Imagine Me and You,” the title of Dana Schutz’s recent solo exhibition at the Friedrich Petzel Gallery in New York, is in itself a strange and suggestive aspect of the artwork in the show. It’s apparently a line borrowed from a 1960s pop tune by the Turtles (as in “so happy together!”). But its placement here turns the idea inside out and asks us to do a number of imaginatively multivalent things at once, like in one of Schutz’s impossible multitasking paintings from several years back. Even if a simple explanation lies behind this authorial decision, the complexities it spawns won’t de-proliferate. Who are these “me and you”? “Me and you” can be read as Schutz herself speaking to “I” the viewer, but just as easily as characters in the paintings talking to one another, or the paintings themselves doing so intertextually, and more. This broad range of implied questioning of agencies and identities is subtly phased into our brains as one of the outcomes of looking at the work, positioning us as both the rhetorically mutable as well as the literal viewers in a richly destabilizing conceptual move. Compellingly obscure wordplay is going on, which translates into visual ironies, which hold together the way an emotive singer slurs words or garbles lines but still powerfully renders the song—because of the delivery, not in spite of it...