Figures of estrangement - sculptor Thomas Schutte

Art in America, May, 1995 by Anne Rochette, Wade Saunders

Twenty-five years ago one never would have thought that images of people, animals or artifacts would be ubiquitous in the sculpture of the '90s. Yet with Robert Gober, Charles Ray and Kiki Smith in the U.S., Damien Hirst and Rachel Whiteread in England, Katharina Fritsch and Thomas Schutte in Germany, and many other emerging sculptors, it is the animate or its implements that predominate. While a number of these artists rely on casting from life, Schutte is a modeler, if scarcely a traditional one. Now 40 years old, he recently had his second major museum show in France at the Carre d'Art, Nimes, which opened a year ago in a gem of new building designed by the English architect Norman Foster [see A.i.A, Oct. '93].

Schutte is a wanderer who, since his first solo show in 1979, has followed a helical rather than linear path, exploring images and configurations and letting them go, only to work them anew later. Fittingly, his installation at the Carre d'Art jumbled chronology and styles, though recent works outnumbered older ones. For instance, Ringe (Rings, 1977), a decorative modular piece that is reconfigured each time it is exhibited, followed a series of sweetly sentimental watercolors, collectively titled "I would rather go blind/Than see you walk away" (1986), and led the viewer into an unsettling group of small sculptures, "United Enemies" (1993), surrounded by photo-offset portraits of themselves. Just as Schutte constantly shifts ideas and means, his titles slip from German into English or, on one occasion, Italian.

A longtime admirer of Gulliver's Travels, this sculptor has always played masterfully with scale. In the '80s he was best known for some memorable public projects, such as the unrealized ship's prow-cumstaircase proposed for Cologne's "Westkunst" in 1981; the closed, above-ground concrete bunker built at Sonsbeek 86, in Holland; the functioning ice cream parlor included in Documenta 8, Kassel; and the column bearing aloft a pair of bright red cherries realized in 1987 for "Skulptur-Projekte," Munster. Many of his other sculptures from that decade resemble architectural models, often without floors or interior walls, arresting not least because of their uncertain status: they hover between proposals for actual structures, things in themselves and paradigms of human relations.

Schutte recently has given the figure center stage, moving away both from public sculpture and from smaller "buildings," though he continues to test the ever-uneasy relationship between sculpture and architecture. His show at the Carre d'Art sprawled through all the galleries of the top floor, and he shrewdly used the grand atriumlike stairwell and terraces of the Foster building. Schutte hung all but two of his 10 "Masks" (1994) high up on the walls flanking the stairs, to theatrical effect. Swiftly gouged in heavily grogged clay, these 18-inch-high pieces were of two types, half of them swirling baroque fantasies and the other half simple reductions of the sort we associate with the primitive. Only viewable from afar or in profile, with their thick metallic glaze shimmering under the overhead light, the masks read more as abstract ornaments than as faces. The two masks hung near eye level in the room-sized top landing lacked the hieratic presence of the eight installed more strategically, reminding us that Schutte's skills with installation are often crucial to the impact of his works.

Along with the two masks, two of the Drei grosse Kopfe (Three Big Heads, 1993) guarded the entrance to the galleries; the third Head stood aloof outside on the terrace. These 34-inch-high heads are types, rather than likenesses, of middle-aged males. Schutte further distanced them from the naturalistic by stretching them slightly forward, ploughing up the clay with his fingers and coating them with parti-colored glazes whose glassiness highlights the modeling. As in most of his modeled works, the polychromy is not descriptive and flirts with ugliness. One head has two faces, one looking slightly older than the other. This Janus, gazing forward and backward, is emblematic of the watchfulness that suffuses these incarnations of the masculine.

Seminal to much of Schutte's recent work is Mohr's Life (1988), which the artist tucked in a little room at the end of the first suite of galleries. This haunting installation piece marks the moment when his small figures definitively moved from being extras to principals. A 14-inch-high, white-headed figurine, wrapped in a real, full-size shirt, stands under a battered, 6-foot-tall steel rack on which hang 130 of Schutte's old socks. To the side, another figure faces us; his black head sticks out of a rope-tied bundle of fabric supported on three dowel legs. Behind him four miniature easels bear small, thickly impastoed paintings of clouds pouring down rain. With slightly caricatural heads--modeled in Fimo, a self-hardening children's clay--and seemingly floppy bodies, the figures feel like puppets abandoned by their puppeteer, autonomous and expressive yet deprived of mobility. In its deadpan merging of the real and the rendered, the piece recalls both early and late works by Paul Thek. Here Schutte may offer a parable of the artist locked in the confines of his work and life, split between his nocturnal struggles to image the world and the daily demands of bodily maintenance; but, with his sure handling of displacement, miniaturization and impersonation, he also makes theatricality once again a virtue.