Dirk Hagner: Discursive Presences
By Peter Frank
Although it parses rather clearly (if not quite tidily) into three sequential groups, the work Dirk Hagner has produced over the past decade seems to recapitulate a vast panoply of modern approaches to printmaking, and, indeed, art making in general. Hagner has lived in America for almost thirty years already, but his art remains European in flavor, even – perhaps especially – when it embraces Asian forms and techniques. In its erudition, this broad command of print forms, media, and even history secures Hagner’s abiding European-ness.
Another characteristic rooting Hagner’s oeuvre in his native continent – and, arguably, in the specific culture of Germany – is his over arching regard for printmaking as a literary as well as visual practice. Even his most seemingly straightforward images – nudes, portraits, studies of animals – resonate with an intricate pathos, the kind we normally feel in a narrative. Although he sometimes exploits (and even satirizes) the American penchant for visual gluttony, Hagner never quite succumbs to it. In his recent food series, for instance, he seems to indulge that very appetite, stimulating one sense by provoking another (and, not incidentally, riding Americans’ penchant for consumption and our resulting susceptibility to visual suggestion). But even here he can’t help but elaborate, however modestly, the otherwise forthright and sensual (if also delicate and decorous) images with extra-pictorial devices such as Sino-Japanese-style signature chops and lines of text – lyric phrases, in fact, pulling us well out of optical desire and into the ruminative realm of poetry. Indeed, some of Hagner’s most graphically arresting work comprises little else but text, running in hand-scrawled rivulets back and forth across the visual field, defying and yet pleading with the viewer to decipher the nervous but mellifluous notation. Further, his few (perhaps too-few) forays into the livre d’artiste format evince a reader’s sensitivity to written contents – without, that is, surrendering the artiste’s prerogatives.
No poetic lines are needed to tag Hagner’s woodcut portraits as literary: the majority of the subjects are writers, artists associated with literary and political as well as visual art movements, or public figures whose iconic visages have become intertwined in our minds with profound quotations and world-changing slogans. And, again, Hagner treats these subjects as discursive presences, people with stories to tell, people we tell stories about, people whose very presence before us stimulates our sensitivity to word and image alike. In his treatment of these figures – which subtly mimics the stylizations associated with their eras – Hagner zooms in on, heightens and refines this stimulation.
Given the respect Hagner shows his subjects in this woodcut series – and given the often provocative nature of those subjects – it should come as no surprise that the artist himself is willing in many of his works to go out himself on a limb and advocate or propound social and political points of view rather at odds with the neighborhood mainstream. Sensitive to conditions around him, and to the history of these conditions, Hagner (who lives and works in notably conservative parts of southern California) unhesitatingly addresses issues such as immigration, environmental degradation, and the corporatization of our polity with an arch eloquence, transforming symbols so recognizable that they have become almost invisible into potent wake-up calls.
Hagner’s practice gentles when it moves into Eastern modes, but even here his northern European sense of irony and respectful parody modifies his approach. At first glance, they seem like purely traditional ink washes (while, of course, they are prints). But a second look reveals Hagner’s wry manipulations of the mode, stylistic anomalies such as block-print Western lettering or comically contemporary subjects that mark the artworks as sensitive adaptations, purposeful in their virtuosity. By similarly appropriating the styles of modern Western graphic masters such as Schiele, Kollwitz, Beuys, and Janssen — not to mention not-so-modern graphic languages such as Medieval manuscript illumination — Hagner further tips his hat to the glorious history of his métier. (Interestingly, the artist has paid no such homage, at least in the last decade, to “usual suspects” such as Dürer and Rembrandt. Perhaps he got those emulations out of the way earlier in his career.)
Dirk Hagner clearly thinks of himself not simply as a jack-of-all-print-trades, but as a guardian of his field, eager and able to master as broad a range of small-edition reproductive media as possible for the sake of preserving and advancing their practice and illumining their histories. Happily, Hagner’s protective umbrella is huge and ever-expandable; he has worked in techniques as far afield as chine collé and fax, pochoir and digital print, bringing disparate approaches together in astoundingly supple combinations. He brings together high style and low, time-honored method and today’s disposable modes without prejudice. Hagner may be old-world, but he’s hardly old-style, and his catholicity of technique, and of knowledge, brings together the best of all visual worlds.
Los Angeles
August 2009
Peter Frank is Editor of THE magazine Los Angeles and Senior Curator at the Riverside Art Museum.