Painting today may be ever so good, as in a magnificent show of new work by Dana Schutz, at the Petzel gallery, and still have you wondering what it’s good for. Can it make a significant difference in our culture? A Schutz painting in last year’s Whitney Biennial would seem to have done so, but haplessly. Her naïvely well-meant “Open Casket,” which presented a semi-abstract image of the murdered Emmett Till, jostled a hornet’s nest of prevalent racial hurts and angers. Protesters declared black suffering off limits for white artists. Defenders of Schutz invoked freedom of expression. The arguments sailed past each other, with one exception. After Schutz was accused of exploiting a sensitive subject for money, she swore that she would never sell the picture. Missing was a discussion of “Open Casket” as a work of art dealing with a theme that is characteristic of Schutz: the aftermath of a disaster. She consistently responds, though rarely so topically, to widespread alarms of social, political, and spiritual disorder—the daily unreason, the falling apart. She vivifies present conditions of life on a faltering planet as dramatically as an artist can while staying devoted to aesthetic ideals. Without respect for the sincerity of those ideals, painting will readily become prey to cynical imputations.
The display of “Open Casket” was ill timed. But the painting’s vehemence is, if anything, moderate in comparison with most of Schutz’s work. Painting wet-in-wet with oils, building thick and eventful surfaces, she creates allegories of uncertain but torrid, gnashing implication, a bit like the enigmatic narratives of the German modern master Max Beckmann, but less solemn. She does this with almost preposterously extraordinary gifts for composition, paint handling, and, in particular, color, suffusing clashes of hue and tone with ghostly essences of a chromatic unity that you feel rather than quite see. “Mountain Group” (from 2018, like almost all the works in the current show), which measures ten feet high by thirteen feet wide, pictures a heap of busy, cartoonish figures in reds, blues, and blacks that somehow generate the sensation of an almost—or wholly—absent color. (I thought, not very confidently, of lavender.) As you gaze, Schutz’s aggressively goofy-looking figuration, though initially unsettling, can come to strum your heart.
In “The Visible World,” a pelican-like bird appears to offer a giant raspberry to a nude woman with weirdly distorted body parts, supine on a rock in a turbulent sea. “Boatman” renders an oncoming rowboat in which a hulking ventriloquist’s dummy smirks knowingly. A dark phalanx of anciently armored troops, in “Beat Out the Sun,” advances on the orb of a yellow sun that casts a black shadow of itself. In “Presenter,” a woman must cope with being naked from the waist down and having her face pulled apart by a huge hand that appears to be her own. “Washing Monsters” shows an animal-skulled creature on a mountaintop clutching a human character who seems to be cleansing it, with consequent soap bubbles. This painting shares its subject (and title) with one of five bronzes—cast from energetically finger-worked clay—which are Schutz’s first exhibited sculptures. Other subjects include a figure sprouting an extra head and a smoker emitting a mighty cloud of smoke. A lovely pinkish-brown patina lends the works a tender, intimate feel, as if they were dreamed into existence.
“Painting in an Earthquake” finds a female artist, seen from behind, with several arms deployed to keep a painting and the wall behind it from falling on her. The scene has been interpreted as an allusion to the Whitney controversy, but it conveys nothing either so pathetic as a plea for sympathy or so defensive as a petulant irony. It is one peculiar vision, among the many that occur to Schutz, of worldwide calamity, and the work wrings from that a precarious but ingenious beauty. Her style suggests Expressionism, but it is detached from mere personal emotion. She objectifies anxious states of mind or soul that should surprise no one these days. Schutz has said that, having talked with people whom “Open Casket” offended, she now includes them in her sense of the audience for her art. That’s citizenship. Artistry commits Schutz to draw on painting of the past in service to painting yet to come. To do so with truth and vitality demands a confidence in values that are imperilled by the Scylla of commerce and the Charybdis of politics, and navigating between them has become harder than it should be.
The new show of my favorite contemporary sculptor, the Brit Richard Deacon, is his eighth at the Marian Goodman gallery. He has enjoyed substantial worldwide success since winning the Turner Prize, in 1987. But his fame (by measures that are not limited to blank looks from generally knowledgeable friends when I mention him) resides somewhere south of modest. I understand this. Deacon is a creator—or fabricator, to use his favored term for himself—of disconcerting objects of variable size (from small to monumental) and unpredictable design (airily looping, glumly massy) made of materials that have included, by turn or in combination, wood, steel, iron, ceramic, plastic, linoleum, and leather. Many of his pieces are held together by excessive amounts of glue or multitudinous screws, as if to withstand an earthquake or a nuclear war—a funny effect, faintly evoking the embarrassment experienced upon finding oneself overdressed at a party.
Deacon’s show adds inkjet-printed digital photography to his list of mediums—big, sumptuous color pictures that he took of landscapes, still-lifes, insects, animals, and whatnot on world travels and around his home, in London. (The show is titled “House & Garden.”) One shot that suggests a starry sky has actually captured flash reflections in the eyes of tiny, swarming fish. In another, tourists crowd along the top rail of an immense cruise ship. Each photograph is mounted and framed on a panel that leans back against another, forming what looks like a peaked roof, and they sit on a finely carpentered wooden table that is about the size of kindergarten furniture. The paired pictures share subtleties of form: homologies. The fish eyes are mated with a closeup of gleaming chain-link fence, the cruise ship with a row of construction barriers. Eggs in a bird’s nest accompany a toad held in a hand. A cactus flower rhymes with a moth.
Interspersed with those works are small, black-topped tables that bear flat, glazed, multicolored ceramic slabs cut in sinuously contoured shapes and often inset with irregular polygons of similar or contrasting patterns. Other pieces include “Under the Weather #2” (2016), a wooden tower of bent and twisting forms that stands more than eleven feet tall; “Wave” (2018), a massive work of smoothly painted steel, about the size of a grand piano, with an undulating footprint and a scalloped top; and “Mire” (2017), a low-lying network of devilishly intricate wooden structures covered by stainless-steel plates that are attached with a great many screws. Centered on a wall facing these sculptures is a photograph of a violently red slice of watermelon.
Whew? Whew. When arriving at the show, I had a moment of dismay, which I should be used to in my first encounters with Deacon’s works. A sinking feeling tells me that I am going to have to do some hard thinking about something stubbornly unfamiliar before I can decide to like it—as, in the end, I always do, albeit gingerly. Though reliably handsome and spectacularly well crafted, the works aren’t especially expressive or, God knows, conceivably functional. But each seems possessed of a mind of its own and doggedly intent on solving some problem that it has posed to itself: “What am I?,” for starters, and “What am I doing?,” for indefinite speculation, with “Why?” incipient but endlessly postponed. You pretty well must smile so as not to take as tragic the recognition that those questions are chronically your very own, concerning yourself. ♦
