NYC Exhibition

Max Schumann

The Tough New Spirit of Dodge

By Todd Alden

Like a moth before a flame, I am drawn to the horrible beauty-or is it the beautiful horror?- of Max Schumann's exquisite, unpretentious paintings on cheap cardboard. The allure, no doubt, is partly in their devilishly seductive surfaces, executed with the expressive brush of a socially engaged artist who also evidently loves to paint. But Schumann also trains his eye on banality, commodity, horror, and violence. Culled from advertising, B-grade horror films, and newspapers, Schumann's world is filled with sport utility vehicles in idyllic landscapes, B-movie skeletons in portraits, George Bush in prayer, violence in Iraq, and brutality against domestic protestors. I would be tempted to liken Schumann's vision to a dystopian version of "America the Beautiful"--if only the violent melody didn't seem so acute and matter-of-factly familiar. Without eschewing the mechanics of aestheticization, Schumann's paintings remind us how anesthetized we are from relentlessly repeated and mediated horrors. In a world increasingly filled with mediated violence, Schumann asks, what is the space between fact and fiction? Between horror and the beautiful? Between the empire of sense and the empire of the senseless?

In keeping with his subjects, Schumann works in serial format, creating multiple versions of more or less the same image. As if to highlight the random rules of the economy of horror and violence, the gallery price for approximately identical works might be $10, $60, or $600. As works are sold, they will be removed while new works will be continually replenished with the exhibition in a constant state of flux throughout its duration. Systems purporting to pedal the tough new spirit of Dodge, whether those of advertising, television, film or Washington, directly impact the system of exhibition. The controlled collaboration between artist/dealer and viewer/consumer is here rendered legible as a metaphor for our engagement with those systems.