home : 15orient

Please note our new location;
72 Walker Street, 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10013
(Entrance on Cortlandt Alley between Walker and Canal)

Open Wednesday-Saturday, 12-6pm

Dustin Hodges
Barley Patch
15 Orient
March 16th - April 26th

Continuing to work against a certain conflation of image and painting, Hodges here presents thirteen paintings as a composite landscape. Elements of a rural configuration mark and qualify the landscape. Architectures, tree trunks, wood piles, fence posts and rails, sections of turf, and cartoon figures map and unfold a space they are not.

Dustin Hodges (b. 1984, Portland OR) lives and works between northern New Mexico and New York City. Recent solo-exhibitions include: Atrata (Paris, La Roche-Posay) 2023, 15 Orient (New York) 2021, Richard Telles (Los Angeles) 2018, Off Vendome (Düsseldorf ) 2015, and Miguel Abreu (New York) 2014.

For more information or for visuals, please contact the gallery;

15 Orient
72 Walker Street, 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10013
(Entrance on Cortlandt Alley)
15orient.com
303.803.4347

A conversation between Amy Sillman and Dustin Hodges from Spring 2023

DUSTIN:

We both think about painting in relation to time arts—film and animation. I was hoping we could talk about this shared impulse.

AMY:

How long have you been thinking about this relationship of painting and film?

In 2018 I did a show in Los Angeles at Richard Telles Fine Art. Privately, I had the idea of a film that functioned as a motor generating paintings as if they were each an individual frame or still. I admitted this to our friend Monika Baer as we were walking through the show. She suggested I make that explicit.

Before 2018, did you only think in terms of a painting as a single image?

I probably began to give up the idea of painting as single image much earlier. I tried various solutions beginning around 2009 and painting as film still was just sort of the last solution in a string of proposals to myself.

How did you begin that?

I had been making copies of a particular painting by Odilon Redon for about 8 years that I make that more explicit in the work and even write about it.
and the Telles paintings came out of taking that more seriously and exploring my interest in that source. I began picturing in my mind “animating” the painting in order to find out how its depicted forms might change, what was just outside the frame, what other scenes might exist within such a film…

I first saw this work when you had a solo show at 15 Orient in October 2021 called Francine. They featured these characters called Arthur and Francine, but I couldn’t remember who they were exactly. Actually I had never heard of Francine, but Arthur was this vaguely familiar round-shaped cartoon character, but I didn't know anything else about him.

Yeah, and that's all I knew about it too. I thought the rounded shapes of the characters from Arthur might function as a soft stabilizing context for the obscure and fragmentary moving image-germ I had begun with in LA.

Did you watch cartoons as a kid? Were they a big deal for you?

I would watch cartoons before anyone else was awake. And yes—they were a big deal! (laughs)

But recently you told me that you don't really care about cartoon characters?

Sure I do, I just never watched Arthur—I didn’t want to dispel their potential for me by finding out more—especially as the dynamics between characters began to intensify within the paintings I was making. I remember as a kid noticing moments in cartoons where you have a continuous image and then one object in the field or the scene would suddenly detach and become rendered in a simplified, even junky style…

Junky style…?

Yeah, you’d have a lushly painted background and then one object would become isolated as a simplified cliché of itself and then you knew it was about to start moving around, independently of the ground it had once been part of...something about especially
low budget animation would telegraph an “about to happen” feeling to even a young viewer.

That sounds like abstraction to me! I totally relate to the idea of a cartoon as a world where things are moving around, and made up of glitches and cuts. As someone who grew up thinking about “bad” painting, I was excited when I read about the production of Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons, about how half the stuff was drawn by hired hands,
non-professionals. And you turned me on to this book by Hannah Frank, Frame by Frame, and she talks about mistakes and errors in cartoons, “...works of mass art in which representation falls apart.” I’m sure that’s related to the art and music I was into in the 70s in NYC, where “bad” was good. But, Arthur is like “good” animation to me, skillfully done…?

Early Disney is what I would call “good”. My great grandmother had Rocky and Bullwinkle on VHS—so I probably watched every episode a million times. That was probably more productive for me…the bad animation just highlights the mechanism of it more. I remember as a kid being like, why is there a shadow or a halo around that moving figure? There's like a millimeter between cells, and the painted figure is casting a literal shadow on the cell behind it. And I loved that. It's not a mistake exactly, it’s just the fact that there's space between transparent cells. As a kid I was totally fascinated by those things that made the parts tactile. I like cultivating moments where it’s unclear if a character’s glance lands on another figure or goes through it, past it. Are they in the same world/space or are they just collaged into the same picture?

I know what you mean from watching “Clutch Cargo” on TV as a kid, a cartoon where the figures were just stills, but the faces had actual films of mouths moving that were pasted into the unmoving drawn frames. A weird effect, and I remember that kind of close looking as a kid, to the feeling of how a mouth moves or how a figure sits on a ground. It was kind of uncanny. But let’s go back to your own development. What happened once you developed this idea of a fictional world that is continuous across multiple paintings?

Immediately after the Telles show, it seemed as if a definite story might unfold. But what I found over and over is that every attempt to stabilize a continuous narrative seemed to result in more splitting, disjunction, fragmentation, and instability. So the longer I work with this premise, the less a clear narrative emerges, and the more a certain kind of contradictory psychic space does.

Yeah, I was wondering about what you’re calling “narrative.” I doubt it’s how a fiction writer would describe “narrative.” I think it’s more like a way to throw a plank down to walk over to the next painting. And a question I have is, given all the feints and discontinuities you’ve been talking about, how can a viewer follow what you’re doing?
What with all the holes and gaps you’re describing, how does a viewer follow the so-called story?

I don’t think the viewer follows at all…if there’s a narrative the viewer will supply it. I think it’s still undecided if the “film” being produced is straightforwardly narrative or if it’s more like an avant-garde experimental film. Certain brief movements are the most established image sequences so far: characters move right to left, heads swivel, gazes meet, an ambiguous rock form falls or “dives” forward, possibly out of frame bottom...but mostly narratives and destinies beyond these are in a state of suspension and deferral, possibly to be resolved or stitched together at a later date. That said, I do feel like the emotional content in my mind has a weird way of being picked up by a lot of viewers—the kinds of psychic investments in “Francine” for example…

What’s the time of making a painting like for you, while it’s in process? What’s its life story?

It can be very long. I work on a lot of paintings at once, all unstretched, frequently being rolled up and put out of sight and later unrolled, rehung—stapled directly to the wall, revisited, moved around, something drawn—usually flat on the floor, a color added…

Do they change a lot?

Your paintings change A LOT—I watched that animation you made of how a single painting changed and it was remarkable that certain phases of a painting might have absolutely no observable relation to an earlier phase. We’re talking about a serious geology—a history in paint in your case! Each painting is a whole film for you and every frame but the last is lost forever except that I know you document as you go—we’ve discussed this before—I do too—this is all a result of the iPhone though. Each of your paintings is like a lost film unless you do the work to document and re-dramatize the making for us, the audience. So, no, compared to that, mine don’t change a lot and I always reserve the right to have a painting that works out with very little paint on it. But usually they do change a lot compared with someone who knows where their painting is going from the start. I definitely don’t. I get stuck often. My grounds are very absorbent so the surfaces have an indelible quality. You can never really get rid of something you put on. Maybe like a film cell, everything is registered on that surface. Recently, I pulled out several paintings I hadn't touched in two years and I thought: I know how to go on with them…and they became the core of the show I’m working on now in France at Atrata in the countryside.

My version of narrative is not fiction. It’s about looking back retroactively and laying out what happened during the making. You once described my work as being about “the drama of production” — which I thought was right. I’m always excavating the steps of how a painting is made; it’s basically all process.

My take on the drama of production is through what I call “the fiction of medium”. When reading art historians of the last century, I loved this idea of medium specificity. I think I’m likely taking that idea in the wrong way, abusing it a bit but mediums like painting and film seem so unreal now. They feel like fictions in our hyper-mediated world and I’ve come to cherish “medium” as fiction. Working with this premise of paintings as frames within a film, I was interested in the experience of an artwork one receives only as rumor, or a film experienced only as a few stills or an architecture known only through a photograph and maybe some text…

That idea of a RUMOR is really interesting. Can you say more?

I think we’ve experienced works of art this way and even had complicated relationships to art objects only known in the most oblique ways. But I was considering what, subjectively, constituted powerful experiences of artworks for me and how very often a fragmentary or insufficient exposure to something actually produced vivid but necessarily private subjective “co-creations” in my mind.

Can you give an example?

Someone once described a performance work, in my memory, attributed to the artist Matt Mullican while he was supposedly in the legendary crit class of Michael Asher at CalArts. I have no idea if any of this is true but my memory of this rumor of a performance goes like this: “Rumor Matt” holds a sycamore leaf, which of course has five points, while standing inside the classroom. Five classmates hold five mirrors outside, each reflecting sunlight toward a magnifying glass which “Rumor Matt” holds in his other hand, focusing the sunlight onto the dry leaf and burning it completely. This image-narrative in my mind is a fiction. If the event even took place, I certainly wasn’t present but it looks and feels a certain way in my mind. A hypothetical film could be a machine for generating paintings and those paintings could appear to a viewer as rumors of a non-present or somehow unavailable artwork, in this case the film. Seeing an exhibition might be like encountering stills which might trigger in the viewer a mental image or feeling of what the rest of the film could be like.

The implication being that the film lies outside the paintings? Maybe that’s how all art history works. I have no idea how to really see all the different historical artworks I see “right,” especially the ones that are from other times in history. In that way, I can ONLY be a co-creator, since the meaning or the stakes are not really known or clear to me. I’m always kind of in the dark, in that way.

Sure, maybe we’re always in the dark but I’m less interested in making this art historical point than I am in the very special feelings I get around the very thin, very incomplete experience of certain art works. These very special feelings around an experience of
“extra distance” are what guide my work. And, yes, the film lies outside the paintings but not completely. It would be more accurate to say movement and time of the film lie outside the paintings, but the paintings are real parts of the film. These individual frames are literally present.

I love this “extra distance” thing and the idea that you might work with it. It’s SCALE, not size. And how you’re talking about it, it’s like working with “aura” or something unseen but that is affecting you. There’s still a difference, however, in what you’re calling the “real” and what you called a rumor — the area of “extra” — an unseen force, a silent or secret part, an unreliable narrator, or something that isn’t quite controllable by you, or by the viewer. It’s like there’s another force present that you can’t trust?

Your characterization of “extra distance” as an invisible material is really wonderful. I think unreliable narrative is just what happens when you build outward from a handful of image-germs to build a space. Our real experience is more like a collection of
image-germs and narrative is a constructed overlay, always unreliable.

But you so often construct an absence or departure, and then there’s this sense of ongoingness, a deus ex machina. I think this is how you get at an emotional situation in your work, staging things that break next to things that are unbroken but also kind of unknowable. The result is almost ungraspable, even though it seems to be made of “facts.” Like cobbled into your fictions and unstable relations, are little facts, like the sprocket holes you paint into your paintings to deepen the fiction of a film.

That’s great—I totally relate to what you just said.

Let’s talk about your format. Given all the precarity we just described in the goings-on, you’ve also developed these extremely beautiful kinds of surfaces with a very delicate touch and color-wash. The paintings have an almost granular surface, with these outbreaks of stain, but in pearly soft, powdery diffusions of color. I don't even know how you do it. It looks like you make a shadow become a color.

I’m a bit obsessed with developing a set of techniques in paint that imitate printed or cellulose things. I always want the figures in my paintings to appear as wafer-like “objects” with their own local color AND an environmental color which suggests they inhabit another space from the one we stand in. I guess this is another distancing tactic…

But I’m going to be pushy and point out: there’s a sense of a trap door here. You want seduction and critical distancing too…

Yes, I love the image of a trap door! But I would suggest the polarity of seduction and critical distance breaks down. For one thing, there is no seduction without distance. I forget who writes about the correct viewing distance for looking at an Agnes Martin — maybe Rosalind Krauss — and the point being to locate one’s body at the precise distance where the near view (canvas grain, tooth, materiality) and the far view (haze, atmosphere, gestalt) are held in tension.

Yeah that’s right between the OPTIC and the HAPTIC. By the way, color-wise, someone could write a whole essay on how you chromatize a shadow. There's no such thing as a hot-pink shadow…

…right. I always imagine a filmic gel coming over a form when I “chromatize” it…

Yeah, so film gave you something else besides time: fiction! You say “film,” especially with those sprocket holes you paint in, and you say “narrative,” but it’s not film or narrative per se, it’s more like a fiction you can situate painting within. Even with the way you think of color, since opticality itself is such a subjective and uncertain thing, and embodied perception is a process of constant change…

…not to mention the other conventions of film: fade in/out, blur, camera focus, and the even more insane liberties taken in animation, the depiction of psychedelic perceptions,
etc. The very idea of a film-still grants permission to leave out a bunch of stuff, so that the painting could be totally fragmentary, but still have this pregnant sense of expectancy, or sense that something had just happened or was about to happen.

I’m totally with you there. I think the idea of animation is the structure for you. Animation is a loose format in which almost anything can happen. It’s about drawing, not looking through a lens at the world. It’s made in artificial colors and happens in a time/space sense that is implausible but HAPPENING NOW. In your hands, you combine this kind of tenderness that cartoons can evoke with a brutal cut-up, that’s what I’d call postmodern. Maybe that’s related to how you actually live: I mean, you actually moved to the same remote place as Agnes Martin! You removed yourself to a very isolated and possibly harsh place, it must be very quiet and maybe lonely? But where you can look at those pink sunrises and delicate landscape colors…

(laughs) Yeah, I guess I believe in going hard in the fiction! Prior to the filmic premise, the pencil and thin washes, the 5 foot square format…that all came from Martin.

Wow, you got a LOT from Agnes! It’s surprising to me, given your work. BTW, I re-read Krauss’s 1979 essay “Grids” since we started this conversation, and realized that besides just repetition, her essay is also about all these negative things like hostility, repression, and schizophrenia. “…the grid announces, among other things, modern art's will to silence, its hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse.” “Because of its bivalent structure (and history) the grid is fully, even cheerfully, schizophrenic.” I think this is something to bring up, in relation to the fiction/non-fiction of your work, and how the impulse of your work seems to both want attachment, but also rupture, real threat of instability. For example, you outline or silhouette Arthur, which highlights him but really obliterates him.

I wanted Agnes Martin by other means, and I found cartoons for that! Meaning, I had wanted the sharp sense of the present that Krauss describes. A filmstill seems to capture this in that the coming and going, the just before and just after is violently cut off leaving
an ongoing present feeling. I’m drawn to liminal moments in narrative when something is appearing or disappearing or changing, morphing.

We really share this working premise that the painting does not contain everything inside itself. The painting is just a threshold. By stretching its limits to a seemingly endless temporal horizon, we both try to make the viewer’s consciousness shift to outside the painting’s time. I think that brings with it a different kind of awareness and emotional tone.

In Lacan’s seminar on anxiety, he makes a big deal about “motion” being contained in “emotion”. So maybe it’s no accident that painting practice aimed at emotion would coincide with a time-based fixation. Maybe I should also mention another related term: repetition. The filmic premise of my work allows me to repeatedly paint the same forms as if it were the most normal thing to do, seeing as they would appear thousands of times in even the shortest film.

That sort of gives you license to do the work in an obsessive way, doesn't it? To kind of be a fetishist, or a weirdo…? Or to be really negative, which seems kind of like not the point of a lot of other modernism, including Agnes. There’s something key in both of us wanting to stretch painting or break it… I think we are both really ambivalent about a single image, the status of an individual picture itself, and in a way, the whole endeavor of painting — even though we both love to work in this medium for various reasons, but it’s not like we have an anodyne or impersonal relationship with it, like you might with a cooler kind of modernism.

Yeah—definitely not impersonal…

We’ve touched on the Arthur material somewhat, but I was also interested in some other themes for you. I know that one important painter for you is Redon. When and how did YOU find Redon?

I found Redon when I was in Frankfurt. There was a Redon show at the Schirn Kunsthalle in 2007. A few years later I started making copies of a Redon painting of Butterflies from 1910, a nasty little painting at MoMA of moths dancing around the edge of some murky water and what appeared to be an ambiguous pile of rocks—enigmatic because this pile form, this rocky outcrop looked to me like maybe it was actually something else, something animate…

Your excitement at the ambiguities of Redon’s space, scale and iconography reminds me of what you said you liked about cartoons early in life?

Yeah, the rocky outcrop seemed like a “detacher” — something that might suddenly get rendered in a “junky” style and start moving around…

Yeah. Exactly– “slipping.” Hannah Frank, who wrote that great book on animation, talks about this kind of phantasmagoric aspect of cartoons: " …you can't not see [it] as real.
But when you analyze it in little pieces and bits you can't see it as anything but a construction." I think both of us are keenly aware of this moment we’re painting in, and how it contains and repudiates the real, the modernist, and even the “body.” I think the time code we’re both using is about flux, an un-hold-able, ungraspable element. But in your case, you also make some kind of truth claim, though you pose it as a kind of “fiction claim.”

I'm not aware of any truth claim but I like the idea of a "fiction claim". I think my notion of fiction is heavily influenced by the writing of Gerald Murnane...but that's for another conversation…

I remember reading somewhere Sigfried Kracauer saying something like, “why are there cartoons? We don't need them — we have photography!” But I might say why are there paintings? We have cartoons!