Here is another older review from this fall. It ended up being more of a review of exhibition practices and politics than the art itself, so be forewarned! (Also, sorry about the black and white photos. I took them a while ago and converted them without ever considering that I might want to upload them some day, and it’s amazing how hard it is to find the works I chose to talk about on the Internet.)

Schnabel: Art and Revision

Schnabel: Art and Film is a revisionist history of Julian Schnabel’s painting career. Through the lens of his recently successful films, this survey exhibition at the AGO recontextualises over 30 years of Schnabel’s painting oeuvre as a benign toast to the film world, veiling the infamous and inflammatory aspects of his work. With the North American premiere of Schnabel’s new film Miral at the Toronto Film Festival this fall, there is no better time for him to sand down the sharp edges of his painterly past.

While monetarily successful, Schnabel and his art were critically controversial at best in the 1980s. His broken plate paintings, with their violence and their second-hand-store materials, caught the attention of many critics for all the wrong reasons. However, it was primarily Schnabel’s bombastic and aggressive personality that provoked critics to respond so negatively to his work. Art critic and Schnabel nemesis Robert Hughes wrote of him: “Schnabel is to painting, what Stallone is to acting – a lurching display of oily pectorals – except Schnabel makes bigger public claims for himself.” (Whyte) Schnabel’s more recent film work on the other hand, especially The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, has garnered more success with less critical resistance than his paintings ever did.

Julian Schnabel, Last Diary Entry (for Roman Polanski), 2010.

Schnabel: Art and Film recontextualizes his supposedly violent, audacious art, in terms of his more intelligible, accessible films. The focus has been shifted from Schnabel’s intuitive and inexplicable means of making the art to the more agreeable, coherent narrative qualities of his paintings, even if these qualities are not inherently present on the canvas. Demonstratively, in the first painting of the exhibition, Last Diary Entry (for Roman Polanski), the parenthesis comes to the fore. The audioguide describes how the painting was created for Polanski’s film The Ghost Writer as a favour, and how it came back to him in the mail, at which point he decided to paint over it; however, the visual contents of the painting are completely overlooked. The labels and audioguide render the works simple homages to films and filmmakers and artifacts of docile anecdotes.

Foreground: Julian Schnabel, The 1000 Meter Mountain (for Virgilio Piñera), 1999; background: Julian Schnabel, Pixote, 1991.

Two other works, The 1000 Meter Mountain (for Virgilio Piñera) and Pixote, are placed adjacent to one another by the logic of these trivial narratives. As one of the labels explains, Pixote is an homage to a film directed by Hector Babenco, and The 1000 Meter Mountain is named after a poem by Virgilio Piñera whom Babanco played in Schnabel’s film Before Night Falls. While this anecdotal connection may be entertaining and true, it does not substitute for substance. A similar exhibition was held at the AGO during TIFF in 2006 called Andy Warhol/Supernova: Stars, Deaths and Disasters. The touring show presented Warhol’s films and prints together for the first time in the same gallery, and guest curator David Cronenberg gave ample analysis of the material and conceptual synergy between the two series. For instance, Cronenberg explained in an interview how the seriality and the minute variations in each print of Warhol’s disaster paintings are inspired by the materiality of film (Giese). Schnabel: Art and Film strategically avoids any such material analysis to the detriment of the works.

In a recent interview with Charlie Rose, Schnabel attempts to distance himself from the infamy he garnered as a painter in the 1980s. Schnabel tells Rose:

I’ve been [making things] in public for a long time, and I’ve changed since the beginning. You have different needs when you’re a kid. I think as you get older […] you get used to being misunderstood, which is fine, but it seems to me that because of [The Diving Bell and the Butterfly], people understand me or think they understand me more or feel closer to me or less confused by my presence because they could see what I think about people in the movie. Do you believe that?

Rose replies, “I do, I do. I think this has brought you more admiration from a wider range of people than anything you’ve ever done. Far superior to the art.” Schnabel is trying to rectify his notoriously grandiose public-image with his more amiable, soft-spoken self-image. With this retrospective exhibition at the AGO and a new film premiering at TIFF, Schnabel has set Toronto as the stage for the presentation of his new persona. Schnabel’s art is the most public manner of projecting a new image aside from his films, and so both media must be present in Toronto this fall, actively working toward this new image. Furthermore, his intuitive paintings that confuse his audience must be recontextualized in terms of his films, which have helped his audience understand him. The paintings are curatorially diluted to being artifacts of filmic transactions or connections in order to downplay the materiality and personality that made his paintings so infamous in the 1980s.

In this way, Schnabel’s paintings have been relegated to the domain of the “special feature.” The driving force of Schnabel’s painting is materiality, and without it this exhibition ceases to be art and becomes support material. As artifacts of the film industry, his paintings are merely epideictic of his films and the film world at large, like production photos or audio commentary (Fisher, 17). Each work benignly amplifies the films of his colleagues, the personas of his filmic friends, and the themes that play out within his own films. If Julian Schnabel wants to move beyond his former self, this exhibition is certainly a step toward self-effacement.

Works Cited:

“An Hour with Julian Schnabel.” Charlie Rose. By Charlie Rose. PBS. WNET New York. 31 Jan. 2008.

Fisher, Jennifer. “Speeches of Display: Museum Audioguides by Artists.” Aural Cultures. Ed. Jim Drobnick. Toronto: YYZ Books, 2004. 17-23.

Giese, Rachel. “Death Star.” CBC. 5 July 2006. 16 Sept. 2010 <http://www.cbc.ca/arts/artdesign/cronenberg.html>.

Schnabel, Julian. Last Diary Entry (for Roman Polanski), artist’s collection.

Schnabel, Julian. Pixote, artist’s collection.

Schnabel, Julian. The 1000 Meter Mountain (for Virgilio Piñera), artist’s collection.

Whyte, Murray. “Julian Schnabel: A second first act for controversial artist-filmmaker.” The Toronto Star 26 Aug. 2010. E2.