1974

A hotel room in Philadelphia. A mesmeric character is seated on a pastel chaise longue. He pours over some handwritten lyrics. His pale, chiselled cheekbones exude extreme elegance. A sculpted shirt with pointed collars enhances his actions as he takes a pair of scis-sors to the text. Snipping random-ly, the lyrics disintegrate. They fall into a heap of language. Plucking arbitrary fragments from the pile, our writer begins over. We watch as a new song is written. Words, phrases, syntax and meter are freed to forge new associations.

The documentary we are watching reveals David Bowie moving restlessly from one creative ap-

proach and persona to another. ‘Cracked Actor’ traces Bowie in another stage of development. Ziggy has fled. Aladdin Sane is dead. This is the Thin White Duke. At times Bowie is confident in his artistic vision, at other times he talks in solemn riddles. Bowie writes his lyrics using Burroughs-inspired ‘cut-ups’. The camera lets us commune with a moment of construction. It gives us a back-stage pass. Hotel room. Green room. Sigma Sound Studio. We witness before the event. Before the stage show.

Looking at Dexter Dal-wood’s collages we are privy to the scene where intrinsic decisions are made

and planned. Before painting. They are modest sites where elusive locations are constructed. Inti-mate connections are fired from printed matter and art historical reproductions. They combine, as if, to produce stills from a twentieth century historical movie. We know the plot. We know the cast. Gor-bachev. Brian Jones. Michael Jack-son. Sharon Tate. Do we know the set and location? Dalwood scouts these locations from our collective imagination. Fuelled from biogra-phy and the speculation of popular

1 Dexter DalwoodAlun Rowlands

Dexter Dalwood

Originally published in This much is certain by the Royal College of Art, edited by Claire Bishop, London, 2004. ISBN 1874175624

mythology, he details spaces set for potential drama. But, unlike Bowie in ‘Cracked Actor’, our main protagonists are absent. They have stepped out. They are off set. We are left to project our imagination into the assemblage of metonymic accoutrements. Props drawn from a myriad of sources collide in a fastidious montage. The resulting collages initiate the details of lode-stone images, like single frames from our movie. Dalwood is seated splicing and cutting from the reel-to-reel of history. The collages he creates are single image cells prior to their projection onto the big screen of painting.

We are behind the wheel, cruising the freeway towards downtown L.A.

There is something disconcert-ingly familiar here. We get the title. ‘White Bronco’ (2001). We are O.J. Simpson mid-flight. Check the mirror. A helicopter hovers. News corporations track our escape. Their dramatic birds-eye view of the freeway is the one we really remember. Dalwood wittily pastes us front seat. We become complicit with the scene of the crime. The rear-view mirror reinforces this wide-screen experience. The sun is setting behind us but ahead is only blue sky. The drama is told through multiple voices. As the el-ements of the collage snap together we shift in time. Ahead, Los Ange-les appears as a two dimensional mirage. Behind, Ed Ruscha’s iconic Hollywood sign recedes. Are we fleeing art history or do the objects in the rear-view mirror appear closer than they are?

This cut and paste episode recalls early cinematog-raphy and montage. Here the jump cut and freeze-

frame fold into traditional ideas of collage. Visual impressions succeed one another. They overlap in a string of shots. Time becomes sol-vent. Collage guarantees contem-poraneity. It is rooted in a modern-ist strategy for bringing the actual into art. It ties art to the moment. In Dalwood’s hands it ties second

Dexter DalwoodAlun Rowlands 2

order material to fragments of history. Like the classic Hollywood cliché of falling calendar pages, spinning clocks and newspaper headlines, Dalwood forges a roll-ing dialogue between the past and the present. This allows us to con-sider the glasnost of ‘Gorbachev’s Winter Retreat’ (2000) through the lenses of Cezanne and hard-edged abstraction, in a visual perestroika. An apercu of the collaged image reveals the haunted autonomy of the fragment. Spliced magazine pages are displaced to act as other spaces. The parts retain a measure of their strangeness. But then this is useful when articulating a world that is not exactly reassuring and becoming stranger.

Dalwood’s promiscuous intermingling of signs allows an adolescent moment of freedom

to imagine. ‘Neverland (Michael Jackson’s Bedroom)’ (1999) is the Prince of Pop’s private domain. Fame and power coalesce in ba-roque camp. A soft-toy innocence is implied amidst the opulence we associate with MTV’s ‘Cribs’. Domesticity is hot. Perhaps it is a validation of the American dream. But beware. Our tabloid press has sensationally written the script for this stage. Slumber parties and

3 Dexter DalwoodAlun Rowlands

sleepovers have dragged the pri-vacy of this haven into litigation and the public courts.

Celebrity is a current obsession. Fan bases are swelling. Images and per-sonas are projected into

our social consciousness. Empathy is laced with nefarious desire. Celebrity worship syndrome, or mad icon disease, is a recognised psychological condition. Media fractures identity. The language of the fanzine is often quasi-religious. It is all ritual and worship. The congregation communes in front of their televisions. The second coming will be peak-time viewing.

Seventy-seven acres of Texan farmland dominated the 24-hour news channels in 1993. We watched from the

perimeter as the Branch David-ian ranch was held under siege. In ‘Mount Carmel, Waco’ (2000) Dalwood takes us inside. The serene interior echoes Matisse’s Dominican chapel in Vence. A utilitarian hardwood altar sits in its own fractured space. The cut edges of the printed components fissure, suggesting an impending implosion. The ceiling fan warns us that things are about to hot up. Outside this enclave the clouds gather. Dalwood has replaced the ranks of the ATF forces and film crews with a pastoral landscape that evokes Andrew Wyeth. This shift in our frame of reference is a subtle one. Art history provides the backdrop. The armed forces are substituted by a representation of nature as a moral force. Wyeth’s pioneering scenes identify with na-tionalism, transcendental populism and rehearsed settled values. These references butt-up against the assembled belief system depicted inside Mount Carmel.

David Koresh, who changed his name from Vernon Howell to en-hance his image as a lead

guitarist, constructed his vision from a variety of Biblical sources that he put into practice in Waco.

Text. Interpretation. Context. The script was already written. The precise context and interpretation were variable. The vagaries of translation aptly reside within the seams of Dalwood’s collages.

Imagine Ulrike Meinhof seated at her desk. Reading Che Guevara’s ‘Guerilla Warfare’. The hip Baader-Meinhof gang

translated the guerrilla theories of Guevara and Marighella into their West German context. They converted a manual for warfare in one of the world’s poorest coun-tries into a manual warfare in one of the richest. A lot was lost in translation. In ‘Ulrike Mein-hof’s Bed-sit’ (2000) and ‘Che Guevara’s Mountain Hideaway’ (1999) Dalwood reveals clandestine spaces fomenting revolutionary zeal. A hessian bivouac is swiftly assembled through jarring cut-up

collage. The National Geographic landscapes stand in for Bolivian isolation. Preparing for war should be a complete ascetic. By contrast, Ulrike Meinhof’s compact dwell-ing is replete with Bauhaus furni-ture and stripped timber entresol. We can only imagine the BMW- Baader-Meinhof Wagen- parked out front. A large poster of Marx hangs on a red wall. He has a looming presence. Dalwood gives us a visual reminder of the power in recycled images of revolution. This is, perhaps, a tense sub-plot in Dalwood’s work.

Plot. Sub-plot. Intrigue. Everyone, and everything, implicitly bound to grand narratives and specific

ideologies. Exhausted political systems, tired revolutionary ideals, empty zealous doctrines mingle with fading stars, rock mythol-ogy and a lamentable Modernism. Dalwood promotes this collusion within his work. It is an implicit provocation. Scissors in hand we can quote Clyfford Still’s dour, insalubrious work that he de-scribed himself as ‘ life and death merging in fearful union’. Pasting it into the tragedy of Brian Jones’ poolside suicide, we can reify the mood at the end of the summer of love. Dalwood’s work manifests these diverse moments of rupture. He relies on relativism in matters of time and space. His collages emerge as an apt form to initiate a discussion about the seismic events and decisions of the twentieth century. Their evocation permits entertaining historical slippage. We slide into the cracks of fact, code and style. The seam versus the seamless. Our visual pleasure is derived from the shock recognition of these seams. We take off on lines of flight, making arboreal con-nections. At times our collective memory, the movie we constantly re-run, snaps into focus. And, for a fleeting moment, we become acutely aware of our place within the pattern of things.

Alun Rowlands Dexter Dalwood 4

1. Che Guevara’s Mountain Hide-away (1999) 2. Mount Carmel, Waco (2000)3. Ulrike Meinhof’s Bed-sit (2000)4. Brian Jones’ Swimming Pool (1999)