Plinth

Spanning Schutz’ oeuvre to date, ‘The Island’ traces recent cultural memory, with a particularly pivotal work being Fanatics (2005). Painted the same year YouTube was launched, between the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the global recession of 2007, this depiction of a small crowd in a ‘free speech cage’ feels uncannily up to the minute. ‘I was thinking about if all these fanatics could exist in the same space,’ Schutz says of the work (which also predates Twitter – premonitory.)

While it was George W. Bush who expanded the scope of free speech cages (as it sounds, these were areas set aside in public places for political protesting, a scheme that continued through Barack Obama’s presidency), Donald Trump’s tenure will no doubt be summoned up for the contemporary viewer presented by this ragtag group of First Amendment enthusiasts – a pointy eared cap (Yoda?) is strangely prescient of the horned headdress worn by a rioter during the 2021 US Capitol Riots.

When viewed in such a climate, the off-fruit salad palette of Schutz’ Fanatics speaks to its oxymoronic freedom cage and the cognitive dissonance of American political discourse, then and now: the need for togetherness comes up against intolerance and polarisation

In paintings titled after the embarrassing facts of their bodies — Sneeze (2001), Swimming, Smoking, Crying (2009) — Schutz’ figures here are all action, yet the plot never advances. This is Samuel Beckett country; I can’t go on, I’ll go on. Schutz’s Face Eater (2004), for instance, is a face eating itself. The gesture is about as self-defeating as it gets – all the more remarkable, then, that the dead-end gag spawned an entire series of paintings that coalesced in an exhibition titled ‘Self Eaters and the People Who Love Them’ (2004), bringing together an entire community of her auto-cannibals. It is as silly as it sounds, and metaphorical too. ‘I was thinking of an American idea of constantly reinventing yourself,’ Schutz says. It is ironic that our constant striving for reinvention often becomes destructive. In Schutz’ world, we really are what we consume.

The Self Eaters series, centred around a feeling of tenderness for a group of people too busy eating themselves to reciprocate, speaks to the incorrigible and all too human desire for connection. In fact, it haunts every frame. Google (2006) depicts an artist in paint-splattered jeans sitting alone in a messy studio, hunched over a screen. ‘I think I was googling telepathy’, Schutz quips — an idea that epitomises the exhibition’s alone-togetherness; the way these works seem to reach from afar, through darkness, humour and obtuseness.

Dear Painter (2023) similarly examines life as an artist. True to a broader shift in Schutz’ practice, away from deadpan, firecracker thought experiments towards a more ambiguous and altogether sludgier mood, it sees a figure with an oversized, papier-mâché-esque head reclining while being fussed over by various other puppet-like figures. One of them could be holding her down and looks to be painting her lips red. Another is either stealing or putting on a slipper. ‘I felt like it was also bestowing the identity with the shoe,’ Schutz observes (a bit like the idiom, ‘if the shoe fits.’) As for the sombre, emerald background, ‘I was thinking of that Edvard Munch painting [The Sick Child (1907)] — that green,’ Schutz says. ‘It feels more like a hospital than a studio.’ Overall, the scene reads like an anti-Cinderella, wherein selfishness wins over kindness, raising all kinds of questions around the stories we tell about artists and what makes a maker. Certainly not meritocracies, Schutz suggests, or other such fairytales.

By contrast, Schutz’ earlier works are lighter, their surfaces correspondingly smooth. Upon entering the exhibition, the viewer is greeted by Daughter (2000), a statue-grey figure who looks like she wouldn’t mind if the ground swallowed her up. On her t-shirt – labelled ‘Daughter’ in Barbie pink – is The Origin of the World, that is Gustave Courbet’s painting of a vulva — a painting of a painting, and a portrait of a young woman upstaged by her own clothes. The painting is funny and awkward from the half-coiffed, half-down hairdo to the hands, self-consciously folded in her lap. ‘It’s a very modern painting because of the way it’s cropped,’ Schutz says of the Courbet, having included it after musing on the work most unlikely to be featured in a museum gift shop. ‘Especially as a weirdly personalised shirt…’

This young woman is the most knowable figure in the exhibition, yet even she shrinks into herself, mortified. Here, you can trace the lines of sight — she looks at the viewer looking at Courbet — making Daughter (2000) the exhibition’s most straightforwardly participatory image. Hanging nearby is Carpool (2016), which sees figures crammed into a gorgeous pool-coloured car (get it?). One of a handful of works loosely organised by a triangular mound closely cropped on the canvas, shared by a cluster of figures who defy physics to appear in, on, or around it, Carpool sees a saucer-like sun shining on a carful of dudes with saucer-like eyes. One leans out, his too-straight arm bisecting the car’s light blue chassis something Cubist, and if there is chat going on, no one is listening.

On the gallery’s top floor, another iteration of a mound organising the composition features in Sea Group (2021). Figures appear to be holding each other together on a skittering pile of crutches, jawbones, fishbones, or ossified letters. This group seems more precarious than their mountainous counterpart in Mountain Group (2018) though the birds are more hopeful than the ones spitting blood in Mountain Group. ‘Maybe there is land,’ Schutz muses.

Maybe there is. Certainly, there is for us. Whether we can find common ground is one thing, what we do with it, another. Throughout ‘The Island’, Schutz seems to court self-defeating impasses: yet time and again, backed into a corner, marooned on an island, she paints her way back to humanity. Proving, as she does so, that we can go on inventing, even – or especially – in those moments when it seems that this time we are finally on the brittle, fishbone brink.

By Sammi Gale