America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

All

12 / 23

Previous Next

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.

Back

13 / 13

Previous Next

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.”

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection

View 648 works

America Is Hard to See

Scotch Tape

12

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

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection

On the Hour

America Is Hard to See

Scotch Tape

12

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

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection