任何杀不死你的都会使你变得更强大：卡罗尔·杜汉姆（Carroll Dunham）的绘画
卡罗尔·杜汉姆 Carroll Dunham
b. 1949 康涅狄格州纽黑文 (New Haven, Connecticut)
现生活和工作在纽约
“我有一种想要创造出无法被实用主义哲学所解释的事物的欲望，它们不能套用常规的还原主义来阐释，也不能用任何既存的绘画风格来讨论。现在，我和绘画之间的关系变得更加复杂，去解决’要如何去画？’的问题显得尤为迫切。”
—卡罗尔·杜汉，2002年
【 早期作品 】
卡罗尔·杜汉的创作轨迹是一条独一无二的、任性而持久的观念之路。这条创作道路始于上世纪70年代，杜汉把他最初的崇拜献给了像罗伯特·莱曼（Robert Ryman）和布莱斯·马登（Brice Marden）这样的极简主义画家，他们的艺术都指向了一种绘画的终结。不过，杜汉没有被任何怀旧情绪或风格方法所束缚，他极为严谨地——并且从零开始——开拓着自己的创作路径。他以自动绘画（automatic drawing）作为起点，在虚无之中信手涂抹。
杜汉不会区别对待绘画（painting）和画画（drawing）这两个行动。按艺术家自己的话说，画画和绘画的实践是相互平行的：“在我看来，绘画和画画之间存在的唯一实质差别就是”，他说道，“我的小画不会被固定在木板上。” 过程一直是杜汉长期关注的重要角度，而自动绘画则一直居于他创作的核心——被他称为“主要事件”（main event）。杜汉不但在实践中肯定了画画的中心性，他还严肃地把这些小图作为完整的艺术作品来展示。他的很多展览就围绕着这些小画而展开，其中包括2015年在丹佛美术馆举办的回顾展，回溯了杜汉在过去三十年里创作的小画。
杜汉的小画体现了超现实主义自动性的创作原则，营造出一种带着科幻感的无意识状态。而不同于超现实主义的是，这既不是象征性的，也未必深奥莫测，其背后的根源是艺术家的冲动和直觉。在杜汉的作品里反复出现的几何和有机图形，令人联想到世界各地的仪式艺术，它们在一种集体无意识之中塑造着我们的历史与文化。
渐渐的，像是创造出一颗新的星球，杜汉的艺术逐步发展出一种看似原始的生命形式：局促不安的幼虫形态在彩色的分子团里不断涌动，被艺术家用粗重、宽阔的彩色线条加以勾勒。多年以来，杜汉在80年代中创作的早期小画里的点和潦草画迹，逐渐发展成为有着嘴、四肢和其他附器的近似于人体的形态。
从一开始，富有性意味的图像就时常在杜汉的作品里出现，这不但显露了作品背后的无意识根源，也连结着作品的抽象形式和主题。杜汉的早期绘画里那些相互贯通的阴茎“人物”和凹凸的“小丘”，暗示了一种具有讽刺意味的弗洛依德式的形式主义。这些引发高度联想的、散发着狂喜气质的作品，也成为了自80年代兴起的振兴绘画运动的一部分。杜汉和他的同伴们借由波普艺术和过程艺术，颇具深意地对抽象表现主义进行开拓。到了90年代，他的绘画里已充满了成堆的毛发、类核的卵形、如张开嘴的孔洞和生殖器的管道形态。
▲ 《红色研究本身》Red Studies Itself, 1994, 综合材料、亚麻画布 Mixed media on linen; 193 x 243.8 x 20.3 cm; 含边框 199.4 x 250.2 x 21.6 cm framed.
▲ 《红色研究本身》（局部）Red Studies Itself (detail), 1994.
【 阴茎男 】
在进入21世纪的最初几年，杜汉的艺术形成了一种全新的双向演变——生物学上的进化和艺术史上的倒退——可识别的人类形象由此浮现：起初是争吵的卡通情侣，然后是龌龊的、脑袋上长着阴茎的男性领袖，接着是近期的“沐浴者”和“摔跤手”。
在杜汉的早期作品里显得尤为突出的阴茎形态，既具有象征性又是歧义的。它象征了人文主义、家长式统治、男性中心社会里的男性主体；而作为器官，它们也与行动紧密相关。在杜汉的作品里，这些阴茎很少萎靡不振，它们通常是硬挺的或是刺入某物。
▲ 《卡罗尔·杜汉：新绘画》展览现场，纽约新美术馆, 2002.10.31 – 2003.02.02 / Installation view of Carroll Dunham: Paintings, New Museum, New York, 2002.10.31 – 2003.02.02.
伴随着卡罗尔·杜汉于2002年在纽约新当代艺术博物馆举办的研究性回顾展，馆长和策展人乔安娜·柏顿（Johanna Burton）在一篇展览文章中写道：
杜汉的作品，在其根源处有一种趋向于达尔文进化论适者生存的内在倾向…他把这些文化毒药以一种近乎致命解药的方式使用，通过注射恰好计量的人类有毒特质——贪婪、憎恨、无休止的自私自利——刺激有机体产生对抗这些病原的免疫力。在每一次愈发强烈的病发中，这些被接种的杂合体都明显变得更具适应能力、更加贪得无厌，它们以骇人的力量印证了那句老话——任何杀不死你的都会使你变得更强大。
杜汉的这些阴茎脸男人是时刻保持警醒的领头人，是全副武装的黑衣杀手——尽管他们眼盲得什么也看不见。眼睛缺席于这些拟人化的身体形态，这割裂了观众与人物进行眼神交汇的可能性。作为整个系列中推动了所有行动和事件的主要器官，阴茎必然成为了我们在解读这些作品时的索引。欲望和外化的能量暗示了排泄、争论、授精和战斗。
【 沐浴者 】
初看之下，最初的“沐浴者”系列似乎背离了杜汉从职业生涯初期便开始创作的高度抽象化的绘画形式。事实上，它们是对过去材料的重新使用，体现了杜汉对于重新组合旧有形式进行更新的偏好。而不那么明显的是，这些绘画的基调也发生了改变。那些早期的生物形态绘画，无论看上去多么无拘无束和淫荡，也还是在某种程度上显得晦涩。而在“沐浴者”系列中，人类形象开始扮演起关键的角色。
对于欲望的本质这一触发艺术家创作作品的根源因素，杜汉曾这样解释道：“欲望不会停歇，没有休止。欲望只会流动到不同的载体上。我想它早已融汇进意识之网，甚至是’现实之网’，这对所有生命体而言都是一样。”杜汉的沐浴者凸显了古典大师画作里的核心主题，即裸体，同时又摒弃了其表达形式。杜汉的裸体是夸张、滑稽、讽刺和不真实的。这些人体形态常常被放置在制造幻觉效果的乌托邦环境下，周围充满了树木、花朵、水和阳光。
这些尼安德特式的夏娃总是强壮和充满活力的，她们以原始的裸体形象出现，在画面里常常抬起一条腿或两腿叉开，在生殖器处长出没有眼睛的脸，以这样的方式暴露着身体的孔洞。杜汉有时会让他的沐浴者离开她们的水池，赤裸着骑上马，屁眼呈X形居于画面的中心。对于裸体，杜汉这样说：“我最终找到了和绘画两情相悦的感觉，因为我开始发现力量具有令人震颤的特质。我会把胳膊画得更加粗壮，让毛发看起来更加疯狂和有活力……”她们不是被动消极的女性形体，不像杜尚的《给予》（Étant donnés）那样，她们是艳俗的、活泼的和毫无悔意的。
▲ 《摔跤手／天空》Wrestlers/Yellow Sky, 2017-2018, 丙烯颜料、铅笔、亚麻画布 Acrylic and pencil on linen; 86.7 x 111.8 cm; 含边框 98.1 x 123.2 x 5.7 cm framed.
【 摔跤手 】
这些摔跤手长着黑色长发、络腮胡和小胡子，拥有着肌肉发达的身体，在画布所圈定的范围内相互推撞，完成着他们的使命。他们显然是毫无保留的具像化的。从历史和权威的角度来看，摔跤手的裸体和他们那希腊风格的、饰带式的布局，表明了他们归属于某种博物馆学范畴的古物，尽管他们来源的时期和地点不明。杜汉所表现的斗争是古老而普遍的，那是我们故意忘却的原始记忆，是我们以恰当的原始形式所展开的重新想象。
为了与自己长期以来的实践保持某种一致性，杜汉在刻画这些男性形体时，依旧去除了他们的眼睛。在乔治·巴塔耶（Georges Bataille）的论文《松果之眼》（The Pineal Eye）中，眼睛为了复刻太阳的无所不在而向它睁开。这一行动伤害了眼睛，也同时隐喻性地摧毁了太阳；最后被留下来的是黑洞，即巴塔耶所称的“太阳肛门”，它反映出肛门和眼睛之间的关系。这种反身性指向了一个性心理学上的地带，生理上的性冲动在此代替了眼睛所见的“客观性”，而更重要的是，它重新考量了奠定着西方身份模式的感官的高低等级。杜汉的眼睛/肛门主题，可以同时在生物学和智性的层面上被加以解读，它超越了普通的象征性，创造出一种奇诡的形式语言。
▲ 《无题（5/28/17）》Untitled (5/28/17), 2017, 铅笔、纸 Pencil on paper; 含边框 47.6 x 54 x 3.8 cm each framed.
在杜汉的“摔跤手”作品中， 男性的对视毫无遮掩地透露出他们自身的落魄。为了更进一步强化这种焦虑感，杜汉常常在画面里加入一只怪诞的、滑稽的、散发着不祥气息的黑秃鹫，暗示了无所不在的死亡和衰败。就像是按透视法缩小的安德烈亚·曼特尼亚的名作《哀悼耶稣》，杜汉所描绘的垂死的摔跤手仰倒在地上，展示着我们自身的必死性。
▲ 《自我体检（5）》Self Examination (5), 2017, 综合材料、亚麻画布 Mixed media on linen; 140.3 x 112.4 x 3.2 cm; 含边框 152.4 x 124.5 x 5.1 cm framed.
“摔跤手”以肖像化的手法，描绘了一种纯粹的人性真相。这些男性人物的毁灭欲和侵略性，与那些女性“沐浴者”的形象和情色意味，形成了鲜明的对比。正如罗兰·巴特所述：“……真正的摔跤其根源是所有的过度放纵，这使其成为一种表演，而不再是一种运动。”而这也讽喻了好与坏之间的推拉关系。杜汉的人物拒绝了运动中的优雅，一头扎进了巴洛克式的决斗场面中。而历史恰巧由此经过。
杜汉在长期的艺术实践中把各种不同的绘画流派融会贯通，将立体主义、抽象表现主义、波普艺术与漫画和涂鸦艺术中放任自由的图形相结合，形成了一套技法高超且视觉内容独特的作品整体。从阿米巴虫的形状，到令人眼花缭乱的拟人化形态，再到最终充分发展出来的人体形象，杜汉的作品对绘画和社会本身做出了审慎的观察。在每一次的过渡和发展中，更深层的意识都揭示着自身，正如我们内心深处的种种心理-性驱动力，翻滚着浮现于画布之上。
▲ 卡罗尔·杜汉姆 Carroll Dunham. 摄影 / Photo: Laurie Simmons
【 关于艺术家 】
卡罗尔·杜汉出生于1949年，目前在纽约和康涅狄格州生活与工作。他曾在诸多国际性知名美术馆和艺术机构举办个展，其中包括：路德维西博物馆，科隆，德国；米勒斯雕塑公园，斯德哥尔摩，瑞典；德拉蒙博物馆，挪威；此外，他还在纽约新当代艺术博物馆举办了职业生涯中期回顾展。杜汉的作品曾在诸多重要群展上亮相，他也曾参加过多届惠特尼双年展和SITE圣塔菲双年展；他参与的其他群展举办机构包括：日内瓦现当代艺术博物馆，瑞士；纽约现代艺术博物馆；毕加索博物馆，巴塞罗那；波士顿当代艺术博物馆。
I had this desire to make something that couldn’t be rationalized through materialistic philosophy, that couldn’t be explained as formal reductivism or in any other the terms that painting was being talked about. My relationship to [painting] is much more complicated now, and “how to paint?” is a much more desperate question.
—Carrol Dunham, 2002
▲ 《第一棵松》（局部）First Pine (detail), 1982.
Early Works
The trajectory of Dunham’s practice is a single, wayward but continuous train of thought. Starting out in the 1970s, his original loyalty was to minimalistpainters like Robert Ryman and Brice Marden, whose art suggested a pictorialendpoint. Unburdened by notions of nostalgia or formal skills, Dunham took his mission—to begin from nothing—seriously. He began by doing automatic drawing, doodling in a void.
Carroll Dunham has made no distinction between the acts of painting and drawing. As noted by the artist, the practices of drawing and painting run parallel: “The only material distinction between what I was calling paintings and what I was calling drawings,” he says, “is that my drawings were not mounted on panel.” Process has always been an overarching concern of Dunham’s, and automatic drawing has always been at the core of his production- the “main event” as he himself has said. The centrality of drawings in his practice and his serious consideration of them as fully formed works of art is made evident in the numerous exhibitions dedicated solely to his drawings, including a 2009 solo exhibiton at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, and a 2015 retrospective at the Denver Art Museum that surveyed his drawings from the past three decades.
▲ 《卡罗尔·杜汉》展览现场，克隆鲁德维奇美术馆, 2009.04.03– 06.21 / Installation view of Carroll Dunham, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, 2009.04.03– 06.21.
Dunham’s drawings reflect the principles of Surrealist automatism, invoking a sci-fi unconscious that, unlike the Surrealists, is neither symbolic nor necessarily profound, but rather produced on impulse and instinct. Dunham’s geometric and organic forms that recur in this work also surface in ritual art throughout the world, cutting across history and cultures in a collective unconscious.
Gradually, like creating a new planet, his art evolved primitive looking life-forms: colorful molecular groups swarming with jittery larval motifs, rendered in thick and broad lines of color. Over the years, the dots and scribbles of early drawings from the 1980s have coalesced into humanoids figures withmouths and limbs and other appendages.
From the beginning, sexual imagery was a constant, offering not only proof of the work’s unconscious origins, but also a link between abstraction and subject matter. With their interpenetrating phallic “figures” and invaginated “mounds,” his early paintings suggested an ironic, Freudian formalism. These richly associative, ecstatic works were part of the reinvigoration of painting that began in the 1980s. Dunham and his peers provided a meaningful extension of abstract expressionism through Pop and Process art. By the 1990s, the paintings had become crowds of graphic cilia, nucleicovals, mouth-like openings, and phallic tubes.
Phallic Men
In the years that followed into the early 2000s, Dunham’s art moved through a new double evolution— biologically forward and art-historically backwards—to arrive at more recognizably human figures: first quarreling cartoon couples, then odious penis-headed alpha males, followed by the more recent “Bathers” and “Wrestlers.”
Protruding from Dunham’s early figures, the phallus shapes are at once symbolic and yet ambiguous. Symbolic of the male subject in humanist, paternalistic, phallocentric society; the organ is also associated with action. In Dunham’s works, the phallus rarely hangs limp, but rather sticks out and ejects something.
▲ 《无题（3/8/05）》Untitled (3/8/05), 2005, 石墨、纸 Graphite on paper; 28.9 x 21.9 cm; 含边框 47 x 40 cm framed.
In the essay accompaniment to his 2002 solo survey retrospective at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, director and curator Johanna Burton wrote, “Dunham’s work has at its core an innate predisposition towardDarwinian survival of the fittest… Dunham uses culture’s poisons as nearly lethal cures, injecting just enough of humankind’s toxic characteristics-greed, hate, envy, relentless self-absorption-to act as an immune system against them. In each ascending manifestation, Dunham’s inoculated mongrels grow increasingly resilient and evermore insatiable, a monstrous testament to the old adage what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
▲ 《卡罗尔·杜汉：绘画》展览现场，纽约新美术馆, 2002.10.31 – 2003.02.02 / Installation view of Carroll Dunham: Paintings, New Museum, New York, 2002.10.31 – 2003.02.02.
Dunham’s penis-faced men are alert protagonists, noir-killers armed and ready, albeit blind and visionless. The absence of eyes on the anthropomorphic bodies undermines the bond that would develop when the eye of the viewer meets the eye of the character. As the main organ in all the actions and events that take place in this series, the penis forms must be regarded as an index. Desire and outwardly oriented energy are associated with urinating, arguing, insemination, and combat.
Bathers
At first glance, the first “Bathers” series looks like a striking departure from the busy abstracted forms that Dunham had begun making at the outset of his career. In fact, they were a thrifty recycling, an example of Dunham’s preference for advancing by recombining old motifs. Less conspicuously, the tone of the paintings had shifted. The early biomorphic paintings, no matter how freewheelingly raunchy, were at least ambiguous. But in the “Bathers” the human form is prominent.
On the nature of desire as the impetus of his work, Dunham has said, “No rest, no end to desire. Desire just moves to a different host vehicle. I think it’s woven into the fabric of consciousness, probably of all life, maybe even the ‘fabric of reality.’” Dunham’s Bathers address a central subject of Old Master painting, the Nude, yet reject their terms. His nudes are overblown, comic, ironic, unrealistic. They often inhabit some psychedelic utopia of trees, flowers, water, and sun all vibrating around the human form.
▲ 《沐浴者8（脸）》 Bathers Eight (Face), 2010-2011, 综合材料、亚麻画布 Mixed media on linen; 109.2 x 119.4 cm; 含边框 118.7 x 128.9 x 3.8 cm framed.
His Neanderthal Eves are often active and strong in their primordial nakedness, typically with a leg raised or both legs outspread, exposing orifices in such a way that the genitals produce a face in the absence of eyes. Dunham’s bathers sometime leave their water pools and are depicted as nude horse riders whose anuses fall dead center in x-shaped compositions. Dunham has said of the nudes that, “The paintings finally clicked for me when I started to find these surprising attributes of power. I found myself making the arms more muscular, the hair a little crazier and more active…”. These are not passive female forms, like Duchamp’s Étant donnés, but rather brash, playful and unapologetic figures.
Wrestlers
The Wrestlers, with long black hair, beards, moustaches, and muscular bodies, push and work each other over within the confines of the canvas. They are palpably and unreservedly figurative. Historical and canonical, the wrestler’s nudity and their Hellenistic, frieze-like arrangement suggest that they belong to some kind of museological antiquity, though when and where is ambiguous. The struggle Dunham evokes is something ancient and general, a piece of our primitive past that has been willfully forgotten and then reimagined in appropriately primitive terms.
In keeping with a motif that follows the majority of Dunham’s practice thus far, the artist depicts these male figures without eyes. In George Bataille’s essay “The Pineal Eye,” the eye seeks to replicate the immanence of the sun by staring into it. The act of staring at the sun destroys the eye and in doing so, metaphorically also destroys the sun; what remains is a black hole, referenced as the “solar anus,” reflecting the relationship between the anus and the eye. The reflexivity implies a psychosexual zone in which biological urges replace the “objectivity” of sight, but more significantly, it reconsiders the hierarchy of the senses on which western models of identity are predicated. Dunham’s eye/anus motif can be read as both biological and celestial, reaching beyond the symbolic into a strange language of forms.
In the Wrestlers, the male gaze is refocused unsparingly on its own abjection. Pushing the anxiety further, there is often the inclusion of an eerie, comical, yet ominous black buzzard, suggesting immanent death and decay. Dramatically foreshortened and reminiscent of Mantegna’s famous Lamentation over the Dead Christ, Dunham’s dying wrestlers lay splayed on the ground, and we are confronted with our own mortality.
The Wrestlers are a depiction of pure humanistic truth as an iconography. These men are destruction and aggression in contrast to the female bathers and their motifof erotic creation. As Roland Barthes wrote, “…true wrestling derives its originality from all the excesses which make it a spectacle and not a sport.” As allegory, it points to the push and pull of good versus evil. Dunham’s figures refuse the niceties of sport and clash in a spectacle of baroquecombat. History rubs up against them.
Long synthesizing the precedents set by divergent schools of paintings, including Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, and Pop, with the cheeky graphics associated with comics and graffiti, Dunham has been able to create a body of work rich in formal accomplishments and unique in visual content. As amoebic shapes evolved into grotesque anthropomorphic figures and, eventually, full-fledged human figures, his paintings became unspoken observations on both the act of painting and society. With each turn of the development, a deeper sense of consciousness reveals itself, as if various psycho-sexual drives churning below boil up to the very surface of the canvas.
▲ 《摔跤手（2）》 Wrestler (2), 2016-2017, 综合材料、亚麻画布 Mixed media on linen; 102.2 x 84.5 x 3.2 cm; 含边框 112.1 x 94 x 5.1 cm framed.
Carroll Dunham was born in 1949 and lives and works in New York and Connecticut. Dunham’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at international institutions including Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Millesgården, Stockholm; Drammens Museum, Drammen, Norway; amid-career retrospective was held at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. Dunham has also been included in notable group exhibitions including multiple Whitney Biennials and SITE Santa Fe; and at institutions including Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Geneva; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museu Picasso, Barcelona; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.
▶︎ About Gladstone | 关于格莱斯顿画廊
格莱斯顿画廊（Gladstone Gallery）由芭芭拉·格莱斯顿女士（Barbara Gladstone）于1980年在纽约曼哈顿创办，目前在纽约和布鲁塞尔有多家分部。画廊代理超过五十位著名在世和已故的艺术家。
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