Signs of empire, ancient empire, dominated here. It was as if this Julian Schnabel museum of pseudo-Egyptian and Roman finds—mummies, standards, amphorae, pot shards—were a confession that he finds contemporary life too minor in key. When he deals with modernity it is in flat, restrained paintings, wherein mechanical life-support systems, intravenous, help sustain an affectless existence subdivided into tracts of Piet Mondrian rectangles tied up with Barnett Newman ribbons. Interiority becomes a matter of tubal connections and ligations. Schnabel’s bent is elegiac; what’s curious is how that strain is purest in the “modern” works, those that treat the present rather than the past. The explanation seems to reside in this variance: for Schnabel glory is the aura bestowed by time, and can only be achieved by objects; as the object ages it annexes surrounding matter in a kind of archaeological halo of immortality (compare Schnabel’s “aging” of his canvases with barnacles of broken china). Human beings, conversely, edge closer to extinction, needing the IV—as long as one is alive, one is dying. Individuals can acquire the aureole solely by becoming objects, artifacts—through embalmment, or as relics of martyrdoms. Leafless tree, mast, cross, antlers are conflated as fetishized trophies of what survives destruction, be it shipwreck in The Raft, religious sacrifice, or a primal compost heap in The Mud in Mudanza. Only that which is tangential to humanity, only the inanimate, endures.
This conflict displaces for the moment an earlier sexual dilemma. The feared dismemberment implicit in Schnabel’s torsos is exorcised in He Had a Hat, a spoof of blatant Freudian castration anxiety. There are a limbless figure, the medical symbol for “male” (which is also an inverted ankh, an Egyptian sign of generation), and a paper hat, but no obligatory wooden sword to accompany the hat, despite the predominance of the saber in Schnabel’s earlier paintings. Although populated with stereotypes of male- and female-ness, the new work suggests a possibly desperate interdependence. The sculptures divide into the phallic “mummies,” shaped and hanging like plumb weights, and the curvaceous weight bearers, the amphorae (from the Greek “to bear”). These latter are sometimes stacked; sometimes, in inverse relief, treated as caryatids, columns wedged between David Smith discs; and sometimes made the emblems on shieldlike standards (implying both bearing and being borne). Smith’s influence is again felt in the stanchions of amphorae, which are simultaneously propped up from below and suspended from above, but either way are not self-supporting. The bulbous amphora form works in two ways: as the urn, a vessel filled with life-giving fluid, it is often to be found as an attendant figure or as a source of the intravenous (in Maria Callas #1 and #4, and in the hospital paintings not shown here); and as a sprouting root it signals flickering new life, combining the underworld crustiness of the conical pendants with the delicate flourish of the leaf-embossing on the vases. Little Mother, which deploys this motif on the most open of Schnabel’s fields, nevertheless renders it nearly invisible, so close in hue and value is it to its carpet-batting ground. With this tentativeness and continuing ache for eternal splendor it could hardly be said that Schnabel has resigned himself to mortality, but it does look as if he’s trying to amortize his fears.
—Jeanne Silverthorne
