America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

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Glossy, stagy, and buzzing with the energy of the street and the media machine, a potent strain of art in the 1980s both reflected and challenged the ethos of the era under President Ronald Reagan. An economic upswing reversed the downturn of the 1970s, though its benefits were felt unequally during a period of political conservatism that valorized conspicuous consumption and Wall Street speculation. Children of the American baby boom, the artists who came of age at this time were the first generation reared on television and the impersonal affect of Pop art. Much of their work relied on their media savvy and new theories of representation that questioned originality and authenticity in a world awash with recycled images and styles.

The sculptures of Jeff Koons, Nam June Paik, and Charles Ray on view in this chapter all incorporate readymade products or the display devices that sell them, from mannequins to lighted cases. These artists conflated the allure of consumer products and art at a time when a booming market led paintings and sculptures to be increasingly seen as commodities, a point emphasized by Louise Lawler’s auction house photograph of Andy Warhol’s take on Marilyn Monroe. Other heroines star in Sarah Charlesworth’s and Dara Birnbaum’s appropriations from art history and television, respectively, while even Keith Haring’s and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s graffiti-tinged paintings play with branding and the zip and glow of the screen.

Below is a selection of works from this chapter.

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A still from a video featuring Linda Carter as Wonder Woman with her arm raised and sparks flying out of it

Dara Birnbaum’s video art consists of sophisticated deconstructions of American media, especially those of broadcast television. Utilizing appropriated imagery and sound, her works are both formal compositions as well as politicized commentaries on how gender, sexuality, and other social norms are perpetuated through the codes of mainstream media culture. Birnbaum’s understanding of the aesthetic underpinnings of social systems grew out of her studies in architecture and urban planning at Carnegie Mellon University and then in painting at the San Francisco Art Institute. She turned to video as a political and aesthetic tool in the mid-1970s.

One of the earliest video works to appropriate broadcast footage, Birnbaum’s Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman is a subversive analysis of the popular 1970s television program. By looping scenes of the title character transforming repeatedly from anonymous secretary into superheroine, the artist vividly exposes an instance of female objectification and gender hierarchies: “This is the image of a woman made by men. . . . I did not want to undo the pleasure [of the image], but it was brought to a very strong visceral level. My hope was that . . . it would empty the signification of it.” Further articulating the construction of this female archetype, Birnbaum concludes the video with the song “Wonder Woman in Discoland”—its suggestive lyrics scrolling on the screen. In addition to its presentation at the Kitchen and on a monitor in a hair salon window, the video aired in 1979 as a public-access cable program opposite a CBS broadcast of the real Wonder Woman show.

Excerpted from Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection (2015), p. 67. Published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; distributed by Yale University Press.

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America Is Hard to See

Racing Thoughts

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DARA BIRNBAUM (B. 1946), TECHNOLOGY/TRANSFORMATION: WONDER WOMAN, 1978-79

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On the Hour

America Is Hard to See

Racing Thoughts

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DARA BIRNBAUM (B. 1946), TECHNOLOGY/TRANSFORMATION: WONDER WOMAN, 1978-79

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Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection