America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

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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.

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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.

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America Is Hard to See

Scotch Tape

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

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America Is Hard to See

Scotch Tape

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

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection