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America the Transient - JaneDicksonChris KrausArt in America, October, 2001

Painted on AstroTurf and industrialcarpet, Jane Dickson's recent picturesrecord a landscape of highways,parking lots, suburban houses andfast-food joints. Within these strangelypixelated, everyday scenes, theauthor discovers a reservoir ofpsychological nuance.

Early last summer at World HouseGallery's temporary exhibition spacein Chelsea, Jane Dickson exhibitedseveral of her gorgeous, blearypictures of parking-lot sunsets and theless-than-great American highway.Unlike the landscape photographs ofAndreas Gursky, which oftendocument that moment when thebalance shifts and "nature" istransformed into the "naturalsurroundings" against whichcommercial-recreational plants havebeen constructed, in Dickson'spaintings the entire world has longago been paved. Painted in oil onmany different grades and shades of

AstroTurf and industrial carpet--unusual mediums Dickson perfectedduring the '90s in hundreds of picturesshowing single-family suburbanhomes--the paintings have a dreamyquality. In Dickson's universe it'salways dawn or dusk, times of daythat are often most problematic forthe mentally disturbed. Once, when Iwas to interview a political refugeefrom Romania, he requested that wechange our 6 P.M. appointmentbecause, he said, "I am not so good

with the transition between day andnight." I was startled by his sensitivity,but later it made perfect sense. "It isdifficult to remember," he told me. "Itis also difficult to forget."

Dickson's highways seem to occupy azone between memory and forgetting.It's an ordinary place, full of small andsometimes realizable hope. In Out ofHere, North (1999), a 6-by-11-footpainting on AstroTurf, the red taillightsof three cars are headed towards a

hazy opening in the cloud-line at thehorizon. (Something persuades me

that these must be family cars--perhaps the fact that the surroundingsare precisely the kind of suburbanlandscape that many Americans havenow grown up with.) The colors of the

road itself are as blurred and dappledas the sky. A few nameless shrubs, oilderricks and transmission towers linethe far edges of the highway. Becausethe plastic blades of AstroTurf grabthe paint so well, the support used inthis painting is barely recognizable aswhat we see on patios and miniaturegolf courses. Instead, the paintedsurface takes on a pixelated quality,creating a pattern of bleeding,edgeless dots that evoke not onlyPointillism but also early TV

transmissions. Details are softened inpassage, rather than wilfullyobscured.

Out of Here, North was installed withthree other "Out of Here" paintings(each named for one of the cardinalpoints of the compass) in the projectroom at the Fort Lauderdale Museumof Art last summer. (The paintingswere first shown at Galapagos inBrooklyn in October 1999.) For thisinstallation, Dickson commissioned a

soundtrack by Derrek Brown and ChrisMorgan of the band Deep Fat. A 17-minute groove that incorporates thesounds of passing traffic, therecording perfectly evokes the endlessmonotony of daily life. In fact, theslow dreamy atmosphere in the "Outof Here" paintings highlights one ofthe paradoxes of our wired-up globe:that ultra-high-speed, nanosecondtechnology still means inertia for mostof us. Information travels betweensatellite receivers at dazzling speed,but we remain trapped in the present.The motion captured in this painting isby no means ecstatic. Rather, itevokes the vague nausea ofcarsickness, as eternal as the 35threfrain of "99 Bottles of Beer on theWall."

In Blue Highway (1999), an emptyeight-lane road stretches out beforeus with its guardrails, lamps andsignage until it meets the clouded sky.Dickson's vision of the American road

is as far from the heroic nomadism of

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the Beats as it is from the labyrinthinemystery of David Lynch's film LostHighway. In Long Beach Lot (1999),the traffic missing from Blue Highwayslumbers in the smoggy sunset,

guarded by a ring of shadeless palms.The cars are conspicuously modest,late-model Mazdas and Toyotas,presumably bought on payment,washed, insured and anxiouslymaintained. Dickson is the most clear-eyed, factual of painters, but what issubtly radical about her work is herability to render the ugly uniformity ofexurban construction in a mannerwhich is not at all dystopian.

"I want to see where the edge in bland

is," Dickson told an interviewer forBomb magazine several years ago.The Chicago-born artist trained as afigurative painter at the Ecole desBeaux-Arts in Paris and at HarvardUniversity. While her work iseffectively conceptual, she is alwaysusing one part of her brain to dealwith traditional formal questions ofperspective, light and shadow. She"knows how" to make a painting. Inthe early 1990s, she moved from aTimes Square loft with her husband,

the filmmaker Charlie Ahearn, andtheir children, to a more conventionalwall-to-wall carpeted dwelling in a lessgritty part of Manhattan. It was thenovelty of being surrounded by graycarpet that led Dickson to considerthe linkages between carpeting andthe desire projected by most peopleonto the idea of home. Freed of thehell of living in a barely plumbedindustrial space above Eighth Avenue,Dickson became fascinated by theAmerican ideal of the single-familyhouse. Her curiosity led her toundertake her portraits of suburbanhomes on carpet and AstroTurf.

Based on snapshots of houses takenby the artist everywhere fromRockland County and Binghamton,N.Y., to the barrio environment of LosAngeles's Highland Park, the paintingsin this ongoing series always keeptheir architectural subjects in thecenter of the frame. Through theprocess of painting, Dickson simplifies

and amplifies the image in the

photograph, trying to recapture theoriginal feeling of the scene, thequalities that did not translate to film.

In Los Angeles, where Dickson lived

for six months in 1999, it's no longerpossible to research a house's historyof ownership in the public records;residential properties change handsso often that old deed informationisn't kept on file. Stripped of thesignifying referents of history, thingsare what they are and there is verylittle left to really long for. Desiredrains. Appropriately, in the "Houses"series there is hardly any anoeticdifference between Home 21-SpanishAdobe (1998), Home 27-Tudor Garage

(1998), Pink House (1998) or the two-storied brick and clapboard modelwith the gambrel roof in Home 22-Matthews St. (1998). Similarly, thereis hardly any difference between whatlooks to be a half-million-dollarproperty, Home 19-Hillside Contempo(1998), and a, let's say, $80,000bungalow near Figueroa Streetdepicted in another painting. As seenby Dickson, all these buildings areprimarily receptacles of domestic life,places where people eat, sleep and

watch television (another of Dickson'sfavorite subjects) in the sacredprivacy of home.

Darkness hides itself within the treesoutside Dickson's houses, the way itdoes in Ed Ruscha's paintings offoliage and buildings silhouettedagainst nighttime Los Angeles skies,which are never absolutely dark. InRuscha's canvases, the desolation ofthe scene is offset by an iconicquality: by isolating these shards of

California emptiness, Ruschareformats them more cheerfully asPop. In Dickson's more "realistic"landscapes, however, emptiness is allthere is. Yet, this emptiness does notinspire pathos. Dickson's housesremind me of the lyrics of art-rockpoet Susie Timmon's paean to hersuburban roots, "Finding Someone toTake Care of You":

Come off the exit, take a rightTake another right when you get to

the lightTake the first left and another right

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Turn off your lights, head up the hillCoast into the driveway and it's very

still ...

When Dickson made her artistic debut

in the 19808, as a part of the ColabGroup, with figurative paintings ofTimes Square life, her work was oftenmisread. Her depictions of strippers,grasping couples on the sidewalk andcrime suspects getting frisked againstpolice cars were emphatically nightscenes, drawn with oilstick onblackened linen in a mannerreminiscent of black velvet paintings.She also created similar effects withoilstick on paper, as in Jai Alai (1985)in which the silhouetted figures of

three men and a policeman, all bathedin artificial yellow light, hover againsta bus station wall. Seen as if throughthe Vaseline-smeared lens of soft-corepornography, these urban sceneswere often taken to be a kind ofromantic neo-social realism, a culturalanthropology steeped in liberalcompassion. In fact, what interestedJane Dickson most about thesesubjects was the existential streetphenomenon of waiting. She wassingle, in her 208, and she was

waiting for her life to begin. Dicksonsaw herself then as a participant-observer. "I was a witness," shecomments in the Bomb interview, "butI wasn't only documenting what washappening to them. It was myexperience too."

A show earlier this year at Scolar FineArt in London presented some ofthese early Times Square paintingsalongside examples of Dickson'ssubsequent work--a series of New

Year's Eve revelers, the highways andthe houses, amusement parks anddemolition derbies. In "Reconfigured,"a recent exhibition of Americanpainting at the Yan Huang Museum inBeijing, examples of her olderpaintings were accompanied by newerworks featuring scenes of strip-mallindustries: Green Laundromat (2000)and Taco Fiesta (2000). Exhibitionssuch as these help to illuminate thelogic and intentions of Dickson's earlypaintings, and make it apparent how

very not romantic they are. It also

becomes clear, as you look at the newand old work together, how impossibleit is to separate the paintings from thecircumstances of Dickson's life.

We love and hate the Beats becausethey were outsiders looking in; theysaw their loneliness refracted in thehighways and the diners, thetenements, the oilskin tablecloths andcheap curtains glimpsed while drivingpast the roadside shacks of America'sdesperate poor. Dickson, on the otherhand, has always been fullyimplicated in her subjects. The littlegirl sprawled out in the darkness, herback facing the viewer as she watchestelevision in Eve on the Carpet (1996)

is her own daughter. The shadowyfigure in Two Palms Motorcycle (1999)walking the concrete path into a smallbungalow, where a blurred TV screenglimpsed through the window seemsto be warming the front room, is mostprobably her neighbor. Dickson'sapproach to painting is frequentlycompared to Edward Hopper's.Despite the distance in time,Dickson's parking lots and taco standsare not so unlike Hopper's famouslate-night diner, but what really unites

both painters is how they use anelusive realism to capture the strangesadness just under the surface ofeveryday life. The interstitial imagesof exurban America typical ofDickson's subject matter are oftenfound in the work of contemporaryphotographers, most notablyCatherine Opie and James Welling. Butin contrast to such work, which tendsto achieve its emotional powerthrough effects of distance andimpersonality, the psychologicalnuances in Dickson's paintings arevery direct. In even her mostdepopulated scenes, Dickson conveysa sense of recent habitation, oftransient human life ghosting thehighways and houses. Her eye isnever very far removed from thetenuously middle-class state of echt-America where most people live twopaychecks away from disaster.Dickson gives an inner life to subjectswhich might otherwise be seen as

kitsch. All the fleeting hopes anddisappointments that she captures are

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integrally a part of how this countrylives, and they're also unmistakablyher own.

Jane Dickson's work has been seen in

recent solo exhibitions at a temporaryNew York space for World HouseGallery, South Orange, N.J. [May 19-June 23], the Fort Lauderdale Museumof Art [May 11-July 15], Scolar FineArt/Gordon Samuel, London [Feb. 15-Mar. 15], Lemberg Gallery, Ferndale,Mich. [Mar. 24-Apr. 21], andMiller/Block Gallery, Boston [Feb. 10-Mar. 10].

Chris Kraus is co-editor of Hatred ofCapitalism, a Reader, forthcoming thisfall from Semiotexte/MIT Press.