![]() ![]() In his introductory essay, curator Werner Spies makes the case for Lynch as a quizzical midwestern heir to Surrealism and Dada and further tracks down any and all potential correspondences with the work of celebrated artists, some less convincing than others. Dark Splendor, a handsome monograph with a silly title produced on the occasion of a 2009 retrospective at Germany’s Max Ernst Museum Brühl, spends a lot of time trying to situate Lynch in relation to official art history. Lynch was a painter before he made movies, and it’s tempting to read his turn to cinema as a means of pursuing a figurative practice against the ascendant Conceptualism and dematerialization of the late-’60s avant-garde. So, too, with his studio art, a largely figurative body of work that, with few exceptions, loses focus the more detached it gets from the body. The most “Lynchian” of Lynch’s films are intensely corporeal: Eraserhead (1977), with its reproductive phantasmagoria the exposed and dismantled bodies of Blue Velvet (1986) Twin Peaks (1990–91), a melodramatic labyrinth with a plastic-wrapped corpse at its heart the doppelgängers and displacements of Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001), and Inland Empire (2006). The opposite is just as true: Lynch as a supremely earthly, material artist, whose great subject is the human body in all its banality-and strangeness. ![]() The publication of two monographs devoted to the art of David Lynch-paintings, photographs, works on paper, installations, canvases smeared with animal corpses-suggests a new way to think about an artist too often taken for an architect of dreamscapes, a fabulist of the psychosexual bizarre.
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