This title was digitized by the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia (MOCA GA).
About Art papers. (Atlanta, Ga.) 1981-current | View Entire Issue (Sept. 1, 1981)
and angel, a man and woman are held in stasis within a closed circle. Additional drawings in the AAWC show extend notions of religiosity with confessional undertones. In Melancholia penciled notes prescribe the process of the work. A hard-edged green cross appears with biblical nota tion: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me.’ Below, a more crudely drawn red cross is labeled: ‘I cry in the daytime but thou hearest not, and in the nighttime and am not silent.’ Encounters with one image after another in the Diagrams and other drawings enforce an image-by- image reading of the work, demand ing attention to the temporal un folding involved in experiences of memory, reflection and narration. In another drawing, a glittered saint with an aureole radiating the numbers one through nine is placed over a segmented circle. Elsewhere, dates are conspicuously stamped onto the sur face of works intentionally arranged in series. Although the connections among images sometimes seem to be the grammar of an obscure language, a syntactical reading evokes the tem porality of cultural and personal memory. The house and its extension into box forms as a personal iconographic structure emerges as a central core. On an entire wall at the AAWC Gallery, a variety of single image, house-shaped pieces become one huge environmental wall piece, reading col lectively rather than individually. These take on certain eccentricities of recognizable style (duplex, raised foundation and so on), yet remain almost immediately and foremost ‘house’ in its most basic, stereotypical sense. Dorset’s houses and their per mutation into box forms are per ceived as concentration of vital energies. The internal identity of their ethereal contents is indicated by gestural representations covering the houses’ exteriors. These houses are licked with flames and covered with glittered sizzle lines. Markings pro vide not only decorative surfaces but more importantly a connection and sign regarding their chambers. Yet their festivity a la Venice, California style seems too hot, too busy and con tradicts the idea of shelter. Rarely do Dorset’s houses provide a physical en trance. Doorways, identical in shape to the house forms, flame or become transmuted into blazing crosses that are barricades, obscuring the notion of access. These houses simultane ously suggest ambiguities of en closure, concealment and entry: they are at once open and closed. Although not physically obvious, one strongly senses the twilight reality of the house as a place containing ongo ing activities, frozen moments and selected objects. These houses become icons of self or, more ac curately, a representation of our long ing and need for a home. Dorset’s materialization of the idea and the image of home continues in the large number of built-up canvases, replete with leather house forms and open or closed boxes. The occurrence of images related to sewing is another constant featured in Dorset’s work. The homemaking im agery is highly self-conscious. In the literal use of materials, cutting becomes contour and rows of meas ured tacks become drawing. The obsessively patterned backgrounds and images of the Diagrams, draw ings and shaped canvases materialize in the use of printed fabrics, paisleys, leather, and borders wrapped with Art Papers September-October 1981 rawhide strips. Reinforced by these techniques, images of flowers and houses or whatever are contained by material substance. When the images become actual objects-a wooden shoe form, padded triangles, celestial statuary, lidded locked boxes, items of clothing-the sense of identification between materials objects and ‘images’ is heightened. Dorset not on ly gives a material character to images but also comments on the procedure that follows from their materiality: they can be physically embedded within the pictorial medium. In these concerns with the objective realiza tion of the image, the paint itself, both in terms of its color and its den sity, functions within the works as its own specialized image, contributing to the works’ iconic power and inten sity. Of the collaged canvases, three were hung together at the AAWC Gallery and represented some of the most intriguing work of that show. All exhibited appendaged forms to their surfaces, their physicality enriched by an aggregate of materials and textures. In one work a thick swirling sea of wet looking pink paint seems insubstantial when contra dicted by two padded leather triangles hammered into its surface. Gaudy carnival colors, squeezed out of the tube into a woven grid, envelope the opened lid of a central shallow box, its contents revealing yet another pat terned field. On the lower portion of this canvas, hair matted into paint ex trudes beyond the boundaries of a closed box form striated with prison bars. In another of these canvases, boxes attached to the upper corners continued the theme of concealment. On the left, a skull and crossbones is forbodingly stenciled across the lid ded surface fastened with a metal lock, its contents forever undisturbed and unknown. The box in the op posite corner, its hinged lid swung open, reveals a flat red interior with a penis outline cleanly pressed into tur quoise wax. In contrast to the riot of texture and color elsewhere in this canvas, the pristine inner clarity of continuous line stands aloof and somehow hollow as another layer of empty imagery is revealed. Upon a centered door/house motif, heavily impastoed in tootsie roll glops of salmon, flesh, spring green and lilac, a wooden shoe form is encrusted in equally lush swipes of paint built up concurrently with the picture plane and accented with glittery energy waves. Below, a painterly yellow field is methodically crossed out while an underlayer of contrasting color barely survives. Other notable pieces in the AAWC show, which stood more in tandem to the Image South show than as a separate body of work, included a pair of decoratively defined chair sculptures. The images protruding from the canvas surfaces seem now to have become totally objectified in the chairs and in true evolutionary style, subsume the importance of the sur face. Reversing the traditional rela tionship of objects dependent upon a surface, these chairs become the sole support for the canvases propped into place in a makeshift fashion with broom handles. A unifying kinetic motif imposed over greys and reds spreads over the chair from the ground up like some contagious creeping jungle disease, encompass ing the exterior of a box which rests on the seat of the chair, while the con tents, feathers seen through a Plexi glass seal, are visibly untouched. The distribution of work between two galleries presents some problems similar to deciding which gift to give your mother and which to give your girlfriend. While the logic wasn’t always certain, on the whole the placement seemed thoughtful although in some cases series were broken. Of the many collaged works at Image South, a pair of canvases, indicating the Rauschenbergian influence which Dorset claims, repe titively and insistently invaded the sanctuaries of modernist ‘good taste.’ More than any of the otjier works, these pay homage to the sacred tradi tion of image making. In a devotion to excess, stencil sheets, patches of eyeletted chamois, layers of paper and ragged gauze soaked in splotches and drips of color are suspended in a solidified tinted gel. As a final state ment of decorative decadence, the word ‘Pitura’ is scrawled across the surface and seemingly anchored down with large superimposed ‘X’ marks. In the second piece, two tacky tro phies, an angel and a cherub, sit atop the canvas they adorn. Surplus can vas, rolled up like a blind, is held in place by cords above a decorative sur face. Then there were Dorset’s boxes, ex hibited almost entirely at Image South. In their most essential form, his richly encrusted boxes are reli quaries. The richness of texture, sur face and the embellishment of these boxes with reliefs and ornate arabes ques is rooted in a far away past associated with the religious icons of Byzantine Eastern Orthodoxy. These constructions use literal enclosure as a form evoking emotional content - all the themes of pain, pleasure, aggres sion, adoration, past, present and so on. Continuing the tension between the rare and the commonplace, the ancient and contemporary, the vio lated and the inviolate, some of the boxes are meant to be manipulated while other are sealed to protect their sanctity. Like the background music of a Baroque organ fugue at Image South which was almost too ap propriate, the work is ecclesiastical and labored. The boxes imply secrets they will never divulge, being either firmly locked or filled with superficial patterns, feathers or other visually simple surprises. Dwelling in delicate insubstantialities, Dorset’s disclo sures are never literally confessional but only confront another decorative and equally superficial veneer. In a box wrapped in multi-colored gauze bandages, glitter dots contrast with red paint splattered fox hair which lines each end. The work offers a strangely compelling necromantic enticement, as if some long past violent act of gore and glory with sacrificial overtones lies frozen in the sealed funerary case. Little stenciled angel wings transmute it into an ethereal realm. Other boxes convey a deep sense of nostalgia and of precious but obscure memory. In one wall mounted box, zebra striped and divided into uniform little cubby holes, eight conical forms washed with glowing color look like special party hats or Christmas decorations, eternally fresh in their protective case, yet as remote as the pretty paper stars pierced by a wooden dowel and obscured by the half closed lid of another of the boxes. Dorset’s boxes equivocate between the desire to transcend materiality and the urge for sensorial realization of amassed materials and textures. Another pair of boxes play on this ambivalence, inviting the forbidden handling of artwork in a gallery. One of this pair, a veritable treasure chest with heavily frescoed surfaces, is wide open and filled with fluffy pink feathers, while an accompanying Pandora’s box is mysteriously slightly ajar. Becoming as much jack-in-the- box as icon, upon opening, it reveals two skulls veiled in a light chalky gauze and packed in a bed of ex celsior. The bare wooden interior of this box and the clean wood shavings were visually very soothing after the plethora of decorative excess of the work in general—yet there was a feel ing that meaning is finally and forever withheld. Dorset’s works remain at their very heart, private and in troverted. In his involvement with the possibilities of the decorative surface, Dorset is sometimes guilty of a refusal to delve beneath the surface of an ap propriate look. The danger he en counters in decorative exaggeration is that ol over-involvement. When lack ing any definitive statement of underlying ambiguities, emotional content and tension, the work becomes decoratively complacent, sidestepping ultimately more crucial issues. Only when the work is search ing, successfully contrasting op posites, does Dorset find his strength. By never transcending the material world, these icons are unambiguously identified with that world. By remain ing physical objects which must be en countered through time, the sculp tures are part of an experience that is fully durational like that of memory, presupposing internal, psychological space. The field of memory itself is changed from an internal to that which is external, from something private to something collective in so far as it arises from a shared culture. Thus, these icons, as distillations of the artist’s experience condensed into intensely personal objects, commit the spectator to join the artist in com muning with himself. In true pagan fashion, Dorset’s images become sacred. Jan A vgikos, a contributing editor of Art Papers, is the Visual Resources Curator at Atlanta College of Art Library. A permanent record of ART PAPERS ON Microfiche CAN BE OBTAINED FROM j=| D u miCRO PHOTO Division L4J LJELL El HOLLIELL 0ld Mansfield Rd. Wooster, OH 44691 *— 1 (800) 321-9881 (216) 264-6666 16
