Washing Monsters with Dana Schutz at Petzel Gallery, New York
By Hannah Moore
One giant hand on his shoulder. Two more tightly clasping the little man, as he writhes to get away. His foot is in flight, his hair has caught the breeze, but his body is locked in bronze. He’ll never get away.
What is it that seems to be embracing him? There’s a monstrous head, like a dragon’s, open-mouthed, gasping for air. No ferocious teeth, though; the artist seems to have scraped them out with her fingers while this thing was still clay, and now it’s been cast, the monster is gelded. Hopelessly, it holds on to a human it could once have destroyed with one bite.
It feels as if Dana Schutz’s Washing Monsters sculpture is reaching for me too, as I step through the doorway of Petzel gallery in Chelsea. Schutz’s fingerprints are all over it; they pock-mark the monster’s face and carve sinew into its feet; they grasp the man’s head and then stretch it like putty, forcing him into a constant expression of agony.
Like lots of little girls I know, I used to rip the heads off my Barbie dolls when I was young. First, I’d hack her smooth princess hair with my blunt safety scissors, going fiber by fiber until the strands stood up straight, as if electrified. Next, I’d smear Barbie’s lips with strawberry gloss, going deliberately outside the lines, and then I’d black out her eyes with permanent marker. I wanted her to look tortured, because I thought that made her somehow more beautiful.
When I look at the bronzes and oil paintings that make up Schutz’s new collection, Imagine Me and You, I get the sense she probably tortured dolls as a child, too. She seems to take pleasure in distorting the human form. In The Wanderer painting, a man dressed only in underpants is running. In his right hand he holds an umbrella, as if he were prepared for this adventure outside, but his left arm juts from his shoulder at a 90-degree angle, as if broken, just hanging there, and wrapped around his ankle is an electronic police tag.
Now I can see that this man isn’t going for a run; he’s more likely on the run. In the darkness behind him, I see the faces of wild dogs appear menacingly through Schutz’s brushstrokes, and beside his feet the rain glows red as it hits the pavement. Like the figure in Washing Monsters, he seems to be struggling towards freedom, and Schutz won’t let him have it. She lays out her canvas like a fly trap, on which her subjects wriggle, break and mutilate themselves. It’s grimly satisfying to see.
Schutz’s ability to depict trauma is what made her famous — infamous — after all. Her painting Open Casket, showing the corpse of Emmett Till, the black teenager lynched by two white men in 1955, whose death was a signal point in the civil rights movement, caused widespread protest when it was shown at the Whitney Biennial two years ago. Many people accused her of cultural appropriation, and demanded that the picture be removed and destroyed.
Imagine Me and You is her first New York show since, and although Schutz, who is based in Brooklyn, has avoided controversial subjects this time, her technique still forces me to share her subjects’ pain. Washing Monsters has a counterpart painting on show here too, that illuminates detail the bronze couldn’t capture. Now I can see that the man is washing the feet of the monster, which is not alive at all, but a statue set high on a rock. The hard globules fixed around them in the bronze are revealed here as mere soap bubbles. And though the man still holds the weary expression of someone trying to escape (who knows how long he’s been here cleaning the statue), the painting feels, at first glance, more innocuous than its partner.
The giant hand that seems so threateningly solid when cast in bronze looks soft here; it feels like the monster is cupping the man in his palm like a newborn baby. And the creature’s toothless grin looks almost friendly when it is flecked with yellow, green, teal and orange paint. I think again of my Barbie dolls, and the compelling sense of threat I brought out of their once anodyne smiles by mutilating them. Schutz is creating the same sense of Stockholm Syndrome. As her little painted man rubs his captor’s legs clean, they seem to be coming to life; they are turning vibrant orange. The man is willing his own capture.
I look at the man, looking over his shoulder, and then I see the hand closing in on him. The monster’s legs that become more muscular, more human, with every swipe of his cloth.