an honest person can praise without feeling like an abject idiot. In a similar vein, Schnabel has included among his more figurative works some heavy dollops of painterliness, as if to say, “See, I can do that too.” But the pleasures of these paintings are not sufficiently great to rest an average reputation on, let alone one as gargantuan as Schnabel’s.
Toward Schnabel’s figurative works it is more difficult to be indulgent. That his depictions of the real world are inept should come as no surprise. They are intentionally rough and seedy, ugly and goofy: the theory being that to make them better would have been to cave in to one of the “strategies” of bourgeois complacency. But, even so, that is not the main problem. There is a conviction abroad that as long as some meaning can be squeezed out of a painting, however elliptical the artist’s transmission, however fantastical the viewer’s construction, then that painting is entitled to our respectful consideration. Even as signification, however, these paintings, bogged down in their own bloated portentousness, cannot be counted anything other than failures. If indeed they have something urgent to tell us, then they do themselves and their viewers a disservice by couching that message in terms so inarticulate, so private, that no one other than the artist and his closest associates can have any idea of what is being said.
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