I've already used dancing as a metaphor for art in this blog, so I feel all the more incredibly uncreative using a dancing metaphor to describe a painting show of dancers and singers, but here goes anyway:
On the night of Caitlin MacQueen's opening (the excellently titled 'Scratch Back Daub-Shebang!') I wandered the school for a few hours after the crowds had disappeared, opening beverages and snacks gone with them, eventually coming to a stop and lingering in the Houghton Gallery pacing languidly in circles.
Maybe dancing is more like what I was doing than pacing; I would take several long, swinging, enervated (perhaps inebriated) steps in one direction, find myself face to face with a smiling pair of women dancing, spin on my heels and move toward other painted dance partners, passing the faces of their painted musical accompanists on the way, before turning to see more. Flitting from one painting to another felt like slowly spinning around a small dimly lit club or bar on an off-night. It was Tuesday, though, so an uncomfortably large crowd couldn't really be expected, could it? As the night grew long, the faces of these other people at the club with me would become familiar and I would zero in on which of them I wanted to take home (given the opportunity).
The pair I most often returned to was a large grey painting at the center of the wall facing the Houghton Gallery's windows. A sketch for it happens to adorn the show cards for 'Scratch Back Daub-Shebang!' and I would be strongly tempted to assume the painting is named that, if it does have a name: as far as I'm concerned, this painting is the show's key and its best (if not my favorite) painting.
The painting's two figures are in mid-step of dance moves that are almost comically awkward, one striking a mock Egyptian pose with a knee raised in the air and the other with arms half vogue-ing, half flailing. No matter how uncomfortable the dance, both wear pleasant expressions and it's hard not to be glad they're having fun together tonight.
One strange thing about the dance hall they're dancing in is how amorphous it is; they seem to be dancing in a curved grey non-place and, for this reason, I take the piece to be less a narrative than a meditation on the idea of dancing. It's not about where they are or who they are (there are other dance-partners on view who could just as easily be them... the dances on view in this show aren't specific to a dancer or dancers), it's just important that they're dancing.
The other strange thing about the dance hall (and about the dancers themselves) is how grim the colors are that they're painted with. As much as the painting comes across as a general celebration of the idea of dancing, this is a celebration set to the tune of a funerary dirge. I begin to wonder if this is all the talk I've heard recently about "mourning the death of painting" gradually turning on its head, sadly shaking its hips in protest of sadness and step by step casting its veil aside while cautiously adopting a guarded, perhaps cynical, grin. You've come a long way, baby.
I highlight this painting instead of the other dancers on display primarily because I did return to it the most during my private dance party, but also because it's the one painting most like the rest of them. There are elements of each of the other paintings' mannerisms in this one and, I think, it's the one painting in which each of those mannerisms 'click.' The use of line is there, the muddy colors are there and the figures are there. They look good dancing there together.
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