Mann im Wind II

The mud that shackles this man could be the primordial earth from which Men, Golems, and Heroes have been shaped in mythology, literature, and religion. Yet in appearance and dress, he is more like an anti-hero—to whom Schütte addresses monuments suppos­edly erected in public space, overturning the usual association between monumentality and glorification. Where does the feeling of being bogged down come from? A drawing from the 1989 September Notes might point us in the direction: beneath a pair of legs stuck in mud, Schütte has inscribed a neologism, “MUDERN,” a hybridization of “modern” and “mud,” the “-ern” ending cor­responding to an infinitive verb in the German language. So “MUDERN” would be an action, that of getting rid of modernism? To get out of it, Schütte suggests walking in the mud at low tide, a Nordic activity that bears the name Wattwanderung. In 2001, Schütte gave this as the title to a colossal set of 139 hanging prints, revisiting virtually all the themes of his work, placing the visitor at the heart of a labyrinth from which they had to extricate themselves, just as the artist himself must perma­nently struggle against getting submerged.