Though Doug Anderson is barely out of art school, his career has skyrocketed in the past two years, and he’s on an inevitable track toward New York. Yet the remarkable invention and charged ambiguity of his paintings dissolve our usual distrust of the wunderkind. Anderson is on to something; what it is remains unclear, but it is exactly this elusive, ungraspable quality that suffuses his work with extraordinary seductiveness. It encapsulates the fractured confusion of a culture caving in on itself, and stimulates the ironic paradox of viewer identification with inversion and disassociation.
Anderson addresses the big themes, equating the global with the intimate. He is obsessed with the sexual foundations of fascist technocracy, the collusion of sexism and militarism. Harshly futuristic, Anderson’s female figures are like sci-fi Amazons of the ’50s imploding on the imminent nuclear holocaust of the ’80s. Spike heeled and bikini clad, they are sex bombs—the ultimate imagistic distortions of partiarchy. Social objectification is paralleled as disconnection in the private sphere, as individuals defensively wrap their arms around their own bodies or lovers turn inward. In I Didn’t Move, I Stayed Too Long a confounded Anderson antihero plugs his fingers into his ears; instead of eyes, crude plus and minus signs reflect failed connections, an inability to see. A struggle to explore the self as a microcosm of culture is in fact everywhere thwarted; paralysis and obscurity hold sway.
Anderson’s Arrow Shirt males suggest the image of a similar ’50s automaton like normalcy, yet they are less parodies than personas of the artist, caught in moments of abstruse unintelligibility and helpless indecision. Their predicament embodies Anderson’s adulteration of normalcy with nightmare; the conflagrations of internal collapse are veiled by tranquil, masked exteriors. The imagery is itself hidden behind shiny surfaces, which satirically reflect the artist’s love-hate relationship with the consumer culture of art-mag glossies.
Anderson’s disconcerting visual derangement is achieved through Kafkaesque distortions (sexy legs sprout from robots’ necks, bodies grow the heads of geese), nonsensical layering of unrelated images (cones and columns poke through TV screens which appear both opaque and translucent; a woman feeds a television with a spoon), a breakdown of line/form and figure/ground relationships, and swift manipulations of scale. The effect is a thorough dislocation of pictorial space both flat and illusionist. We can’t read it; instead, we sense the dread and incomprehension of the unconscious, a symptom of a culture dominated by chaos and violence.
Anderson reminds us that although the media may momentarily drone us out of anxiety, the possibility of escape is fleeting. Yet his frightening dissociations encompass the prospect of survival, for the rigorous exploration of the irrational in self and society may inversely lead to salvation from ideological madness. As the growing exigency of these questions compels the brave and brightest to explore the convulsions of contemporary experience, it is comforting to see an emerging artist confront these themes with unaffected brilliance and startling originality.
—Nancy Stapen
