Public Process, the art of Dana Schutz by Alice Godwin
The crowning glory of Dana Schutz’s mid-career survey at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark, is a riff on public and private persona. Known for her post-apocalyptic scenes of painterly survivors, filled with allusions to the fantastical, satirical and grotesque, The Public Process (2022) is one of two works the American artist has created specifically for Louisiana. This vast scene centres upon a seated figure leaning against a blank wall, like a stage set or a notice board affixed with a yellow post-it note. Overhead is the audience, with legs dangling down like marionettes with their strings cut.
Joining the figure on stage are a woman, doubled over while giving birth and smearing paint on canvas, and a vandal holding a paint pot, who looks the viewer straight in the eye. These artists and the trailing splashes of paint on the ground suggest this is not just a theatrical stage, but an exhibition space, along with a curator ticking off a checklist and a group of visitors on the right.
Though Schutz leaves her narratives open to interpretation, it seems The Public Process is about what it means to be an artist and to bare your soul in public. An artist is vulnerable to both violence and exaltation in the court of public opinion, and Schutz’s paintings often hover on this threshold. We might think of other blank walls in history – like the backdrop of Francisco Goya’s firing squad in The Third of May 1808 (1814) and Edouard Manet’s The Execution of Emperor Maximilian (1867–69). In The Public Process, is Schutz the one facing the firing squad?
Dana Schutz, The Public Process. 2022. Oil on canvas, 289.6 × 579.1 cm. Courtesy the artist. © Dana Schutz
After the tumultuous backlash to the painting Open Casket (2016) at the Whitney Biennial in 2017, which depicted the body of the young black boy Emmett Till who was brutally murdered by Mississippi racists in 1955, one can imagine Schutz has spent a lot of time thinking about the role of the artist. Indeed, her work is indelibly stained by her predecessors – Picasso, Baselitz, De Kooning, Guston. Open Casket is not present, but its residue in public debate and Schutz’s practice seems to remain here.
The creative figures of artists, painters, sculptors, and writers abound at Louisiana. A group of believers ascend a mountain in The Arts (2021) carrying a skeleton, canvas and paints, riding a beast whose legs buckle under the weight. One raises a whip to beat the dead horse. In The Wheel (2022), another artist is blithely unaware of the carnage as a gigantic wheel crushes everything in its path. In Mountain Group (2020), an artist painting the landscape is seated too close to appreciate their subject. The hilltop is overrun by figures gesturing wildly. These gestures are reminiscent of the arrows used by Francis Bacon as an objective tool amidst painful human themes. Though, in Schutz’s case pointing hands are curious misdirects that drive us away from the painting. We are left to wonder what we should look at, and indeed, what should the artist paint? The tussle between what should and should not be said is further apparent in the silenced figures of Schutz’s ethereal Sleepwalker (2015) and sculptural Ventriloquist (2021).
Dana Schutz, Mountain Group, 2018. Oil on canvas, 304.8 × 396.2 cm. Collection of Marguerite Steed Hoffma. © Dana Schutz
Artists and makers have long appeared in Schutz’s work as the creators of worlds and bodies, as in New Legs (2003) and Twin Parts (2004). In Reformers (2004), a team reconstruct a figure on an operating table, one even using their feet – Schutz explains that she is often drawn to the tension between people doing something together and apart. And then there is the fictive race of “self-eaters,” who continually consume, digest and remake themselves. In one room, curator Anders Kold highlights Schutz’s visceral engagement with the body, with such masterpieces as the early Sneeze (2001) and its violent outburst of paint over canvas.
Dana Schutz, Twin Parts, 2004. Oil on canvas, 198.1 × 182.9 cm. Private property © Dana Schutz
There is something innately American about the act of building that pervades Schutz’s painting. It speaks to the foundations of democracy and the need for debate at the heart of American nationhood. In Party (2004), created on the eve of George W. Bush Jr.’s re-election, a mutant made from members of the truncated Republican administration staggers over the beach – pieces of electoral voting cards or confetti fall from above. In Fanatics (2005) a crowd protest, pray and beg for calm at a collapsed fence, like a town hall meeting spiralling out of control that eerily foreshadows the storming of the Capitol in 2021. It's this same instinct to construct and deconstruct that seems to define recent works like The Public Process, in which the artist is forged in the public arena.
There is no doubt through the characters of her imagination, which have become more monstrous and wide-eyed of late, that Schutz is a fantastic painter. She delights in the textures, light and colours of paint. Kold presents a cross-section of some of her painterly tactics in one room, from the iridescent figure of Swimming, Smoking, Crying (2009), whose tears inexplicably pool beneath the water, to the luscious green-eyed nude of The Visible World (2018), like a siren on the rocks or the last survivor of a shipwreck - or did she consume the others?
The title of Schutz’s survey, Between Us, alludes to some intimate secret between artist and audience or an obstacle that keeps one from the other. For Schutz, her paintings represent a place where problems are raised and negotiated, but not necessarily solved.
Dana Schutz, The Visible World, 2018. Oil on canvas, 274.3 × 355.6 cm. Private property © Dana Schutz