LA Weekly: Carroll Dunham at Blum & Poe

June 14, 2017

Catherine Wagley

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5 Art Shows to See in L.A. This Week
By: Catherine Wagley

Wrestling in the wilderness
Two long-haired, nearly identical naked men wrestle in Carroll Dunham’s The Golden Age drawings, on view at Blum & Poe. They’re in a mostly empty landscape, underneath a cartoonish tree, often with a bemused, dark-haired dog looking on. In one drawing, they grab at each other's faces while the dog howls. In another, one man picks up the other with unnatural ease and shoves him head-first into the tree’s trunk — in this drawing, the dog appears confounded. There’s something biblically epic about this wrestling; it conjures that Old Testament story in which Jacob wrestles with an angel. At the same time, their aggression mostly seems pointless. Perhaps it’s the only thing two contentious brothers who have been stranded in the wilderness can think to do with themselves.

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