Compared with volume, everything else-technical handling, weight, structure, representational idea, likeness, expression, proportion, rhythm, consistency, color, texture-is secondary, belonging to the sphere of mastery of details.
Lazlo Moholy-Nagy 1
Central to the modernist project was a strategic move, beginning at least with Gotthold Lessing's Laokoön-if not with Kant-to a reductivist, essentialist, purist employment of medium. 2 Reiterated in Clement Greenberg's "Towards a Newer Laokoön," and in his subsequent criticism, this mode of employment of a medium was such that:
Each art had to determine, through the operations peculiar to itself, the effects peculiar and exclusive 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. 3
Now, this view of the enterprise has been attacked for more than forty years. The modernist project has been supplanted by the several versions of postmodernism. That too may now be past, though the pluralism inherent in the postmodern turn perdures. Yet, if not in the realities of the current practices of the enterprise, then in the preconception of many, perhaps, something of the reductivist, essentialist purism of the modernist project perdures as well. There seems yet to be a tendency to suppose that an artist is a sculptor, or a painter, or whatever, but not simply an artist who works in whatever medium that at a given time seems useful and necessary, and that one's practice may be sufficiently voluminous to encompass more than one medium. Sometimes the reduction to a single medium is simply a matter of one's preferences, which may be a complex matter indeed. Sometimes it is attendant on the commodification of artworks. Both long-established preferences and commodification are concerns for mature artists more than for art students. But for anyone working in more than one medium, some substantial value may be found to obtain for one's work in each medium. This is scarcely a new notion, as Kimon Nicolaides long since noted:
Each medium you use should enrich the others. . . . This change of medium might be likened to a change of language. The experience of using two languages makes each more rich than it possibly can be by itself. 4
So it ought not surprise that David Dreyer, as a mature working artist, works in more than one medium. Each medium informs the other. David A. Dreyer's sculpture and painting thematize volume, deploying fundamental forces of compression and tension to articulate the relations between lines and shapes and volumes. Not appearing as elemental compositional components, compression, tension, and space are emergent qualities 5 manifest within one's perception of a work when the work's structure and complexity reach threshold levels of sufficiency. As such, emergent qualities are interpretive aspects of viewer response to the work, underwriting further notions of expression and style.
If to thus engage these works through such a framework evokes a formalism, it is not a formalism in which form and content are regarded as severed oppositional terms, but rather a formalism that entails, equiprimordially, the materiality of the artwork in its full specificity, and content-in its fullest sense-collocated in the form which is its articulation. 6 If one speaks or writes first of one, and then the other, it is for convenience in translating into a temporal from a spatial medium.
In Sun Sail, the volume opened by the steel spinnaker's billowing compresses downward on the floor plane through the point to which the form tapers; the framing steel bar extends outward, is bent downward and torqued forward, running back across the floor plane to provide stability, while the vertical steel bar reiterates the direction of gravity as a plumb bob against which the variations from verticality within the piece are mensurable. The blackness of the sheet steel sail-volume are of the same underlying materiality, but of quite another perceptual and emotional weight than the linear steel bars. If the shapes of Early Spring are not isomorphic with those of Sun Sail, if the shapes of Red Bud (the sculpture) with those of Red Bud (the painting), this is scarely surprising. The painting is not a transcription, or a translation, or a paraphrase of the sculpture, nor vice versa.
In Dreyer's practice each medium is what it is, employed for how it enables engaging the most fundamental of questions in each: the flatness of the support and the negation of that flatness in marking the support, the volume of space and its articulation in sculpture. In the end, the questions are analogous, placed into question in two languages.