Dana Schutz

A painting by Dana Schutz included in this year's Whitney Biennial in New York has been criticized for perceived racial insensitivity. It lead to a big controversy in the contemporary art world. But, as I argue, the reasons for being critical of the painting were misguided. The problem was not the identity of the white painter as opposed to the Black subject matter, but the way in which she had painted Emmet Till, which both masked and repeated the act of violence initially perpetrated.

"As such, I want to tackle three topics: 1) how excess has traditionally been the exclusive monopoly of history painting within the visual arts; 2) how history painting lost its artistic preeminence but its function was taken up by other media like photography, film, video, installation and even television, among others; 3) how the artistic configured the political through its experimental and educational function." [...]

"What is commonly accepted is that politics influences art, but the way from art to politics is poorly acknowledged. Both politicians and audiences receive images that stem from painting, films, theater, novels, and so on. Seeing, as Murray Edelman argues, is a constructed process and although some people may not experience these works of art directly, they do indirectly via television, Internet, and social media. Many of the virtues and vices displayed in the political arena like ambition, power, generosity, authority, philanthropy, and leadership derive directly and indirectly from art. They are based on social, political, and psychological myths and values from the artistic field (Edelman, 1995, pp. 1-5). In other words: art manufactures the images that define our world. As a catalyst, it provides images and creates situations that are strange, provocative, utopian, engaging or radical and by doing so it ends up configuring the political regime." [...]

--> Essay "Painting History, Manufacturing Excess: How the Artistic Configures the Political" in "Art, Excess, and Education: Historical and Discursive Contents", edited by Kevin Tavin, Mira Kallio-Tavin and Max Ryynänen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 39-51

In this article, we mobilize a theoretical and political critique to the aesthetic and affect that informs ‘white innocence’ and its attempts at witnessing the pain of the Other. Engaging with the work of critical race theorists we put the artistic interventions of Hannah Black and Parker Bright critique of Dana Shutz’s Open Casket in conversation with Teresa Margolles’ Vaporization. In doing so, we explore the epistemological, affective, and aesthetic dimensions involved in the desire of whiteness
to transcend its own matrix of race-power and aestheticization of black suffering. That is, instead of anti-racist and transformative, Schutz’s piece, in our view, remains caught within a Manichean subject/object relationship constituted by a curative relation of mastery and servitude that is inextricably contained with and by the ontology of whiteness. We argue that this dynamic of ‘pornotroping’ mobilizes an aesthetics of hailing and identification that reaffirms white innocence. Margolles’
Vaporization, on the other hand, compels us to engage the space, corporality, and epistemology of flesh outside of the subject/object divide, while confronting us with multiplicities of embodiment as experienced through art and social productions.

The return of the zombie genre in the aftermath of 9/11 operated not only in the American film industry, but also occurred in the rise of disintegrating corporeal forms in visual art. Together, American painter Dana Schutz and American-Canadian filmmaker George A. Romero offer a new psychological outlook in the traumatic aftermath of the terrorist attacks, one defined by group solidarity and mutual progressive action rather than fearful conservatism.

In the 2002-2004 Self Eaters series by American painter Dana Schutz, figures are shown in acts of autocannibalism and construction of new bodies.  In comparing these works to the self-aware zombies present in George A. Romero’s 2005 film Land of the Dead, it becomes apparent that both artist and filmmaker present a Bakhtinian grotesque body that digests itself to offer an alternative ideological construction. In doing so, the paintings and film present a possible fulfillment to traumatic memory’s repetitiousness. Traumatic memory is a psychological state in which a memory void, created by disavowing the traumatic event and relegating it to the unconscious, is filled by reenactment and repetition until the trauma can be merged with the conscious identity. By re-enacting the familiar yet denied trauma again and again in the context of viewing either the art series or film, or both, the viewer not only acknowledges the mass death and cultural trauma of 9/11 but realizes the conception of a “world inside out” and alive with alternatives to official culture.