"What is the purpose and meaning of the obscure rituals that Dunham paints these characters engaging in, with their eyes averted from the viewer, as if reluctant to have their private customs disturbed or even looked at?"
Questions asked by Naomi Fry in The New Yorker, in "Carroll Dunham’s Paintings Make You Squirm/The artist discusses his most recent work, how the art world resembles a cult, and what it’s like having a famous child."
The artist — Lena Dunham's father — gives some answers:
"[The] males and females together... appear to be copulating so there’s something for them to do together. It took me years to imagine a way that I could work with a subject like that without it being gratuitously sensationalistic. That’s the way it goes with painting, for me.... And I completely reject any association with porn or anything like that, because that’s just not an interest of mine. As I’ve told people for years, the images that involve females to me have more to do with the idea that everyone has a mother than they do with any idea about sexuality, per se....
"If you can find me some kid somewhere who’s jerking off looking at pictures of my paintings, I’d love to meet them. But I find it highly unlikely. [Laughs.] That’s just not the zone. There’s nothing about that in what the paintings look like or in the intention behind them, as far as I can see. And I’m not saying that to be disingenuous. Our culture has relegated thinking about the human body to some pretty creepy domains, but art’s been around an awfully long time, and the human body has been a subject since the beginning...."
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21 comments:
Well...that answers a lot.
No WONDER their daughter is so whacked out.
“Now, at seventy-two, Dunham is one of the most successful and well-respected American painters of his generation.“
I Googled him and looked at his work. We really are a failed culture.
The Lives of the Dissolute.
The painting in the article with the copulating green couple looked more like rape to me.
“Now, at seventy-two, Dunham is one of the most successful and well-respected American painters of his generation.“
hmm yet, i've NEVER heard of him. Not once, Not EVER
And now the puzzle pieces make more sense.
When I was young, there were famous artists, painters and sculptors who were on magazine covers and their deaths were international news, and below them a level of artists who were seen to matter. I read ArtNews and ArtForum and understood how they connected to the past and pointed to the future.
Today it appears that the most famous artist in America is known for being the father of a not particularly talented celebrity.
When I was a boy, everything was right and Pablo Picasso never got called an asshole.
>>"[The] males and females together... appear to be copulating so there’s something for them to do together. It took me years to imagine a way that I could work with a subject like that without it being gratuitously sensationalistic.<<
Well, you failed, bud.
Imagine someone dedicating years to that particular goal!
Even the questions in that interview were bizarre.
I have a drawing of yours, and it’s a woman from behind, and you see her labia from behind, and she’s splayed open, and I have no problem with it — I appreciate having it in my home. But it’s a matter of convention. It’s a question of the way the body is packaged. There’s something more open about it in your work than what we see on the sides of buses.
I found his statements and responses to be quite trite…. Good for him though for making his art and finding buyers for it. One less household needing govt assistance, it appears.
We have socially progressed to revel in Christ in Urine, normalize transgender spectrum conversion therapy through medical, surgical, and psychiatric corruption, and defend with our blood and treasure a baby... fetus on slab, but with our eyes and mind averted, with a Twilight faith, a liberal religion, and chauvinistic ideologies.
Lena's mother, Laurie Simmons, is also an artist and has appeared in films with Lena. They are indeed a very messed-up family. Lena's sister/brother is a trans man and those with long memories will recall the controversy about whether Lena sexually abused her/him when they were children.
I wasn't familiar with Carroll Dunham's work, but there's always been a question mark surrounding him. In the commentary to Girls Lena says that her father insisted that she tell us that the character of her father in the show is not based on her real father. Jesse Peretz was one of the directors. Maybe the character is based on his father, Martin Peretz.
I don't think he is particularly well respected artist, but American painters seem to have fallen from view some time in the 70s or 80s, replaced by earth artists, makers of installations, and performance artists. Bastiat and Keith Haring aside, most of the painters we recognize are people who were already famous in the 60s or 70s.
hideous "art"
“Now, at seventy-two, Dunham is one of the most successful and well-respected American painters of his generation.”
Perhaps he is not of Hunter Beiden’s generation. I am told Hunter is the greatest artist of all, by income.
It seems that great art comes and goes in cycles with periods of greatness when artists discover something about our reality worth expressing. The ancients discovered human and animal bodies (even stealing corpses to cut open to learn what caused various body shapes). Later artists discovered nature, realistic human faces, myth, qualities of light, two and three dimensional shapes (e.g. cubism), the unconscious (surrealism), randomness/chaos, modernity, etc. I am at a loss as to what this generation of artists have discovered and are exploring. We are in a down period in art, IMHO. Yet people with money seem to need to buy art. So the tallest midget sell.
half-biblical etc...
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praise or diss at the Deplorables who will never ADORE this artist[e?]
Good for him though for making his art and finding buyers for it
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before or after Hunter Biden business plan?
Yeah..keep those kids away from him/
"The older and flabbier and more out of shape, the better you’re going to be as an artist."
Lena got the wrong idea.
The Chair of Pediatrics at Johns Hopkins when my spouse was a resident there in the 1990s was a strong advocate of mothers breastfeeding their infants. His home was chock full of paintings of topless women, some lewd, others very high art. I draw no conclusions from the preceding two sentences.
Likewise, I draw no conclusions from the occupational focus of the father of the woman who so famously exposed herself in her brief TV career.
Sometimes these issues, as well as many more problems with staying dressed, just happen.
Nudity is not the secular sin. We're still children, but with lascivious thoughts. Immoderation is the moral vacuum, thus the progress of AIDS, Covid-19, 20, 21, 22, and Covid-X of the viral-parasitic pathogens in safe sanctuaries with collateral damage.
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