Evidence of Failure Dan Colen interview
American painter and printmaker Robert Rauschenberg, during the 1950’s and 60’s in New York, was one of the greatest advocates of ‘art by failure’. Seeing in material mismatches and mistakes a greater candidness of a work’s visual value; so much so that Rauschenberg drew from his creative faults a fortune for something aesthetically more convincing. Saying of the fallout of failure “screwing things up is a positive, being correct is never the point, (and) being right can stop the momentum of a very interesting idea.” For New York based artist Dan Colen everything that he applies himself to, appears as accidents into art. That likens his approach to two and threedimensional works to that of a child enthused by one idea, only to discard it for another. Saying of his own shortcomings “a lot of the work is evidence of the failure. This sculpture (The Big Kahuna) is about failure obviously, so the idea of actual experience and actual material, and content and ideas, leads to my shifting from foreground to background often. Just that idea that ‘is it a failure or is it about a failure? Of whether there is a different to those two things, and is failure more interesting than a story about a failure?”
Cohen is a man playing with techniques to prove that they are all available to him, who is equally spurred on by the same kind of mental terrorism that Rauschenberg enthused about when he said, “I go into the studio, and I think ‘Is this going to be it?’ ‘Is this the end?’ You see, nearly everything terrorises me. When an artist loses that terror, he’s through.” For want of such adrenaline Colen’s approach appears born of a cavalier curiosity for what it is to be alive, and far from being preoccupied with a notion of beauty, Colen revels in the idle absurdity of being in and of the world. That together with his appetite for unearthing emotions sees his art as a celebration of our self-worth and loathing. Applying himself very physically to his situation works or paintings, by pinning metal stubs to a series of canvases, A Little Wooden Ship 2015, The Winter Witch 2015, The Rivers Bride 2015, and revealing them as imperfect, for the sheer weight of metal multiplied. Of riotously treading over a painting laid flat, in order to impregnate its skin with an impossible layer of dirt and detritus, as the identifying situation and circumstances of its labour. And of attaching mouthfuls of coloured bubble-gum to a canvas, in order again as Rauschenberg saw it, that art ‘could be more like the real world if it was made of the real world.’
In situ Colen sites his sculptural works (The Big Kahuna 2010 – 2017, and Haiku 2015 – 2017, among them), as being conceived of and carried by the ignition of an idea. That as ideas go, has him entirely unafraid of taking a thirty-five ton block of concrete and putting it onto a discarded American flag; with a twisted and contorted flagpole thrown in for good measure. And as Colen’s individual artworks can be measured by his use of materials, so we see an overriding physicality to how he goes about everything. Explaining ideas not as formulas but as flight of fancy. “I have an idea to start with, and I will immediately abandon that as my goal, even though the idea is about some imagined end point. I know that something much better than my idea will happen if I pursue my original idea.”
Saying of the American flagpole piece “there are a couple of things that happened with the sculpture, that hopefully will continue throughout the exhibition, is that I have been playing with background and foreground a lot, so there is this situation of the block being on the flag, obliterating the flag (in The Big Kahuna), but just from a more formal standpoint I am trying to skew the subject matter of the piece from one thing to another.”
