America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

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Scotch Tape

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

Bruce Conner, PORTRAIT OF ALLEN GINSBERG, 1960

In America Is Hard to See

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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. . .

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.”

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Maya Man, A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City

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