Dani Tull

I.D. Magazine – Spring 2011

Text by William Oliver

California born, bred, and influenced Dani Tull continues a lineage of bohemian, alt-lifestyle and Psychedelia inspired artists that have emerged from the Golden State. While Tull may be in part referencing an era of radical, yet perhaps naïve, possibility with his fantasy driven art, he brings it sharply up to date with a subtle and subversive take on modern American society.

Living in Los Angeles for the last twenty years, Tull appeared firmly on the city's left of center art scene at the beginning of the 1990s with numerous exhibitions across L.A and California. Starting out producing mainly illustrative pieces, focusing on iconography from America's pop culture heritage that somehow feel like a veiled comment on the country's social values, it was these early works that jettisoned Tull's career. His first solo exhibition featured an extended portfolio of 'clown' paintings. “For me, there seemed to be level of psychic connectivity and an acidic mysticism between the clown image and the physical properties of oil paint” he explains, “I liked the challenge of redeeming the painted clown image”.

Due to a family background that included his pre-beat bohemian photographer granddad, Sam Cherry, and influential beat poet uncle, Neeli Cherkovski, and his own alt-output, Tull quickly became an integral part of the indie Californian scene. “When I was a kid family friends included the writer Charles Bukowski amongst others, I’ve always been around artists and individualists,” he says. “I think any artist is a continuation of a crucial lineage, and this is an important time to be an artist because so much is missing from the current state of our civilization”.

During the 90s Dani's prominence continued, showing at numerous cutting edge galleries including Blum & Poe and Jessica Fredericks, he was invited to install an exhibition as part of Lollapalooza and appeared as the only straight male artist featured in Marsha Tucker's infamous post-feminist Bad Girls exhibition at the New Museum, New York.

While a stellar career loomed, at the end of the 90s, in a typically laid back Cali style, Dani removed himself from the art world to focus on making music. After fronting bands including Boygeorgemichaeljacksonbrowne and playing guitar in Eric Avery’s post Jane’s Addiction project, Polarbear, for almost ten years, Tull freely slipped back to visual art full-time. Given his background it seems only appropriate that artist, photographer and designer Hedi Slimane, who has an intrinsic interest in various music scenes, would appreciate Tull. Introduced to the artists' work while visiting Tull's friend and central alt Californian figure Jim Shaw's studio, Slimane invited Tull to be a part of his forthcoming California Dreamin – Myths and legends of Los Angeles group exhibition at Almine Rech Gallery, Paris. The show includes pieces by John Baldessari, Dennis Hopper, Mike Kelley, Raymond Pettibon, Ed Ruscha, Sterling Ruby, and Aaron Young, highlighting the work of a generation influenced by the area's optimism and informed by its counter culture heritage.

Tull describes being an artist in Los Angeles to being “on your own island, with the other islands just close enough to visit but far enough away to maintain the enterprise of your own islands cultural affairs department”.

He see's the physical distance between people and places as contributing to the actual work he produces. “There is a lot of space between us here, and plenty between the galleries and museums. That space is not a vacuum, it’s purposeful, meaningful and plays on the psyche,” he says.

Taking a step back and looking at Tull's work, you can clearly see the influence this distance, and subsequent isolation, has had. The time devoted to exploring his own thought processes and narratives is obvious in his concepts, which often create worlds within worlds. Tull's work visually tells a highly constructed story that is overlaid with what he sees around him, “Fantasy lays just under the surface of our own reality,” he says.

This idea of invented reality is perhaps best seen in Tull's The Subterranean River Caverns of Los Angeles. The body of work chronicles his investigations into a secret network of caverns supposedly hidden under northeast Los Angeles. As part of the project Tull created maps to these imaginary sites. Many people believed these maps were real and dedicated time to looking for the 'portals' marked with an X. Although the resulting hunts were originally not conceived of by Tull, they are an interesting and fitting real world by-product of his constructed mythology.

It was in fact the concept of this LA mythology that led Slimane to commission Tull for his i-D cover portrait, which, in turn, Tull felt gelled with his personal ideology. “I appreciate Hedi's willingness to let me draw his portrait for a magazine that typically features a high-fashion oriented photo for its cover. There’s a nice irony to that. There seems to be a flow and freedom to his creative energy that is both natural and deliberate”.

With a lifestyle as involved in the artistic and creative as Dani Tull's, he is a character that defiantly sums up the idea of 'living with art'. An artist dedicated to continuously remoulding their life and output to fit ever evolving concepts and ideas. Tull is not constrained by one particular medium and his work both draws on the heritage of a 'scene' that has gone before, while still clearly referencing a knowledgable and sharp evaluation of the contemporary world around him.