Art Review - March Issue - (Page 54)
Warning : session_start : The session id contains invalid characters,
valid characters are only a-z, A-Z and 0-9 in
/mnt/data/www.nxtbook.com/fx/config_1.3/global.php on line 9 Warning :
session_start : Cannot send session cache limiter - headers already sent
output started at /mnt/data/www.nxtbook.com/fx/config_1.3/global.php:9 in
/mnt/data/www.nxtbook.com/fx/config_1.3/global.php on line 9 Warning :
Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by output started
at /mnt/data/www.nxtbook.com/fx/config_1.3/global.php:9 in
/mnt/data/www.nxtbook.com/fx/config_1.3/global.php on line 10 FEATURE
DAVID LYNCH DAVID LYNCH WEIRD ON TOP He’s a great filmmaker, but is
David Lynch a great artist? words SKYE SHERWIN portrait JUERGEN TELLER In
1990 Parkett ran the feature ‘ Why Is David Lynch Important?’ In it,
various cultural commentators, artists, curators and other thinkers waxed
lyrical on the significance of the director’s films. There was mention
of his achievements as a ‘stylist’, of ‘clip-aesthetics’, the MTV
generation mentality and, of course, his impact on Hollywood and, by
extension, global culture. By 1995 David Foster Wallace was able to remark
that Lynch had reached a point at which he could be defined in his own
terms; he had achieved adjectival status: he was simply Lynchian. And to
many he is one of the ‘great artists’ of our times. This month a major
show of Lynch’s artwork, The Air Is on Fire – encompassing painting,
photography, drawings, film, animation, installation and sound art from
the 1960s to the present day – opens at the Fondation Cartier, in Paris.
At the same time, a new movie, Inland Empire, is being released in France
and the UK, following rapturous reviews in the States, where critics
declared it to be his best work since Eraserhead 1977 . What better time,
then, to revisit the question of his importance, the claim that he is one
of our great artists? On a day of blazing heat, even by LA standards,
Lynch sits in his studio above ‘the compound’: two beautiful modernist
constructions of grey stucco and glass. One is his home; the other houses
the offices of his production company, Asymmetrical Productions as well as
having been a location for 1997’s Lost Highway . He hasn’t felt the
need to show his art on a grand scale before, so why, I wonder, does he
want to exhibit it now? “Well… I didn’t really want to,” is his
characteristically perverse response. p ARTREVIEW Perhaps one of the main
reasons is the fact that Lynch is most often described as an artist, not a
filmmaker, a title that when used in the context of movie reviews suggests
he has moved beyond the mainstream position he found himself in when Twin
Peaks 1990–1 afforded him the double-edged honour of cult household
name. The forthcoming Cartier show provides an opportunity to assess
whether he can be described as an artist in the conventional sense. When
it comes to films, the past decade has seen the director abandon the
rudder of accessibility that financiers insist upon; instead he pioneers
an experiential type of cinema in which sound and image usurp plot, where
character is destabilised, formula negated and conclusive understanding
eluded. Inland Empire, his first experiment with digital filmmaking, sees
him reach the most extreme point of this trajectory to date. Lynch’s
improvised approach to digital film – including smudging out faces,
layering images and using extreme close-up to create texture in the
notoriously flat medium – certainly prompts comparisons to the act of
painting. Indeed, Lynch’s creative career was initially that of a
painter; he felt an impulse towards cinema as a desire to make paintings
that moved. His first film, Six Figures Getting Sick 1966 , which will be
shown alongside other shorts at the Fondation Cartier, was an animation
derived from a painting. And even as his career as a filmmaker developed
Lynch never abandoned his commitment to painting, while further expanding
his output into the domains of photography, sculpture, music projects and
furniture design. Never ostensibly made for an audience, these works
function as important creative outlets for someone who is a restless doer.
However, many pieces, including drawings on Post-it notes and lined paper
that 54-61 David Lynch AR Mar07.ind54 54 1/2/07 04:13:43 Warning : Unknown : The session id contains invalid characters, valid
characters are only a-z, A-Z and 0-9 in Unknown on line 0 Warning :
Unknown : Failed to write session data files . Please verify that the
current setting of session.save_path is correct /var/lib/php/session in
Unknown on line 0
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Art Review - March Issue
Manifesto
Dispatches
Consumed
Tales from the City
David Lynch
Marcel Dzama
Future Greats
Art Pilgrimage: Moscow
Mixed Media: Moving Images
Mixed Media: Photography
Mixed Media: Digital
Reviews
Book Reviews
On the Town
On the Record
Art Review - March Issue
https://www.nxtbookmedia.com