Julian Schnabel’s recent series of works, collectively entitled “Fox Farm Paintings,” 1989, places him within the now broad spectrum of artists engaging/exploiting ecological themes and motifs as either entertainment or enlightenment. Repeated throughout these paintings is a phrase Schnabel discovered scrawled on a ten-dollar bill: “There is no place on this planet more horrible than a fox farm during pelting season.” Despite the phrase’s appeal to animal-rights enthusiasts, its tone of unmodulated asseveration makes its effect primarily histrionic. Probably there are several places on this planet more horrible than a fox farm during pelting season. The phrase is like an obscuring veil which must be rent so that the reader of these works may reach within them and discover their fictional reality.
It isn’t the evident, univocal meaning of the phrase that matters in Schnabel’s new paintings; rather, it is the rhetorical effect, one that inheres in the stylistic/emotive tendency with which the artist has always been associated—Expressionism. In an essay from Prisms, 1967, Theodor Adorno observes that Expressionism’s “transcendent attack on culture regularly speaks the language of false escape, that of ‘nature boy.’ ” The nature/culture dichotomy in Schnabel’s art ostensibly posits nature as the perpetual victim of culture’s depredations. But like the incandescently glowing beasts of Franz Marc’s paintings, Schnabel’s animal nature functions primarily as a displacement of human psychic torment.
In this respect, one of the artist’s most revealing works—reproduced on the cover of the show’s catalogue but not displayed in the show—consists of a weathered found painting depicting Saint Sebastian, over which Schnabel has scribbled his ubiquitous phrase. As the cognitive disjunction between text and image underscores, the work is not really about nature at all, but rather about the projection of suffering. Iconographically, the figure of Saint Sebastian pierced by arrows is an almost stereotypical avatar of artistic anguish. The real subject then becomes the artist as exemplary sufferer, whose precisely orchestrated agonies resonate through the medium of an idealized nature.
Schnabel’s big, abstractish paintings on red velvet are not without pictorial virtues, and there are many passages of frothy, impastoed, virtuosic execution. They also have a certain operatic, kitschy splendor, as the red velvet evokes both opulence and degradation, the socialite’s gown and the tattered theatrical curtain. The paintings’ surfaces suggest an inevitable, banal one-to-one correspondence: a vast acreage of red velvet becomes a sea of blood. In this apocalyptic yet generalized schema of theatrical misery, it does not especially matter whose blood it is—the fox’s, the artist’s, Saint Sebastian’s, Christ’s. Thomas McEvilley remarks in his catalogue essay that the fox—farm phrase “signifies humanity, and the plague of AIDS.” Some might object to this reading as politically insensitive to the issues raised by the AIDS crisis, but it colludes figuratively with Schnabel’s Saint Sebastian, who becomes a symbol of homoerotic suffering and delirium.
—David Rimanelli
