REVIEWS DANA SCHUTZ
How We Cured the Plague, 2007,
oil on canvas, 305 x 366 cm.
Courtesy Zach Feuer Gallery, New York
DANA SCHUTZ: Dana Schutz’s new show is surprisingly disappointing on fi rst sight – the sort of outing that critics typically describe as either
STAND BY EARTH MAN transitional or, even more euphemistically, experimental. Her jolting, complexly sensuous colour and thick, oily brushstrokes are subdued,
ZACH FEUER GALLERY, NEW YORK anaemic or tepid – her expressionist (or faux-expressionist) impulses
13 APRIL – 19 MAY restrained in favour of something more like conventional realism and
less audacious.
Fortunately, her ideas are as fresh and loopy as ever. The titles
of several of the works begin with the phrase How We Would… (…Talk, …Dance, …Give Birth, for example). These place her paintings in an ambiguous
space between fi ction and reality, past and future, realism and fantasy, in a way that correlates nicely with the bizarre scenarios that she’s imagined. It also
connects her to a vein of contemporary fi ction (David Foster Wallace, George Saunders) which uses surrealist or experimental devices in an essentially
realist mode.
The fantastically titled How We Cured the Plague (all works 2007), for example, is chock-full of weird shit that could have come straight from
a Saunders story. A Christ-like Elephant Man connected by red tubes to an enormous fl accid shark hovers in the foreground amidst doctors, plague
victims, caged monkeys, a torso-less fi gure with four legs and… what’s that? Another Christ-like-Elephant-Man-plus-shark in the far distance? It’s
impressively complex and ambitious, but it’s also cluttered and seems hastily rendered – problems which make one wonder if the ambiguities of her
hypothetical world aren’t merely contrivances, whimsy or easy surrealism; unlike Saunders’s fi ction, its weirdness doesn’t necessarily belie a deeply felt
sadness or compassion.
For all of the interesting ideas here, there’s something about them that seems either deliberately clever or too easily exhausted by analysis. How
We Would Give Birth, which shows a woman looking at a painting (and appearing oddly calm) while giving birth, presents an interesting commentary on
creativity, the body and how art history can become a living thing, but also feels a little like a novel gloss on a feminist cliché.
In general, Stand by Earth Man evinces a frustration with the tools of representation and with ham-fi sted paint-handling which seems neither
entirely ironic nor deliberately purposeful. Two straightforward fi gurative paintings (Male and Female) with holes in Arp-ish shapes cut in the canvas over
the fi gures embody this tendency – an ironically self-referential painting-is-dead critique which is tired and familiar. (We all have doubts, but what can
you commit to?)
It’s easy, of course, to set up a familiar dichotomy of sensuous painting versus seriousness of purpose (or to pick a side). Neither of these stances
describes the mysterious mechanism by which painting can complicate narratives and generate worlds rather than simply presenting them in an
unconsummated marriage of painterly form and narrative content – something that Schutz seems to be struggling with here. It is laudable to step out of
the comfort zone of previous success; harder, though, not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Elwyn Palmerton
one.linthree.linone.lin ARTREVIEW
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