We don’t always give pop music the analytical attention it merits. This is especially true when the music in question comes from non-Western countries and incorporates folk elements. After all, this kind of dancefloor-filler presents a higher access barrier for Western audiences and brings with it associations of kitsch, Eurovision and backward rural hinterlands untouched by wifi and non-binary gender classifications.
Yet here hidden treasures lie. As mainstream Western pop stews in its own Instagram-friendly feelgood mediocrity year on year, I can’t stop listening to eastern European pop-folk – from Ukraine’s otherworldly Onuka, who marry traditional local instruments with electronica, ethereal vocals and the occasional theremin, to Hungary’s Oláh Gergő, who augments Romani folk with trap-pop and modern choreography, and Bulgaria’s chalga music, a sort of sexed-up post-Ottoman reggaeton with a healthy sense of absurdity. But my favourite of all is Serbia’s “turbofolk” genre.
IT WAS EARLY March, not yet two months into the Trump administration, and the new Not-Normal was setting in: It continued to be the administration’s position, as enunciated by Sean Spicer, that the inauguration had attracted the “largest audience ever”; barely a month had passed since Kellyanne Conway brought the fictitious “Bowling Green massacre” to national attention; and just for kicks, on March 4, the president alerted the nation by tweet, “Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower.”
If the administration had tossed the customs and niceties of American politics to the wind, there was one clearly identifiable constant: mendacity. “Fake news” accusations flew back and forth every day, like so many spitballs in a third-grade classroom.
Feeling depressed about the conflation of fiction and fact in the first few months of 2017, I steered a car into the hills of Calabasas to meet with one person whom many rely on to set things straight. This is an area near Los Angeles best known for its production of Kardashians, but there were no McMansions on the street where I was headed, only old, gnarled trees and a few modest houses. I spotted the one I was looking for—a ramshackle bungalow—because the car in the driveway gave it away. Its license plate read SNOPES.
Dana Schutz’s studio, in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn, may not be as catastrophically messy as Francis Bacon’s used to be, but there are days when it comes close. Last July, she was making paintings for a solo show, in the fall, at Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin, and for the 2017 Whitney Biennial, in New York. Large and medium-sized canvases in varying stages of completion covered most of the wall space in the studio, a long, windowless room that was once an auto-body shop, and the floor was a palimpsest of rags, used paper palettes, brushes, metal tubs filled with defunct tubes of Old Holland oil paint, colored pencils and broken charcoal sticks, cans of solvent, spavined art books, pages torn from magazines, bundled work clothes stiff with paint, paper towels, a prelapsarian boom box, empty Roach Motel cartons, and other debris.
Schutz’s paintings, in which abstract and figurative images combine to tell enigmatic stories, sometimes carry veiled references to what’s going on in the world. “Men’s Retreat,” made in 2005, shows blindfolded members of George W. Bush’s Cabinet pursuing strange outdoor rites; “Poisoned Man,” painted the same year, is an imagined portrait of the former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, who barely survived an assassination attempt, in 2004. Schutz, thirty-nine at the time, with untamable hair and a radiant smile, said that she had been up until very late the night before, watching the Republican National Convention on television. “I remember the second Bush nomination in 2003 and feeling so angry, but this was depressing,” she said. “It was like a disaster you can’t look away from.” When I asked if the rise of Donald Trump might invade her new work, she thought for a moment, and said, “I want to make a painting about shame. Public shaming has become an element in contemporary life. You can take a picture of someone and post it online, and thousands of people see it. We’re so ashamed, about so many things, and I think for a candidate to be without shame, like Trump, is really powerful. His lack of shame becomes our shame.”
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