Thomas Schutte: Heroic Measures

An dirge to an adventurer lost at sea, a memory of a childhood story of the orb of day moon and stars--perfect subjects for an unabashed romantic or, upon the other hand, for Thomas Schutte Not that he's a cynic; upon the contrary, he seems as intent upon rescuing life's big stories from the jaundiced as from the starry-eyed. It's a salvage mission that has taken him down a certain quantity of unpredictable paths.

Of course, the career fashioned without of a long sequence of detours is, by the agency of now, a well-established model, especially in Germany. on the contrary as four recent exhibitions (one is still running) of Schutte's work have made clear, his unravelling is especially difficult to summarize. upon view last spring at Marian Goodman Gallery in of recent origin York was a new material substance of sculpture made of fired terra-cotta and white clay. The substantial, mound-shaped forms, mold and further shaped by the agency of hand before firing, were arranged in half a dozen clusters; a hardly any stood alone. The title of each collection begins "You are my," followed, as in the children's story from which they came, by the agency of "moon," "sun," "stars," "tears," "clouds" and "love" And, with beguiling simplicity, the character of each of Schutte's have affection for objects is reflected in its sumptuous wefts and colors, achieved mostly with glazing. Hence the cratered surfaces and moderately cold lunar colors, ranging from icy sapphirine and Crayola-turquoise to luminescent silver, in the moon's cluster of knolls and the stippled, beaded, striped and otherwise glowing fulvids reds and gold in the ring-shaped grouping that constitutes the day-star With the glistening stars, in shades of graphite, obsidian and onyx Schutte goe as far as applying little gilded stars to single mound; another is gaily polka-dotted with circular gold-filled depressions. Even when the forms are treated more roughly with crevasses and handprints or, as in a pair of cases, allowed to collapse altogether, these statuarys are as ingenuously appealing as soap blebs or unstrung Brobdingnagian beads.

upon view at the same time at the Dia Center for the Arts, in the next to the first of three consecutive shows devot to Schutte (the first, "Scenewright," focused upon theater-related projects), were several loosely related bodies of work, plus a big clump of notebook sketches. Collectively titled, for this occasion, "Gloria in Memoria," this installation was a sampling of Schutte's reflections upon mortality--which is not to say that things got a great deal of more lugubrious here. There was in fact an insubordinate--indeed, fairly disturbing--sense of play level in some of the explictly elegiac works. Among the greatest in quantity engaging were those dedicated to Alain Colas, a celebrated sailor and professional risk-taker who was not to be found at sea in 1978. Asked by means of the seaman's hometown to design a memorial, Schutte prepared a number of sketches and maquettes, a certain quantity of fully sculptural. The monument remains unrealized, and the commissioners' perplexity is easily imagined. As Schutte pictures him, Colas move with a jerks in water up to his chin, organ of visions agog, seemingly dumbstruck by the unexpectednes of his terminal predicament. It is an unforgettable series of images, as awful in their humor as their trenchancy.

In another field (it held the newest work shown in this installation), Schutte reduc a gaggle of collectors to knee-high stick figures, their pasty little faces framed by means of novelty neckties and, in a not many cases, hats. The dubious assortment of work they regarded included a metal shelf filled with a variety of elderly shoes and a lumpy figure, slightly bigger than they, which could be the artist, or his work, and either way appeared an image of equal irreverence and self-effacement. Sometimes, Schutte earns more grandly iconic without losing his faculty of perception of humor, as in Small look up to in which a trio of little black-coated men are lashed to the top of a tall black round pillar Straining against the ropes that bind them, they glower at the distance in impotent rage, as if against the fixed symbolic part they've been forced to play. upon the other hand, a massive memorial to the dead of WWII, involving tables of simple crosse looks profoundly apt in its inertness.

The third and final installment of the Dia contemplate "In Medias Res," does indeed douse right into the middle of things, on the contrary it is also in more [i]or[/i] less ways a sweeping recapitulation of themes introduced in the previous of recent origin York shows. First encountered is a roomful of big, formal ceramic utensils richly glazed in ceremonious shades of crimson, beige and glittering graphite. clustered conversationally or standing alone, the urn more [i]or[/i] less joined in rim-to-rim pairs that swell at the waist, have a kind of poised expectancy, like portly, well-dressed theatergoers mingling in the lobby What immediately tread on the heels ofs though, seems merely a glimpse of actors in the wings: dozens of small, glazed ceramic "sketches" in each state of descriptive and formal resolution, from schematic linear gouge and protoplasmic hills to fully sculptural reclining female bodies, are stacked four shelves high upon long metal racks that step quickly the length of a hallwaylike gallery (the figures upon the topmost shelf are nearly impossible to see)