Charles Clough’s Dreampix
Elizabeth Licata
Art in America, July 1992, (by the author’s and editor’s permission)
(Elizabeth Licata is the curator at the Castellani Museum in Niagara Falls.)

Charles Clough half-jokingly refers to his work as “po-mo-ab-ex-post-imp-fauvish dreampix,” a
label which betrays his rueful awareness of painting’s current situation as well as his confidence in
its possibilities. Keeping one foot solidly planted in the modernist tradition, Clough simultaneously
explores strategies based on art-historical citation and mechanical distancing. The result is an
exhilarating and oddly compelling body of work.
A survey of Clough’s career took place last fall at multiple venues on his home territory in western
New York State. Buffalo’s Burchfield Art Center Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center presented
early work and 20 years’ worth of drawings, the State University of New York at Fredonia showed
paintings from the last five years, and the Castellani Art Museum of Niagara University reprised a
three-painting installation commissioned by the Brooklyn Museum. Held concurrently, these
exhibitions highlighted the range of Clough’s working methods and concerns.
During a brief period in the early ‘80s, the artist flirted with literal-minded appropriation, smearing
swipes of paint Abtract-Expressionist style over photographic reproductions of canonical art works
and then rephotographing the results. Adding more paint and taking more photographs, sometimes
adding collage elements and airbrushing the photos along the way, he continued until he had created
a dense, multireferential surface. Acetone (1983) and The Resolution of Sparky (1982-84), a project
which found its final expression as a large mural for Buffalo’s subway system, are typical examples
from this process-obsessive period. Clough eventually discarded his photo-smear technique, which
had attracted much attention, because he felt himself too entangled in the irony of conceit. Since the
mid-’80s he has concentrated on the problem of painting abstractly with traditional materials,
refusing, like many other artists today, to give up on painting’s possibilities. Unlike many recent
abstractionists, though, Clough stops well short of reaffirming abstraction as an instrument of
straightforward emotional expression.
If Clough was once entranced by the easily replicated photographic image, the irony is that today he
finds his painting in competition with a juggernaut of media-obsessive art which he himself helped
set in motion during the early days of Hallwalls, the Buffalo exhibition space he cofounded with
Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, Nancy Dwyer and Michael Zwack in 1974. At Hallwalls, Clough
created one installation using “eye vises”—paint smeared photos of eyes that were hung on opposing
walls so that the viewer was caught between them. Other installations were mechanically driven,
employing pulleys and rotary devices to move the visual elements.
Clough shows a continuing fascination with funky imagery, but now he incorporates that machinery
into the process of painting. In the mid-’80s he began applying paint with what he calls “the big
finger”—a crude device consisting of a wooden pole with a round pad at the end. This apparatus
produces large, somewhat uniform blots and sweeps of paint. More importantly, it distances the
artist’s hand from the gestural maelstroms that result. Three paintings from 1985— Oysters, The
Governor and Doubloon—define Clough’s approach in this phase of his of his work. They were
made as a special project for The Brooklyn Museum’s Grand Lobby where they were shown under
the collective title “Three Paintings for One Wall.” These works refer to some of the greatest hits
from the museum’s collection of 19th-century paintings, among them Albert Bierstadt’s A Storm in
the Rocky Mountains—Mt. Rosalie, Benjamin West’s The Angel of the Lord Announcing the
Resurrection and several pieces by Childe Hassam and Henry Twachtman. Clough uses these
sources as more than inspiration. With his “big finger,” he approximates their composition schemes
on a scale (The Governor measures 14 by 21 feet) that rivals the majesty of 19th-century landscape
canvases. These three works are at once intimidating and hilarious in their mock grandeur; they count
among late 20th-century art’s final words on the visionary landscape.
In many of his paintings, Clough’s gestural marks hover in a circular pattern on the canvas.
Suggesting inner and outer space rather than earthbound vistas. They maintain the artist’s
characteristic balance of exaggerated expression and the “mechanical” distance provided by his “big
finger.” In a few paintings, such as September Twelfth (1985), the circular movement is subdued,
and puddles of color settle into configurations like Rorschach blots overlying bits of lyrical gestural
activity.
Other of Clough’s works, especially his recent “vortex” paintings, depend less on historical
antecedents. One of the most successful is Fan the Sickle (1990),
a painting in which two rainbowlike segments are slapped together over a cluster of apocalyptic red
swirls. Clough makes this bombastic mixture credible by subduing the high-key swirls with cool
sweeps of blue and green, and allowing darker forms to drift in from the right. With its various
elements balanced in Hofmannesque push-pull fashion, the painting’s vigor remains unabated.
In his “vortex” paintings, Clough’s blots seem magnetically drawn to the center of the canvas.
Shapes cavort in a centrifugal whirl, and the pictorial space becomes a dizzying fun house. Large
works like Grozny and Chagrinulator (both 1990) use size in order to intimidate rather than invite the
viewer. What seem to be grotesque eyes and orifices—ears, mouths—open up, revealing
ever-receding depths of swirling paint. Yet even in Grozny’s leering, cartoonish visage, the artist
never completely forsakes his Abstract-Expressionist heritage.
Clough’s view of the contemporary context requires him to be aware of the artist’s dual role as hero
and fool. When, in his work, the hero begins to take himself too seriously, the fool steps in and
speaks directly to the audience. Sometimes the jester is at center stage from the beginning, as in the
absurd fireworks of The Social Contract (1990), which suggests a slapstick critique of “masculine”
painting traditions like Action painting. But here the exuberance of the work’s central, backlit phallic
shape nevertheless reminds us of art’s heroic ability to transform humdrum bodily references. At
other times Clough’s title choices undercut presumptions of painting’s sincerity. Ever since he
started making art objects, his titles have been consistently humorous and occasionally ribald. While
Clough may simply date his paintings, he also comes up with titles like Chagrinulator, Holus Bolus,
Colliculus or Parabulia, which call forth campy images of B-movie monsters and Roman heroes.
Clough’s long-standing concern with both abstract and representational imagery was clear to see in
the notebook drawings exhibited at Hallwalls last fall. The artist’s earliest notebooks are filled with
sketches of body parts as well as variations based on his own fingerprints; also evident is his early
interest in the amorphous facelike shapes that have come to fruition in the “vortex” paintings.
Throughout the notebooks, too, we find diagrams of various apparatuses for moving paint around,
as well as studies from modern masterworks such as Cézanne’s The Great Bathers and Gorky’s The
Liver is the Cock’s Comb.
Many items from this list might appear in the notebooks of virtually any serious artist, but it is the
combination of all of them that provides the best insight into Clough’s agenda. The wide-ranging
stylistic quotations in his paintings serve to acknowledge his debts to earlier traditions and at the
same time free him to make new connections. Clough is making a distinctive contribution to what
appears to be a common enterprise for many contemporary artists: the rejuvenation of a vocabulary
of abstract painting.