Reading what is written about Dana Schutz, it’s all glowing. There are references to surrealism, German expressionism, Brueghel, Alice Neel, allegory, the incommunicability between beings (?), contemporary mythologies, nightmares, you name it. Most descriptors (or fast-fashion art critics) don’t ask how it’s painted; they talk about dense, charged colour contrasts, dynamics of form, depth, thick layers, etc. In this kind of inventory, we don’t ask how it’s painted. Don’t you see what I mean? Let’s take this example:
At first glance, there’s nothing really new in the way this is painted; many have been painting with rectangular brushstrokes for a long time now (Cézanne, for one). So, first of all, there’s not much to say about the style. We can also note that there is nothing, precisely, in terms of depth. So if the manner of painting doesn’t hold us, what’s left? What remains is the image (our perception), or the subject (painted). Even if the subject may seem spectacular, it’s not hard to imagine that Roland Topor, for example, could have done the same kind of figuration. In fact, there’s no reason to dwell on this image any further. Having said that, I must lack imagination and be too impervious to the messages in the painting, as you verify when one reads the rather performative tone of the Phillips House Notice, down below.
Shall we try another image?
In 2023, so yesterday, how has Schutz’s painting evolved? The characters have multiplied, whereas before we were dealing with just one. What does this multiplication offer? The possibility of increasing the mess (to put it mildly). A family of farmers, shepherds, sheep, one urinating, improbable figures and paraphernalia. And up close?
Nothing to report. Schutz, let me tell you, can’t paint, she has nothing to say as a painter. If she’s not a painter, what is she? An illustrator. In fact, for a long time now, many painters on the market have only been able to illustrate, from David Salle to Claire Tabouret’s latest; via Cecily Brown, Alex Katz, and many others… But what is it that makes illustrators so overwhelmingly successful? In a nutshell: Inculture. In another word: a carefree attitude. Maurice Denis was famous for this phrase, and instead of which he would have been better off breaking his nose:
Remember that a painting — before being a warhorse, a naked woman, or some anecdote — is essentially a flat surface covered with colours in a certain assembled order.
I. Art et critique, august 23 and 30 1890. I wasn’t twenty years old…
The damage done by this quote is immeasurable. Imagine Mallarmé writing: ‘Remembering that a poem, before being an epic, an ode, or anything else, is essentially a series of words aligned on a sheet of paper?’ It would have been received as one of the most stupid sentences in French literature. But Denis didn’t have Mallarmé’s level, he was quite stubborn (he wasn’t twenty, he wrote, yes, all the more reason!). In short, if you think back to this phrase, which has become a gimmick, you realise that it has become a textbook. How many paintings can we say are “stains” and nothing else? Mind you, even stains can say something; from Rothko to Newman, from Marfaing to de Staël. And who, as a painter, would say that he paints spots? That’s rather grotesque. But it’s only half a step from stains to figurative illustration. Half-step’ is a technique used in sliding sports, where one skate glides over an icy or smooth surface while the other is slightly offset to maintain balance and control. The aim of this technique is to achieve a fluid, elegant advance while maintaining a certain degree of stability. See?
The painter-illustrator can glide from stain to face without a hitch, depending on the mood and the price of the asparagus. In short, it’s not serious. But it’s popular, filling up auction rooms, galleries and the bank accounts of gallery owners and famous illustrators (Banksy, JR, Hirst, etc.). But what’s the point of pointing out the obvious? It helps me to go deeper in order to distinguish between what is painted and what illustrates the opposite, and, as a last or first resort, it helps me, as a theorist, to continue along the path of developing taxonomies, which, I believe, we badly need. I am well aware that a number of critics always bring everything back to the past in order to evoke influences and names, or consider the work(s) of such and such an artist solely in terms of his or her production, whereas art is not alone (just as poetry is not alone, as Michel Deguy titled it in a book that was, incidentally, a little too pedantic) but, since the work of Wölfflin, Greenberg and Wollheim, we have every right to hope for up-to-the-minute theoretical proposals. To this end, the illustration/painting distinction can be used to distinguish between those who have, in fact, given up on painting, and those who question it on proof. An example of a proof can be found, among others, with Julien des Monstiers (article here). In here, we can detect ways of painting that are significant, because they imply chronologies, temporalities, rhythm, and the question of what is represented in its representation itself. In other words, des Monstiers makes painting ‘say’, which is the least we can do when painting. And here again is a major difference, a clear demarcation, between illustrators and painters; the former have nothing to say, the latter are always elaborating a saying — there is no “Un dire”, as Mallarmé dreamed, but “dires”. About “saying” in painting, check in this very website.
Notice from the Maison Philipps website about ‘Face Eater’:
Dana Schutz’s Face Eater is a painting of contrasts: boldly executed in Schutz’s unmistakable trademark style, it provokes both revulsion and intrigue. The young human, gender being rather difficult to tell given the drastic perversion of the facial features, is roughly figured in broad, expressive brushstrokes and a subtly muted palette. The face, if it can reasonably be described as such, is all chin with only a gaping mouth full of equine size teeth, two eyeballs hovering in their “normal” location, and an incredibly suggestive phallic tongue. On the one hand, Schutz has painted a self-destructive, a potentially psychopathic individual hell-bent on devouring its own face. On the other, one could understand this individual to be nourishing itself, as any one must, and doing so in the most quintessentially American fashion possible – self-made and self-nourished.
This process of creative destruction, both breaking down and then (re)building back up, is frequently addressed in Schutz’s oeuvre. Indeed, the very process of artistic creativity can, and often will, follow such a trajectory. Each of her characters, over whom she exercises omniscience and omnipotence dictating their every move, exists within their own world bordered by the frame. Schutz has imbued them with a seeming sense of self-awareness and self-sufficiency. The Face Eater itself looks beyond the confines of its frame, maybe considering making some move, some advancement; however, it is only its creator, the artist, who can ever enact any change. Schutz, playing by her own rules, blurs the reality where life and art converge through her portal-like canvases. At once real and imagined, the mutated figure consolidates figuration and abstraction, as if the result of a monstrous experiment. The effect of this visual and kinetic collision is of a vision abandoned, unbounded, and limitless.
There would be definitely studies to be made on the production of explanatory leaflets by major art houses, because it is certainly a sophist’s tour de force to make an illustration saying so many things that it cannot demonstrate since the counterfactual image does not exist. But its aim is to impress and bait the shopper with the OK wallet, eager for a bit of sensationalism in his living room.
