Wheels Within Wheels:
Dave Lane’s Material World and the Life of the Spirit
by Renny Pritikin

…in Eden: which
Wheel within Wheel in freedom revolve in harmony & peace
--William Blake, Jerusalem

California’s water is managed through a complex system of dams, canals and policies that manipulate its flow around geographic and political obstacles. Dave Lane’s day job is working with that system. Such a complex and vast scheme is an earthbound parallel to a celestial mechanics in which matter is distributed through the universe in a flowing, spinning and evolving spew of light, energy and mass. William Parsons’s rendering of the Whirlpool Galaxy in 1845—likely the inspiration for Van Gogh’s Starry Night, half a century later—captures that liquid movement of energy through space that is both scientifically accurate and spiritually satisfying. Out in Space, Lane’s exhibition for the Nelson Gallery, represents the artist’s synthesis of Blake’s mystical wheels within wheels, and Enlightenment science.

Lane reminds us that there is no time in space; time is a human convenience. Mass is what determines the relationships among objects, and thus shapes space, (and time). Using very large and heavy found steel industrial objects, Lane reconfigures them into metaphoric totems for planetary and astrophysical forces and the objects on which they act.

The steel forms that Lane uses should be understood as Kantian, earthly substitutes for magnificent, incomprehensible, invisible cosmic forces that act on planets and stars and our bodies. Out in Space has a cosmology that is mythical: planets are carried through space by these invisible powers; Lane makes these forces visible as tractor-tricycles on which the planets ride. It is also literary and narrative: phenomena occur as a result of the family dynamics of anthropomorphized planets and stars. William Blake is known as the consummate visionary artist who chose to see celestial causality in terms of emotion and spirit, and rejected the mechanics of Newton. For Newton the universe of things is compelled in machine-like style by cold and indifferent forces, (like industrial revolution factories). This was anathema to Blake, who saw “divine spirit” behind everything. Dave Lane, a scientist and an artist, does not see the need to choose between science and spirit. He can embrace science’s version of the cosmos; it is so spooky and strange it allows plenty of room for mystification. Both matter and spirit are part of a wonderful machine and alive with myth and poetry. For Lane, planets and stars are not merely compelled; they are fulfilling a kind of employment, a job of work.

Lane shares an attribute of fellow Northern Californian sculptor Richard Serra—they both love the power of steel in enormous chunks. While Serra is concerned with how his torqued forms affect the psychology of spatial perception, Lane is interested in how the forms of large-scale manufacture can be twisted to recreate a mythopoetic psychological space. Lane also participates in the artistic practice of reusing found material, like the late California artist Ed Kienholz, or San Francisco’s Mark Pauline of Survival Research Laboratories. They tacitly evoke the human history embodied in used objects, which history constitutes a subtext for whatever subject matter their art addresses.

Lane’s work is ebullient and excessive. It offers itself up to us, almost gushes, obsessively communicative, generous almost to a fault. Yet the texts (including the objects-as-texts) are never neatly resolved; the installation resists any simple this-means-that narrative resolution. The viewer is engulfed in a maelstrom of objects large and small, lights, framed works, boxed works, and more. Though his drawings are done digitally, Lane’s essentially an old-school manual worker. He uses his hands and thinks of himself as partaking in the tradition of those laborers who work with concrete, and steel, and wood, as do many Northern Californian sculptors, notably David Ireland.

Dave Lane is one of several artists—I think of the architect/painter Paul Laffoley for instance—who have elaborated personal systems for organizing the spiritual, somatic and material worlds on a large scale. What is offered to the viewer is a belief that there is more profundity to the world than is available to our senses, or the tools that extend our senses, or our reasoning alone. What is offered is a synthesis of the three, and a sincere attempt to be fully human by inhaling and exhaling the vastness of existence.

Image: Grandma Planet

A Trip to the Outside
By Tessa DeCarlo

Years ago, when I first started writing about outsider art, I mentioned the term to someone who didn’t happen to be an art world insider. She looked puzzled and asked, “Outside art…you mean art that’s shown outdoors?”

By that definition, Dave Lane is indisputably an outsider artist. Much of his work originates out of doors, in his backyard studio, and many pieces are too big to be shown comfortably anywhere else. Moreover, his creations explore the vast, human-dwarfing world out beyond the buildings and banalities we erect to protect ourselves from what’s always looming over us—the immensity of time, the endlessness of space, the great outdoors on a literally cosmic scale.

Lane wants to show us the ultimate solace he has found out there where most of us see only terrifying desolation, and warn us of the desolation and terror he sees lurking where most of us look for comfort—family, home, the insides of our own heads, the cozy little worlds we draw tightly around ourselves to keep what we can’t comprehend at bay.

This evangelical aspect of Lane’s work, and the obsessions that drive him to create, point to the reasons he has been likened to an outsider artist. True, Lane himself falls outside the outsider universe by almost every definition. Yet his art and its intentions evoke some of the most moving and unsettling qualities of the outsider idea.

Of course outsider art really doesn’t refer to art out in the open. But what exactly it does mean has long been under dispute, even among specialists in the field. The term was launched in the early 1970s as the English-language equivalent of art brut, Jean Dubuffet’s coinage for the work of the institutionalized insane and the deeply eccentric. People have been arguing ever since about how or whether to use it. Dubuffet’s own definition of art brut was very personal and full of loopholes, and attempts to transpose his idea to the American context and apply it to art by everyone from rural Southern African-Americans to the developmentally disabled to prison inmates quickly ran into a minefield of intellectual, marketing, and political-correctness problems.

Some have tried to replace outsider with more neutral terms, such as self-taught or vernacular. Yet even many indisputably establishment artists are largely self-taught and use vernacular sources and themes, and anyway these antiseptic labels deliberately ignore the deep strangeness that is part of the power of such outsider masterpieces as Henry Darger’s hallucinatory scenes of charging soldiers battling naked children, Adolf Wölfli’s ecstatically dense autobiographical song-maps, and Martin Ramirez’s throbbing vaqueros and madonnas.

The most useful definition of outsider is the one pointed to by the critic Arthur Danto: “art not of the art world.” Just about all artists feel compelled to make art, but outsiders create to grapple with a different set of problems. Most art responds—brilliantly or incompetently, sophisticatedly or crudely—to our culture’s dominant art-historical narrative, whether as a reflection of the story, an effort to move it forward, or a reaction against it. Outsider work can be recognized by its lack of engagement with that narrative, by its more personal, more obsessive focus, by the way art conventions are shoved aside in the artist’s fanatical effort to realize a compelling vision that has little to do with art per se. As a result, outsider work’s intention, look, and spirit stand well outside what we’re likely to find in most galleries, art schools, or museums.

For those who define outsider artists via their biographies, rather than their work, Dave Lane emphatically does not qualify. He’s a college graduate who lives in a comfortable house and has held down a demanding job for more than a quarter century. He has studied art in depth, in both academic and informal settings, and is well versed in the practice and thinking of other contemporary artists. This is a portrait of an art insider, not the unhinged recluse the words outsider artist typically connote.

Lane’s art, however, thrums with otherness. His giant steel constructions look like nothing but themselves, with their ominous rollers and sharp prongs, their artful near-symmetry and neo-Victorian furbelows, their ponderous lightness, their air of mysterious but urgent purpose. It’s all too clear that aesthetics are not the primary motivation for his text-filled thought-maps, dense tangles of mentation-made-visible, records of ideas tying themselves into fantastical crochet.

The point is not merely that Lane’s work is highly original, but that its originality flows from Lane’s burning need to trumpet a message he can find no other way of conveying. Perhaps calling Lane a visionary artist—yet another term sometimes treated as a synonym for outsider—is the best way to describe his undertaking.

Like outsider master Howard Finster, who saw his art as a vehicle for spreading visions of God’s word, Lane is a proselytizer, albeit one whose message is considerably less familiar. His works, large and small, all have a primarily heuristic function: they seek to articulate what Lane’s visions have revealed to him about the nature of the mind and the world.

Lane grew up in rural California, east of Modesto, and spent much of his time on his family’s ranch outside of Tuolumne. As a child he was an avid model builder, making every model kit he could get his hands on. It was also in childhood that he first sought to manage troubling dreams by recreating them with paper, pen, and cardboard. When he was about ten years old he dreamt about giant bird heads that were also locomotive-like mechanisms. Later he tried to recreate these “bird machines” with old boxes and a toy wagon, to the bemusement of his neighbors. This was perhaps his first experience with the difficulty of explaining what his creations were about.

He attended college first in Modesto and then at Cal State Fresno. Putting aside his youthful desire to be a writer, he majored in engineering in the interest of future employability. He maintained his model-making hobby, abandoning commercially produced kits for “scratch building” of model boats. When he again began having frightening dreams, he sought relief from the anxiety they provoked by drawing them on paper and sculpting them in bronze.

After graduating he moved to Sacramento and was hired as a map maker by a state agency for which he has worked ever since. But he was plagued by visions, and the “bird machines” and other dreams of his childhood forcefully came back to him. He redoubled his efforts to make models of what he’d seen. His earlier small bronzes led to increasingly ambitious pieces in wood and then steel. Through Sacramento State’s Open University extension program, Lane learned welding and other techniques, then refined and elaborated them through his own intense practice, building ever larger, more technically challenging pieces.

He also moved far beyond simply recreating his dreams, instead seeking to understand and elaborate them in scientific, artistic, and philosophical contexts, letting them lead him into a never-ending exploration of the process of exploration. He has seized on metaphors of outer space—of interplanetary travel, of aliens who create and destroy planets, of intergalactic civilizations that sow stars like wheat—as a way of investigating our place in the world, the nature of time, and the purpose of art. Casting himself as a kind of mad scientist, he tinkers with a magical device that is his own brain, observing its limits, experimenting with ever more complicated art-machines that push consciousness in previously unimagined directions.

He began entering his sculptures in the California State Fair’s art show in 1996, and has appeared there every year since. Many thousands more people visit the state fair, he has pointed out, than ever enter a typical gallery. Although his sculptures have repeatedly won recognition at the fair, including two Best of Show awards, he has never sold his work and has rarely exhibited elsewhere. He estimates that his large sculptures cost him an average of $8,000 apiece to make.

In his thought-maps and in the texts that are a feature of many of his other works, in his statements about individual pieces, in his voluminous writings, and in conversation, Lane overflows with the desire to tell “what all these things are about,” “these things” being not only his work but his life, his ideas, perhaps the whole world as it exists for him. He explains one analogy with another, follows one digression breathlessly into the next, nests one metaphor inside another like Russian dolls that range from infinitely small to big enough to contain the whole universe. For him it is not enough that all this has led to the work he has made; he passionately wants the rest of us to see, in the steel colossi and paper and paint before us, the full measure of the “all this” from which his art arises. He knows this is impossible, but he cannot bear to give up. He is endlessly frustrated by this and perhaps thereby endlessly inspired.

At the same time, Lane’s urge to communicate struggles with an equally strong urge to conceal. His elegant Keys pieces are proclaimed to embody a secret that the artist will neither write nor speak about. His Family Secrets series include paintings whose content is deliberately obscured and creatures with multiple eyes that are unwilling to articulate what they see. Even when Lane tries to communicate what he’s up to, his impassioned explanations resist clarity at every turn; pursuing his meaning is like chasing a fox that keeps disappearing into thickets of story and digression. His thought-maps lay bare what’s on his mind but in tiny writing that curves around the page and doubles back on itself; to decipher them a reader has to be nearly as obsessed as the artist himself.

This primal tension between revelation and secrecy is one reason that, despite Lane’s Christian faith and stoic acceptance of humankind’s humble place in the universe, his work radiates a profound anxiety about loss. In everything from his use of rescued farm equipment and discarded industrial steel to his preoccupation with the recycling of planets, Lane expresses a yearning to recapture what time takes away, to preserve and reuse as a way of pushing back oblivion. He seeks to preserve his visions, too, in his art and his archives: amid all the collections that crowd his house—of globes, antique machine parts, art books—perhaps the biggest collection of all is his years-long, day-to-day record of his own thoughts and activities, entombed in dozens of thick white binders.

He is haunted by the prospect of nonexistence—the earth’s, his own. The more he diligently populates his world with ever bigger and more elaborate creations, the more painful is his recognition that in time both he and they must inevitably disappear. His maps and his family genealogies of planets seek to impose order on disorderly thoughts and feelings, but the ordering system itself keeps elaborating into incoherence. His towering, rusting space machines devour worlds as well as create them; they’re as terrifying as they are beautiful. His ranks of giant keys proclaim the impossibility of unlocking the shackles that bind our hearts.

There is so much Lane wants to tell us, so much he needs to show us, but in the end all we are left with are the gorgeous, heartbroken, angry, jubilant things he has made. That is both a tragedy and a triumph. The tragedy lies in the work’s qualities of outsiderness—the urgency of its message, the impossibility of its mission. The triumph is the work itself, whose richness of potential meaning—formal, emotional, scientific, religious, psychological, political, philosophical—far exceeds even the artist’s maddest ambitions.

Image: The Illusion of Gravity

I mostly wanted you to know
by Dave Lane

I thought I would try to tell you about some things I’ve been working on over the years, some things that may help you understand what all these things are about.

A Little Background: I grew up with a pretty strong background in science. My mom and dad were the first of their families to graduate from college; he was a science teacher, and she was a nurse. I ended up with a Bachelors in science, and most of my working life has been engineering-related. But parallel to that, my stronger inclinations were to make things. It was convenient to call these things “art” because more things were possible and less explanation was required. Along the line I encountered some really great teachers: Urban Bernardo, Steve Kaltenbach, and especially Richard Press, who is an art book dealer. I owe Richard a lot. Richard is the sort of person I could really talk to about these things and he helped me sort out this complex and usually confusing art world. As for myself, I guess you could say that I was always having these “visions”… hearing things, seeing things, and art became my way of working things out. Otherwise, I guess they would have called me an inventor of useless gadgets. Art is what I use to identify my life. But there’s more to art than life. I guess otherwise they would just say I’m crazy and lock me up. As far as I’m concerned, there is nothing unusual or special about me. I’ve tried to be a productive citizen, and not bother people with my artwork, to some degree. But, that’s where I draw the line. You should know that most of the folks I hang around with don’t know much about art and haven’t had the opportunities I’ve had. So, in a way, I guess I’ve had to make some things accessible to them, while at the same time, not compromising my visions.

Is it Art or Not?: I’ve never been really sure about what I was doing, in terms of having to explain things to other people. When I’m alone these things take care of themselves. I think making art is incredibly selfish and the experience of making art is very isolating. This nagging sense of doubt has led me to find ways of living with it. This probably spills over to those around me. A couple years ago, Renny asked me to install a piece at the Davis Train Station. One of the Davis Art Commission members came up to me and said he wasn’t sure this thing was art. I told him I wasn’t sure myself! I wish it were otherwise, but I have to admit that things people say have an effect on me. I did get asked once if I would still make art if I were the last person on earth. The answer is no. On some level the things are for other people, even if I have trouble communicating. Sometimes it gets really bad for me and I feel as if I’m nearly helpless. So then, I have to figure out how to work this sense of helplessness into my work in such a way that I can go on. And so, this has become somewhat normal for me, and has developed into a sort-of rhythm over the years. In 1998 I met Chris Daubert, and was offered a show at Sacramento City College. Chris is an artist in his own right, and seems to understand what I am doing, even when I’m uncertain. We had started talking and these conversations woke up something in my mind having to do with context. This was when I started trying to write about it. These writings first took the form of explorations of relationships between the artist and the viewer. These continued with an exploration of value systems, around 2003, and attempted to articulate contrasting values between business, consumer, and artistic interests. I’ve recently accepted that we all simply operate in different modes, often living our lives while being unconscious. My hope is still to make art that brings these things out in the open.

Heavy Metal and Tiny Maps: I wanted to tell you that for much of my life, these things I’m describing run on parallel tracks. So when I describe them with words, they necessarily appear to be linear. This is a limitation with language. All the other things I work with operate kind-of simultaneously, so I hope it is not too confusing. In terms of context, some of these big steel things you see are like vehicles I use to conduct explorations, and the maps are the records of what I find. This is a bit simplistic. I was interested in space – not just outer space, but “space” in terms of how an object occupies a volume, and how other objects relate to each other. Outer space is kind-of like the ultimate sculptor’s medium. Space also meant that anything was possible. I guess if I was being really honest, I’d tell you that these big things were built to be intimidating. I thought this was necessary because when I say things, nobody believes me. I think almost all our communication revolves around keeping secrets and lying. The alternative is simply tell people the truth, and I guess that’s what this art is for. Art can bring hidden things to the surface, or die trying.

A Word about the Fair: For the most part, the California State Fair is where I show my work. A lot of people don’t like the art show at the fair, but there is something special about that show: it gives the viewer the same opportunity as a first-year art student. They have to make an important decision about what they like or don’t like. And that puts them where they have to think. I always advise people not to go by preferences, because your likes and dislikes have a way of holding you back. I believe in the progress of art, that art should always push the boundary of what’s possible, tear away at the unknown, and it is hoped, make breakthroughs. I also like showing at the fair because they don’t have any weight limits.

Exploring Space: I guess a lot of artists think of themselves as being “aliens” in their own culture (such as it is). My wife Lisa told me about a short story called, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, by Dostoyevsky. I took part of this story, and switched things around to pose a question: What would it be like if an alien fell out of the sky onto the Earth? People might ask him what it’s like where he comes from, but his answer is incomprehensible. So he looks around and takes some things that are familiar to people who live here, like old tractors, and he uses them to describe things that are like back home. So, if he came from a culture that built and moved their own planets, then he might get a tractor and a ball and move it around. It’s not exactly like how it is, but the concept is basically the same. He might even make a whole system of things, then people can see how all the parts work together. And it might have an effect on how people think about things.

The Limits of the Brain: One might reach some unhappy conclusions if they were to keep exploring, that there are some limitations to how well we can perceive things. Our machines tend to run down, and remind people of their own mortality. I wanted to tell people about the nature of exploring. You might make some descriptions, then as you move into unknown territory these descriptions are somewhat based on what you already know. You run into these gaps between what you see and what others can comprehend. Even “knowing” something brings additional limitations. Smarter people than me must have realized when we see things in terms of duality, that we are really looking in a mirror, because at a physiological level our brain is basically bipolar, and necessarily sees things in terms of duality. So, a big part of my process is to try and overcome the limitations of the brain, sort of like “thinking outside the brain.” I’ve also said that the brain is my own worst enemy, even though I need it to think with! An alternative to thinking with “either-or’s” or “only-isms” is to try and think in terms of “all at the same time.” It’s tough. It’s sort-of like trying to see the big picture. When I feel like I’ve reached my limit, I look to something mechanical to get outside myself. I made this little girl who acts like a kind-of alter ego. Her task is to wander around inside my brain, and interview these folks who are the metaphorical manifestations of different aspects of personality, thought, or some form of consciousness. While she conducts these explorations, she thinks she’s just living her life.

Some Artistic License with God: Some people have described me as being religious, and although I consider myself to be a Christian, I don’t think I’m a very “good” one. My belief system is a little heretical: God made a man, and as he went about his life, he did things that even God could not understand. So God made himself into a man (Jesus, in my own belief) so he could experience being human, essentially becoming one with His creation. Well, if God made us in imitation of himself as a creative being, then making art is my way of imitating God. This opens up a lot of possibilities. I don’t have much trouble believing in God, but I have trouble believing in art. I might have some leeway, being as I accept that I’m not exactly a perfect creation. So, for me, the way things come out has to be kind-of okay. They don’t have to be perfect. This is my own form of “Abstract Expressionism!!”

You should know that I don’t really think that ideas originate with me. I think I get them from God. It would be really bad if I told people these were “my” ideas. These vision things are really just God’s way of telling me how things are someplace else. My job is just to make some sense of it.

I know I’m only going to live about 30 or 40 more years… tops. My hope is that I will have been able to work these art-things out to a point where my physical self can be removed entirely from the art-process and the work will get along just fine without me.

Alright, that’s it. I mostly wanted you to know about these things.

Image: Grandpa Mosley