David Diao’s paintings over time have been oddly resonant with their historical moments. Diao began exhibiting paintings in New York in 1967, and Untitled (1969) stood out in the exhibit “High Times Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975” for its monochromatic scale and subtlety of gesture. A glowing pale pink with a gentle moire effect belied the aggressive and rather silly athletics of repeatedly running from a distance to sweep a dripping sponge of paint over the large horizontal field propped against the wall. This entire exhibit was shot through by multiple and varied desires to take painting to the next level at a time that it was under siege, but it was in Diao’s painting that a certain allegiance to Modernist painting was held, even to the medium-specific aim of revealing the supporting stretchers as a mark of tension in painting’s support. For Artforum in 1969 Emily Wassermann wrote of Diao's paintings that “...these are purely optical surfaces which somehow are not sensed as tactile or palpable.” * Sheer opticality is code for Modernist painting’s achievement, and at this time it was both notable and belated.
Cardboard tubes, push brooms and squeegees came into use during the seventies, but Diao eventually abandoned such approaches as they were “too technological in their thinking.”** In the ‘80s Diao realized along with everyone else that everything he was doing was already a type, that no empirical research within a technological approach to painting was going to ever bust out of convention, as convention is all there is. In response to this "end of painting" other painters began to appropriate styles one after the other, such as Ross Bleckner or Phillip Taaffe, or like David Reed to treat the brush stroke as a free-floating signifier so slick that it might slide across the surface with the click of a mouse. Faced with Postmodernism’s refusal of authenticity and origin, Diao worried over what it meant to “take painting to the next step.” Modernist self-criticism entered the scene, but in the guise of other technologies absorbed into the field of painting: the famous photograph of Malevich’s first show, Alfred Barr’s chart, eye charts, graphs and statistical diagrams marking the sales and exhibition of the artists own work, served as templates for the compositional field. Any distinctions between medium-specific self-criticism and anecdotal self-referentiality were lost in these maneuvers to the point that in Diao's postmodern hands, painting had become colorfully picaresque, somewhere between romance and satire in its enterprise and failure.
Diao explains that the critic Robert Pincus Witten referred to his early paintings, such as Untitled (1969), as ‘oriental screens’ linking Diao’s Chinese heritage to his work. This was long before identity politics was all the rage, and Diao “thought it was a denigration at the time, and it pushed my hand. I began to use Warhol’s synthetic color, and it was only then that I came close to High Modernism and Warhol’s kitsch.” As his art historical references became increasingly personal, he rose to the challenge that Pincus-Witten set before him so long ago, and began to use Bruce Lee as his altar ego, the pop-culture icon standing in for Diao the action painter. More reserved than this brazen parody is Lying 1, 2000, a silkscreened photograph of Diao lounging in a Chinese moon-gazing chair, facing us and set against a Jackson Pollock. This image in turn is set against an expansive monochromatic field. With his own painter’s identity in the languorous pose of the colonialist’s imagination, this is not simply a one-liner but is infused with a longing that, like Manet’s Olympia, implicates painter and viewer alike.
Longing fuses with mourning in Endangered Species 2, 2004, a map of modern houses in New Canaan Conn., with a corresponding key showing those houses that have been demolished and those that are at risk. Against the deep blue monochrome of an architect’s plan, an appropriated graphic system tells the story of Modernism’s demise in the face of newly formed suburban identities appropriating from a more distant past and in search of something bigger. In Sitting in the Glass House, 2003, Diao plants himself in Philip Johnson's house. Johnson died only two years later - visiting the house at the very end of Johnson's life, Diao is gathering up the daily news at the moment of loss and preservation.
Born in 1943, Diao left his home in Chengdu - claimed by the Communist Party for office space - at the age of six, eventually joining his father in New York. He never saw this home again, returning 30 years later to find that it had been demolished. To some extent identifying with his father’s role as an engineer for Robert Moses, alongside of becoming a painter Diao is a connoisseur of Modern architecture. His own home is the Marcel Breuer Wolfson Trailer House. Even though this is one of John Paul Getty’s elite Spartan mansions, the trailer home fused to the walls of the house exhibits what is now a blend of high Modernism and Pop culture in the place where he lives. Diao spends much of his time obsessively preserving this house and campaigning for its survival in the face its extinction.
A sense of loss relating to his own identity appears in Diao’s most recent paintings. In 1991, Diao began exhibiting in Taiwan, and in that same year his father died on a tennis court in New York. Diao now exhibits in Beijing, and in his recent exhibition, March 1-April 5th at Courtyard Gallery Diao exhibited a cycle of paintings named for the house he had known as a child, “Da Hen Li House.” In From My Memory (2007) the house plan appears to the far right of a long horizontal field. Most prominent is the red tennis court against what is otherwise an expanse of dark green, and the stairs that mark the passage from the interior to the exterior of the house. The blankness of the remaining monochromatic field is what can no longer be remembered. The red tennis court reads like a Chinese seal and a burial plot holding the bare memories of a man displaced so long ago that he no longer knows the language, and whose earlier sweeping horizontal gestures were an embodied erasure of his cultural past as much as they were the making of an oriental screen.
An aesthetic of ruins is in full play in Chinese contemporary art. David Spalding describes contemporary Chinese photography as driven by the haunting ruins of “the most radical restructuring of urban space on earth.” China may have bypassed Modernism, but David Diao is in tune with its postmodern ruins, taking up his residency in a field of bold and fragile geometries.
By Catherine Spaeth
* Emily Wassermann, “Three Younger Artists, “ Artforum, Summer 1969, p. 31
**All artist’s statements are from personal interview.
Photos courtesy of David Diao, in order of appearance: Untitled, 1969, acrylic on canvas, 72x96", Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, Ohio, gift of Ruth Ruosh; Barnett newman, Chronology of Work, 1990-92, acrylic and vinyl on canvas, 96x180", FRAC Bretagne;Lying 1, 2000, acrylic and silkscreen on canvas, 79x115"; Endangered Species 2, 2004, acrylic, silkscreen and enamel on canvas, 84x108"; From My Memory, 2007, vinyl, acrylic and oil on canvas, 42x78"; Demolish 2, 2008, acrylic, vinyl and oil on canvas, 24x24".
6 comments:
This is a nice piece on David Diao's paintings. I was familiar with his early paintings from the early 1970's which were interesting to me at the time. I then lost track of his work for a long while until I saw an exhibition, I forget where, of paintings I recall were like the blue Endangered Species work illustrated. I found it encouraging that he was able to move away from the strict bounds of color field painting towards a more complex painting and still maintain a focus on color as well.
Thank you, George - that was "Demolished/At Risk," at his Postmasters show Spring 2005. And you are so right about the color, whatever happens conceptually one's immediate response to them is quite physically caught up in that field. My emphasis on the odalisque over Bruce Lee was to favor this aspect of his work.
Yes, that was it. I had a vague mental image of the sidestreet gallery location, it was at Postmasters. The paintings were a big surprise since I hadn't seen anything of his in a long time. I admire David for his ability to work his way out of the cul de sac he might have found himself in, with color field painting. It may not seem like it, but I think it was a gutsy move. In spite of what people say, the art world doesn't like change in an individual artists work, they want "one like those." True exploration within a chosen medium is discouraged by the marketplace and it takes courage for an artist to move counter to this. More power to him.
That was really helpful. Thank you! Indeed, generally the huge attention in recent museum group shows, like the one at NAD, to the 1970s, has been helpful. He was always an artist who was there but whom I couldn't quite fully place apart from others in the abstract painting I took for granted when I graduated. Another show worth seeing along those lines but which I haven't managed to write up is Majorie Welish's, at Bjorn Ressle now on 79th Street.
John, your mentioning of the Welish show is so appropriate!. Welish is also a very strong arts writer and poet, I don’t have a copy of Signifying Art, but there is a 1998 essay, “Contratemplates,” that is quite relevant to Diao. Where Duchamp fetishized the erotic without appealing to beauty, Three Standard Stoppages refers to, without expressing, beauty via Hogarth’s serpentine line. And so this sense of referring to, which we see so often in contemporary art, is historicallly located in Duchamp’s template. Duchamp’s move is a willful misreading of formalist disinterestedness, what Welish argues for as a strategic aesthetics.
And she has admiration for those art historical types who get this, praising (of all people) Alfred Barr for purchasing Jasper Johns, proving that “engaged art which defeats his position is much more significant than the mere institutionalization of the abstract art he already knew.”
After reading her, I am embarrassed that I didn’t see Johns at the Met, only yesterday boasting that I marched straight past it for Courbet. Regarding “Contratemplates,”I also would add that I don’t buy a “strategic aesthetics” as the be-all and end-all for painting (and this is not what she claims, it is a history, not the history.). After writing about Bridget Riley for Art in America, I became convinced that painting still has special claim upon focused empirical research within very narrow but quite spacious parameter, and I don’t think this has much to do with strategy.
A quote from Welish’s essay that I liked very much: “Theories of aesthetics are theories of art compelling to art history, as much as the other way around. Perverse in its hierarchy, perhaps, the history of art appropriates from philosophy what it requires, or what culture requires, for thought.” “Contratemplates,” in Uncontrollable Beauty: Toward a New Aesthetics, Beckley and Shapiro, eds., c. 1998 NY: Allworth Press.
Line is just a line. Whether it be curved as in 'C', or curving back, as in 'S', it is still a line. In type we identify the line as face. With brush look for gravity and color. A line can also hark back or look forward. But after all a line is just a line - a thing that is most hard to measure.
Thanks Catherine
c.p.
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