Dana Schutz

Microstory of Art II –
Dana Schutz


(Picture: nytimes.com)

In Dana Schutz’ painting Historical Reenactment with Plants (I’m into Conceptual Gardening) of 2008 we find a beautiful and very contemporary version of an idea that is at the same time very old, but in its odd beauty probably timeless and also very futuristic in its conceptual potential: it’s the idea of the botanical theatre, the very idea, that plants might act as performers on a stage (provided by humans and maybe by other plants and animals). And the process of growing and the interacting between the plants and with weather, climate and external factors in itself seems to alienate from the very idea of human theatre as we know it, and rather comes close to works of media art that slow processes, of showing a movie, for example, down to produce other, and very extreme experiences with time.
The idea of a botanical theatre may also be associated with educational purposes, but we would like to associate it here with, as the painting itself advises us, conceptual ideas. Not of ideas of how to garden but of how to paint today.

(Picture: pictify.com)

The idea of the historical reenactment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_reenactment) is also a very old idea, rooted probably at the same time in Roman theatrical reenactments of battles as well as in Christian passion plays. But while the idea of the reenactment today is associated rather with a passion for – or even obsession with – historical accuracy, the painting by Dana Schutz (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dana_Schutz) offers a conceptual version – the exact opposite of literal historical accuracy.
But of what? What is reenacted here?
We see sheets with floral patterns. We also see actual plants in the foreground on a pedestal. And we see fragments on the ground as well as the two architectural fragments in the background. Sheets with floral patterns, replacing or representing actual flowers within conceptual gardening, are carefully-chaotically arranged – and like being dragged into the picture. All this might seem like a riddle painting, and one way to see the painting might be now to individually make sense of the various elements interacting with the title and without caring about the original ideas behind the painting and about the actual botanical performances that are being reenacted here.

(Picture: sitestory.dk)

What Dana Schutz did drag into her 2008 painting and melted as to one were the two conceptual ideas of the botanical theatre and the historical reenactment. But a main stimulus to the painting had been, as Schutz explained in her Boston lecture (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvhzMh4nZKI), that also showed her as a very cheerful and likable person, willing to share her ideas, her changing guiding principles and also her own being entangled and lost from time to time in her own ideas and associations, an email from a writer friend (Jonathan Safran Foer?) about the flora of the Roman Colosseum.
It might be fair to say that the history of the painting goes back at least as far as to botanist Richard Deakin, who in 1855 did publish a flora of the Roman Colosseum (https://archive.org/stream/floracolosseumr00deakgoog#page/n8/mode/2up), assembling more than 400 species, and species that got, to the main part, eliminated, when the building, for archeological purposes, got cleaned from the »weed« from about 1870. And the idea of seeds brought to the Colosseum by wild animals meant to fight and die there – and resulting in a spectacular botanical garden or theatre over history – was also a key element from the Colosseum’s history (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colosseum#Flora) that echoed in Schutz’ lecture.
The sheets with floral elements she did drag into her picture make a beautiful analogy to the single sections that Deakin, in his book, dedicated to a single species. But the botanist did not only assemble and describe, but also open a window into historical associations and names and ancient literature, so as to open a whole new world with every section dedicated to one single species; and the single sheet, dragged into the painting (Schutz did use, at some point of her lecture, this contemporary metaphor that I like), does show on the surface stylized pictorial information, but also does cover up what has been eliminated (or what had been lost and is now being reenacted) and makes it live again – but only in the viewers mind. It might be a memory, the memory of a lost species, but also the memory to whatever is being associated with that species, one performer within the theatre of time, and the single inhabitant of the Colosseum, seen maybe as a metaphor for Rome itself (not only the Ancient Rome, but also Rome as a unique city as such).
What exactly is being covered we don’t now. The sheet might also be seen as a beautiful metaphor for the many fields of associations and ideas that by the artist are combined and brought together, in sum are being dragged into the painting. Every field of association might be a whole world in itself (with all its dangers to be lost). And these groundless worlds of endless references into the depths of history (and also of art history; see below the Botanisches Theater of Paul Klee) are needed for and used by the painting, as are needed and used the organizing and structuring, and as the title names: the conceptual ideas like the botanical theatre and the reenactment, that help to make sense of what crosses our minds chaotically and finally help to structure and to make a painting out of potentially image-producing ideas which are, and especially seem to be in Dana Schutz’ art, like playfellows to be played with.


Botanisches Theater by Paul Klee (picture: lenbach.gwi.uni-muenchen.de)

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