Spencer Dormitzer
Spencer Dormitzer’s startlingly goofy paintings–15 are on view at Space Gallery–are something of a surprise even today, when anything can be art. True, bright, pop colors, cartoonish imagery, and bizarre fantasy figures all made it into galleries years ago. What’s striking is the way his aggressive, sensually colored figures, which look like pop icons but are mostly his inventions, are often left almost surrealistically unexplained. His work is a bit like a brilliantly drawn comic book, more subtly colored than it seems at first, with a story by Andre Breton.
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Humor is not highly valued in the art world. The possibility that laughter can itself be serious, even sublime, is rarely considered. But Dormitzer’s humor, fun in itself, also serves a larger purpose: it heightens the absurdity of the situations his characters are caught in. In Badass Descending a Staircase a black woman stands confrontationally, legs slightly spread, on a staircase, facing off with a white woman in a bikini below whose head is cut off at about the mouth. From the empty space within the head a small flagpole with a banner rises, on which the words “YOU AINT SHIT” are printed–presumably a joke on the white woman’s empty-headed racism. Smaller details make the white woman seem totally silly: her bikini is orange with red polka dots, and her pinkish, perhaps sunburned skin has lighter-colored polka dots. She may well be a pale person trying, and failing, to get a tan, and the light dots are similar in shade to what one would expect to see under her bikini–a little voyeuristic fantasy, perhaps? The similar polka-dot patterns on her skin and bathing suit suggest that attempts to alter one’s skin color are absurd, akin to the efforts of a clothing designer to “remake” an individual.
Dormitzer, 28, was a loner as a kid, relentlessly teased in part because of his unusual appearance–he never rinsed the soap out of his hair, for example, “so it would shoot all over the place.” His parents split up when he was young, and he spent many afternoons outdoors. “I had these backwoods that went on forever; I was always watching UFOs, killing enemies–then you throw in nude women…” At about age six he discovered that his “dad had the greatest Playboy collection ever–Playboy, Oui, Penthouse. There was this vision of a woman I never really lost, this amazing superwoman that came out of nowhere.” Imagining the mixture of wonder and bafflement he must have felt at seeing nude women as a child for me added a human dimension to his odd mixture of aggression and mystery, of self-assured characters who proudly display themselves and inexplicable situations, of human drama and surreal apparition.
Screen Play suggests traditional theater: each of five small connected wooden panels is covered with a piece of paper printed with a phrase: “Act I,” “Act II,” and so on. The punning title also points out the work’s resemblance to a Japanese folding screen. But there’s no further content, no additional words. One untitled work consists of a wooden panel on which Fraser has mounted an antique binder for photographs from which he’s cut out the photo. The cutout oval, recalling the shape of old photo portraits, is mounted on the wall next to the panel. In Prologue/Epilogue these two words are printed on opposite ends of a long wooden panel; mounted between them on a string is a book binding with the pages mostly cut off so that no words are visible. This art is made up of “containers” that have traditionally held works of some ambition–plays, novels, photographs. The effect is a bit like a painting exhibition with the canvases removed and only the frames displayed.
Fraser’s collar pieces clearly express his notion that “some of the best work is the work that defies identity.” These collars are stripped of their social meaning. In another untitled work a collar is mounted vertically on a wood backing, revealing its “I” shape. In A Painting (In Appearance) Fraser mounts 11 collars horizontally in parallel bands; Spin fastens collars together in a sphere. Fraser effaces the proud self-presentation of these markers of personality, just as he eschews the usual forms of self-expression in his art; his simple geometries focus on the collars themselves, not the artist’s hand.
