Dushko petrovich biography of rory
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And of course now we live in a global age where plaids are made all over the world and depending on the context and their particular qualities can reference a range of places from honky-tonks, country clubs, grunge shows, the board room—all the while signaling membership in various groups. I didn’t really know you as a painter until your project at the deCordova Biennial with Roger White.
Petrovich is a co-founder of Paper Monument, where he has co-edited many publications, including I Like Your Work: Art and Etiquette and Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment. Over the years, I amassed a large collection of plaid shirts, not all of them preppy, and came to wear the pattern almost exclusively, but for decades I was merely a collector, a self-taught connoisseur.
So I had developed a certain expertise, but deciding to paint plaids didn’t come from that so much as from sensing that there was a kind of joke in it, something funny about a painting that was plainly abstract but also utterly recognizable.
I think it was the Yvonne Rainer/Rob Storr talk at BU. Afterwards, we had a bit of a chat and you told me about PAPER MONUMENT and were sweet enough to send me a few copies. Actually, the earliest known examples of plaid are from 3500 BC China, but most people think plaid comes from Scotland, so that is itself notable.
At first I thought that was too strong a word, but you’re right—the various conflicts are always there.
Of course, on a material level, plaid emphasizes the interweaving of warp and weft, so in this sense it renders the conflict/confluence of fabric visible. The moment of emergency becomes suddenly (and blindingly) visible.
But when the sirens begin to accumulate—as they undoubtedly have, in reality, on the doomscroll, and in our minds—they stop signifying temporary rupture and begin to establish their own continuity, a condition of seemingly uninterrupted emergency, this new phase of history we find ourselves in.
The sirens are the first set of works for PNTG and serve as its overture.
Dushko Petrovich Córdova works across media as a painter, writer, and publisher.
Petrovich has also produced Adjunct Commuter Weekly and The Daily Gentrifier under his personal imprint, DME. He has written about art and visual culture for many publications including n+1, Bookforum, and the New York Times. They don’t have pretensions of heroism and they completely deflate the notion of the “gestalt” that is promised by Modernist Painting and in this way, they start to tackle some of the same territory as Daniel Buren and some of the other artists in the Supports-Surfaces movement in France.
So here too, in the process, I think the conflict between illusion and material reality is the generative force.
Born in Quito, Ecuador, Dushko Petrovich is a New York-based artist, writer, editor, and teacher. Letters from Asian Americans in the arts. Which leads me to my question:
How does conflict play a role in what appears to be a deeply structured practice in the Plaid Paintings and how does it inform decisions about the separate but conjoined acts of painting and presentation?
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Dear Steve,
I’m so glad you asked me about conflict in the plaids!
He has also written about art and visual culture for multiple publications including n+1, Bookforum, Art in America, ArtNews and the Boston Globe. Many fabrics reference or evoke a place, but plaid is a special case because it is both so ubiquitous and so commonly associated with “clans”—Scottish and otherwise.
So the pattern carries all those conflicts for me—of class, of origin, of group membership and assimilation—in a personal way. You can’t actually interweave the paint, so the illusion of plaid involves layering, transparency, and a lot of guile in the way you choose and organize the colors. His newest project, Adjunct Commuter Weekly, made its debut at ICA Boston in July.
Tags: acrylic, Adjunct Commuter Weekly, Anoka Faruqee, Colleen Asper, Daniel Buren, deCordova, Dushko Petrovich, ICA, Ken Johnson, Mary Heilman, n + 1, painting, Paper Monument, plaid, Robert Storr, Roger White, Sol LeWitt, Supports-Surfaces, Will Villalongo, Yvonne Rainer
Artist Talk – Dushko Petrovich Córdova in conversation with Matt Morris
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Join the artist in conversation with Matt Morris as they discuss Petrovich’s new project, PNTG.
Petrovich currently teaches at Boston University, RISD, NYU, and Yale.