Dana Schutz: A Metaphorical Painting
From October 6th, 2023 to February 11th, 2024, after the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, in Denmark, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris presents Dana Schutz. The Visible World (curated by Anaël Pigeat), the first exhibition of this scale in France to be devoted to the American artist. Although she is best known for her paintings, the exhibition also features a number of recent sculptures alongside some forty paintings from the last twenty years, drawings and engravings. Eleonor Heartney met her.
Born in 1976 in Lavonia, Michigan, Dana Schutz is recognised as one of the main heirs to the tradition of Surrealist expressionism exemplified by painters like Max Beckmann, Philip Guston and James Ensor. Her paintings present absurdist situations in a style that combines a homage to icons of popular culture with the innovations of modernist abstraction. As Klaus Biesenbach, the curator of one of her early shows (PS1, NewYork, 2001) remarked, she offers a bridge between cartoons and social realism. Her psychologically complex paintings are suffused with low brow, scatalogical humor and offbeat social commentary.
In 2017, one of her works became enmeshed in the politics of the culture wars. Titled Open Casket, it presented a fractured and abstracted image of a black man in a casket. The work was based on a 1955 photograph of the mutilated corpse of Emmett Till, a fourteen year old boy who was brutally murdered after being accused of offending a white woman in Mississippi. At the time of his funeral, Till’s mother made the photograph available to the press to expose the brutality of American racism. The image became a powerful impetus for the nascent Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Schutz painted her work in 2016, at a time when the Black Lives Matter movement was refocusing attention on contemporary racial injustice in the United States. When Schutz was invited to participate in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, Open Casket was included in the show. It quickly became a flashpoint when African American artist Hannah Black objected to its inclusion. She demanded that the painting be removed, arguing that it was unacceptable for a white artist to appropriate and profit from Black suffering. The ensuing controversy divided the American art world. On one side were those who demanded
that the painting be destroyed and on the other, those who placed it within the long history of anti-racist art by white artists and decried the efforts to remove and destroy it as unwarranted censorship. In the end the Museum kept the painting in the show with an explanatory label and a small group of protesters held vigil in front of it every day. In this interview, Schutz talks about her complex dance between figuration and abstraction, the illogic logic in her work, her kinship with Philip Guston and her reaction to the controversy over Open Casket. EH
Your early work included paintings of sneezes, self-eaters and Frank, the last man in the world. Critics tended to talk about these works as allegories of painting and modernism. Was that a fair assessment? I wouldn’t say they were that selfreferential, although some of the subjects dealt with gesture and material as it was subsumed by subject matter.The self-eaters, for example, were always about their own process. Mostly, I was thinking of a problem as a framework. With the paintings of Frank, the last man on Earth, it began with the question of what is representation in a situation with one subject, one painter and no audience, and a relative world of limited material. It was never about painting the end of the world, but more about how one could rearrange the world. The paintings were like open space with a simple, curved horizon, like there was endless time without events. How do you begin to build events?
How has the work evolved since then? The paintings now seem much more complex. Recently the subjects have been moodier. Ideas are coming and they feel more immediate, and I don’t know if they will stick because I have no idea what the painting will look like, or even if the idea is worth painting.
Can you talk about your relation to art history? We feel references to painters as varied as Goya, Käthe Kollwitz, Robert Colescott, Giotto, Paolo Uccello, James Ensor, Max Beckmann and Picasso. Do you gravitate toward certain artists for inspiration, either formal or otherwise? I definitely gravitate toward certain artists, but it’s also always changing. Sometimes it’s surprising. Even with an artist’s work that you don’t really think you like, you can get something that you didn’t know you needed.
One person that you have particular affinity with is Philip Guston. I just saw the Guston show in Washington, D.C. It was so great to see the abstractions.They’re so beautiful. I’ve always really loved his later work, and I feel like I had kind of skipped past the abstractions before. Seeing that shift from his early figurative works, I think he must have felt like he was flying. The earlier works of the children in masks were so stuffy and tight, and then the abstractions had this wild air. It must have felt thrilling for him. You can feel it in the paint.Then at a certain point, he felt hampered by abstraction. It wasn’t saying enough of what he wanted to say. So he had to move on, but he incorporated that way of painting into his later work.
I was at a dinner and a Guston quote came up—that painting is about bearing witness and that you paint what you want to see. But I didn’t feel comfortable with how the conversation continued. It was like, is the point to bear witness to what you’ve actually seen? Or to paint affirmatively, to paint a better world? People seemed to be saying these are the options, but I don’t think that’s what Guston was saying. I think he meant that painting is to bear witness to what this world is like and what it is to be in this world. To paint what you want to see is more about the possibility of a painting. So, if Guston would paint a bowl of cherries, it’s not because he wants cherries as a social policy for everyone. It’s because he wants to see what it would be like for cherries to exist in one of his paintings.
CULTURE WAR ISSUES
What you are pointing to is a tendency to read paintings in a literal way, looking for messages. The Guston retrospective itself became mired in that problem. It was postponed for several years because the museum administrators were afraid people would misinterpret Guston’s use of Ku Klux Klan imagery. They were afraid they wouldn’t make a distinction between the art and the symbol. Yes, and paintings aren’t just images. I think paintings are much stranger than that. Art is interesting because in some ways it’s parallel to the world. It’s not necessarily the world; it’s this space that is separated. And painting is metaphorical. You think something is sort of like something else. It’s not necessarily like it in terms of how it looks, but in terms of what it could feel like. I think that’s a strength of painting.
to death in 1955 for talking to a white woman. Till’s mother made that photograph of his disfigured body public to expose the racial brutality of the Jim Crow South. But critics of your painting asserted you had no right as a white woman to use that image and that you were profiting from Black suffering. I made the painting, in the summer of 2016 in America, because it was something I felt was a problem for myself. How do you even begin to approach this subject? It was never for sale, even before the biennial. I didn’t like the idea of it circulating on the market. But the painting caused a lot of pain. It was important to be open and hear what people were saying. It was about more than just the painting.
It got mixed up with all kinds of culture war issues, and somehow you or that painting became a scapegoat for all these larger racial traumas. I don’t feel like a victim or anything. Things needed to be said, and they were.
One way Open Casket is different is that there isn’t any humor in that work, unlike so many of your other paintings. Even when they deal with dark subjects—self eating, vivisection and various sorts of mayhem—the paintings tend to exhibit a playful, even cartoonish quality. That is something you share with Guston. Humor creates a kind of deliberate dissonance which makes the grotesque and often macabre imagery easier to take. Humor can do that. That can happen in a painting. But it can only happen if I’m surprised while I’m making the painting. So, it’s never something I would set out to do.
You start with a relative space of associations and build a logic, and then all of a sudden you can be jolted out of that space because there is a complication or something that breaks the logic. You can’t predict it, but it’s wonderful when it happens.
You talked about painting as a parallel world. In your work it’s an irrational world where everything is turning into everything else. Which is sort of like humor, or sometimes just like life. Because a painting is already something that’s doubled. It is a material, but then it is also an image and has space. Even if it’s abstract, you’re always in this other space, potentially, while also being reminded of the thing itself.
Recently you have been making sculptures. How do they fit into all of this? I really love making them. I think they’re much looser than the paintings. And there is something about being able to make a form with no framing edge. It feels like the form can just sort of grow. It feels really alive. And because sculpture is a more concrete form, light is such a big part of how you read it. You get all this tonality with the material catching light in space.
Do you think that working on sculpture has changed the way you work on paintings? Yes. When I’m painting figures, now I think about where the light hits a cheek, for instance. It’s almost like that’s a slab of clay. The paintings have become much more volumetric.
Your works mix abstraction and representation and borrow from the whole range of art history in a way that would have been considered anathema in an earlier era. I am wondering if that is a reflection of the years you went to art school? I started art school at the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1995. Then in 2000, I was in graduate school at Columbia University.
That was a very transitional time in terms of art theory and ideas of progress in art. When I emerged, ideas about progress in art were not so relevant. People would talk about painterly language, but it felt like they were dealing with it in a way that had already been coded. If someone were to do something abstract, they would say, well, that’s a reference. But I didn’t really want that. It seemed very boring to me. I didn’t want to be making paintings that were just referencing referencing. If you were painting like someone or liked the way so-and-so painted an arm, it wasn’t just appropriation. It wasn’t meant to be a comment on a whole history of art.
A lot of the theory at the time felt very antiart or at least opposed to the sensuous experience of art. What struck me was that certain ideas about art could be very beautiful or interesting. And then they get built on to create this whole complicated structure. I was really into it. I thought it was fascinating. It was rigorous and cool. But it also was not what I was doing. After a while you start to think, what if that was just bullshit? Then, when I moved to New York, it felt like artists were involved with other disciplines such as architecture or fashion or infotainment. It felt like these historical narratives we had studied in school were not right.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, there was a major shift in the art world toward a kind of promiscuous pluralism. Yes, art can do a lot of different things. One aim of art could be just to say, well, this is what it was like. And then you can understand that moment in time. I think that’s the great thing about art—that it’s very amorphous, it changes in time. Going back to the Guston show, he probably also had this feeling that things were stuck, that nothing good is coming out of any of this. That the future is bleak. And yet, things continue to move and change.
Eleanor Heartney is a New York based writer and curator. She has published Doomsday Dreams: the Apocalyptic Imagination in Contemporary Art (Silver Hollow Press, 2019), amongst others books.