By Lawrence Rinder

Monumental, narrative, and enclosed in heavy frames of carved and painted wood, Dan Dutton’s cycle of twelve ballad paintings appears like something from another time, another place. The ballads themselves, of course, do come to us via Dutton’s new recordings — from ages past, from the early settlements of the Appalachian Mountains and, in advance of their appearance in the New World, from ancient England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. Some of these lyrics, or at least the tales they tell — equally antique, can be traced to the towns and villages of West Africa. The actual maturity of these songs is tempered by their having been adopted in more recent times as signifiers of an ideal past. In nineteenth-century Great Britain, the ballads, along with other manifestations of “folk”culture, were resurrected by poets and painters in search of a remedy to industrialization’s ruination of land and culture. More recently, the 1960s folk revival in America adopted this body of songs as part of a back-to-the-land ethos that implicitly questioned the “advances” of modernity. So, as much as we might like to see and feel these works as part of the fabric of the present moment; as Dutton hopes we will — we do so only with the knowledge that they are weighted not only with imagery from the past but with the very idea of the past itself.

Dutton has chosen to paint the ballads in keeping with the spirit of their nineteenth-century revival. English painters such as Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and John Everett Millais — some of whom were ballad composers themselves — combined  indigenously English subject matter (Arthurian legends, fairy tales, ballads, and romantic fables like the apocryphal story of Ossian) with academic painting techniques derived from Italian masters. Drawing on similar themes, Dutton describes his painting technique in terms that would have been familiar to Titian: “(I) cover the canvas with a coat of reddish brown, draw with dark brown, then develop the contours with white and monochrome browns until its like a sepia photo. The colors are then laid on in transparent layers.”

Stylistically, his paintings share a nineteenth-century English penchant for pattern and decoration. It was common to the coterie that developed around William Morris, for example, to give as much attention to the frame as to the image. Art and craft for Morris and his followers were not estranged and their union was seen as signifying the union of art and life. So much what has come to constitute our various Modernisms (openness to the unconscious, emphasis on the thing-ness of artistic forms, and the inter-penetration of art and design) originated in the work of Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites, yet their motivation derived largely from a rejection of modern life and their inspiration came predominantly from the distant past and far away lands. Morris, for example, a social utopian, had to travel as far as the wintry wastes of Iceland, to discover regenerative cultural fuel in that tiny country’s surviving Norse-age sagas.

Dutton’s anthology of ballads grows out of a conviction akin to these artists, that in the past lie the seeds of salvation for our time. While Morris bravely sought to transform contemporary society with his ante-industrial ethos, Dutton perhaps more keenly sees that the only path left for the utopian soul today is the path of the hermit. Indeed, in his own Kentucky abode, Dutton has created a private sanctuary; which he only half jokingly refers to as Dandyland — that could easily be mistaken for the setting of one of the ballads he depicts: a heavy-beamed lodge set in an ancient forest dappled with hidden meadows and ponds.

Those of my generation (I’m 44) or older, might also relate to Dutton’s paintings not only in terms of an abstract historical past, but also in light of the past of our own childhoods. His images recall the illustrations that accompanied children’s books of a certain age, some of which were still on nursery shelves thirty or forty years ago. Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle with illustrations by Arthur Rackham (originally published in 1905) supplied the images of my own young fantasies and my favorite of Dutton’s ballad paintings (The Frog’s Courtship, The Farmer’s Curst Wife, and The Fox) echo that artist’s dizzying, lurid displays. Rackham specialized in images both technically adroit and thematically rich. I could stare at one of his illustrations for hours on end, lost in a fairytale reverie. In his work, the nuance and complexity of detail was intrinsic to the limitless richness of the tale being told. Dutton adopts this holistic approach to narrative image-making; an approach that embodies the particular kind of fascination of a child: our sense of his ballad paintings relies as much on the panoply of plants and flowers (many of which are Kentucky natives) surrounding his protagonists as on the stature of the heroes themselves. )Perhaps it’s just in the nature of a tale to unfold in a setting, a setting that may or may not sit still as the narrative passes by.) I cannot see these paintings without seeing my own childhood, and knowing that it is gone.

Insofar as these paintings depend on and evoke the past, they can be comprehended in similar terms to Roland Barthes’ understanding of the photograph, that is, as mementi mori. Because of its intrinsic connection (via light) to the thing it depicts, a photograph is incontestably “real,” yet, by shifting this reality to the past (“this-has-been”), the photograph suggests that it is already dead. Dutton’s paintings — as well as the ballads from which they derive —are like photographs except that their medium of recording and transmission is not light but lyric. Like photographs they combine an originary flash (a broken heart, a frightened child, a heroic man) with the capacity for infinite repetition. To paraphrase Barthes, the effect of hearing a ballad is not to restore what has been abolished (by time, by distance) but to attest that what I hear has indeed existed.

Despite all I have said concerning the past in Dutton’s ballad paintings, there is a current in them that flows in the opposite direction. Perhaps it is more apparent in the ballad recordings themselves, in which one clearly hears a tone of voice that is immediate and familiar. In his singing, Dutton never affects an archaic style. Instead he sounds like someone who has just put down their cell phone or taken your order at Starbucks. His voice is recognizably of our time, as is his instrumentation. The ancient ballad lyrics are transformed and sung to us in a voice we can understand. In the paintings this contemporaneity is a bit harder to see, at least at first. This is because, I think, visual style in art has become more periodized than musical style. In music we are much more used to repetition, interpretation, and sampling. Think of Dvorak’s New World Symphony, which, although based on folk melodies, would have sounded thoroughly of-the-moment to the audiences that heard its New York premiere in 1893. Where in Dutton’ s painting is this tone of voice that speaks of our familiar present? It is, I think, in the bodies of his men. These are not the bodies of timeless legend nor of Appalachian tale. Broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped, and muscular, they are the bodies of men who workout at gyms, who look good in suits, and who may love other men.

Sensual love between men is overt in only one of Dutton’s ballad paintings, Gypsy Johnny, an image that he has, delightfully, given a twist to. The ballad originally told of an affair between a run-away squire’s wife and a singing gypsy. This was a crime in 17th century Scotland, and the punishment was hanging for the gypsy, disgrace for the upper class woman. In Dutton’s Gypsy Johnny the subjects defy an equivalent and contemporary prejudice. Dutton reports that despite searching high and low he never found an instance of two men kissing in a ballad. Yet, same-sex attraction courses through these paintings. It is likely that this has to do with the predilections of the artist as well as his personal romantic history. Indeed, he has layered many of these ballads over the stories of his own affairs, and cast his lovers as the leading men. How could he have done otherwise? To sing a song is to occupy it and, especially in the case of ballads, occupying a song means making it your own. Ballads are more than a cultural patrimony, they are an affirmation of common human experience, an affirmation that must be made again and again, generation after generation in order to take hold. Only because the singers actually felt what they sang, do we know that what ballads tell us is true: that love and cruelty sit side by side in the human heart. To be true to the form, Dutton had to sing his heart, had to paint his heart.  

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Lawrence Rinder was appointed Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator of Contemporary Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art in May 2000. Recent exhibitions at the Whitney include "The American Effect," an exploration of global perceptions of America in art made since 1990. He was chief curator of the 2002 Whitney Biennial, served as an advisor on the 1991 and 1993 Biennials, and was one of six curators of the 2000 Biennial.

Prior to his position at the Whitney, Rinder was founding director of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts. While at the college, he organized several exhibitions, including the groundbreaking "Searchlight: Consciousness at the Millennium" (1999) and "Fabrice Hybert: At Your Own Risk" (1999).

From 1988 to 1998, he worked at the Berkeley Art Museum (BAM) in a variety of positions including curator of 20th-century art and curator of the museum's MATRIX program, an ongoing series of contemporary art exhibitions. Among the many exhibitions he organized for BAM are "Louise Bourgeois: Drawings" (1996), "In a Different Light" (1995) and "Andrea Fraser: Aren't They Lovely?" (1992).

Rinder received a BA in art from Reed College and an MA in art history from Hunter College. He has held teaching positions at UC Berkeley and Deep Springs College and is currently adjunct professor of art history and archaeology at Columbia University.