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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Six color images of people in various scenes.

In the late 1970s photographer Nan Goldin began to document her life, recording friends, lovers, relatives, and herself. The resulting color snapshots capture moments of tenderness, pleasure, and intimacy, but these works also chronicle the harsh effects of drug use, squalid living conditions, and the physical traces of abuse. Unlike documentary photographers, who observe communities from an outsider’s position, Goldin is deeply entwined with her subjects: “This is my party,” she has explained. “This is my family, my history.”

Goldin first presented the accumulating photographs as live slideshow performances in downtown New York bars, clubs, and alternative art spaces. Loading her slides into the projector carousel, she conflated public with private by displaying what she called “the diary I let people read.” In 1981 she named the still-evolving project The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (after the song from Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera) and arranged the slides into loose categorical groupings—women looking into mirrors, people at clubs, empty interiors. She timed the progression to a soundtrack of pop songs, reggae music, blues, and operatic arias, each underscoring various emotional states that emerge as the narrative opens up to issues of gender, sexuality, and love. Goldin completed the Ballad in the mid-1990s, explaining that “stories can be rewritten, memory can’t. If each picture is a story, then the accumulation of these pictures comes closer to the experience of memory, a story without end.” A deeply personal work, Goldin’s Ballad nonetheless strikes a universal chord as it demonstrates the human need for connection.

Excerpted from Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection (2015), p. 147. 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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NAN GOLDIN (B. 1953, THE BALLAD OF SEXUAL DEPENDENCY, 1979-96

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On the Hour

America Is Hard to See

Love Letter From The War Front

21

NAN GOLDIN (B. 1953, THE BALLAD OF SEXUAL DEPENDENCY, 1979-96

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection