“Art allows for things that we don’t use in our day-to-day social space to understand each other, to categorize each other.” A conversation with the artist Carroll Dunham.
Poor choice of words. It’s a sequence of hypotheses about painting, and the hypotheses take the form of more paintings. It’s completely tautological, but within that tautology things fly off, things leak in. As a boy, I went to the beach every summer, and I watched my mother and my aunts and their friends go in and out of the water every day. And then fifty, sixty years later, I get the bright idea of making paintings of women in the water. What does that mean, quote-unquote? I haven’t a clue.
Do you impute the changes in your work to a different cohort you found yourself in? Your marriage to Laurie and the kind of work she was doing? Becoming a father? Yeah, I think so. In ways that are a little surprising, maybe. We didn’t really then and we still don’t spend huge amounts of time in each other’s studios. But I knew when I met Laurie that I really liked what she was doing in her art work. We were both white kids from reasonably comfortable families; there were things that were not different, but it was different enough that it felt both enriching and safe to be around.
Yeah, it was a stupid cliché, but also deep, human stuff, which is why it’s a stupid cliché. And I kept going around and around that, just in circles, trying to think my way past it. I had thought I could make trees the central motifs of the paintings: I thought it was a way for me to circle back into something I would think of as abstraction. And the last thing in the world I wanted on a conscious level was to be making paintings of naked people. I was really, like, That’s not me.
You and Laurie have had your own version of art-world fame, not TV fame, when both your children were younger. Was it a strange experience to have a later-in-life-by-proxy experience of fame at a level that you hadn’t experienced yourself?
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