The Mercurial Artineering of Lance Dehn�
James Adam
Lance Dehné has a draftsman’s
orientation to the way actual masses take up space. But he also has the unconscious
freedom to create imaginary objects. This is an almost-rare combination, and
his self-presentation as a kind of engineer bespeaks a central concern with artmaking
as a big deal, a place in human activity where novel forms can be added to the
stock of our common visual vocabulary. The notion of engineering non-natural
two-dimensional products is associated with Surrealism, but this overestimates
the reach of that movement; Dali, for example, did not do this. It’s one
thing to melt a clock, but quite another to place genuine perceptual expectations
in a context that doesn’t answer to them.
In drawings from the 1980’s, Dehné
emerges from the tradition of Brancusi and Duchamp —- the figure study
above invokes the Nude Descending a Staircase while moving toward the avian severity
of the sculptor’s later work. In his box collage “Lost Picnic,”
he salutes Max Ernst as a sponsoring precursor whose lessons keep teaching those
with ears to hear them. And in a grand series of assertively polychrome constructions,
he joins a conversation with (and about) Picasso that touches childlike picture-making
drives while extending toward the powers of artifice that constitute engineering.
The man can be playful, too: one set of drawings features Rube Goldberg
like contraptions, each with a pulley and counterweight, used to accomplish tasks
that don’t require any such machinery. “Plant” waters a potted
daisy by turning a vise that squeezes water out of a cloud; while “Bread”
shows a serrated knife that saws back and forth when a wheel on its front moves
a peg on its other end forward and back in a track that leads it in a sine-wave.
These are plans for things that won’t be built, and their status as
art is like that of conceptual projects whose curators hang the proposal on the
wall and step back to imagine it realized. And this is a kind of freedom.
