“make me a maze i can’t find my way out of”

Dear Dana Schutz, you are an amazing human.

I saw Dana speak today at a local college, and she was, to say the least, inspiring. From her midwestern charm, to her digression on acid washed jeans (“I mean I don’t know anyone who does horseback riding that much.”), to her abstract colorful paintings that could be seen as gruesome at times, I became enamored by her during her 60- minute long slide presentation. I mean, the girl took up Republican talk radio just to understand why her friend “converted” to Republicanism.

From her robotic representation of P.J. Harvey to her “I’m into…series” (where she bases a painting on someone who is into things like minimalist tattoos or gardening or Jesus) to painting a series of mates she made up for her friends (“the red hair makes him sensitive”), to her painting of the autopsy of Michael Jackson, to a series on the last man on earth (“he might have had a comb over because maybe worked at an office”) who she killed off in a next painting, each piece had character, a narrative, and so much thought and intent behind it.

Schutz explores the unexamined in her work. For example, she painted a men’s retreat, which she could only guess what would look like, which featured a blindfolded man in a suit with other men in a jungle-like setting.

She looks for the experience that can’t be documented, like what someone sees before they die in a storm, or the last man on earth, or what becomes of a record player when it is broken.

She takes things out of their context by painting a record player “sculpture” in the middle of tall grassy prairie. She examines what they mean outside of its context/culture; would it be of the same value in another culture? She shows this in her painting centered on the Mona Lisa entitled “Mona”, whose face is turned. She said “I just wanted to see how much information you need to provide for someone to recognize something that is familiar.”

There is definitely a theme of creation and destruction in her work. Schutz literally breaks people down into limbs, explores the notion of being able to create oneself out of picked pieces from a shelf, or eat one’s own face. She “kills off” her subjects, like “Frank”, the last man on earth. She explores creation – from painting the beginnings of sculptures, to its most literal sense, childbirth, in “How We Would Give Birth”. I guess I would sum up experiencing Schutz’s work in that painting. She kept repeating cutely that she “didn’t know what it felt like” to give birth. In the painting, the woman’s head is turned, not unlike the Mona Lisa painting. But the woman is staring at a painting on the wall. It serves as “an escape” or distraction from the pain of the experience of childbirth. It also depicts the moment at hand – a baby, arms in the air, almost reaching for the sky, bloody, coming out of the woman. And in the corner on a table sits a lilac-colored square tissue box.