I've just bumped into a site on Dana Schutz' paintings:
"My paintings are loosely based on meta-narratives. The pictures float in and out of pictorial genres. Still lives become personified, portraits become events, and landscapes become constructions. I embrace the area between which the subject is composed and decomposing, formed and formless, inanimate and alive. Recently I have been making paintings of sculptural goddesses, transitory still lives, people who make things, people who are made, and people who have the ability to eat themselves. Although the paintings themselves are not specifically narrative, I often invent imaginative systems and situations to generate information. These situations usually delineate a site where making is a necessity, audiences potentially don?t exist, objects transcend their function, and reality is malleable."
- Dana Schutz, January 2004
I found it after finding Tom Moody's blogsite:
I have an animated .GIF in the online exhibition "Sunday Afternoon," curated by MatCh-Art (Matthew Fisher and Christina Vassallo). The show of approximately 25 artists, described as "an interdisciplinary exploration of leisure, love and obligations," showcases, among other things, what Jerry Saltz has called "puberty escapism" and what I would call the The New Dumb Little Painting, a style sweeping New York, if not the world. I don't mean the term disparagingly at all: antecedents would be Laura Owens and Karen Kilimnick and the reigning queen, I suppose, would be Dana Schutz (even though her paintings aren't very little). The style is marked by faux naive paint handling, disguising sharp, emotionally punchy, and/or socially-tinged observations; MatCh-Art and its earlier incarnations specialize in fairly intimate and ambiguous twists on the genre.Posted by Dennis at September 24, 2004 1:01 AM
I'm Sorry, but Dana Schutz is one of the most overrated artists around and her success represents why the "art world" is no longer contributing anything culuturally new/fresh to the world and had become a joke. She isn't a bad painter and does some great paintings, but she is almost hailed like a great master of this time which is ridiculous and her work doesn't exceed many artists though her profits are which is not a good thing. Her aesthetic style of painting is nothing new and like so much art nowadays just a re-hashing of approaches done a long time ago. Her subject matter is also just a mess of re-used ideas put together into a quirky new painting! It's amazing that someone who simply is ripping off other artists and styles can be considered so important. Anybody seen: surrealism (dali, in regards to images of a human consuming itself), Cannibalism? Give me a break Goya, Chapman brothers, Guston (Guston ideas about painting were way ahead of Shutz's and this Frank story idea that gave her so much success), Schnabel, de-kooning and the list goes on etc.. (aesthetically) etc. etc.... She even blatantly rips off contemporary artists and even mentions them as her favourite artists! Anybody see Barnaby Furnace's first show????? Beach scenes, lovers embracing, night scenes etc.... a year later they all appear (very similarly I might add in how they are used) in Schutz's paintings! But I guess its ok for no one to actually acknowledge that, if they did then geez, maybe we would have to admit that many of our most successful artists AREN'T doing anything NEW or Important at all!