Dewey Crumpler at Derek Eller
An under the radar show of acidic art history edits and sci-fi imagination
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Dewey Crumpler
”Painting is an Act of Spiritual Aggression”
Derek Eller
March 17 - April 23 2022
East coasters can be forgiven for lack of familiarity with Dewey Crumpler, whose decades-long career has been largely confined to the west coast. Each of the modestly scaled and impeccably executed canvases is its own fully formed universe, pulsing with expansive, if opaque, mythologies. The pictures transform the palette and verve of vintage pulp fiction covers into something much more seductive, whose secret cannot be revealed by a hundred and fifty pages of fiction. They function not unlike comic book frames with a loose cast of characters — hoodies and klan robes draped over invisible men, fragments of art history, disembodied brains and eyeballs — passing through art museums and sci-fi landscapes, suggesting but never settling into a narrative.
I first took the hoodies to be a reference to the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012, but I was mistaken: Crumpler has been working with that imagery since 1993. The zip-up sweatshirt is indeed an enduring accoutrement of racecraft: the social manufacture of races of humans whose sinister mechanics haunt most of these pictures.1 These pictures unambiguously deal with blackness — as concept and figure — but remain ambiguous, even ambivalent, about it. The hoodies acknowledge the dark magic of racecraft but also embrace its mutability.
Rendered in these pictures under the starry skies of foreign planets, in fun house rides, in chilly museums and at a generic protest, the hoodies bend and curve in sympathetic gestures animated by pathos. In one instance the empty space inside the fabric is revealed as sprawling galaxies. Whitman’s I contain multitudes comes to mind.
Modernity is an ambivalent inheritance. Is it the gift that keeps on taking, or the take that keeps on giving? Art about the history of art has diminishing returns, but Crumpler plays on the cocksure naivety of the art student to great effect. A hoodie totes a volume of the October group’s heady contribution to collegiate art history textbooks, Art Since 1900, as he photographs a trio of fountains in front of a Mondrian and Matisse: two of the drinking variety, one Duchamp. Another stands in for the role of the dying Marat, whose pedestal is adorned with Alfred Barr’s chart of modern art. A spectacle unfolds before Picasso and Ringgold, a reference to the 2019 MoMA rehanging which placed the two paintings in the same gallery. Modernism is collaged here as a somewhat awkward and faltering attempt to order the world and organize its future.
Where he really soars — pun intended — is in the hallucinogenic space visions untethered, mostly, from earthly clues, and in sinister X-Files tableaus of abductions and transformations. Acid trip neons squiggle through future pastorals and across menacing stills from sagas yet unknown.
I like the title of this show — “Painting is an Act of Spiritual Aggression” — because it reminds me of Trotsky’s wish or observation that a work of art is a “protest against reality.” Crumpler fully exploits the world-making capacity of painting. Appeals to “art” and “artiness” are given over to playful invention.
Racecraft was elaborated in historian Barbara Fields and sociologist Karen Fields’ excellent 2012 book of the same title. Witches, the Fields sisters explain, do not exist in any empirical form, but that did not stop “witches” from being burned at the stake. So too is race, without physical, biological reality, deployed with very real and devastating effect. Racism, they argue, produces the dark fiction of race, not the other way around.