Artworld Analog: A Conversation with Anne Doran

Anne Doran is best known as a second-wave Pictures Generation artist. Her large, wall-mounted photo-sculptures appropriate found images from sources such as ads, porn magazines, and military literature, juxtaposing them in formally playful ways that at once recall the pop collages of James Rosenquist or Richard Hamilton and the angular designs of the Constructivists. However, Doran's artworld footprint is much more expansive than her visual art. For nearly three decades now, she has split her time working as an artist, a critic, an editor, and a curator. After showing at 303 Gallery in the 1980s, alongside such artists as Richard Prince, Liz Lamer, and Thomas Ruff, the economic recession led Doran to take a break from making art--a hiatus that, with a few exceptions, ended up lasting twenty-plus years. However, her visual work was rediscovered several years ago by gallerists Benjamin Tischer and Risa Needleman of the upstart New York City gallery Invisible Exports, and in 2014 they showed Doran's sculptures for the first time since they were on view in the 1990s. The exhibition garnered a great deal of reception and critical praise, helping introduce her prescient work to a new generation of artists interested in appropriation, image production, and the materiality of photographs. Now Doran is back to making work regularly. Her second show with the gallery, Analogs, was on view January 6-February 12 of this year, and coincided with the 11th White Columns Annual, which she curated--both exhibitions received more positive reviews. In February, Doran sat down with me in Brooklyn to talk about her work, the hiatus she took from making visual art, and the many artworld hats she's worn since. TAYLOR DAFOE: Let's start with your early work from the 1980s. At that time, how much did you know about the work of the Pictures artists, who were also appropriating found images? ANNE DORAN: I moved to New York City on the advice of Martha Wilson, who had seen my senior show at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, DC. I was working at a place called d.c. space, which was a restaurant and jazz venue that also occasionally hosted performance art. Howard Halle, an old friend and one of my mentors, was a partner in the club and scheduled the art performances. He brought people like Martha, Vito Acconci, Laurie Anderson, and Robert Longo down from New York. I was living upstairs, and I'd put people up. I remember I once had the entire World Saxophone Quartet crashed out in my apartment. So I already knew some people. I moved to Brooklyn in 1979, in a snowstorm. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A friend and fellow artist, Gretchen Bender, had moved to New York City a bit earlier, and through her I got to know some of the Pictures Generation artists early on. Their work really excited me. I hadn't realized that you could use found images as your own. But, like Gretchen, I was part of a slightly younger generation that was working with multiple images rather than a single image. I was trying to put them together in ways that resonated personally or politically. By the late '80s, I was doing fairly well with my art. I was showing at 303 Gallery, which had moved to SoHo by then. But in 1987 the stock market crashed and the art market with it, and within a couple of years I, like many other artists, was out of a job. At that moment, I was offered a position as an associate art editor at Grand Street magazine, which the curator Walter Hopps had persuaded Jean Stein, the author of Edie: American Girl (1994), to purchase. She bought it in 1990 from Ben Sonnenberg, who had started it as a strictly literary journal in 1981. Walter's idea was that it should become a literary and art magazine modeled on publications like View. I'd known Walter since my Washington days, when he was working at the Smithsonian. We met when he did his 36 Hours show at the Museum of Temporary Art in DC, to which I lent a piece. …