The Artist Dana Schutz Exhibition Overview: An Orgy of Gloop from the Artist Who Outraged New York
Dana Schutz smothers her canvases in heavy layers of gooey paint. This inaugural London show is a messy, exuberant tribute of her material, but significant themes are smuggled through if you can scratch your way towards them.
The Artist's Technique
Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim as a leading figurative artists of her generation – is focused on texture, application, colour and materiality. This is art for artists, truly advanced aesthetic geekery. If you get your kicks losing yourself in coats of color and shading, there’s plenty to engage you for a while. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, surreal, cartoony, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the paintings tick.
Initial Exhibition Pieces
These pieces in the initial room are full of enormous one-eyed beings and roaring mobs. In one shows a group of figures stomps senselessly toward an event off canvas, brandishing fists and creating a path of debris in their wake. A different work features a person receiving a large disguise in an odd ceremony in front of a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s easy to interpret these as political, as commentary on America’s condition, on societal splits and furious, and crowd psychology is turning everything to waste.
An Embrace by Dana Schutz.
Shift in Focus
In the second exhibition area, Schutz seems to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, rather than the masses that support them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a green-clad man recline in golden chairs – while in other works a pair comfort one another in a scene filled with dead bodies, and a woman, maybe Schutz herself, rests unclothed, desolate and powerless in a bed.
Influences and Allusions
This is ultradense, thickly layered art, filled with references. There’s the dreamy surreal symbolism of a symbolist master, the pink, corporeal animation of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of James Ensor, the large-headed oddities of Paul McCarthy. There are riffs on the history of painting, numerous references to pop culture (I am almost 100% sure that one painting is a depiction of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). It would take time identifying all the elements from classic painters with which she’s sprinkled the artworks.
A Model by Dana Schutz.
Meaning and Stories
Painting this dense, complex and allegorical leaves itself open to analysis. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the symbolism of a Renaissance masterpiece but, for my money, there are two relatively clear narratives: the ruling class, and the public that they bait.
The 2017 Scandal
And Schutz should know about that. In 2017, her painting a titled piece – a partly abstract representation of the body of a historical figure, a young African-American who was murdered by racist perpetrators in a southern state in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was displayed at the a New York exhibition. Critics charged her of profiting from tragedy for her own gain. A protester demonstrated against the work each day, and some called for it to be destroyed. An artist of European descent depicting – perhaps compassionately – a image of African-American suffering was the biggest story of the event. This marked the height of the recent culture wars, a period that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the same side. In retrospect, in a society increasingly polarized, less nuanced and more hostile than ever, it feels almost quaint that individuals found moments to get upset at this heartfelt, sorrowful artwork.
Legacy and Current Work
It could have ruined her career, and Schutz probably wants to progress. But all her subsequent work since exists in its shadow. She unavoidably came out of that experience a transformed creator. But what remains constant is her exceptional skill, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, gloopy and deeply political art at the highest level.
