Review: Dana Schutz
21/01/18
By Steven Litt, The Plain Dealer
CLEVELAND, Ohio - There's nothing overtly political about the Cleveland Museum of Art's show of big, juicy, new paintings and drawings by Dana Schutz that opened Friday night at the Transformer Station gallery in Ohio City.
But it's hard to avoid the sensation that Schutz, who sparked controversy last year at the Whitney Biennial in New York with her painting of Jim Crow murder victim Emmett Till in his coffin, is channeling the existential dread of the Trump era, just as she sought to explore American racism in her contribution to the Whitney show.
If the time of Trump means living with threat of nuclear war, presidential tweetstorms and strife over immigration, racial divisions, gender conflict and cutting the social safety net, Schutz seems to be very much in the moment.
And that's not only because her show is entitled "Eating Atom Bombs," a clear reference to the potential for a nuclear holocaust.
It's because the protagonists in her paintings are battered, scarred, riven by fears, doubts and a pervasive sense of precariousness that seems very apt right now.
Explicit dig at Trump
Last January, Schutz contributed "Trump Descending an Escalator" to a show at her New York gallery, Petzel, which surveyed responses to the 2016 election. The painting was an obvious dig at Trump's original presidential campaign appearance, and a play on the title of Marcel Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase."
Yet in the Transformer show, devoted to a dozen paintings and three drawings created mostly over the past year, Schutz avoids pinning things down with signifiers of the current national mood, except for an overall sense of conflict and tension.
At the same time, her large-scale paintings evoke ancient myths, Biblical narratives and universal emotions.
"You can read it or relate it to current politics or specific people, but at the same time, there's something larger than that, so it also relates to bigger questions," said Reto Thuring, the Cleveland museum's curator of contemporary art, who co-organized the show with Beau Rutland, the former associate curator of contemporary art.
In the moment, but universal
"Shame," painted in 2017, is a dystopian twist on the myth of Narcissus in which a sobbing nude figure stands in a dark stream that receives her tears and reflects her pain like a mirror.
In "Crawling," a 2016 canvas, a bearded man resembling an ancient philosopher carries a gaunt, greenish man, who could be a war refugee or a plague victim, through a desert swarming with insects and scorched by a huge sun.
And in "Expulsion," another 2016 canvas, Schutz reinterprets the famous 1427 fresco of Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden of Eden, painted in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence, by Italian Renaissance painter Masaccio.
In Schutz's version, the flesh of the protagonists is distorted and clenched. Their bodies press hard against the confining boundaries of the picture's edge as if they were trying to avoid being crushed like the Star Wars protagonists in the trash compactor scene.
Tragic and comic
The show may sound grim, and at times, it is. But what keeps it from drowning in gloom is Schutz's quirky humor, bright colors and engaging, animated, action-filled brushwork.
"Some figures, even if they depict something that seems violent or drastic have a comical quality because these are cartoonish figures," Thuring said.
Schutz's work is an uncanny combination of grandeur and awkwardness, heroism and self-deprecation, virtuosity and cultivated clumsiness that give her paintings an intensity and authenticity that look as if they've been hard-earned, not tossed off with smooth facility.
Mastery of touch
Yet a bold mastery of touch is certainly evident. "Conflict," a 2017 canvas that brings to mind the boxers in "Stag at Sharkey's," the Cleveland's Museum's 1909 masterpiece by George Bellows, is full of slashing, bravura strokes of thick paint, known as impasto in the trade.
Viewed up close, these marks bear a whiff of 1950s Abstract Expressionist gestural painting. Step away a few feet, and they resolve into gnarly feet, a jabbing knee, and a bulbous, fleshy head with a red, gasping mouth.
The Transformer Station show is a homecoming of sorts for a former wunderkind-turned-global-star who rose to fame within years of graduating from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2000, and whose works have been collected by major museums (although not yet the Cleveland Museum of Art).
As much as anything, the protests aroused by Schutz's Emmett Till painting at the Whitney signaled that she's viewed as a worthy, high-profile target. Her critics, many of them African-American, accused her of appropriating black history for careerist purposes.
A problematic painting
"It's a problematic painting and I knew that getting into it," Schutz told Artnet news in a brief interview last March. "I do think that it is better to try to engage something extremely uncomfortable, maybe impossible, and fail, than to not respond at all."
The poise in such words indicate that if there's a tension between achieving prominence while remaining self-possessed, focused and authentic, Schutz, born in 1976 in Livonia, MI, seems to be handling it well.
As a snapshot of a mid-career star in full stride, her new show has the kind of immediacy the Cleveland Museum of Art never would have attempted when it was a far more conservative institution as recently as 10 or 15 years ago.
Some of the paintings on view are so fresh they exude the warm, earthy aroma of wet oil paint. That feels particularly right at the Transformer Station, a former streetcar transformer building turned into a gallery by cultural entrepreneurs Fred and Laura Bidwell in 2013.
Under an agreement with the Bidwells, the museum programs the galleries roughly half of each year, and will take over ownership of the space in about a decade.
Artistic development
As the exhibit demonstrates, Schutz has gone from being a painter known for depicting bizarre personal fantasies such as images of people eating their own face or limbs, to an artist reaching for more universal themes.
The show is anchored by "Deposition," measuring 13 feet wide and 10 feet high, which depicts a Christ-like businessman, beaten and partially stripped of his clothing by a mob, who is about to be dumped in a sea of ravenous fish like a piece of human chum.
Thuring said the work's title refers both to the traditional 13th station of the Cross and to the legal meaning of deposition: sworn, out-of-court testimony.
Like many other works in the show, "Deposition" is full of art historical references. Looking for them - and seeing how Schutz has absorbed and incorporated them - is part of the fun of exploring the show.
'Never too literal'
Such references, as Thuring pointed out, are "never too literal, too direct. But if you're someone who has an archive of images in your head, you'll see many of them in one way or another" in Schutz's paintings.
In the case of "Deposition," Schutz was clearly looking at the "Raft of the Medusa," Theodore Gericault's grisly 1819 painting of a shipwreck that now hangs in the Louvre.
Schutz's "Cryers," a big charcoal drawing completed just this month, very much brings to mind the "weeping women" studies completed in 1937 by Pablo Picasso in preparation for his "Guernica."
And "Self Exam," a 2017 painting, depicts a woman in a claustrophobic bathroom sandwiched between three mirrors that reflect her grimacing mouth and bulging eyes in fragmented snippets that clearly evoke early 20th century Cubism.
There's also a great deal more to see in Schutz's paintings, which reward the kind of prolonged looking that is one of the greatest satisfactions of art.
"Most of the works give away a certain story quickly and easily," Thuring said. "But there's something about looking closely for a long time - you just discover so many things."