America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

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In the early 1960s, Pop art challenged the gestures of Abstract Expressionism with an unflinching embrace of America’s exploding commercial and media culture. The sources of this new art were generally neither the artist’s imagination nor direct observation of the world, but rather images themselves—whether product packaging, print advertisements, newspaper photography, or comic books. Early in their careers, many of Pop’s protagonists worked as commercial artists; Andy Warhol was an illustrator and James Rosenquist a Billboard painter, while Ed Ruscha trained in graphic design. These commercial backgrounds yielded flat, boldly graphic, mechanical-looking, and impersonal surfaces that were sometimes marked by photographic and printing processes.

The works on view in this chapter present a range of attitudes toward consumer culture. Some feel upbeat and celebratory, such as Tom Wesselmann’s enormous sandwich or Wayne Thiebaud’s luscious cakes. Other works, however, seem to distort or critique the American dream by hinting at overindulgent materialism or the social turmoil of the 1960s. Marisol’s fractured figures present themselves as mutant mannequins, and in Warhol’s hands, plastic surgery and an endless display of Coca-Cola bottles offer a false promise of beauty and sustenance, a vision of branding and self-improvement run amok. Despite its bright colors and visual wallop, Pop art’s tone was often deadpan and chilly, closer to its banal sources than to traditional fine art. Fittingly, it incited a media sensation and charges of vulgarity, but the aftershocks of its revolutionary take on American culture can still be felt today.

Below is a selection of works from this chapter.

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John Baldessari, An Artist is Not Merely the Slavish Announcer, 1966–68

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Narrator: The text at the bottom of this canvas came from an art book that proclaimed the superiority of painting to photography. The artist, John Baldessari.

John Baldessari: And it kind of bothered me that photography had one history and, and art had another history or, or more specifically painting. And to me it was all kind of the same. It was just different materials, photographic materials versus paint and canvas. And so I think that, it was that argument I was addressing.

Narrator: The photo in this piece is of an anonymous parking lot in San Diego, with a tree randomly dividing the picture in half.

John Baldessari: I was. . .trying to counter that I just would go around taking snapshots and trying to, to really violate rules of photography. And I thought, Well, what would be more violative of a photograph than just having this post come down in the middle of it, just splitting the image left and right? Some of them are just driving around in my VW bus and holding the camera out the window and shooting without even looking through the viewfinder. Basically I was just trying to avoid the conventional ideas of art.

Narrator: Towards this end, Baldessari was trying to downplay the role of the artist, both in his non-choice of photographic subject matter and his mechanical, impersonal approach to painting this work. He hired a professional sign painter and had him print the featureless script on the canvas rather than paint it. Baldessari coated the canvas with emulsion—the chemical mixture used to make photo paper light sensitive—using a photographic process to develop a painting. By doing so, Baldessari ironically challenges the authority of the reproduced text, and its insistence that photography is somehow a less artistic and more mechanical medium than painting.

For An Artist Is Not Merely the Slavish Announcer, John Baldessari commissioned a commercial sign painter to hand-letter a hackneyed statement taken from an art textbook. Above it, he printed a photograph of an ordinary suburban parking lot. The uppercase, sans serif lettering style presents the clichéd message of the text with a deadpan sense of factuality. Likewise, the photograph presents the banal scene as if it were a piece of forensic evidence. Even the work’s odd dimensions reflect the circumstantial: 59” x 45” is the size of the door of the van used to transport the work.

The combination of text and image raises narrative and allusive possibilities even while cancelling them out. Are we to look at the image for evidence that the photographer has not “slavishly announced” facts, but has created a carefully considered composition? Or do the text and image simply represent a random, meaningless juxtaposition? Baldessari has distanced himself as much as possible from making artistic decisions that would elicit clearly defined meanings. As he has said, “Seeing selectively means you screen out a lot of interesting things.” His works are open, and encourage, in his own words, “conceptual leaps people can make from one bit of information to another.”

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JOHN BALDESSARI (B. 1931), AN ARTIST IS NOT MERELY THE SLAVISH ANNOUNCER, 1966-68

John Baldessari, An Artist is Not Merely the Slavish Announcer, 1966–68

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America Is Hard to See

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JOHN BALDESSARI (B. 1931), AN ARTIST IS NOT MERELY THE SLAVISH ANNOUNCER, 1966-68

John Baldessari, An Artist is Not Merely the Slavish Announcer, 1966–68

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection