America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

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During the 1980s and 1990s, the AIDS epidemic caused nearly half a million deaths in the United States, becoming one of the most searing issues in American life and politics. The artistic community lost thousands, while even more friends, lovers, survivors, and family members faced lives transformed by grief, fear, indignation, and struggle with illness. Many artists made activist work bravely aimed at AIDS awareness and support for people fighting the disease. Donald Moffett’s He Kills Me, for example, lambasted President Ronald Reagan’s failure to recognize the epidemic. Other artists, such as Robert Mapplethorpe, Andreas Serrano, and David Wojnarowicz, became embroiled in the culture wars of the late eighties and early nineties, as religious and political conservatives objected to their work, with its frank and sometimes challenging subject matter.

Taken together, the works in this chapter, however, offer a more intimate and poetic meditation on the AIDS crisis and the creative community it devastated. Some, made before the discovery of the HIV virus in 1984, were created by artists picturing other artists who were also their lovers, rivals, and friends. Mark Morrisroe’s sexually assertive self-portrait appears with his classmate David Armstrong’s tender rendition of his boyfriend, while Armstrong himself figures in their friend Nan Goldin’s stirring diaristic slideshow. The human body appears fragile, mysterious, and unknowable in Robert Gober’s disembodied wax leg and in Kiki Smith’s chilling print of an ovum surrounded by protective cells. The era’s overwhelming sense of loss is poignantly encapsulated in Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s photographic puzzles, which cling together while threatening to fall apart. One pictures a fragment of a haunting love letter from Gonzalez-Torres to his companion Ross Laycock. By the end of the 1990s, both men had died, along with most of the artists featured here, but through their art their memory remains.

Below is a selection of works from this chapter.

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Martin Wong, Big Heat, 1988

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Narrator: This 1988 painting by artist Martin Wong is called Big Heat. Andrew Castrucci was a friend of the artist. During the 1980s, he and Wong were both residents of the Lower East Side.

Andrew Castrucci: I knew him as a character of the neighborhood. He used to walk around with this, the firemen's uniform, actually. So he was kind of very theatrical. Martin lived, I believe on Attorney Street in a tenement there and he did have an obsession and love for, for bricks.

The tenements were beautiful to Martin, no matter how empty it was or, or so forth. It was like a Roman ruin or a Greek ruin or an Egyptian ruin, the pyramids. What Martin was part of, what I was part of, we were trying to hold on to. . .the whole tradition of what the Lower East Side was about. The diversity of it. . .It's very gentrified now and so forth.

Artists are constantly redefining what beauty is. So I think this is just another perspective of redefining beauty—the kissing firemen. It certainly celebrates gay life, but it's also, I think, more abstract than that. It's just about human contacts, somehow. I mean it's part of the nature of the city is this beautiful chaos, somehow. And I really see this in this painting even though it's very calm and still.

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America Is Hard to See

Love Letter From The War Front

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MARTIN WONG (1946-1999), BIG HEAT, 1988

Martin Wong, Big Heat, 1988

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Explore works from this exhibition
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On the Hour

America Is Hard to See

Love Letter From The War Front

21

MARTIN WONG (1946-1999), BIG HEAT, 1988

Martin Wong, Big Heat, 1988

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection