America Is Hard to See | Art & Artists

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

Exhibition works

23 total
Scotch Tape
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Scotch Tape

Floor 6
Gray layers of oil paint and sediment radiate in a starlike shape from a central white point that seems to emanate light in a monumental abstract artwork standing over 10½ feet tall.
Gray layers of oil paint and sediment radiate in a starlike shape from a central white point that seems to emanate light in a monumental abstract artwork standing over 10½ feet tall.

Jay DeFeo, The Rose, 1958–66. Oil with wood and mica on canvas, 128 7/8 × 92 1/4 × 11 in. (327.3 × 234.3 × 27.9 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of The Jay DeFeo Trust and purchase, with funds from the Contemporary Painting and Sculpture Committee and the Judith Rothschild Foundation 95.170. © 2015 The Jay DeFeo Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Scotch Tape
Floor 6

Jack Smith’s film Scotch Tape takes its name from something almost invisible and unintentional—a shadow in the lower right corner, caused by a piece of cellophane tape that got caught in the camera while Smith was filming. By titling his work after this bit of detritus, Smith underscores his embrace of accident and the real world’s intrusion into art. Many of the artists represented in this chapter shared in this omnivorous attitude, and their work features extensive use of nontraditional materials, often scavenged in junk shops and along city streets. There are assemblages including bits of burned paper, deconstructed furniture, comics, conveyor belts, newsprint, and a stuffed pheasant. Even the paintings and other works in more traditional mediums appear built up or perhaps excavated from the base stuff of the world.

These works were made at a time of great postwar prosperity, when widespread material excess and consumption existed as never before in human history. Yet the planned obsolescence of mass-produced goods led to more and more junk, and the booming economy was inextricably linked to the military-industrial complex and a daily life informed by the simmering tensions of the Cold War. Under these circumstances, making art from castoffs and embracing chance could be seen as a way of resisting the norms of postwar American consumer society. That challenge manifests itself differently in the various works on view in this chapter, whether through irony, perversity, humor, hermeticism, creative intensity or refusal, shamanic ritual, or material transformation.

Below is a selection of works from this chapter.

From left to right: Louise Nevelson, Dawn’s Wedding Chapel II, 1959; Lee Bontecou, Untitled, 1961, 1961; Jay Defeo, The Rose, 1958-1959; Bruce Conner, PORTRAIT OF ALLEN GINSBERG, 1960; Jim Dine, The Black Rainbow, 1959-1960. Photography by Ronald Amstutz

INSTALLATION VIEW

Noah Purifoy (1917-2004), Untitled, 1970. Wood, leather, brass, and copper, 49 3/8 × 28 5/8 × 21 1/4 in. (125.4 × 72.7 × 54 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase 71.170 © artist's estate; courtesy the Noah Purifoy Foundation

NOAH PURIFOY (1917-2004), UNTITLED, 1970

Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008), Satellite, 1955. Oil, fabric, paper and wood on canvas with taxidermied pheasant, 79 3/8 × 43 5/16 × 5 5/8 in. (201.6 × 110 × 14.3 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Claire B. Zeisler and purchase with funds from the Mrs. Percy Uris Purchase Fund 91.85. © The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG (1925-2008), SATELLITE, 1955

Satellite is a Combine, Robert Rauschenberg’s term for the hybrids of painting, sculpture, and collage he created between 1954 and 1964. In these wall-bound reliefs and freestanding sculptures, the artist joined the improvisatory brushwork of Abstract Expressionism—notice the thick application of paint and the numerous drips on the surface—with a proliferation of everyday, scavenged elements. Satellite includes a painted, stuffed pheasant that stands on a wooden ledge above a canvas collaged with images and flattened objects such as newspaper comics, doilies, and even a pair of socks. “A pair of socks,” Rauschenberg later asserted, “is no less suitable to make a painting with than wood, nails, turpentine, oil, and fabric.”

Jack Smith (1932-1989), Scotch Tape, 1959-62. 16mm film, black-and-white, sound, 3 min., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Gladstone Gallery, New York 2010.207 © Jack Smith Archive; Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels

JACK SMITH (1932-1989), SCOTCH TAPE, 1959-62

Artwork made of metal and wood.
Artwork made of metal and wood.

Lee Bontecou, Untitled, 1961, 1961. Welded steel, canvas, wire and rope, 72 1/2 × 66 × 24 3/4in. (184.2 × 167.6 × 62.9 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York purchase 61.41 © Lee Bontecou

LEE BONTECOU (B. 1931), UNTITLED, 1961, 1961

Lee Bontecou constructed Untitled, 1961, 1961. a hulking wall-mounted relief, primarily from the discarded conveyer belts that had been employed in the laundry service beneath her New York studio. She stretched these like a skin over a welded steel frame before suturing the cut scraps with copper wire. Additional salvaged materials, including grommets, rope, and saw blades, share the three-dimensional surface, which is covered in irregular circular openings. She filled these with black velvet or soot from her welding torch, creating areas of deep, matte darkness. Bontecou compared these orifices to the “new frontier” of outer space, which had just begun to seem within reach when she made the work in the 1960s. Yet she also acknowledged that the sculpture reflects “the negative side of the atomic age,” likening its appearance to “war equipment. With teeth.”

Cameron (1922-1995), Fossil (Bat), 1958. Brush and ink on board, sheet: 12 × 20 in. (30.5 × 50.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Drawing Committee 2007.33 © Cameron Parsons Foundation

CAMERON (1922-1995), FOSSIL (BAT), 1958

Chryssa (1933–2013), Newspaper Page, Sock Advertisement, 1959–1962. Two-color screenprint, oil and graphite on paper, 39 × 24 1/2in. (99.1 × 61.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of the artist 72.140 © Estate of Chryssa; Courtesy MIHALARIAS ART, Athens, Greece

CHRYSSA (1933–2013), NEWSPAPER PAGE, SOCK ADVERTISEMENT, 1959–1962

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Bruce Conner, PORTRAIT OF ALLEN GINSBERG, 1960

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Narrator: This small assemblage—made of nylon stockings, a tin can, candle wax, and other unorthodox materials—is a portrait of the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Made by artist Bruce Conner in 1960, the work deliberately flouts convention with its unheroic scale and use of junk materials. Here, Conner rejects the traditional notions of art as representational, refined, and permanent, and captures the questioning, anti-establishment spirit of Ginsberg and the 1960s.

Take a moment to listen to this excerpt of Ginsberg reading from Howl, his famous 1956 poem, which begins, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.”

Allen Ginsberg: who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,

who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery,

who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,

who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts. . .

Bruce Conner, PORTRAIT OF ALLEN GINSBERG, 1960

In America Is Hard to See

BRUCE CONNER (1933-2008), PORTRAIT OF ALLEN GINSBERG, 1960

A key figure in the Beat counterculture of the 1950s, Bruce Conner rejected bourgeois ideals of art as an expression of privileged creativity that produces a beautiful, eternal object. Instead, he challenged artists to deliver new forms based on new values—spontaneity, impurity, the degraded, and the marginal. In this portrait of the renowned Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, Conner thumbed his nose at the conventions of portraiture. Conner’s depiction of his friend is evocative rather than representational. Through this casual assemblage of junk materials and detritus, including a tin can, candles, wax, spray paint, and one of his favorite materials, nylon stockings, Conner conveyed the spirit of the unorthodox poet whose famous 1956 poem Howl begins: “I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.”

JAY DEFEO (1929-1989), THE ROSE, 1958-66

Jay DeFeo, who emerged as part of a vibrant community of artists, poets, and musicians active in San Francisco in the 1950s, worked on this monumental painting for nearly eight years. She later described The Roseas “a marriage between painting and sculpture.” Built almost entirely from thick layers of paint—supported in some cases by wooden dowels—the work weighs more than 1,500 pounds. DeFeo made it using a laborious process of building up, carving back, and repainting. Her original idea was simply to produce a painting that had a center. Over the ensuing years, she extended its length and width, and worked and reworked the painting stylistically. In the end, The Rose had to be removed from her second-story studio through a partially dismantled window using a forklift.

Al Held (1928–2005), Untitled (Life Magazine), 1959. Oil, ink, and printed paper collage on Life magazine, 14 1/2 × 11 5/16 × 1 1/16in. (36.8 × 28.7 × 2.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of the artist 2006.6 © 2016 Al Held/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

AL HELD (1928–2005), UNTITLED (LIFE MAGAZINE), 1959

Sam Middleton (b.1927), Out Chorus, 1960. Collage, 29 7/8 × 35 13/16 in. (75.9 × 91 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of the Ford Foundation Purchase Program 62.11 © artist

SAM MIDDLETON (B.1927), OUT CHORUS, 1960

Louise Nevelson, Dawn’s Wedding Chapel II, 1959. Painted wood: 115 7/8 × 83 1/2 × 10 1/2 in. (294.3 × 212.1 × 26.7 cm); base, 6 × 83 1/2 × 10 1/2 in. (15.2 × 212.1 × 26.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Howard and Jean Lipman Foundation, Inc. 70.68a-m. © Louise Nevelson Estate/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

LOUISE NEVELSON (1899-1988), DAWN’S WEDDING CHAPEL II, 1959

One of the foremost American sculptors of the twentieth century, Louise Nevelson is renowned for her large, monochromatic wood sculptures. Her largest works, or “environments,” as they are often called, are assemblages consisting of hundreds of boxes filled with objects scavenged from the streets of New York City, and painted a uniform color (white, gold, or, most commonly, black). Dawn’s Wedding Chapel II includes elements from one such environment, titled Dawn’s Wedding Feast, an installation of Nevelson’s first white sculptures, which she created for a 1959 exhibition. The work was, in Nevelson’s words, “a white wedding cake, a wedding mirror . . . a pillow . . . a kind of fulfillment, a transition to marriage with the world.” After the exhibition closed, she reassembled individual elements to form several discrete sculptures, of which Dawn’s Wedding Chapel II is but one example.

Raphael Montañez Ortiz (b. 1934), Archaeological Find, Number 9, 1964. Wood, steel, plastic glues, rope, fabric and horse hair, 76 3/4 × 66 3/4 × 22 in. (195 × 169.6 × 55.9 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of George and Lillian Schwartz 65.33 © Raphael Montañez Ortiz

RAPHAEL MONTAÑEZ ORTIZ (B. 1934), ARCHAEOLOGICAL FIND, NUMBER 9, 1964

Archaeological Find, Number 9, is a sofa that Raphael Montañez Ortiz took apart in a kind of ritual sacrifice. He began by meditating on what he called its “Inner-Spirit”; then, while intoning a shamanic chant, he dismantled it in thirty-three sessions, each thirty-three minutes long. After covering the remains in thick layers of transparent glue and constructing an armature, Ortiz walked around the work until it “told” him how it should be oriented in space. The artist—who described his work from this period as “Destructivism”—intended his acts of creative destruction to release the energy “buried in each of us.” Ortiz performed similar excavations on other manufactured objects, offering them up as relics of contemporary society. His work countered the complacent materialism of an affluent postwar nation. “Art,” he wrote, “must come to terms with the anguish and anger at the core of man’s existence.”

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