Bill Dunning: Still Reaching

Art appearing here is Copyrighted by Bill Dunning and may not be used or reproduced without written permission from the artist.

Friends and Critics

1979 Oil on Canvas

Childhood Stories Retold With Feeling

1980 Oil on Canvas

Madonna

1956 Welded Aluminum

(Editor's Note: This interview first appeared on July 21, 2001 in our free celiac newsletter. If you'd like to subscribe, send an email to celiac@clanthompson.com. The word SUBSCRIBE should appear in the subject line.)

In adition to teaching at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, WA (where he is a Professor Emeritus of Fine Arts), Bill Dunning - or Vance, as he's known to members of the Celiac List Serve - has published three books: Advice to Young Artists in a Postmodern Era, Roots of Postmodernism, and Changing Images of Pictorial Space: A History of Spatial Illusion in Painting.

Changing Images was selected by the American Library Association as one of only four painting books for display at their conferences for 1992.

CLAN THOMPSON: What is "postmodernism"?

BILL: A very hard question to answer in a sound byte. By the nature of the name, it's what came after modernism. But the best simplistic explanation I can give is to explain that modern pursuits, such as philosophy, science and art were based on what they perceived at that time to be a universal experience: human perception -- mainly how we interpret the information we receive from the five senses, each in itself an illusion. So the modern, including Descartes, Kant, Newton and de Kooning, believed that we interpreted the reality and the world through the five illusions we receive through our senses, and, furthermore, that we all interpreted reality and the world similarly around the world because the architecture of our brains was genetically constructed to interpret these illusions in a similar way. Hence, the modern can be said to be based on illusion, specifically an exploration of the thin line between illusion and reality.

The postmodern (pomo), on the other hand, also believe that we construct interpret and construct reality because of the physical architecture of our brains. But where the modern believed it was through the architecture designed to interpret the five senses that we knew and constructed our reality, the pomos held that it was through the abilities and limitations of the linguistic architecture of our brains that we understand reality. In other words, pomos held that it was through our language that we know ourselves, reality and the world. And language to them included our verbal language as well as our rituals, ceremonies, culture, clothing, etc: each a language within itself.

The moderns believed that we came to understand science and the world through careful and objective scientific observation and recording done through a rigorous scientific method; and the classic modern scientists, for instance, called themselves "observers," implying that they had no part in the outcome. The pomos, on the other hand, believe there is no such thing as objective observation, so a quantum physicist would call herself the "participant," implying that many things happen differently, or only happen, because they are being observed; and they can offer experimental proofs of this where reality on the subatomic level appears to be "aware" but not "conscious" of phenomena that do not physically affect them.

CLAN THOMPSON: In an earlier email, you said you were a "serious artist in the mainline modern/postmodern tradition"...I thought an artist was either modern or postmodern. Can you explain?

BILL: I have never liked the "either/or" school of practice. Either this or that. Sometimes called the "dualistic" approach. I prefer a synthesis of the best of both. So I believe in understanding the "competencies?" of both approaches and then deciding which elements of each are pertinent to my interests. And I also tried to offer my students such a choice. So my teaching focused mainly on teaching that there was more than one way to approach each element (dark/light, composition, color, etc) so they could make the choice for themselves and not just fall by chance into which ever method or manner they happen to discover by happenstance.

CLAN THOMPSON: Did your background in architecture influence your art? If so, in what ways?

BILL: Yes, it had a tendency to aim me at focusing on structure, either the perception of structure or the structure of language, rather than superficials and/or what the artist often refers to as the "decorative."

CLAN THOMPSON: What artists have inspired your work and/or who are your favorite artists and why?

BILL: In the beginning when I knew only the modern, it was the Renaissance artists (starting with the trinity of painting -- Giotto, Masaccio and Leonardo). When I began to be interested in the linguistic direction of pomo, however, I moved quickly toward the medieval artists and the Northern Renaissance artists such as Jan van Eyck, Bosh, Breughel, etc. Then as my influences moved to more current artists, my interests included some in each camp: in the modern camp were the "retinal" painters such as Monet, Turner, Kline, de Kooning and Rothko; among the early pomos were Duchamp, Dubuffet, the surrealists and Anselm Kiefer, perhaps the one "old master" pomo artist.

CLAN THOMPSON: As a professor of Art History, what time periods or cultures particularly interest you? Why?

BILL: I am specifically focused on the two millennia from Greco/Roman through pomo, because I see about 85 percent (I guess that's as good any other arbitrary number I might have picked) of our influences evolving through that period in Europe and America. Of course the influence of the third world artists must also be added into the mix if you wish to understand pomo, which attempts to focus more on that than on Euro/American art.

CLAN THOMPSON: What one lesson do you most wish to impart to your students?

BILL: "Lessons." I concentrate on hard work (self-discipline), solid knowledge and background and try to teach them "never ever to defend the status quo" in their discipline. Science, philosophy, trees and art constantly grow and change, or they die.

CLAN THOMPSON: Do people (non-artists) who go to an exhibit, or otherwise view an artist's work, have an obligation to "bring anything" to the experience? If so, what?

BILL: Nope. Non-artists have no responsibility toward art. But if they bring the right things (namely the discipline to view passively, rather than with expectations that hide the meaning) to the exhibit they will get more out of it.

CLAN THOMPSON: Has celiac disease affected your art in any way? If so, how?

BILL: Perhaps it has strengthened soemthing I've always known. Because I came to see very early that each celiac was different -- that no generalization about symptoms, reactions, recovery, responses, what we can eat ever fits us all -- I understood more fully that each artist and art student was different and that no method, theory, direction or teaching practice would fit all of them. So perhaps I emphasized even more the search for what each student was good at, rather than trying to teach them what I was good at.

CLAN THOMPSON: While reading your Curriculum Vita, I noticed that you publised an article called "Postmodernism and the Construct of the Divisible Self." Just out of curiosity -- what is the "divisible self?"

BILL: The modern perceived the "self" as something whole and individual, built by that particular person, which remained whole and unchanged in any context; but the pomo sees the "self" as diverse, composed of changing roles and images. One situation may call for one, while another may call for yet a different one, and each is a construct of their specific culture over which they had no control, not a construct arrived at through their own self will.

CLAN THOMPSON: If modernists believe that the individual is the sole source of meaning and truth, and premodernists believe that meaning and truth are derived from authority, where do meaning and truth reside for a postmodernist?

BILL: The postmodern would insist that no person or text ever contains any complete truth (as opposed to simple facts). Each text (or person) is limited by a particular assumption, bias, or focus to just part of a truth, or to one (or even a few) point of view of something that has many different but valid points of view. This is not the same as the oft repeated, but wrong, bromide that the "postmodern insists there is no truth." A knowledgeable pomo would say there is a greater truth out there,but that no person is ever capable of understanding the totality of it. Each of us just carves out one or two little pieces of it. And logically - though most of the pomos despise reason and logic as a totalitarian tool - this must be true since any truth you try to explain or understand is so intertwined with every other reality that you cannot separate one from the other enough to ever understand it.

CLAN THOMPSON: Do you have a favorite medium in which to work?

BILL: When I was sculpting I preferred the constructive or additive approach and so focused on wood construction and welded metal. In painting, though I did paint with acrylic for seven years once, I prefer oil paint.

CLAN THOMPSON: What do you find exciting about your own work?

BILL: The fact that I can't ever do it right, so there is always something left to work toward. The painter never reaches her goal, and most artists do their best work after 40, and often after 60, so you're never necessarily a "has-been", or a "never gonna be," so long as you keep working.

CLAN THOMPSON: Is there anything you'd like to say that I didn't think to ask?

BILL: Yes, "donations may be sent to . . . . ." :)