The path that led to VanDyke’s recent works, however, runs not only through the library but also through the studio, and, as much as a riposte to his own historical research project, his dripping panels are a distillation of an artistic practice that began in the MFA program at Bard College, which he completed in 2004. During his second summer there, he relates, "I poured cheap leftover paint over a sculpture I couldn’t solve. It was such a relief to let the piece fall apart under the flow of liquid and see what happened." That initial gesture evolved into an ongoing series of installations, often with accompanying performances, that found their most complete formulation to date in Involuntary House at Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens in 2005. The roof of its freestanding, towerlike wooden structure collected rainwater, which flowed intermittently into pigment-filled buckets, rigged to slowly drip from a second storey onto trash and construction debris on the ground floor. Viewers could peer in through side windows to watch the amorphous pile of refuse grow ever more soddenly beautiful under streams and rivulets of color.

Once set in motion, the drip in these entropic, Rube Goldbergian constructions (which distantly parody formalist, Clem Greenbergian notions) becomes unpredictable, ungovernable, and, ultimately, as liquid paint eventually covers and erodes everything in its wake, destructive. "This dripping in my work," VanDyke says, "lines up with something I try to recognize about myself, namely a desire for complete order mixed with the coexisting desire to completely make a shambles of that order. . . .In every work, I try to set up an overarching system that is ruptured." And it’s a short leap to see the dripping rainbows of color cascading through his works as metaphors for gloriously transformative disruptions in social structures. "As a queer person, I think you feel at times the pressure of the overarching culture that says that there’s something in you, something inseparable from the way you experience the world, that isn’t quite right. Yet as you discover the incredible pleasure of your desire, you also realize that, although your queer body has been evaluated as a rupture to culture, this rupture isn’t such a bad thing. I mean, bring on the rupture!"

Jonathan VanDyke’s work will be on view at HQ Gallery in Brooklyn this May.

"Drip by Drip" originally appeared in the April 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' April 2009 Table of Contents.