LUCID DREAMING
by Beth Elaine Wilson

Language is the house of Being. Man dwells in this house. Those who think and those who create poetry are the custodians of the dwelling.
— Martin Heidegger

Years ago, when I was an over-stimulated, fresh young graduate student, I got into an argument with my old college roommate. She’d gotten interested in doing some artwork on her own, and was involved with the popular genre of fantasy images—you know, unicorns, Celtic goddesses, semi-psychedelic stuff. And of course I, with my new-found knowledge of critical theory and cutting edge cultural analysis, found myself criticizing her for not properly engaging the “real” issues facing art—the “problem of representation,” the multifarious issues raised by late capitalism and consumer commodity culture, and so on.

The Changing Cynthia Dill: (top) History Rains, collage and drawing; and 3-10-01, oil on panel

Needless to say, she didn’t appreciate the condescension. (Sorry, MJ!) Over the years, I like to think that I’ve managed to digest the insights that first inspired me in graduate school, and to bring them to bear on my everyday experience of reality in a fuller sense, to understand how they reflect (and impact upon) the material basis of daily life. When ascending to the ethereal heights of philosophical abstraction, it is all too possible to become caught up in one’s own cleverness, to the detriment of the experience that is presumably the object of the philosophizing in the first place. (This phenomenon was admirably skewered by Jonathan Swift in the Laputan section of Gulliver’s Travels, describing a race of philosophers who literally live in the sky, and who construct for Gulliver an ill-fitting suit tailored on the basis of a single measurement of his height, the remainder of the dimensions calculated on paper “with Rule and Compasses.” He takes small comfort, however, in the fact that “such accidents [were] very frequent, and little regarded.”)

The perceived gap between the intellectual and the real, between thought and feeling, creates all sorts of difficulties with respect to art and artmaking. Teaching in art schools helps to reinforce the distance between what one feels and what one knows. Talking recently with one local artist, Cynthia Dill, has brought this problem to my attention once again—as well as an awareness of my own apparent complicity in its production.

Dill received her MFA in painting from SUNY New Paltz a few years ago. I met her when she asked if I would work with her as her professor on an independent study project, because she wanted an introduction to the major themes of contemporary critical theory. So we set off on the path together, reading and discussing the major points of Lyotard, Derrida, Baudrillard, Benjamin, Heidegger, and the rest. The dedication and adeptness with which she tackled all this impressed me—and were also qualities that struck me in her painting, when I finally saw it. Dill, ever the artist, processed this new mass of information through her work, which shifted from a painterly, abstract style heavily influenced by Abstract Expressionism, toward a more eclectic approach that integrated photographic images, collaged into the work to address broader cultural issues such as the mass consumption of media made possible through mechanical reproduction. Even so, the work never completely cut its ties to the material world—in one series, the silkscreens appeared on sheets of steel, bringing together the weightlessness of the photographic image with the dense materiality of its base in a deeply creative dialectic.

I was thus a bit surprised then, to see the invitation card for Dill’s solo show at the Muroff-Kotler Gallery at Ulster Community College. A loosely handled landscape, the painting features a familiar old industrial building from the Rondout neighborhood in Kingston—one of those places you know you’ve seen or driven past a thousand times, but never really stopped to look at. The painting is small, just 8 by 10 inches, and utterly, irreducibly representational. No artiness, no references to photography, or to Baudrillard for that matter. So what was going on here?
“It’s been a totally intuitive year,” she informed me when we finally talked. Due to a number of close, and in some cases unexpected personal losses, Dill found herself turning away from what she calls “all that MFA stuff, the intellectual brainwashing, going around in circles looking for answers and control” in favor of a return to family, to her connections with people and places. She felt the need “to let go of one to get to the other,” exploring the world by means of feeling and intuition rather than intellect and analysis. This is exactly the sort of turn that would have gotten her in hot water while she was in school, where she would have been criticized for turning her art into mere “therapy”.
It’s interesting that she feels the need to qualify the work she’s produced in this year in such terms. She apologized for being “totally inarticulate” about the paintings, but in a sense, that’s exactly what this body of work is all about—a year of reflection on an emotional level, applying her talents and attention in almost total solitude, in order to find a way to reconcile death and love, rupture and healing. And she has applied herself primarily to the issue of place, memorializing in paint local venues that now speak volumes about themselves, and the people and community connections (and disconnections) they represent. Essentially, Dill has conducted an aesthetic quest for the very things that many of us find ourselves doing in the rest of our lives, since September 11. Asking her about the now all-too-appropriate mood of these introspective works, she allowed that she’d spent a year in that emotional state already, and it seems that now everybody else has just caught up with her. I find myself fascinated with this twist of fate: Imagine what we would have had to say about these paintings if these past weeks had never happened. Would they have simply struck me as “therapy” in the negative sense then? And knowing that disasters happen to individual people everyday—car crashes, affairs, flunking out of school, cancer diagnoses, what have you—how is it that this particular media event (not to mention the anthrax aftermath) has gripped our collective psyche in such a way as to make any of these personal traumas seem so much less important?

I know she isn’t ready to push it in this direction (and perhaps I’m doing some violence by even suggesting it), but perhaps the next step for Dill is to start working out the algebra of these relationships between personal loss and communal catastrophe, and the ways in which art can help us understand representation—and ourselves—in a deeper, richer way.

“2000-2001 Close to Home,” paintings by Cynthia Dill, through November 9 at the Muroff Kotler Visual Arts Gallery, Ulster County Community College, Stone Ridge. 687-5113.