hannah dougherty

Making something new or recycling? Using someone else’s meaning or making your own? These are questions that Hannah Dougherty wrestles with all the time in her sculptures, drawings and assemblages – constellations of objects and images drawn from the mass of everyday culture and of popular iconography. Drawings of dinosaurs and sail-ships, of beer-mädchen and beach-balls, of decorative geometry and collectable match-boxes, of young men in their underwear and comic-book characters, all existing alongside funny, distracted, philosophising commentaries and textual non-sequiturs. Living in a culture and an epoch when culture is mass-manufactured means thinking about what you mean yourself, and how you make that meaning.

Dougherty’s approach to the ephemera of mass culture isn’t cynical or disdainful, unlike many artistic approaches to the appropriation of popular material. For some artists, mass-produced culture appears as an entirely negative force, the alienated experience of culture as commodity, or as the vehicle for ideology. It would be overly romantic to say that Dougherty is in love with the forms and meanings of popular culture, yet her works collect, accumulate and orchestrate such artefacts with an interest in their positive, enjoyable and celebratory qualities, suggesting a sentimental attachment (in the most objective sense) to what they affirm about the living of every life.

This isn’t a cynical sentimentalism either. This isn’t a agressive use of the saccharine effects of mass culture as a form of ‘critique’ of mass culture against itself. Dougherty is involved in a kind of archaeology of popular form in order to create a foundation on which to act for herself as an artist, both part of mass culture, and separate from it. Which is perhaps why, as much as assembling and collating the ephemera of mass-cultural forms, she then acts on it, tracing, transcribing and remaking, copying and re-processing, from the position of an artist who understands both her subjective attachment to the pleasures of the mainstream, and her role as someone who can operates on it and away, making something which is similar, but not the same.

This is not a new situation for an artist; it touches on the continued predicament of how art positions itself in relation to the democratic and demotic space of common culture and common society, while refusing to be reduced to a merely passive consumption of industrialised cultural production. Dougherty’s work is a complex hybrid of the already-made and the new, a reprocessing of the desires and interests of common culture into a re-activated version of it, exposing the dividing line between the producers and publics of art in one place and the producers and publics of culture elsewhere. Dougherty’s assemblages dramatise the dual identity of the contemporary artist; someone who is just like everyone else, and yet, by virtue of the space in which she operates and what she produces, is still different. They ask who it is ‘we’ are when we look at them, and to which culture we ‘belong’.

JJ Charlesworth

Pernicius Arcadia

Text for catalog accompanying the exhibition “The Gartenhaus Project” at the Berlinische Galerie, Berlin Germany

Featured like a theatre set offering a representation of Arcadian suburbia, The Gartenhaus Project is placed in a separate gallery and sunk in twilight, dramatically illuminated by spotlights. Alone the lighting, which contrasts with the glaring whiteness and orderly display of the surrounding museum, attracts attention. Upon entering, we are faced with a kitsch scenario of prefabricated garden houses, with pots of artificial flowers decorating the windowsills, a stuffed fox and deer surrounding them, and birdhouses that look like wooden props with anthropomorphic caricature appearances, gazing at us with hollow eyes. In other works that also use birdhouses, Dougherty has titled these props individually with forenames much like Ikea furniture – Christine, Bernd, Detlev… Here, they simply stand around as simulacra, more sinister than jolly, like garden gnomes. The Gartenhaus Project adopts the principle of the Russian doll to re-set the context of the paintings; two outdoor sheds have been mounted in the art space and murals installed on their interior walls, so that the museum becomes the host of hosts. One context overlaps onto the other. The second container formally reduces the scale of the first, and metaphorically opens up the gallery area entirely by referencing popular subculture that dominates outside the museum doors. High art is defined by its context and exclusivity, becoming self-referential, popular subculture is about engaging the largest common denominator. The Gartenhaus Project coerces the two into the same space and addresses the discrepancy generated by their proximity.

Murals, bird and garden houses concur in constructing a bucolic scenario played on a continuity of narrative, one lending context to the other, and vice versa. They recalibrate the environment for the paintings, and share a fairy-tale flair, recurrent in Dougherty’s work. Alone the fact of using bird and garden houses connects with an imaginary dimension in which objects are important for their symbolic rather than utilitarian value. Birds build their own nests, which are more efficient and look very different from the birdhouses humans provide them with. Yet, the idea of controlling nature, bending it to our own desires, prevails over common sense. The tiny allotments cultivated with flowers and vegetables by family units and furnished with garden houses, which have developed in modern suburbia at a similar rate to the urban landscapes, are an example. Leftovers from a rural culture these cheap substitutes for country houses of more affluent classes respond to a desire of recreation through the ideal return to a natural state. Under continuous threat from real estate developers eroding “nature” with concrete, these allotments represent a lost Arcadia to their owners, a modest Sunday dream engulfed in a big city; a mental refuge from adulthood. Finally, both the bird and the garden houses – Ikea and prefabs – expose the promiscuous relation between personal fantasies and mass-produced commodities, innocence versus consumerism. The European company with the highest revenues sells furniture for intimate dwellings.

Extrapolate the garden house from a commercial show room or from anyone’s back yard and install it in a museum in Berlin or Korea. Placed within a structure globally accepted as fit to display contemporary art, and you no longer have one construction – the garden house – looking out of place, but the framework itself – the pristine, severe space of the white cube – will become dysfunctional. The reciprocal corruption and the discrepancy between the two settings becomes a locus for reflection. The double facet of innocence and perversion embedded in children’s stories and grown-ups fantasies about a long lost Eden – inevitably associated with the garden house and its props – suddenly overshadows the art context. With a touch of irreverence, Dougherty hints at how much the abstracted art space also relates to a form of fiction, this time of purity and neutrality. But its authority is easily breached by kitsch. Had The Gartenhaus Project been located in a park no friction would have been generated by conflicting contexts. The sheds would harmonize with the setting and our reading of the work inevitably change.

Hannah Dougherty’s painting is characterized by a ‘retro-patina’ lent by a predominance of pastel

colours and strongly contoured figures inspired mainly by children-book illustrations, ‘50s advertisements and comic strips, which mingle with graphic images that recall Dürer’s etchings and pictures from encyclopaedias. In The Gartenhaus Project she also juxtaposes hand written notes and diverse scraps of paper such as a Berlin butcher’s bill dated 1939 or a Japanese train schedule, glued to the painting, mostly upside-down, so that they appear like hardly readable memorabilia. They seem placed there to extend the sign language from images to written text and verbal communication, and to amplify the chain of references displayed on the painting surface. They also expand the focal range of our eyes from large format images to minute letters, from overview to detail. Elements borrowed from classical art twisted into graphics, turned into illustration, informed by advertisement, juxtaposed with language and resulting in do-it-yourself collage – all transposed back into art again, as the museum context sanctions – result in a stratification of interfering signs. One example is Dürer-like clouds raining blue droplets cut from thick board and stuck onto the wall, that seem very unlikely to fall with gravity. This bricolage demystifies the illusion of rainfall, which the droplets would generate if painting were used as an illusion- making device. Instead, a historicist view of painting is addressed here, which displays styles and images showing how appropriation shifts meaning. Warhol commented that art is not becoming more commercialized, rather commerce is becoming much more artistic. Prada boutiques are an example of how commerce appropriates a style and suppresses its content twisting meaning according to its own targets. The style of the stores – interior decoration, furnishing, merchandise-display – are what we could define “minimalist”. Yet the principles of Minimalism have nothing to do with fashion. Style as a container of meaning, as a hollow, interable wrapping, is addressed in Dougherty’s work as separate from its content. Or rather, this separation is under observation. No medium as loaded as painting can stand free of style. Yet, it also wants to exude style and talk about what it stands for, or what it does not stand for any longer.

Sketchy figures emerge from patches of paint that look like first attempts to coat the raw surface of the wall, so that the effect is a pun between painting as art and painting as home decoration (artist versus house painter). The gesture of creating and annihilating images is signalized through strong contours that restrain the images and through the flat coats of dripping house paint that reinstate the pictorial surface as simple wall plank. Figures taken from Greek mythology, half-horse-half-human, re-emerge from the remote age of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, when one physical condition did not preclude another. Wearing modern attire and painted in a style that transforms them from epic into fairy tale characters, they loose their original significance. Here they mingle with paraphernalia associated to the modern male hero, such as motor bikes and beer cans rendered in a style reminiscent of Pop Art, juxtaposed to animals and figures related to children’s stories. But there is nothing particularly heroic about them, nor a dramatic fate that gives them depth. They are rather flattened-out figures, vaguely floating in our collective imagination. Yet, contrasting the freshness of naïve appearance, her paintings convey nostalgia and delusion. Nostalgia because the principal referent is a world of lost innocence, a space and time never experienced, locked in our head, establishing an ideal locus far away from the one we are situated in. The mere notion of alternatives destabilises the idea of a cohesive reality – maybe things can be different from what they are. Delusion because painting here does not even trick us into credulity. It stages its own disillusion before offering us the illusion, because it quotes familiar images treating the viewer as a visually articulate, hard-to-impress receptor. After all, painting is an artefact and dreamland a fiction. And delusion also because the dreamland it addresses is not a virgin territory any longer; it has been appropriated by specific social classes, littered with garden gnomes and become overcrowded. If we consider how pervasive and penetrating visual culture is at present it is quite evident that the portion art occupies in the realm of image making is negligible compared to what is produced by advertisement and the media. Art – and painting as a traditional locus for representation – cannot compete with these realms. Pop Art accepted and was even complacent of this fact. Dougherty seems to deliberately exclude contemporary visual overlaps and the technical sophistication of large format colour prints, turning instead to hand-made imagery that confines the arena of references. By so doing, she concentrates on the dynamics of this imagery as if moved by a cognitive process resulting from the association of images. After all this is how children build their knowledge before they are able to articulate thought in complex sentences. As if organizing space visually and reproducing objects gave some fuzzy degree of understanding of how things function and how they are made.

(Alessandra Pace, Pernius Arcadia)

Painting. Pop Post Problem Poetry – Thoughts about the painting of Hannah Dougherty

(Raimar Stange, in: Catalog for the exhibition of Hannah Dougherty, Junge Kunst Wolfsburg, 2004.)

“Find broken things that still work” (Rainald Goetz)

I

Painting is apparently celebrating a real hype at the moment. Resurrected for the umpteenth time, it has been the subject of many major group exhibitions this year. Some critics are again hailing its aura producing capability, and the wildly producing heroes of this movement who call to mind those of the 50s, are even offered for sale to keen buyers by serious galleries. Still, care is advised here. Painting and its rather “program of simple apparatus” (Vilem Flusser) ? , canvas, paint, frames, brush, eye, hand and elbows ? , could quickly be in danger of paying tribute to this seductive simplicity: a supposed “authenticity”, the unreflective, alluring character of an item for consumption, and the media’s isolation thanks to the absoluteness of its own genre. These are just some of the artistic risks awaiting most young painters (and old curators) at the beginning of the new millennium.

II

New Berlin in the Fall of 2003. I ride my bike from my apartment in Prenzlauer Berg to Friedrichshain, from a former East center of art and culture to a current Mecca for young, alternative, chic hipsters who give Berlin the charm of a creative, chaotic dynamic. I visit the young Irish/American artist Hannah Dougherty in her studio on Niederbarnimstraße, a quiet street in the sometimes annoyingly happy little neighborhood. There’s no bell. The stairwell is in bad repair, but the rent here is very cheap. Kitchen, living room and studio in only one apartment ? Hannah Dougherty lives and works here, the way many of her colleagues do — inexpensively, but full of a pulsating quality of life. After having a glass of red wine in the kitchen, we quickly sit down in the studio and finally talk about the artist’s paintings that are leaning against or hanging on the bare walls. One in particular immediately catches my eye. This work tries neither, what is common again at the moment, to convince with its oh so vital expressive quality, nor with a (bourgeois) fixation on originality and innovation. Instead, we see in Hannah Dougherty’s artistic master plan a cleverly calculated, typically post-modern aesthetic play on knowing quotations, a cool collage and funny but puzzling, intelligent but not individualistic narrations.

III

An unfinished large-format painting is leaning against the wall. Its black background and strange silhouette-like, headless figures and monochrome, colorful birdhouses refer to Hannah Dougherty’s typical vocabulary. Like a type of language, this work is continuously made up of (seEmantic) elements that might appear in different formulations and various visual constellations. With this, the artist manages to provoke new associations in the viewer thanks to a clever, barely fathomable theory of combinations. Associations however, which are rooted in the artist’s own experience and memory. Nonetheless, the viewer’s imagination and the artist’s contemplations are, thanks to the artist’s conscious puzzlements, never in agreement.? Hannah Dougherty deliberately distances herself from an “ensocialization”. Conversation situations between stylishly, neatly dressed men — these figures are obviously taken from illustration books, or from photos or even he her own fantasy — start up opposite one another on the canvas. Still these conversation situations always lead nowhere, into a (perhaps fillable?) emptiness, because, as mentioned above, the heads are missing on these quasi broken people. On the other hand, the comic dialog bubbles integrated wholeheartedly into the composition are not filled with words, but with objects: a paper airplane in a cloud — a motif quoted, purloined from a children’s’ book belonging to the artist. The birdhouses are also quotations, this time from a hobby book for reformed alcoholics who want to dedicate their lives to birds (seriously!), and they appear, so to speak, in the place of the “talking nonheads”. Their roofs make you think of hats, their stick-like landing places for the birds look like noses, their forms like heads, the posts they are perched on like necks… Then, there is a single bicycle standing in the left corner of the painting, and another paper airplane is crossing the picture. Altogether this painterly erratic storyboard creates this: the love of a narrative that is at once prototypical as it is stereotypical, poetic as it is pithy, in short “that work”.

IV

Hannah Dougherty’s art historical role models are obvious: Sigmar Polke, Rene Magritte, Larry Rivers, maybe Martin Kippenberger or Michel Majerus. But what is even funnier, is that the young artist exploits the strategies of these role models without any respect or guilt about over-referencing — exactly in order, in relation to the recycling of her models from which I say come from low culture sources, to achieve the status of fabricator, which is only possible in our global, post-modern service society: the sensible management of sensual data as “post-heroic virtue” (Dirk Baeker), as an artistic method that, in dealing with a “second grade material” (Theodor W. Adorno), allows for the individual without raising this individuality and creativity to a false ideology. And this aesthetic strategy is not only seen in the visual arts right now, but also in music, somewhat in brit-pop or hip-hop, in literature you just have to read and there’s Rainald Goetz again and again, just like at the movies Kino, for example Quentin Tarantino and Co.

1) for example: “Painting Pictures” at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg 2003,“Lieber Maler, bitte male mir“, Paris, Wien, Frankfurt a. M. 2003 and: „deutschemalereizweitausenddrei“ at Kunstverein Frankfurt 2003. 2) read: Texte zur Kunst, issue 50, Berlin June 2003

3) more in Diedrich Diederichsen, Freiheit macht arm, p. 53 cc, Köln 1993.

Jetzt I now I 9

Berlinische Galerie Museum für Moderne Kunst

Alte Jakobstrasse 124 – 128 10969 Berlin

28. Juli – 15. Oktober 2006

The Gartenhaus Project # 2

Hannah Dougherty, a young American of Irish origin, has been living in Berlin since 2002. At the tender age of 25, she has already begun a remarkable career here, making herself known far beyond the borders of the city and even the country. The sensitive artist responds to her surroundings in a seismographic way. It is thus possible to recognise influences in her work of her Irish origin and mentality, but also – and even more so – of her American childhood and youth, as well as the direct impact of the German environment in Berlin, which has become her new home. Here, for example, she came across the typical, small wooden summer houses that can be bought in prefabricated form. The examples shown here were also acquired in a wholesale store.

It is intended as accommodation for the stressed big-city dweller, who wishes to recuperate in his garden colony in the midst of nature, but the artist gives the summer house a new function as a place to exhibit her painting. The viewer must enter in order to see the pictures, and in this way he isolates himself from the environment – in this case from the museum – and is able to investigate them in a secure, undisturbed atmosphere. He submerges into an art world inspired by nature, in which fable, the observation of animals, woodland idylls and influences from comics are all combined. Mixed beings populate her pictorial worlds, men with the heads of stags or centaurs; their forms were stimulated by Ovid’s Metamorphoses, although no clearly definable stories are told. These things are connected associatively to one anotherand yet they stand alongside each other in an isolated and de-individualised way. There are no faces. A conceivable interchangeability lends the figures space, which grants them an ambivalent significance. The historical and mythical American hero John Henry, who inspired many legends and songs in America, often lies behind the male figures. This black man – two metres tall – was born a slave in the 19th century; he had enormous physical strength and worked for the C&O Railway Company in the Southern States of America. The strongest of all the workers, his strength was equal to that of steel, which earned him the name “the hammer man”. The power of nature against the power of the machine is a theme that fascinates Hannah Dougherty. The vision of nature and longing for nature that is manifest in the summer house, even if this is situated in direct proximity to an airport, for example, is set against our technology-dominated environment. It is not a matter of conjuring up things gone by, but of a very purposeful look at the present. The artificiality of our dreams is clear in these pictures, particularly in the recurrent metaphor of the birdhouse.

In this “nest” made by the hand of man, it is possible to see the transfer of human habits and dwellings to the animal world. Man wishes to help the animal and so transposes his own notions of comfort onto the birds. As a sign of sympathy and caring, it is a symbol as moving as it is ironic: a human house for birds, just as the summer house is a birdhouse for people. The animal is anthropomorphised, because – among other things – an intense relationship to nature is one of man’s fundamental needs.

Wit and a perhaps Irish sense of humour repeatedly characterise the work of Hannah Dougherty. The impulse for the nesting boxes, for example, came from an American brochure for alcoholics; it was intended to stimulate alcoholics to treat their addiction by building such birdhouses and so find their own salvation in caring for animals. This demonstrates once again the ambivalence of seriousness and irony on which this ultimately bright, light painting is founded. The envisioned castle in the country, to which reality grants existence only as a summer house, is all in the mind. A young American’s feel for life in the here and now of the big city, with her longing for nature, warmth and happiness, is also expressed in an extension to the installation created by music. In our case, this is a concert that takes place in the summer houses on one occasion.

Man and animal, reality and dream, artificiality and the concept of the original and the authentic are interconnected in a brightly-coloured collage, in an intelligent and

slapstick-like assemblage of quotations. The method of recycling leads Dougherty to ever new combinations, which nonetheless operate within the range of her own unmistakable themes. She employs a wide range of drawing, painting and collage techniques for this and copies from books, magazines and brochures. She uses ready-mades as well as children’s drawings. And she does not shy away from clichés, for example from the – not, however, belling – stag. Her world is as brightly- coloured as the world that presents itself to us today, conveyed through a wide range of media. We all experience the simultaneity of opposites, of reality and fiction, every day, sometimes without noticing where the boundaries, the crossovers or even the chaos begin or end. In Dougherty’s work, this all takes place in a playful way, without weighing us down. Like sketches, these works with their thin application of paint – not always tied to the object – and lightness of colours, often permitting the background to shine through or even leaving it uncovered, can give the impression of fleeting perceptions, yet they always reflect the most precise of observations and they are calculated compositions. A kind of dramatic scenario emerges, in which the viewer is obliged to imagine and feel the story right to its end. It is his responsibility to use whatever the artist offers.

Such freedom for associations and interpretations offered by the artist constitutes the attraction of a variety of contemporary art, whereby the trick of combining things that do not actually belong together is not new, by any means. Basically, it is an older method dating from the Surrealists working in the first half of the last century. One is reminded, for example, of René Magritte or Max Ernst, who provided such important stimulus for the art of many subsequent decades. Not that Dougherty consciously refers to them: nonetheless, it is impossible to overlook an affinity in their dramatically staged approaches. And it is by no means a disadvantage – indeed, it is a quality – when works utterly indebted to the here and now can also be seen in the context of artistic developments.

Ursula Prinz