America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

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Over the past fifteen years, a revolution in digital technologies has fundamentally transformed the way we make and consume images. As with the proliferation of the printing press, camera, and television in earlier centuries, today the spread of the Internet, smartphones, and desktop printers has made it faster and easier to create and share pictures than ever before. Despite these changes, as the works on view here suggest, we live in a transitional age, navigating between screens and books, printed photographs and JPEGs, technologies on the brink of obsolescence and on the rise.

Wade Guyton and Cory Arcangel seize directly on digital technologies like inkjet printing or outdated video games but purposefully misuse them to new aesthetic ends. Kelley Walker scrambles past and present by funneling scans of old Volkswagen advertisements through high-tech modeling software before screenprinting them by hand. This interest in images as artifacts extends to R. H. Quaytman’s restaging of Edward Hopper’s iconic 1961 painting A Woman in the Sun and Christopher Williams’s clinical documentation of a remnant of printed wallpaper by the artist Daniel Buren. These works heighten both the allure and distance of past movements and styles, as does Carol Bove’s carefully curated library of sexual, political, and artistic tracts. Throughout the chapter, images flicker lightly across surfaces or burrow deep within them, come sharply into focus or all but disappear. An atmosphere of quiet contemplation—melancholy, even—reminds us that with each technological or aesthetic advance something is lost or fades away.

Below is a selection of works from this chapter.

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In the early 2000s Carol Bove began making understated assemblages of books, magazines, and curios on pedestals, tables, or wood-and-metal shelving units. The meticulous arrangements position the recent past of art and design—minimalist forms and modernist decor—in the context of the social and political upheavals of the 1960s, a decade that looms large in the cultural imagination and in Bove’s own self-understanding: she was born at its twilight and raised in Berkeley, California, a mecca for the counterculture, student protests, and leftist politics.

Adventures in Poetry exhumes an archive of this period in dog-eared volumes culled from thrift shops and garage sales: Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, Abbie Hoffman’s Revolution for the Hell of It, Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore’s The Medium Is the Massage(splayed open on the bottom shelf), books on the activist Angela Davis, LSD, avant-garde art, and communism, as well as Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon and a monograph on the abstract painter Nicolas de Staël, cracked open at the far left and sitting atop John Giorno’s Cum (the installation takes its title from Giorno’s publisher, Adventures in Poetry). Bove investigates how these juxtapositions might reveal fissures in the canonized narratives that can be plumbed anew or how they might reanimate the objects’ dormant dimensions (for example, the utopianism or sexual emancipation many of them encode), a new poetic meaning emerging from the synthesis. The work’s force emerges not just in examining how we receive cultural artifacts from the past but in imagining how future archaeologists will interpret our present thirty years hence.

Excerpted from Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection (2015), p. 74. Published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; distributed by Yale University Press.

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America Is Hard to See

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CAROL BOVE (B. 1971), ADVENTURES IN POETRY, 2002

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America Is Hard to See

Distracting Distance

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CAROL BOVE (B. 1971), ADVENTURES IN POETRY, 2002

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection