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The Next Big Thing
John Haberin New York City
Thomas Schütte, Rodney Graham, and the KAWS Collection
From the start, Thomas Schütte was destined to be the next big thing, and he delivers big things as well. Now if only the little things mattered along the way.
For conceptual art that keeps you thinking, turn instead to Rodney Graham, but is he just clowning around? And what about KAWS, the perpetual class clown? Could he be a serious collector? Your answer may depend on whether you accept him as a serious artist. I am not so sure, but the Drawing Center is counting on it, with the KAWS collection. First, though, to MoMA for Thomas Schütte. 
One can hear the expectations in his titles—Large Wall, Large Wallpapers, Large Spirit, Father State, and Mother Earth. One can see it in his care to recycle his themes often enough to spread the word. One can hear it words, traced on the wall above the entrance to his exhibition. Alles in Ordnung, he writes in simulated jet trails, perhaps on his way to an international career. "All Is in Order," which is only fair when all is in his hands. Once inside, things can only get bigger.
That large wall simulates a brick wall, interrupted by another wide passage between rooms, in simulated bricks akin to dozens of monochrome paintings. Just before it, the twelve and a half foot bronze of the father state faces visitors with an ample robe and impassive smile. Trust me, it says, but do not even think to get past me. Born in 1954, Schütte lived through the fall of the Berlin Wall and the creation of a larger state, with grand new construction and memorials to match. The artist has no patience for such politics, power grabs, and platitudes, but he matches them in every way. It is what makes his work conceptual but reassuringly material.
A tall order
Thomas Schütte has not had nearly the presence in New York that he has found with European fairs and collectors. Even close followers of contemporary art may be surprised to find him in the museum's largest exhibition space. His large work and frequent repetition make a visit quick and easy all the same. Works appear in no obvious order, least of all chronological, which is only fair. The greatest number date from close to when his expectations began. He painted and sculpted his own grave in 1981, with a death date of 1996, because he gave himself fifteen years to make it big, and that's that.
He came up just when art was taking on its own new expectations, which could easily have excluded him, but Schütte caught on and made it his subject. For the curators, Paulina Pobocha with Caitlin Chaisson, art was seeing the decline of Minimalism and a surge of conceptual art, but plain old realism was just too appealing for him to pass up. Perhaps, but he could never let go of anything. He studied at the Academy in Düsseldorf with Gerhard Richter and a stellar cast, including Katharina Fritsch, Isa Genzken, Andreas Gursky, and Thomas Struth. Richter could have shown him how the lushest of paintings, abstract or representational, could pose intellectual puzzles. Struth showed how the art of museums could pose the same questions, Gursky how large projects could remake the human landscape.
He was fine all along with Minimalism, but it had to be at least halfway conceptual. He paints with a single color on swatches of fabric or plaster, and his wallpaper has delicate verticals that recall Daniel Buren, but with an overlay of stains and brush marks. He starts with more strictly conceptual art, but it has to be skillful as well. He gives himself a day apiece and no more for self-portraits, just as he gave himself fifteen years to succeed. He sketches Valium, like Andy Warhol with a heavier dose of irony. Don't worry, and for god's sake be happy.
Still, he built his reputation on sculpture. Genzken had shown how portrait busts can look makeshift and sloppy, and Schütte fashions a man lost at sea from oozing polyester and clay. Almost immediately, though, busts acquire a fine polish in ceramics or bronze. Most are of women, with their heads down in a vain search for comfort and rest. Some are men, as Strangers or Jerks. Both are an assault on the pretensions of public sculpture.
Schütte is less well known for full-length figures like Father State and Mother Earth, but they, too, can look grand while refusing to play the hero. Some have a silvery finish on comic-strip body armor or bulging muscles, but in poses that all but shout torment. The busts can rest on pedestals or shipping crates. He has the same love-hate relationship with architecture, including models of museums and mansions that will never be built. A concrete cylinder could be a bomb shelter, but then it emits dog yelps like another kind of shelter entirely.
From realism and public works to conceptual puzzles and Modernism's last gasp, Schütte is showing off. Long after his self-portraits, his real subject is himself. He obsesses over it, with no end of sketches and prints. Take what pleasure you like in oversized slices of watermelon as Melonely, and do not take too seriously the hints of melancholy and loneliness. Do take seriously or comically an artist at home and in his studio, with a clothes closet, a rack for socks, miniature easels, and pitifully small collectors. It is not easy being a great artist, but Schütte will do, he promises, whatever it takes.
Send in the clown
At his most deadly serious, Rodney Graham plays the artist and the clown. Perhaps he never could distinguish the two. He photographs dead flowers in his studio, prints it as large as life, and calls it art. He saves a photo of a pipe-cleaner artist in Amalfi for more than fifty years before printing it again as a diptych, running seven and a half feet across. He must have loved the artist's dedication, ingenuity, and, when it comes down to it, serious child's play. Italian sunlight cannot make it past the studio window.
If the colors of Graham's flowers look vivid, even pleasing, they are still the colors of death. So is the white of the stool on which they rest—the same white as his easel in a Studio Construction, framed and mounted behind glass. Another construction saves some of those pipe cleaners from the trash, as a white shroud. Still, he is clowning around while making art. The most recent work in a gallery career survey turns to acrylic and sand. One painting adds seeming eyes to the abstraction. It has an equal debt to Cubism and to a clown face, but then artists from Antoine Watteau to Pablo Picasso have no shortage of harlequins. 
Graham has his clown face, too, on video, where death is a mere vexation. He lies on the sand as if dead, in Vexation Island from 1997. Strong winds blow through the palm trees, and a barrel rests at his feet. Somehow he draws the attraction of a colorful parrot, the mark of a pirate, and dresses in the red vest and stockings of an ancient mariner, only cleaner. The camera closes in on a serious gash on his forehead, which looks more and more deadly as the camera lingers and his eyes open. But then they are the black eyes not of a fight, but of a make-up artist.
For all his media, he made his name as a conceptual artist. He brought glitter to the 2006 Whitney Biennial and upside-down trees to the Fisher Landau Center, as if the bright lights of the club scene were not serious enough. The gallery links him to other Canadian artists, Stan Douglas and Jeff Wall, as the Vancouver school. One may want to dismiss them all as a one-joke affair. Still, Graham has more than one trick up his sleeve. He could teach a whole course.
And so he does, as Media Studies '77. Once again he recycles or appropriates an old photo. He has wheeled in a VCR, at left in again a large diptych. Someone might as well have wheeled him in, too, on the right, where he sits at ease on a desk, cigarette in hand. He must enjoy prompting viewers to complain about the dated media studies. They could almost forget the work's actual medium, its color and resolution rooting it in 2016, though the classroom clock is frozen in time.
The lecture has begun, but the monitor remains black, and the cigarette has not a puff of smoke. Perhaps the past is as dead, for Graham, as the present—lingering on just long enough to provoke you. Surely the blackboard is not part of the class, but it, too, looks suspiciously like a work of art. Chalk has smeared out into what could be layers of abstraction—or waves lapping at Vexation Island. You may never know when to admire a series for its dark humor or to write it off as glib. Better wait, though, until the lecture is over.
Smile!
KAWS and his work is an assault on the whole idea of seriousness, in or out of art. His cast of characters, from the Simpsons to the Michelin Man, is always smiling. He can hardly restrain a smile himself with his second museum appearance in barely three years. Yet he is a collector, of thousands of pieces in an eclectic mix of art-world regulars and the comics. If you cannot tell the difference, that could be the point. The KAWS collection searches for art high and low, in more than one sense, but its heart is in the comics and the comedy.
Right on the way in, to both sides of the entrance, KAWS includes colorful evil creatures out of an epic battle and reserved faces bearing the subtitle Original. But then you know not to look at either evil or claims for originality without smiling. Postmodernists questioning the "originality of the avant-garde" and post-Siri-alists can only agree. The collection includes self-taught artists like Adolf Wölfli along with street artists like FUTURA 2000, but then no one, however naïve, is immune to convention. What counts as outsider art anyway? Inquiring minds want to know.
KAWS himself (in real life, whatever that means, Brian Donnelly) began with graffiti and graduated to commerce. The highlight of his Brooklyn retrospective may well have been the gift shop, and the show was an exercise in branding for the museum as much as him. Even now, passing his huge cartoon Companions in the museum lobby, in polished wood, I cannot eradicate the pit in my stomach. The Drawing Center has only a modest lobby gift shop (with its own merchandise, not his), but it has succumbed to commercialism all the same. That still, though, leaves the real question: can it keep you smiling and get you thinking? 
The results are mixed. KAWS could make Banksy, with his own museum just two blocks away, a model of self-sacrifice and Jeff Koons a model of integrity. And the layout can keep one guessing or get one giving up. The collection fills the entire Drawing Center in no obvious order, by theme or anything else. Three sections identify artists and titles only on plastic cards, and even those take an effort to find. Who needs artists anyway?
Taken differently, though, they create their own context for art. Two of the three resemble the living rooms and study centers favored by museums today. Works there hang on the wall and occupy platforms much like furniture, including robotic sculpture. And artists do cross over into the mainstream, including Joyce Pensato, Lee Lozano, and Willem de Kooning. Each has the fierceness of the artist's own battles between forces of darkness and light. They leave open what to call demonic, sophisticated, or funny.
Too much else does not. R. Crumb has his usual high anxiety, and Peter Saul gets to misspell KILL, but you know their routine cold. Is there still something special about popular culture, alienation, or art? Just wait for the next installment in the series. KAWS is smart enough and dedicated enough to keep them coming. And keep smiling.
Thomas Schütte ran at The Museum of Modern Art through January 18, 2025, the KAWS collection at the Drawing Center through January 19. Rodney Graham ran at 303 Gallery through October 24, 2024. A related review looks at KAWS on his own.