A master printmaker
Carroll Dunham's work gets a complete showing
ANDOVER - On view until July 13 at the Addison Gallery of American Art, located on the campus of Phillips Academy, is the first complete showing of Carroll Dunham's prints: 119 works dating from 1984 to 2006. Dunham, 58, graduated from Andover in 1967 and after moving to New York City in the 1970s became a significant figure in American painting, drawing comparisons to such disparate artists as Philip Guston, Cy Twombly, Hieronymus Bosch, and R. Crumb.
Dunham's work can be found in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, among others. He has also taught at Yale and Columbia while creating what critic Sanford Schwartz calls "one of the nervier and richer bodies of work in contemporary art." Dunham reflected on his career - and prep school years - while conducting a tour of his show.
Q Describe the relationship between your printmaking and painting.
A Printmaking is fundamentally a collaborative process, a chance to work outside my studio with the best publishers and master printers there are. At first, the issue was: If I'm making these kinds of paintings, what would that mean as prints? The more I grew to like printmaking, the more the influence went the other way: If my prints look like this, maybe my paintings could take something from that.
Q How do you divide your work time?
A As a young artist, the hardest thing was getting comfortable with being alone in a studio. The idea that other people not only liked my work but wanted to help me do it was so lovely, I jumped right on it. For the first five or six years, I was typically in the print studio one day a week. That changed when I began teaching more, but it's remained pretty steady.
Q In the 1980s, you burst onto the scene with paintings praised for their spontaneity and exuberance.
A And you're wondering, how could a person with my worldview make those?
Q No, no, I -
A (laughs) That's what I think to myself sometimes. The funny thing is, when I look at these prints now, I think, whoa. Bright colors. Things are happening here. But at the time, it was just little decisions. What happens if I put all the colors of the spectrum together? Or make little colored rings fly around on a sheet of paper? I can see their emotional climate better now than I could then.
Q As representations of your emotional state 20 years ago?
A Yes, although it's not as clear as, say, bright colors equal happy fellow. To me, it looks more like somebody trying to depict a state of extreme confusion. When I started a family, I was not conscious of it affecting my work. Now I think, my first kid was born and then this happened in the work.
Q Andover has produced many contemporary artists of note: Frank Stella, Carl Andre, your former roommate Mel Kendrick .
A Statistically speaking, it's actually not that many. Still, given the assumptions people make about this type of school, you're right. It's probably a bit more surprising that Frank Stella went here than that George Bush did.
Q What influence did Andover's art program have on your career?
A I spent a lot of time in this museum, but more important was Andover's view that a "good education" included an appreciation of beautiful things. There was also the whole late-'60s thing going on. I doubt I would have been an artist in a different time. It was a pure act of will on my part. Nobody ever said: "Oh, you're so talented, you should be a painter." I was interested in thinking about art, and I liked the scene. So I decided to try it.
Q How do you work? On several projects concurrently?
A I work on several paintings at a time. Once I've gotten myself into my activity zone, it's quite fluid. When I was young, the most difficult thing was spending long periods of time alone. Now it's the thing I value most.
Q When you shifted to so-called Shape painting in the '90s, did it feel like a major break?
A Not at all. It felt like, why is my work tormenting me and making me go in this weird direction that I don't want to go in?
Q You were unhappy with what you'd been producing?
A No, it isn't that -
Q You used the word "tormenting."
A (laughs) I did, didn't I? When I started painting, I was still deciding what kind of artist I wanted to be, which was an abstract painter. That was the big historical wave washing through my time, and I wanted to explore it. As I let more of my emotional life into my work, it pointed me in another direction, to creating more humanoid characters. I had resisted that for a long time, until I got bored with resisting it and what I felt was the dishonesty involved. So for about a year, I largely stopped painting. I went into a period of rumination. I produced a lot of drawings. Out of that came a whole new chapter for me.
Q> You've talked candidly about your early recreational drug use and psychoanalysis.
A I have. I was in psychoanalysis for most of my 20s and early 30s. The chronic pot smoking ended by age 35. Contrary to what you might think, my work got less managed as I grew older and more settled down. More - I don't know the right word - aggressive, maybe.
Q More narrative, certainly. More loaded guns and brandished knives, more soldiers and gangsters -
A Having kids changed my sense of what the content of my work could be. Not should be, but could be.
Q It seems every week brings record-breaking auction prices for contemporary artists. What impact is this having on your generation?
A Money makes people crazy, that's the big effect. Art's function as some sort of market commodity? That's a subject I'm not interested in. Any society where basketball players make more than teachers is fundamentally nuts. I'm happy if I can make art rather than do something else, but the world certainly doesn't owe artists anything.
