"I think there's something kind of utopian and slightly absurd about group effort. I was thinking about this recently, we might be the last generation to know what it's like to live private lives. It's a fictional thing – the turning of public space into a fictional environment. So I'm interested in how people try to define themselves through these various identity groups."
D ana Schutz’s large-scale canvas, Speech, 2009, encapsulates the American artist’s masterful painterly technique and genre-defying relationship to her forbears in art history. At first glance, the palette is bright and inviting; warm shades of violet and orange draw the eye to what appears to be an outdoor gathering. Under a warm evening sun, five hoofprints have left their imprint in the mottled dirt. On closer inspection, this rural idyll is not what it seems. The figures are awkward and fragmented; their cocktail party dresses out of place in this muddy terrain. In their semi-abstraction, and in the grey geometric hatching that scars their profiles, one is reminded of Picasso’s portraits of the late 1930s and 1940s.
The eye is then drawn to the dominant figure of the composition, the speaker in this Speech. An abstracted arm is held aloft, apparently commanding attention from the group. Yet the speaker’s face is expressionless, depicted in swirls of paint that bleed into the surrounds. In this figure, we are reminded again of Picasso, adorned as he is in a Breton striped shirt (and what looks like a beret); an outfit that has become synonymous with the image of great the Spanish painter in popular culture.
Picasso collects ion, Mougins © SCALA, Florence
Schutz has spoken of her admiration for Picasso. “I never had the feeling I had to ‘get past’ Picasso, it was a more playful kind of influence,” she told the Boston Globe in 2006. She speaks of taking inspiration from Picasso’s “contradictory spaces, and liberatingly poor taste". In Speech, the viewer is most certainly presented with a contradictory space - a tableau arranged to seem at once pastoral and cosmopolitan, organised and chaotic. There is an evasiveness in the story behind the subject matter that is typical of Schutz:
"I don’t write out stories, in the way a writer would; the situations are very loose. I never want the viewer to have to know the whole story to ‘get’ the painting. What you see is what you get. If it’s a painting of a person eating their hands, they’re eating their hands. Often I will invent hypothetical situations that can act as surrogate situations for conditions that I am thinking about and that I always feel are logical.”
Speech was first presented as part of the solo exhibition Missing Pictures at Zach Feuer Gallery in 2009. This was her fourth solo exhibition with the gallery that had championed her since her debut show, Frank from Observation, in 2002. That debut show was the launchpad for a meteoric rise: Schutz was invited to the 2003 Venice Biennale, followed by solo museum shows at SITE Santa Fe and the Rose Art Museum, Massachusetts. Her work has been accessioned into the permanent collects
ions of the Museum of Replica Handbags
s in Boston, the Museum of Contemporary Arts, Los Angeles, and the Tel Aviv Museum, among others.
「群體合作就像烏托邦一樣，而且有點荒謬。我最近一直在想，在我們這一代之後，也許再沒人會知道有著私生活是甚麼感覺。將公共空間變成虛構環境是件需要想像力的事。我對大家如何以不同的身份群體來定義自己很感興趣。」
戴 娜·舒茨的巨幅作品《演講》（2009 年）概括了她精湛高超的畫技以及融合不同藝術流派的能耐。乍看之下，作品顏色明亮旖旎，溫暖的紫羅蘭色和橙色建構出一個似乎是戶外聚會的場景。和煦的餘暉下，斑駁的泥土上留下五道蹄印。然而，定眼細看，這片田園風光卻不如表象一般明快。事實上，畫中人物侷促不安，形象支離破碎；而且，他們身穿的雞尾酒會禮服在一片泥濘中亦顯得格格不入。這些半抽象形象和其畫滿灰色幾何影線的側影，令人聯想到畢加索在 1930 年代末至 1940 年代的肖像畫。
觀者其後會注意到作品的主要人物，亦即是《演講》中的講者。抽象的手臂高高舉起，顯然在吸引眾人的注意。但是他目無表情，面容是油彩繪成的漩渦，融入了周圍背景。這位人物身穿布列塔尼條紋襯衫，頭戴一頂似乎是貝雷帽的帽子，再次令人想到畢加索；在大眾文化中，這身裝束已成為這位西班牙藝術大師的代名詞。
2006 年，舒茨向《波士頓環球報》提到她對畢加索的欽佩：「我從沒覺得自己必須『超越』畢加索，他對我的影響較充滿玩味」。她說她從畢加索的「矛盾空間和令人獲得解放的壞品味」中取得靈感。在《演講》中，觀者的而且確看到一個充滿矛盾的空間——構圖既具田園風味卻又看似大都會、既有組織卻又混亂。如往常一般，舒茨對作品的背後故事避而不談：
「我不像作家一樣將故事寫得明明白白；我筆下的景象非常鬆散，我從來都不想讓觀眾掌握所有來龍去脈來『了解』作品。你所看到的，就是你所了解到的。如果這是一幅描述人在吃手的畫作，那他就是正在吃手。通常，我會建構一些我認為合乎常理的虛擬場景，演繹心中所想。」
2009 年，《演講》在 Zach Feuer 畫廊為舒茨舉辦的第四個個展「Missing Pictures」中首次亮相。自 2002 年為舒茨舉辦處女展「Frank from Observation」起，Zach Feuer 畫廊一直非常支持這位美國藝術家。那場處女展亦令舒茨聲名鵲起，獲邀參加 2003 年威尼斯雙年展，以及在 SITE Santa Fe 和馬薩諸塞州玫瑰藝術博物館舉辦個展。至今，她的作品已成為波士頓美術館、洛杉磯當代藝術館和特拉維夫博物館等的永久收藏。