Dana Schutz: The Island

With 15 paintings and five works on paper, this show takes on a journey spanning 20 years of Schutz’s fantastical, often grotesque, figures

Dana Schutz: The Island, installation view, The George Economou Collection, Athens, 16 June, 2024 - March 2025. Photo: Natalia Tsoukala.

George Economou Collection, Athens
16 June 2024 – March 2025

by MAX L FELDMAN

Displayed over three floors, the 20 works in The Island – 15 paintings and five charcoal works on paper – sample Dana Schutz’s career so far. Chronologically, they span Daughter (2000) to Sleeping Head (2024), but the floors are organised thematically, giving viewers a cross-section of Schutz’s development, accenting her anxious takes on social relationships, studies of the human head and unique sense of the grotesque.

For example, on the first floor, Carpool (2016) shows five figures squeezed into a car, staring fixedly at the horizon or from the windows, overseen by a glaring, hollow sun. Though one of the least obviously unsettling images in the exhibition, it intimates Schutz’s abilities as a mood-creator. This tenor is consistent whether she paints from “reality” or imagined dream spaces, so the sense of claustrophobia in Carpool is amplified in another work on the first floor, produced not long after: the huge Mountain Group (2018).

Dana Schutz. Mountain Group, 2018. Oil on canvas, 304.8 x 396.2 cm (120 x 156 in). Courtesy of the artist, David Zwirner, Thomas Dane Gallery and CFA Berlin. Photo: Jason Mandella.

This piece is crowded with oddities – including vomiting birds, a small red demon and a bulging-eyed face with a frog- or even buttock-shape – crowded on to a mountain peak. None of them acknowledge the presence of any of the others, though some are pointing to the murky sky as if in warning, while others make two-fingered “peace” signs. All these strange personalities seem to have reached the summit by climbing up one of four rickety ladders that still balance precariously on the rocks, but this does not explain how they reached this summit, and it is not clear if they offer a way down, escaping the ordeal.

Other works evoke similarly weird feelings, even when they represent real-enough-looking people having normal-enough experiences. To Have a Head (2017), which shows a frowning face tentatively fingering a gaping hole in their own skull, isn’t an example of this, but it is still quite tame and almost relatable when compared with the self-cannibalising visage in Face Eater (2004), or the gross Sneeze (2001). The last two pieces take a mischievous enjoyment in showing us amusingly horrid things, especially Sneeze, which captures someone with a grey complexion and swinish facial features mid-mucus-explosion. In the context of The Island, they do, however, seem to serve a limited role, preparing us for the outright uncanny scenes on the third floor.

The earliest of these, Fanatics (2005), shows eight characters staggering like zombies towards a broken chain-link fence. All of them would seem to represent a self-appointed authority figure, including what appears to be a lay preacher brandishing a Bible; what could be a browbeating health fanatic wearing a tasteful sweatband, raising his fist in defiance or rebuke; and what looks like an ancient, hollow-eyed precolonial Central American deity. Their hectoring seems to reach beyond the picture plane, directed towards the viewer, and it is hard not to get the sense that they are admonishing us, mouths agape, about our life-choices. The viewer can, as a result, probably get the gist of what they are trying to tell us even if we can’t be sure about the precise denominations of the causes they represent (the narcissism of petty differences no doubt plays a role in these ghouls’ inner lives and ideological outlook).

This ambiguity, typical of the Schutz mood, probably reaches its climax in The Arbiters (2023). Its five horribles sit at a long table with microphones in front of them. It is the kind of set up you might find in an expert panel discussion at a public artworld event – a fair or biennale, perhaps. The tone that first appears in Fanatics now becomes a hellish psychodrama seemingly informed by the televised talent shows of yesteryear: one of the menaces has a howling platypus face, another is like a fetid corpse in stilettos, and the woman at bottom left grins and rests her fist on her chin behind a demonic mask that probably can’t be separated from her “real” face.

Dana Schutz. Sea Group, 2021. Oil on canvas, 238.8 x 238.8 cm (94 x 94 in). Courtesy of the artist, David Zwirner, Thomas Dane Gallery and CFA Berlin. Photo: Jason Mandella.

None of these brutes, like those of Mountain Group or Sea Group (2021), are fully human or entirely monstrous. Their ghastly, distended facial features make them seem threatening even if there is no obvious danger, but their gestures and relationships with each other are ordered only by dream logic, and would have a very different feel if they appeared in some “really real” reality. Thus, like so many of Schutz’s fiends, they remain comic enough for the scenes to be grotesque rather than the products of some hideous black demonology.

There are, however, other, perhaps more subtly persistent, issues in Schutz’s practice. They can’t be contained by the limited selection of works or themes in a mid-career survey such as this, but there are certainly traces of them here: on the one hand, the works’ emotional legibility – the clarity with which recognisable character-types express themselves – and the stakes of modernism in the digital age, on the other.

Dana Schutz. Google, 2006. Oil on canvas, 182.9 x 182.9 cm (72 x 72 in). Collection of Suzi and Andrew B. Cohen. © Dana Schutz / Courtesy of the artist, David Zwirner, Thomas Dane Gallery and CFA Berlin. Photo: Jason Mandella.

The emotional legibility issue can even be seen in her early creatures, such as the awkwardly grinning young woman in Daughter, or the crumpled concentrating face of the artist herself in self-portrait Google (2006), not to mention the blustering near-automatons in Fanatics. Even so, as viewers, we need to work out and qualify for ourselves what these personae are thinking and feeling; their psychological and emotional states are open to interpretation but they are still feeling something identifiable.

In some more recent works, however, the individuals’ interior lives are as distorted as their physical features. In The Interview (2020), for example, as well as Sea Group, Mountain Group and The Arbiters, who these wretches are and why they feel so intimidating – to each other and the viewer – is not immediately obvious. They are packed together in confined settings, interacting with various types of violence (perhaps a discussion about prospects in The Interview, a fight to the death in Sea Group) with faces locked in unevenly melting grimaces.

Dana Schutz. Swimming, Smoking, Crying, 2009. Oil on canvas, 114.3 x 121.9 cm (45 x 48 in). Courtesy of the artist, David Zwirner, Thomas Dane Gallery and CFA Berlin. Photo: Jason Mandella.

The settings in which Schutz places her rogues also change over time, though there is no linear dynamic. The environment of Fanatics (New York City), Carpool (an anonymous car journey), and Google (the artist’s studio) can all be named even if the viewer doesn’t know precisely where they are. Eventually, however, these definite locations make way for fantasy scenes, as in Mountain Group (a perilous mountain peak) or Sea Group (what seems to be an island made of bones). Nor does Schutz’s take on digital modernism conform to a unidirectional sequence, even when her art-historical references are explicit.

In Daughter, for example, the young woman wears a T-shirt printed with an image of Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World (1866). This closeup view of a naked woman lying on a bed, legs spread, vulva and abdomen exposed, is probably the least likely image to be turned into wearable merchandise from a museum gift shop (in this instance, the Musée D’Orsay in Paris).

Dear Painter (2023), meanwhile, shows a woman lying on a table; her lips and shoes being painted inside the painting by two malevolent male figures, overseen by a wraith-like figure with a blurry face. Where Daughter simply refers to a work from the origins of modernism, Dear Painter is an allegory of painting based on a specific work: Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863). Manet’s masterpiece shows us a nude white woman lying on a bed, propped up by fluffy white pillows, being attended to by a black maid. The reclining woman is, in the context of the painting, putatively anonymous; some of the details in the picture identify her as a prostitute, though she is modelled on fellow painter Victorine Meurent.

But everyone in Schutz’s Dear Painter is nameless. There is no indication that Schutz has identified herself with the woman subjecting herself to being painted, and the details indicating prostitution that made Olympia such a scandal are not there either (unless the viewer accepts the idea that artistic activity is a comparable act of turning one’s very self into a buyable commodity).

The more likely point is that this woman is not only represented in a work of art by Dana Schutz, but she is in a narrative that shows her being constructed as a painted object – actively being painted in front of us – in the work itself, not unlike the painter at the bottom right of Mountain Group, who is creating a version of the very scene the viewer sees in the picture plane, only without any of Schutz’s freaks. Whatever the interpretation, the layered references to Courbet and Manet could be what makes Google the key to making sense of The Island.

In an interview with curator Courtney J Martin, printed in the catalogue text, Schutz explains that the exhibition compares painting to being on an island. Both are finite conditions that shape what can be done, whether by an artist limited by painting as a medium or a shipwreck survivor stranded in the ocean. Schutz also refers to three influences: symbolism, surrealism and new objectivity. Though it will only be possible to assess the latter claim, and Schutz’s general relation to modernism, based on a future retrospective exhibition, we can unpack some of this through Google.

Google is, ultimately, not just a painting about painting, but a reflection on its most decidedlyunglamorous elements: the routine drudgery of getting into a working habit, the mood swings they experience, the messiness of the studio (fully ashtrays, half-drunk cups of coffee, overturned plant pots) the gloomy possibility that what you are doing might not be any good. Even early in her career, then, Schutz was asking what it means to make or look at art in the digital age.

Of course, this kind of self-reflexivity and self-referentiality makes up much of the content of works of contemporary art. Works of art are often about what it is for works of art to be works of art, and Googleis about what it is for a painter to (prepare to) paint. Of course, this doesn’t make this painting about painting much different from many others and doesn’t make Schutz much different from many other artists.

There is, however, a sense in which Daughter, Google, and Dear Painter show how Schutz takes this self-awareness to another level, intensifying modernist questions about the nature of art and painting in and through an interrogation of her own imagination. This comes, at least partly, from an inevitable feature of her background and training: the conventional American understanding of modernism, filtered through critical revisions to the ideas of Clement Greenberg, to which Schutz was exposed when she was studying art in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Greenberg said that traditional art imitates the real world, and avant-garde art imitates art, meaning the repertoire of artistic imitations of reality already embedded in the culture, seen in museums or photographically reproduced in books. The basic fact about modern art – what makes it modernart – is that the person looking at the work can see or feel the presence of the artist who created it in the work. The artist makes no attempt to conceal the fact that they are self-consciously producing a work of art and not a faithful copy of reality. We can see this in, among other things, the visible brushstroke in painting or the finger-, thumb- and handprints in sculpture. In Fredric Jameson’s expanded version of this theory, this takes place through “quotation”: the reader can see, or hear in their “mind’s ear”, the writer’s reference to a narrative register or voice that comes before the text we are reading; the listener hears the composer’s use of traditional folk melodies and popular forms that we have already heard before we listen to this piece of music.

By the time Schutz was studying and beginning her practice, these approaches to making and talking about art had already become hardened conventions. Then again, so had questioning or subverting them asconventions, quoting-them-as-quotations – this is what, for a few decades, passed for “postmodernism”, which has now long-since become a kind of orthodoxy, even if it is undergoing renewed, but already very dated, attacks from conservative commentators online.

Schutz’s move is, then, not to try to imitate imitations, as if there were something natural or pure that could be achieved by doing this. It is, rather, to imitate the ways in which imitation is even possible in the digital age, under conditions when we already know all this because we are already saturated by the anxiety of influence, and no viewer – in a gallery, museum, reading an art magazine in print or online – cares or has the time to differentiate between an original art-object and its numberless copies.

Google is, then, on the one hand, a self-portrait showing the grim reality of Schutz’s own artistic practice and how she feels about it (or, at least, how she felt about it nearly 20 years ago). On the other hand, however, it is about how, in the digital age, all artistic practices – all of what gets lumped into the abstract category of “creative labour” – involve much the same kinds of physical and intellectual acts: sitting in front of a computer screen, clicking, typing and organising documents into folders.

The artist is, as a result, just like everyone else. They are like people with “normal” jobs requiring clerical skills. At the same time, they are no different from anybody else who has not only those skills for work but uses them in a peculiar new way, mostly on social media as a leisure activity: imitating the very avant-garde artistic processes – selecting, editing, framing and curating – that imitate art, only without making any art beyond the cultivation of an imagined, pre-digested self that can be consumed by many others doing exactly the same thing.

Seen in this light, Schutz’s work can be read as a personal, imaginative response to what these conditions do to art – the works, the processes, the people who make and look at them. Daughter and Dear Painter may contain obvious references to the art-historical canon, but it is the bulging eyes of one of the absurdities in Mountain Group that may be the next link, after Google, in the chain to understand Schutz. This strange apparition – the one with the frog- or buttock-like face – could be a reference, deliberate or not, to one of the film-maker Hayao Miyazaki’s more unsettling creations; or they could be another figment of Schutz’s warped imagination; or it could be that, in today’s image-world, our own imaginations have been colonised by so many sedimented layers of references that it is hard to tell. It is not clear if Schutz thinks we should even have to.