A crowd of curiosity-seekers packs the top of the picture to get a look at two cartoonish corpses, one very small and one absurdly large, that have been exhumed from an open grave. The two bodies are laid out on a wooden plank, and the larger one, which takes up almost the entire fourteen-foot width of the painting, is rendered in thick, confectionary brush strokes of red, green, and yellow. Some of the spectators are interfering with it. A bald man in a white shirt pokes a stick into the corpse’s upper thigh. Below him, a yokel hoists a rope that extends diagonally up and out of the picture and then down again, where it supports one of the corpse’s arms in a makeshift sling. A young woman with a scalpel makes an incision into its big, floppy hand.
Of the landscape there is little: a band of blue sky at the top of the canvas and a few feet of grass and dirt at the bottom. It’s a nice day but the crowd is glum. The large corpse itself, looking chagrined, practically makes eye contact with the viewer. In fact, it seems quite lively; maybe it isn’t dead at all. On closer inspection, it’s on the verge of delivering a lame wisecrack: Gosh, isn’t this just my luck, or, You and me both, huh?
That’s my sense of it, at least. Descriptions of the painting’s contents differ. No one says that Dana Schutz’s Presentation is a painting of a blue horse in a red field, but critics are split as to whether it depicts a burial, an exhumation, a medical procedure, or the making of a piece of sculpture. The scene of the painting has been called “a human dissection,”1 “some sort of surgery or autopsy,”2 and “a human figure being assembled or corrected on a table.”3 “Its central figure, the big maybe-dead guy, is “a mutant body, bones broken and limbs ripped asunder,”4 “a naked giant,”5 “the dismembered body of an ‘Other.’”6 The looky-loos at the top are “a curious but blank-faced crowd,”7 “anxious whites,”8 “ruddy-faced congregants,”9 “spectators at a surgery.”10 The one thing most commentators agree on is that Presentation recalls an 1889 painting by the Belgian artist James Ensor, Christ’s Entry into Brussels, a crowd scene with a similarly florid palette and pronounced elements of the grotesque—though Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Nicolaes Tulp (1632) is a close second in the art-historical reference category.
Any written description of a picture has a minute degree of imprecision, which is inevitable because words are different from images. But the variation here exceeds that, and you can’t chalk it up to the so-called subjective nature of art interpretation either. On the formal level, Presentation is clear as a bell; each hand and face and the giant mutant corpse are limned in clean, bright colors like a Renaissance fresco.
And that’s another thing. Abstracting for a moment the bodies, the grave, the dejected crowd, and dealing with the work merely as an assortment of shapes and colors arrayed on a flat surface, Presentation looks downright festive, a real wingding of a painting. This is entirely at odds with the somber linguistic palette of the work’s textual interpretation—the ripping asunder and dismemberment, the blank-facedness. Something else is going on here.
Presentation was included in the “Greater New York” survey exhibition at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, New York, in the fall of the year it was painted, 2005. The entertainment executive Michael Ovitz bought it as a promised gift to the Museum of Modern Art. Perhaps this means we should defer to the museum’s official gallery text for the painting, which puts its institutional weight behind the idea that Presentation’s narrative is ultimately undecidable:
A mutilated and partially dismembered figure lies on a board suspended above an opening in the ground. Whether the figure is about to be lowered into this grave or has been recently exhumed, we do not know.
What do we know? When she painted Presentation, Schutz was twenty-eight. She had been out of graduate school for three years. She’d had four solo exhibitions and participated in twenty-odd group shows in galleries, five in museums, and two biennales, Venice and Prague. Her exhibitions had been reviewed extensively and favorably in most major arts publications. (“I believe she may have an extra wrinkle on her frontal lobe,” then–Village Voice critic Jerry Saltz wrote on the occasion of her first solo show.)11 The artist herself had appeared in W and Italian Vogue, a young woman in an iconic Brooklynite uniform of plain black T-shirt, jeans, and New Balance sneakers, with a head of wildly corkscrewing brown curls. Art schools were already full of Schutz imitators.
Now, at thirty-six, Schutz has been the subject of two traveling museum retrospectives and three monographs. Her work sits in eighteen public collections including at the Whitney, MoMA, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, and the Corcoran. The market for her paintings has grown steadily since her first New York exhibition, held while the artist was still an MFA student at Columbia. In a 2011 show in New York, retail prices for her paintings ranged from $45,000 for a small canvas to $200,000 for a large one. Drawings in the thirty-by-forty-inch range cost about $20,000, and those in the six-by-eight-foot range will run you $60,000.
In the secondary market, these numbers spike. Recently, an eighteen-by-nineteen-inch Schutz from 2002 (Sneeze, a woman expelling a stream of mucousy paint out of an upturned, slightly piggy nose) fetched $245,000 on an estimate of $30,000 to $40,000. Schutz’s aren’t the most expensive paintings on the market, by any stretch of the imagination (though they may be the most expensive paintings on the market made by a woman under forty), but her stats certainly put her in a very small circle of career achievement, one well above the staggeringly huge percentage of artists whose work will never appreciate one red cent beyond its initial purchase price, if it sells at all. To essay a brief, personal comparison here: you could probably buy most of the art I’ve exhibited over the past ten years with the 20 percent auction-house commission paid on Death Comes to Us All, a ten-foot-tall Schutz from 2003 showing a figure in red shorts being attacked by, or transforming into, something between an exploding totem pole and a duck, which sold in 2012 for $482,500 on an estimate of $300,000 to $400,000.
“She’s the poster child for everything,” said her ex-dealer Zach Feuer: for the dramatic return of expressive, large-scale, representational painting to contemporary art in the early 2000s; for the art market bubble in which collectors consumed it by the square mile; even for the system of graduate education that produced her and her peers. Notable, also, is the fact that Schutz managed to weather the experience of early, runaway success and come out the other side with sanity and career intact—a hard trick for a poster child for everything.
For all that, it’s not clear if we really know much about her work. “Dana Schutz does not prescribe any answers to the numerous questions her paintings raise,” a press release from her Berlin gallery sternly reminds us.12 But what do the paintings themselves have to say?
I’d first met Schutz in 2000, when we passed each other going through the MFA program at Columbia. Dana visited the studios as a prospective student in the spring before her first semester. I remember that she seemed uncomfortable in a conservative ensemble clearly chosen for her interview, but that she managed to chat normally: instant points in the personality column.
A typical MFA program cycles through a completely different student body every two years, and, as fewer and fewer professors are getting tenured in the United States, may contain a nearly completely different faculty in little more time than that. MFA programs are swiftly flowing rivers into which it’s impossible to step twice.
When I left, painting had been a divisive topic within the school: some hard-liners in the faculty championed it, but an equally vocal contingent wrote it off as a waste of everybody’s time. As students, we got the sense that it probably wasn’t the quickest way to be taken seriously in the contemporary art world and made our choices accordingly.
But in the brief interval between our times at the school, something happened. Painting bloomed in Schutz’s class and the one after it, and the program produced several bumper crops of painters who left the program and headed straight to the galleries, into a market ready and willing to embrace them. This rapid, auspicious sea change was a curiosity across the world of art school and the recently graduated. What had happened there? Was it merely a function of geography and pinpoint timing (by virtue of its location, Columbia offered us unparalleled access to the New York art world), or could the phenomenon be repeated elsewhere? I followed Schutz’s career closely, and many years later, I tracked her and some of her classmates down to hear the whole story.
Schutz paints in a floor-through converted garage in a half-residential, half-commercial block in Gowanus, Brooklyn, surrounded by auto-body shops and two-story houses with plastic siding. Entering the studio, you pass through a small, dark front room, with nothing much in it, into a long, high-ceilinged space—about the size and shape of a basketball court—lit with halogen cans on a track. Two long wooden tables toward the back are piled up with brushes and tubes of oil paint, spilling over onto the floor along with rubber squeegees, short-handled brooms, and paint-covered sheets of disposable palette paper lying in sticky drifts. A wheeled cart with a mirror mounted upright on a wooden frame kicks around the middle of the room, usually stacked with artists’ monographs borrowed from the personal library housed in a long bookshelf/bench nearby, also on wheels. High on the wall opposite the front entrance is an exhaust fan and the window of a lofted office space. Through the back of the studio are a storage area and a bathroom. Everything is smeared with paint, in Dana’s supercharged palette of warm golds and leafy greens, clear bright primaries and weaponized hot pinks. The copy of the Arthur Danto book in the bathroom is smeared with paint.
The first time I visited, a couple of years ago in early summer, there was hardly any art in the studio: no paintings and just a few half-finished drawings tacked to the walls. Schutz had just shipped off practically everything she’d been working on to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, where an exhibition of works on paper would accompany a show of her paintings at the Denver Art Museum.
She was late in delivering the work and felt sheepish about it. Halfway through the project, she’d decided to redo most of the large-scale charcoal drawings for the show in ink. “I think I drove everyone crazy,” she said. “With ink, if you mess up, you have to start all over again. You’re going along, and then you make a move, and the whole thing is destroyed.”
“I really held them up,” she added. “I’ll get to Denver, and they’ll be, like, ‘There’s that asshole.’”
For a high-profile New York painter, Schutz is gracious almost to a fault, the kind of artist who might get buttonholed at an opening by an overzealous fan and feel obliged to keep the conversation going. She’s candid about her anxieties as an artist but verbally guarded against anything that sounds remotely art-star-ish. This doesn’t seem like a PR strategy; it’s more like a tic. Jason Murison, a mutual friend and a director at her New York gallery, Friedrich Petzel, worried that she would run down her own work in print and negatively affect her market. “Did she say she hated any specific paintings?” he asked me nervously after the studio visit.
Dana grew up in the Detroit suburb of Livonia. Her parents, a guidance counselor and a junior-high art teacher, are now retired. She decided to be an artist at fourteen, and her school let her paint in a storage closet. Her employment history (apart from her job as a professional artist and the occasional visiting artist lecture or teaching stint) is still limited to having waitressed at Boston Chicken, Kerby’s Koney Island, and other fast-food restaurants in Michigan when she was in high school, and at a Middle Eastern restaurant when she was in college at the Cleveland Institute of Art. She was halfway through narrating undergraduate art school when she suddenly clasped a hand to her mouth. “I just remembered I didn’t mean to say the thing about the storage closet. It sounds so annoying.” I said I’d forget it.
As far as I could tell, Schutz’s lifestyle is far-removed from any of the clichéd excesses of young, successful artists. No cocaine-fueled hotel weekends or celebrity trysts. She kicked smoking but has served no time in rehab. She’s happily married to the sculptor Ryan Johnson, whom she met at Columbia. (“When he came in for an interview, I got the wrong impression of him,” she said. “He does this thing where he’ll sigh. Now I know it’s just him trying to breathe when he’s nervous and afraid of passing out, but it sounds exasperated. So I asked him a question and he went, ‘Pffffffffffff . . .’ and I thought, ‘Oh my god—he’s really depressed!’”) They live in a modest house near the studio, where Dana clocks in nearly all her waking hours.
She works early in the morning until late in the evening. As she gets further into a given body of work, a phase shift occurs and she begins around noon but works all the way through the night. “People don’t call at night. And if you’ve worked all night, then you feel like you’ve done something, so it’s fine. You wake up at noon, and then you’ve missed that weird part of the day where people call you and you have to do stuff. It’s really hermit-ey.”
Her assistant, Anthony Iacono, primarily deals with e-mail and logistics (shipping, crating, gallery and museum interfacing, deadline management) but also cuts paper and cleans brushes. She prefers to mix her own paint, but if she’s working on a large painting, or on an especially tight deadline, she’ll have other assistants come in to help out with this and other chores.
Prior to the drawing show, she’d done an exhibition of paintings in the spring, and prior to that, a cycle of Wagner-inspired prints for the Metropolitan Opera that opened in January. This meant she had only four months to prepare the painting show—about half as much time as she likes to have. On top of that, it was to be her first exhibition at Petzel—Schutz had parted ways with Feuer, her longtime dealer, in 2011—and there were nerves on both sides.
“I had this idea for this large painting, and sometimes that can be like the Bermuda Triangle,” Dana said. “You don’t know how that’s going to be. I wanted to make a large painting that felt like a coloring book or something . . . And I wanted it to almost feel like synchronized swimming. Or just things happening in a youth center.”
The painting, Building the Boat While Sailing, is an ebullient thirteen-footer crammed with colorful, geometricized people lounging on a makeshift wooden raft that seems to flip up in space, flattening everyone in a jumble against the picture plane; blue-green waves churn in the corners of the canvas. True to its title, two people are improvising a mast and a sail, a girl fastens some nails into the deck, someone else is hoisting a length of wood, and there’s a saw sticking halfway through a plank. Most people on the boat are idling; a few fountain water out of their mouths in vertical streams. The painting manages to seem becalmed, practically effortless. In fact, it’s almost about that: overcoming the anxiety of the creative process through determined joyfulness. It’s a work free from the undercurrent of dread that has marked most of her large canvases, a sunny Raft of the Medusa with no dead bodies.
Schutz moved to her current studio in 2011. Before that, she and her husband worked side by side in a building in Gowanus near the Smith–9th Street subway station, along with six other Columbia MFA graduates. An unusually close-knit group, they’d moved to Brooklyn together in 2005 from a space in Harlem, chipping in to rent an unfinished floor of a warehouse and dividing it up into handsomely proportioned studios. The building is accessible through the parking lot of a Lowe’s hardware store, beyond a self-storage facility and a fenced-in area inexplicably crammed with rusting bathtubs, sinks, and department store mannequins. It sits directly under the elevated train tracks, and over the fence of the parking lot you can watch the tops of excavators sifting through mountains of glittering scrap metal in a yard on the bank of the Gowanus Canal—a notoriously polluted Superfund site and one of the last truly unpleasant stretches of the otherwise refurbished Brooklyn waterfront.
Tom McGrath, one of Dana’s former classmates and studio neighbors, was also picked up by Feuer; the two were also gallery-mates until 2009. For his thesis exhibition at Columbia, Tom made romantic, panoramic streetscape paintings, blurred and fractured as if seen through a rain-streaked windshield from the passenger side of a car. In his new work Tom has been spraying layers of aerosolized oil paint onto huge canvases, using leaves, tree branches, and lengths of chain-link fence as stencils to make life-size urban nocturnes—broody images reminiscent of the walk to and from the studio.
McGrath speaks very fast, pinballing from one topic to the next. He’s handsome in an actorly way, and maybe because of the industrial wasteland feel of his paintings, I thought of Crispin Glover’s paranoid punk in River’s Edge, all non sequiturs and angular momentum. He told me that the last person who came to interview him threw down his notebook in frustration. “He never wrote—he made—he just—and then we started talking about the work and it got so far so fast he never caught up.”
The Columbia program had good chemistry in the fall of 2000, Tom said: promising students and a faculty ideologically divided enough to insure that the students never got the same feedback twice. Visiting artists accepted invitations to lecture in a heartbeat; the commute time from downtown Manhattan was unbeatable. McGrath came in with his friend Kris Benedict from Cooper Union; he and Kris were the youngest people in the class. Tom described a slideshow during the second week of school, in which each member of the two-year program gave a short presentation of his or her work. “I was really intimidated by this,” he said. “There were a significant number of artists doing really interesting things.”
The group convened in a temporary building on the Columbia quad that served for a few years as an auxiliary studio space. Jon Kessler, the program’s newly appointed chair, put the group at ease by executing an elaborate fake-vomit gag during his opening remarks. A sculptor named Samuel Yates talked about a project in which he’d run a 1974 MG Midget sports car through an auto shredder, then steamrolled the remains, then put the pieces into plastic bags and sorted them by weight (“Get it? MG, milligrams?”), and then placed the bags in folders in a seven-story-tall stack of filing cabinets. Kevin Zucker, with whom I’d later critique art in the Painting program at RISD, showed a series of cool, architectural interiors made with a 3-D modeling program.
“And then Dana showed her slides, and I’ve never seen people laugh that hard at an artwork,” said Tom. In one painting she’d made during undergraduate art school, a pear-shaped woman posed in front of a gray photo-studio backdrop. This woman had a thin, very straight nose, a suggestion of buckteeth, and mouse-brown bangs teased into a gravity-defying whorl above her head. And if that wasn’t enough, said Tom, she was wearing an oversize white sweatshirt tucked into a pair of unflattering blue jeans. And if that wasn’t enough, in the center of the sweatshirt, where you might expect to see a picture of a painting by Monet or Van Gogh, Schutz had painted a stroke-for-stroke reproduction of Gustave Courbet’s Origin of the World: a woman’s belly, vagina, and upper thighs, modern art’s canonical beaver shot. Below it, the word “Daughter” was written out in pink wedding script.
The painting (which someone bought from Dana in art school and later resold through Zach Feuer) teeters on the edge of actual cruelty. “But it was brilliant and it was felt and it was warm, and she had this Midwestern way of making fun of herself and being really sweet,” Tom said. “I mean, how can you argue with painting like that?”
If MFA programs are rivers, then the discipline of painting is an ocean. It’s continually beset by waves of all lengths and amplitudes: from long, slow historical swells that run their course over centuries to quick fashion ripples lasting a season. It can be hard to see, while bobbing along on its surface, that the changes form a coherent rhythm—to see the structures beneath the water that created the waves in the first place.
When I asked what that ocean had looked like in the fall of 2000, Tom fired off a high-speed barrage of disconnected impressions. There had been funky, ultramodern abstraction and faux-academic figuration. There were the post-pictures artists, and Martin Kippenberger and his former assistants. The prevalence of the sideways drip, and lonely tree paintings. Masking-tape abstractions. David Salle. Cecily Brown’s stylish, Ab-Ex-ish orgy paintings (“She’s kind of brilliant, you know? I completely misunderstood her!”)
Subculture: The Meaning of Style, the Dick Hebdige book that everyone carried around in art school, Tom continued. Mary Heilmann. Rosalind Krauss’s lecture course at Columbia (“It seemed to be pointing toward the idea that it was no longer possible to paint”), the New Sincerity (“well there was no sincerity in it, was the thing”), the Museum of Natural History, where he and Benedict went to take drugs and look at the dioramas.
Painting had been sleepy for most of the nineties, taking a backseat to video, installation, sculpture, performance. But perhaps that’s understating it. In critical circles, painting had been high up on the no-no list: theoretically passé, politically suspect, yesterday’s news.
So, inevitably, according to the inexorable logic of the fashion cycle, the tail end of the nineties saw a group of practitioners rise to prominence. Acknowledging painting’s belatedness, they sifted through the ruins of different painterly traditions: John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage sent up Old Master painting, Luc Tuymans worked from photographs non-photorealistically, Elizabeth Peyton looked at celebrity culture through a filter of teen angst and Sunday painting.
Abstract paintings were few and far between, at least in the under-forty crowd, and most were self-consciously impure: Ellen Gallagher’s doodled-over monochromes, Fabian Marcaccio’s explosions of photo collage and acrylic modeling paste, Laura Owens’s enormous color fields dotted with bees and flowers.
The common thread of the painting of the nineties was quotation. Painters didn’t create new forms; they ventriloquized old ones to produce new effects. Painting still operated, in other words, within the domain of pastiche, the combinatory stylistic imitation that anchored the most persuasive theories of the postmodern in the visual arts a decade before. This approach seemed like the best bet painting had for maintaining relevance to the culture at large.
The notion of a painterly style, as something invented, unique, personal, meaningful, had long been written off as an artifact of the modern or derided as an ideological illusion. But if you wore style as an affectation, acknowledged it as the threadbare period costume it was—and painting as the antiquated, somewhat perverse enterprise it was—you could eke some life out of the medium yet.
The field of possibility was thus both wide open and oddly limited. The painting discourse of the 1990s formatted innovation as the shuffling of signs, and required that painters demonstrate a high, nearly incapacitating degree of self-consciousness about their craft. So, the problem facing young painters in the year 2000 was how to loosen up a little and to approach the medium without performing a lot of theoretical calisthenics beforehand. Or, as Tom put it, the trick was “to make culture without being so programmatic that you’re strictly within quotation marks.”
In his studio down the hall from Tom’s, Ryan Johnson remembered a similar sense of art-historical weight, and a feeling of incipient lightening. “When I met Dana, we talked about the fact that it seemed more radical for someone to just totally invent their own thing,” he said. “To go further with it, where you’re not so explicitly tied to history. Obviously you can’t make a painting that’s devoid of reference to its history, but you can treat it in a more intuitive, open way.”
Sweetly, husbandly, he added, “Coming out of undergrad, I had the feeling that there was a thing that just had to happen. Weirdly, once I met Dana, I knew she was going to be the person to walk through that door.”
Then, on a Tuesday in the first month of his first year in the program (and Dana and Tom’s second), a group of jihadis crashed two airplanes into the World Trade Towers, and one into the Pentagon, and one into a field in Pennsylvania, and art history was just the least of anybody’s worries for a while. “You felt like you should just be doing exactly what you felt like doing,” said Ryan with a pffffffffffff.
He’s reclining on a rock jutting out of the water; let’s take the cue from the painting’s title and call him Frank. The bottom edge of the canvas cuts him off at the knees, and the horizon line has been pushed all the way to the top. The rock is white, the water is blue, the sky is a flinty gray, and Frank is very, very orange.
Frank’s is the orange of deep, thermonuclear sunburn, the orange of the lifelong tanner in extremis. It exceeds the level of orange you can produce with an opaque application of oil paint—even the most expensive, high-pigment-count, straight-out-of-the-tube orange. To achieve this color, Schutz laid down a thick coat of red within the contour of Frank’s body and then scraped it off with the edge of a palette knife or a rubber squeegee, revealing a layer of transparent yellow underneath that vibrates with the residual red deposited in the weave of the canvas. Quick pink and red daubs suggest the volume of Frank’s arms, legs, chest, dick. He is bracing himself on two palms, resplendent in the sun, inviting the viewer to drink him in.
Sadly, Frank is no looker. He has prehensile lips, a sparse beard, and stringy blond hair pasted over the dome of his head. His small, wide-set eyes poke out turtlishly from beneath a prominent brow. Not if he were the last man on Earth, you might think, which is exactly who he is.
Frank is the title character in “Frank from Observation,” Schutz’s first solo exhibition in New York. In an artist statement, she explains:
The paintings are premised on the imaginary situation that the man and I are the last people on earth. The man is the last subject and the last audience and, because the man isn’t making any paintings, I am the last painter.
Frank is an accommodating subject. Other canvases capture him in a field, on a beach, in a leafy jungle. He is always nude; sometimes he is semi-erect. In Frank at Night, he holds up a tree branch under a starry sky, and the starlight is reflected in the foamy surf lapping on the beach and in Frank’s wide, freaked-out eyes. He doesn’t seem to be doing any work, though; and because he isn’t making any paintings, as Schutz tells us, the entire project of culture is left up to her.
In 2002, the post-apocalyptic was already a pop-culture staple, but the next few years saw the genre take off in film, television, and literature—the known world destroyed by wave after wave of asteroids, plagues, environmental disasters, zombies, with haggard survivors combing through the wreckage. On that note, lower Manhattan was a ghost town. We’d invaded Afghanistan and we had our eye on Iraq. A depopulated tropical idyll with nothing to do but paint Frank may have sounded heavenly: not post-apocalyptic but prelapsarian.
Schutz already had two New York exhibitions under her belt by this time. During her second year of graduate school, Jerry Saltz, who taught a seminar at Columbia, recommended her to the curators of MoMA PS1. She showed a series of portraits there: awkward, imaginary people conceived as ideal blind dates for her friends and colleagues. Dana carted the paintings to the museum in a U-Haul and unpacked them in front of founder and director Alanna Heiss. Dana recalls that Heiss, historically no fan of painting in general, told her, “You must be the worst painter I’ve ever met.” She remembers being very nervous at the opening and thinking that the paintings were too embarrassing to be out in public.
At the time, a newish gallery in Chelsea was operating out of a small fourth-floor space on 26th Street. LFL Gallery—named for its two financial backers, Nick Lawrence and Russell LaMontagne, and its precocious twenty-four-year-old director, Zach Feuer—had been giving shows to young postgraduate artists on the East Coast circuit, with modest success. Schutz and Feuer met at a party in spring 2001. Later that year, when an artist canceled an exhibition at the last minute, Feuer arranged a two-person show in January 2002 with Schutz and the painter Holly Coulis. Schutz presented more imaginary people, sneezing or coughing. It got a good review in the New York Times. The paintings sold. That success and other windfalls led LFL to a bigger, nicer ground-floor space on 24th Street. Schutz presented “Frank from Observation” there nine months later.
Other canvases in the “Frank” show represented “hallucinatory arrangements of objects, mirages and visions of transitory events” such as the writhing ball of Slugs, the exuberantly colorful Flowers, and Skull, with a cranium laying on the ground under a pink sunset. Everything is rendered in wide, athletic brushstrokes, and the entire world of the paintings is in motion: waves crash, clouds skid across the sky, even pebbles on the beach appear to vibrate. But in a cryptic image called The Gathering, it looks like Frank has been dismembered and his choice parts strung up on a crude wooden lean-to.
This last image leads us to contemplate the long-term prospects of Schutz’s post-apocalyptic scenario. Did the painter eat her model? If she did, would Earth soon be devoid of human life? Another work in the show, Suicide, a picture of a record player stuck in the sand before an onrushing tide, suggests one grim possibility.
Schutz’s earliest paintings at Columbia had been preoccupied with sculpture. She made thick—absurdly thick—paintings, with pounds of oil paint piled onto the canvas and molded into crude representations of objects: a purse, a bowling ball, a lump of blonde hair. She also made paintings about people making sculptures of a landscape. In our studio visit, I couldn’t get this idea straight in my head.
“I was thinking about people who would go outside and then sculpt the landscape,” she said.
“—so instead of painting it, like a picture, they would sculpt it.”
“So this would be a painting?”
“Of a sculpture, of the landscape, in the landscape. But it didn’t work out. They just looked like blobs.”
She found that most of her classmates, even the painters, had taken at least a stab at making sculpture during undergraduate art school. So she asked them to describe their first, most awkward attempts, and she painted what she thought the results would look like. Her classmate Kris Benedict told her about an assemblage he’d made, about Kafka and the death of rock and roll; Dana painted Chris’s Rubber Soul, a turntable in a field with an oversize beetle impaled on a stick, and stuck into the beetle, a fish.
I wondered whether Dana’s sculpture obsession had been her attempt to skirt the quicksand of post-postmodernist painting theory and get back onto solid ground, so to speak. By metaphorically borrowing the massiveness of sculpture, the artist could anchor her paintings in the world of real, workaday things.
This was wrong. Schutz was asking another question, one that I think may have been too embarrassing to speak aloud within the context of a sophisticated MFA program like Columbia’s at the tail end of a theory-driven decade in contemporary art. You could phrase it this way: What’s the place of imagination within painting? Or: How can you invent something in art without descending into frivolous fantasy?
“I wanted to find some space where you weren’t just making stuff up, but where you could actually paint something you wanted to paint,” Dana told me. “I was looking for a way to paint something I was close to, that wasn’t apologizing for being a painting or accounting for itself.”
Sculpture was a way to tackle these painting problems indirectly. The crucial thing about the sculptures Dana tried to paint (the ones her classmates described to her) was that she’d never set eyes on them. She was painting real things in the world, but she wasn’t competing with any other images of them, mental or photographic. So her own necessarily flawed, necessarily subjective images became, by virtue of being the only ones available to her, perfectly serviceable representations. Plus, there was no right way to paint a turntable in a field with an oversize beetle and fish impaled on a stick; she had to invent that too.13
It was a short leap from painting real objects that she hadn’t seen (like other people’s sculptures), to painting unreal, plausible but unpictured, things: imaginary boyfriends and girlfriends, imagined people caught in the act of sneezing or coughing. From there, she could expand outward and think about how imaginary situations could generate paintings—for example, the imaginary situation of being the last painter on Earth and having only one subject to paint and one viewer to paint for. In other words, “Frank from Observation” posed the question of subjectivity in painting within a thought experiment.
The Robinson Crusoe myth has long served as a vehicle for speculation. The classical economists of the eighteenth century loved it, and the model of a self-contained “Robinson Crusoe economy” eventually became a staple of introductory-level microeconomics. It posited one agent performing as both producer and consumer, optimizing his work and leisure with mathematical precision—the presence of Friday was optional, and served only to model trade.
In comparison, Schutz’s Frank economy of painting requires a minimum of two actors. A last painter alone would run aground against boredom and futility, and a last viewer would of course have nothing to view; they require each other to complete the intersubjective circuit that makes the activities of observing and representing make sense. As a thought experiment, it would seem to explore philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the Other as “the tribunal of all reality,” who alone has the capacity “to debate, verify, or falsify that which I think I see.”14 So, far from merely loafing on the beach, Frank is actually hard at work maintaining the imaginary reality principle in Dana’s imaginary world.
But the whole situation is on pretty shaky ground, philosophically speaking, and in fact it goes seriously awry. Exhibit A, The Gathering, where Frank is hacked to pieces and hung up to dry in what Deleuze (who framed his theories here around a retelling of the Crusoe story) would surely call an extreme instance of “desubjectivation”: the subject’s failure to recognize his Other that marks the essential “perversion” of the desert island scenario.15
Why do thought experiments always seem to end so badly? Why do so many of them involve grotesque forms of violence? From Schrödinger’s poor cat, placed in a box with a flask of poison and a radioactive isotope to illustrate something about uncertainty, to the proliferation of brains in vats that help us visualize the mind-body problem, the mental laboratory of Western thought is stacked high with corpses. Freed of real-world limitations, the collective imagination runs straight to mutilation and murder.
Schutz’s painting-generation system had a similar grisly bent, and over the next few years she went on to pursue even more elaborate fictional scenarios—many of them similarly tinged with the gruesome—to see what, if anything, they could tell us about the real world. This was no accident. After all, as she later remarked, “The distinction between reality and fiction in America seems like it is becoming really blurry.”16
That girl is eating her own face! is a disturbing sentence regardless of context. Even if you specify that the face-eating in question is happening in art and not in real life, the imagination jumps frantically between a horrified why and an appalling series of hows: methodology, anatomical possibility, considerations of shock, blood loss, and unconsciousness—are surgical instruments involved? What part of the face does one eat first?
Schutz’s Face-Eater makes such considerations almost irrelevant. A simplified, blocky figure in a green collared shirt, seen in a standard nineteenth-century head-and-shoulders portrait format, she (I’m guessing on the gender) seems to be having a great time of it. Eyes, ears, and nose are disappearing down a comically enlarged upturned mouth like vegetable scraps down a garbage disposal, tumbled by rocklike teeth and a protruding red tongue. The only thing missing is the soundtrack: grunts of gustatory approval and wet smacks of the lips.
Face-Eater was first shown in “Panic,” Schutz’s fall 2004 exhibition at Zach Feuer (who had by now shed his two bracketing backers at LFL and renamed the gallery). “Panic” also included two kindred works, Eye-Eater and Devourer; Self-Eaters 2 and 3 had appeared earlier that year in a show in Paris.
Each canvas depicts a gastro-anatomical exercise carried out with a contortionist’s aplomb: in Self-Eater 2, a nocturne, a reclining figure stretches out in the shadows and enjoys a midnight snack of her own toes; in Devourer, the fingers of both hands are sucked down at once. There’s a little blood here and there, but the self-eating seems to be mostly painless, in the way that Wile E. Coyote could be flattened by a boulder and then shake off the experience a few cartoon frames later.
But a cartoon isn’t quite the right analogy here. The mere idea of a man eating his own chest (for example, in Man Eating His Chest, 2005) is grisly enough to elicit a sympathetic, corporeal twinge from the viewer, no matter how casually it’s presented. Schutz had to field questions from critics and peers about her mental well-being—to assure people that she was fine, really. The artist Peter Halley interviewed her about the Self-Eaters series for Index magazine. “They’re not self-portraits, are they?” he asked. “God, I hope not,” said Dana.17
Besides (as she had to remind everyone), the Self-Eaters were eating only themselves—they weren’t cannibals or anything. Autophagy, a perfectly normal process through which living cells recycle unnecessary components to combat starvation or disease, had to be distinguished here from anthropophagy, or eating other people. In Schutz’s paintings, the process just happened to be occurring on the macroscopic level, not the microscopic.
But the complete story of the Self-Eaters appears only with the addition of related paintings from the same time period. In New Legs, a legless woman in a field sculpts herself a replacement pair from an oozing, green-brown substance that may well be the digested and excreted remains of her old ones. In Twin Parts, another woman fashions an arm from similarly fecal lumps on a rickety set of shelves. For Schutz, the Self-Eaters were icons of autonomy, engaged in the first steps of a self-sufficient, regenerative process. Self-eating was the prelude to self-remaking. Describing the chain of associations that led to the paintings, Schutz told an audience:
I started thinking of the different ways people could eat themselves. Then I thought: Well, that’s not enough. Then what happens? What if they can remake themselves in any form they want to be? Would what they make be considered art?18
Let’s say that the Self-Eaters are artists. What kind of artists are they? Body artists is the first thing that comes to mind, and we could choose from any number of affinities, none of them exactly right, around the theme of ingesting and/or mutilating the self: Janine Antoni, who made classical self-portrait busts out of chocolate and then licked them into abstract lumps; Kafka’s Hunger Artist, who fasted to death (“because I couldn’t find the food I liked”); or Rudolf Schwarzkogler, the Viennese Actionist of the 1960s who was rumored to have auto-castrated in a performance (but actually didn’t).
But here we’re fixating on the destructive moment in the consumption-regeneration cycle. The Self-Eaters could instead be seen as heroic avant-gardists—like the French playwright Antonin Artaud, who wrote:
I hate and renounce as a coward every being who does not recognize that life is given him only to recreate and reconstitute his entire body and organism.19
Or the German painter Max Pechstein, who began his circa 1920 “Creative Credo” with the self–exhortation
Work!
Ecstasy! Smash your brains! Chew, stuff your self, gulp it down, mix it around!20
So perhaps the Self-Eaters are Expressionists of some sort. This interpretation is borne out by the look of the paintings themselves, which contain all the hallmarks of the style: strident, clashing colors, figural distortions, energetic if not violent brushwork, nature imagery. Anatomically, Face-Eater recalls some of Picasso’s most expressive (and misogynistic) images—the late-1920s pictures of Olga Khokhlova in which the head of his soon-to-be-ex-wife is rendered as a gaping, vaginal mouth lined with razor teeth. It also bears a passing resemblance to Francis Bacon’s eyeless, screaming popes of the 1940s and early ’50s—though Schutz’s variation is remarkably free of angst.
But if the Self-Eaters themselves are Expressionists, where does this leave Schutz’s paintings of them? What do they express? Discussing them in 2010, the poet and critic Barry Schwabsky read the Self-Eaters as emblems for the situation of painting at the beginning of the twenty-first century: perpetually renewing itself by digesting and redigesting its own history, but self-referential to the point of extremism. He wrote, “These self-consuming, self-creating figures are, needless to say, allegories of painting.”21
The critic Micah J. Malone saw them, instead, as allegories of capitalism—in which many philosophers have noticed a similar interplay between destruction and re-creation.22 In this reading, Schutz’s paintings are expressive in the way that a physical trait is the expression of a certain gene: they look the way they do because of the economic system that generated them.
But both interpretations seem to dodge the question of what Schutz’s Self Eaters are saying to us. Because, in what work of art can’t you find an allegory for the conditions of its own production?
Face-Eater appeared again the following year in “The Triumph of Painting,” a mammoth three-part survey exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in London. In the first installment, the work of big-name artists like Martin Kippenberger, Marlene Dumas, Luc Tuymans, and Jörg Immendorff staked out a painterly territory explored by the mid-career artists in the second installment, and then the less-established ones in the third; the torch was thus passed from one generation to the next. Most of the paintings in the exhibition were big and representational rather than small and abstract. A majority of them were owned by Charles Saatchi himself, the advertising executive and mega-collector for whose collection the gallery had been founded to display to the public.
The exhibition’s title was a soft pitch down the middle of home plate, and the critics clobbered it: “It isn’t exactly a triumph. Resignation is in the air.”23 “On balance, I think ‘survival’ rather than ‘triumph’ is the appropriate word.”24 “Titling an exhibition ‘The Triumph of Painting’ is like putting out a CD called ‘The Greatest Hits of 2005’ in June: safe, if a little myopic.”25
The question of the medium’s aesthetic supremacy aside, no one could deny that painting was a juggernaut in the market in 2005. That year saw huge art industry gains across the boards. Auction prices for Old Masters, Modern Masters, and established living artists topped previous high-water marks set at the end of the booming, mad 1980s.26 The steadily increasing heat of the art market, the possibility of investment returns with no ceiling, and the lack of market regulation made contemporary art attractive to an influx of “speculator-collectors” arriving from Wall Street.27
The new face of art collecting was the young financial professional: the hedge fund manager who combined cultural philanthropy with portfolio diversification through arts patronage. High prices and stiff competition for works sent buyers in search of more affordable fare in previously untapped strata of the art world. They found it in the work of “emerging artists,” an industry category that came to designate artists in the process of achieving visibility in the professional art world. Usually but not necessarily young, talked about but not overexposed, the emerging artist captured the seductive pairing of creative and economic growth-potential that enamored contemporary art to the financial sector in the early 2000s—in the phrase “emerging artist,” for “artist” read “market.” Art school, which had been tacitly regarded as no-fly zone for dealers and collectors, was open for business. Students made big sales out of their studios, and what they mainly sold were paintings.
If painting had been an iffy proposition in 2000, it was practically a sure-fire winner in 2005. Critical opposition to the practice was largely drowned out by the deafening roar of its commercial success. Chelsea was like a United Nations of painting styles: cartoony paintings and academic paintings, ironic paintings and sincere ones, gargantuan Photorealism and wacked-out Surrealism—a multiplicity of images produced, for the most part, by recent MFAs from a short list of top-ranked schools. The apparent visual free-for-all concealed a handful of commonalities: like the sampling of the medium collected in “The Triumph of Painting,” the new painting was representational, handmade (perhaps even traditional in its use of brushes and canvas), unabashed in its painterliness, and often studiously unstudied; references to folk art, outsider art, and Bad Painting abounded in reviews, on blogs, and in the conversational ether of the New York painting scene.
Schutz and her young peers—McGrath, Marc Handelman, Kehinde Wiley, Barnaby Furnas, Mickalene Thomas, and Jules de Balincourt, to name just a few—began to look like elder statespeople compared with the even younger practitioners gracing the scene. And in fact, Schutz was bumped from the third, emerging-artists installment of “The Triumph of Painting” to the more illustrious second, where her work was exhibited alongside that of more well-established figures like Albert Oehlen and Cecily Brown. Along with Face-Eater, the show included few of her Franks, an early portrait called Albino, and new painting called Twister Mat: a lump of bones and sticks, a felled tree, and a detached penis playing a forlorn game of Twister in a desert. Saatchi had acquired these paintings on the secondary market and grouped them without any input from the artist.
“The Triumph of Painting” closely echoed an earlier London painting jubilee: “A New Spirit in Painting,” mounted in 1981 at the Royal Academy of Arts. That exhibition also adopted a generational structure, from Picasso to Bacon to Julian Schnabel, then age thirty (whose work Saatchi himself had collected voraciously in the early 1980s). It, too, emphasized figuration over abstraction: a significant move at the tail end of thirty years of the hegemony of abstract art. Of the thirty-eight artists in that exhibition, none were women.
The newest thing in the show was Neo-Expressionism, an international supermovement cobbled together out of various related tendencies in then-recent art. “A New Spirit” brought together the representative Germans (Anselm Kiefer, Georg Baselitz, Markus Lüpertz, Rainer Fetting), some of their Italian counterparts (Sandro Chia, Mimmo Paladino), and a handful of Americans and Brits working in a similar vein: figurative painting that self-consciously harkened back to early modernist art—particularly, but not exclusively, the Expressionism that flourished in Germany from the beginning of the twentieth century through the end of the Weimar Republic.
Neo-Expressionism was steeped in allusions to art history, myth, and folklore and dedicated to the exploration of the creative self; it was a far cry from the text and geometry, Xeroxes and aluminum cubes of advanced art in the 1960s and ’70s. It touched off a frenzy in the art market, where collectors showed a voracious appetite for this colorful, sensuous, and recognizably artlike (yet still purportedly avant-garde) art. Works by the Neo-Expressionists got expensive, fast—more expensive, and faster, by an order of magnitude than the market had ever seen; the movement dominated the art world of the early 1980s. Art stars hobnobbed with stars from other sectors of the culture industry, and museums rushed to acquire significant Neo-expressionist works. The contemporary art market that exists today, its interplay of speculative buying, celebrity culture, and institutional validation, was built on Neo-Expressionism.
Its critical reception was vociferously mixed. In the New York Times, conservative critic Hilton Kramer applauded the Neo-Expressionist challenge to the “consensus of ‘advanced’ opinion” that preferred an art of reductive, dispassionate analysis to one of ardent subjectivity.28 For art historian Donald Kuspit, the Neo-Expressionists reunited art with image making: a conceptual pairing that had been systematically severed in the modernist project. For Kuspit, steeped in psychoanalytic theory, this represented nothing less than a therapeutic breakthrough, “ending art’s bad faith with reality.”29
In the opposite corner, critics and art historians committed to the historical legacy of modernist abstraction (a legacy that Neo-Expressionism casually upset, like a champagne flute in a crowded restaurant) saw in the style an evasion of the social and political responsibility of the artist. Hal Foster and Craig Owens argued that by aping the look of the Expressionists’ impassioned response to early-twentieth-century societal turmoil, the Neo-Expressionists simply reduced it to a set of conventions.30
Foster and Owens were relatively soft on the movement, compared with the art historian Benjamin Buchloh. “The specter of derivativeness hovers over every contemporary attempt to resurrect figuration, representation, and traditional modes of production,” he fumed. “That is the price of instant acclaim achieved by affirming the status quo under the guise of innovation.”31
Like the art it contended with, this critical battle over Neo-Expressionism was also, in a sense, a historical repetition: both sides drew heavily on a debate about Expressionism itself, a postmortem on the movement waged in the late 1930s among German Marxist intellectuals. Ernst Bloch considered it a powerful lens for viewing the deformations of subjectivity under capitalism; Georg Lukács saw Expressionism as politically incoherent: its embrace of the irrational was ideological preparation for fascism. (In a textbook case of bad timing, the polemical attack against Expressionism reached a peak in 1937, just as the Nazis were rounding up many significant examples of the movement for their traveling “Degenerate Art” exhibition.)
As is the case with most movements in art, the term Neo-Expressionism struggled to encapsulate different, often opposing ideas and attitudes. But as the Foster-Owens-Buchloh interpretation gradually won out, being a Neo-Expressionist became a liability rather than an asset. Near the end of the 1980s, the pendulum of taste swung toward a cooler art, historically indebted to Conceptualism. When the art market underwent one of its periodic crashes in 1990, so did the prices of many of the movement’s brightest stars. Neo-Expressionism (if not the entire idea of self-expression in art, period) became the object of a strongly enforced critical prohibition. Naturally, this also made it an attractive option for young painters, and by the turn of the century, the statute of limitations against it was just about to expire.
The dominant painting style of the early 2000s had most, if not all the markers of the figurative painting that stormed the art world in the late seventies and early eighties: brash, unself-conscious figuration, exuberant and colorful canvases, polyglot art-historical references, a penchant for folklore and outsider art, deep subjectivist commitments. It came on the heels of a prolonged period of theory-driven, non-painting art, and it spurred a period of growth in the art market. It was unfolding during the sharpest political turn to the right in the United States since Reaganism. It was even accompanied by two decidedly imperial wars; you didn’t have to be an art-historical genius to see that Schutz and her peers were playing with fire.
“That’s our job as artists,” Ryan Johnson said. “When people say something is dead, that’s when it starts to have traction. For Dana, it was probably fresh in her mind as just the worst thing you could do.”
Tom McGrath rejected the entire discussion as reductive and anachronistic. “Painting isn’t ‘the language of oppression,’ know what I mean? The language of oppression is the language of oppression.” Painting was the way it was in early-twenty-first-century America because America was the way it was. In a moment when the irrational was taking center stage, he said, the only thing artists could do was to follow suit—to prod the collective psyche of a country in the throes of warfare, political upheaval, and moral injury. If you wanted to play with the culture, it was the only game in town.
So the question—what do Dana Schutz’s paintings of Self-Eaters express?—is hardly a neutral one. Schutz herself was characteristically demure on the topic of expression, neo- or otherwise. “You read theory from 1982, and then you think it’s not good to do certain things. But then, it doesn’t quite line up with what you feel at the time,” she said.
On the subject of Francis Bacon’s screaming popes, art historian Arthur Danto noted that to say “I am screaming” is to fall into a performative contradiction. If you’re screaming, you can’t say you’re screaming; and if you say that you’re screaming, you’re not really screaming. The means of the expression makes the content of the expression nonsensical.
Danto made this point to remind us, against popular ideas about self-expression in art, that the screams in Bacon’s paintings were not the artist’s own: in painting a scream, the artist couldn’t himself be in the throes of any overpowering emotion. (In fact, Bacon himself professed utter calm and disinterest, and, for Danto, this was a real problem; the artist was damnably offhanded about other people’s agony.)
You could make a similar case about Schutz and self-eating, which is like screaming in reverse. Schutz is necessarily removed from whatever complex experience the painting’s subject is undergoing and representing to the viewer. The artist might find it funny, interesting, appalling—but those are her emotions, not the ones depicted in the painting or registered by the viewer. The Self-Eaters are science fictions about a physical and emotional state and how a painting might, still (after all the historical arguments for and against it have been made), express it.
What the title identifies as singed (the left sides of the people and objects in the painting) look instead like they have been torn off, as if the whole scene were made of paper. There are jagged black edges running down the lengths of heads, arms, torsos, bottles of wine and baguettes, and through the equators of a watermelon, an apple, an orange. The setting of the painting is intact, though: a walled-in park with leafy trees. You can see it in the spaces where the parts of the things that aren’t there anymore should have been, for example behind the missing face and chest of a seated man in a striped shirt, whose hand grabs a bisected apple from the center of the picnic blanket.
Other paintings from 2008 show similarly lessened figures. Two men playing chess at a park bench, the face of one and the back of the other’s head both absent, along with the left halves of all the chess pieces between them; a man at a dinner table eating chicken (only the bones remain visible); husks of men in old-fashioned jackets and powdered wigs leaning in to sign a document with a quill pen in an opulent-looking room. Despite the fact that her themes up to this point had included dismemberment, self-mutilation, and exhumation, these paintings seem the saddest of any in Schutz’s oeuvre. They recall stories about the neutron bomb (Brezhnev: “the capitalist bomb”) that would eradicate people but leave everything else standing.
Of all Schutz’s paintings, these also seem the most like corny visual jokes. Here, the artist has applied the same operation—painting things as if they’ve been burned away—to generic, seemingly indiscriminate subjects from the annals of art history: jolly picnickers, game players, bits of kitsch Americana like the Founding Fathers in the powdered wigs. The paintings suggest themes of illusion and flatness, plays on the phantom solidity of objects in a picture. Rather than the oily tangles of guts that viewers saw spilling out of the punctured bodies of Schutz’s earlier paintings, these people reveal only an undifferentiated black non-substance when they’re opened up. The paintings look like they’ve been hit by an unreality bomb.
Speaking of the period of artistic self-doubt she went through between 2006 and 2007, Dana was as candid as usual.
“I didn’t mean to focus on the negative. I overdo it a bit. It wasn’t that big of a deal,” she said.
“You weren’t chain-smoking, is what you mean.”
“No. But I was chewing nicotine gum.”
Any artist who shows her work in public, no matter how good her work is or how nice a person she may be, comes in for a certain amount of public abuse; rapid success simply adds fuel to the fire. Schutz’s rise to prominence coincided with the rise of art blog, where the phenomenon of her nearly instantaneous success was placed under the microscope by many anonymous critics:
People like Dana, who get handed too much, too fast for too little, will never know how little of the phenomenon that is her current status is actually attributable to her “work” but to the star-making, self-serving machinery that has been the disgracefully degenerate art market for quite some time, now. But she will figure it out when, as happened to so many “stars” of the 80’s whose names are long-forgotten, their rabid patrons, each out a few hundred thousand dollars, embarrassed and chagrinned by their own stupidity, that she better have invested her fortune well.32
I haved personally known dana for years and like her work, but she is also WAY overhyped and her work often falls very short in person which is the worst way to fall short in painting. She has painting subject matter like this since she was an undergrad so it isn’t that impressive. All your comments reflect exactly what the problem is with her work and the artworld and painting in general. The whole canniblism of the artworld bullshit???????? That isn’t dana, that is some critic reading that shit into her work trying to make it more valid than it is.33
personally, i feel burned out on it all. i am tired of hearing about prices and collectors and fashion magazines and wild young artists. the times has covered shutz more than the war in iraq. it doesn’t make the work any better.34
On top of this inevitable backlash, the ocean of painting was buffeted by new waves and squalls. Following the representation-heavy offerings of the first half of the decade, its remainder would see the dominance of abstraction. Tastes ran toward the monochromatic, the digital, the minimal, the austere, and the de-skilled—just about everything that Dana’s paintings weren’t. “I understood the urgency toward abstraction,” she said, “but it seemed like everything was pegboard with sprayed holes and flopped-over burlap. Saturated color seemed flashy, ‘out of it,’ and somehow connected to the market. And the market had become this problem—the only thing that people seemed to be on the same page about. It felt as though if you weren’t making work to critique it, you were a part of the problem. I thought, ‘If I’m using color, what does that mean? Am I just extroverted?’”
She spent a while making small abstract paintings, which she never showed to anyone, and paintings with no color in them; “they ended up just being brown,” she said. “I said no to a lot of things, because I think I knew it was a bad situation. You have studio visits and it looks so depressing in there . . . Like there’s nothing in there except for creepy, bad stuff.”
The paintings that did make it out of Schutz’s studio from that period betray small signs of artistic fatigue (“I think I was just really tired and burnt-out, you know?”), but they hold up well. A series of large works shown at Feuer in 2007 departed the fantastical terrain she’d explored earlier in the decade and focused on the here and now. They represented plausible, almost banal scenes given a slight, speculative torque by the conditional-tense constructions of their titles: How We Would Dance, How We Would Drive, How We Would Talk, How We Would Give Birth.
They’re subtle, emotionally subdued—at least compared with the gonzo quasi-expressionism of the Self-Eater pictures. In How We Would Dance, five angular hipsters contort in a darkened living room under a disco ball. Schutz had stuck lengths of masking tape onto the canvas here and there, painted the image around them, and then ripped the tape off to leave sharp white lines that interrupt and flatten the picture: a precursor of the thinning effect that would occur in her paintings for the next couple of years.
At the Zach Feuer Gallery, a giant X formed by crossed lengths of steel railroad tracks, a floor sculpture by Marianne Vitale, spanned the main exhibition room. Feuer and I stepped over it four times to get to the office in the back. We sat at the end of a wall-length desk, opposite a set of bookshelves stocked with catalogs and binders for each of the gallery’s artists. A fax machine spit papers onto the floor.
Feuer is now in his mid-thirties and looks pretty much the same as he did when he began dealing art in New York in his early twenties: a stocky guy with a groomed beard and receding, close-cropped hair. He’d been an art student in Boston before becoming a gallerist, and he maintains an artistlike wardrobe of cuffed jeans, sneakers, and open-collared shirts. Perhaps the look keeps him in touch with the early days of the gallery, the exhilarating moment before the onrush of success when “we didn’t really know what we were doing—we just did a show and that was it.” He told me that during their first studio visit, when she’d still been a student at Columbia, Dana had been hung over and threw up.
We talked about the current state of the gallery world. Feuer worried about the “disposable culture of the emerging artist . . . everyone chases them for two years and then literally, people can’t give the work away.” I thought about the gauntlet that Schutz—or any artist who succeeds right off the bat—had to run in order to sustain a career beyond the initial flush of fame. Beyond the usual pitfalls of creative burnout and poor decision-making, the mathematics of the art market are statistically set against the longevity of the emerging artist.
The price of an artist’s work is only ever supposed to rise. It can do this quickly or slowly, so long as it continues to climb up the bar graph. As it does, the artist requires larger and larger financial commitments from collectors and institutions to keep the whole apparatus moving in the right direction. A young artists whose prices rise too high, too fast risks an equally precipitous drop: all it takes is an iffy review, or a bad day sale at Sotheby’s, and the speculators who initially inflated the artist’s market may scamper for cover. Feuer struggled to keep Schutz’s prices at a reasonable level: commensurate with her works’ importance and merit, but beneath the reach of the speculative whirlwind that captured, elevated, and then spat out many of her peers.
We talked about the economic conversation around Schutz’s work, which Zach said was the only conversation anyone wanted to have for most of the time they worked together. “I would do everything I could not to talk about Dana and the market.”
Then, inevitably, we had a conversation about Schutz’s market. “They would attack her youth and her gender and try to push her prices down by talking about how inflated and huge they were,” Zach said. “I think her work is still tremendously undervalued.”
Feuer pointed to the example of Mark Grotjahn, a Los Angeles artist who’d just set an auction record of $6.5 million for a large painting that spring. “I mean, I love Grotjahn’s work, but Dana is a really important artist and the fact that her auction record is under a half million dollars is illogical if people use her as an example of the market craziness. It wasn’t crazy compared to everything else—it was just that we were kids and she was a woman.”
Schutz exhibited Singed Picnic at the gallery in March of 2009, in what would be her last show there. A month earlier, Bloomberg News had reported that Feuer, in an effort to downsize in the post-bubble art market, had dropped eight artists from the gallery’s roster over the winter. The move was abrupt and its publicity jarring, most of all to the artists who’d been asked to leave. All but three painters (Schutz, Jules de Balincourt, and Dasha Shishkin) were encouraged to find other representation—which suggested that in addition to weathering a financial downturn, Feuer was also revamping his program: steering it away from the no-longer-so-stylish style of brash figurative painting with which the gallery had become closely associated. For the next few years, the gallery exhibited almost exclusively video and sculpture.
The relationship between an artist and a dealer attempts to combine friendship, creative rapport, and business into one functional arrangement; it’s practically inevitable that at least one of these components suffers in the long run. With so many psychological dynamics to contend with, the end of the relationship can be accompanied by feelings of betrayal and competing public relations campaigns: who left whom first, who was the instigator and whom the injured party. Feuer’s and Schutz’s was no exception, and Zach was visibly wary when talking about Dana’s decision to leave the gallery in 2011.
“It seems like it was very hard,” I said.
“It was. It was awful,” he said. “The biggest fear I had as a business owner for many years was her leaving. And maybe that anxiety actually caused the breakdown that happened.”
“Without going into the details of the petty fights we had,” he added.
Schutz didn’t want to go into the details of the petty fights either. She said she’d felt increasingly isolated in the gallery. (Possibly, the 2009 roster cuts had had a lot to do with this; she was friends with many of those artists—Tom McGrath being one—and deciding to stay on after their departure put her in an awkward position). “Zach was going through a lot of changes, and so was I,” she told me. “I think we just wanted different things. Leaving was awful. I mean, we’d been friends and worked together for a long time. There was no easy way to go about it.”
A few weeks after I saw Feuer, I went uptown to visit Schutz collectors Andrew Cohen and Suzi Kwon Cohen at their apartment on the Upper East Side. Andrew, a prominent hedge fund manager, was careful to distance himself from the style of broad, speculative buying and aggressive auction flipping associated, fairly or not, with the members of his profession who got into the art game en masse in the middle of the last decade. “It isn’t like buying groceries,” he told me.
We toured the Cohens’ collection, devoted almost exclusively to the work of American artists of the couple’s generation. A gray monochrome canvas made with an Epson printer by Schutz’s gallery-mate Wade Guyton hung in the hallway, opposite a digital print under Plexiglas by the mid-career Conceptualist Kelley Walker (an enlarged Artforum cover smeared with toothpaste). In the library, Suzi sat at a desk under an eleven-part Walker (images of turntables) and a sculpture by Dana’s husband, Ryan, a clock with painted-on hands pointing crazily in all directions. A hallway was hung with small Mark Grotjahn drawings, and in a playroom with kids playing on the floor (Cohen: “We’re just going to look at the art, guys”) was a Schutz painting on paper of the face of a coin. We went back through the hall to the dining room, which had a melon-headed woman looking down at her hands (Schutz, Stare, 2003) and another painting by Walker. We ended up in the living room: another Guyton (three black circles on a white ground), a Grotjahn over the fireplace (a radial purple abstraction), and a Schutz painting of a disembodied ochre brain on a golden platter that seems to pulsate with mental activity.
Cohen told me that he’d followed Dana’s work since the beginning of her career but didn’t buy anything until 2006, when he was offered a painting from her retrospective at the Rose Museum at Brandeis University. Since then, he’s acquired pieces from most exhibitions. “When there’s so much interest in someone’s work, you don’t always get to choose,” he said, but in Schutz’s 2011 show at Petzel, he got the pick of the litter: Flasher, a big picture of a man pulling open his raincoat to reveal not genitalia but a field of abstract shapes, squiggles, and smears.
The work at the Rose Museum was called Google, an uncharacteristically naturalistic self-portrait painted in 2006 and showing Schutz in her studio, hunched over a cluttered desk staring at an already-outdated iMac—the bulbous model that debuted in 1998. The screen shows the results of an image search, but you could just as easily imagine that the artist is refreshing a blog page over and over as the anonymous, poison-keyboard commentary piles up.
The picture made me think of two prominent self-portraits in the canon. The first was a Chardin pastel from the Salon of 1771, in which the artist, whose eyesight was failing at age seventy-two, shockingly wears a pair of round pince-nez. They look incongruous, even anachronistic. Eyeglasses date back to the thirteenth century at least, but people generally took them off to sit for painted portraits until the nineteenth century.
Google produces a corollary effect. Even an artist like Schutz, whose work is so much concerned with the life of the imagination, spends a lot of time on the computer. But seeing one show up in a painting of hers looks unaccountably awkward: a stage-dressing goof, like the Roman soldiers with wristwatches in Spartacus, that punctures the fictional space we enter in order to look at her work. Cohen said he’d been attracted to the painting because it dated itself immediately: it was a perfect piece of contemporary art.
The other was Courbet’s panoramic Artist’s Studio of 1855. It shows the artist perched on a stool in his spacious Parisian atelier, applying the finishing touches to a landscape while a host of symbolic people mill about the dark, high-ceilinged room. To one side are arrayed a cross-section of social types (mendicant, merchant, priest). To the other, an urbane group of individual onlookers, including a pensive Proudhon and a brooding Baudelaire, represent the artist’s intellectual milieu—“all the shareholders,” Courbet called them. “It’s the whole world coming to me to be painted,” he said of the picture, to which he appended a paradoxical designation in the work’s subtitle: a real allegory summing up seven years of my artistic and moral life. The figures in the painting were at once symbolic and concrete, subjective and objective, real-ly allegorical, and together they attested to the breadth of Courbet’s world. The artist was naturally at its center.
Schutz had painted herself painting before. In 2003, she placed herself in a surreal studio-landscape (a forest lit incongruously with two tungsten clip-lamps) daubing the outline of a pink homunculus onto an even pinker canvas. But Google is the only self-portrait in which we see her properly in her world.
It’s a mess: overturned potted plants and gum wrappers on the floor, deli coffee cups, plastic bottles of water, and crumpled receipts on the desk. Two calendars and a day planner, an open box of checks, broken CD cases, and an overspilling ashtray attest that the boring, everyday frustrations of the artist are as boringly frustrating as anyone else’s.
Compared with the imagistic splendor of Courbet’s self-portrait, which shows us that even while alone in the studio the artist is surrounded by the sprites of his creative universe, Google is painfully prosaic. But the two paintings are about the same thing; the representatives of Schutz’s artistic and moral life appear here, too, as the tiny glyphs on the computer screen. The world doesn’t come to the studio to be painted; it’s channeled to the artist through the glowing box on the desk, in a layer of colored light that’s thinner even than paint on canvas.
On first inspection it seems to belong with other Schutz paintings from that year, in which groups carry out unspecified tasks in simple landscapes. Here, simplified men and women form a human sculpture on a beach. They’re wrapped up in microphone cords, and little wedges of bright color suggest falling confetti. Five figures are carrying a larger one, a stick-limbed guy in a navy suit with a round pink head and a snowman’s jutting, carroty nose. He isn’t dead or dying, like the giant in Presentation, but he’s slack, three sheets to the wind—all except for his red tie, which points priapically up toward one o’clock. The landscape is three stacked horizontal bands of color.
Like most (maybe all) of Schutz’s pictures, Party is an art-historical gala. You can trace its landscape of horizontal bands backward in time, from Picasso’s surrealistic beachgoing couples of the early 1930s or Max Beckmann’s nearly contemporaneous seascape friezes, to Cézanne’s bathers a quarter century before that, then back even further to Nicholas Poussin and eventually the Greeks.
I looked at Party a dozen times before I noticed that the people in it are George W. Bush’s cabinet, circa 2004. Schutz had simplified them to the point of near-anonymity: Donald Rumsfeld is a pale rectangle with a pair of rectangular glasses, John Ashcroft is a puce square with a lank forelock. Dick Cheney is a dull pink circle and Condoleezza Rice is a leg in a blue pump and a flip of brown hair atop an orangey-brown oval. Powell (a sliver of purple) is almost entirely hidden behind the president, the limp fellow with the erect tie.
Schutz told me that Party began, like many of her canvases, with an abstract idea: a group of people trying to become one person. Anxieties about the upcoming election, and the photographs from Abu Ghraib that had begun circulating in April of that year, crept into the work—through the artist’s computer, no doubt. The figures in the painting took on identities (what better representation of amalgamated personhood than that of a head of state?), and their frolic began to seem like the sinister kind of human sculpture practiced at the notorious Iraq prison, its dogpiles of hooded prisoners. Microphone cords became leashes or electrodes.
“I kind of wanted it to be in between,” Dana said. “Not because I liked the idea of it being ambiguous—my feelings toward the subject were not ambiguous; I thought the country was in a shitty situation—but I thought it was interesting if the characters were caught in a moment where they could either be celebrating or falling apart.”
The idea of ambiguity crops up incessantly in recent art criticism. As a quality of art, it’s almost universally desired: it’s associated with semiotic richness, interpretive openness, and the active role of the viewer in constructing the meaning of the work. If something is ambiguous, it isn’t facile, easy, didactic, affirmative, propagandistic. Ambiguous is to painting today what existential was to Abstract Expressionism; it’s hard to imagine contemporary art without it.
Being desirable themselves, Schutz’s paintings are full of the stuff. You could say that ambiguity is Schutz’s métier, and many people have: “Dana Schutz [is] known for her large paintings, which combine riotous color with distorted figurative forms, producing scenes as emotional as they are ambiguous.”35 “These place her paintings in an ambiguous space between fiction and reality, past and future, realism and fantasy.”36 “It’s a tour de force, dazzling in its mosaic-like application of color and maddening in its ambiguous approach to mob psychology.”37
An art-blog review of Schutz’s 2006 exhibition at the Rose Museum, in which Party was featured, put the case like this:
Some of her more recent paintings move into gimmicks that would be best avoided. Social and political commentary are not her strong suit. Party, a painting of members of the Bush administration melded together and wrapped in microphone cords, is one that could have been a disaster but is saved by ambiguity.38
The notion is bracing. For an artist, what does it mean to be ambiguous in a painting about a subject as charged as torture? For a viewer or critic, what does it mean to prefer an ambiguous painting of it to one that is unambiguous? The desire suggests an idea about the division of representational labor: that the painted image is now historically superfluous to the task of bearing witness (even, possibly, to the task of conveying a political message). Other media do this more efficiently and accurately. And in one sense this is true: what painted image of torture could possibly add to the terrible completeness we see in its photographic representation, or feel in the firsthand account of its victims or perpetrators? But if this is the case, what does painting do?
Schutz set Party on a beach as a nod to Philip Guston’s 1975 painting San Clemente. Using the same sky-sea-sand tricolor as Beckmann and Picasso had, Guston painted the recently resigned Nixon skulking around at his family’s California retreat. The landscape in the two paintings is nearly the same, and the two presidents’ neckties are pointing in precisely the same direction.
Guston had risen to prominence as an Abstract Expressionist before returning to representational art in the late 1960s. This transformation in his work had everything to do with being an artist in the United States at that time, he told an interviewer after the fact:
I was feeling split, schizophrenic; the war, what was happening to America, the brutality of the world. What kind of a man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything—and then going home to adjust a red to a blue?39
Abstract art, for Guston, lacked the capacity to address the pressing problems of being alive just then and there. Making pictures could at least make you feel like you were doing something; ask any political cartoonist. And his Nixon takes many cues from that genre of image making. San Clemente is an explicit picture, in both senses of the word. It’s an obvious caricature of Nixon, and a grotesque one: Guston has transformed the president’s nose and cheeks into a huge, dangling cock and balls.
In a few paintings from 2005, Schutz tried her hand at a similar explicitness. In Men’s Retreat, titans of industry engage in a touchy-feely revel in a Bohemian Grove–esque flowered glen. Unlike the nearly unrecognizable figures in Party, the men here are rendered in merciless, caricaturistic detail: Rupert Murdoch crouches in the bushes wearing a headband, Dennis Kozlowski mopes, Bill Gates, in a wife beater and blue briefs, applies war paint to the face of a naked Ted Turner. (Michael Ovitz bought this painting too.) It puts Schutz in the camp of the great satirists of postwar American art: Guston, Robert Colescott, Peter Saul. It also feels slightly out of character.
Party, however, is an altogether more oblique image. It’s constitutionally vague. Trying to sort out the tangle of interlocking limbs in the picture, you come up against unexpected lacks and excesses: there are too few legs and arms, and in some cases you can’t tell what belongs to whom. Other elements of the picture—the patches and the little falling daubs of color, two cryptic triangles protruding from above the group’s shoulders—can’t be accounted for within its pictorial logic.
Party is a picture of epistemological doubt. Interpreting it means (to paraphrase one of the painting’s subjects) taking stock of the unknowns, both known and unknown. But I don’t think it’s a more successful picture than Men’s Retreat because it’s interpretively uncertain. It’s successful because Party is a clearest possible representation of a contradiction: Party is the body politic celebrating its own collapse.
Max Beckmann made drawings and etchings of the corpses he saw in Belgium as an orderly during the First World War; “four years of staring straight into the stupid face of horror,” he wrote of it.40 If Schutz’s work testifies to anything, it’s to the anxiety of seeing at a distance, and only partially—and having to make up what one can’t see. (Consider the living-or-dead giant in Presentation, a chimerical stand-in for the scores of civilian casualties and dead soldiers whose images weren’t, and still aren’t, available to us; or the acts of mutilation presented by the Self-Eaters, in which physical violence is experienced at several removes from immediate, bodily reality.) Primarly, her images bear witness to the mood of boom-time, war-time America: festive and horrible, monstrously cheerful, like a party about to get thoroughly out of control.
One is a chubby, iridescent lizard-thing, with suggestions of scales and claws. Its powerful legs are painted in thin washes of orange-red and purple, most of which seems to have been wiped off with a thinner-soaked rag. One of its eyes has a vivid, golden iris, and the other is bisected by the tip of the brushy black V forming the creature’s stubby, upturned nose. “There might be a cigarette between her toes,” said Dana.
Another has a lower jaw lined with serrated teeth, like an upturned saw, and an eyeball that seems to be exploding. Abstract tattoos run down the length of one arm, and it wears a denim mini-skirt with a beaded fringe. “This one is based on a woman in the neighborhood. I think she’s a meth addict. I thought of people who wander around and pick up anything shiny, or trash. Something between that, and those fish that glow from inside.”
The third, she said, began with an idea of a place rather than a person: a town out in the hills, perhaps outside Los Angeles. Maybe it’s abandoned, or inhabited only by actors. The figure has a white short-sleeved shirt and khakis. “I think there could be a lot of black-and-white TVs in it,” she said. “Or maybe that’s how he sees things. I have to figure out how to paint the sky. I don’t know how it would be.” She seemed relatively sure about what to do with the figure: “The shirt is going to be more Hawaiian. And he’s going to have a ponytail.”
I’d gone to visit Schutz’s studio again on a hot day in July. I ran into her on the corner of her block. She was taking a break and getting an iced tea; she was supposed to be working on a group of unfinished paintings scheduled to go to Berlin at the end of the summer but had ended up just lying down in the middle of the studio floor.
The three unfinished paintings were pictures of gods—“Not different gods,” she told me, “like the pantheon of Greek Gods. More like different proposals for gods . . . what God could look like if you’re not religious.” The canvases were each about eight feet tall, and Dana said that a large, narrow, vertical format is much harder to pull off than a large horizontal—something about getting up on a ladder to paint and resisting the tendency to divide the canvas into a top and a bottom.
The paint on Schutz’s recent canvases is thick and viscous, but unlike on her earlier ones, there isn’t a whole lot of it; it doesn’t accrete into crusty layers anymore. She tries to complete a section of a painting in one session and to wipe it down with solvent at the end of the day if she isn’t satisfied with the results. Life often gets in the way of this approach. “I stopped this one because I started to panic about it, and the paint got all sticky. And then my cousin came to town, and we went upstate . . .”
Schutz told me about a promo she’d just seen for Google Glass. The advertisement is shot from the perspective of the user. He or she is doing a number of interesting things and recording them: piloting a hot air balloon, riding a horse, playing Ping-Pong, walking down a runway at a fashion show. In the segment that caught her eye, the user is about to embark on an ice sculpture of a tiger. He’s staring down at the block of ice, and he says to the device, “Pull up photos of tiger heads,” and, like magic, images of tiger heads appear in the upper left corner of the viewscreen. A minute later, we see him using one of these as a guide for the sculpture.
“So it seems interesting and also completely ominous,” Dana said. I thought again about the painting Google, and the uneasy reciprocity in Schutz’s work between the screen and the canvas. “I don’t know, I guess people will still be able to imagine things, and come up with different images, but . . .” She looked uncomfortable.
“I’m not against it or anything. But I like the idea of headspace. I mean, personal headspace. That’s why I think artists are so great. Because it takes that headspace to make a painting.”
When Courbet painted The Artist’s Studio, painting was just about to cede its position to photography as the medium best suited to transmitting visual information; perhaps that accounts for his insistent desire to picture himself, and painterly realism, at the center of culture and as the apex of art history. But painting and drawing were still the tools by which his culture imagined itself most vividly.
Painting is now a profoundly eccentric way to try to represent the world: as materially and methodologically divorced from our everyday mode of image production as the illuminated manuscript is from the text message. But rather than lessening that gap, Schutz seems to want to keep it open: to bring the culturally complicated act of painting into some functional relationship with the more basic, perhaps fundamental activities of imagining and picturing.
It doesn’t always work. Hence the affinity of her work with the paradoxical and the self-contradictory, its dalliance with ambiguity, and the absurd and protracted lengths she goes to in order to invent situations in which the act of painting makes sense. Hence, too, the occasional failures of nerve she experiences, and the immense satisfaction we feel when her images hit their marks and attach themselves to the world.