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Lot Essay
Le roi est mort, vive le roi!
This is Frank and Frank is dead. The last work from Dana Schutz's Frank from Observation series, in Night in Day we the viewer have come to the end and to the beginning. As Jörf Heiser calls "the last dude on earth", Frank is the last man and Schutz is the last painter. This tautological loop highlights the active dialogue between artist and work as she has eliminated all need for outside reference or comparison with an art historical narrative. Unlike a Pygmalion love for subject, Schutz acknowledges that her loutish Frank is both subject and the viewer, so unnecessary interpretation ends with him. Each work then becomes a meta-critique on painting. Begging the allegory of the cave, if Frank is the only audience than does the art exist and what is the culture it references? In Schutz's focused universe, Frank and his creator are therefore amoral and anachronistic, making the experience of Night in Day exhilarating as we are aware of the challenge the artist posited to herself.
We can discern a discarded skull and puncture ridden torso addressing the day and coming night with a violent affrontery but also humility in its sacrifice back to the artist and by proxy the viewer. "I like that slippage between something being very actual and imaginary." Despite this work being the last in the series and also showing the death of Frank, death becomes re-imagining and re-conceiving an thus reveals the artist's potential for new exploration, "But then I got restless and wanted to paint other things, so I took him apart and built other people and events out of him." If every painting is a an act of the last painter giving voice or motion to the last man, then ending his life is ending the process of exploration which explains why her next series is solipsistic and regurgitative; the subsequent Self-Eaters are subjects who consume their body parts only to regenerate, not as re-birth but as re-growth.
In Night in Day we can see the fractured bodily aesthetic that is explored further in Schutz's later works, in which unlike her private reveries with Frank she creates spaces and audiences for her examinations and dissections. The scene and its viscera perfectly complement the natural, bodily palette. Green becomes bile, plump pink becomes flesh, arterial red, jaundiced yellow. The palate and composition vibrate between the wholly realistic and privately fantastic. As she states "If I make a painting of a sick man I want the color to describe how sick he is and in what way he is sick."
This work also represents a microcosm of Schutz's career. This series is what launched her at such a young age into the international spotlight, while at the same time that artist herself realizes the embodied anathema, it is the end of the beginning, the catalyst for future exploration and potential. Despite his normal loutishness, Frank to us is also an enabler, embodying the inherent talent of a brilliant young artist during her breakthrough series.
This is Frank and Frank is dead. The last work from Dana Schutz's Frank from Observation series, in Night in Day we the viewer have come to the end and to the beginning. As Jörf Heiser calls "the last dude on earth", Frank is the last man and Schutz is the last painter. This tautological loop highlights the active dialogue between artist and work as she has eliminated all need for outside reference or comparison with an art historical narrative. Unlike a Pygmalion love for subject, Schutz acknowledges that her loutish Frank is both subject and the viewer, so unnecessary interpretation ends with him. Each work then becomes a meta-critique on painting. Begging the allegory of the cave, if Frank is the only audience than does the art exist and what is the culture it references? In Schutz's focused universe, Frank and his creator are therefore amoral and anachronistic, making the experience of Night in Day exhilarating as we are aware of the challenge the artist posited to herself.
We can discern a discarded skull and puncture ridden torso addressing the day and coming night with a violent affrontery but also humility in its sacrifice back to the artist and by proxy the viewer. "I like that slippage between something being very actual and imaginary." Despite this work being the last in the series and also showing the death of Frank, death becomes re-imagining and re-conceiving an thus reveals the artist's potential for new exploration, "But then I got restless and wanted to paint other things, so I took him apart and built other people and events out of him." If every painting is a an act of the last painter giving voice or motion to the last man, then ending his life is ending the process of exploration which explains why her next series is solipsistic and regurgitative; the subsequent Self-Eaters are subjects who consume their body parts only to regenerate, not as re-birth but as re-growth.
In Night in Day we can see the fractured bodily aesthetic that is explored further in Schutz's later works, in which unlike her private reveries with Frank she creates spaces and audiences for her examinations and dissections. The scene and its viscera perfectly complement the natural, bodily palette. Green becomes bile, plump pink becomes flesh, arterial red, jaundiced yellow. The palate and composition vibrate between the wholly realistic and privately fantastic. As she states "If I make a painting of a sick man I want the color to describe how sick he is and in what way he is sick."
This work also represents a microcosm of Schutz's career. This series is what launched her at such a young age into the international spotlight, while at the same time that artist herself realizes the embodied anathema, it is the end of the beginning, the catalyst for future exploration and potential. Despite his normal loutishness, Frank to us is also an enabler, embodying the inherent talent of a brilliant young artist during her breakthrough series.