Dana Schutz, 2004 WITH PETER HALLEY INDEX MAGAZINE
PETER: In your first exhibition, Frank From Observation, you constructed a universe around the title character, Frank. DANA: Well, the premise was that Frank was the last man on earth. I would observe and paint him. I decided that he needed the paintings in some way, even though he was kind of out of it. The paintings raised some really interesting questions. PETER: Like what? DANA: Well, if Frank were the only audience for the paintings, would they even be art? In that situation, what would culture be? PETER: Did you consider putting yourself into the pictures? DANA: I thought about it, but I decided that since I was making the paintings I was connected to them anyway. I didn't want to force it. PETER: The title encourages people to see the exhibition as an interconnected series of works, almost like a movie. DANA: I didn't feel that the narrative, if there even was one, needed to guide the paintings. The show failed in that way � I ended up with a sort of ambivalent relationship to it. PETER: Your paintings seem to celebrate a spontaneous pleasure in the medium. The brushstrokes are a physical presence on the canvas. It looks like you're experimenting with paint texture and handling, like shifts between thick and thin paint. DANA: Definitely. It's not that I have a thing for thick paint, but sometimes a picture really works when the paint gets built up. Then it appears flatter than it actually is. The funny thing is, I probably would have rejected this kind of talk just a few years ago. PETER: Why is that? DANA: I used to be very conscious of the way each brushstroke could be coded. But it started to hold me back from painting the way I wanted to. Now I just project into the space. I'll put on some music and really get into whatever it is that I'm painting. PETER: In many of your paintings, you almost seem to be carving form out of the space. Do you think about making sculpture? DANA: I've tried it, but I never get around to seeing the back of the form. I relate to things frontally. In the end, I'm very pictorial. PETER: You were in graduate school at Columbia at an exciting time when the program was really taking off. How did things change for you when you left? DANA: I realized that I'm going to be painting for the rest of my life, that I have the time to experiment, to try some things that might not be successful. I feel the same freedom I felt when I first began painting. PETER: When was that? DANA: My mom gave me my first set of paints when I was fifteen, and let me paint in our basement. She used to be a middle-school art teacher. When she was at college in the '60s, she did all these abstract expressionist paintings of Lake Michigan. I used to look at them when I was little, trying to figure out what was going on in them. PETER: Was it significant for you that your mom was an artist? DANA: I think so, even though she was pretty hands-off. I just made typical high-school art. But I got into painting immediately � I felt as if I were involved in something very serious, even though I was just in my mom's basement. I even loved the smell of the paint. PETER: You grew up in Detroit, right? DANA: Outside the city � it was super suburban. PETER: I've always thought of culture from Detroit as gritty. It's where Mike Kelley is from. I associate his beat-up stuffed dolls with... DANA: ...tactility. PETER: Is that how you see it? DANA: Yeah, I think of tactility when I think of the Midwest. PETER: Did you come away with anything else? DANA: The Detroit Institute of Arts has always had an excellent collection of German expressionist paintings. I love Kirchner's unexpected use of color � his pink trees! It's just not something you'd think to do, but they look great. And I like the way he built up his landscapes, using one image on top of another and one brushstroke after another. PETER: Are there other German expressionists you particularly like? DANA:I have to say, I'm not in love with any of them. Their work can be really ugly. PETER: Well, someone could say your paintings are ugly in the same way. DANA: I suppose so. People generally use three labels for my work � bad painting, outsider art, or folk art � and they all irk me. Bad painting doesn't bother me as much, because I know people reference it as a label for certain work in the '70s. But I definitely don't think my work is folk. PETER: Neither do I � your approach is certainly schooled. DANA: I've tried to put my finger on why people think that. PETER: Perhaps it's just because your style is big and clunky. You recast people and objects in a simplified, bold language, almost like a cartoon. You also seem to have an affinity for adolescent imagery � sometimes your paintings have the feel of underground comics or zines. DANA: If a painting starts to look too cartoony, it really annoys me, so I'll change it. After making the P.J. Harvey and Kim Gordon paintings, I didn't paint any more rock stars because I'm not interested in that adolescent fan club thing. PETER: Was that the interpretation? DANA: I wanted to paint those people not as a comment on their celebrity, but more to explore the idea of building a monument. I loved the idea of seeing P.J. Harvey really huge. My work doesn't have a lot of pop content, and I didn't want the paintings to be seen as hip or attitude-filled. PETER: Your first show in Europe just opened in Paris. Several pictures depict figures who seem to be devouring their own limbs. DANA: Yeah, this one's eating her arm, and that one's eating her leg. [laughs] But they're not cannibals � they don't eat other people, only themselves. PETER: So it's self-cannibalism... DANA: Yeah. They digest themselves, and they can build new parts for themselves, too. They are totally self-involved. PETER: So they regenerate after eating themselves? DANA: Yeah, I thought they could also turn into other things. I imagined a revolutionary group whose members would sacrifice themselves to construct a building. The building material would be alive, but there'd be no one to build it because they're all too busy eating themselves. But I haven't started on those paintings yet. PETER: This is a very strange idea. Where did it come from? DANA: It's kind of embarrassing. I was really tense last year, and one day I was just doodling while I was talking on the phone. PETER: But they're not self-portraits, are they? DANA: No, I don't think so ... God, I hope not. [laughs] PETER: You seem to be focused on a range of experience beyond the conscious mind. The scenarios you create could never physically happen, but they have meaning in the imagination. I think Picasso also painted like that � he used mythic, symbolic imagery that came from instinct or intuition, almost as if he were dreaming it. The Surrealists worked that way too. DANA: I think of painting in a more pragmatic way. I often think of painting as building � like I'm building the space. But I do think my paintings come from a basic impulse to make something. PETER: So your paintings bridge the intuitive and pragmatic. Perhaps your work is shamanistic? DANA:I like that. When I'm painting, I don't think of myself as putting down paint, but as bringing to life whatever it is that I'm painting. PETER: By means of magic? DANA: [laughs] Yeah, with my magic wand
