America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

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Get Rid of Yourself

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The two alternating programs on view in this chapter respond to the shifting cultural and political climate of America’s recent past. Program A presents works that cleverly engage forms of popular entertainment, advertising, music, dance, and technology. Works by artists such as Alex Bag, Tony Oursler, and Ryan Trecartin reflect a post-MTV era of lo-fi visual effects and disjointed editing, while those by Loretta Fahrenholz, Luis Gispert, and Jacolby Satterwhite use slick techniques to picture a remixed, science-fiction inflected future.

Program B is organized around politically driven works, which deal with themes including mass media’s role in shaping social and cultural consciousness; the politics of race, gender, and sexual identity; and the potential perils of global capitalism. Get Rid of Yourself, a video by the artist collective Bernadette Corporation, takes the anarchist protests at the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa, Italy, as an opportunity to examine decentralized, anonymous political resistance and its rhetoric. The protesters’ call to “get rid of yourself” speaks to the futility of individual action and the general feeling of instability at the beginning of the new millennium (something that was heightened when the artists were editing the video in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks). Videos by artists like Tala Madani and Richard Serra confront us with their candor, while works by Kevin Jerome Everson, Sharon Hayes, and Wu Tsang address history and memory from more personal perspectives.

These two programs alternate and cycle through each day. Program A is screened first on Mondays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, and Program B is screened first on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays.

Below is a selection of works from this chapter.

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SHARON HAYES (B. 1970), SYMBIONESE LIBERATION ARMY (SLA) SCREEDS #13, 16, 20 & 29, 2003

A woman with short hair staring directly at the camera.
A woman with short hair staring directly at the camera.

Sharon Hayes (b. 1970), still from Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) Screeds #13, 16, 20 & 29, 2003. Four screen video projection, color, sound. Courtesy the artist and Tanya Leighton Gallery

In the video installation Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) Screeds #13, 16, 20 & 29, we see Sharon Hayes’s face looking straight ahead, closely framed against a white backdrop. Hayes recites four of the audiotaped messages recorded by heiress Patty Hearst to her parents and broadcast in the media after her kidnapping in 1974 by the Symbionese Liberation Army, a left-wing revolutionary group. On occasion Hayes’s memory falters, and off-screen participants correct or prompt her with lines from the original transcript before the monologue resumes. The tone of Hearst’s communiqués shifted over the months between the first and the last, as she began collaborating with the SLA, but Hayes’s voice remains affectless, imparting no position on what remains a contested episode in American history.

The SLA Screeds is one of a number of Hayes’s performances, videos, and video installations that take social or political documents from the past as their point of departure. She also has “respoken” addresses by Ronald Reagan and appeared with protest signs from various eras in locations around New York and other international centers. This citing of the past in the present not only draws renewed attention to old sources but also highlights the mechanisms of a text’s transmission, reception, and interpretation over time, and often testifies to stasis as much as change when her sources take on contemporary reverberations and relevance. Equally important, Hayes’s work underscores the performative dimension of public activism and political speech, demonstrating how much of what a message means is determined by how, when, and where it is conveyed.

Excerpted from Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection (2015), p. 170. Published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; distributed by Yale University Press.

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