Elevator brawls, basketball trolls, and slow-motion showers: The subjects of Dana Schutz’s latest paintings are about as bizarre as one might expect from an artist who can turn a simple sneeze into a grotesque epic. Her latest exhibition at Petzel in New York, “Fight In An Elevator,” opening September 10, comes on the heels of a busy year, one that included the birth of her son, a pivotal experience that found its way into the work in interesting ways. Schutz has been finding inspiration in unlikely places — the in-progress canvas seen above in her Brooklyn studio is based on a Swiss family she encountered in an airport. Modern Painters executive editor Scott Indrisek met with the artist to discuss claustrophobic spaces, bodies, and why Schutz is sometimes relieved to leave color behind.
Scott Indrisek: So everything here in the studio is for your Petzel show this fall?
Dana Schutz: I’m halfway through, I think. There are a lot of interior situations—like this fight
in a mirrored elevator. I’d actually considered “Interior Situation” for the show’s title, but then I thought it would creep people out. “We have to talk... there’s something... this situation in your interior.” But yes, I was thinking about these interior spaces that could be permeable, or that are really structured. The compositions are tightly constructed and kind of claustrophobic. The bodies of the subjects map out the space in the paintings.
Why an elevator?
Well, there have been a lot of fights in elevators: Beyoncé’s sister; Ray Rice. That one was really horrible. But I liked that it’s a space in which there’s a feeling of the painting opening up. It’s not quite voyeuristic, but
the action is bracketed in the painting, and it’s being revealed. There’s a mirrored floor; I wanted everything to be refracted. There’s an action in the painting. I don’t know if I love George Bellows, but I really like his boxing paintings. I was interested in seeing how I could paint a high-action situation in a very compressed space. It’s tough painting a fight between a man and a woman. There’s the politics of how you depict it. I didn’t want it
to be about abuse, and I didn’t want it to be a catfight. I wanted them to be equal aggressors. I think the woman is winning.
Were you consciously aiming for a sense
of claustrophobia in these new works?
The pictorial compression came from drawing, over the past few years. I was consciously trying to make finished drawings. I’d have an idea, but the format of the paper would always stay the same, and it was a matter of trying to structure the subject into this space—a lot of erasure while figuring out how it could work. When I approached these paintings, I started drawing them out on the canvas before painting them, which was new for me. In the past, I’d have a general idea of where things would go. But this time I was painting wet onto wet; the paint is much thinner, and drawing is more a part of the process than before.
Will there be drawings at Petzel?
I hope so. I’ve been in group shows with the drawings, and a couple museum
shows, but I’ve never shown them in a solo gallery show in New York. I’ve always drawn, but it was more like thumbnails or preliminary sketches.
So what changed?
I felt there was a crisis. That sounds so dramatic! “Everything burnt down, and then I started to draw.” But I started wanting
the paintings to feel a lot lighter. I didn’t feel that they were quite working.
Was it strange to be working without color?
No, it’s great! It’s fantastic and really pleasurable. You just have one tool to make different marks.
Can you tell me about this painting of
a man in the shower?
It’s actually a woman. It’s a slow-motion shower. You know how when you wash
your face, your face sort of feels... deformed? I wanted the water and figuration in the painting to feel slow and lumpy.
What about this one, which is almost totally abstract?
It’s a breastfeeding painting. There’s the lap, and the body, and the baby’s head. To breastfeed you have to use all of these weird pillows — it’s really unstable. I wanted the painting to feel like a clock, spinning around.
Based on the schedule of breastfeeding?
There’s just so much sitting in a chair! This is the first painting I made once I was back in the studio after having my son. You sit in a chair forever. It’s crazy. For some people
I guess it’s wonderful and relaxing. I got better at it, but initially it felt like wrestling badgers, like a calamity. And it was
all the time, night and day. It’s funny because a lot of these paintings have compressed spaces, and
I was thinking about that before having a baby,
but doing so gave them
a whole new meaning.
In 2007 you made a painting titled How We Would Give Birth. What were you thinking about childbirth before going through it in real life?
I didn’t know what that experience would be like, and the challenge was to see if I could make a painting with that subject, which seemed so heavy and difficult and intense. How do you paint that? And I was also interested in getting it wrong, too. Because painting can give you a lot of information but it can’t tell you exactly how to do something. I think of the work in that “How We Would...” series as being inaccurate instructions for people in the future. Now,
I think painting childbirth would feel too serious to me. That makes a difference. It was like a miserable flu — not the normal flu, but one where you think you’re dying. And
I don’t know if I’d want to paint that.
This small-scale portrait here — the woman’s expression is interesting.
I was in St. Louis, walking with my husband. We saw someone get pulled over by the cops; I think she was stoned. It did not seem like she got pulled over very often. She seemed a little freaked. The expression on her face while being interrogated by the police was one of trying both to conceal and engage at the same time — I wanted to make a painting that was like that, where the person is trying to hide and also really engage with the viewer, but also trying to look as normal as possible.
What about this painting, with the odd child in it with these huge testicles?
It’s a boy, and I wanted his body to become like a painter’s palette that looks like the features on it
could be moved around. His body has a torque to it. And I added a basketball for scale and because it seemed boyish. The body’s pose felt like Roman sculpture, and the basketball is so everyday that it brought it back
to the actual world. Also, my husband, Ryan, had had this crazy dream about shrinking after we had our
baby. It was like a hallucination, that first week, when you don’t sleep at all. You spend so much time staring at this little body. And then, in the middle of the
night, Ryan was really worried; he kept asking: “Am I shrinking? Am I shrinking?” It was intense. And then he had this crazy dream about a little bald, mentally impaired troll, sort of like a leprechaun, but he was holding a basketball. The troll said, “I’ll be your friend.” In the beginning when you have a baby you are so
tired and freaked out. But I should probably not talk about Ryan’s dreams, or any dreams, really!
What do you still have to do for the Petzel show?
I want to make a large painting of an intimate subject: something simple, like a couple in bed, from
an aerial view.
Figurative painting has seen a resurgence in the recent past (in no small part due to your influence). But at the same time there has been an upsurge in process-driven abstract painting, most of it fairly homogeneous. What excites you these days, reminding you that there’s still work to be done in a fairly conservative medium?
I don’t think painting is conservative, or any more conservative than any other medium. But I do think
it’s a good time: It feels very open. And there has been a lot of serious thinking and writing about painting in the past 10 years, which is exciting. About abstraction and figuration, I think there are bad and great artists in both camps and there really isn’t too much of a difference. It really only comes down to making interesting paintings.
In your work, the body occupies a fraught position — sometimes it’s dissolving, or exploding in violent gestures, or being dissected, or cannibalized. What
sorts of bodies inhabit these new paintings?
I think they are all different. Maybe they are containers of a sort? Some of them feel like they could be Trojan horses, sculptural, or active. I want them
all to engage the viewer directly, to be very frontal. Even the figures that are in profile, I feel like they are totally set up for a viewer. I want them to be pushing
up against their physical limitations, the space of
the painting — hemmed in by their interior space but able to step outside themselves.
A version of this article appears in the September 2015 issue of Modern Painters magazine.
