“Great Dana”
Vogue Magazine
by DODIE KAZANJIAN

Twenty-nine-year-old Dana Schutz’s wildly inventive work explodes with color, pop culture, and political comment.

The Gowanus section of Brooklyn, where the artist Dana Schutz works and lives, is so foreign to me that I have to call her three times from the car coming over. Dana is waiting on the street when I finally arrive, holding a supersize coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts and waving her other hand. She’s tall and slim, a tomboy type with a mop of short, tousled brown hair and a wide Midwestern grin that makes her look even younger than her years. It’s ten after twelve on a steaming summer day. Dana, who does most of her painting after dark, knocked off work at 5.30 this morning and slept in the studio, as she often does these days – the house that she and her fiancé, the artist

Ryan Johnson, are renovating, a block away from here, isn’t ready yet. Along with several classmates, they are colonizing the newest Brooklyn haven for young artists. “Gowanus – it sounds like a foot disease, doesn’t it?” she says. “We’re right by the Gowanus Canal, which is so polluted that they say if you fall into it, the only way you can get the canal water off is to be hosed down with gasoline. But about a month ago, we found this huge, really great space, cheap and close to the F line.”

Just three-and-a-half years out of the graduate art program at Columbia, Dana is already recognized internationally as one of her generation’s leading artists. The Museum of Modern Art has acquired (as a promised gift) her mural-size Presentation, an epic, wildly colorful painting that nearly stole the show at the recent “Greater New York” exhibition at P.S.1 in Queens; it is currently hanging in “Take Two,” MoMA’s new installation of contemporary art. Charles Saatchi, the British supercollector, owns at least ten of her pictures and is featuring her in the third installment of the “Triumph of Painting” show. She’s been in the Venice Biennale, has had several gallery shows in Europe, and has a solo show right now at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University. There’s a waiting list for everything she paints, and her New York dealer, Zach Feuer, is extremely choosy about who gets to buy her work. You’d think this degree of high-velocity success might discombobulate a girl from Livonia, Michigan, but Dana seems unfazed (and unspoiled) by it. “She’s interested in being an artist,” says Feuer, “not in being a famous artist.” And besides, as Dana tells me, “There’s nothing I can do about any of that. It’s really unexpected and scary and cool. Not cool – but, yes, wow. My day-to-day activities haven’t changed at all. I still see all the people I really like a lot, and I’m just mainly in the studio. You have to stay connected to the work, because otherwise what’s the point of it? The other stuff can come and go.”

We climb three flights of stairs to her non-airconditioned studio. She’s been working here for only three weeks, but it’s fully broken in – a couple of dozen throwaway (paper) palettes with freshly mixed paint scattered around the floor, along with some lose change, crumpled Nicorette wrappers, discarded clothes, a sleeping mat, and a whole lot of new paintings on the walls. The paintings range from quite small to very large, and they are all high-impact – filled with figurative and often grotesque images in singing, Fauve-like oranges, reds, yellows, greens, and other bright hues. Awkward, clumsy, yet sophisticated, gripping, and indelible, they have a daredevil quality that could never be mistaken for the work of anyone else.

There’s one of a brown dog, headless but very much alive and ready to dash off into the landscape. Next to it is Man Eating His Chest, which shows a blond-haired youth doing just that, difficult as it sounds. It’s the latest in a series of “Self Eaters” that she made in 2004 for her second solo show at Feuer’s gallery in Chelsea. Dana explains to me that her “Self Eaters” are neither male nor female, don’t have genitals, and don’t need anything because they continually consume and rebuild themselves – in her mind they seem to have something to do with the creative process, but what they really suggest is the peculiar inventiveness, partly gruesome and partly hilarious, of the Schutz imagination.

Dana decided at age fifteen that she was going to be an artist. She painted in the basement at home and in the art-room storage closet at school. “I would paint during lunch and skip my other classes to paint. I really fell in love with it.” After graduating in 2000 from the Cleveland Institute of Art, she moved to New York and entered Columbia, whose graduate art program was just emerging then as one of the best in the country. “I really wanted to go to New York,” she tells me, “but for a long time I was afraid to. When I was sixteen, I was reading all these flaky books about the end of the world, and I thought New York was going to physically sink into the ocean by 1998. When it didn’t, that’s when I moved here.”

In Cleveland, the curriculum had been strictly departmentalized. “If you were in painting, that’s pretty much what you did – it was a fight to do something else. That’s why I was excited about Columbia, because it was interdisciplinary, and you could do whatever you wanted.” Dana stuck with painting, more or less, but some of her close friends were video artists or photographers or sculptors, who opened her up to a variety of new influences. Columbia brings in high-profile contemporary artists to teach and critique – Peter Halley, Kara Walker, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Cecily Brown, and many others. “Dana certainly made an impression,” Brown told me. “During one crit, I whispered in her ear, ‘You’re by far the best painter here.’”

According to Bruce Ferguson, who was dean of the art school when Dana was there, “She was almost more influential on the other students than we were on her. She was that strong a figure. Every now and then you get that kind of artist … her ambition rubbed off on a number of other painters, no question about it.” Dana demurs. “I disagree with Bruce,” she tells me, “because my first year at Columbia, I was a wreck. I was making all sorts of paintings that were really crappy. They got much worse because I wanted to experiment and try a lot of different things. I was going through a Luc Tuymans stage – everybody does that – and I had a mini- Gerhard Richter fling. [Lots of girlish laughter here.] Laura Owens was really influential. And John Currin and Martin Kippenberger and Alex Katz.

Flash-forward to November, at the Museum of Modern Art. Dana and I are standing in front of her gigantic Presentation, painted just a few months earlier. “I’m nervous about being in a room with one of my paintings when it’s outside the studio,” she says with uneasy candor. She’s just back from a week in London with Ryan, his parents, and hers, who were meeting for the first time. Her show in Berlin was a huge success. Dana had a good time there because of Berlin’s vibrant art and music scene, and the opportunity to go dancing every night. “I love dancing,” she says. “I’m a bad dancer, but that doesn’t stop me.” Before London, she went to the opening of her show at Site Santa Fe. She’s done some teaching at Yale and Columbia. Just this week she and Ryan moved in to the top-floor apartment of their house in Brooklyn – they’ve rented the other two floors to artist friends – so they don’t have to take bucket showers anymore.

Presentation, fourteen feet long by ten feet high, is quite a picture. In the foreground, a giant nude man, maybe dead and maybe not, lies on a slablike table in a flowered landscape, observed by a sea of witnesses. There’s no obvious story line here – it’s as enigmatic as one of James Ensor’s symbolist paintings. “It started with the idea of all those bodies coming back from Iraq that you weren’t allowed to see,” she tells me. “But it became other things. The body could be about to be exhumed or buried, or it could be some sort of event or spectacle. I also wanted to paint a crowd, a landscape made out of people, because I was going to a lot of protests against the war.” Some of the people in the crowd are her friends. “Painting it was really fun, all the way through. It was all the things I wanted to paint.”

Early success can hardly top this, to see your work in MoMA, with one of Andy Warhol’s “Hammer and Sickle” paintings on the facing wall. The danger and the expectations this creates for a young artist are almost unimaginable, but Dana, at least for now, seems to know how to deal with it. “Things are all happening at once,” she says. “There are times when I feel almost overwhelmed. But I just want to make work. I just want to be in the studio forever now.

back to top