David Lynch at PAFA: Why a Duck?

Julien Robson, who once judged me into a group show at the Main Line Art Center, mentioned in his talk about curating the show that the most useful distinction between a serious artist and a flower-pot painting amateur is that your professionals hold themselves accountable to the whole history of art. I love that statement for at least two reasons: one, it excludes everyone while naming a concrete and all-encompassing goal to shoot for, and two, it ignores technique, or suffering, or a degree from a respected institute and a testimonial from the Wizard of Oz as relevant qualifiers for the coveted title.

A fellow said to me recently that he went to a Picasso exhibition, and he was so gratified to see some good old, faithful-to-life sketches in it, "which prove Picasso could [jump through hoops] if he wanted to." So there. The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts' show of paintings by David Lynch, Unified Field, follows the future Academy Award nominee when he was a student at that school from 1966-1967. It provides a record of Mr. Lynch’s progress as an art student just before he began to make films. Was he an artist then, and is he now? No one can claim to grasp “the whole history” of art, but essentials in the posture of the real deal, if you will, are clear. Art is an intellectual and physical engagement with the unknown for the purpose of communicating the artist's presence to it. Unified Field is a superb presentation of a personal history and seems essential to understanding films like Blue Velvet and Eraserhead, or the television series Twin Peaks, and it certainly establishes Mr. Lynch’s credentials as an artist, right there at PAFA, the third art school he abandoned.

Mr. Lynch’s films and art works are nothing if not enigmatic. Most of modern art has an opacity about it, that sickening I don’t-have-enough-information feeling taking hold in a viewer, but a movie that doesn’t fall all over itself trying to declare what it means is rare, and Mr. Lynch has made several of those. The best thing about Lynch’s work is that meaning remains unclear and unresolved. The mechanism for wresting a moral from the story is present. We see it in the hard-working and straight-shooting detectives in Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, but the plots amble towards an eventual revelation that doesn’t literally reveal anything, or at least anything useful to the human sensibility. Of Eraserhead, Lynch said it was “a Philadelphia of the mind.” A baffling movie becomes that much clearer: like Philadelphia, Eraserhead is about the decline of the Industrial Age, the stubborn and inconvenient fleshiness of the human form, and the importance of good grooming.

The point is to thwart revelation in a Hollywood-type vehicle that insists on disclosure. Lynch the movie-maker explains that, as much as we arm ourselves with facts and measurements, we don’t understand what’s going on, and even the most banal scenes and locations are fraught with cosmos-sized perils. Twin Peaks stripped away layer after layer of an insidious evil infecting a whole town, and called it "Bob." Bob turns up in the PAFA exhibit. Despite the promise in its title, Unified Field doesn’t tell us why things are the way they are either. The title of the collection refers to a branch of physics that attempts to discover the Theory of Everything, a single background of sums and data that unifies the four atomic forces: gravity, strong interaction, weak interaction, and electromagnetism. Every attempt at this is a failure: even at the level of pure math and science we can’t make all the numbers work out. String theory as an explanation has yet to be discredited, but it presumes an order of randomness and multiplicity that’s anathema to a unified anything.

A vanity is the belief that the human mind can grasp what the universe means. One should still take a scientific approach, but be content that science can’t explain nature in ways that will appeal to the human reason. Lynch on art said, “You can learn a lot by studying a duck.” The point there is that the composition of duckness is unsatisfying, all lopsided and cartoonish, but since the duck is a form created by nature, we should be content that it is perfect (eight billion years of evolution can’t be wrong). Lynch’s work explores a margin of aesthetics and observation where paradoxically the human desire for closure and balance are thwarted and our discomfort with randomness is ignored; nevertheless, “It’s art!”

David Lynch has made it clear over time that Philadelphia crystallized his understanding of art and the path he should take as an artist. A particularly intense night in the studio revealed to him the idea of a painting that moves. From this he made one of his finest pieces, the installation Six Men Getting Sick (1967). A projector plays a movie made with a crude camera over plaster casts of the artist wearing various expressions in various states of fulfillment. A siren screams continuously. The installation graphically depicts vomit passing through the six men as if they were culverts conducting life’s rejected dross, the horrific and ugly experience of a consciousness riveted to nature by illness, a doubter praying. Lynch might be using nausea as Sartre employed it, to describe the epiphany of realizing our utter aloneness and lack of resources, but in any case, human life is a sickness that only death cures.

Embrace the sickness. Philadelphia’s seedy, grimy, gray patina over scenes of depravity and loopiness heightened the state of emergency the artist David Lynch craved. PAFA’s notes tell us he was simultaneously horrified and energized by life in my city. He grew up in a picture perfect suburb in Montana but developed a grim, Gahan Wilson-like consciousness about the evil under the rose bushes. I love the opening of Blue Velvet, Jeffrey Beaumont’s dad in a Hugh Beaumont/Leave it to Beaver suburb having a heart attack and falling to the ground. The camera detects the predatory bugs at the grassroots level. Home in Lynch’s paintings is where sickness arrives and deranged men scream from their front lawns, “I Burn Pinecone and Throw In Your House!” The notes tell us David Lynch at one time had to assure reporters that his childhood was perfectly normal and safe. I think of Edgar Allan Poe and how the public invented his nightmarish history because otherwise his horror stories didn't add up or make sense.

While David Lynch was at PAFA the MoMA had its huge Francis Bacon retrospective, and a couple of the works here crib from Bacon explicitly. They have the same museum or operating theater setting and vivisectioned subjects. I spotted the open mouth and pearly white signature of England’s superb and morbid portraitist, whose stated goal was doing for dentition what Monet did for haystacks. Francis Bacon’s visceral portraits of dissected humankind undoubtedly encouraged Lynch’s oddness and maybe the notoriously self-taught artist who mastered technique—but only so much technique as he needed-- gave Lynch the confidence to “loady up the truck and move to Beverly. Hills that is.”

Lynch’s very large works constructed on huge spans of cardboard with hard-wired lighting and all the other flotsam that makes its way into mixed media, commercial paint and industrial materials, signal an outsider sensibility, in this case, a creepy one. I think about the art work of marginal people, who don’t know about art, Windsor and Newton art, but know what they like, and what they want, and they make it themselves: shrines, mementos, and homunculi that reference the most banal private acts of perverse cruelty imaginable. I'm thinking about Ed Gein's lady shirt and Jeffrey Daumer's throne of skulls. Several of the works here use unwrapped cigarette filters to represent the intrusion of a death-obsessed corporate culture living in the dilapidated tract homes of the consumer-forging 50s. Lynch communicates in his films the unthinkable boogeyman lurking by the dumpster, behind the diner, or cruising through the neighborhood, driving too slowly.

Bacon’s Painting (1955) demonstrated the extreme viciousness and carnality of ordinary men. He does it with a confident brush, an umbrella, white teeth shiny with saliva, and a flayed carcass. The image is indelible and had its movie moment in Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs. That another fine American filmmaker was influenced by Bacon is something to ponder in the rich and disturbing PAFA show of David Lynch’s works, mounted on cardboard and presaging the most disturbing images in his big screen catalog: Laura Palmer’s blue cadaver wrapped in industrial plastic and left in the park and naked Dorothy Vallens running across the front lawn in Blue Velvet, interrupting her lover’s introduction of the girl next door to his horrified mom.