Around the time I was trying to sort out the clutter of paintings
qua sculpture at MassMoCA for a blog post, I received a self-published book from
the gallery owner, Paul Rodgers, on his theories of the origins of 20th
Modernism. Looming large in his story of the Genesis of the Modern is Barnett Newman.
Recently, as I started to put together a critique of Dana Schutz’s work at the
Boston ICA, the artist Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe emailed me an article that he
published in a collection of essays called “Contemporary Visual Culture and the
Sublime” published by “Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies”. He had
been sent my article on the end of Zombie Formalism by the artist Chris Haub,
and reached out to me to share what he thought was the complementarity of our
ideas on the state of contemporary art. In
Gilbert-Rolfe’s essay, Newman also comes across as an important figure in
establishing the metaphysics of Modernism. Newman had never been for me a
conscious influence on my painting nor for that matter someone I was excited
about. I do recall the painter Don Shambroom being an enthusiast of his work.
Don is a figurative painter, although lately his work has shown a more
conceptual strain. That has not stopped him from often providing some of the
best commentary on Abstraction of any painter I know and on my work in
particular. He remarked at the time on how a Newman painting could dominate the
gallery space and in so doing affect powerfully the consciousness of the viewer.
Like Rothko there is a religious import
that sees the work of art as creating an architectural space similar to a
chapel.
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| Newman |
The journal in which Gilbert-Rolfe wrote his essay contains fifteen essays by other writers on the Sublime and lack thereof in contemporary art. Much of Gilbert-Rolfe’s essay deals with the structure of the art world: artists, gallerists and museums that all seem to be working under the aegis of a seamless Hegelian structure where to quote the essay “painting is the readable part of a system and causes no bodily surprises.” This stood me in good stead when I was perplexed over any justification for the work of Dana Schutz being given a show at the Boston ICA. Until the brouhaha over her painting of Emmett Till in the Whitney Biennial I had not heard of her work. The over-explained show at the ICA presents her as having been an important presence in the art world for quite some time. Gilbert-Rolfe’s essay gave me a handle on the work. He says: “Inside the museum what the work must be about is closely controlled. “ “Hegel is invoked but there is little dialectical contradiction to be seen.”
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| Schutz |
Each painting is given an extensive explanation as to its message.
Typically, large shows like this provide the viewer with a long description at
the beginning and maybe one at the end but rarely does each painting get such
in depth analysis. Many of the paintings deal with social conflict, which of
course was the story behind the Emmett Till piece not exhibited here. However,
to lean on Gilbert-Rolfe’s citation from above, ”... there is little dialectical
contradiction to be seen.” There are no ”bodily surprises.” There is an attempt
to express the impact of conflict via a cubistic language that breaks up the picture
plane but that is it. Unlike a great artist like De Kooning there is no pushing
of cubism into a new territory. Here is a person with no doubt, no second
thoughts as to the efficaciousness of her work to convey its intended meaning. The colors are thinly applied with no
admixture. The often effaced faces deny the viewer an extra level of meaning that might be grounded in private
experience. In one of the explanatory panels, references are made to
Gericault’s “Raft of the Medusa”. That painting of course functions on several
levels where in fact there are faces that convey the personal horror of it all.
Could it be that her view of mankind is so dictated by social media in which
the system is so much larger than the individual as to render any part/whole
dynamic irrelevant. There is in most every painting a cubistic whole implying a
sort of topsy-turvy worldview but the cartoony faces give no inkling of an
inner life. I guess I get into murky waters when I fault her for what may be
the meaning of the individual faces that sag or are effaced. It is Dasein
without the Da. Mediated faces that have lost their immediacy. Is this the
message of the show: in our modern world there is “No dialectical
contradiction”?
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| Kirchner |
Artists like Ernst Kirchner or Max Beckmann, who seem to be her
antecedents, despite the overall cubistic disarray ground their paintings in
the here and now. In the case of Kirchner you have the strange colors
distorting the faces that provide the shiver of existential angst. In Beckmann
the very non-generic faces seem borrowed from the intensely focused portraits
of August Sanders. In Schutz I see this lack of grounding in specificity as either
a cognitive defect or the outcome of contemporary fatuousness that gets its sense
of the real from Facebook.
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| Beckmann |
Schutz is the “readable part of the system and causes no
bodily surprise.” One might think that painting would retain its role in
society as a locus of intense emotional and metaphysical surprises that still
matter to the individual in a society where we all in some way have a role of supporting highly
efficient social functioning. But in this show the emptiness of social
functioning has leaked its way into the consciousness of Schutz. No wonder the
Black community protested her use of the photo of Emmett Till. Here was in an
iconic image of an event that represents the Black’s struggle against the
violence of Jim Crow and in no way could be dealt with effectively with the
squishy visual language of Dana Schutz.
