America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

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“Under the enthusiastic banner of opening up the institutional art world to expansive diversity, the Whitney has in fact perversely narrowed its scope to an almost excruciating degree. The result: Artistically, it’s awful.” Critic Christopher Knight’s review of the 1993 Whitney Biennial was one of many negative appraisals of the exhibition, applauding the unprecedented presence of art by women, ethnic minorities, and gays and lesbians, while decrying the show’s artistic quality and polemical tone. The following year, the Whitney’s Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art proved equally controversial. Now regarded as landmarks, these exhibitions featured many of the artists whose work is on view in this room and the adjoining one: Matthew Barney, Jimmie Durham, David Hammons, Mike Kelley, Karen Kilimnik, Lorna Simpson, Sue Williams, and Fred Wilson. Each of them explores how our identities are shaped by culture as much as by birth, and how categories like race and gender depend on the complicated interaction between how we see and present ourselves and how others see us.

Nearly all of the works here focus on the body as a site of contest, ideology, desire, or disgust. Lorna Simpson and Catherine Opie turn their backs to the camera, challenging our gaze and our ability to classify them as either individuals or types. David Hammons’s use of black hair is both literal and symbolic, while Fred Wilson’s Guarded View confronts us with black figures that serve institutional power but are usually meant to go unseen. Other works dissect how common objects and images inform our sense of self, whether Mike Kelley’s manic accumulation of dolls or Karen Kilimnik’s do-it-yourself take on teenage fandom and feminine power and allure. As critics of the 1993 Biennial lamented the loss of traditional aesthetics at the hands of “political correctness,” these artists forged new and lasting understandings of beauty in relation to both bodies and art.

Below is a selection of works from this chapter.

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David Hammons, Untitled, 1992

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Narrator: Art historian Kellie Jones.

Kellie Jones: Some people describe it as like a tarantula; some kind of animal; some kind of bug; but huge. But if you go close to it, of course, what the main thing about it is that it’s this huge construction that’s made with African American hair, I mean not solid tendrils of hair, but hair that’s been affixed to wires, that’s been strung on wires.

Of course probably the most direct comparison in that case, is dreadlocks.I think it’s just, like I said, a kind of monumental homage to the body. But again, as David usually does, at this point, after the ‘70s, the body is only made reference to, and it’s not a figurative work, necessarily.

David starts out in LA, in the mid sixties, working with a group of artists, African American artists who are kind of right in the middle of the kind of California interest in assemblage that came out of the Beat movement of the fifties and early sixties.

So there’s an African American movement at that time, in the sixties, which is using castoff materials in the same way, but actually with a different slant, in that they’re using materials that have a significance for African American life.

And you know as he always says, you know, these items are free. That’s why I use whatever there’s a lot of that’s free. So he’s used bottle caps. He used hair in the same way, because he goes to barbershops, and this is garbage. This is the refuse that’s thrown away. And he also talks about, particularly in the case of hair, you can think of all the magical properties that it also has as well in so many cultures.

On first glance, David Hammons’s Untitled resembles an overgrown plant or an enormous spider. Closer inspection reveals that the artist made this installation primarily from cut hair, which he collected from African American barbershop patrons and threaded onto bendable wires. He carefully anchored the wires into a collection of twenty smooth rocks and then nestled in other found objects, including beads, feathers, pantyhose, and a hammer.

Just as humans shed hairs, Untitled’s strands and tufts inevitably fall off the wires and scatter among and around the rocks. These remnants offer reminders of the anonymous individuals who contributed to the work, while also evoking natural processes of growth and decay.

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America Is Hard to See

Guarded View

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DAVID HAMMONS (B. 1943), UNTITLED, 1992

David Hammons, Untitled, 1992

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Explore works from this exhibition
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America Is Hard to See

Guarded View

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DAVID HAMMONS (B. 1943), UNTITLED, 1992

David Hammons, Untitled, 1992

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection