“Words tend to be inadequate,” Jenny Holzer once declared. Nancy Dwyer must have missed the memo—for her, words are the whole thing. Since 1974, when Dwyer and her peers at the State University of New York, Buffalo, began hanging their art in improvised hallway galleries between their studios, she has made hay out of thoughtless chitchat. Dwyer thinks about language until it inflates to the size of furniture, jailbreaking it from the polite confines of the page—or the banal environs of work, the grocery store, and the local bar—to loose it upon an unsuspecting populace. Her patter rudely barges in mid-conversation and makes a spectacle of itself. You can talk about Dwyer’s art, but it talks back.
The artist’s show “How About Never?” was a tight survey of nine works from 1997 to the present. Such a small presentation might not have seemed worth the bother, but the pieces provided an effective entry into Dwyer’s conceptual project, which has always been deceptively simple yet bitingly funny. Dwyer hijacks consumerism’s vulgarities and insecurities, its come-ons and carnival barking, and takes the whole mess out for a joyride around aphoristic possibility before letting it all crash into a deadpan one-liner, forcing the viewer to sort out the linguistic wreckage.
Featured in this show were a video animation, four paintings, two sculptures, and a pair of wall works. Such medium-specific descriptions, however, form a rough taxonomy (were the bandsawed wood pieces detachable friezes or shaped paintings? Yes. Were the acrylic-daubed panels sprouting from flat-screen TV wall mounts paintings or sculptures? Also yes). Their refusal to conform to the strict parameters of objecthood doubles as a neat analogue for how Dwyer treats language: as something unstable, mysterious, and full of trapdoors, its meaning locatable at multiple points, always correct but also wrong.
Usually Dwyer sets her sights on a word or two and its constituent letters, but short phrases also come into play. (The artist loves a good colloquialism.) Much of the work has ripened beautifully. Take Everybody’s Angry, 2013, a set of fifteen papier-mâché spheres that spell out the titular observation. Strung from the ceiling as if ready to be plucked for a Powerball drawing, the sculpture is as accurate an assessment of the national mood now as it was a decade ago, maybe even more so. Its pastel palette makes the sentiment look absurdly cheerful as it waves away the corrosive bitterness: Everybody is angry—so fucking what?
Dwyer’s art is especially effective at revealing advertising’s barely hidden manipulations—the industry’s casual abandonment of soul for surface. One could also align her work with that of the concrete poets, who cared how words both read and looked. Consider her painting Uhuh, 1998, which turns on that very ’90s utterance of ambiguity. The expression is arranged into a daisy-chain pattern within the borders of what appears to be an emerald-hued sheet of paper floating against a backdrop of variegated greens. The letters look die-cut, as if the object were a party favor for a recalcitrant teen. One can almost hear the phrase being grunted with passive-aggressive dissent. The work’s retinal effect is transfixing, like a horrific droning sound made flesh.
Hasbeen Wannabe, 2002, a fifty-six-second digital animation featuring seven letters that morph from one word of the title to the next (and back again), also seizes upon the language of the late twentieth century. (“Wannabe,” the Spice Girls’ unfathomably popular and gleefully nonsensical hit single, was released six years before this work was made). The piece seems to be a meditation on the vicissitudes of artistic ambition and obsolescence: The puffy attenuated characters float in a soup of toxic-sludge green, lolling within innocuous, drowsy graphics that call to mind those of a PC screen saver. The daggers of Dwyer’s critique are sharp—this twenty-one-year-old reflection on success finds new purchase today, wrung into a kind of lament for the “late career” artist who’s likely seen and experienced too much of the art world’s capriciousness, intellectual laziness, and cruelty. Dwyer, who was born in 1954, has exhibited widely, yet she’s never really achieved the sort of acclaim that many in her Pictures generation cohort did. Her smart, droll, and prescient art deserves to be more than a well-kept secret.
