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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Barbara Kruger studied at Syracuse University and then Parsons School of Design, where her instructors included the photographer Diane Arbus and the graphic designer Marvin Israel, art director at the fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar at the time. She began her career in commercial art, designing book covers and working as an editorial designer at Condé Nast on publications such as Mademoiselle. After initiating her fine art practice with abstract paintings and woven wall hangings, Kruger arrived at her signature aesthetic by the early 1980s—the juxtaposition of provocative catchphrases (slogans she appropriates or formulates herself), printed in bold blocks of text, with found and often vintage photographic imagery. These graphic combinations of text and image, often bordered in red, dramatize—and call into question—the effect of the contemporary mass media in shaping identity, desire, and structures of power. Kruger implicates her audience through the use of neutral pronouns such as you and we, and viewers must work to untangle the often ambiguous relationship between her texts and images. Untitled (We Don’t Need Another Hero) pairs the lyric from a 1985 Tina Turner song with a photograph of children performing stereotypical adult gender roles: the boy flexes his bicep and makes a macho expression while the girl, in her dress and pigtails, is his eager admirer.

Adapted from Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection (2015), p. 212. 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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BARBARA KRUGER (B. 1945), UNTITLED (WE DON’T NEED ANOTHER HERO), 1987

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On the Hour

America Is Hard to See

Racing Thoughts

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BARBARA KRUGER (B. 1945), UNTITLED (WE DON’T NEED ANOTHER HERO), 1987

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection