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- Drawing Board<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
28 March, 2019<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"\/standpoint\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/dant-new-york-tawk.jpg\" "\\"Feature")
<\/p>\nWhen I meet Adam Dant, it is in the art gallery of an East London antique shop because his Shoreditch studio, a former sweetshop turned minicab office which he has occupied since 1991, is being pulled down. His reaction to the forced move is almost indifference: \u201cIt\u2019s a disturbance, more than a tragedy. You can\u2019t be too sentimental about places like that.\u201d He is surprisingly animated on the topic of local redevelopments, the abrupt transformation of once derelict neighbourhood yards and lorry parks into \u201ca real El Dorado\u201d. He once chose the area for the traditional printers and lithographers dotted along Redchurch Street, but these locals have long since left. If Dant misses anything, it is the sense of community dissolved by pop-up shops and Airbnb, by which endless newcomers leave the streets in eternal transition. Still, it is just one more symptom of a constantly evolving city, and Dant has watched and recorded similar changes closely over the past three decades, using his wry observations to fill a series of themed maps, published last year in Adam Dant\u2019s\u00a0Maps of London and Beyond<\/em>.<\/p>\n
Though his work makes space for change, stylistically Dant inhabits the practices of his historical predecessors as a framework for recording the world around him in ways that are entertaining and lightly edifying. In\u00a0Sloane Square<\/em>, he observes the typically West London landmark over several days, capturing \u201cthe different types of people that might pass your table \u2014 models, fitness enthusiasts, 1970s film directors, dealers\u201d, and cataloguing each inside the border. He is both Hogarth, exposing the city\u2019s street cries, and Bruegel, zooming in and out of lively vignettes that, pieced together, infer grander narratives. Each character is placed in a levelling throng of little people, \u201cnot fashionable in an age where it\u2019s all about the individual\u201d. But Dant is no Dante, and the decentralised entanglement of detailed threads captures \u201cwhat can be delightful in the contemporary world\u201d to uplifting effect.<\/p>\n
As with all Dant\u2019s drawings, the work rewards close inspection. We find that just a brush and bottle of ink is enough to build complex, imagined worlds that resist straightforward, linear reading. It could be a tough sell in a world of ever simpler statements and \u201cinsta-gratification\u201d, but, as Dant points out, \u201cPeople sit through 16 hours of\u00a0Game of Thrones<\/em>. Why can\u2019t they stand in front of a painting for at least ten minutes?\u201d His recourse to the past in the present moment requires the artist to be almost impervious to contemporary tendencies and Dant is suspicious of the conceptual artists who \u201cmake something and then ask their audience to post-rationalise it\u201d. His art is not made for our free interpretation, but projects his own perspective in a manner that is unapologetically diaristic.<\/p>\n
Modus Vivendi<\/em>\u00a0was produced for the Soane Museum in commemoration of the Entente Cordiale of 1814. It fits firmly within a tradition of acerbic cross-Channel caricature, and Dant, who commissioned the painter Jean-Baptiste Marot to draw England as seen by the French, completes the reverse with a slew of stereotypes, including protesters, mime artists, snails and suppositories. As the art world globalises, pulling off ever-greater feats of homogeneity with each flavourless art fair, Dant\u2019s work is steeped with a highly referential, almost anachronistic cultural specificity. Though the work is functionally commemorative, it doubles as satirical commentary. Dant produces almanacs, maps and other documents, but his works remain in the realm of fine art, unbeholden to practical purposes, from which they \u201cveer off, as other imperatives take their place. That\u2019s where it becomes interesting.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 2015, Dant was assigned to be the country\u2019s Official Election Artist, and produced several works that now hang in the parliamentary collection at Portcullis House. With political impartiality a part of the brief, he chose to move his focus off the candidates and onto \u201cthe people, what their expectations where and how they allied themselves with certain individuals\u201d. Imagining an affinity to Goya sketching the Peninsular War, Dant was excited to get \u201cin the thick of it\u201d, inviting chance encounters that led to charmingly anecdotal insights. The above detail from his large drawing\u00a0Government Stable<\/em>\u00a0features several of these \u2014 the impenetrable press scrum within which Nigel Farage was permanently submerged, reimagined here as a sculpture carved in alabaster; a pair of anti-hunting, Labour-supporting Welsh students dressed as foxes and badgers; the conference room chairs found at UKIP\u2019s manifesto launch; and Brian May fronting his Common Decency campaign on the Brighton Pavilion bandstand. Underpinning the inexhaustible visual density is an imagined architectural space built around a central vanishing point, a \u201ctraditional armature\u201d that lends \u201can orthodoxy to the construction of the drawings\u201d.<\/p>\n
As he prepares to sign a lease on a studio in Spitalfields, Dant is entering a new chapter, although in some sense nothing will change. His work pokes fun at cosmopolitan life and the ways in which the past and present jostle and jibe with each other. He\u2019s unlikely to run out of material anytime soon.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"\/standpoint\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/dant-new-york-tawk.jpg\"\/)
<\/a><\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\u201cNew York Tawk\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/standpointmag.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/dant-detail-Government-Stable.jpg\"\/)
<\/a><\/p>\n\t\t\t\tA detail from \u201cGovernment Stable\u201d, drawn by Dant when he was Official Election Artist<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/standpointmag.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/dant-detail-England-France.jpg\"\/)
<\/a><\/p>\n\t\t\t\tA detail from \u201cModus Vivendi\u201d, by Adam Dant and Jean-Baptiste Marot
\n\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/standpointmag.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/Sloane-Square-Litho.jpg\"\/)
<\/a><\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\u201cSloane Square\u201d by Adam Dant<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Prints of Adam Dant\u2019s works are available from TAG Fine Arts. His \u201cMaps of London and Beyond\u201d is published by Batsford Ltd, \u00a330, and \u201cLiving Maps: An Atlas of Cities Personified\u201d by Chronicle, \u00a326.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n
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\n![\"\"](\"\/standpoint\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/lartigue-Pg.32.jpg\"\/)
A boy\u2019s own adventure<\/a>
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\n![\"\"](\"\/standpoint\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/2.-Fidenza-1985-serie-Il-profilo-delle-nuvole-stampa-cromogenica-contact-C-printCollezione-privata-Bergamo.jpg\"\/)
The crowds and the emptiness<\/a>
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\n![\"\"](\"\/standpoint\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/4_The-Bubble.jpg\"\/)
Focusing on the female gaze<\/a><\/p>\nWhat to read next<\/h6>\n
<\/h3>\n
\nA boy\u2019s own adventure<\/a>
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\nThe crowds and the emptiness<\/a>
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