Denzil Hurley
April 28, 2008 by Sam K
Posted in Painting | Tagged Denzil Hurley, Guggenheim, Kemper, minimal, Pollock-Krasner, Portland Museum Art School, reduction, University of Washington, Yale | 33 Comments
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little interview with him here: http://mcclain.johnson.googlepages.com/denzil.hurley.html
if you are going to be in tacoma the second week of may he’ll be talking:
http://tamdocents.blogspot.com/2008/04/tam-training-update-denzil-hurley-on.html
the work reminds me of james bishop a bit…
I hope these are as subtly amazing in person as I imagine them.
Right with you, Carla.
I’m going to motion (as in, it must be seconded) that we move the previous thread’s discussions of inward-turned painting practice, the ‘why?’, the intuitive-conceptual boundary-in-flux, professor-stress, contradiction, and context over to this post.
PS– if you want to get an idea where he’s coming from, there’s an essay here and an interview here.
i’ll second that
the post i made about hurley disappeared into the ether yesterday, but i linked to that interview and made an observation that the work reminded me of james bishop. bishop’s got a strange, ephemeral show up in the contemporary arts space at the art institute of chicago: http://www.artic.edu/aic/exhibitions/exhibition/bishop
both hurley and bishop seem to aim their work at a specific surface feeling or tension – hurley’s is denser, more laid and worked than bishops, but the end is quite similar in the airy play between surface event and a kind of space. bishop seems more interested in certain forms/shapes/icons, while hurley is, in a sense, reconstituting an experience of a mark from many.
I know y’all are looking at this post…
these look like noises.
also, i really like the titles of the pieces. especially the ‘redact’, ‘glyph’ and ‘scrib’ ones. there is a bouncy kind of mimesis taking place between the sound of the truncated words and the painting as a visual experience. i like it. it almost works the way onomatopoeia works in language alone…but here with a twist.
does this make sense to anyone else?
seeing works this process driven just make me want to peel back the layers and gets some peeks at what (if anything) is underneath.
yes jen, that makes sense. noises, not so much as notes or words, but i dont think language.
jen, upon reading your “these look like noises” i immediately flashed back to the extra-mundane keyboard solos from “close encounters of the third kind.”
thank you.
yeah, mbnjmntrb, i agree that they really aren’t reminiscient of language in the sense that they don’t attempt to illustrate any sort of recognition of meaning. when i referenced the language thing, i was more keyed into the sounds of those titles…just as sounds themselves and not as meanings. because all of those words, though translatable in a way that attributes meaning, in this context, are slippery and evade meaning, because they are pared down to their base/root components (except for ‘redact’ which has a prefix) which makes me much more aware that language is just a system of noises.
but, in westernized languages, we often lose our sense of those sounds because intonation is not as important to meaning. whereas, in a sung-language (like mandarin) intonation is essential to meaning.
also part of the reason that an obscene percentage of people who grow up speaking mandarin have perfect pitch, compared to people who grow up speaking westernized english.
how’s that for tangential?
“aloha means ‘goodbye’
but also ‘hello’
it’s
in
how you inflect…”
– pavement
ezzzactly…
Hey Matt, I don’t know what was going on yesterday with the comment thread. Whatever it was, it seems to be fine now.
Jen, and Benjamin, I don’t think what you’re talking about is that tangential. I posted this specifically because of the previous thread’s discussion re: subject/content issues, and separation of thought and action.
It seems like these are (intentionally) inscrutable, regardless of the context of their viewing. To put it another way, there’s what he got out of making it, there’s what the viewer gets from seeing it, and that’s that. Does anyone think they’re ‘locked-up’?
locked down,
not
locked up.
So, inward-turned, but in a good way?
yeah. i think it was matt C. who used the word ‘hermetic’ in the last thread to describe bonnie’s work. these have some of that too, but in a way that still invites a larger conversation. they aren’t mired in subject matter…that makes a big difference.
also, ‘locked down’ seems to go hand in hand with their distilled nature. like, they’ve been found/retained over time.
‘mired’ seems like sort of a strong word..both in terms of bonnie’s paintings being mired and these not being mired. any expanding, anyone? i’m just curious about that response. could hurley’s be mired in process? would mired in process be more tasteful than mired in subject?
well my own internal jury is still out on whether being mired in subject is worse than being mired in process, but i definitely think it’s more acceptable to be mired in a process.
it just seems to me – and this could be totally just because of my own ways of working and thinking about working – that there has to be more going on for him here. his engagement or obsession with achieving a certain surface mode has to offer him something more than just a procedure to partake in.
and on a side note, these seem to be far more sensual and visually interesting than sean scully’s work…
This was kind of my thought.
There’s a question I can’t quite form. Maybe it’s best to just let this post and the previous one sit side by side, with the general context-info attached, compare/contrast, draw your own conclusions.
Non-objectivity might seem ‘free’ in the eyes of the image-bound painter, but I expect it’s just as frustrating and limited.
I don’t put faith in ‘process’ any more than ‘subject matter’ (or the bigger whatever-it-is for which the subject and paint are the communicative vehicle). I do notice that the making itself teaches you things, and they’re just for you. It’s not intuitive or conceptual, it just is.
‘Mired in process’ is more acceptable/accepted. It’s definitely more ‘I AM PAINTER!’ (Ian H. said that when he saw a photograph of Edvard Munch buck naked, painting on a beach)
‘YO’
that’s for Ian
-and maybe if i inflected ‘mired’ differently, i could make it seem more positive? lilting ^^^?-
sorry. let the conversation continue.
yeh, stress the second syllable…
me-RED…
sort of like strie-PED…
maybe…i’ll try it out in our next grad crits.
seriously, though. i know what you mean about being mired in subject matter, especially relative to bonnie’s work. i agree, but then i kind of questioned that feeling.
(actually, i once heard bonnie refer to her struggles with this issue, which many of us shared as “seduced by the subject matter.” )
Speaking of loaded words. I thought ‘conceptual’ was bad.
God forbid you wind up, you know, ‘involved’ with your subject matter. Be warned. S.M. is just looking for some good times, no strings attached (or suspended across the middle of the canvas). What a cad, what a tramp, that Subject Matter.
All critiques should sound like the red room scenes in Twin Peaks. They might as well anyway, right?
I’d assert that the very idea of process, rightly understood (in other words, as I understand it, haha!) is counter to the condition of being “mired”. “Process” implies and encompasses travel, consideration, response, affirmation, negation, discovery. I suppose a case could be made that over-privileging process could lead to a condition of endless search and questioning, conveniently avoiding a resolution. But in an art like Thomas Nozkowski’s, which at present is among the most exciting things happening in painting (check out new work at Pace Wildenstein, work last year in Storr’s show at the Venice Biennale), what I see as an almost ruthless appetite for process leads frequently to resolutions that somehow coexist as divergent investigations and a coherent body of images.
And Sam, remember, Cooper ended up in an endless cat-and-mouse chase scene with his doppelganger there in the Black Lodge…are you commenting on the presence (and soundness) of mind of the average painter?
Nah, just that some crits would be easier with captions.
Also, thought it fit to bring up in this thread because the words are almost just sounds.
But then again, it’s not impossible that Lynch might be exorcising crit-demons…
i guess if i said that i find hurley’s paintings more exciting to think about than to look at/experience, and if i believe that’s not entirely the intention, then i still might think they could be said to be mired in process.
my take is subjective.
but, i think the conditions of being mired in subject and mired in process would be much the same. i’m willing to go with that being process wrongly understood, just as being mired in subject would be the use of subject wrongly understood in the overall ‘about’ of the painting.
(i think that most of the time my own work is usually mired in subject and mired in process at the same time.)
i couple of contrasts i’d make would be between hurley’s work and wes mills’ (who i keep meaning to post up sometimes).
also between hurley’s and karen kunc’s.
both process-oriented, minimal-oriented artists whose works just seem richer, and fuller of allusion to me.
(and i don’t really mean any of this to be taking potshots at the guy’s paintings. i’m pretty favorably disposed to the work. i think i’m just pushing back at that inscrutability that sam rightly mentioned.)
sklarski and hurley, mired and open, subject and process, intuitive and conceptual… i think each of these things is sort of related to the content of this article comparing lois dodd and jake berthot
http://www.nysun.com/arts/untraditional-american-traditionalists
Yes indeed.
We are thread-webbing with panache and I’m enjoying it.
thread wedding…
Kunc’s work seems decorative and extraneous, indulgent in comparison to Denzil’s. His paintings offer only what is necessary, nothing else. Lean painting.
These are computer images, try to see them in person if you want to get a sense of them. Even then they will leave you with questions. I see in them a connection to ancient art and modes of language/signs. The obliqueness is intentional. An essay that relates to this is ‘Art Objects’ by Jeanette Winterson which talks about expectation and limitation of the viewer who seeks a familiar/guided experience when looking at art- difficult art refuses. The more resistance a painting gives, the harder it is to take apart…I think the better and more interesting.
If its too easy, then…
Is that you Stephanie?
so maybe it is…
The ‘S’ is for ‘shy’.