On Big Bongo Night

BIG BONGO NIGHTBy David Lynch. Exhibition of paintings and multi-media sculptures. New York: Pace Gallery. December 2022. Amidst the new oil paintings by David Lynch on display at Pace Gallery in New York City—images that continue his pictorial exploration of anxious reverie (see David Lynch: The Unified Field, University of California Press, 2014) through depictions of stick figures in barren gray landscapes with elementary objects (buildings, airplanes, and guns) and clotted gobs of primary color, along with childish doodles and jokey jottings (“he-he”)—one also finds an array of eleven “sculptures.” Fashioned of wood, metal, resin, and wire, each object features a single, dimly glowing light bulb. Speaking of the materiality of these objects, Lynch has mused: “Electricity is so thrilling, and think about wood ... Nature supplies this for us, all different kinds of wood, and the structure of it can be sawed, sanded, shaped, polished, turned into furniture, so many things like houses.” The word “uncanny,” treated by Freud in a 1919 text analyzing that peculiar “species of fear” aroused by certain experiences of art and in life, is the usual translation of the German unheimlich, whose literal meaning is “un-home-like.” Lynch turns wood, from which a house, a home, could be fashioned, into things that are very unheimlich, unhomelike—very Lynchian. In 2018, the word “Lynchian” entered the Oxford English Dictionary, where it is defined as “characteristic, reminiscent, or imitative of the films or television work of David Lynch, [who] is noted for juxtaposing surreal or sinister elements with mundane, everyday environments, and for using compelling visual images to emphasize a dreamlike quality of mystery or menace.” In addition to being apotheosized in an adjective, Lynch has been lauded by professional critics, such as those polled by the BBC, who declared his 2001 movie Mulholland Drive—a suspenseful, obliquely funny, erotic, allusive, unsettling, and definitely Lynchian cinematic nightmare—the best film thus far of the twenty-first century. Canonized in mainstream culture, Lynch yet maintains a cult following. Even as he has aged into a household name, his dark, disquieting work remains undomesticated. And Lynch has been prolific in media beyond the film and television for which he's best known. He has worked extensively in photography and animation. He also creates music, roasts and sells a signature coffee, and evangelizes Transcendental Meditation. (Lynch has been a devoted practitioner of TM since 1973). But painting and sculpture were Lynch's first and, as the passing of time has proven, most enduring artistic loves. The 2016 documentary David Lynch: The Art Life illuminates Lynch's special relationship to these mediums and his commitment to a particular way of life. Since his late teens in the American Northwest, Lynch has professed and practiced “the art life.” Formed around a romantic ideal of artistic practice (centrally involving “painting, smoking, drinking coffee”), Lynch's way of life derives (as he has repeatedly declared) from reading The Art Spirit (1923). Robert Henri's book is a classic manifesto and artist's manual of gritty American realism, a tradition that began with Thomas Eakins and, with Henri's tutelage in Philadelphia (the city in which Lynch would study painting and eventually film Eraserhead, his first feature-length movie), would grow into the famous Ashcan School, which included George Bellows and Edward Hopper. How might this hardboiled, urban, realist expressionist art, born of the Great Depression and developed through the war years, influence Lynch's surrealist neo-noir aesthetic? Consider Edward Hopper's 1940 painting Office at Night—how its characters, composition, and moody ambiguity anticipate a scene in the seventh episode of Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), when businessman Ben Horne and his assistant, played by Ashley Judd in a form-fitting dress hearkening to an earlier era, search their wood-paneled office for the source of a strange electric humming sound. At first, they suspect a lamp in the corner to be the culprit, but ultimately, they find themselves unable to solve the mystery, leaving the viewer suspended in a sense of unspecified menace. Dwelling in this way upon Lynch's life, his influences, and his critical reception may amount to avoiding personal confrontation with the mystery and menace of his lamp-like sculptures. For example, one small, sandy-colored cone on a plinth glows with a single amber bulb, its unblinking cyclopean gaze seeming to follow you around the room. A conspicuous switch resembling a navel or a nipple—somehow, one can't help but think of these oddly proportioned lamp objects as figures—beckons to be touched. Do we want to switch off its light to stop its blank stare? What's the source of our unease? Lynch's lamps don't spread much light, and their construction out of minimal parts is patently simple. Not useful enough to constitute furniture but too recognizably fixture-like to count as sculptures per se, the lamps teeter on the brink of insignificance—except that they make you look and then catch yourself in the act of looking. What meaning, what mystery or menace, is perceived in the object—even as it seems to look back at you—must be your own projection. Indeed, this subjectively unsettling dynamic may constitute a phenomenological dimension of Lynchian objecthood. The unblinking gaze of a Lynch lamp may cast an apotropaic spell. It turns your gaze back upon you. Like a blue glass eye hanging in the white-washed window of a Greek house; like the eyes on boats of Portuguese fishermen; like the staring eyes of Athena's owl or the Medusa gorgoneion on the goddess's breastplate; like the eyes of Horus in an Egyptian temple, the eyes of these lamps lure one's attention, but like the mythic Sphinx brooding over the sandy wasteland, these lamps also prompt questions that we direct to ourselves. Who goes there? Who are you? Who dares hold my gaze? The blank gaze of these lamps thus arouses self-interrogation of the sort indicated in the imperative carved over the entry of the temple of the Delphic oracle millennia before Freud asked patients to scrutinize their dreams and desires: Know your place and know yourself. With electricity and wood, Lynch has found a modern means for casting an apotropaic magic spell that wards away distraction and focuses attention on existential matters. The lamps' amber lights are not sufficiently luminous to read by, but, by that same token, neither are they so bright that you have to avert your eyes. They do not twinkle; rather, they glow softly, like beings only now awakening to the mystery and menace of the world—just like you

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