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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In Lee Lozano’s early 1960s graphite drawing, inanimate objects protrude from a rectangular, grinning face. Its crooked teeth grip a cigar or crayon, yet other accessories defy bodily logic: instead of a neck, a pipe and faucet extend from the disembodied head; instead of eyes, a triangular opening is pierced by the crank of a brace drill, positioned so that its handle serves as ear while its jaws become a phallic nose. The inconsistency of graphite marks, which range from subtle chiaroscuro to violent scribbles, enhances the strangeness of the scene. This grotesque, Surrealist collision of human and mechanical forms is one of many Lozano produced in the years immediately following her move to New York around 1960. Made in pencil, wax crayon, pastel, and paint, these drawings stage disturbing, humorous, and perverse encounters between body parts—especially breasts, phalluses, and orifices—and a variety of handheld tools and household objects.

Lozano’s artistic career was cut short by a self-imposed exile from the art world in 1972, but during the nearly dozen years she spent in New York she produced a complex and provocative body of work. Her charged, mechanomorphic drawings can be seen as a comment on a turn to industrial techniques of art making, while also anticipating the gender politics of the late 1960s. A subsequent series of large-scale paintings and drawings depicts tools in a more hard-edged style that nonetheless retains suggestive anthropomorphism, while her language-based works of the late 1960s place her at the vanguard of Conceptualism.

Excerpted from Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection (2015), p. 238. 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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LEE LOZANO (1930-1999), UNTITLED (GRINNING FACE WITH EAR/CRANK), C. 1962

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On the Hour

America Is Hard to See

Raw War

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LEE LOZANO (1930-1999), UNTITLED (GRINNING FACE WITH EAR/CRANK), C. 1962

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection