{"id":22017,"date":"2013-07-07T10:00:28","date_gmt":"2013-07-07T16:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=22017"},"modified":"2020-08-01T17:54:08","modified_gmt":"2020-08-01T23:54:08","slug":"david-ruhlman-artist-profile","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/david-ruhlman-artist-profile\/","title":{"rendered":"The Personal Mythic Vernacular of David Ruhlman"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"David<\/a>

Utah artist David Ruhlman at his Salt Lake City studio. Photo by Robert Swift-Rodriguez.<\/p><\/div>\n

In the center of David Ruhlman\u2019s UMOCA exhibition, standing like an altar, there is an ancient card table. The black material of the table is rubbed off around the edges, with the old plywood substructure showing through at the corners and in patches across the surface. Painted across all this is a large ram\u2019s head. Curling horns, tender little mouth, thick nappy wool, black eyes staring at you. The piece is called \u201cThe Ram.\u201d The same ram is repeated in several of the other pieces in the show. \u201cThe ram, entity, in my mind was this, I wouldn\u2019t say deity, but this\u00a0thing<\/em>\u00a0that was in charge of the event,\u201d David Ruhlman tells me as we stand amongst his paintings. By \u201cevent\u201d he means apocalypse, and the paintings in the show,\u00a0A History of the Hidden World,<\/em>\u00a0feature several apocalypses, as well as the beginning of the world, some creative mis-starts in the early world, and an ode to Edvard Munch, among other things.<\/p>\n

Filled with Ruhlman\u2019s work, UMOCA\u2019S Locals Only gallery takes on an almost strange sacred feeling; as if it is filled with holy iconography from a slightly different\u2014weirder\u2014culture in a slightly different time. The canon of figures, creatures, and objects Ruhlman uses repeat, reverse, and then show up again in other paintings, creating the feeling of a distinct mythic world. In addition to the ram\u2019s heads, there are women in orange dresses, viscera, birds, children, upside-down birds, women in blue dresses, pea-pods, finless fish, the crucified Jesus with a stag\u2019s head, two-headed turtles, conjoined twins, a chair, upside-down crucified Jesus with a child\u2019s body for a head, conjoined rabbits, three-legged foxes. Birds. And the reverse of all that.<\/p>\n

The paintings are mainly gouache on panel, though the panel is often covered in other material: sometimes old book pages, brown bag, or newspaper that is then given multiple washes of paint. The painted images are laid out more like diagrams than landscapes or portraits, with a flatness that is a satisfying contrast against the materiality of the background texture. The diagrams have a cryptic, somewhat familiar but also opaque sort of feeling, as if you should be able to read them, but just can\u2019t quite. As if they were a visual form of writing\u2014 or as if they were formally structured poems written in a new form of hieroglyphs. Or hieroglyphic word puzzles. And while it\u2019s not at all necessary to understand the stories behind the works to enjoy them, it turns out that it\u2019s great fun to have their creator explain them to you.<\/p>\n

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To explain \u201cThe Ram,\u201d and what the symbol of the ram means in his work, Ruhlman leads me to another painting on the wall to the right called \u201cThe World is a Secret Knot.\u201d It\u2019s the piece in which the ram first appears in in David\u2019s work, suddenly, as the harbinger of the apocalypse.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo I was reading a book on Artaud, Antonin Artaud,\u201d Ruhlman says. \u201cWho who was a French playwright, slash actor, slash madman, slash artist. Really interesting guy,\u201d he says, \u201cwho was one of the first westerners who went to Mexico to do, well, drugs. Very hallucinogenic drugs.\u201d That was in the 1930s. \u201cAnd while he was down there,\u201d Ruhlman continues, \u201che had this vision, and he prophesied that the world would come to an end on November 7, 1937.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then one day as David was walking through Salt Lake with the biography fresh in his mind, he imagined what it would look like to see Artaud\u2019s 1937 apocalypse unfold. \u201cIt would be this kind of flash,\u201d Ruhlman says. \u201cThis opening up in history from the very beginning to the very end.\u201d And in Ruhlman\u2019s vision of Artaud\u2019s vision, there\u2019s a ram there, in the sky, overseeing the whole ordeal. \u201cThe ram\u2019s kind of the organizer, or the entity that would summon everything.\u201d Summon the end, but the beginning as well. That flash became the outline for \u201cThe World is a Secret Knot.\u201d In addition to the ram, Ruhlman has painted a version of Albrecht D\u00fcrer\u2019s Adam and Eve as symbols of the beginning of history. \u201cAnd you have war,\u201d Ruhlman says, pointing at a WW1 fighter plane, \u201cand death and birth,\u201d pointing at legs spilling viscera, and then a fetus suspended below a tree trunk, \u201cand the skyline here.\u201d The skyline is a sweet, stylized, vaguely Scandinavian, almost fairytale looking village.<\/p>\n

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In the initial flash in which he envisioned the piece, he knew there would be the ram, and the row of houses making up the skyline underneath. \u201cA lot of times, how I work, is I\u2019ll kind of\u00a0see<\/em>\u00a0it,\u201d Ruhlman says. The elements of the piece that he didn\u2019t see in the initial vision, he discovered as he went along, adding images that felt right to flesh out the narrative of the piece.<\/p>\n

While \u201cThe Earth is a Secret Knot\u201d is the first place the ram appeared, and represents a universal sort of apocalypse, one that\u2019s the end of history, in other pieces the ram presides over more personal apocalypses. \u201cWhen I say apocalypse,\u201d David says, \u201cI don\u2019t mean like \u2018apocalypse.\u2019\u201d He says that second \u201capocalypse\u201d in a gloomy, whiney voice, \u201cbut this ending, or this transformation.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Ruhlman has a quiet, thoughtful demeanor. He is slim, a runner, over six feet tall, with large blue eyes. He is sensitive and inward but with a sharp, unexpected wit. His house is filled with books on artists. His house is also filled with his art: he\u2019s a steady and prolific artist. He is deeply serious about art, and there is a feeling about him as if he comes from a slightly different world. Or, rather, that he is a very active member of a parallel culture where the forgotten geniuses and artists are superstars, and the forgotten or unnoticed subcultures of this and other eras are the mainstream. Talking with him, I get the feeling that his sense of wonder is very much intact. Wonder, as well as a somewhat twisted sense of delight in the world. But twisted in a darling kind of way. Like, at one point in our conversation, as he\u2019s describing the ho-hum nature of one of his paintings he says, \u201cthere\u2019s nothing really that odd about it. It\u2019s pretty straight up: a body, a tree, you know, little innards, and things like that.\u201d<\/p>\n

After \u201cThe Earth is a Secret Knot\u201d Ruhlman leads me to another piece in the show, an earlier one\u2014\u201cThe Left Hand of Edvard Munch is the Right Hand of God\u201d\u2014which was inspired by a biography of Munch. \u201cIt just hit a nerve for me,\u201d he says. He was drawn to Munch\u2019s obsessions with sex, death, and religion. \u201cI wanted to do kind of an ode to him\u2026 and this is somewhat him, and somewhat me.\u201d The piece uses images from the Ruhlman alphabet, but then incorporates images from Munch\u2019s life, as well.<\/p>\n

David tells me the Munch piece was his \u201cfirst mirroring kind of thing.\u201d Which has since become an important part of his work. \u201cI was always interested in anagrams,\u201d Ruhlman says.\u00a0 So the puzzle he gave himself for the Munch painting was to create some preliminary images and then photocopy them. \u201cThen,\u201d he continues, \u201cI cut out all the images, and used the same images, but put them in a different way, and so the meaning would then change because of the placement.\u201d \u00a0For example: \u201cyou would have this Christ image, with this naked woman coming out of his head \u2013 which is strange,\u201d he admits, laughing. \u201cOr the Christ with the stag head would now be with\u00a0her<\/em>.\u201d And listening to him talk about making the work, there is that familiar giddy absorption of play. He says that the arrangement of the work all goes back to play, and goes back to his very early love of surrealists, who were very much about play. He loved Salvador Dali when he was 13, and still he cites Max Ernst a major influence. \u201cAnd the surrealists did a lot of the word games,\u201d he says, \u201clike the exquisite corpses, and scrambling of\u2014or just re-ordering of\u2014placement or of narrative.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The early love of Dali and the surrealists was a part of a larger love of odd cultural artifacts that arose out of a close creative collaboration\/friendship\/competition David had with his younger brother, Mathieu Ruhlman. There were five kids, total, in their family, with David squarely in the middle. They moved around a lot. David was born in Germany, but by the time he was 17 he\u2019d lived in Maryland, Colorado\u2014twice, Kansas\u2014twice, Pennsylvania\u2014twice, California, then Texas for awhile, and finally Utah. His dad was in the army.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were a big influence on each other,\u201d David says of his brother (who is now a composer). They used to bring each other odd things they\u2019d find: album covers, songs, and films. The more peculiar the better. Through all those different states and schools, the two of them would hole up in whatever house they were living in at the time, \u201clistening to crazy music, and doing strange paintings and drawings,\u201d he says. David says there was a kind of one-upmanship with finding things that would blow the other\u2019s mind: the warts of pop culture, and alternate branches and earlier dead-ends of cultural evolution.<\/p>\n

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Later, as art became a serious pursuit, he found kindred spirits in artists who had come before. He has a mutable trinity of favorites who he has studied deeply and who inspire his own practice. All three of them, he says, have a little bit of the dark humor he likes, as well as an interest in color and play. \u201cI would say Jean Dubuffet, for me is probably the number one, where he had a lot of styles, and materiality,\u201d Ruhlman says. And then there\u2019s Paul Klee, for the color and play, and also the versatility of his work. The third, it\u2019s hard to tell, is either Wallace Berman, Joseph Beuys, or Dieter Roth. Max Ernst is important, but is more like the grandfather of his influences, rather than part of the current trinity. As Ruhlman talks about his favorite artists, he speaks faster, almost getting a little breathless. He speaks of assemblage, activating materials, play, adventure, and materiality of the work.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a quote by Jean Dubuffet that David Ruhlman particularly loves. \u201cIt\u2019s a little bit of a mis-translation,\u201d he says, but it goes: \u201c\u2019Art should frighten you a little, and make you laugh a little. Anything but bore you. Art has no right to be boring.\u2019 I would hope that you would not be bored by it,” Ruhlman says, “and make your own narrative, or your own story.\u201d<\/p>\n