When an artistic tradition moves from one culture to another, it inevitably changes. And if that other culture is very different, it changes greatly. When El Greco moved from being an icon painter in Greece to Italy, and then on to Spain, inevitably his pictures changed.
Colby Chamberlain on the art of Dave McKenzie
Bobblehead from Dave McKenzie’s
While Supplies Last, 2003, performance, poly-resin figures, 7 × 2 1⁄2 × 2 1⁄2 .
“I KNOW YOU ARE DAVE, but who is Dave?” Sixteen years ago, in these pages, the artist Glenn Ligon recounted how a stranger once posed this question to Dave McKenzie’s face. Or rather, she posed it to a papier-mâché approximation of his face, which McKenzie wore while he handed out bobblehead figurines of himself during an opening at SculptureCenter in New York. Ligon floated a few possible rejoinders: Dave was a dancing machine; Dave felt your pain; Dave wanted to be like Mike; Dave believed he could fly; Dave was a dime-store Jesus, for whom made-in-China tchotchkes were the bread and wine of a secular communion. These musings riffed on McKenzie’s various attempts to embody public figures, such as when he marched through Harlem sporting a rubber mask of Bill Clinto