lecture recap

Dana Schutz has a very honest, playful art point of view. Schutz, a native detroiter who went on to cleveland for for bfa and columbia for her mfa, gave a slide lecture at ccs yesterday. I wasn't quite sure what to expect because she is so young and already achieving national and international recognition. She currently has a show at MOCA cleveland, which I intend on making my way to. I enjoy her painting and loved hearing that there is much thought that goes into them...even if at first it appears to just be a painting of a sneeze:)
Here some points from the lecture:

• She moved to ny for grad school where she first made work that she thought was "graduate" work (very white, simple and conceptual) which she joked about. She is not an art snob: quite the opposite - very funny and lighthearted slide critiquing.
• She doesn't like to work from photography, instead she uses her imagination to plot out the subject matter.
• At the end of her first year of grad school she started making portraits to give to her single friends of who she imagined them dating. (very funny and brilliant!)
• Her paintings explore sculpture - painting 3d forms as in discarded sculpture from other students' trashed end of the year work. She uses her memory of the objects and places them in a landscape in her paintings. Defining a space with objects or forms is something that she is concerned with. Often her subjects are at the beach, in the forest or hospital-like examining settings.
• Using her imagination she is able to interpret what it would look like to eat oneself or to re-generate a body. She becomes the maker of another breed of humans that are able to survive without food or any other necessities.
• Making lists of possible subject matter, she is able to narrow down the good and bad ideas. Painting is personal to her and she often portrays topics on her mind. She says that you should always paint what you want and not to limit yourself to what you believe makes a "good" painting.
• Myths, stories and the news are all influences on her work.