Molly Schulman, Anec-notes — Couch in the Desert

Molly Schulman, Anec-notes at Windmill Library

by D.K. Sole

The tragic spectacle of a thing that was created so it could be drained of its essence and die: that’s what David Shrigley was playing with in his 2017 “Memorial” (an enormous shopping list made of granite like a headstone) and that’s what Molly Schulman is playing with here too in Anec-notes (supersized versions of Post-It notes and ripped-out notepad pages filled with jotted-down ideas). But this is different. The notes she is creating in giant form are an artist’s reminders for herself, short observations and prompts, like “invention: record smell” and “embroidery bowl cuts–family portrait.” The stack of crumpled papers in the middle of the floor at Windmill library (with the word “... Broodthaers” chopped short by a fold and one paper covered with cartoon drawings of holes next to the word “hole”) is a portrait of the Muse.

The artist has a fear: are my ideas boring? Schulman is based in Los Angeles, where the king of that idea is the late John Baldessari, with his “I will not make any more boring art” wallpapered like punishment on the wall of MOCA. (“I will not” is also taken from a handwritten page.) Schulman’s show dramatises and externalises that self-questioning (or self-castigation, depending on how you look at it). Like Baldessari she does it in a humourous way. The tone of Anec-notes is droll, witty, civilised. The goofiness of the hole in context with the art-historical awareness of “Broodthaers” tells you that the artist has some perspective on things: presumably she expects you do too. This is not Balzac’s Unknown Masterpiece—you’re not afraid, like Frenhofer’s friends, that the fretful person who made the art will weep, curse themselves, and die. But like Frenhofer she wants to know what you think of her endeavour. In the context of this show, the title of a picture like “Spaghettibrella” (an image of an umbrella topped with noodles and sauce) or “Brick Hole” (bricks hovering in a hole) comes with an implicit question mark. So what do you guys think? Was this dumb idea worth painting after all? Is it OK? Or maybe self-deprecation. You think this is stupid? You should see the ones I didn’t paint! The giant notepad page that lists the “embroidery bowl cuts” and “record smell” responds to that unstated remark.

“I will make boring art,” she writes on one of the notepapers, imitating Baldessari’s handwriting. By the time we reach the bottom of the page this has mutated into a declaration that she will make the most boring art ever, art so boring that it will stun all the other boring artists with its boringness and history will celebrate its incredible intensity of boring and it will die of pure boring. The extreme she is describing is impossible to actually create, except through text. Can you explode your art out of the category of boringness? Shoot through it and out the other side? (Donald Judd? Charlotte Posenenske? The Luxor?) Maybe boringness is actually impossible, or at least hard? She writes the word “Boring” dismissively over the work that is also her list of ideas (the “embroidery bowl cut,” etc), but you notice that it’s written with imagination, repeated in a bouncing pattern, sometimes playfully shortened to a flying “B,” or filled in with red to make it kind of interesting. Ambition and imagination restrain us from reaching the extremes of boringness we aspire to. Maybe Molly Schulman’s boringness could stand in for any pure conceptual state: we can’t really be boring, or interesting, or anything straightforward.

She counterpoints her fears with a piece that reads, “Max Ernst dumped an ash tray on Clement Greenberg’s head.” You picture her coming across that anecdote, laughing, and writing it down. (You might also notice that she doesn’t give us the more violent, more predictable, and less funny reaction: Greenberg punched Ernst in the face. The dumping gesture is allowed to hover in isolation.) Was Ernst afraid that he was “boring” at that moment? Probably not! Was dumping an ashtray on Greenberg’s head an effective application of the artist’s materials? Is this an example of someone successfully having a not-boring idea? (A quick search reveals that the story is retold in reviews and blog posts across the internet, so evidently the answer is yes.) Imagine the immediacy of this spontaneous sculptural act! Was Ernst inspired to swing his arm up and send that burnt garbage flittering down upon the critical skull? Was Greenberg at that point his muse? Should other artists all just marvel at the Ernstian perfection and give up now? Could you liken it to the act of jotting down a note on a bit of paper, spontaneous and sudden? Each note is unique, a point that Schulman makes in her giant pile. (Do we know for sure that the originals of these notes even exist? No, we don’t.)

Molly Schulman, Anec-notes
at Windmill Library, Las Vegas
February 20-May 11, 2025

Photos courtesy the artist and Darren Johnson.

Posted and published by Wendy Kveck on May 12, 20225