Dana Schutz

There are two Dana Schutz paintings from 2009 in this engrossing show, part of a series of works she calls “verbs.” They are Swimming, Smoking, Crying and Shaking, Cooking, Peeing. The gallery titles rightly identify them as dealing with, or at least referring to, some kind of personal tumult. The first of the paintings is quite small and uses colour in a sensuous way, not unknown, but unusual in Schutz’s work—she is more often strategic in her use of colour, one colour versus another, rather than using colour to represent something experienced. The sensuous colour in this instance is a vivid, transparent aqua—a cool, Gulf moment beneath her tearful swimmer. Her ink and gouache work on paper of the same title, and made after the painting, is here too, and it’s even better. Her varieties of line and mark articulate the crazy premise of the painting with great lucidity, as smoke, water and tears coil together. The other “verbs” painting, titled Shaking, Cooking, Peeing, is, I think, a fairly awful picture (but perhaps a transitional one, if I am seeing her recent work correctly). The yellow arm in Shaking… is seen three, or possibly four times. We can identify three thumbs and ten fingers (on one hand), all in the service of painting the motion of the shake. (The cooking, by the way, is perfunctory, the peeing, well…voluminous). The paint in that trembling arm is applied evenly and with an insistent line. It is emphatically illustrative in trying to deliver to the viewer the optics of shake. This kind of motion—agitated and quick—has more than one good historical painting pedigree: Velázquez’s spinners’ fingers and Balla’s pooch on a walk come to mind—both much more eloquent pieces of descriptive painting. Of course, there’s another way altogether to deal with a shaking motion, and that is to actually shake as the mark is made. Schutz’s deliberation is evident; she didn’t do that. There’s a work by Betty Goodwin, So certain was I, I was a horse, 1984, that, like other paintings by that wonderful artist, build a deliberately tremulous hand into a kind of customized, uncertain mark-making. Perhaps that should have been Schutz’s solution in Shaking, Cooking, Peeing. It would require a procedural daring and an attitude toward experimentation in painting that, happily, is to be found in a recent work in the show. This is Licking a Brick. Here, the only part of the painting modelled with any representational three-dimensionality is the tongue. The rest—the open-armed figure and the strange world he/she inhabits—is all speed and gesture. This is one of the paintings she terms “Tourette’s,” and the juxtaposition of that tongue to the rest of the painting is like a convulsion. These paintings depict physical actions—cutting eyelashes, biting wood, licking bricks—that cause a slight tremor of revulsion even as they are imagined—the proverbial “fingernails on the blackboard” feeling. Schutz refers to these as “Tourette’s” in order to infer that a sufferer from that syndrome might act on impulses generally resisted.

The show is full of Schutz’s inventive painting, as she finds ways to describe what is difficult to imagine, or at least to visualize. Examples: a woman mistrustful of gravity helping things out with tape and string; the by now well-known self-eaters; and what might be a single creature composed of several members of a George Bush cabinet. We’re carried along by her exuberant, speedy painting. Some of it can be formulaic, as she returns to what has worked in certain situations; the large paintings, Twin Parts, 2004, and Men’s Retreat, 2005, rely on a warm versus cool palette for their dynamics in a way that can appear predictable. This is apparent when we encounter the specifics of that aqua colour in Swimming, Smoking, Crying or the wonderfully punning cut black hole in Guitar Girl, 2009—the hole in the guitar sound box painted, the holes in the girl cut out from the canvas, and impenetrably black. In those moments, the boldness of execution matches the novelty of the premise that generates the work. Perhaps the strongest work in the entire show is Gravity Fanatic, 2005. Here, the colour is a transition from turquoise to ochre with reciprocal moments of one infecting the other—ochre into turquoise ground above the figure, the arm below turning green. Where there’s evidence of paintings being revised (heavily in Party, 2004, the Bush crew picture), we know there will be a satisfying working out of whatever she has come up with. When there’s apparently little revision, I’m Into Shooting in the Natural Environment, 2008, for example, that old critical skewer applied to picture-making holds true. When the use of colour and the execution of the painting are available to us too fast, where there’s too much action of one colour against another, the true weirdness of her imagination, and of the whole project, is somewhat undermined. It is, I think, a lack of her physically working through a painting, thinking of material conditions as well as pictures. But, overall, it’s a sustained eight-year ride, a tour-de-force of painting that surprises and confounds. And those 2010 paintings are made in a way that the varying speeds of mark making and the juxtaposition of painted language support, in a procedurally daring fashion, the social/political and personal anxieties Dana Schutz engages in her remarkable work. ❚

“If the Face had Wheels” was exhibited at Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, SUNY, New York from September 25 to December 18, 2011; Miami Art Museum from January 15 to March 4, 2012; and will be exhibited at the Denver Art Museum, November 10, 2012 to January 13, 2013.

Martin Pearce makes paintings and drawings. He teaches in the School of Fine Art and Music at the University of Guelph.