We are looking at a man who stands on his own, arms hanging by his side, chest puffed out, face untroubled. He is an ideal, a model; he ought to be a hero. But just above his knees his legs give out, thawing into a formless muck — the result, the German artist Thomas Schütte once explained, of his inability to get a wax figure to stand upright on its own. It was the first time he’d tried to sculpt a standing human, but he couldn’t get the relative weight right. It kept on falling, failing. The only solution was to clump leftover wax onto the legs, so that the man seemed half-submerged in mud.
Well, we are knee-deep in it too these days, and for the last 50 years this wryly intelligent artist has validated a few good resolutions: to try even though we may fail, and to accept that fear of failure offers no exemption from hard work. His motif of the “Man in Mud,” first sculpted in 1982 and realized in 20 versions since (including a massive bronze one in his hometown in northwest Germany), splashes through the demanding, beautifully understated retrospective that’s held sway since September at the Museum of Modern Art, and which comes to a close, along with who knows what else, on Inauguration Day.
I want to suggest very humbly, in this new year that does not feel like a fresh start, that Schütte’s half-inhumed human can serve as an emblem: a symbol of incapacity that births a lifetime’s creativity. The heroic statue, striding progressively through history, will not be contemporary again. But a statue can still stand upright, even as the Dreck engulfs him from below.
The Schütte retrospective is MoMA operating at full power, the result of nine years’ effort by the curator Paulina Pobocha, who was recently named the chair of modern and contemporary art at the Art Institute of Chicago. (Pobocha has also edited a very clever catalog, with wise and heartfelt contributions from Schütte’s fellow artists Charles Ray and Marlene Dumas.) When I first saw this show in September, I found it deeply cunning but also downcast, inward-looking — and thought too, mistakenly, that its theoretical heft and ach-so-German humor would struggle to find its audience. There’s a queasy, ornery aspect to Schütte’s figurative sculptures: ceramics of old men in candy-colored hues, or steel casts of reclining women put through the spin cycle. His models of cheap fiberboard and aluminum, which he frequently treats as sculptures in their own right, will not be adapted for an immersive exhibit any time soon.
Yet on repeat visits over the holidays I was delighted to see a tourist-heavy public packing the Schütte show. Dozens of museumgoers were poring over his pained or pinched “Glass Heads,” plopped on steel pedestals like the output of a cartoon guillotine, and gazing up at his “Warriors,” tall but pathetic wooden sentries who wear beer-bottle caps as an alternative to the Prussian spiked helmet. Quietly, this cagey and equivocal show seems to have matured from a retrospective into a prospective, and its restless ambivalence does not feel so insidery anymore.
Schütte was born in 1954 and was part of a charmed generation of artists trained at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he studied under Gerhard Richter. The students were trying to find their own way through the tension of 1970s West Germany, but all the roads forward seemed blocked. The Nazi inheritance had bankrupted any appeal to pure beauty. The Socialist Realism mandated in the East made any explicit political program seem totalitarian. The Minimalism and Conceptualism his professors propounded felt, by then, like just more American cultural imperialism.
There were no easy answers, you were stuck in the mud, and Schütte tried everything: hippieish self-portraits, drawings of Valium. He spent a month making 1,200 gestural paintings, lashed with red and orange, that when hung together registered as a brick wall: abstraction turned into a literal representation of going nowhere.
A way through presented itself when Schütte sat in on the academy’s stage design program, where the students produced three-dimensional models of theatrical productions, whole worlds that could sit on a tabletop. These models or maquettes offered him a different way of thinking about sculpture: Now, an abstract form could suggest a narrative, and an object could also be a space. Schütte positioned his first “Man in Mud” on a low-slung platform, like a dais or a politician’s tribune, and later models included free-standing bunkers, crystalline huts, and a Farnsworth House-like “vacation home for terrorists” — the last of which he actually built at full scale. His “Model for a Museum,” which like the mud-man dates from 1982, is a trapezoidal prism topped by a chimney, less a classical temple than a modern incinerator: the museum as power station, the museum as Auschwitz.
“A German joke is no laughing matter,” Mark Twain may or may not have quipped. Schütte would agree, but he also argues the opposite: The old German angst is often a hoot. The man in mud is a paradigm of Schütte’s own artistic failure — but he’s also the unwitting star of a black comedy, onstage in a pantomime of the history of sculpture. (A manifest predecessor here: the relentlessly sunny Winnie of Samuel Beckett’s “Happy Days,” nattering about the beauty of life while buried up to her waist, then her neck.)
There’s a similar dark humor behind his decrepit sculptures of “Black Lemons,” scattered on MoMA’s floor; in his scrunched sculptures of reclining women, which turn the traditional female nude into a rendition of male artistic ineptitude; and in his bronze busts of “Jerks,” whose contorted or caricatured expressions turn the authority figure into the figure of fun. This may be a matter of taste — I like my German jokes like my German riesling, bone-dry. But a joke told with a straight face, delivered in the most rarefied climes, is the one that lands the hardest. That’s a trick Schütte learned, more than anyone, from Claes Oldenburg, who provided a priceless example of how to divert the antagonism of conceptual sculpture into representational art, and to get a laugh in the process.
In 1992, Schütte was staying in Rome during the mother of all political scandals: Tangentopoli, a head-spinning nationwide bribery scheme that ended with more than half of the Italian legislature under indictment. Watching the corrupt politicians on the TV news night after night, Schütte began a series of small, tender, handmade sculptures. He started by wrapping brightly colored FIMO modeling clay — children’s stuff, clay you can fire in your kitchen oven — around little wooden dowels he’d knotted together. Quickly, vigorously, he pinched and scrunched the clay into faces of pairs of old men: both angry, both grotesque, both buffoonish, both bewildered. These tied-together rivals, swaddled in shapeless rags, were his “United Enemies,” their faces shriveled, their lips chapped, each cursed to be simultaneously the other’s prisoner and warden.
A dozen of these little haters are sitting under bell jars in the largest gallery of this vexingly wonderful show. They are doomed to each other’s company, but they are not rival Italian politicians, nor West and East Germans, nor from any other polarized polity you may be thinking of. They are twins, equals and opposites, obliged to learn the same lesson as the man in the mud: You cannot stand up on your own. Your identity is tied to the one you hate. And when you try to run you will stumble and stagger, bumble and backslide, until you realize that your stumbling is the consequence of the bonds that you share. This is the art of life, in all its bitter comedy.
Thomas Schütte
Through Jan. 18, Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. 53rd Street, Manhattan; 212-708-9400, moma.org. (Open to members Jan. 19-20.)