America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

All

11 / 23

Previous Next

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.

Back

4 / 12

Previous Next

While Judith Bernstein was an art student at Yale University during the Vietnam War, she adopted the image of the phallus as a central motif in her work, based in part on graffiti she found in men’s bathrooms on campus. She was attracted to the bold defiance of graffiti and to the masculine pompousness of tagging property with images of genitalia. In her drawings she transformed penises into guns, caped superheroes, giant screws, and flagpoles. In an era when many feminist artists were looking at their own bodies for subject matter, Bernstein’s virile, in-your-face phallus drawings were shocking. By forcing the male administration to address and accredit these works, Bernstein challenged the masculine culture that dominated Yale.

Vietnam Garden is one of a series of antiwar drawings that attacked the macho militarism of US foreign policy during the war. A group of erect phalluses capped with American flags rises up from the crest of a hill; a cross on one and a Star of David on another suggest that they are stand-ins for tombstones, with the steel-wool pubic hair covering their bases recalling flowers or plants left by mourners. This oil-stick-and-charcoal drawing retains the informal style and belligerence of the bathroom graffiti. Describing the use of humor in her work to address political issues, Bernstein has said: “When something is funny, you laugh. . . . It’s almost like an ejaculation, so you get a release by laughing at it, by laughing with the viewer when you see it; but it’s dead serious.”

Excerpted from Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection (2015), p. 65. Published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; distributed by Yale University Press.

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection

View 648 works

America Is Hard to See

Raw War

11

JUDITH BERNSTEIN (B. 1942), VIETNAM GARDEN, 1967

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection

On the Hour

America Is Hard to See

Raw War

11

JUDITH BERNSTEIN (B. 1942), VIETNAM GARDEN, 1967

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection