On the occasion of Cathouse Proper's fifth-year anniversary, arts writer and independent curator Sara Nadal-Melsió, led a discussion with artist and founding director David Dixon about the gallery’s anniversary exhibition. The conversation took place at Cathouse Proper on May 19, 2019. DL is pleased to publish the conversation below.
David Dixon: So, here we are. Thank you all
for coming on this beautiful spring day. Basically, this is our
fifth-anniversary conversation about the exhibition that we’re sitting in, “Cathouse
FUNeral in Cathouse Proper: Life to Art to Life,” and also the five-year
history of the space. We have
Sara Nadal-Melsió here with us, who’s going to ask the tough questions. We’re
not really doing much of an introduction as far as bios go, but if you Google Sara
Nadal-Melsió you shall see lots of interesting articles about art and
interviews, some of the people that you’ve written about are Glenn Ligon — I
know that — Los Carpinteros, Allora and Calzadilla, and many others…
Sara Nadal-Melsió: So, the way I
understood this is basically I’ll set up some scenarios so that you can develop
them. It’s going to be very informal. The
first thing is, I’m going to be talking about David as an artist, as a
film-maker and as a curator, without distinguishing between the three very
strictly. I was watching your film “David Dixon is dead” and there’s a scene
that’s slightly comedic, that I like very much, and I thought we might start
with that. In that
scene, the character of the ‘father’ has just received a
head — the character ‘David’’s head — frozen in a cooler, and he’s trying to
figure out where to put it to drive off to Oklahoma to have the skull cleaned
up and bleached for display… (as per ‘David’’s precise instructions)
