America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

All

17 / 23

Previous Next

“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.

Back

7 / 10

Previous Next

0:00

Paul Pfeiffer, Fragment of a Crucifixion, 1999

0:00

Adam Weinberg: Artist Paul Pfeiffer talks about this video work, entitled Fragment of a Crucifixion (After Francis Bacon).

Paul Pfeiffer: It's an image taken from a commercial video of a basketball game. And it's a moment right after a particular player slam dunks. So he looks into the camera and kind of screams. And that image is digitized and looped and then edited on the computer, so that all the other players on the basketball court are edited out. Actually, all the evidence of the basketball game, all the corporate logos and all of the team jersey numbers are all edited out. And its kind of, you know, indeterminate what he's screaming about, it kind of looks like, a little bit like rage, or it could be some kind of ecstasy or it could be some kind of humiliation.

I thought of it as being in a way somewhat like the treatment of the Pope in Francis Bacon's painting, where the guy's recognizable as the Pope, or as a Pope. But there's something about the gesture that makes it not just the Pope but kind of almost like an archetypal image of a kind of human condition.

It's an amazing spectacle to be in an arena with tens of thousands of people and to have everything focused on this one, what is it, 50 square meter piece of ground, where this drama is going on. Then it's even more intense to think about what that must be like from the court itself, and to be an athlete that's attempting to play a game, and kind of call all of their strength and precision and talent into play while being surrounded completely by cameras and lights and tens of thousands of people screaming. And in a way, there's something about that I think of as being almost an archetypal image of our time.

Paul Pfeiffer, who grew up in the Philippines, studied at the San Francisco Art Institute and at Hunter College in New York, and was a participant in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program (1997–98), is known for video installations that destabilize the viewing experience. Pfeiffer dissects filmed material into clips, modifies it—for example, by erasing figures or elements—and reconstructs it into brief loops that reframe the original scene’s meaning or highlight its iconic nature. Sports, religion, gender identity, and power structures are themes that frequently surface in the work. Pfeiffer’s thirty-second video loop Fragment of a Crucifixion (After Francis Bacon) features basketball player Larry Johnson, centrally framed in the small projected image and trapped in a silent, triumphant scream that accompanies a quick movement between three different positions. The ball, backboard, and other players have been erased from the image, which frames Johnson in an explosion of flashbulbs in front of an audience that seems distant. The athletic moment is removed from and transcends its original context, and Johnson’sroar thus becomes ambiguous, oscillating between triumph and torment. Pfeiffer’s project references the 1950 painting Fragment of a Crucifixion by Francis Bacon, in which the scream of a dying creature suspended from a cross becomes the centerpiece of the work. Pfeiffer’s Fragment of a Crucifixion also has a strong sculptural quality: mounted on a metal armature, the projector emitting the video image becomes a prominent material component, and time itself becomes sculptural in the way it is compressed and formed into a continuously repeating moment.

Excerpted from Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection (2015), p. 303. Published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; distributed by Yale University Press.

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection

View 648 works

America Is Hard to See

Guarded View

17

PAUL PFEIFFER (B. 1966), FRAGMENT OF A CRUCIFIXION (AFTER FRANCIS BACON), 1999

Paul Pfeiffer, Fragment of a Crucifixion, 1999

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection

On the Hour

America Is Hard to See

Guarded View

17

PAUL PFEIFFER (B. 1966), FRAGMENT OF A CRUCIFIXION (AFTER FRANCIS BACON), 1999

Paul Pfeiffer, Fragment of a Crucifixion, 1999

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection