In one respect, it might have been better to send a painter. Talking about Steed the other day with my associate Suzy Spence, who by coincidence also visited his studio recently, I heard second hand about his conviction that there is no such thing as muddy color, that arresting color can, and should, sometimes be found from the erratic mixture of what is at hand. Instead, a different kind of color dominated our discussion, as “Danagate” (controversy surrounding Dana Schutz and her painting at the Whitney Biennial, Open Casket, discussed at length here at artcritical earlier this year) was just then erupting again, in Boston. Some black artists there had called for the ICA to withdraw their exhibition of Schutz. Clintel Steed’s perspective as an impassioned, driven, truly independent African American painter is equally enriching, however, whether he is addressing his own dense, lively, intriguing paintings or broader issues of politics, history and subject matter.

We met at his Sunset Park studio and began by looking at large pictures of an Olympic swimming event, part of the series that includes his piece in the Alumni Exhibition. The painting captures the swimmers just as they take their dive.

CLINTEL STEED: I think there is something about that feeling of letting the body go that is pretty amazing, they can totally trust that. I wanted to paint this subject because I felt, watching the Olympics, that all the athletes are so in tune with themselves: it is the most Zen moment there can ever be. I just think there is something magical about that. I like that philosophy of trying to live your life everyday, in the moment, and trusting.

Everything depends on the moment: in one they are about to dive into the water, in another they are frozen mid-air. There’s a different kind of painting space, a different intensity: the figure floating on a plane. So each time you paint it, there is a different kind of time. You know the way time can exist in paintings? I watched the Olympics and took pictures with my phone of the TV screen, and then from those images I have made the paintings. I wanted to take the pictures with my own phone because that made it personal. My way of taking ownership of that moment. I didn’t want to go with the image that comes out later, taken by other photographers.

DAVID COHEN: When you look at these images do you feel that you are in the room or do you sense the artifice of the screen? Do you want the remoteness or intimacy? What is our viewing connection to this space?

I think as an image-maker I am always searching for an image that will be challenging that will have some of the elements that I find exciting in painting. When you find these moments, there’s the rhythm in the figures, right? I always liked Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie and the way that kind of moves around the rectangle. In my way, too, I’m always trying to get some sense of movement, some sense of time, some sense of rhythm. And these things allow me to make it in an observational way. I always need that sense of nature, and this is a part of nature in a way, these sports: human beings, in this coliseum, and I like it because it sometimes borderlines on some kind of abstraction, too. But it is not abstraction, it is something that always excites me.

We are looking now at a painting of a Taekwondo match: The fighters are like a readymade abstraction, because of the uniforms and the way they are blocked in, the cube-like nature of their moves.

That is the thing that is magic about the visual world, when you pay attention to things, that you don’t have to fight hard, all you have to do is pay attention and things kind of happen naturally. Shapes and forms interacting with each other. The thing is to be able to be open enough or aware enough.

Did you feel, in any way, that the exuberance of the Olympics and its appeal across boundaries took you away from the darker imagery you have explored in your work? 

I think there is something about it, the way all cultures come together for this event; countries that wouldn’t ordinarily socialize or integrate are doing so through this thing. I am always trying to find some kind of subject matter. Sometimes I am just filling up the time, but with this, I just knew that I wanted to paint it.

That figure walking along there, a judge or an official, almost becomes a dominant figure in this composition. He is no less interesting than the fighters. There does seem to be a strong democracy across your surfaces: not so much of a figure-ground relationship. The way the background is fissured or broken up can make other kinds of figures out of things that aren’t figures.

I think about surface a lot. Relationships: relationship to the rectangle, for instance. I want these areas to be activated, to somehow have their say, too. Everything has to have an impact, and that gives it its all-overness. There is no hierarchy to me. It is how that dynamic symmetry or whatever starts to happen. You are being pushed or pulled. Even though this is a dead moment in the painting somehow it has weight to it; it is reacting to those figures; that yellow and that black are communicating to each other. This is something that makes the work dynamic, just visually.

I’ve known you since we ran into each other at the New York Studio School; there was almost a mythology around you. You already had all your degrees; you’d been a guard at the Met; some facts and fictions got mixed up in my mind. Run through your story.

I was born in Salt Lake City. I went to undergrad right out of high school, moving to Chicago, that’s where I got my BFA, and went to the Studio School right after that for the summer marathon and that’s when I met Graham. He offered for me to stay for the year but Susanna Coffey told me I needed to go to grad school, to get my degree, so I went to Indiana University. Then I came back to New York and applied for a Fulbright but I didn’t get it. I was working at the Met and I saw Graham and he said, come back to the School for a year and apply for it again, as they were exploring the idea of a PhD program. That never really happened but I ended up going back to school for four years.

It sounds like an addiction to education!

I had been challenged at IU, I’d been challenged through my whole education, but I think there was something special about being able to go back to the Studio School and study with Graham, with Stanley Lewis, Paul Resika, meeting Bill Jensen. These were great opportunities for me. It made me grow as a person and as an artist. I was able to revaluate what I had learned for those six years [BFA, MFA]. It is kind of intense to think about that stuff, but the PhD? People hated that idea. Somehow it was against the gods. I really respected Graham, so if he had asked me to do it, I would have done it anyway. He is a real hard worker and he respects hard workers. I think painting really is just about hard work and being consistent.

Much of your imagery before the Olympic series had to do with politics. 

No, before the Olympics I was doing the boxers. Before that I had done the bills, and the Somali pirates. And then I hit this moment where I wanted to get rid of all that stuff. I got into the Beijing smog series: that’s the CCTV building.  I painted it more than once. I just liked it as an idea.  As for politics, being African American it is hard not to paint about that experience. But there are other times when I just want to paint for painting’s sake, to see a stroke next to a stroke or a color next to a color. Paint the landscape. Different subjects, not just politics. But as a painter you are always trying to find some kind of a subject. You are always looking for something.

I find your painting intriguing because it has amazing sophistication and awareness of what painting can do and the history of painting but it also has a very raw immediacy; an instinctive, “street” feeling as well. Are you conscious of that as a dichotomy?

Not all the time. I fight to stay myself. I do paint a lot of motifs sometimes, I do have a lot of things going on, but I’m always just searching for that purity. I am always trying to be affected by where I am at, where I am standing at the moment. I am using history, I am using my moment. I want to be a sponge in that way. So if it comes out, it comes out. Thinking about Van Gogh: when he was painting those paintings he didn’t know what they were going to be for us in a hundred years, but that constant searching, looking, making is what made him, so somehow that’s the way I want to be, constantly acting and making. Talking about things that are important to me.

What do you think of the Dana Schutz affair, in Boston?

I think it’s terrible. It is hard to exclude ourselves from race and stuff, but it is 2017. We have to drop some of these mental constraints that stop us from mixing and telling stories and sharing stories. I fall prey to that a lot because I feel at times the black community doesn’t pay attention because if you look at my paintings they don’t feel like they are made by an African American artist, it is not black subject matter. If I painted more of it, would people pay attention to me more?  But I’m also human. I’m born and raised in this country, and I know there is a lot to offer in the world, more than just this burden of Twelve Years a Slave. As long as we are trying to fight these battles like this we are not going to make an evolution.  For her, I think it is something that she did innocently. And that is what painters do, we look for subject matter. Her explanation of why she did it, that she can imagine it happening to her own child, rings true. And I didn’t even know the story of Emmet Till until this all happened.

Really? That’s fascinating because I have been on a panel where a black critic stated that there is no African American who didn’t have this story drummed into them as a child.

That’s the thing: The history that we talk about that we share sometimes is very limited. We don’t always know about our own past. That’s why they keep telling these stories, like Twelve Years A Slave, because the more you find out, the brutality of it, or you could walk down the field and there’s five black guys being hung, that’s kind of crazy, but at the same time when we are telling these stories it can’t be an isolated thing; the more people share and talk about it, the more the pain become real for other people. MLK wouldn’t have been MLK without Caucasian or white people standing next to him and marching on the front line. We need each other. Our stories need to be told. Look at Hollywood. The Color Purple was made by Spielberg. That’s one of the greatest black, African American films of that period but that wasn’t made by an African American. I would be more mad about the fact that we don’t tell our own stories. African Americans can be very ashamed of their histories, their family histories, their grandmother’s history, so things got buried up.

Did you grow up in a household that was very proud of its heritage.

We were very religious, so sometimes there is no space for history. The stories we told were sad stories about people, basically about the Devil lurking after you; they would talk about bars out in the woods with people drinking, very scary places, you didn’t feel like a good time was happening, people walking around with guns, getting shot. Religion is good, but it also makes you blind to certain truths. Talking about race, especially right now, is very intense. The sad thing about some of these people with Dana Schutz is that they should be uplifting African American artists, championing people who have gone to that other level. Why don’t they talk about Henry Taylor? I love his work. Nobody said anything about him. And that’s a problem. As long as we are fighting this battle, how are we going to give our own people that limelight? We need to be supporting each other. I think there was a fairly big amount of African Americans in that show; it was certainly very diverse. When we fight these battles we lose.

I mean, what would black people think about my paintings, I don’t even know. I don’t know what my own people would think if they saw these paintings. Because they are not like Kara Walker. I’m not putting black in their face. I’m not making a picture of a black male and pouring honey on it. If I did that would it be stronger? If I made black face work? [laughs]

But there are a fair number of black figures in your painting. I don’t know, because, I know you, I know you are black, and I look at your paintings. If someone showed them to me and said they were by a young African American it would make sense. because it does have a quality of rawness, energy, speed, a little bit of (in a positive way) aggression, physicality, athleticism. Athleticism is a better word than aggression. They are athletic paintings, they dance, they sing. Okay, maybe these are cultural clichés. (Actually, they are definitely clichés [laughs].) but these are of course black accomplishments.

That’s something we can’t deny. It has been there since the beginning of time. I don’t think you have to run from it. You have to embrace it.

But it is not that you are consciously cultivating a language that would feel in any way black, it is just that you are being yourself and you are black and it comes through.

Exactly. But if I tried to express my blackness all the time I would lose a sense of myself because there is that part of me where I just want to be able to experience the Olympics void my color just as a human being watching another human being doing something exciting and challenging at the same time without this cloak, without this war. Other people can use it as power and I understand that but I am searching for this very intellectual thing, I want to express this side of the mind that creates things, that makes stuff. To me the idea of Tesla is incredible. How can the human mind design such a car? That fascinates me, about being human. when you use your mind it can do great and beautiful things. [laughs]

You mentioned that you wonder how a black audience would view your work. Do you show in black contexts? 

Most of the time I guess my work isn’t black enough. I went to the Studio Museum in Harlem and saw Rico Gatson, who does those halos of color around the heads of artists and musicians. He is a friend and I respect his work and other African American artists but I think, I’m not talking about what they are talking about. But I’d really like to have the opportunity to see what my own culture would think about. I know what my family thinks: they think it is just a bunch of abstraction. They believe if you can draw and it looks like something then you are talented. They don’t believe that red next to that yellow can be a thing. [laughs]

The post “That is What Painters Do. We Look for Subject Matter”: Clintel Steed in conversation with David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.

INTRODUCTION BY DAVID COHEN
Public reaction to Dana Schutz’s “Open Casket”, to be seen (at the time of writing at least) in the Whitney Biennial, and responses to the vociferous protests of the painting – a letter to the Biennial curators that went so far as to call for the destruction of the painting – have been galvanizing. One never knows, in the heat of such excitement, whether controversy will blow over as suddenly as it appeared or continue to resonate for years to come, but it seems a fair gamble that Black-versus-Schutz might be the Whistler-versus-Ruskin of our moment. Many of the issues raised by this case — of artistic freedom and responsibility; the role of race in art and criticism; painting as, once again, a contested medium; the status of intentions and motivations — all make this affair indicative of deep tensions in our art culture.

And yet, as so often happens in culture wars, queasiness can overtake bystanders. For unlike, say, the battle between the work of Robert Mapplethorpe and the politics of Jesse Helms where most Americans felt imperative, almost tribal affinity for one side or the other, in this debate, if you find yourself veering in one direction half your heart might go out to the other side. Freedom of expression versus freedom from insensitivity is no duel the civilized should relish. And yet, you might wish a plague on both their houses where the choice is between a flawed and misconceived painting and a shrill, almost vicious demand for its destruction.

This scandal has already in three long days generated its own literature. While I have littered Facebook posts with a few comments, some heartfelt, some glib, I now find that, in having held back in the interests of gathering and editing this “enquête,” that two very fine statements pretty much say, for me, what needs most to be said. Kara Walker, with the poise of one of her own silhouettes, has made the case, exquisitely, for leaving a fellow artist the space to experiment, to fail, to learn. On her Instagram page, accompanying an image of Judith and Holofernes, and naming no names, she writes, with exhilarating humanism: “Painting…often lasts longer than the controversies that greet it. I say this as a shout [out] to every artist and artwork that gives rise to vocal outrage. Perhaps it too gives rise to deeper inquiries and better art. It can only do this when it is seen.” And Gary Indiana hits the nail on the head in a shrewd analysis that calls out the “cliché-riddled, race-baiting demagoguery” of Hannah Black’s literally destructive manifesto.

artcritical prides itself on its promotion of diverse opinion. In that spirit we invited a cross section of regular contributors, guests of The Review Panel, and artists whose opinions reached us on social media to contribute brief statements on whatever aspect of this affair –the painting or the protest – excites their passions or what they feel to be their most useful observations. In striving for inclusiveness I initially invited an equal number of writers who qualify as people of color and writers who don’t. If eventual balance had been a greater priority this “enquête” would have appeared later; instead we have who we have, and are deeply grateful to our writers for sharing considered thoughts on a tight deadline. They are presented in alphabetical order by last name. More may be added in due course.

SASCHA BEHRENDT
This painting is well meaning but in poor taste. It shows a lack of understanding of violence and trauma in the wake of slavery that black people still experience daily as an existential threat.

It is naive to imagine just being a mother and to paint is enough to bridge the huge chasm between Schutz’s reality and that of Mamie Tills.

Schutz could have chosen other subjects, but she didn’t – she chose this one, with all the history and context attached. Unfortunately, in this case there is a responsibility to meet the seriousness of the subject with all its accompanying contextual difficulties. Black bodies violated have appeared as ‘spectacle’ in many forms in the public realm, a focus for distanced, fascinated horror and pity, whether lynchings, Rodney King or recent shootings, that have been disseminated as images by photography, TV or iPhone.

Mamie Tills originally only wanted the black community to be able see her son in an open casket. There were reasons for this, one clearly being a distrust of some of the above. An exception to this was her allowing the circulation of images in Jet’, a black magazine.

This painting fails to deal with these important complexities and so unwittingly ends up acting as a self indulgent, limited, personal response. Without the title, we have no idea what this painting is about and when we do it repeats problematic relations between the public viewer and a black destroyed body. One could say that Schutz by the attempt has created a move forward by opening up a dialogue. However it actually displays a kind of lazy ignorance since she did not do her homework and consider the consequences of presenting this particular content in this way, or how hurtful it might be to experience as a black person.

Everyone is entitled to express him-or-herself, but in this case, in relation to the subject matter, this just was not good enough.

DAVID CARRIER
Almost all contemporary political art preaches to the choir. Ask yourself, when was the last time that a prominent gallery or museum exhibition challenged the beliefs of its prime audience?

This is why the controversy over Dana Schutz’s Open Casket (2016) is so challenging. For once political art inspires a genuine moral conflict. On one hand, it’s not hard to understand why Parker Bright, Hannah Black and the other protesting African-Americans were outraged by this painting. The history of artistic representations of black Americans is mortifying. And right now no non-black artist who makes such representations can avoid being a part of that tradition. But on the other hand, given the statement of her intentions by Dana Schutz, it’s superabundantly clear that she’s a person of good will. We believe that artists should be free to present their chosen images without censorship. But here that right conflicts with the claims announced by members of the black artistic community.

In New York, a city where whites are now a minority, the art world—for all of its rhetoric about inclusiveness— is surprisingly segregated. And so this debate is not surprising. In the larger context of present American politics, it may seem a petty disagreement. But if the art world cannot resolve its moral disputes, then what claim have we to critique conflicts in the larger culture?

As should be becoming clear, I have no way of resolving this conflict, which does justice to the competing claims. But I do feel a real, heartfelt debt to Parker, Bright and their colleagues for presenting this quandary. On the whole, we art world people tend to take an aesthetic distance on art—even on political art. What they teach is the limits of that way of thinking. And that, to speak personally, is a lesson I take to heart. I haven’t yet seen this exhibition. But I do not think that viewing the show or the painting would change this argument.

LISA CORINNE DAVIS
The question of who can tell whose stories is ripe at the moment, from discussions ranging from Kelley Walker’s exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum of Saint Louis to the notion of “sensitivity readers” in the literary world. Therefore, I am not surprised it has taken center stage in the conversation around the 2017 Whitney Biennial. In comparing the hysteria around Dana Schutz’s painting to the lack of outrage over the painting by Henry Taylor of Philandro Castile, or Jordan Wolfson’s extremely violent virtual reality film orchestrated by the sound of Chanukah blessings, I can only conclude the difference is due to a question of ownership of one’s own cultural and historical narratives. Of course artists and writers are free to tell the stories of others – but only if they are clear they are telling a story from their own very personal perspective and not simply appropriating another’s.

Schutz’s mistake was to confuse an image for a story. Schutz’s subject matter has often consisted of responses to observed moments around her. She conjures up the creation of rumpus narratives, their meaning lying in the story and not in static imagery. Unlike her previous works, the Till painting is based on a singular, iconic, historical image and therefore is pinned to a very specific, known story of a victimized person, a symbol of the Civil Rights Movement and unjust race relations. This leaves no room for Schutz to impose her personal relationship to that image. In this instance, her sense of wonder, her imagination and her narrative invention are held hostage to this iconic image. Material manipulation is limited to the image’s borders. Her response of empathy and grief to the original photograph is impossible to locate in the absence of some visual connection that would be provided by the mechanism of narrative. For a white person to use this image – by definition “a representation of the external form of a person or thing” – of a seminal figure of the civil rights movement, seems tone deaf at best and hurtful or insulting at worst.

As artists, we try to effect change in the world by opening up dialogs around difficult issues. But visual images, especially iconic ones, are fixed in their position and are capable of confining the conversation to previously known facts and issues, and therefore undermining their power.to engage with new meanings. Unfortunately, Schutz has stepped into these muddy waters.

ANNE HARRIS
Some questions:

Is the heart of the problem that Schutz’s painting just isn’t good enough? Does it rely on its source for its intensity, thus failing to do what painting does—to transform its material? Does the attempt at transformation overwhelm the source, reducing it to stylized paint?

Is this a subject Dana Schutz cannot touch? Is it impossible for her to succeed with this content? Is this the failure of a white woman to acknowledge that not all content is hers to use?

Or is this a painting failure? Should she try again? What would happen if she invented the painting whole cloth? What would happen if she aimed for another point of view—not the camera’s, not Emmett Till’s mother’s, but her own?

Some thoughts:

Painters who paint from photographs get into trouble when they assume that what’s inside a photograph (subject, content, emotion, power) will automatically translate into paint. But too often, the painting becomes about the painted interpretation—painterly style imposed on top of a preconceived image. If the photograph is highly charged and well known, the painting only functions as a painted reminder.

The painters who get beyond this—like Vija Celmins’s WWII bombers or Gerhard Richter’s Baader-Meinhof series—do so by focusing on the translation of the surface plane of the photograph. Ironically, their work becomes more psychologically powerful when they aim at something else. Of course, Schutz is a different kind of painter. I’m guessing she’d do better bouncing off a photograph, rather than working directly from it.

Another issue: artists and viewers can confuse intent with meaning. The intent of the artist does matter, but if art fails to go beyond its intent it often falls flat, becoming an illustration of an idea. That’s another kind of transformational failure. Also, the evolution of meaning continues after the piece is made. Meaning is acquired through the interaction of art and audience. Much of the current debate is actually doing this—defining the meaning of Schutz’s painting. For better or worse.

Finally: Schutz’s stated intent was to paint empathy. But empathy is imagining that someone else’s pain is ours. If I, a white woman painter, want to paint the pain that Emmett Till’s mother felt, I need to paint my own son, mutilated and dead in that coffin.

SUSAN JENNINGS
I was discussing “Open Casket” with a dear friend and writer, when he asked,  “What sound do you hear when a bell rings?” “I hear “a bell,” obviously. But this friend is too smart to ask a simple question. Do people hear different things when a bell rings?

To all of those who have contributed to the discussion around Dana Schutz’s “Open Casket”, in particular to Dana Schutz herself, whose work I have long admired; and to Hannah Black, who I think is brave; and to Kara Walker whose work is undeniably powerful and who wrote profoundly on Instagram using Artemisia Gentileschi’s “Judith Slaying Holofernes” to make her case; I am grateful and full of respect.

I believe Schutz when she says the painting came about out of empathy and was not purposefully hurtful. And yet it has hit some as painfully tone deaf to the situation in which we have been living where innocent black adults and children are killed and their killers still go free. White empathy is certainly necessary and yet it is not enough.  We are all watching in horror as black brothers and sisters are murdered without indictments or reparations. This is the historical situation in which “Open Casket” lives, separated from the intentions of the artist. We are aghast, waiting for someone to do something.  That Emmet Till was brutally murdered because a white woman lied and now a white woman could repair something through art is possibly profound if she/we could figure it out. I believe entirely in the power of art. I believe in the possibility that art can create new paradigms. A bell has just rung for us all in the form of this painting.

I have a fantasy in which we all agree that Hannah Black’s letter and the protesters in the museum and all of the discussions and Dana Schutz choosing to heed the call to destroy her painting – all of this- becomes a new collaborative relational aesthetics work of art.  In my fantasy, Black and Schutz are Judith and the painting (along with all the nuanced and historical racism it engenders) is Holofernes.

In my dream we are together in the process of beheading the oppressor by creating this new art. Dana Schutz chooses to complete the art, begun by making and exhibiting “Open Casket,” by destroying her painting. There are no victims in my dream.  Dana Schutz heard the protests not as forcible demand or as coercion but as an opening to something new and she chose powerfully, for herself, to hear the bell of invitation and to collaborate with those who call for the paintings’ demise. The success of this new work of art is achieved through a performance in which the painting is destroyed and Dana speaks the language of strength, humility and grace in so doing.

If Dana Schutz could chose to allow her work to be “erased” in the spirit that de Kooning allowed Rauschenberg to erase his drawing, we would all be authors in her new so far unfamiliar art. My fantasy may be horrifying to some painters and artists, art appreciators and politicos and may smack of censorship. I have been told already that I am awful and terrible for giving voice to my dream. I am not advocating for censorship. Of course no art should ever be censored. And of course no art should ever be destroyed by anyone other than the artist.

I am reaching for something else, an artwork as of yet “unknown.”

There is another sound in this ringing bell. It is the sound of the magpie. She sounds wise and she recognizes herself in the mirror when it is shown to her.

KEN JOHNSON
Leaving aside the recommendation that Schutz’s painting be destroyed and the question who should administer said destruction, consider the substance of the protest: that white people should not make art that represents black people. Speaking as an old white man, I say the heck with that. I want to see MORE art by white people about black people. Also, more art by black people about white people; more art by Asian people about Native American people; more art by heterosexuals about homosexuals; more art by trans people about cis people; more art by Jews about the goyim; more art by theists about atheists; more art by short people about tall people; more art about identity group X by identity group Y.  Feelings may be hurt – so what? Are we not grownups?

No to sectarian prohibitionism! No to political bullying! No to opportunistic, self-appointed ayatollahs of righteousness! Yes to conversational promiscuity! Yes to creative imagination! Radical ecumenicism!

DENNIS KARDON
Does the controversy surrounding Open Casket automatically make it an important work of art? After reading at least four major articles, and volumes of compelling, complex intellectual argument on social media, what has become clear is this: what constitutes a work of art, and what role we expect art, and especially painting to play in our culture today is still hotly contested. Indeed who exactly belongs in our? Or does our even exist anymore except as a privileged code?

In the end, I find the opinions of people who think they have seen this painting, when what they have seen is a jpeg on their cellphone, to be the most problematic. To claim the irrelevance of having to see the actual painting when what is important are the situational dynamics of race and voice, devalues the very idea of a painting. After viewing Open Casket in person, the problems with a photo of the painting became immediately apparent when I tried to take one.

First, photos deny the physical relationship of your body to the painting in real space-time. The scale of Open Casket is larger than life-size, which means the image becomes more intimate as its scale enacts a closeness not afforded in digital representation.

Second, this painting becomes completely flattened by photography. Clearly, Open Casket is not at all a “rendering of a photograph.” It’s a complex re-invention in three dimensions, from black and white images, of the mutilated head of a child in an immaculate tuxedo and satin-lined coffin, as if at the funeral, looking down. I’ve read the only thing not visible in jpegs of Schutz’s painting is merely her “bravura paint handling,” a damning reduction to a generic phrase of nuanced physical movements. Only in person can one observe the enactment of the complex emotional involvement and invention by the painter as she tries to revivify in paint (scraping out, scooping to over an inch in places, slashing as well as madly brushing) a horrific image. Schutz interjects her perverse imagination into the situation, trying to rediscover what might have been lost from the original photographs, through the diminished detail of black and white, and the distanced formulation and familiarity produced from continued reproduction. Only after seeing the painting can one advance a real opinion as to whether risking that act of imagination was either brave or a clueless, foolhardy undertaking. Schutz seems well aware of the consequences of that risk and choosing to take it is what makes her an important painter.

LEE ANN NORMAN
Art can be a powerful tool to render the world and a range of human experiences, as many scholars and thinkers have concluded, and Schutz, known for colorful, humorous, gestural painting of fictional subjects has said[1] that she, too, chooses subject matter based on how she sees the world. In a statement[2] to The Guardian about the Open Casket controversy, Schutz noted that art can be “. . . a space of empathy,” where one can understand and share the feelings of another. She also stated that she may not know what it is like to be Black, but she could empathize with Mamie Till Bradley, one mother to another (although one who has not experienced the horror of racialized violence like a lynching).

Open Casket renders a version of Till in Schutz’s signature color palette of vomit-and shit-like pinks, reds, beiges and browns, further abstracting the image of his already disfigured face. When Mrs. Till Bradley decided to have an open casket funeral, she openly defied the Jim Crow rule that Black Americans stay quiet and know their place. And when she turned her private grief into a public matter, she broke yet another social taboo, despite knowing that her son’s image circulating around the world may have little consequence at home. In fact, the now-iconic black-and-white photos of Till’s disfigured corpse disseminated by The Chicago Defender and Jet magazine then picked up by news outlets worldwide did not positively influence the outcome of the murder trial. Defense counsel argued that since the boy’s body was so badly disfigured, the corpse may not be Emmett Till at all.

Open Casket and images of the painting now circulate much like viral videos of police shootings, shocking and traumatizing people every time they pop up in a search for Schutz, the Whitney Biennial, and now even Emmett Till. Had Schutz painted Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Williams standing at the bridge near the Tallahatchie River where they dumped his body, or Carolyn Bryant, who in a recently published 2008 interview, admitted that the testimony she gave implicating the teen was a lie, perhaps that would have been helpful, less harmful. We’ve all seen Emmett Till rendered a monster, his bloated body brutalized beyond recognition, yet the ones who are responsible for his horrific demise are still allowed to keep their humanity intact.

WALTER ROBINSON
I think Hannah Black is a Russian plant.

SEPH RODNEY
There is a way in which the controversy around “Open Casket” coerces us into taking authoritarian and reactionary positions, and more than objecting to the painting itself, I object to the ways the ensuing debate has compelled participants to take extreme perspectives.

For example, Christina Sharpe, in an interview with Siddartha Mitter amplifies her respect for Hannah Black’s call for the removal and destruction of the painting, explaining that it is now part of a circulation system in which black people’s suffering is distributed for enjoyment and profit. Sharpe argues that Emmett Till’s mother Mamie Till Mobley decided to publish photographs (on which the painting is loosely based) of her son’s mutilated body in a black publication, Jet Magazine, for black people — not attempting to address mainstream white consciousness. Sharpe contends that the painting fails because it presumes an intimacy with the subject, Till, that is not earned, and the viewer is necessarily placed in that counterfeit intimacy, which is really rooted in spectacle. Thereby Sharpe makes an oblique argument that “there can be an ethical call to destroy something,” in this case the painting, because although Schutz has insisted she won’t sell the painting, according to Sharpe it might still be inherited and eradicating it “does stop the ability of the artist to profit from it in a certain way.”

The liberal response to this is to protect a notion of free speech, artistic license, and intellectual autonomy that seems threatened by these absolutist appeals to rid ourselves of offensive objects.

This debate impoverishes us. Arguments premised on the notion of black ownership of “black pain” essentially balkanize culture into discrete demesnes in which only certain members of the particular group are authorized to address issues intimately relevant to that group. I understand regarding culture as a possession—so much has been taken from black folks, repurposed and sold to mainstream audiences without acknowledgment that it seems aggressive policing of cultural goods is required. But this position presumes the logic of the marketplace, and I don’t want to live there. I believe in nurturing a civic space where the crucial notions that support a healthy life are collectively negotiated. I think we always need others: women helping to unpack masculinity, black people helping us understand whiteness, and poor people contributing to our comprehension of wealth. The painting may fail, but the subsequent dispute is moving us toward ugly dictatorial positions.

SUZY SPENCE
I believe Dana Schutz has the right to evolve, even if it’s painful to watch. The visceral rendering of the child’s head in “Open Casket”, handled with blurring and impasto, disturbs because it reanimates the historic image of Emmett Till with such physical proximity as to conjure the real, horrific mutilating events that took place. Schutz’s truly empathic piece is a testament to the enduring power of painting and its ability to stir strong emotion.

Schutz’s application of paint in this work is consistent with her distinctive manner of abstraction. Cubistic distortions of fleshy pink men and women showering, walking in the park, sneezing, are her usual subjects. She’s good at the daily life of white people doing just about nothing; on occasion she’ll approach violent themes, or birth and death, but she dips in briefly then on to something else.

The problem I have with Schutz, is that she failed to established her position on race in earlier works, and now she’s dropped a bomb. Her detractors are wrong to try to silence her, but they are right to mind the sudden, forceful injection of race as subject. Her choice of image, which has a unique place in African American history, is particularly problematic.

In reality Schutz’s work has always been about race (whiteness), but the art world has focused on her formal and narrative techniques. That is a privilege. Asking whether she ought to paint a historic image of a black man is beside the point, as she’s never been held accountable for the ways she’s depicted her own race. Others like John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage, Alex Katz, and Will Cotton and company, also seem to paint about power and privilege unconsciously. Why critics and curators tend not to address this when considering them could be fear or laziness, or lack of vocabulary. I struggle with it too.

Philip Guston was remarkable in his ability to address whiteness, using a combination of color, symbolism, and caricature to get at the sorry state of things. Kerry James Marshall, Jacob Lawrence, Kara Walker, and Laylah Ali come to mind as artists who employ the color black (or near black) for skin tone as a powerful formal device. They give flesh its own special key, they deal with it as a kind of monochrome, which then carries the painting forth. I wonder how it would reshape the conversation if Schutz found a better formal methodology for addressing race in the future. Maybe then her earnest, well intentioned voice would be better heard in the important dialog about race and representation.

PETER WILLIAMS
A fiction: Neo Negro, a ” — ” [old-school black], asks the question, What now is this thing called “whiteness”? How does it exist, in whose body does it reside? Not mine he thinks, but then again his pale features belie the family history. He thinks of his great-great-great-great-grandfather. He was kinda white, wasn’t he? Could pass for white, they said. Neo had that fine hair, lithe and straight. His great-great-great-great-grandfather had the good talk and was educated– could this be his, Neo’s, own whiteness? There was a picture of him made by a white painter at the time. But now some wanted it to remake it to fit their image of the past.

White people were gathering around trying to explain this to Neo. That he too was possessed not by ghosts (though there was that too), but by his own whiteness. But Neo knew it was a demon’s history that had much maligned the history of the nigga, the colored and negro, even the Black and now African-American. This history, white people said, once owned his body and they wanted to complete that possession through this image. Didn’t matter that this negro didn’t own anything. He didn’t own his past, maybe he did not own his future either, certainly his own people’s image was his, he thought.

Now Neo had a picture of his great great great great grandfather, a picture whose ownership was being debated. Why did whiteness want it too? It was valuable to Neo; it was his history. For white people, it was a valuable document that proved they owned Neo’s body and soul. Didn’t matter that Neo had original possession– the devil was in the details. Beside he knew white people often overlooked the truth to have their way, since they had long ago lost their own Soul. The fact was, he was still of the mind that the past was never really over, and whiteness (which was their religion) had a right to take ownership of Neo’s history. In effect it wasn’t so much the image they wanted. It wasn’t of great value to them, but to their legacy of whiteness. It was ownership that gave a kind of power to whiteness.

ALEXI WORTH
On “Open Casket”

My first thought was that the painting was, for Schutz, unusually quiet, modest, and static. There’s none of her usual crowding vertiginousness, except maybe in the very top band, where pale flowers– or perhaps the bunched satins of the casket interior?– lean out over Till’s shoulder. This quietness seemed like deference. Schutz must have felt constrained—who wouldn’t?– by the gravity of the famous photographs. Her painting is dominated by one simple shape: Till’s white shirtfront, bordered by the black of his jacket and pants. Together these make a wide flat arrow pointing to his face. Schutz doesn’t seem to have relied directly (ie., literally) on any of the photographs here. Instead she built up some kind of 3-D structure under the canvas, so that it juts out slightly toward the viewer, into our physical space. Over that projection, curving semi-abstract brushstrokes are roughly legible as physiognomy. The effect is something like a becalmed, softened version of one of Francis Bacon’s portraits. But unlike Bacon’s middle distance, the viewpoint here is uncomfortably close. As several observers have noted, the suggestion is unmistakable. We are visitor’s at Till’s wake.

Why paint that wake now? Even before Schutz’s explanatory statement, the connection to recent violence seemed obvious enough–arguably too obvious. It’s clear that Schutz was thinking about a kind of subject she hesitated to paint directly: Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice and other killings painfully fresh in American memories. Sensibly, cautiously, she chose an oblique route, not painting the news but going back to a canonical Civil Rights image, one taught in high schools. Whatever you think of her painting, its point was plain: to link the grim present to the grim past, and implicitly to remind us that the public sorrow, outrage and resolve that led from Till’s casket to the (incomplete) Civil Rights victories of the 1960s is needed all over again. It’s a plain painting with a plain message. Do many Americans already feel that outrage and sorrow, 24/7? Of course. Are still more reminders necessary? After the recent elections, in a country where Confederate flags still fly, who is to say not?

The post Open Casket: “Enquête” regarding the Dana Schutz affair, the painting, the protests appeared first on artcritical.

September 10 to October 24, 2015
456 W 18th Street (between 9th and 10th avenues)
New York, 212 680 9467

In her exhibition eight years ago at Zach Feuer gallery, Dana Schutz showed a series of “How We Would…” paintings – fantasies of accomplishment or desire. Especially striking was How We Would Give Birth (2007), which depicted a woman on a bed distracting herself by staring at a Hudson River School painting on the wall while a bloody infant struggles to emerge from her open womb. This painting came to mind while confronting twelve huge exuberant paintings (one close to 10 by 20 feet) and four drawings in her present show at Petzel, and realizing all but one were done in the past several months of 2015 after the birth of her child, a little more than a year ago.

While usually her paintings look out at a world gone wild, most of these paintings seem to gaze inward. Schutz’s images have always seemed like proscenia, upon which are enacted the dramatic complexity of her own ambivalent feelings. And in this spirit we might consider the animating engine of her current exhibition to be Post-partum Expression. Whatever her fantasy of parenthood might have been eight years ago, these paintings are the palpable result.

The human-scaled Sleepwalker (2015) in Petzel’s entryway guides us into the exhibit. It displays a person in a yellow t-shirt, hands outstretched zombie-like, having just descended, or ascended, or about to tumble down (the perspective is ambiguous) a long flight of stairs. The vision is reminiscent of those post-childbirth, middle-of-the-night walks to quiet a crying infant: trying to be awake just enough to accomplish the task, yet still able to fall back to sleep afterwards. Ironically, the “Adidas” emblazoned across her chest has its final “s” obscured or missing to become Adida, the past participle of the Spanish verb adir — to accept.

Acceptance of the present moment, of chaos and loss of control, is not only a condition of parenthood, but of painting, as well. Some of these images might seem incoherent at first, but the confusing, fractured, and contradictory points of view of Cubist space, which frustrates stable analysis, seems to have become the ideal tool for Schutz to explore her emotional state.

Lion Eating Its Tamer (2015) introduces us to this ravaged pictorial space where every brushstroke simultaneously creates form and is a form itself. Being consumed by what one is trying to control calls to mind the experience of being physically and emotionally devoured by one’s child, probably every nursing mother’s nightmare. The lion is an implacably ferocious stone idol upon whose altar the tamer has been sacrificed. The various objects contained in this flattened image — a ball, a sperm-like whip, a ring of milky flames, a nipple shaped pedestal, a purple streaked square of paper or diaper, a broken wooden joint and nails — are arranged around the central action like iconographs in a Byzantine Madonna and Child painting. The tamer seems less terrified than resigned or sleep-deprived, engulfed by, or perhaps ejected from, the mouth/womb of the chimeric beast. The drama is staged not in a circus ring but on a trapezoidal examination table under overhead surgical lighting.

A yet more mysterious painting, The Glider (2015) is as bewildering as any Cubist Pablo Picasso, and at first the central female’s face seems pulled from one of his paintings. Learning that this glider is not an airborne one, but the term for a reclining nursing chair clarifies the image. The wood chair, the red infant, elongated funnel breasts (there seems to be four), and various glasses with water and straws create a private moment that we share. The Picassoid face of the nursing mother, as fractured as it may seem, expresses a specific emotion somewhere between shock and ecstasy, and locates a head that is leaning back and seen from below, which would be the nursing infant’s point of view, and becomes our own, pulling us into this intimate experience.

This sense of introspection and privacy, despite the manic energy of their execution, extends even to the two titular paintings of the show with their metaphors of a brawl in the enclosed space of an elevator. The calm abstractions of flat brushed metal doors, either opening or closing like curtains on the intense energy of wildly painted forms at the center, separate us from the drama. The chaotic confrontations of a contained world are in the process of being concealed or revealed to our isolated view. The quite wonderful Slow Motion Shower far from a salacious view of a naked female bather offers a hunched over, multi-armed and possibly weeping Shiva, whose tears blend with the shower spray and conveys the feeling of a retreat from the demands of human contact and the one place to find solitude and release.

The immense Shaking Out the Bed (2015) in the last room depicts not only a locus of pleasure and conception (certainly not sleep here) but also a fraught arena for any new family. Initially so chaotic seeming, the painting slowly reveals how Schutz has structured this boudoir explosion.

Several different points of view here have been woven together. Seen frontally the stable entry point into this eruption, at the center bottom, is the dark surface of a night table. Upon it rests an ominous hammer, a water glass, a crumpled paper, and a giant cockroach. Anchoring the right side of the painting is the flat top of a headboard seen from above, displaying four ornamental ceramic pots. The upper part of the painting is held in place by a lamp on a blond night table, drawer expressionistically askew, and on the left side, looking down past the foot of the bed is a laundry basket possibly containing soiled diapers.

The “shaking out” of the title occurs in the center of the painting where coins, newspaper and pizza slice fly out at us like a big bang. Bang might be the operative word as it is generated by two figures caught in coitus, as evinced by their straining appendages and bare buttocks, and the concentrated expressions of their giant Philip Guston-like heads pressed intimately together, trying unsuccessfully not to disturb the diapered infant at the foot of the bed. Mostly we are looking down on this scene, which throws us into the air as well.

Schutz emphasizes how personally significant this painting must be for her, not only through the scale and the intimacy of the activity, but in the specificity of markers around the edge: the stack of Self magazines under the bed, the calendar page in one corner showing the date June 27, and the digital clock in another revealing the time to be 12:31.

Evident here is the influence of other artists who have explored the metaphoric significance of family experience, whether Guston, Elizabeth Murray, Nicole Eisenman or Judith Linhares, each in entirely different ways. But the boldness and fearlessness of Schutz’s approach, her constant risky experimentation with both form and subject matter, and an almost desperate desire to get to the bottom of her feelings through paint, reveal her, to my mind, as one of the great painters of our time. Julian Schnabel once bragged that he was the closest thing to Picasso we were going to get in our lifetime, but he’s now been pushed aside.

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A cursory glance at Michael Berryhill’s paintings could lead to a mistake on the order of confusing fiberglass insulation with cotton candy. So beware of complacency induced by pastel colors, sensuous surfaces and snarky titles. Something disturbing may be lurking behind the cheerful ambiguities in the nine new paintings and vitrine of drawings in his new show at Kansas Gallery.

Saturn n Son (all 2014), a play on words of the ‘70s sitcom Sanford and Son, is the title of two initially puzzling paintings in Kansas’s rear room. Layered in mostly blues and rusty browns, they seem to represent an indistinct, non-descript figure, which could be a piece of disintegrated statuary, bent over in some kind of activity. Without knowing the title, the activity could range from manual labor to microscopic examination.

However anyone who has a passing acquaintance with art history will immediately recognize the Saturn in the title as the one Goya depicts devouring his son. Which of course makes the figure in Berryhill’s painting discernable as Goya’s wild-eyed, child-eating demon, and Berryhill’s resonances with Goya more obvious. The TV show reference emphasizes a bit of campy goofiness in the Goya seen from the present, despite the horrific subject matter, and conveys a spirit of ambivalence that permeates this work.

Berryhill is not ambivalent about his ambition however. Though modest in scale, the paintings use expensive, thick-weave linen, a high culture archival maneuver that serves to offset some of the low culture references, and telegraphs his seriousness. Berryhill nods to not only Goya, but Picasso, Matisse and Bonnard, as well as his contemporaries, such as Dana Schutz. He places himself in an early modernist painting tradition that, despite an apparently abstract affect, is always representational in its ultimate methods.

The major ambivalences in this show concern the perception of the imagery and how important it is to decipher it. Berryhill presents his subjects theatrically with proscenium-like verticals as quotation marks and a shallow horizontal strip at the bottom that stages each event. The grain of the linen, and small, dry brushstrokes allow Berryhill to use a halftone-like layering process, producing a surface of fuzzy colors and figure-ground inversions. The results are images seeming indefinite, corroded, or out of focus.

Like the wordplay of his titles, each of Berryhill’s paintings involves some kind of visual misreading or multiplicity of meaning. Indeed the very title of the exhibition, Beggars Blanket, is an obvious reference to the 1968 Rolling Stones album, Beggar’s Banquet, replacing a humble repast with an inadequate fuzzy fabric (the canvases themselves?).

How we respond then is always dependent on how easily one psychologically negotiates the frustration of not being able to resolve the paintings into coherent images.

Some viewers will simply accept the work as abstract and just appreciate the sensuous, warm and fuzzy mood it projects, which can lead to overlooking a reference to parental cannibalism. But the sustained attention required of viewers to parse partial bits of imagery in hopes of a deeper comprehension carries a risk for the artist. Too much unresolved ambiguity, coupled with a flippant title, like Axis of Easel, might interfere with the painting attaining memorability, and the futility of finding resolution could overwhelm the artist-viewer bond.

Long Long, Gone Gone, a painting with fairly straightforward imagery, is a great ploy to engage one in the work’s hermeneutics as well as a direct statement of Berryhill’s themes. This painting depicts the back of a longhaired person, left hand to brow in a peering-off-into-the-distance gesture, and with a parrot on the right shoulder.

The formal ambiguities are easy to parse, but their metaphorical implications give the painting gravitas. The airy blue background, grading from ultramarine to cerulean, can be either sky or sea, or both, and the blue reappears at the bottom to frame the bust of a figure, who, given the layered hairdo and delicate wrist is probably meant to be seen as female. Or the bottom strip might indicate that the figure is submerged to her chest in water. To her chest that is, if the patterned rectangular shape spanning the canvas is her back, and not in fact the back of a couch. The parrot, as signifier of both imitation and piracy, is depicted as a degraded representation. The searching gesture, which echoes our own concentration of looking, seems futile because nothing can be deciphered from the scumbled brushstrokes that represent the distance.

The title, Long Long, Gone Gone, can represent not only our own fruitless attempts to find meaning in Berryhill’s paintings, but perhaps an elegy for the past itself — a recognition that painting has departed as the major vehicle for conveying cultural meaning. Despite the rigor and purpose that Berryhill brings to his paintings, there is also a sophisticated understanding of that ship having already sailed, and we peer desperately at its surface, trying to understand why it exists, trusting only our own perceptions, Flaubert’s stuffed parrot squawking useless artspeak at our shoulder.

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Andrea K. Scott and Katy Siegel joined David Cohen to discuss Kathy Butterly at Tibor de Nagy, Tim Hawkinson at PaceWildenstein and Nyehaus, Julianne Swartz at Josee Bienvenu, Dana Schutz at Zach Feuer, and Rebecca Warren at Matthew Marks.

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March 13 to September 26, 2005

“Greater New York” is a survey exhibition mounted periodically by PS1 to give an overview of exciting work done recently in or near New York by artists who are not household names.  Selected by curators from PS1 and MoMA, of which PS1 is an affiliate, the show is an almost overwhelmingly large assembly of works by 160 artists.  “Greater New York” has established itself as the antidote to Whitney Biennial, generally showing younger and more experimental artists In the current version of “Greater New York,” the old and the new clash with unexpected results.

Tactics that were popular in the 1990s, such as interventions, installations, and simultaneous work in various media look clichéd and lacking in inspiration, rather than showing a spark of rebellious genius.  Valerie Hegarty’s tree trunk, for instance, made of paste and cardboard and appearing to burst through the wall and floor of the museum, seems very safe, not at all disturbing to one’s perception of the museum space or subversively humorous.  David Opdyke’s “USS Mall,” a scale model of an aircraft carrier, whose top surface is composed of the details of a suburban mall and parking lot, functions only as a weak visual pun.  It lacks the sophistication to make any social critique and go beyond being a joke.  Another attempt at social comment, Elif Uras’ painting “He got Game,” depicts a culture obsessed with the possession and use of firearms.  In each case, these pieces are merely lazy ideas unsupported by technical skill, as uninteresting to look at as they are to think about.

There are “computer-aided” pictures, which is another way of saying pictures that have attempted to avoid the unavoidable need to know how to make something with one’s own hands in order to create an object that can bear more than several seconds’ observation.  Finally, there are several artists who believe that by working in diverse and what they consider to be unconventional media they are breaking from the traditional mold of the artist.  Of course this gambit (which has often been used to subvert the use of the art object as a market tool) is at least as old as Duchamp’s early work.  Here, it often has the result that perfectly respectable work in one medium is degraded by its random association with much weaker work in another medium.  Hope Atherton’s contribution is diminished when her ambitious painting The Watcher (acrylic on linen, 87 x 66 inches) is paired with a limp wall sculpture of a rabbit/unicorn.  Guy Benner takes up a whole gallery with a video of performers in ostrich suits, accompanied by the suits themselves, which add nothing.  Christian Holstad’s collages combine product logos in compositions whose inspiration goes beyond Pop mannerism, but this effect is undercut by his decision also to include a generic-looking floor installation.

Countering these  weaknesses there is a strong representation of work being done in the traditional mediums of painting, sculpture, film, photography, and (we now need to add) installation. Several installations reflect a thoughtful approach, as opposed to one that is mechanical or overly conceptual.  Wangechi Mutu’s piece combines collage with non-art elements in a harmonious ensemble.  Bozidar Brazda has two site-specific pieces.  One creates an image of a man camped out on a ledge outside a window, while the other, just beside the entrance to PS1’s large courtyard, is a real Jaguar XJ6, filled with books and straw.  The references these two pieces make are various.  One possibility is the museum director’s car, and in fact walking around the museum, not far away, one may find a single car, a BMW, parked inside the museum’s gates.  But the most evocative work of installation in the exhibition is Marc Swanson’s “Killing Moon 3 (Self portrait as Yeti in his lair),” which some viewers (though not those already familiar with PS1) might miss, as it is located in the basement, at the far end of the former boiler room.  Using the location to maximum effect, Swanson made a tableau that was poetic, and not at all ironic, despite the mythical figure central to its impact.  This white-haired being, also known as the Abominable Snowman, is seated on the floor, looking like a homeless person, surrounded by his scavenged belongings, or like someone who does not come from our planet (literally) and does not share our values.

In photography, Tanyth Berkeley’s portraits seem to have a new kind of light, and Gil Blank’s images of a man floating in water and of fireworks are simultaneously hip and serene.  Sue de Beer, who also has an exhibition currently at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Altrea Gallery on 42nd Street, creates installations in which to project her films.  What is really captivating is her mastery of conventional film language — her use of framing and narrative.  Rather than bringing conventional film language into fine art — as many artists have done — her work seems to yearn to break free of its self-imposed art world confines and simply exist in its natural habitat, the world of television and movies.  Film and video more firmly set in the art mode include  xurban_collective’s evocative stationary view of a city skyline at sunset, Abbey Williams’ effective coupling of footage of New York subway passengers with a rock soundtrack featuring sexy female vocals, and Pawel Woytasik’s enigmatic images of industrial systems that could be processing waste.

The real achievements in “Greater New York” are left to the most traditional media.  Adam McEwen’s huge piece uses a photograph of Mussolini and his girlfriend, Claretta Petacci, strung up in a square in Milan, after having been executed and beaten by a crowd on April 28, 1945.  The found photograph is merely the starting point for this remarkable work, in which McEwen inverts the photo, greatly enlarges it and mounts and frames it in such a way that the final image is an imposing one that mixes a horrible melancholy with the inexplicable levity of seeing these mutilated figures that appear to be gaily dancing and singing.  Sculpture makes a strong showing in various modes.  Will Ryman shows his plaintive papier mâché figures, famous by now on the New York scene, and Tobias Putrih has an effective installation of gradation of sheets of cardboard. Nathan Carter uses mundane materials — acrylic and enamel paint on cut plywood — to make a structure  at once suggestive of the observable world (it looks like a mountain ski village with pine trees) and insistent on its nature as built and painted sculptural relief.  Interesting forays into material are undertaken by Ryan Johnson, who uses cut paper and acrylic paint to make three-dimensional figures, Mickalene Thomas, who uses rhinestones with acrylic and enamel paint to make a reclining figure, and Taylor McKimens, whose small  mixed-media television set has a refreshing home-made quality to it.

The most significant achievements in recent New York art, as presented by “Greater New York,”  are in the area of painting.  There are few examples of paintings that simply illustrate an idea (and many of these can be seen around New York on a regular basis); instead, one finds a generous sampling of painters who seem involved with the implications of the paint medium and the seemingly limitless variety of ways to use it.  The first work one sees in the lobby is the large-scale tour-de-force effort Perfume II (Feb. 2003) (114 x 180 inches) by Cheyney Thompson, which depicts, in loving detail, a typical New York magazine and candy stand.  The unpainted canvas surrounding the image underscores the reality that this work is about the painting, not the idea of a newsstand as cultural artifact, let alone the role of commerce in contemporary life.  The stand is simply a fact anyone can observe in New York, and its detail is carefully rendered by Thompson without ever becoming precious.  Kristin Baker and Garth Weiser contribute powerful large-scale treatments — she in acrylic, relying on a scraping technique, he in oils whose paint is pushed or allowed to accumulate in waves that become an idea of form.  Angela Dufresne, Kurt Lightner, Kamrooz Aram, and Anna Conway, in different ways, exhibit inventive approaches to imagery and technique.

The two most successful painters in the exhibition, who really show a way to travel with the tradition of oil painting, are Dana Schutz and Ena Swansea.  While Swansea has only one painting, it is a doozy.  Entitled “devil on the road” (oil on graphite on linen, 56 x 56 inches), it depicts a bright red devil wearing glasses in a crouched position, as if about to pounce.  The paint is laid on in precise, meaningful strokes, and the color is blended expressively, while the figure’s shadow is effected by the lack of tan paint on the ground.  What does it mean to say a stroke of paint is meaningful?  It means that its fact of being exactly where and how it is resonates in the viewer the realization that this stroke really has to be, it should be, where it is.  Contrast this to the plethora of easily-made and easily-encountered meaningless brush strokes, which, by contrast, command no sense at all of having to be where and how they are, but instead give the feeling of having randomly landed where they are (in a setting where randomness is not prized).  Schutz’s strokes, likes Swansea’s, command the recognition of meaningfulness, yet they are quite different.  Swansea’s marks, though readily apparent, are subsumed into a larger pictorial narrative of the painting and image as a whole, while Schutz’s marks are expressionistic, in that each individual mark has a life of its own and often a color value of its own, distinguishing it from other nearby marks.  Schutz has a small painting, “Poisoned Man,” and a large tableau, “Presentation,” a picture of a huge corpse, laid out in front of a crowd of onlookers, who could also double as participants in a medical class.  The scale of her imagery is impressive.

“Greater New York” is successful partly because of its ambition and scope, but mainly because of the acuity of its curatorial eye.  It lets visitors to PS1 be aware that the newest things happening in the New York art world today are happening in the oldest mediums.

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