Over the course of her decade-and-a-half-long career, the painter Dana Schutz has dreamed up an impressive number of absurd scenarios and rendered them on canvas in her signature blaringly colorful palette and Expressionist, Cubist-influenced style. Schutz’s often-frantic-seeming figures have found themselves doing all of the following: sunbathing on the beach while shaving their pubic hair, building the boat they’re in the process of floating away on, cannibalizing their own faces, attempting to cook while enduring seizure-like shakes and also simultaneously peeing, and rocketing out an alarming torrent of snot mid-sneeze.
In Schutz’s most recent paintings, elevator doors crack open to reveal a melee of people duking it out Jay Z-and-Solange-style, and tolerating other similarly confined environs: In one painting, for example, a lion tamer folds his body into the mouth of his beast; in another, a person showering, flushed pink by the hot water, elbows akimbo, can hardly be contained by the circumference of the tub. That new work makes up Schutz’s exhibition “Fight in an Elevator,” which is open for only a few more days, through October 24, at New York’s Petzel Gallery.
But like the figures in her paintings who rage against the spatial and temporal constraints of the physical world, Dana Schutz cannot be contained by just one solo show. This weekend, a 22-painting survey of Schutz’s lively oeuvre went up at Montreal’s Musée d’Art Contemporain, meaning that the 39-year-old artist is currently having a major moment on both sides of the border.
“When I saw one of her pictures for the first time, I was just so blown away by the freshness, the courage of the language,” MAC chief curator John Zeppetelli tells me by phone. “How something ostensibly quite ugly could be so powerful and compelling, forcing you to reassess what beauty can be—all of these things came flooding in, and I just became obsessed.”
One key to Schutz’s art, says Zeppetelli, is that the painter leavens her darker or coarser subjects with a strong dose of comedy. “One of the great qualities of Dana’s work is the caustic wit. It’s this perfect sort of collision between hilarity and the grotesque, psychopathology and disfiguration, comedy and dread, all these kinds of things coming together. It’s really vital language that I responded to.”
But when I get on the phone with Schutz to discuss a piece of her choosing from the Montreal survey, she’s not quite as sure that her work reads as humorous (though she does laugh a lot while talking about it). Read on for our conversation with the artist about her 2012 painting Getting Dressed All at Once, which depicts exactly what you might imagine, and which, if we’re being honest, is not exactly an _un_funny idea.
You’re having this big moment, with the Petzel Gallery show and now this show at Montreal’s Musée d’Art Contemporain. How’s it feel?
The [MAC] show spans from 2001 to 2015. It’s a survey show. It’s happening at the same time as the Petzel show, so it’s interesting to see all the work together. I was interested to see the shifts in the work and the different ways I was approaching the subject in terms of process. I noticed that the more recent work felt more expansive.
How has your process changed?
I’ve been drawing a lot in the past three years, and I feel like that’s changed how I structure the paintings. The subject is much more structured into the space or the format of the canvas. And then I feel like I’m trying to get the right composition. There’s a lot more erasure. I’ve been trying to work wet into wet more.
For this discussion, you chose a painting from 2012 called Getting Dressed All at Once. How does it fit into what you’re describing?
I feel like it was the first painting that I made where I was getting a feeling of the painting just sort of happening all at once. I tried to paint it all wet into wet, and if an area wasn’t working, I would wipe it down. I really tried to land the gestures in the painting. If it didn’t have the right speed or the right placement or angle to it, then I would wipe it down. But that also meant wiping down all the moves previous, so in a way I felt I was beginning to rehearse the image.
The subject, too: someone getting dressed all at once. I feel like with a lot of my paintings, I’ll paint things that are difficult to imagine. I didn’t know how that would work in the real world, if you were to get dressed all at once. So the challenge is how to depict it. I felt like [the figure] definitely had to have eye contact with the viewer in order to read right. It’s an anchoring point in all the activity of the painting.
How did you develop the way this would actually look? Was it just trial and error?
It was more like trying to work out how the figure could fit within the space of the canvas, and also what would have the right movement. I felt like maybe the legs should be up, and then she’s trying to pull the sweater over her head at the same time. Her hand touches this tree in the back. I was thinking about it almost like touching the back wall of the painting. I love that [Picasso] painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the way that one of the women looks at the viewer, her elbow up in this very provocative way. She’s revealing herself but also looking back at the viewer. It’s very confrontational.
Did you pick a painting about clothing because we’re Vogue?
Oh, yes! No, that’s great. I did think of that afterward. I picked it because it was an important painting for me. I felt like my language really opened up in that painting. I think my paintings afterward really changed. I learned a lot after making it. I felt that it encapsulated a lot of things I had been thinking about all along, like depicting a difficult situation. But also I think there’s a feeling about painting, too: the subject dressing themselves, there’s this parallel to making a painting. I had been making these paintings of people kind of wrestling with their garments. I was interested in clothes as a surrogate for the plane of the canvas—they’re almost like wrestling within this space and kind of up against it, too.
Did anyone model for you?
There was no model. It’s so much of a moment. Unless you’re an amazing gymnast, a yogi . . . There was a shoe that I really liked. There was a particular shoe that I wanted in the painting. I got that shoe. I liked the shape of it. Sometimes there’s a moment when you’re painting people and you’re like, “What are they wearing? Where are they?” Sometimes they’ll wear things that I might wear myself. I thought, “Well, that’s a great shoe. I think that’s the shoe that could be in the picture.” It’s a very basic shoe.
What about the rest of her outfit?
It’s actually an outfit I wore for my fourth-grade school picture, which is the first time I dressed myself for a school picture. It was in the ’80s, probably ’87. I wore this teal-and-white striped shirt, and then my mother’s mustard-colored cardigan. It wasn’t a sweater cardigan—it was some puffy material. I thought I looked amazing. I looked insane! I looked like a clown.
Did you have a picture on hand?
No, but it’s burned into my memory. I was very proud of it, the idea of putting it together. I think it works really well in the painting, but maybe not so great in the real world.
The rest [of the outfit] is improvised. The color of the pants, they seemed to go well. Maybe I started with that fourth-grade school picture, and then went into the ’90s with those corduroy pants.
How long did it take you to paint this?
I had to work really rapidly because I was wanting to paint the whole thing wet into wet. It ended up being close to a week of just really trying to figure out the subject. And then the body takes up most of the picture, and a lot of that was painted together. I was moving around a lot in the painting. I really wanted to have the shirt and the leg be painted all within the same surface.
In the past I would usually paint a space, and that would be all in one sitting, and then I’d begin to populate it, paint on top of it. Currently, I feel like it’s really important for me to have the surface open. There’s this painting that’s in the show in New York that’s really large, a couple in bed. That was a real challenge, to have it feel like it all happened at once. It was a lot of really long nights. It’s really important to me now. I’ll know there’s a time period where I can do the painting, because paint usually can be wet for four days, and then it begins to dry. If I couldn’t finish the whole thing in that amount of time, I would paint parts of the painting and work in sections.
How important is humor in your work?
Humor is so much about surprise. I love it if that ever happens in a painting. But it’s really hard to consciously make a painting that’s funny. Humor can come from an absurd situation, but I think if it’s really truly funny, you have to surprise yourself first. Sometimes it happens and it’s great, but it’s really rare.
But to me it seems like you’re choosing deliberately humorous subjects and concepts. There’s something about the idea of getting dressed all at once that’s funny.
You never know what ends up happening in a painting. I don’t think that painting is really funny, the getting dressed. But maybe the idea for it is. There’s a painting in the New York show of a Swiss family traveling. To me, that idea feels funny. I don’t know if the painting is funny. I think the thing it attempts to do is strange. It just came from being at the airport and seeing this Swiss family. The daughter was very attractive. The mother seemed like she was maybe hanging onto her youth in her 30s in the ’80s. And then the father seemed really separate. Even just making an airport painting felt like a question. For a while I felt like I didn’t want to make a painting of an airport—in the past 10 years, maybe after September 11. It felt like something you just wouldn’t want to do.
It evokes the Swiss Family Robinson.
Yeah, I know. The Swiss Family Robinson. The contemporary version. Global and particular.
This interview has been condensed and edited.