Eclecticism & interpretation in the work of Richard Dunn
‘All of us, even when we think we have noted every detail, resort to set pieces which have already been staged often enough by others. We try to reproduce the reality, but the harder we try, the more we find the pictures that make up the stock-in-trade of the spectacle of history forcing themselves upon us… Our concern with history … is a concern with pre-formed images already imprinted on our brains, images at which we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere, away from it all, somewhere as yet undiscovered.’1
Richard Dunn began his artistic apprenticeship as a student of high modernist architecture in the 1960s. At this time a powerful triumvirate—Pop, Minimalism and Conceptualism—dominated the art scene, and in the intervening years this legacy has suffused the artist’s work like a series of ripple effects from stones dropped in a pond. Such complex historical influences represent both a driving force and something of a barrier to easy understanding. Dunn comments:
When I look at the things I’ve made, what may be difficult for a casual viewer, I think, is the absence of a signature style…This is the result of a very conscious decision on my part. In my way of thinking, things are simply too complex to be able to be accommodated by a single approach.2
The presence of eclectic and multiple styles in Dunn’s work is the result both of the weight of history and the artist’s conscious deployment of ‘complexity’ as an operative concept and art strategy. In an interview with Stian Grogaard in 2001 Dunn cites this as a central notion underpinning his approach: ‘It may seem curious to say that... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline