Banners and drawings
March 21 - April 26, 2008
Opening Reception – Thurs. April 3, 5:30-7:30 pm
John Dugger, a Berkeley-based artist whose participation works of the 60s and 70s are widely-appreciated in Europe where he spent much of his career but hardly known here, will exhibit mountain banners at Steven Wolf Fine Arts. The Los Angeles-born Dugger began his career in London creating participation events alongside other expatriates like Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticica. This work earned him a pavilion that he shared with the artist David Medalla in the 1972 Documenta curated by Harold Szeemann.
In the middle 1970s, looking to renew his art practice, Dugger turned to banners, an ancient art form explicitly designed for public spectacles and largely ignored by western artists. He has since gone on to create banners that were used to commemorate the Dalai Lama, the Black Panthers, The Queen of England and the Olympics.
In the 1980s Dugger took up climbing and this activity led to the mountain banners, large geometric tapestries with a detailed mountain drawing in the center. Dugger makes drawings on site during his climbs then, back in the studio, uses a pen carved from a twig found during the outing to permanently fix them to the fabric using a dye-discharge process. Monochromatic by design, these panels then become the central focus of colorful banners that are hung using state of the art mountain riggings designed by Dugger himself.
Historically banners have been used in battle, in spiritual processions, in sporting events and in political marches. Both 1066 and 1968 were big years for the banner. Dugger’s first banner in 1974, commissioned by the Chile Solidarity Campaign for a march protesting that country’s military dictatorship, took its place in that tradition.
However, as our notion of public space and spectacle has evolved, we probably think of banners more now as headlines atop newspapers and internet sites than as physical standard bearers. As the physical and metaphorical space around the banner changed so too had Dugger’s work. In the late 1980s, he began to shift the banner to the private sphere. Fearing rejection from the supporters of his public art and political work, he kept the mountain banners out of sight for five years, until he encountered the Dalai Lama from whom he received a sense of permission to embrace without reservation the more overtly spiritual aims celebrated in the new work. He was also emboldened by the realization that while the mountain banners emulated the tradition of alpine drawing, glorified the great outdoors, and possessed the pantheistic spirit of American transcendentalism, they also retained some connection to his early participation work, political by nature, in which he eschewed technology for human energy and worked to bridge his audience to the environment.
The show at Steven Wolf Fine Arts, Dugger’s first one-person exhibition in the U.S., takes its name from Mount Analogue, an unfinished novel by the surrealist prose artist Rene Dumont, in which a small group of intellectual outsiders in Paris drop everything in their lives to scale a mountain that seems like it might be part fantasy, part reality, all analogy.
STEVEN WOLF FINE ARTS
415-263-3677
info@stevenwolffinearts.com
www.stevenwolffinearts.com
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