Danville Chadbourne

Danville Chadbourne: Markers of Presence

We refuse-or have refused for many decades-to acknowledge the traces of animism in our own perception of and response to images: not necessarily "animism" in the nineteenth century ethnographic sense of the transference of spirits to inanimate objects, but rather in the sense of the degree of life or liveliness believed to inhere in an image.

David Freedberg ¹

Danville Chadbourne's works combine materials, cultural domains, and period references, eliding the distinction of artwork and artifact. Chadbourne's works are markers of affecting presence. ²

Such a combination of materials, cultures and periods is some distance from the modernist paradigm-at least in its Greenbergian formulation-of purity predicated on a reduction to that which is posited as essential to a particular medium, ³ and of Kant's concomitant notions, foundational for modernist aesthetics, of purposiveness and interestedness of viewer response. ⁴ Prior to the modernist turn in Eurocentric art practice, and in cultures beyond the horizon of Eurocentric modernism, affecting presence in viewer response is a commonplace with regard to the functioning of artworks (though not necessarily functioning qua artworks as lately understood in the Eurocentric tradition) within a cultural formation. ⁵ Within postmodernism, the notion of presence is highly contested as an aspect of the postmodern critique of metaphysics in particular, and of metanarratives in general. ⁶ In the present situation, after not only modernism but after postmodernism as well, works eliding the distinction of artwork and artifact, or of artwork and ethnographic object, posit a dialectical synthesis of form, materiality and affecting presence that repositions the extension of the concept of artwork. Arthur Danto has urged:

In fact the art world as I see it-and as I now think it sees itself-is a field of possibilities in which nothing is necessary and nothing is obliged. Heinrich Wölfflin famously ended the preface to the later editions of The Principles of Art History by saying that not everything is possible at every time. It is a mark of what I have termed the posthistorical period of art that everything is possible at this time, or that anything is. ⁷

Such a situation is open to dialectical synthesis, though pace Hegel, dialectical synthesis is not necessary to the situation. Perhaps it was always already a condition of the artist's enterprise, and never a condition of the postmodern alone, "that practice is not defined in relation to a given medium . . . but rather in relation to the logical operation on a set of cultural terms . . . ."⁸

So in Danville Chadbourne's works. The general type of which the specific works are tokens ⁹ is that of the monument, though not necessarily with the usual denotation of 'monument.' Chadbourne has noted that he has:

always been fascinated by monuments, cultural markers of events and ideas. These are objects consciously created by humanity to acknowledge history. They have become artifacts about time. The concept of monument (especially in western culture) tends to suggest an heroic or literal image that reflects the dominant political ideology, placed in a public arena for reverential reflection. The idea of a monument as cultural identity is ubiquitous and runs the spectrum of forms from a small grave marker to the grandest of architecture. . . .

The fact that cultural changes over time alter the meanings of these memorials is what interests me and is at the heart of my monument-like works. These works are memorials to ambiguity and change, to metamorphosis and transformation, to the uncertainty of meanings eroded by time. By extension, the works become monuments to abstract ideas like logical contradiction, paradoxes, duplicity, etc. ¹⁰

Thus even the notion of monument qua marker for Chadbourne's work placed in the secular space of the gallery-albeit a quasi-sacred secular space by virtue of its separation from the quotidean space of the lifeworld-undergoes a shift of signification from a hypothetical similar form placed in a primeval sacred precinct. ¹¹ Yet a shift of signification retains reference to antecedent significations, and is thus evocative of these antecedent significations. So too the specifics of formal articulation and material cause in Chadbourne's works.

Chadbourne's three-dimensional works are anthropomorphic, though not figurative. As Donald Kuspit has urged, the body is the ur-form of sculptural space:

For whether it wishes to be or not, sculpture is dependent on the unconscious, inner relationship to the body. The body may not be subject matter, but it is the model for sculptural space. Since the body exists 'speculatively' in imagination as well as empirically in the world, sculpture's space and its tactility are necessarily as subjective as they are objective. ¹²

Chadbourne's articulation of this sculptural space is a manifestation of the nascent formitive propensity of the material: the plasticity and density of clay, the gestural movement of a piece of wood. This is true in general, but begs the question with regard to particular instantiations in individual works: clay can take many forms, pieces of wood in their natural state have many gestural aspects. A particular piece of sculpture has a concrete form, a specific gesture drawn in space. Selection within the possibilities offered by materials in general and specific instances of those materials already entails signification. The refinement of form and gesture in the facture of the work entails a further articulation of signification. Consider, for example, the gestures of The Reckless Game of Penitence and The Rebirth of Archaic Concerns.

So also the use of geometric elements within the integral bases of many of the floor works, and within the wall pieces. The geometric elements serve to divide the surface, in itself a siginification, and are in counterpoint to the organic wood elements of the works. The geometric patterning is simple, direct, and suggests a range of cultural referents: e.g., Native American ceramics, African and Precolumbian textiles. Along with the frequently polychromed surfaces, generally of rather intense color in complementary relationships, and abraded in suggestion of wear and age, the applied geometry is in contrast with and oppositionally related to the less overtly transformed 'natural' elements of wood ('wood' is here distinguished from 'lumber'), gourd, shells.

The underlying tension of nature and artifice, of material retaining overt aspects of its primordial state and of material employed so as to manifest its transformed state qua material, manifests the operation of a medium at its fundamental level. It is, in Heidegger's terms, earth becoming world. ¹³ This appearing, this disconcealing of signification in operation, no less than the specific iconic form or of individual gesture of a particular work, is the wellspring of affecting presence in Chadbourne's works.

David Newman
Gallery Director

Biographical Note

San Antonio artist Danville Chadbourne's recent one-person exhibitions include: Danville Chadbourne: Recent Outdoor Sculpture, Beeville Art Museum, 2003-2004; Danville Chadbourne: Recent Works, Instituto Cultural Mexicano, San Antonio, 1998; Danville Chadbourne, San Antonio Art League, 1996. Danville Chadbourne's work is in the collections of San Antonio Museum of Art, The Martin Museum of Art, Baylor University, American Airlines, Los Angeles, Gaulladet University, Washington, D.C., and numerous other corporate, institutional, and private collections. Chadbourne received the Master of Fine Arts from Texas Tech University and the Bachelor of Fine Arts from Sam Houston State University. Chadbourne was selected 1996 Artist of the Year by the San Antonio Art League.

Endnotes

David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 32.

Robert Plant Armstrong, Wellspring: On the Myth and Source of Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975) and his The Powers of Presence: Consciousness, Myth, and Affecting Presence (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981).

Clement Greenberg, "Modernist Painting," Art and Literature 4 (Spring 1965), 193-201:
Each art had to determine, through the operations peculiar to itself, the effects peculiar and ex- clusive of it. By doing this each art would, to be sure, narrow its area of competence, but at the same time it would make it possession of this area all the more secure. It quickly emerged that the unique and proper area of competence of each art coincided with all that was unique to the nature of its medium. The task of self- criticism became to eliminate from the effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art. Thereby each art would be rendered "pure", and in its "purity" find the guarantee of its standards of quality as well as of its independence. "Purity" meant self- definition, and the enterprise of self-criticism in the arts became one of self-definition with a vengeance.
Cf. Clement Greenberg, "Towards a Newer Laokoon," Partisan Review, July-August, 1940.

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment [1790], §10-11, 42. Kant introduces the notion of disinterestedness to factor out such individual concerns that obviate universality in response, as a move in his resolution of the antimony of taste. Yet 'disinterestedness' is problematic in its assertion of impartiality, as Noël Carroll urges in Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 401 n. 14, in that 'disinterestedness' qua an implicit claim for impartiality applies to judgments in general and is thus not restricted to nor distinctive of aesthetic judgments. Carroll further urges, ibid., that it does not follow that "the reasonable expectation of impartiality in aesthetic judgments requires that this entails or excludes moral, political, cognitive, and other concerns from aesthetic experience." It is notorious that precisely those concerns have been bracketed from regard in the discourse of high modernism. But disinterestedness is not being devoid of interest, and impartiality is not coextensive with detachment.

Charlotte M. Otten, ed., Anthropology and Art: Readings in Cross-Cultural Aesthetics (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971). Of interest particularly with regard to exhibition practices, see Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, eds., Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991); another perspective is provided by Charles W. Hexthausen, ed., The Two Art Histories: The Museum and the University [Clark Studies in the Visual Arts, Proceedings of the Clark Conference "The Two Art Histories: The Museum and the University," Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA, April 9-10, 1999] (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).

Postmodernism, and poststructuralism insofar as it entails a deconstruction of metanarratives, entails the problematic of the notion of ground as a correlative of the deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence. The literature is too vast to cite in anything approaching an exhaustive way; suffice it to reference Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington, Brian Massumi. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

Arthur C. Danto, "Art After the End of Art," Artforum 31:8 (April 1993), 67. Danto's reference to Heinrich Wölfflin, The Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, is to the Preface to the sixth [German] edition, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe [1922]; in the M. D. Hottinger trans., (New York: Dover, [1950]), ix: "Not every thing is possible at all times, and certain thoughts can only be thought at certain stages of the development." See also Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History [The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1995, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.] (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

Rosalind E. Krauss, "Sculpture in the Expanded Field," The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: M. I. T. Press, 1985), 288.

For the distinction of 'token' and 'type,' see Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, eds., Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1933), vol. IV, 423: 'type' is the universal of which the 'token' is the particular.

Danville Chadbourne, "Statement from the Artist", Danville Chadbourne: Recent Works (San Antonio: Instituto Cultural Mexicano, 1998), unpaginated.

Brian O'Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space. (San Francisco: Lapis Press, 1976, 1986). Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Trans. Willard R. Trask. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1959).

Donald Kuspit, "Material as Sculptural Metaphor," in ed. Howard Singerman, Individuals: A Selected History of Contemporary Art 1945 - 1986. (New York: Abbeville, 1986), p. 106.

Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art," Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Row, 1971.