A Whole Other Way • Dane Goodman
by David Pagel
“Right now, I’d never let anyone into my studio,” Dane Goodman declared, just a few minutes into my call to see if I could set up a time to get together and talk about what he was doing in his studio. As always, his tone was friendly and anything but off-putting. It wasn’t as though he had something to hide or some secret to withhold – it was just that invitations to his studio were off the table; an activity so far removed from the realm of possibility that it was not worth thinking twice about.
Dane Goodman, Paint (Red Room), 1980, Hunter College Art Gallery, New York City
At the same time, Dane was perfectly happy to discuss what he was up to in his studio and what was going on in his mind – not to mention in his heart and soul – in the same welcoming way that he has always talked about art and his relationship to it, whether that art was made by him or someone else. He spoke with warmth and inquisitiveness, unguarded, explaining that he had recently committed to an exhibition at the Atkinson Gallery at Santa Barbara City College.
The solo show, scheduled for fall 2023, will be something of a homecoming, because from 2004 to 2012, Dane served as the first full-time director of the gallery, organizing an impressive list of exhibitions during his tenure. For his own show, he promised himself and the current gallery director, John Connelly, that he would make all new works. He wanted to do something new, to look forward, not back.
So, what he was doing in the studio was exploratory, in the most profound sense. There were sketches and studies and inklings of intuitions and ideas that had not yet gelled; nothing even close to finished and everything at the very beginning of a process that not even Dane knew where it would take him, each of its stages riddled with doubts and discoveries, double-backs and do-overs.
And if, over the next year, he managed not to fall back into previous practices and also managed to keep expectations – from others and himself – at bay, he just might arrive at what he loved about art: the kind of soul-stirring joy at the beauty and strangeness of things he never expected to see – nor even imagined existed – yet somehow, still capturing something essential about what it feels like to be alive today, in a world as fraught with uncertainty as it has ever been.
Dane Goodman, installation view of Consorts, 2018, UCSB College of Creative Studies Gallery, curtesy of Estrada Fine Art
“Sometimes I even regret telling people I have the show, especially when I think of Paul Thek, who insisted that you never schedule a show until the work you want to exhibit is finished,” Dane confessed.
“Even when Marie (Schoeff, Dane’s wife of 40 years) and I are working in our separate studios – we knock on each other’s doors. We’ve always been that way, thinking ‘that’s your space.’”
For Dane, his studio “is where I figure things out. I don’t have a lot of people in there. I keep it sacrosanct. If I have something I feel good about I might invite people in. But not when I’m in the middle of things. When I’m not firm on it, I don’t want people’s ideas to influence me. I don’t want to have any obligations or expectations. In the end, the process is the best part. I want the work to come about however it comes about. So, it is my own.”
That integrity is essential to everything Dane does as an artist. It’s not that he thinks that what he has to say is so special and pure and unique that other people’s ideas and comments would sully its precious perfectionism. It’s just that the kind of conversation he is interested in having with himself requires silence – and stillness – and would be drowned out – or shouted down – by other voices.
What Dane is after, especially when he is embarking on a new body of work by exploring a new set of concerns, is the chance to find out what is most important to him: the feelings and beliefs that are integral to his identity as, he says, “a human being on this complicated, beguiling planet.”
That outlook excites me because unlike so much art being made today, Dane’s begins with the conviction that the self does not yet know itself, and that, in the process of making something, the self might discover something important about itself, which is never settled or finished or fixed, but developing – changing and opening by paying attention to its surroundings. For Dane, that means devoting his attentiveness to the materials and imagery he is working with, both internal and external .
Dane Goodman and Keith Puccinelli, installation view of tug, 2015, Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art, Santa Barbara
The external stuff is obvious: the pencils, pigments, putty, paper, wire and wood that fill his studio and give it the feel of a backyard workshop inhabited by an inveterate tinkerer – a dyed-in-the-wool do-it-yourselfer who keeps the tables, shelves, workbenches, and odds and ends just tidy enough to allow him to focus on the task at hand, but not so tidied up that you feel as if you’ve stepped into a spread in a design magazine. The internal elements to which Dane pays attention are more elusive; subtle whispers that flash and flit through his mind’s eye when he’s not interrupted by visitors.
“In art,” he explains, “you have this opportunity to be in the world in a whole other way – not in the usual logical or linear sense. Some art works that way, and I’m often drawn to it. But it doesn’t have to stick to such rational, explicable ways of making sense of things. That’s where my work takes me. I am comfortable with ambiguity.”
Dane doesn’t seek out ambiguity for its own sake, or cultivate ambivalence because that’s easier than arriving at any kind of clarity. He dives into that world because he knows, from experience, that it’s the ground out of which the most profound and intimate insights emerge, neither logically nor predictably, but nonetheless powerfully, even undeniably.
“It’s amazing,” he says, “that humans have made trillions and trillions of things. And then, for example, I’ll come across something Ron Nagle has made, and I’ll go: ‘That’s perfect!’ I don’t know why or in terms of what I judge it to be perfect, but his little sculpture stops me in my tracks and elicits profound joy. It’s stunning.” Such qualities of “immediacy and freshness and unencumberedness” set Dane wondering about the mysteriousness of it all. “I can go back to it again and again and every time I say to myself, ‘What is that?!?’” Not knowing is not a problem. In fact, it’s part of the pleasure. And essential to the mystery.
“A lot of my work is very simple,” Dane says. “I try to call out an image that has a lot of resonance for a lot of people. Really common things – snowmen, jack-o-lanterns, shovels, beds, pillows. But my images are also refined. I’ve edited out countless others.” That’s what takes so much time – alone and focused in the studio.
Dane Goodman and Keith Puccinelli, installation view of Pajamas, 2015, Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art, Santa Barbara
And that’s where another side of Dane’s need for solitude comes in. Some visitors don’t get past surface appearances. He says they “don’t fully consider what I’m trying to do.” The last part of that phrase is important. Dane is not a snob. He is not saying that he is more sophisticated or intelligent or insightful than just about everyone else, nor that his perceptual acuity is sharper or more developed. It’s just that he knows that he is in the best position to figure out how it is with him, and what that means for the art he is making. No one else can do that for him. Insight is a matter of firsthand experience.
That’s what transpires in the studio, in works that he works out in due time. Then, when he has a good sense of what they have done for him and continue to do to him, he takes them out into the world and presents them to others. That’s where exhibitions come in. And it’s important to Dane that his works are democratic: unpretentious, accessible, open to as broad a swathe of the population as possible. He doesn’t want the particularities of his story – his personal history – to get in the way of any viewer’s relationship to what he has made.
In all his works, he says, “I’m mulling around meaning. But I don’t believe a viewer has to have any awareness of that. I’m trying to give a visual experience. That’s how art works. It starts things. I learned that from Oliver Jackson, who insisted when he was finished working on a piece it was no longer his. Works of art have a life of their own.”
Dane reflects: “I like doing things that might be perceived as dumb, trite, old-fashioned.” Just out of grad school, he worked for years to make photographs with the clarity of Ansel Adams using an SX-70 Polaroid camera; works with a subtlety, detail and tonal richness at odds with the snapshot casualness common to point-and-shoot Polaroids. “That’s where I learned,” he says, “that it doesn’t matter what medium you are working in, all you have to do is believe something. Have a vision.”
He has been cultivating that vision for 50 years. And it’s not getting old. “I’m trying to be clear about who I am. Where I am,” Dane says. “I could do angry. Today there’s plenty to be angry about. But I feel that there are so many people doing that. Some very powerfully. The world doesn’t really need me doing more of that. So, I ask myself, ‘What can I do? What does the world need?’”
Dane answers that question in his work, visually not verbally, aesthetically not argumentatively, experientially not conceptually. Making time and space for reflection and introspection – both his own and ours – he makes room in the world for what is in desperately short supply: honesty and insight, gentleness and wisdom, empathy and compassion. And you don’t need to be invited into his studio to know the value and transformative impact of all that.
Cover Image: Dane Goodman, Water Suite, lithograph triptych
