This diversion [dancing on the tightrope] is only practised by those people who are candidates for great employments, and high favour, at court… When a great office is vacant either by death or disgrace (Which often happens), five or six of those candidates petition the emperor to entertain his Majesty and the court with a dance on the rope, and whoever jumps the highest without falling, succeeds in the office. Very often the chief ministers themselves are commanded to show their skill, and to convince the emperor that they have not lost their faculty. Flimnap, the treasurer, is allowed to cut a caper on the strait rope, at least an inch higher than any other Lord in the whole Empire.
—Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels

The funambuliist (rope-walking) hiring process of the Lilliputians would fit perfectly into the world John Dobbs depicts in “Balancing Acts,” a series of paintings commenting on the current tenuous state of our union, in which inept appointees are awarded medals and plaudits; crony-friendly legislation is disguised with Orwellian euphemism; and a hypocritical leadership clutches at rhetorical straws as its grasp on power weakens daily.

Dobbs was provoked beyond his usual subjective interpretations of the urban scene into satire and provocation, the territory of Swift and, more directly, Goya, whose drawings inspire several of these paintings (Break Up, Look At It This Way, Hand Stand); we seem to have advanced less than we thought. Dobbs sees the circus performer —who inspired in earlier painters either romance, heroic athleticism, or the pathos of the alienated artist— as an apt symbol of our current plight: “Life out of whack. Askew. Distorted.” The irrationality and absurdity of the world is a theme of continuing relevance, as many of the German artists that Dobbs admires —from Durer to Beckmann— attest.

Dobbs’ funambulists, contortionists, wrestlers, and daredevils are, like Swift’s politicians, both timely and eternal archetypes, simultaneously American and universal. They go through their paces in anonymous nakedness, dusted with flour like butoh actors; or, more contemporary, they’re costumed in star-spangled tights like the frantic Uncle Sam/Evel Knievel of He Appears to Have Lost His Balance, or, fitting our current political stalemate, in adversarial red or blue (Is It Worth It?). In several works we leave the circus to examine the racial divide between black and white: in Is It Worth It?two naked warriors on stilts duel with cudgels (a clear borrowing from Goya’s late “black paintings”) while flames lick their feet; At It Again likens the racial rivalry to Cain’s primal fratricide, with a black Abel as victim; Three-Legged Race suggests that if the two racers cooperated instead of ignoring each other they might make escape the sharpshooter’s cross-hairs through which we view them.

John Dobbs, He Appears To Have Lost His Balance, 2004, oil on linen, 20 x 18 in.

Despite their desperate conditions, however, these performers remain symbolic figures or puppets, as unreal as the floppy mannequin in Tossing the Strawman (After Goya). These figures sometimes appear undifferentiated and anonymous, even phantasmal, like bad dreams fading at sunrise.

Dobbs finds more interest in the individual figures in the crowd, who have assembled spontaneously, than in the performers who efface themselves in their professional roles. The crowds retain their specificity and quirky humanity, unlike the robotic entertainers (Spectacle), even while awaiting some mysterious portentous event (Spectators), and even while attacked by a runaway cartoon-character blimp (Mickey’s Mishap) — oh, the humanity! A dog chases its tail; a policeman talks on the phone; figures gesticulate, fidget, bicker and wave.

In Goya the crowds are subhuman mobs; art historian Fred Licht enumerates the “total suspension of plausible activity, blank faces that bespeak mass anonymity, and [the] distinct sense of the irrelevance and meaninglessness of all human relationships.” When Goya’s Spain was restored to Bourbon control after the brutalities of the Napoleonic invasion, many patriotic traditionalists, welcoming back the old tyrants, shouted, “Vivan las cadenas!” Long live our chains! In Dobbs, individuality reposes in the people. We have only to remember how much we have changed since Swift’s and Goya’s times, thanks to the awakening of reason, and demand more than Flimnappian rope-dancing and its modern equivalents.

John Dobbs: Balancing Acts was on view at George Krevsky Gallery May 3rd through June 16th, 2007.