Critical Distance Vol 13:2

Dan Donaldson
Art Imitating Life Imitating Art
October 26 – November 24, 2007

The Post-Bolshevic (oh no…not another prefixed word)
A response by Derek Brueckner

By now most people who are familiar with the local Winnipeg art scene have heard of various art collectives emerging from the School of Art at Winnipeg’s University of Manitoba. There is of course The Royal Art Lodge, Two-Six collective and the more recent Those Who Walk with Legend and Creation. Even General Idea members had connections to the Art School in the late sixties. There was however a period some time after this and before the former mentioned emerging collectives that gave birth to a group of artists who appropriately christened themselves The Student Bolshevics.
One of the first officially published texts on The Bolshevics appeared in a 1993 Border Crossings article.¹ It was an interesting piece, although incomplete, and I thought this would be the perfect time to address its omissions. Firstly, Dan Donaldson and Ralph Dueck, though members of the collective, were never mentioned in the 1993 article. Secondly the Bolshevics for the collective was spelt with a “c” not with a “k” as in the article.
…It was a very Iate evening in 1988, working as a 4th year BFA student in my drawing thesis space on the ground floor of the now infamous Art Barn, that I glanced out of the open doorway and watched two young art students carrying a large assortment of supplies to and from parking lot E. The two lanky, young and energetic students were John (Bunny) White and Ralph Dueck, but I wasn’t certain what I was witnessing of the bouncing long curly-haired White and the redheaded Dueck.
I recall a flurry of activity in their (now defunct) work area. I quietly watched the uninhibited artists as the floors and walls quickly filled up with their massive “combine paintings”. Their fresh combinationof truth to materials and anything goes use of popular and subculture images caught my attention. In many ways, Donaldson’s show at aceartinc. demonstrates those same sensibilities.
In some ways seemingly no more than your typical art school party group, looking back I can’t deny that this collective broke ground with their work, challenging the definitions and boundaries of painting, sculpture, installation, video and performance. I suspect they viewed themselves as I viewed them, antithetical to the established art world and to the theoretical buttressing of visually illiterate work and the academic structures within parts of that world. Therefore, though undoubtedly representative of the eighties neo-expressionist type aesthetics, this collective pushed the boundaries of what was deemed ‘acceptable’ tastes.
With some of its members heading off to graduate school in the early nineties, The Bolshevics remained an active part of Winnipeg’s art community. While the Winnipeg Art Gallery held its EDGE Manitoba Exhibition, The Bolshevics responded with the satirically titled HEDGE Show. This massive hybrid salon show meets installation art exhibition included invited non-members, such as myself, to show their works (as long as we brought our own lighting and extension cords!). But a Bolshevics Christmas spoke loudest in understanding what was acceptable to a Bolshevics member. Donaldson and friends once again challenged the boundaries of acceptable tastes. The party I attended had for its centerpiece a fountain that had a liquid recycling from one life size female sculpture’s very visible vagina and detailed urethra flowing down with a slight arch into a reclining Santa sculpture’s mouth. And knowing that Dan and his accomplice transported the said Santa avec erect penis on foot through downtown Winnipeg streets, the bearded man must have received a few gazes.
I will now jump ahead to the fall of 2007 and to Dan Donaldson’s Ace Art opening night, which is really why I’m here, by the way. Given the history of the Bolshevics it was no surprise to me that his exhibition presented charged images. One part of a wall combined a large, black ace of spades with the charged image of an African American man chained to a tree. Like many of the images in his exhibition, this one was also sourced from a Life magazine photo, this hate crime image presenting us with the irrevocable results of barbaric behavior. Some spectators have interpreted the appropriation of that image in Donaldson’s work as racist or at the very least problematic. I see it in the context of the work as a whole, though perhaps used a bit too freely, but a free association of imagery, which should not be used to discredit his work. The juxtaposition of Lincoln’s image along with the cartoon children and the dialogue balloons is more suggestive to me of a criticism to racism, rather than racism itself.
Thinking back to the late eighties, artist Robert Gober, known for addressing such issues as gay rights, religion, gender, and sexuality also used an image of the lynching of an African American man. The controversial image for Gober was his 1989 wallpaper work, “Hanging man/Sleeping man” which elicited horror for some, with its interspersed images of a sleeping white man and a hanging black man.
Now, taken out of context, a KKK member may find parts of both Gober or of Donaldson’s works quite appealing, but when those images are taken in context of their installations, I would think it loses its appeal to the white supremacists. It is perhaps true that both of these artists are formally playing with images that might be viewed differently by the African American community.
In terms of semiotic theory (or as a post–colonial critique) the repetition of these images perhaps reinforces the terrible hate crime murders. Most white people aren’t able to share the personal and cultural pain connected to those images, or own them in the same way. Does that mean Gober or Donaldson should avoid using these images altogether? In terms of art making do the poetics of a work of art have to be crystal clear on its intent when using politically charged subject matter such as in these two examples? If we answer yes to these questions, the making of art runs the risk of being reduced to a utilitarian device for political messages, which would then be equally as problematic.
I see these criticisms as a kind of semiotic hang over. The new ground within the ideas that semiotics and issues surrounding the representation of the “other” has been gained is obviously crucial in any dialogue and needs to be maintained. Unfortunately, the marginalization of the other is still stronger than ever. These ideas and criticisms are and have been misused (formerly with Gober’s work, currently in Donaldson’s) with the intent to discredit an interesting painter and sculptor. To accept this does very little in changing or stopping systems that are still marginalizing groups and individuals.
Donaldson’s images are taken mainly from the lexicon of media and more recently from cyberspace. There exists a manner of attraction to some of the images by the every-day observer, but these images are quickly transformed once painted and immediately re-contextualized as a formal free association device, and at times not always with conscious intent. His work is sometimes densely thematic/metaphorical in it’s layering and at other times, it is left for the viewer to decipher, which I suspect is what Donaldson prefers.
This free association of pop culture images references some ideas from Robert Rauschenberg’s work (an influence of Donaldson’s). In alluding to Rauschenberg’s work, Leo Steinberg is quoted as saying, “…it seemed at times that Rauschenberg’s work surface stood for the mind itself—dump, reservoir, switching center, abundant with concrete references freely associated as in an internal monologue—the outward symbol of the mind as a running transformer of the external world, constantly ingesting incoming unprocessed data to be mapped in an overcharged field.” ²
Donaldson’s work operates with very similar ideas. I wonder if we should perhaps rename Steinberg’s “The Flatbed Picture Plane” essay, to “The Scanner-bed Picture Plane” or “The Cybernetic Picture Plane”? It might be more fitting in the context of Donaldson’s work. Like Rauschenberg the artist shifts outside the paradigm of painting while still offering his reaffirmation of painting, though I’ve discussed the issue at length regarding the reaffirmation of painting and the repeated premature declarations through out history of painting as “dead” in another article written a decade ago. (http://www.aceart.org/archives/cd/cd97/CD_98_brueckner.html)
Even now I still disagree (along with Donaldson) with the redundant declarations that “Painting is Dead”. After all here we are in 2007 and painting still exists. Indeed, painting is alive and kicking in Donaldson’s work, albeit in an illustrative style and as an installation which may not have a beginning or an end. Overall I recognize the painter and Donaldson as researchers who explore painting as a viral medium that continues to mutate and adapt to new technologies, new environments and new contexts.
Duchamp has been attributed to releasing the art world from many constraints, thus moving the artist away from the romantic notion of the artist’s hand and eye, and moving the artist into interdisciplinary terrain. It is in that terrain where art began to have a more conceptual emphasis, which after a century of Duchampian and Dadaist influences is continuing to thrive among contemporary art practices. Donaldson’s work is navigating this Duchampian terrain as much as any of the other pop artist from the sixties (the Neo-Dadaists of the era) or the current 21st Century conceptual artists. But Donaldson advocates the sense of touch and the ocular processes involved with painting more than those artists while still harvesting some ideas from Duchamp, the Dadaists and the pop artists. For Donaldson, painting continues to “fester” along as part of the dialogue.
<sup>Notes
1. Scott Ellis, Border Crossings, “Storming the Ramparts with the Student Bolsheviks”, Winter 1993, pp.62-63
2. Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria, “The Flatbed Picture Plane”, 1972, pp.61-98</sup>