The following is an essay written by Glenn Adamson for Doyle’s monograph, published on the occasion of the solo exhibition.
That’s Robert Johnson, singing to us through the foaming hiss of ancient acetate, in his 1937 track “Cross Road Blues.” It is the stuff of legend, this recording—quite literally so, as it has come to occupy a central place in the myth of this pioneering Delta blues guitarist, who supposedly sold his soul to the devil at just such a crossroads in exchange for his musical potency. To listen is to believe: if not in a Mephistophelean pact, then in Johnson himself, a man all too aware of his own humanity, flawed, and heartbroken. And brimful of power, nonetheless.
Blue. It is at once the color of the heavens above and downcast feelings. And also—as in blue collar—the reality of manual labor. Around the time that Johnson had is voice permanently pressed into plastic, quilters like Lutisha Pettway, in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, were fashioning bedcovers from their families’ worn-out work clothes. These extraordinary pieces are to textile what the blues are to music: improvisations in which the very materials of suffering are transcendently recomposed.
Is it possible to see, in Nick Doyle’s work—which is also collaged from denim scraps—a reprise of this deepgrooved history? Even asking the question may seem inappropriate. Doyle’s success has come the new-fashioned way, with the support of numerous prestigious institutions—an MFA at Hunter College, a residency at Skowhegan, a steady stream of exhibitions at Perrotin and other galleries. What does he have in common with marginalized figures like Johnson and Pettway, who faced challenges not easily imagined from any contemporary perspective, much less one couched in a white man’s privilege?
The short answer: America. Official pronouncements to the contrary (—out of many, one— and so on), this country has always been defined by its differences. It’s all too easy for white men—and I include myself—to compartmentalize this self-evident truth, to acknowledge the inequities of race, class, and gender, and then turn blithely away, telling ourselves we can mind our own business. That has never been Doyle’s instinct. He has made it his business to explore his own vexed place in a troubled nation, pursuing an art informed by scholarly whiteness studies and critiques of “toxic masculinity.” One of his particular touchstones is bell hooks’s powerful 2004 feminist manifesto , in which she notes, “It is true that masses of men have not even begun to look at the ways that patriarchy keeps them from knowing themselves, from being in touch with their feelings, from loving.” (1) Just that—to know himself, to be in touch with his feelings, and yes, to love—is what Doyle aims to achieve, even if it is (and he would be the first to say so) only a beginning.
To see how, we can start with his material of choice, which he composes with a painter’s eye and sutures with surgical precision. Denim, despite its French origins (it was first manufactured in Nîmes, hence the name), is the most American of fabrics, worn by actual cowboys, pretend punks, and seemingly every pop icon we’ve ever had, from Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe to Brooke Shields and Beyoncé. Its primary constituents are indigo and cotton, which, not incidentally, were two of the American slave economy’s main cash crops. (The third, tobacco, also features prominently in Doyle’s work.) That this connection has likely not occurred to you before—it didn’t to me, either, until he pointed it out to me—shows just how whitewashed American culture can be. It’s an erasure centuries in the making, which Doyle is trying to fill back in, one scrap at a time.
That is one reason, perhaps, why his work is so much larger than life. It is a simple and effective way to command attention: look at this, don’t pass it by. A disarmingly direct tactic that Doyle came by honestly. As a child of Los Angeles, the city that plays itself, he grew up surrounded by XXL advertising. If he has an art historical precursor, it is the Pop artist James Rosenquist, who painted billboards on the side (he even did some in Times Square), and reflected America back on itself as if in a great big fun-house mirror. Doyle’s works have an even more roadside feeling to them, often alluding to the hallowed ground of the Great American Road Trip. For a recent show in Louisville, titled , he reprised Ed Ruscha’s famous 1966 painting , supersizing the painting’s central motif, adding some droopy bunting, and giving it the deflationary title .
This attitude, mocking yet strangely tender, is also seen in Doyle’s series, to date his most explicit treatment of male identity and its discontents. The elaborate, mechanically activated contrivances were central to his 2022 Perrotin exhibition . The walls were filled with oversized emblems of latent violence, including various hand tools, some of them bound with rope. There was a vase of flowers smashed sideways, called . The themselves feature a recurring character (or rather, a character type), a red-tie-wearing executive who finds himself in predicaments recalling those of Wile E. Coyote. Doyle has variously imagined these men suspended on a stand like a marionette, head in a box; straddling the muzzle of a huge handgun, heads in bags; stuck inside a mailbox, peering out anxiously through the drop slot; and roasted on the spit of a backyard barbecue. This last work, titled , cannot help but prompt thoughts of a certain ex-president. There has been far angrier art aimed in that direction; Rachel Harrison’s hilarious Trump piñatas, made during the 2016 election, spring to mind. But Doyle’s concern is not so much with one arch- sociopath as it is with the psychological state of America’s white men in general. As critic Max Lakin observed at the time, explored “masculinity in its self-pitying stage,” the wounded defensiveness of men who have always assumed authority was theirs by right, and now find themselves unmoored by the dawning realization of their own fraudulence.
This sense of a culture caught at the crossroads reckoning only incompletely with its past, is everywhere in Doyle’s work. His electrical outlets, which ought to be emblems of power, instead stare at us like vacant faces, screws loose in their corners. A wall-mounted urinal—a nod to Duchamp, of course, and to Robert Gober—is called . In the stunning, extremely ironic , the sublime vastness of Monument Valley (scene of many a classic western) is chopped up across the fronts of five Coke machines. A related work confines six glowing orange orbs, worthy of a roll-the-credits sunset, to the doors of coin-operated washing machines. Even his most apparently celebratory images have chilling undercurrents: a disco ball executed in every conceivable tint of azure and indigo, for example, bears the title . (If you wanted to see it as a memorial to the generation lost to AIDS, I wouldn’t disagree.)
Then there’s the old-fashioned typewriter he made in 2020, unfurling a blank sheet of paper. It’s called , but the only one that occurs to me is from : “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy / All work and NO play makes JACa dull boy....”
And yet; and yet. If all that Doyle had to offer was bitter satire or coiled rage, his work would scarcely touch the viewer as it does. Nor would it come close to answering hooks’s call for a “will to change.” When I visited his Brooklyn studio recently, one wall had hundreds of dye samples hanging on it, in all the colors of the rainbow. On the facing wall were the new works he was making from these raw materials: a waffle, looking somewhat like a manhole cover, sporting a single pat of yellow butter and a dribble of syrup like one of Roy Lichtenstein’s cartoon brushstrokes; a monumental acorn executed in all browns with exquisite sensitivity; a jukebox from the era when they had CDs inside them (talk about a transitional object); an ear of “gem corn” in multicolored jewel tones; a pair of riding gloves, with a horse-shaped charm dangling from a string; a rose propped in a glass Coke bottle, based on something Doyle once saw at the Kentucky State Fair.
Two related things struck me about this beguiling array. First, there was the unexpected polychrome—was Doyle no longer playing the blues?— and second, the abundant sense of affection. There was no question in my mind that he did love these images. He’d almost have to, you know, given the skill and time he was lavishing on them. Somehow, he captures the most fleeting effects of transparency and reflectivity, recalling not so much Pop Art as its successor movement, Super-Realism. Not least despite his use of a medium far more recalcitrant than paint. All that technique would be meaningless, though, if it did not capture a broader, deeper, more complicated feeling. Something like the love you have for a parent or sibling who lets you down, but is family nonetheless.
Yes, Doyle’s images are a little bit like that. A little like Lutisha Pettway’s quilt. A little like Robert Johnson’s “Cross Road Blues.” And an awful lot like another song from 1937, this one by Woody Guthrie, one of the first white musicians who dared to mine the blues:
It’s a Depression song, from another time when America knew it had to take a good, long look at itself. We were at the crossroads then, and as Doyle’s work eloquently expresses, we find ourselves there again today.
But as he also shows us, with a poignancy that is almost hard to bear, ain’t none of us alone.
— Glenn Adamson, independent curator and author in New York and London.
(1) bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (New York: Washington Square Press, 2004, xvii.)

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Time:	Mar 6–Apr 27, 2024 (UTC+9) ENDED
Location:	1F, 6-6-9 Roppongi, Minato City, 106-0032

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