View on Turning Point

Dike Blair rose to prominence in the mid-1980s as a sculptor of voluminous-yet-matter-of-fact constructions, montages made of everyday materials and supports—think industrial coatings on glass panels—which he would stage and paint or otherwise dramatize until they reached a higher-brow vernacular, i.e., the status of “art.” Like everyone else though, Blair also took vacations. In fact, one summer in the early eighties, Blair began making paintings while on Shelter Island in New York. These were small and simple gouaches, painted in the late afternoon or after dark, with an aperitif, or after the meal had ended, as a casual way to pass the time, or perhaps to leave his summertime compatriots or hosts a parting gift.1 These early gouaches were mainly beach scenes, often loose and scrubby in their execution, and ambiguous enough in their imagery—as if to suggest that they emerged from a collective consciousness casually taking in a little unspecific maritime spectacle during the sunny dog days, or moonlit nights, of summer.

Blair would later add handmade frames to these little paintings on paper, after returning home to his studio in New York City, in order to instill a little more sense of substance to these works, which might otherwise look like small pages torn from a sketchbook.2 In a few of these, he included a bit more “site-specific” imagery—imagery inseparable from any overland vacation: the drive home. One untitled gouache dated 1985 shows a dashboard view of a highway darkened by the night sky above but lit-up in its bottom half by the yellow glow of sodium roadside lights extending across the horizon, and the familiar red rays of break lights, receding toward a more-or-less off-center vanishing point. This painting still retains the crude mark-making of its beach-y counterparts, but it seems to “shake” a little: shake in the sense that its center—that vanishing point—is slightly off-kilter, and the loose rendering of the overhead lighting to the left has been deliberately stretched into an angular blur. These are the types of “capture” effects painters use only when unambiguously producing from—or, simply, reproducing—photographs.

According to Blair’s own admission,3 these earliest paintings were done with some flippant self-regard; it seems, in the summer of ’85, he had no real desire to quit the New York art world to become a full-time painter of trite little beach scenes. But what began as a deliberately half-hearted project quickly expanded into something, more serious, if not earnest, and more consuming. Blair has, in the decades since, devoted much more of his time to his paintings. So much so that they are a full-fledged part of his now more-or-less bifurcated studio practice—divided, that is, between sculpture and painting. Meanwhile, the paintings have taken up the theme of in-between time (and not necessarily just time spent on vacation). They do so, it would seem, because of Blair’s practice of consistently painting from photographs—snapshots taken while traveling around and living the life of a globetrotting artist.

For a moment, Blair’s paintings shifted to depict solitary cocktails, only mildly appetizing foodstuffs, beer cans, packs of cigarettes, billiard balls, playing cards, and plenty of cheap reading material. Many were rendered using a certain technical trick—masking central subject shapes and then spay-painting onto the surrounding negative space—a technique borrowed from “trade” artists (billboard painters, commercial illustrators) tasked with the faithful reproduction of photographs, in paint, for the sake of advertisement. The result of this masking-and-spraying technique is arresting: the abrupt shift from soft- to hard-edge paint applications mimics the appearance of objects caught in a camera’s depth of field, while the spray paint surrounding the paintings’ central subjects radiates out from them like a luminous halo.

By the early 1990s, however, Blair’s object fixation(s), the careful construction of a certain intimate “artist’s” subjectivity in his paintings, gave way—or, as in the freeway painting mentioned above, returned—to a total construction of photographic subjectivity itself. His “staged” paintings—of beers cans, cigarettes, cocktails, and comic books—have an obvious, constructed quality to them: akin to advertising photography in their source photographs’ obviously arranged quality, the objects, set against a featureless background, or “sweep.” The sprayed halos duplicate the hardworking handicraft of commercial product photographers, those shutterbugs who, with their specialized effort and ingenuity—the perfectly placed spotlight and faultlessly innocuous background—create seductive wondrous scenes featuring otherwise ordinary stuff. However, Blair’s paintings since have become exercises in faithfully reproducing what his camera sees in everyday settings: shots looking at and out of windows, overexposed interiors, light (and shadow) spreading across nondescript walls, tables, and floors.

A few of these paintings have recently become the sole subject of a show now on view at the life-long home of another American painter. The Edward Hopper House Museum and Study Center in Nyack, New York, has staged Matinee: Dike Blair, positioning fifteen of the artist’s paintings, installed in the living room, in dialogue with Hopper’s work. The exhibition surveys twenty-five years of Blair’s output, with a painting dating as far back as 1997 and a few made as recently as 2022. The relationship between the two artists focuses on cinema (hence, the “matinee.”) Hopper was an avid movie-goer, and his paintings have often been praised for their cinematic qualities: their compositions borrow from movies of his time, and later movie have, in turn, borrowed Hopper’s imagery and themes.

Critic, curator, and editor Tim Griffin drew an insightful connection between Blair’s paintings and cinema in a short text from 2020, that focused on the minute paintings’ “sense of scale”: he claims this is at once “deceptive” and “dynamic,” borrowing a term from the artist.4 According to Griffin, their dynamism is “indebted to a telescopic vision that renders the most idiomatic occasions psychological in their isolating focus.” Here, he is referring us to the rich—i.e., universal—psycho-affective potential of a drawn-out, close-up shot. Griffin cites two in particular: one, from Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), in which we see the main character Travis Bickle’s AlkaSeltzer tablet briefly consume the given universe as it dissolves in a glass of diner water, “making the rest of the world’s images and sounds fall entirely away for the film’s lead character and audience alike.” The second, as we learn, inspired the first: an all-enveloping shot of a black cup of coffee in Jean-Luc Godard’s Two or Three Things I know About Her (1967):

in which the camera similarly focuses on foam swirling on the liquid surface, explicitly circumventing any firm since of scale—or more accurately using a cinematic leap of scale from cup to screen to underline the ties between object and perception, phenomenology and psychology, that organize (and disorganize) even the most ordinary scenes in life.

Griffin then strengthens the connection between Blair’s paintings and cinema; it’s a matter of how, exactly, the paintings perform their unique function. In contrast to the traditional still life: 

genre studies [that] might frequently offer allegories of the passage of time, Blair’s subjects more rightly engage the passing of time—or, again, the organization of time, and the social alignments of its cadences. Indeed, so many of his selected subjects revolve around interstitial moments and transitions: the moment after the cigarette has been crushed…the minutes spent waiting for the next flight…the drink received in anticipation of the main dish that will arrive. Blair’s images dial into, and offer entryways onto, the subconscious cues by which one orients oneself.5

An untitled work in the current show in Nyack, dated 2016, features almost nothing but the black-and-white dial of an analog clock set on a lime green wall. Its hands read approximately “2:45,” forming a nearly flat, slightly-off horizontal bar across its face. The “bar” formed by the clock hands echoes a snippet of off-white molding, which creeps down into the frame from above, offering us, as viewers, a well-contained universe in which to situate ourselves, albeit not as tight as Godard’s coffee cup of Scorsese’s drinking glass.

Such so-called “clock shots” have a definite utility in cinema. They provide a ready aid to the artifice of fictive duration within cinema. For exhaustive proof of their effectiveness in this capacity, look no further than their ubiquity, as registered through sheer volume, in Christian Marclay’s moving-image work, The Clock (2010).  Marclay amassed thousands of clips from more-or-less well-known films featuring clocks into a twenty-four-hour-long video. Its 1:1 ratio of filmic time—the various, (re)sequentialized filmic fragments—to real time leaves us with a day-long durational “movie” that is itself a functional chronograph. It’s a very modernist piece, inasmuch as it does to something with the artform itself, exposing the artifice inherent in the work by reductively stressing the work’s material parameters. Marclay’s Clock separates these thousands of discrete signifiers (the clock shots) from their original signifieds (the original plot lines they were intended to serve), and equates them directly, very modernistically in fact, with the ultimate signified: a purely empirical datum, the cinematic medium itself—duration.

In his 1970 study S/Z, French writer and semiotician Roland Barthes breaks down Honoré de Balzac’s short story Sarrasine (1830), identifying something like the literary equivalent of the cinematic “clock shot”.6 A story, like a movie, has an inherent structure—a plot—which “unfolds” not according to fixed duration, as cinema does, but to the structure(s) of discourse as we experience them through the act of reading (though, he writes, we read “the text” itself, which is irreducible to, and so much more than, the plot itself). Plot progresses, as Barthes claims, in several ways. These are, as he puts it, the movements, or “interweavings,” of distinguishable codes that are themselves—when taken together, read at once—the text.7 A text like Sarrasine contains a chronological reference code, which appears occasionally (we’ll avoid the phrase “from time to time” here) in its sentences and paragraphs, and serves as the text’s internal timekeeper or “time-stamp”: “Sarrasine left for Italy in 1758”; “He had already spent two weeks in the ecstatic state which overwhelms young minds at the sight of the queen of ruins”; “On the following day, he sent his valet to rent a box next to the stage for the entire season”; “In a week he lived a lifetime, spending the mornings kneading the clay by which he would copy La Zambinella,”etc.8

In literature, these chronological stamps merely mark out a space in which a story’s events unfold, situating its happenings within a span of time, historical or otherwise. In cinema, chronological markers appear within the overarching sequence, or duration, of shots; as viewers, our ability to suspend disbelief “stitches” them together into a fictive time divorced from actual “running” time. Unlike cinema, literature has no durational component. The same goes for painting. Both simply present units of signification. In literature, narrative “moves” as a function of what Barthes calls the proairetic code, or actions in sequence (yet another type of code weaving its way through the text, creating effect and/or affect): one action, implies another, or, in other words, indicates “a logic in human behavior… [i]n Aristotelian terms, in which praxis is linked to proairesis, or the rational ability rationally to determine the result of an action,”9: i.e. “She knocked. The door opened.”10 In literature, according to Barthes:

Actions (terms in the proairetic code) can fall into various sequences which should be indicated merely by listing them, since the proairetic sequence is never more than the result of an artifice of reading: whoever reads the text amasses certain data under some generic titles for actions (stroll, murder, rendezvous), and this title embodies the sequence; the sequence exists when and because it can be given a name, it unfolds as this process of naming takes place, as a title is sought or confirmed; its basis is therefore more empirical than rational, and it is useless to attempt to force it into a statutory order; its only logic is that of the “already-done” or “already-read”….11

Paintings like Blair’s present such terms… one at a time, in isolation. Their (photo)realism, the generic nature of their subject matter, call on us, as viewers, to supply the next step in the action. In the Nyack show, an untitled painting—with charcoal—on paper from 2021 shows a cropped view of white door with a faux-crystal handle, a sliding bolt, and a window, one that looks out onto a stark, black nightscape of trees illuminated in silhouette. Is there a story there? Will a hand reach for the bolt, and then the knob? Will a figure appear in the opening? We can’t help but complete the sequence. An untitled oil on aluminum shows a lonely lamp with red shade on a table. It illuminates the table below it and a wall behind (much like the spot lighting in Blair’s earlier “product photo” paintings), revealing its dark-colored electrical cord, which snakes its way into a socket on the wall. The next step in this electrical binary is simple and obvious—the lamp turns off, the room goes dark.

An untitled work from 2002 shows a slightly upward looking view of a commonplace bathroom interior. We see a portion of a mirror, yellow-beige tile, and part of a shower curtain complete with rings and rod. The next step in this sequence is certainly cinematic—it comes to us from cinema, in a sense, or will for many viewers. One can’t help but think of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). One can’t help but instantly stitch Blair’s painted image together with those from Hitchcock’s famous “shower scene.” This is the cultural inflection which weighs on Barthes’s proairetic code (and the text in general), the influence of one upon the other, imposing to its limit. Of course, only viewers of the painting who are somewhat familiar with Hollywood film will make this association. Then again, the murder scene from Psycho is probably one of the best-known scenes in all of cinema.

The show’s curator, Helen Molesworth, approaches these sorts of associations in another short text about Blair’s paintings, also from a few years ago.12 In it, she offers some autobiographical details in regards to her own interaction with one of Blair’s paintings, a painting of an apartment door with three different locks: “a knob lock, a jimmy proof deadbolt, and a security door chain.” It’s a typical door to a New York City apartment, albeit one from a (then) bygone era of crime and insecurity:

Anyone who has ever lived in New York City will immediately recognize the situation. The door speaks to the time when New York was dangerous, and apartment dwellers stacked locks one on top of another…. What I love about the painting, though, is not its provocation of my analogue-based childhood nostalgia but rather the way in which the painting registers, as so many of Blair’s images do, the intensity of human habit…. This is the space of bodily habit, the realm of the quotidian, the jurisdiction of the banal; and yet it’s the only way out of the apartment, which I mean both literally and metaphorically, for habit is the only way we can go out into the world. Without the matrix of habit how exactly would we even cohere into a self? The details of how one takes one’s coffee (in Blair it’s almost invariably in the thick old-fashioned pottery of a diner mug or the cheap take-out cup of Dunkin’ Donuts) is as stabilizing as a marriage. These small moments of personal preference and bodily knowledge behave similarly to how the fascia of the body connect muscle to bone, girding us from the ongoing effects of gravity. We step away from someone else’s door because it’s their door. We open our door effortlessly because it’s our door.

This toggling between oneself and others is, for me, the hallmark of Blair’s work. Both the psy-chic [sic] heft and the existential truth of his picture’s loneliness—their production and registration of this most human of affects—emanates from his unsentimental depiction of how habit allows us to navigate the ongoing logic of the generic and the specific. Every scene he paints…is generic. There is nothing here we haven’t already seen. Novelty is not what is at stake, familiarity is. And yet each image is rendered with a degree of specificity that is undeniable: that door…. In Blair’s hands life is as much in the details as it is in the main event.13

But what is habit and familiarity really—what is it really made of? This is where the implications of Barthes’s work can be so existentially destabilizing for many. Some people, like Molesworth, may have lived through this “high crime” era in New York City, and probably had an apartment with a front door arrayed with all types of locks and other security measures. Then again, many more of us have come to “know” this experience because we’ve seen it in a movie. As Barthes would argue, we are the sum of the cultural codes that we bring to a text—or a painting, or film, or anything really, any experience—through the act of reading. These codes form a chain, relay, a meta-code that starts to resemble “us,” in a sense.14 That gritty, old New York exists as memories of lived experience for some, but constitutes, for most, a shared cultural mythology, even for those people who “lived it” themselves. This chain extends far beyond the one evoked by the apartment door—to The French Connection (1971), Serpico (1973), Taxi Driver (of course!), Ghostbusters (1984), After Hours (1985), Goodfellas (1990)…even the more-or-less squeaky-clean Seinfeld (1989–96), had its momentary interactions with a harsher reality (Kramer the unwitting pimp, etc.). We can even go as far as to substitute “Scorsese” for the chain itself, and from there add a transhistorical value to the signifier with Gangs of New York (2002).

Barthesian demystification can be profoundly destabilizing for the traditionally conceived existential subject15—or, rather, the bourgeois reader. In his 1957 Mythologies, Barthes explores the world created and inhabited by this personality in a series of short essays. He begins each of his brief studies with a particular prompt, an excerpt, snatched—in many broad swipes of critical intelligence—from what is today casually called “popular culture.” One essay, “The Writer on Vacation,” begins with a magazine article featuring a photo of André Gide caught “reading Bossuet [while] going down the Congo.”16 It is a scene of “banal leisure,” Barthes remarks, mixed with “the prestige of a vocation nothing can halt or corrupt,” and also one “which candidly informs us about our bourgeoisie’s notion of its writers.” Yet what is more important for Barthes and his overarching project in Mythologies are these curious confrontations between everyday existence (a notion quickly estranged by most of Barthes’s readings in Mythologies) and quasi-divinity. Such are, for him, the legible traces of an ideologically charged elision of History within Nature—or, rather, ideology operating at a distance (…always at a distance)—which everywhere, in so many corners of culture, passes as reality.17

As for the “bourgeois” readers’ notions, “what initially seems to surprise and delight that bourgeoisie is its own broad-mindedness in acknowledging that writers too are the kind of people who take vacations.” Nevertheless, for Barthes, the fascination isn’t so straightforward. Even though these “specialists of the human heart” may behave like modern, workaday laborers in that they too take part in “certain prosaic realties” like going on holiday, they are still seen as Writers…in the mythic sense: they are always working the day away… even while on vacation! Rather, that is how the popular imagination—the so-called French public at the time—saw them…literally. The magazine article Barthes was responding to was part of a 1954 summer series in the literary supplement of the widely read daily Le Figaro, in which the paper solicited and published recent vacation photographs sent in by various, notable French literary figures.18 Here, Barthes notes: “One of them writes his memoirs, another corrects his proofs, a third is preparing his next book.” More to his point:

What proves the writer’s marvelous singularity is that during those famous vacations, which he fraternally shares with workmen and shops assistants, he never ceases, if not working, at least producing.19

The writer’s “work” becomes “a kind of involuntary…secretion”; thus, “to put it more nobly, the writer is the prey of an internal god who speaks at all times, without concern, tyrant that he is, for his medium’s vacation.” This “logorrhea” then “passes quite naturally for the writer’s very essence.” It is the “ambrosia,” that special something that endows the ordinary man, one with ordinary needs and functions—“with a human existence, with an old house in the country, with a family, with shorts, with a granddaughter, etc.”—with a paradoxical, ever-present surplus of brilliance:

the writer always preserves his writer’s nature; provided with a vacation, he raises the sign of his humanity; yet the god remains, one is a writer the way Louis XIV was a king, even on the commode.20

Might it be that some of what appeals to and fascinates us in Blair’s paintings comes from their autobiographical, journalistic nature, and our irresistible inclination to yield to a celebrity culture that surrounds “the artist,” one which Barthes explored in an earlier, more nascent form. Hence, perhaps, the stated irony which Blair initially felt toward his painting endeavors at their outset (was that ambivalent acquiescence to play the role?). Blair’s sculptures might easily be labeled under the term “post-minimalism.” But the fact that these works clearly inhabited the spaces they were installed in—that is, without recourse to mediumistic metaphysical purity—and did so without clear ambitions toward merging ideational pattern with “literal” form, would warrant the use of the “post-minimalist” moniker.

Yet, Blair is, or was, when he started working in this vein, more-or-less a half-generation removed from the earlier, original group of “post-minimalists.” As he rose on the art scene, English translations of Barthes and his cohort were arriving in the United States under the label of “French Theory,” and these thinkers and their ideas were rapidly catching on in academia and the art world. Meanwhile Benjamin H. D. Buchloh was busy pointing out that another group of artists like Sherrie Levine and Dara Birnbaum had discovered in anachronism (or, “allegorical procedures”)—to do something after it has already been done, provided that it is not the product of pure naiveté—a potent, critical position for their art, an antidote to the kind of (pop)cultural mythification/mystification that Barthes diagnosed in his Mythologies (Bathes called this solution  a “second,” or “second-order myth”).21 Blair, an artist deeply embedded in New York since the late 1970s, when and where he did a stint in the ever-so-up-to-date Whitey Independent Study Program, would have, without a doubt, been aware of, if not surrounded by, these (then) cutting-edge ideas and the methods and techniques they spawned.

Hopper’s paintings would have easily made for a nice little essay in Barthes’s book had he sought to expand his analysis beyond France to a more distant American popular culture. With its writer-on-vacation phenomena, the writer-figure, a god-like being, becomes more divine in direct proportion to his evident everydayness. Hopper’s work inverts this schema. He mythologizes everydayness—the mild, quotidian ennui—underlying American life in the early-twentieth century, in a major metropolis such as New York City or further-flung parts of the country. He turned this landscapes’ anonymous creatures—the cities’ everyman and woman, indistinct in their details; the antique typologies of Victorian homes in Gloucester, or anywhere really—into heroes in a staged, yet utterly humanistic, saga of dissatisfaction and loneliness.

By contrast, Blair’s paintings are so very often devoid of human beings. Whether or not we, as viewers, mythologize when looking at them (and can we really help ourselves?), it seems that Blair might be attempting something else, something more direct. They really are “quotidian,” they really do create a “the jurisdiction of the banal.” And there is an “ongoing logic of the generic and the specific” there, as Molesworth writes. But is there really “existential truth,” relayed via “bodily habit”? The former can easily imply, or may even hinge upon, an “ahistorical body” or a universal “human nature”—concepts which would seem to frustrate the dynamic (the particular self) that Molesworth seeks to highlight. The paintings are “texts”: they might even verge upon the “writerly” text (c.f. Barthes) in their call to fill in the next frame. Or, rather, as “merely polysemous”, “readerly”22 texts, they remain “plural” or capacious enough to simultaneously accommodate connotations of singular bodily experience and conduct commerce in the codes that condition us to—and within—our social order.23 Yet, each painted image stands, on some level, apart without us: they are novel, that is, specific…a little too specific. The camera captures what it captures (it indexes), and Blair paints from there. Blair really might be trying to offer us a world, “a world where the writer’s work [is] desacralized to the point of appearing as natural as his…gustatory functions.”24