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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Sue Coe’s message in Aids and the Federal Government is grim and unambiguous: the AIDS epidemic—personified in dozens of lifeless bodies sprawled on the ground—was neglected by the country’s leaders, symbolized by the US Capitol Building looming at the top of the image, and the cropped, smirking face of an apparent politician or anchorman on a television screen in the foreground. Coe suggests that American military involvement in the Persian Gulf following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 came at the expense of addressing the domestic health crisis, which the etching’s caption identifies as the true enemy. The image’s threatening sky, austere palette, and severe figural renderings reinforce its ominous sentiment, and evoke the charged agendas and stark representational modes of art historical antecedents such as social realism and German Expressionism.

British-born, Coe moved to the United States in 1973 and worked as a freelance newspaper and magazine illustrator at periodicals including the New York Times and Time, and her art evinces a journalistic concern with truth telling and straightforward communication. Motivated by what she has described as “the idea that art can be used to speak for those that cannot,” her paintings, drawings, prints, and mixed-media works involve extensive research and have investigated social and political injustices, such as apartheid, wartime torture, sweatshop labor, and cruelty to animals. Coe’s art embodies activism; she hopes that her moving images—often disseminated through publications—will not only provoke emotional responses but also galvanize protest and positive change.

Excerpted from Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection (2015), p. 98. Published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; distributed by Yale University Press.

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America Is Hard to See

Love Letter From The War Front

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SUE COE (B. 1951), AIDS AND THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT, 1990

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On the Hour

America Is Hard to See

Love Letter From The War Front

21

SUE COE (B. 1951), AIDS AND THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT, 1990

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection