Dana Schutz and Itchy Life.

Contemporary Evidence.
Dana Schutz Missing Pictures at Zach Feuer Gallery


Dana Schutz recently had an exhibition of new paintings at Zach Feuer gallery. It was much buzzed about, notable being the freshness of the work and its instant-classic art history dialogue making. The paintings to me are phenomenal; they bring together a history of figuration in art, a destructive surrealism and a constructive belief in the representative power of real life. Even though her figures fall apart, they get built back together into archetypes and put onto theater stages to totter in our gaze.

Painting a figure is a loaded gesture. It’s a kind of visual snap to the viewer, the lines click together into the shape of a person and it immediately carries a connotation: these lines are a body. What is the body doing? What is performing? What do its actions mean to us? Painting a figure refers compulsively to now. Representing a person is representing the present tense; it carries information about how we think of ourselves within our environment. That’s what makes Dana Schutz’ paintings so interesting: despite depicting events that could take place within some altered universe out of time, they come back relentlessly to now and the evidence and detritus of our lives.


Like the politics of Dada and Surrealism’s origins in the enervation and desperation of World War I, Schutz’ paintings distill the contradictions of life around them. The same visual trauma that is evident in Max Ernst’s melting landscape The Eye of Silence (1943-44) and Yves Tanguy’s Indefinite Divisibility comes through in Schutz’ 2008 Accident. Like a splinter lodged under the skin, the present irritant pushes through to the surface of the painting and makes itself felt in scars and striations. The tar of pavement becomes a series of writhing lines topped by wrinkled material, cloth or metal or an abstract quantity, bordering an eye-obstructing black hole. What’s the irritant here? What makes the ground so twitchy and hypersensitive? Something like the itch of what’s happening and the grating need to make it into art. I think that’s part of the urgency of Dana Schutz’ paintings. The irritation, then the painting, is the physical evidence of how we live.

Max Ernst, The Eye of Silence, 1943-44

So what is it to live in Dana Schutz’ mirror?

People are distorted into half forms, with dangling arms and burnt away sides. A blind masseuse’s eyes gape glowing into the air, neck thrown back and teeth bared. He grasps his subject’s foot with fingers that tangle into each other and turn into lines in front of us. Everything confused and pictorial space mushed up to the front, the painting becomes a wash of beautiful colors that pulse with the hues of rashes and bruises. It’s a fleshy story. Two chess players sit at a table; a normal scene except the players burn into leftover halves, a leg crumbles and a park planter turns into a bed of splotchy germs. The funny thing is that the picture retains its normalcy. What’s wrong with this alternate universe? Throughout it all the chess turn-clock keeps ticking into the middle, untouched. A woman gapes at a newspaper, but the woman’s face suddenly turns into Goya’s Saturn Devours His Son.

Goya, Saturn Devours His Son, 1819

Nothing is settled in these paintings. It all keeps pushing against each other in a constant battle to stay, to draw attention, to live for the audience. There’s a sense that the pictures are using themselves up in a constant mytosis of form, breeding and dying in front of our eyes. Atop all this, certain touchstones stay whole. A pair of glasses. The movie title Spiderman 3 scrawled into the sand. What remains are the things we recognize. The RCA dog listening to a gramophone. The sudden recognition of pop symbols is present and anxious. Schutz’ paintings don’t want to stay abstractly beautiful. They fight to form things, not deconstruct them. The figures fight to stay in focus in the blistering of life rushing past.


It’s an itch to stay alive. It’s a constant itch not to dissolve into a pile of thoughts, a pile of misguided and misdirected instincts and emotions.


Dana Schutz’ figures are victims and witnesses. They watch as they crumble and blow away and topple, only to pile up again, a squirming stack of lines that snap back into people and eyes. Like late Guston’s despairing Klansmen and clutching hands, the pictures seem so intent on being that meaning becomes less important than existing. Life is a struggle not to fall apart. That is what makes Schutz’ paintings so local but universalized in time; they are always fighting to stay in the moment you see them. That’s what makes me itch.

All pictures not noted are by Dana Schutz, a log of Schutz' gallery shows and titles can be found here. Schutz is represented by the Zach Feuer Gallery.