William Conger
Allusive
March 26 - June 19, 2022
Bruno David Gallery
7513 Forsyth Boulevard
Saint Louis, Missouri 63105, U.S.A.
info@brunodavidgallery.com
www.brunodavidgallery.com
Founder/Director: Bruno L. David
This catalogue was published in conjunction with the exhibition
“William Conger: Allusive” at Bruno David Gallery.
Editor: Bruno L. David
Catalogue Designer: Kenya Mitchell and Hazel Tao
Designer Assistant: Claudia R. David
Printed in USA
All works courtesy of William Conger and Bruno David Gallery
Photographs by Bruno David Gallery
Cover image: Snow Devil, 2021
Oil on wood, 12 x 12 inches (30.5 x 30.5 cm)
First Edition
Copyright ©2022 William Conger and Bruno David Gallery
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the written permission of Bruno David Gallery
CHECKLIST AND IMAGES OF THE EXHIBITION BIOGRAPHY
ALLUSIVE
BY PAUL KRAINAKAbstract painting was once permeated by the stylistic tropes of landscape, architecture, and figuration – decrees from the depths of classical art. This made critical sense until the late 20th century when artists gradually began to paint reflexively, pursuing more existential imperatives about easel painting and studio production. Painters then approached art history outside of the taxonomies of style and virtuosity, prompting an investment in studio mechanics that shelved academic classification. The longer they connected intuitively and fore-fronted their discipline’s methods and materials, the more motifs were reframed without permission. A re-naming and/or un-naming of classical methodology, followed by a subversion of progressivist logic, freed subject matter and drove experimentation. A radical pictorial independence became a hallmark of late modern painting, especially in Chicago.
For William Conger, the influence of language and the romance of the studio runs concurrently, and it’s distanced him from more common obsessions with spectacle and tragicomedy. His production method is textual, analogous to editing streams of consciousness, which incorporate chance, paradox, and conflicting perceptions of space, that to paraphrase him, exist only in painting. For decades, his images have fluctuated between fragments of receding landscapes and middle ground architecture, which provided optical tension and content equilibrium. Each informed the others through irregular, one-off patterns bearing softly modelled details and huddled vistas. They’re skewed enough to incise a precarious balance of light and shadow, color temperature, planes, curves, supple edges, and varied surfaces that are his signature. Their asymmetry is calculated to compress interior and exterior dialogue onto one brilliant and unusually intimate depictive plane.
Conger is both a product of the city’s cultural history and a significant contributor. He’s an archetypal cultural worker and historian. In a recent interview for “Bad-at-Sports” he wrote clearly about the Chicago’s art legacy.
“When I began MFA study at The University of Chicago in 1964, the graduate art studios were in sculptor Lorado Taft’s (1860-1936) original Midway Studios — attached to his home — where he and his assistants created many of his major monumental sculptures. The sprawling building contained a number of separate small studios nestled among larger spaces and a communal hall where Taft encouraged an atelier collegiality. The MFA program was intended to embody Taft’s atelier spirit. Thus, students worked independently but in constant engagement with other students and faculty mentors. That was perfect for me because I had already maintained a storefront studio since 1961 and had developed good work habits and a fledging exhibition record. My formal coursework was in art history, which was wonderful for its rigor, research methodology, and esteemed faculty. It was a total immersion in art practice and academic scholarship. The Midway studios faced what had been the ‘Midway’ of the 1893 Columbian Exposition, the World’s Fair, which firmly established Chicago as the spectacular new industrial, economic, and cultural center, and fastest growing city in the world. If that 1893 World’s Fair celebrated Chicago’s world-class economic status it can also be said to have commemorated the city’s South Side, in the midst of the new University of Chicago, as the origin of Chicago’s artworld.”
“I’ve always had an avid interest in Chicago History. I’ve lived here so long, since the early 1940s, and I think my aesthetic sensibility has been shaped as much by Chicago’s urbanity and history as by my broader study of art and art history. My bookshelves contain a collection on Chicago History, including its literature, art, and architecture. Many of my painting titles allude to Chicago places and events. Chicago’s remarkably fast and unruly development in the 19th Century was fueled by idiosyncratic and experimental innovators and workers. They created the modern city with its risky public struggle to symbolize beauty, growth, and social equality. In that sense, I think Chicago, still a new city, mirrors the development of modernist art. But it’s ironic that Chicago, from its beginning as a paradigm of the modern city, did not embrace modernist art, despite exemplifying it. Early leaders and tastemakers relished the messy creativity of Chicago but wanted to mask it with the resolved, idealized Victorian and Beaux-Arts style. Thus the 1893 World’s Fair was a hallucinated “classical” replication sharply in contrast to the exciting and chaotic real Chicago. The later emergence of progressive cultural institutions on Chicago’s south side was stimulated by the desire to overcome the entrenched Beaux-Arts and “classical” aesthetic that began there.”
The artist’s method is determined, in part, by his esteem for cultural history and for the contingencies of place. He contributes to a critical direction of American art that disputes the dwindling borders between art and pop culture, between the hand and remote sensing, and the misreading of our historic geographic center. He remained in Chicago after numerous opportunities to leave, as he preferred the city’s reputation as a place where artists determine the cultural landscape, as opposed to it being a cabaret of market speculators and curators of monoculture.
For Conger, rendering abstract form is a reflexive exercise that provides glimpses of space between indefinite objects and speech yet to be formed. It extends abstraction’s original graphic fracturing– a feature of Dada that imposed experimental art on reality, and vice versa, including the psychological and ideological fallout. But abstraction peaked for some as only realist sabotage because even if it became a credible, recurring symbol of critique, rather than an example of atrophy or decoration, it shelved its connection to foundational Western definitions of beauty. Conger’s rhythms of abstraction, unlike collage motifs, are closer to Eisenstein’s film strategies of montage. They reveal a different way of resolving boundaries by layering them in the picture plane. They show chronological risk-taking with visual inventories that float like improvisational music attuned to street noise. Conger imagined ground for new constructivist environments and rejuvenated narratives sputtering under the hood of modernism, while the public continued to struggle with radical mechanistic and social transformation.
“Allusive,” the title of Conger’s most recent body of work, reinforces that his painting has always been inspired by somewhat private aesthetic encounters. His work is an exploration of a full practice and life as an artist, observer, mentor, and intellectual, and the pictures are subtly coded to note them. They’re chronicles in the sense that each form has a precursor, or pre-form stimulus layering intervals of spacetime onto canvas. He alludes to few stylistic trends or other artists – exceptions being the occasional composition with a spirited Stuart Davis-like camouflage or gripping de Chirico otherworldliness. They stream from mindful acts and lived experience, rather than theoretical texts or critical theory. His is a method and a language that has investigative traditions connected both to individual subjectivity and to a radical critique of culture, a projection of how one actor thinks the world ought to look.
Chicago Imagism is often discussed in regard to Conger’s feel for uncanny imagery and confining spaces. Once considered somewhat of a Hyde Park aesthetic, it overlaps with his sensibility. Imagism’s stance, however, is aggressively alien, anal, and anecdotal. Conger’s paintings, embrace radical autonomy with a more expansive view of creative production. He doesn’t rely on spectacle or schizoid narratives yet respects the nature of vernacularist surrealism’s thumb in the eye of global monoculture.
Chicago Imagism and post-formalist abstraction are clearly not the only sensibilities in which Conger is conversant. The newest paintings subtly reflect not only the impact of nature (Lake Michigan) and culture (Loop architecture), but surprisingly Native American art. Its light and texture caught his attention as a student in a radically distinct landscape and culture of the of New Mexico, where he was student in the late 50’s. In his exhibition, “Allusive,” certain square works such as “Thief,” “Ascend,” and “Snow Devil” express linkage to histories other than his urban/ contemporary instincts and tastes. Organic forms are edged in black, and others lie just beneath billowing frameworks of stand-alone coils. The use of organic form and bolder flat color conjure slivers of visual speech with a larger cache of cultural references, including a Chinese brush painting sensibility, replete with calligraphic detail and traces of traditional Asian perspective.
“Prisoner,” a somewhat earlier work that breaks from the squarer paintings, stages a more architectural composition, and unveils a bit more of the artist’s observance of early Bauhaus and Constructivist design. Extruded verticals are compartmentalized into an open lattice full of semi-transparent screens and modulated light that reflects early modernists’ attraction to traditional Japanese clothing, tea house design, and gardens. A splintered silver armature resembling a Shoji partition stabilizes sweeping pleats of cadmiums and earth tones, and the entire painting resembles an elaborate silk kimono.
In 2011, Conger published a breakdown of the correlation between visibility and language and discussed how the relationship between language and painting plays out neurologically, and then aesthetically.
“When I am painting, I enjoy the inner conversations and seemingly farfetched associations, memories – and ongoing silent banter (and mental sounds) of playful pranks I seem to carry on with the painting and it with me. Rambling, aimless self-conversations accompany painting and direct its making. Shapes and colors in troubling or pleasing juxtapositions may come and go but never without the interior language that announces their arrivals, their roles, their interactions and their own memories, as it were. A decade ago, reflecting on the role of language in visual creativity, I turned to neuroscience to learn what I could about the brain and how we think visually and verbally. I read Antonio Damasio, Oliver Sacks, Semir Zeki, V.S. Ramachandran, and others. They all variously explain how our thinking involves
blending of reasoning and emotion, even synesthesia for some. By studying the causes and effects of some brain lesions, these neuroscientists identify zones and neural pathways that carry visual information – conscious and unconscious – through language centers in the process of visual cognition. They explain the biology of mirror neurons and how they cause us to project our inner world as a spatialized construct of what’s out there. My current summary is good enough for a painter: seeing is a linguistic construct.”
Conger’s fundamental position is modernist, possibly Brechtian. He sets a formal stage and presents a perceptual problem, akin to real life rather than optical pleasures so viewers need to be active participants in the construction of meaning. Conger does this by withholding specific matter from the simple facts of form and space and by avoiding traditional types of abstract compositions that reduce resemblances to zero. He doesn’t want viewers to consider his images as fetishes – factual or illusionistic – but vehicles for contemplation. He intends his visual text to be scanned for codes that trigger collective experiences and accumulated tastes – some aesthetic, some routine, and some paradoxical.
“I am flooded with words and associations wrapped in words when I paint an abstract shape. I can assume it is the same for the viewer upon seeing my work. Should our word associations match? Can they? My painting is a linguistic act. Because the painting exists as an object of certain shapes and colors that resulted from my linguistic brain activity (fusing visual and verbal), it offers a proxy form of potential communication that must be invented by the beholder in fantasy with the painting.”
His thoughts about the neurologic, dialogic, and chronologic aspect of making art are plausible and appealing. Art and its partnership with language calculates the future through a morphological fine-tuning of expression. Studio artists like Conger keep their work prescient by acknowledging a harmonic r/evolutionary call-and-response formula, linked to the past, and the most palpable allusion is imminence. Artists who move beyond the sequential negation of the avant-garde aren’t frozen in the moment. They permit historical continuity by ensuring the pleasure of reading visual texts in multiple time frames. Conger concludes.
“In many ways any painting is a proposal that it be taken as an artwork. It is a communicational linguistic act, not because the painting speaks or even depicts, but because the beholder is invited to construct a communication with it as if it, the painting, symbolized culture itself, standing for a projected and magnified extension of the self in culture, through history and across a given time. Nothing is fixed in this
organic relationship and each communicative event differs and simply adds to the accumulated memory to be continually re-imagined.”
In varying degrees, each artist’s oeuvre is motivated by previous artwork, but Conger’s forms recur with modalities dispersed over 50 years. These consist of fragmented autobiographical details that overlay his abstraction, an emblematic thread interwoven with fiber from Chicago and other cultural zones. It’s a significant antidote for the entropy of contemporary art and the coastal hubris that confines it.
Formal cycles of Conger’s abstraction reveal chronological risk-taking and inventories of shapes that drift across decades. The artist is a rejuvenator of narratives, as well as virtual constructivist positioned on a platform of diagrammatics and grammatology. Despite his calculated compositional structures and exploration of language, he also demonstrates an appetite for the psychological and imaginary. These pictures are generally nocturnal with brooding atmospheres, serpentine forms, and acidic pigments. They’re often downbeat, pensive, vaporous, and subtly transgressive and tinged by what he refers to as Chicago’s “daemonic” cultural history harkening back to its earliest flirtation with, resistance to, and revision of modernism. Though Conger has internalized the requisite insouciance of post-modernism, he manipulates that language in often ironic and melancholic terms that stream in his pictures like light in a de Chirico piazza. Few painters have constructed a contemplative visual discourse so diagnostic of any city’s carnivalesque personality. They embody the experience of the sequestered studio artist’s persistent valuation of self, staving off doubt and a forfeiture of shared culture with a steady nerve and immeasurable spirit.
Paul Krainak is a painter, art writer, and Professor Emeritus at Bradley University where he was Art Department chair from 2006 to 2016. He has exhibited widely throughout the U.S. He is a former Associate Editor and Corresponding Editor of the New Art Examiner and Art Papers. Krainak is the founder and former Director of the Inland Visual Studies Center at Bradley University. He’s contributed essays on contemporary art to numerous journals, exhibition catalogues and academic presses, including the Kemper Museum of Art in St. Louis, the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University, INOVA – University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Indiana University Press, Sculpture Magazine, American Ceramics, and Afterimage. He currently live in Madison, Wisconsin and writes a monthly blog on inland art and aesthetics for Bad-At-Sports titled “Sub-rural.” This text is one in a series of the gallery’s exhibitions written by fellow artists and friends. His newsletter can be found at https://pencilbooth.com/subruralkrainak
AFTERWORD
BY BRUNO L. DAVIDI am pleased to present Allusive, an exhibition by Chicago-based artist William Conger. This is his second solo exhibition with the gallery.
Much contemporary abstract art has long centered on the literal art object and aims to exclude reference or allusion to what’s not literally present. Now, more and more, recent abstraction evokes real or imagined objects and experience not actually depicted.
In 1981, William Conger proposed the term “Allusive Abstraction” to distinguish his own work an abstraction that shared some traits with other Chicago artists, some earlier American painting (like Arthur Dove) and with Chicago Imagist artists. Art historian and critic Mary Matthews Gedo wrote about Allusive Abstraction in Arts Magazine, Art Criticism, and elsewhere in the 1980s. Some critics now use the term “Abstract Imagism” to include “Allusive Abstraction”.
Conger said, “Over the decades my work has remained purposely allusive and formally abstract as it has also explored many alternatives. My newer work is flatter and more evenly colored with more mixed figure-ground paradoxes than my earlier work which is layered with modulated shapes. But it still alludes to landscape and objects, even anatomy, without ever giving up the primacy of purely abstract form.”
William Conger lives and works in Chicago IL. He earned a B.F.A. from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM in 1960 and an M.F.A. from the University of Chicago in 1966. His work has been exhibited extensively and is represented in numerous museum collections, including: The Art Institute of Chicago; Chicago, IL; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Chicago IL; The Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, East Lansing MI; The Indianapolis Museum of Art (Newfields), Indianapolis IN; The Wichita Art Museum, Wichita KS; Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, GA; The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Madison WI; Illinois State Museum, Springfield IL; Mary and Leigh Block Museum, Northwestern University, Evanston IL; DePaul University Art Museum, Chicago IL; Loyola University Art Museum, Chicago IL; Tarble Museum, Eastern Illinois University Art Museum, Charleston IL; The University of New Mexico Art Museum (the Jonson Collection), Albuquerque, NM. William Conger is professor emeritus of art theory and practice at Northwestern University.
Support for the creation of significant new works of art has been the core to the mission and program of the Bruno David Gallery since its founding in 2005. I would like to express my sincere thanks to Paul Krainak for his thoughtful essay. I am deeply grateful to Kenya Mitchell and Hazel Tao, who gave much time, talent, and expertise to the production of this catalogue. Invaluable gallery staff support for the exhibition was provided by Bonnie Dana, Naomi Yu, Arthur Baue, and Alex McLaughlin.
