Art in America
September 2003
by: Peter Kalb
 

Tom Duncan's mixed-medium tableaux enlist sculpted figurines,
toy soldiers, scrap metal and a range of useful detritus to tell of the
artist's childhood in World War II Scotland and postwar New York. 
"The Art of War and Peace" at Andrew Edlin presented Duncan's
work from 1979 to 2002, mostly known in Outsider art circles.  It
opened with Tommy and Ian in the Snow (1979), a scene
constructed in a 1940s-era radio body that shows terra-cotta
figurines of two children (the artist and his brother) trekking
through hip-deep snow made of Styrofoam.  The setting is New
York City in 1947, the winter Duncan's family emigrated
from Scotland.  Its biographical focus and narrative form set the
tone for Duncan's career. 

Among works loosely illustrated the artist's life was The Brandy
Straffing (1991).  At six feet high, the elaborate vitrine of corroded
and foliated metalwork houses plastic and metal figures of the
artist and his mother fleeing German aircraft fire against a painted
view of the Scottish countryside.  The much smaller Aunt Meg's Gift
for Tommy (1996), a handcrafted candy box, frames a scene of a
boy sculpting the foil wrappers of rationed chocolates into goblets.

Tommy and Ian take the front seat of a ride in the monumental
Dedicated to Coney Island (1984-2002).  The 7-1/2-foot-wide
interactive re-creation of the amusement park is based on
Duncan's memories of growing up near Coney Island and his
photographic documentation of the park.  From wood, plastic,
metal and other materials, the artist has sculpted the beach, the
boardwalk, various rides, and the elevated train in painstaking
detail.  At the push of a button, the viewer can watch the figurines
on the rides sail past dragons, the Wonder Wheel, and assorted
revelers.

Duncan combines his interest in play with adult concerns in a
series dealing with sexuality and authority.  The two works shown
here, A Nurse Gets Dressed (1999) and Five Nazi Women Get
Dressed (2002), propose a striptease in reverse.  The latter is a
five-by-five grid of female figures, each about five inches tall and
formed from embossed etching paper that the artist has hand-
colored.  The women are shown naked in the left-hand column,
and then wearing successive layers of under-garments, and finally
on the right side, fully clothed in their uniforms.  Seriality and the
artist's fantasy, rooted in Catholic school and a National
Geographic  article, inform the extravagant 500 Nuns Donate Their
Brains to Science.  Many rows of rubber-stamped nuns surround
the postmortem donation, depicted by prone nuns on stretchers in
a small arched reliquary at the work's center.  1935- A War Toy for
a German Child-1945 (1989), a 27-inch-wide concentration camp,
elaborates the coincidence of horror and play and brings Duncan
into dialogue with recent Holocaust art and issues that are as
much insider as outsider.