America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

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Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the United States underwent a dramatic social and cultural upheaval. The sunny veneer and conformism of the immediate postwar years gave way to skepticism and calls for social justice, particularly on behalf of women, racial minorities, and others left behind. As in previous decades, such as the 1930s, artists bravely addressed pressing issues in their work as a form of protest and call for change. This chapter shows them tackling topics including voting rights in Danny Lyon’s photographs of Selma, Alabama; the exploitation of California farmworkers in Milton Glaser’s Don’t Eat Grapes; and the relationship between American patriarchal impulses and military action in Vietnam in May Stevens’s Big Daddy Paper Doll. We find images of the slain Martin Luther King Jr., civil rights activist Angela Davis, a ghoulish President Richard Nixon as well as the smiling portraits gathered by Howard Lester of the 242 soldiers killed during a single week in 1970 in the Vietnam War. The United States, as Bruce Nauman’s blistering 1971 palindrome suggests, was literally raw with war—on many fronts.

Other works in this chapter offer a more oblique take on a troubled time. The surreal bodies presented by Chicago artists Jim Nutt, Christina Ramberg, and Karl Wirsum suggest distortion, violence, and bondage, while Nam June Paik and Earl Reilback’s television sets each transmit images that are more eerie than entertaining. And On Kawara’s somber painting July 4, 1967, mutely marks the date on which it was made—Independence Day of a year when the world felt on fire.

Below is a selection of works from this chapter.

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Associated with the Chicago Imagists as well as the Hairy Who group of artists, Christina Ramberg is best known for her discomfiting paintings of female torsos completed in the 1970s. Rendered in profile and tightly cropped by the edges of the canvas to create a sense of voyeuristic intimacy, the disembodied figures are bound, corseted, and bandaged in outfits that variously recall 1950s lingerie, sadomasochistic bondage, or the bionic prosthetics of the future. Recounting the childhood experience of watching her mother dress for parties, Ramberg would wear a foundation garment referred to as a “merry widow,” and recalled that “the paintings have a lot to do with this, with watching and realizing that these undergarments totally transform a woman’s body. . . . I thought it was fascinating . . . in some ways, I thought it was awful.”

In Istrian River Lady, a figure wears a long-sleeved bustier covered in what appear to be scales and trimmed with hair. The bustier squeezes the chest to an unnatural point. Soft curves of flesh swell over the hard edges of the outfit, and three loose stitches are visible where a seam is bursting at the figure’s shoulder. Ramberg’s paintings betray her conflicted reaction to her mother’s undergarments: it is unclear whether the garments are sources of power or restraints that limit it. Rejecting readings of her work as either feminist or erotically fetishistic, Ramberg shifted her subject in the late 1970s from the recognizable female form to an ambiguous, androgynous cyborg.

Excerpted from Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection (2015), p. 320. Published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; distributed by Yale University Press.

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America Is Hard to See

Raw War

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CHRISTINA RAMBERG (1946-1995), ISTRIAN RIVER LADY, 1974

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On the Hour

America Is Hard to See

Raw War

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CHRISTINA RAMBERG (1946-1995), ISTRIAN RIVER LADY, 1974

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection