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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Mike Kelley, More Love Hours than Can Ever Be Repaid and Wages of Sin, 1987

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Narrator: Mike Kelley’s work More Love Hours than Can Ever Be Repaid is made out of stuffed animals, afghans, and other craft objects.

Mike Kelley: They were all used items that I bought at thrift stores and yard sales. And they're all handmade objects. So they're not the kind of objects that would generally be sold—they’re the kind of objects that would be given away.

Narrator: The work’s surface is tightly packed with objects, suggesting an almost compulsive desire to fill the picture plane. Kelley was interested in the huge amount of time it took people to make all of these craft objects.

Mike Kelley: It had an accumulative effect. If you saw these things as representing love, then it was a massive amount of love. If you saw the things as being inducers of guilt or repayment, then it was more than you could ever pay back. So depending on your point of view, you either see it as super-lovable or super-creepy. And you know, so people tend to see it either way. Like, some people are really repulsed by it, and some people love it to death.

Narrator: Kelley paired this work with the piece on the floor, called Wages of Sin. More Love Hours than Can Ever Be Repaid, Wages of Sin is a massive accumulation of a material we don’t usually associate with high art—candle wax.

Mike Kelley: [It’s] like the kind of sculpture that a teenager would make in their pot smoking room or something like that. And by titling it The Wages of Sin, it gives this kind of morbid overtone, you know, some pseudo-ritualistic kind of thing.

Narrator: In the 1960s, many artists became interested in repetition and accumulation as almost mechanical techniques that downplayed the role of individual expression. In More Love Hours than Can Ever Be Repaid and Wages of Sin, Kelley questions that impulse. With the materials he uses, accumulation doesn’t result in just more of the same. Instead, it creates layers of association, feeling, and meaning.

More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid is an assemblage of handmade dolls, stuffed animals, and blankets that Mike Kelley found in thrift stores, stitched together onto blankets, and then attached to canvas. The work addresses the transactional relationships between parent and child, and child and toy, and sets up a complex economy in which it is difficult to tell if the currency is love or guilt. Somewhere along the line, these objects have been abandoned, allowing Kelley to transform the orphaned handicrafts into a dense morass of unrequited affection.

The shrine-like collection of half-melted candles in the pendant work, The Wages of Sin, appears almost as an altar to teen angst and might imply a child’s rite of passage into the adult world, filled with labor, debt, remorse, and atonement.

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America Is Hard to See

Guarded View

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MIKE KELLEY (1954-2012), MORE LOVE HOURS THAN CAN EVER BE REPAID AND THE WAGES OF SIN, 1987

Mike Kelley, More Love Hours than Can Ever Be Repaid and Wages of Sin, 1987

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Explore works from this exhibition
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On the Hour

America Is Hard to See

Guarded View

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MIKE KELLEY (1954-2012), MORE LOVE HOURS THAN CAN EVER BE REPAID AND THE WAGES OF SIN, 1987

Mike Kelley, More Love Hours than Can Ever Be Repaid and Wages of Sin, 1987

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection