silver hair braided neatly down her back. But facts should not shine: Holly Solomon, the pioneer dealer of the Patterns and Decoration movement in the 1970s, agreed to paint her gallery. dark,” said Dennis, for her 1980 installation — a warm gray Dennis borrowed from sculptor Louise Nevelson, who had shown her dark sculptures in low light. “The next show was Laurie Anderson, and Laurie Anderson said ‘Donna, can I keep that color for my show?'”
The nocturnal effect so well achieved at O’Flaherty’s, together with the upward tilt of the gallery floor (an old film theatre), tricks your perspective in the style of Hitchcock’s dolly zoom. You feel distance, but you are close.
These works have been in her possession, some unseen, for decades. “First I was relieved that they were in as good a condition as they were,” the sculptor told me. “Then I felt very proud of the young woman I was.”
Dennis’ devotion to the built environment unfolds with striking clarity in “Writing Toward Dawn,” an edition of her diaries published this month by Bamberger Books and edited by Nicole Miller, a Dennis authority. A lifelong diarist (“You’ll be in it,” Dennis promised as we surveyed his bookshelf of notebooks), the artist has mined the years 1969 to 1982 — from her first foray into three dimensions to her emergence the Whitney biennial in 1979, to the Venice Biennale in 1982.
Born in 1942 (in the same bedroom as her mother) to observant Scottish Presbyterians, Dennis studied painting at Carleton College, Minn., with a year at the American Center in Paris.
Although Philip Guston admired her automotive paintings from 1966, the book begins as she leaves the canvas behind. After four years in New York, she drafts a menu of possible media that holds the lead on pluralism: “Canvas or not? Paint or not? A statue? Environment? Stain? A brush?”
It takes courage to publish one’s trials, I said. (May 24, 1974: “He was rejected by Silvermine [Arts Center] today. I fell down the subway stairs and broke my only pair of shoes.”) Dennis replied flatly: “Well, I’m a feminist. And although I felt empowered by Anaïs Nin’s diaries, I was annoyed that she never explained where her money came from.”
Money, mainly from design jobs or desk jobs, but also from “very little” gallery sales, is never out of mind in his chronicle. More documentary than confession, the diaries list the extremes of finance, euphoria, depression, necessity, body image, love and — above all — the slow genesis of works like the “Two Stories” and “Tourist Cabin Porch (Maine)” (1976). ) can be seen at O’Flaherty’s.
While it rivals Frida Kahlo’s private writings for honesty and Warhol’s Chronicle for New York, what makes “Writing Toward Dawn” rare among artists’ diaries is Dennis’ renewed self-education. . Carpentry, neon, electrical, metalwork and photographic research is undertaken with a seriousness – and ultimately mastery – that should encourage new artists in any medium.
Although this edition is helpfully illustrated and annotated, a strong monograph of Dennis’s work, also recently published by Monacelli, explains with a wealth of pictures his progression from canvas to sculpture to installation.
As for the larger-scale industrial plants that occupy the latter years of the diary, and ever since, The Ranch in Montauk, NY, opens its summer season with a temporary exhibition of its subway platform “Deep Station” (1981 -85).
“I envy the Renaissance and N. painters with their religious themes,” he wrote in 1970. The New York answer was secular. By 1973 the city’s architecture had taught her a cynicism that still speaks through her work: she nails buildings that are “full of life but bubbly, superficial, sad-mysterious.” And this: “I have an urge to record them in a Hopper-like way.”
A yearning of this kind — like Hopper’s single-lit windows, Miles Davis’ mood in silence or EM Forster’s “Only connect” — reveals a highly urban brand of romanticism. “When I’m alone, everything becomes beautiful,” Dennis writes in 1972. “But when I’m with people,” she continues, “I lose my sense of being beautiful, mysterious, and lonely.”
As with her work at O’Flaherty’s, one finds an isolated presence in the space which, nevertheless, comforts by being complete. With prolonged viewing, her works seem to take on a personality.
Like many of her TriBeCa generation, Dennis fought to keep her loft unzoned—a struggle documented in the diary. She had rushed to court hearings, she told me, “with sawdust in my eyelids,” and in 1982 secured her renter’s rights, even as market pressure continued to mount.
Exterior shots of his old studio on Duane Street, with its windows glistening from the city street at night, appear in “The Art of Metaphor,” a compelling short film about Dennis by filmmaker Kate Taverna and debuted in Montreal last month. Among her strengths is Dennis’s reading of the diary in her principled Midwestern voice. The film travels this month to Boston, then Berlin and Madrid.
By 2018, among the last tenants, Dennis took her purchase and left, with her partner, for a neo-colonial home and studio off the Hudson River, whose sloping grounds have been compared to Andrew Wyeth’s “Christina’s World”. As she leans into the brisk March wind, cloaked in black, one senses her plain honesty without exchanging a word.
The suddenness of Dennis’s renaissance this spring invites comparisons to her more visible colleagues in the installation: like Red Grooms with her joyous “photo-sculptures” in Yonkers and Queens, or Alice Aycock with her vortexes up and along the FDR Drive. More ambiguously, perhaps, Dennis’s works have not been so readily seen.
The solidarity of second-wave feminism “gave me a bigger cause than ‘Donna Dennis wants to be a great artist,'” she told me, referring to Linda Nochlin’s provocation of the oblivion of women in art history. Her eyes are good when she describes the way there is a torch between generations of female artists, a subject that was explained to her by writers such as Virginia Woolf and Germaine Greer. “It gave me something outside of myself that I believed in and felt a part of and gave me purpose.”
Purpose is still there. “I used to worry about being avant-garde enough, opening up new territories in art history,” he wrote 53 years ago. “Now I know that my path is within myself.”
Source link
The post A Heartland Godmother of Installation Art, No Longer in the Shadows appeared first on Canada News Media.
