NICK DOYLE: AMERICAN BLUES
Perrotin Tokyo presents American Blues, the first solo exhibition in Japan by New York based artist Nick Doyle. The exhibition introduces a new series of supersized denim works and macabre sculptures, foregrounding the dangers of nostalgia and the evolving relationship to consumerism.
March 6 – April 27, 2024
Blue. It is at once the color of the heavens above and downcast feelings. And also—as in blue collar—the reality of manual labor. Around the time that Johnson had is voice permanently pressed into plastic, quilters like Lutisha Pettway, in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, were fashioning bedcovers from their families’ worn-out work clothes. These extraordinary pieces are to textile what the blues are to music: improvisations in which the very materials of suffering are transcendently recomposed.
The short answer: America. Official pronouncements to the contrary (e pluribus unum—out of many, one— and so on), this country has always been defined by its differences. It’s all too easy for white men—and I include myself—to compartmentalize this self-evident truth, to acknowledge the inequities of race, class, and gender, and then turn blithely away, telling ourselves we can mind our own business. That has never been Doyle’s instinct.
Denim, despite its French origins (it was first manufactured in Nîmes, hence the name), is the most American of fabrics, worn by actual cowboys, pretend punks, and seemingly every pop icon we’ve ever had, from Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe to Brooke Shields and Beyoncé. Its primary constituents are indigo and cotton, which, not incidentally, were two of the American slave economy’s main cash crops
Doyle’s works have an even more roadside feeling to them, often alluding to the hallowed ground of the Great American Road Trip. For a recent show in Louisville, titled Old Roads and Broken Records, he reprised Ed Ruscha’s famous 1966 painting Standard Station, supersizing the painting’s central motif, adding some droopy bunting, and giving it the deflationary title Not So Grand After All.
Doyle has variously imagined these men suspended on a stand like a marionette, head in a box; straddling the muzzle of a huge handgun, heads in bags; stuck inside a mailbox, peering out anxiously through the drop slot; and roasted on the spit of a backyard barbecue.
A wall-mounted urinal—a nod to Duchamp, of course, and to Robert Gober—is called What It Means to Stand Alone. In the stunning, extremely ironic Transcendent Promises, the sublime vastness of Monument Valley (scene of many a classic western) is chopped up across the fronts of five Coke machines. A related work confines six glowing orange orbs, worthy of a roll-the-credits sunset, to the doors of coin-operated washing machines.