Monster’s Ball Dana Schutz @ MOCA Over the past half decade the artist Dana Schutz has experienced the sort of dazzling rise to international fame usually reserved for the very hottest actors, musicians, and basket ball players. The February 2006 issue of Vogue, for instance, featured a six page spread that clued in the monthly fashion epistle’s national readership to Dana and her work; the article was headlined Great Dana. For a painter, that’s pretty snazzy. It just doesn’t happen that a young artist from Livonia, MI goes off to grad school in New York and emerges with the name recognition of, if not Scarlett or Lebron, then something pretty darn close. Maybe the oddest aspect of the whole phenomenon is the fact that she’s good enough to deserve it. Outrageously facile even as a student in the late 1990’s at the Cleveland Institute of Art, Shutz continues to challenge herself and her gifts, sometimes stumbling in the process but usually ending up not only on her feet, but poised, with a gymnast’s improbable grace, at the brink of new perception. She is by any standard a painter’s painter, dabbling simultaneously in techniques that embrace representation and abstraction, swinging from smooth to rough, gooey to overdone, all with the drop-dead aplomb of a Sunday commix Caravaggio. Indeed the influences visible in a given work can be a crash course in the history of figurative and narrative painting. Contemporary painter Laura Owens’ starving-artist, faux minimalist manner, for instance, might come to mind as one source for Schutz’ 2002 Night in Day, which seems to depict an essentially indescribable object placed in a sort of landscape. It takes up where Philip Guston’s late paintings leave off, constituting a brief visual essay on what it means to make a painting. The painterly calculus sketched by Guston started with the homespun realities of paint as material, moving immediately and shockingly to a weird mixture of politics and reverie – to the politics of dreaming. Schutz is up to something similar. But where Guston fixates on certain images and vernaculars – clunky shoes and Ku Klux Klan hoods rendered in a flatfooted thick black line– Schutz skips from paint to half-formulated narratives. The images almost don’t matter, and if she wasn’t so very good with paint, there often wouldn’t be much to look at. Since she is so agile, a growing list of propositions is made to the mind and eye. In Night in Day this has to do with the fact that an object seems to be represented in very concrete terms, somewhat in the manner of Guston, or Owens, or like a crunchier version of some background object in George Herriman’s classic Crazy Kat; and yet it has no identifiable function or provenance. It sits in the middle of nowhere (maybe on a beach), and there’s a strip of night sky at the upper left. In other words, a painting can be whatever it wants to be and persuades the viewer by fiat of substance, color, and artistic will. It also is nothing of the kind, says nothing, is nothing, is known to be an illusion at best. Visual persuasiveness in itself is almost but not quite enough to keep a Schutz painting on its feet. But where is it going? All of her works flirt with a vanishing horizon of connectedness. Fortunately she has devised a solution, a bridge over the chasm of self-referentiality; it could be called the half-assed narrative. Back in 2001 Schutz began a series of paintings which as usual were all about paint, but also were about an imaginary boyfriend who she named Frank. The time was not now, the place not here. Time had ended and Frank was the last man on earth – Dana was the last painter. As the series went on, Dana kept an eye on Frank as he did desert-island, last man sorts of stuff, like getting sunburned and building flotsam-based contraptions. Night in Day probably is one of those, and knowing that story, which is no more a real story than the object is a real object, nevertheless serves to jumpstart the cognitive energies of the piece by assigning the whole thing the value of x in an ongoing equation of paint and thought. Since then Schutz has explored a number of other meta-storyboard scenarios, sampled by the sixteen large and small paintings on view at MOCA. Among the weirdest characters to date are the self-eaters, in a series that catches them in the act of eating their own faces, or chests, or arms. As with the Frank paintings, these crackle with the energy jumping between the vivid, almost palpable realities (however unreal) their situation evokes, and questions about what it all means. Above all, Schutz is creating space for herself, constructing a sense of priority engineered to outflank the chronic poetic malaise that literary theorist Harold Bloom terms belatedness. One of Schutz’ early influences, the Belgian painter Luc Tuymans, describes belatedness as his central dilemma. But where Tuymans’ paintings almost disappear in a misty residue of anxiety, Schutz is one hundred percent present, asserting the conditions of anxiety – extremes of abandonment, loathing of various kinds, and dismemberment – as if they were displays in a theme park. She is the last and first painter, at least in her own world, and the economy of her paintings is self-sufficient: her subjects can be taken apart and reassembled from one series to the next, eating themselves, or as it may be, proactively building themselves a pair of new legs out of gobs of paint, as in the 2003 painting New Legs. More recently Schutz has moved on to tackle political and corporate realities. Ranging up to 12 by 10 feet in size, the heroic scale of these works declares her ambition to make a difference in the public sphere in which she finds herself. They also can be very funny. Schutz’ fey, slightly goofy sense of humor is a saving grace throughout her oeuvre, but in a painting like Men’s Retreat it’s positively triumphant. Based on accounts of Men’s Movement-inspired corporate rituals, Schutz imagines Bill Gates and Ted Turner communing in the undergrowth. It’s like a mild, middle-aged cast version of Lord of the Flies. Tyco’s deposed CEO Dennis Kozlowski’s floating head haunts the background. The inspiration is Pieter Bruegel’s sixteenth century masterpiece The Blind Leading the Blind. In Men’s Retreat, as in the ambitious Surgery hanging next to it at MOCA, Schutz continues to carve out new territory for her hard-to-categorize approach. Nearby, an absolutely uncanny work titled Fishing Trip dips even farther into darkly whimsical, uncharted waters. It shows a lantern-jawed Mussolini somewhere upstream in a small boat; in the stern sits Stalin, all shadows and evil mesmerism: a vampire. This is dreaming, with the illogic and amorality of dream, where everything old is new again and vice versa. In such half-uncoupled fragments of plot and history Schutz rediscovers the bones of painting, building monster after monster like a gleeful Frankenstein.
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