Dana Schutz at the Neuberger
“Who do you measure yourself against?” asked Maurizio Cattelan in a 2005 interview with Dana Schutz for Flash Art.
“Picasso,” Schutz replied, “you can always try, right?”
This is a telling response. It speaks not only of the magnitude of Schutz’s ambition, but its scope as well. The audacity of her answer is not lost on us. Of course, Picasso was the most revered artist of the 20th century, thus magnitude. But what do I mean by scope? Living in an era of artists defined by movements and styles Picasso managed to transcend both, returning successfully decade after decade to one main theme: the human condition. In this respect he was the heir to painters like Rembrandt, Goya and Degas. These artists weren’t just factual documenters of the human figure, but instinctual interpreters of it, internalizing the world around them through an amazing alloy of observation, empathy and imagination. The beings who inhabit their paintings seem to spring to life -- directly from the hand and mind of the artist -- with an exceptional depth of psychological insight. By looking at her work we can see that this kind of figural interpretation is an important part of Schutz’s ambition as well.
As painters go she is something of a phenom these days. It seems there’s not a year that goes by when she isn’t having some kind of a major show. This year Schutz is the recipient of the Roy R. Neuberger Exhibition Prize, which is awarded to an early-to-mid career artist biannually. The award includes a major show at the Neuberger Museum and the publication of a monographic catalogue. The exhibition, If the Face Had Wheels, is a ten year survey of thirty paintings and twelve drawings. It’s a good opportunity to take in a broad, comparative sample of the artist’s work on its own terms - then to ask, “Is she really the heir apparent to Picasso?”
With all the critical acclaim Schutz has received over the last decade It’s not an entirely inappropriate question to pose.
The last man on earth lies in a rock strewn path surrounded by a field of weeds. Nude, raised up on one elbow and returning our gaze, he is obviously posing. His nose is stubby and upturned, and his heavily lidded eyes, though sympathetic and friendly, protrude from his head in a startling way. He is confident and self-possessed despite his quirky features and thinning, straggly hair. Painted an unnatural purple, the complement of the mustard-yellow weeds surrounding him, he is apparently made of different stuff than we are. Yet he is believable, both as a corporeal body and a human character. His name is Frank and he is posing for the last woman on earth. That woman is Dana Schutz, or perhaps an imaginary alter ego of Dana's.
Frank appears again in Frank as a Probiscus Monkey. He is standing in a Henri Rousseau forest painted in lush, efficient strokes reminiscent of early Matisse. This time his flesh is rendered in more naturalistic hues of pink and orange, but his flabby nose has been pressed forcibly upward by the painter, leaving several creases along its bridge and revealing small, piggish nostrils on the flattened plane of its underside.
Is this a real model, or is he a figment of the artist's imagination?
And if Frank does exist, does he mind being painted in such an un-flattering way?
"He doesn't exist, so he doesn't mind," is Dana's simple, paradoxical response to this question. In her first clause she admits he's a fiction, in the second she treats the matter of his embarrassment as a real possibility. It seems she is able to hold both sides of the contradiction simultaneously in her mind: no, he’s not real, so anything can be done to him, and yet he has an autonomous emotional life of his own. These rich imaginative dualisms pervade much of Schutz's work, like in Twin Parts a clumsy female-ish creature stands in a bucolic summer landscape. She is built like a bar-stool with a giant head and three arms. Schutz has made her with long, rectangular strokes of gloppy reddish-pink, warm-brown and violet. Her large square head is painted something like a three-dimensional Hans Hoffman with the palette of a pink DeKooning. Despite her awkward construction, the creature exudes a thoughtfulness and charming feminine dignity. Pulling some kind of clump from the top of her head, she reaches for a similar one from a shelf of assorted bodily forms. The title gives us a hint but no definitive answer as to what she is really doing. Is she trading in bits of her ogre-like body for more attractive replacement parts?
The landscape itself is virtuosic and believable. Figure, field and sky are enveloped in the same delicate, golden light. The grass is alive and growing, emerging from the canvas as though it were overflowing from the fertile memory of the artist. While veering toward the cartoonish, (and certainly not painted from life), the scene still evokes authentic visual experience, deeply felt and decisively executed. This gives the painting an obdurate credibility and coherence despite its obvious absurdities. The strange creature inhabits a world like ours. The slapstick humor becomes whimsical, refreshing, poignant and human.
The figure itself takes on a interesting life of its own - mostly by how it has been painted. Some passages feel alla prima, with flowing, incisive brushwork. Other areas have been scraped and then repainted with thick, striated marks. There is a kind of animation here that has to do with the artist’s kinesthetic involvement with the materiality of the creature, whose small round eyes, each encircled by an embossed ring of raised paint, have ended up at opposite sides of her face - and not adjacent. Everything is located with surgical precision, yet the surgeon has been moving parts into unexpected places, apparently trying to surprise herself while still getting everything right.
This is the distinguishing touch in Schutz's oeuvre: she paints with visible directness and commitment, yet you can tell she almost always does something she didn't plan on doing. At times, however, the ad-lib surgery falls apart, and so does the link between the artist’s imagination and the creation of a serious, believable, human world on the canvas.
How we would give birth shows a woman on the maternity table, legs flailing akimbo, belly round as a ball and near bursting. The head and shoulders of her blood-and-placenta covered child have just popped out from between her legs and into the world. Though she is just a cartoon, her fully distended birth canal is a painful thing to behold. Red fluid has run out onto clean white sheets. Her toes are curled, she grips the side bar of her bed with one hand and looks away at a painting on the wall. Cased in a gold-gilt frame this painting-of-a-painting brings to mind Bierstadt or something Hudson Valley, perhaps a combination of the two. The landscape is done in golden tones like the frame, some brush marks are long and elegant, others frazzled and impish. It is by far the most beautifully painted passage on the canvas.
This piece has two main actors, two places of tension - the fictional Bierstadt replica and the expanding crotch, the cathartic vehiculum navitas. Neither the room, the fetus nor the rest of the woman is executed with the same kind of painterly search for the corporeal and the beautiful we see throughout Twins Parts. The over all light is limpid and unconvincing. The woman's legs and belly seem flat, her gestures forced, her form brittle. Though conveying something rather startling on the purely visceral level, her gestures remain cold, mechanical and emotionless - something like the anxious writhing of a spider after it has been poked.
How feels pre-determined and hollow, both in its in its psychology and its execution. The slapstick sputters and stalls, the absurdity is tilted so far toward irony it feels dismissive and even impish, like the brushwork in the faux Bierstadt. The birthing mother is more anatomically correct than the bar-stool creature in Twin Parts, but she is created with less empathy and human dignity. We feel some of her pain, but little else for her. It seems Schutz is trying to play with the same kinds of coy dualisms she employs elsewhere, utilizing the contrast between the beautiful, romantic landscape on the wall and the woman’s agony. But it comes off as a clever puzzle with a visceral side-show or a cheap, embarrassing joke; not as a lively, coherent world-- human and painterly -- brought to life from the artist's imagination. There is a wide gap here between what Schutz delivers and the gravity and tenderness the subject calls for.
This happens in other paintings throughout the show, including The Presentation and The Autopsy of Michael Jackson, both of which deal with post-mortem examinations. While Presentation is more convincing in its form and execution than How we should give birth, there is once again a disconnect here between the seriousness of the subject and the tone of the painting. The canvas depicts a human dissection. The corpse is yellow, red, orange, gigantic and mutilated. A sea of round, dull faces look on. The palette is reminiscent of a garish dime-store Hawaiian shirt, and the character doing the dissecting appears to be Schutz herself. Is this really about death? Or is it a quip about what the painter does for her audience? If so the grotesque element seems over-the-top. This approach to death is a bit like an amateur comedian who shows up to a family funeral ready to try out a few of his new jokes.
There is a noticeable pattern in Schutz’s work. When she deals with the whimsical or comically neurotic she’s often able to hit something touching, poignant, or just plain funny. But in tackling more serious themes there is always a tendency to inject the insipid, grotesque or asinine. Perhaps she does this to avoid the risk of sentimentality. The more acute the suffering, the more Schutz distances us from empathy, not by a classicizing reserve, but by garish irony. This seems to be her dilemma: with the trivial she often ends up deep, but with the deep she invariably ends up trivializing. Perhaps this dilemma is part-and-parcel of the age we live in.
The century of the will to power, the most cruel and brutish century in human history, was Picasso’s century. There is undeniably something cruel and brutish about how Picasso handles the human figure as well, but this harshness is balanced by a certain tenderness and formal reserve. Rather than diminishing the psychological tension in Picasso’s paintings this fusion increases it, and while Dana Schutz has proved herself to be a talented and imaginative painter, she’s failed to achieve a similar fusion in her own work.