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.
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