There is a modern-day Hieronymus Bosch feel about American artist Dana Schutz’s huge canvases, brimming as they are with all sorts of creatures, each preoccupied with its own idiosyncrasies. They gesture, point in and out of the picture, and maintain our eye contact, or – the very opposite – they seem completely lost to the outside world, immersed in their particular, personal little project, which is often a painting.
One example is Mountain Group (2018), where a rather motley group comprising all sorts of types – ranging from a small red Buddha character to grimly expressive female figures to a cartoon-like creature with a fluttering beard and hands raised in a V-sign – has gathered on a mountaintop. Here we find climate activists and religious figures, all raising their hands in the air, partly in enthusiastic rapture at having reached the summit, partly to indicate that they, too, have an opinion; they, too, have something to say. An artist is in the process of painting the mountain she herself sits on (and so cannot see), while birds vomit blood and a woman removes the ladders intended for use in the group’s descent.
It looks like an allegory, perhaps a modern Tower of Babel, where conflicting opinions and ideas on how to solve humanity’s challenges mean that no one understands each other. Meanwhile, the reddening evening sky heralds the impending apocalypse.
Another scene, Beat Out the Sun (2018), shares similar subject matter. A group of men, arranged as if on an Egyptian relief, march firmly and in perfect time into the picture from one side. They, too, have a plan: armed with boards, they head towards the sun, its rays made up of the same kind of boards. They are determined to give the sun a beating, perhaps even finally extinguishing the only source of light we have. Here, too, we are bowled over by an abundance of obscure references. For example, one of the men brandishing a board has stigmata on his feet, a Christ-like figure grimly resolved to end the world as we know it.
Such images, depicting humanity’s foolish struggle against ourselves and each other, dominate Louisiana’s retrospective featuring 47-year-old Dana Schutz. In terms of content, allegory, and formal traits alike, these are battle scenes where multitudes of figures seem to vie for space and attention across canvases that may well be gigantic, yet are still filled to the very edge with gestures, gazes, and movements. Dripping with hints and allusions to everything from medieval depictions of chaos to Gustave Courbet, Édouard Manet, and, perhaps most clearly of all, to fellow American artist Philip Guston, these scenes nevertheless present no absolutely clear-cut references. As if the history of painting were just one part of the palette Schutz uses in her vast pictures, which constantly point to great conflicts, yet may in reality be mostly about issues of form, about painting’s struggle with itself.
Schutz’s early works are far simpler in terms of subject matter. They are smaller in format, but still come across as figurative depictions of rather abstract situations. For example, the series ‘Self Eaters’ from the early 2000s sees her examine what it would look like if a person could eat themselves. Would the mouth start by spreading across the face, eating its way from the nose up towards the eyes? Would the subject then disappear, or would it instead digest itself and re-emerge as something else?
A wonderful picture visualises the sensation of a sneeze; the head seems to dissolve in a single, powerful movement that turns the body inside out and, in its own way, seems to wonder at the mutual interaction between the surface – the face and the canvas – and what lies behind.
At Louisiana, Schutz’s work is presented in a non-chronological display that mixes the recent and more expressively abstract giant canvases with older, more cartoonish images, charcoal drawings, and even the slightly awkward bronze sculptures to which she has recently tried her hand. The set-up is in some ways confusing because the shifts in genre and scale are so striking, but it also allows us to read Schutz’s overall practice as a reflection on the more formal possibilities of painting.
In doing so, the museum slightly downplays just how politically her practice can also be read – not least when recollecting the scandal surrounding her Open Casket (2016), which took its starting point in the lynching of the only 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955. When the work was shown at the Whitney Biennial in 2017, Schutz came under fire for profiting from this painful event, and with that in mind, Louisiana’s focus on the more formal aspects of Schutz’s practice seems quite deliberate.
Even so, it feels as if that particular work is with us the whole time, perhaps simply because it is hard to forget that level of furore at an oeuvre unseen on Danish soil before now, but also because Schutz’s work always articulates the artist’s role in society – including the question of who has the right to certain subjects.
In her painting The Presenter (2018), a performer stands in the middle of the spotlight on a TED talk stage, her genitals exposed and a microphone pointed towards them. A giant hand enters from the right and clutches her face as if to stop her flow of speech. In the exhibition hang, the hand clasping the figure’s face points towards the grotesque mouths of the Self Eater series, but really: how are we supposed to read that work without thinking of the scandal of 2017?
The largest work in the show, The Public Process (2020), hints at matters concerning judgement and punishment while visually referencing The Third of May 1808 in Madrid (1814), Francisco Goya’s painting of a public execution during the Spanish Civil War, in which a civilian is shot in front of a wall. In Schutz’s work, the wall in the centre of the picture remains relatively empty, like a canvas with a few daubs of paint and a yellow post-it note. Around, above, and behind the wall, however, there is a great deal of commotion: clouds of smoke billow, ancient columns topple, and marionettes tear themselves loose from their strings; a figure reminiscent of a curator takes notes, while an artist is so busy with her work that she apparently fails to notice that she is also giving birth. An activist arrests our gaze with burning eyes as he passes the wall carrying a bucket of blood-red paint, ready to express his antipathy to whatever issue made him take to the streets.
Is this an allegory of a political situation in which society is simultaneously under construction and demolition? Or are we back in a purely painterly world that only speaks about how the painting’s composition constantly creates and consumes its own potential? As in the exhibition in general, it is as if something is being said and withheld at the same time.
