“Nancy Dwyer: Hot Mess,” Kunsthalle Winterthur, 2024

“Hot Mess” marks Nancy Dwyer’s first institutional solo exhibition in Europe, which feels remarkably overdue, considering the range and depth of the work on view. Although Dwyer cofounded and ran the exhibition space Hallwalls in Buffalo, New York, in the 1980s, along with Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo, among others, and was included in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s retrospective “The Pictures Generation” in 2009, her practice gradually diverged from that of her now-canonized peers, gravitating instead toward the kind of language-based works on view in Winterthur. The show is divided into two rather distinct parts in the two rooms of the Kunsthalle. The first offers a tight survey of major works from the 1980s until the early 2000s, while the second is dedicated to an entirely new body of work. This way, the show does justice to a long, productive career while avoiding the retrospective narrative of the “older, overlooked, and rediscovered female artist.” Dwyer took a seven-year hiatus from exhibiting before her 2023 show with the young New York gallery Theta, but she has never completely stopped making work. Yet the Winterthur show seems to mark a particularly important moment of resurgence.

“Nancy Dwyer: Hot Mess,” Kunsthalle Winterthur, 2024

Dwyer works across media, but her ultimate material is almost exclusively language. Single words, phrases, or jingles take up fleshy and tangible forms, resonating with the direct and colloquial rhetoric popularized by advertising in the latter half of the 20th century. This appropriation of mass-media communication is probably most directly synthesized in Dwyer’s new works. Eight screen-like boards, mounted on wall-bound TV arms, spell out catchy phrases in colorful typefaces. “Hot Mess,” the title of the show, appears in the grand, golden letters instantly recognizable as the 20th Century Fox logo. A bulgy, deep-blue, spiral-shaped lettering that reads “Comfort Zone” rolls upward like the grin of an opium-high Cheshire cat. The phrase “Pre-approved,” a vapid neologism used to advertise loans, seems to advance linearly, like a beam of light, symbolizing the optimistic promise of progress. Akin to a visual equivalent of onomatopoesis, what these phrases feel like is illustrated by – or illustrates? – the forms they appear in. Dwyer calls them “mini-poems,” and they are all suspiciously sticky, eerily familiar in a way that makes them hard to shake off. Just like commercials, they are manufactured to trigger visceral reactions – libidinal energies, even – in a targeted, individual subject.

In his 2002 documentary The Century of the Self, Adam Curtis traced the crude exploitation of Sigmund Freud’s theories on drive and desire to fuel the postwar economy in the US and, shortly after, the rest of the Western world. The rising interest in psychoanalysis, combined with the escalation of mass media, birthed modern advertising and the new consumer as a collective US-American identity. Dwyer herself briefly worked as a sign maker in the 1980s, and until today, the techniques and strategies of the trade resonate in her work. It seems plausible for a young artist to leverage one’s skills for a money job in the commercial arts. But Dwyer’s story, on a wider scale, also tells of the mass mobilization of the humanities into what we today call the “creative industry,” a vital force in the marriage of democracy and consumerism under the ruling neoliberalism of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Over the past decades, forms of media influence have perhaps become subtler than the overt messaging of the ad-man heyday. But in today’s digital reality, flooded with memes and soundbites that circulate through platforms such as TikTok and Instagram and ultimately influence speech, media engagement has become all the more affective and intimate. Dwyer tunes into the visual and emotional resonance of language beyond pure semantic denotation and skillfully leverages it. Hot Mess and Comfort Zone are prime examples of this, as they strip the eponymous phrases from their commercial uses, exposing how such catchy, hollow expressions infiltrate our lives, even as – or especially because – they become increasingly detached from tangible products.

Nancy Dwyer, “LIE,” 1986

Whereas Adam Curtis’s unambiguous narrative portrays the manipulation by “those in power” of a subjugated mass, Dwyer embraces the inescapable, perhaps intoxicating, dopamine rush of consumer identity. For her, as for many Pictures Generation peers, the dialectic of the powerful and powerless in the “age of the self” is less absolute. [1] Dwyer is quoted in the exhibition text: “Have you ever noticed how we all think that advertising works on everyone but me? Clue: that means it’s working. But it has also made us all experts in its language.” [2] Mere critique can seem futile when advertising itself has become the master of détournement. [3] Rather than resist, Dwyer celebrates the absurdity of this language with humor and full awareness of her own subsumption in it. When language has become so tainted by cliché, or used to predetermined ends, she finds great pleasure in blowing up words until they become strange. These phrases and words are plucked not from specific sources but from the collective imagination, wielding the familiar vernacular of consumerism yet pointedly void of any product. Once emptied of their capitalist payload, the slogans take on a performative quality and reflexively collapse in self-parody.

Dwyer’s wordplay resonates with Dadaist or later-evolving Letterist techniques, where words were regarded as politically potent entities beyond their semantic, predetermined meaning. Founder of Letterism Isidore Isou perceived the language of his day as a tool of propaganda, no longer sufficient to capture the complexity of modern life. “No word is capable of carrying the impulses one wants to send with it. […] Unique feelings are so unique that they can not be popularized,” he claimed, proposing a systematic dismantling of semantic logic to emphasize the raw materiality of language itself. Words were no longer pure signifiers but aesthetic objects in themselves. As sensory forms, they aimed to create “emotions against language, for the pleasure of the tongue.” [4]

Nancy Dwyer, “Good Mood Fool,” 1988

Words, in Isou’s view, transform into visceral experiences – felt, heard, and almost tasted – no longer bound by function. Dwyer’s poems have a similar sensory effect. They render the fabric of everyday life strange, as if mirroring the way language has transformed, and continues to transform in the digital sphere, into performative symbols rather than vehicles of specific meaning. The large-scale painting Good Mood Fool (1988) at the far end of the Kunsthalle’s first room exemplifies this approach. It shows nine colorful rolls of fabric painted in Flashe, a type of vinyl paint typically used for billboards due to its matte and luminous quality, stacked in two neat rows. Dwyer turns the tail end of each cylinder into an O, adding more letters to spell out the titular phrase. Appropriating a found image, she not only subverts the original cheerful message into a satirical take on consumer expectation but embraces the textual, material quality of language in phonetic play.

Dwyer’s sculptures often turn words into three-dimensional objects. An early example is Lie (1986), positioned at the entrance of the Kunsthalle. Three blocks cladded in faux-marble Formica spell out the eponymous word. Both verb and noun, the reading of the work is shaped by the combination of material, which invites sly commentary on a culture of consumption and waste, aspiration and status, or the prioritization of surface over substance in the age of the image. An anatomically similar piece features three large yellow inflated letters placed, slightly lopsidedly, in the center of the room, spelling out “EGO”. Titled Big Ego (1990/2024), Dwyer’s inflatable letters emphasize the literal inflation of self-worth, delivering the backhanded comment with a service-industry-grade smile. Suspended precariously in their own self-importance, they also appear as a playful merger nodding to both Jacques Lacan’s big Other, which he equates with language (and law), and Freud’s ego, the rational part of the psyche, which, according to Freud, mediates between instinctual desires and moral constraints.

“Nancy Dwyer: Hot Mess,” Kunsthalle Winterthur, 2024

The third work of this kind in the show – and three is just enough before it starts to feel repetitive – is a mound of encyclopedias carved into B’s L’s, A’s, and H’s, titled Blah Blah Blah Britannicas (1998). Considering the lack of trust in institutions which has increased from both the right and left in recent years, this piece has ripened particularly sharply. The right-wing strategy of denouncing fixed definitions as “blah blah,” or to dismiss facts as fake news, has become shockingly commonplace in recent years, as feelings over facts dominate the field of advertising but also politics. Dwyer’s manipulation of slogans and hollow phrases reflects a cultural landscape way beyond the realm of consumerism, where words are increasingly divorced from fact or substantive meaning, instead engineered as performative tools for visceral impact. Blah Blah Blah Britannicas can be read as one such jaded response to authority and confronts viewers with a question that divides the left: Can established, democratic structures effectively counter right-wing attacks, or is it in fact time to rethink dysfunctional systems on a more fundamental level? This again resonates strongly with Dada and Letterist strategies, which originated in response to fascistoid propaganda and embraced absurdity when language fails. Isou’s asemantic use of the letter outside the logic of words or sentences emphasized the possibility of language beyond purpose. Not as a retreat from politics, but as a stark rejection of conventional narratives and a reflection of the subsumption of language in capitalist logic. Isou states: “Feelings without words in the dictionary disappear,” [5] emphasizing how our grasp of reality is limited by what can be expressed.

Language and the way it is used determines the parameters of what action is possible. Words are everything, but also not enough. By allowing for ambiguity and experimentation, by playing with words beyond their vernacular use, Dwyer exercises the tension between language as a tool of communication and its use as a means of shaping ideological identity and desire. She has politics, but she’s not a moralist. Working from within the desiring machine and acknowledging art as a tool of societal reproduction, her works on show in Winterthur bathe in the dopamine-driven sugar rush of the attention economy, only without selling us anything – except themselves.

“Nancy Dwyer: Hot Mess,” Kunsthalle Winterthur, September 8–December 1, 2024.

Dara Jochum is a writer based in Berlin and the director of Schiefe Zähne.

Image credit: Courtesy of Kunsthalle Winterthur, photos Cedric Mussano