America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

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Distracting Distance

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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Wade Guyton and Cory Arcangel seize directly on digital technologies like inkjet printing or outdated video games but purposefully misuse them to new aesthetic ends.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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R. H. QUAYTMAN (B. 1961), DISTRACTING DISTANCE, CHAPTER 16, 2010

R.H. Quaytman, Distracting Distance, Chapter 16, 2010

In Human Interest and America Is Hard to See

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R.H. Quaytman, Distracting Distance, Chapter 16, 2010

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Narrator: The work you see here, by R.H. Quaytman, isll part of a larger group of paintings, each of which the artist considers "a chapter."  The chapters relate to the place where the work will first be shown. This one was first shown in the 2010 Whitney Biennial, which took place in the Upper East Side museum designed by Marcel Breuer. Quaytman’s work hung next to one of the building’s distinctive windows.

R. H. Quaytman: Because I really have always loved those Breuer windows. And they also refer to a concept I use a lot in my work, which is pushing the picture plane back into one point perspective.

And then I started thinking about just the history of the Whitney. And I went to the library. I did some research on Breuer, the collection. In the end, I just saw this painting of the Hopper, Woman in the Sun. And I've always just really admired this painting a lot because I felt that the woman in it was very powerful and authoritative, and you wonder what she's thinking more than you wonder how she looks. And also to me [it] is the quintessential Whitney collection painting.

Narrator: Quaytman photographed a friend and colleague next to the Breuer window, in a composition that strongly recalls the Hopper painting. Quaytman then silkscreened the image onto gessoed wood panels. 

R. H. Quaytman organizes her paintings into “chapters” that are influenced by the place where they are first displayed. Quaytman conceived of Distracting Distance, Chapter 16—a twenty-nine-panel work, one panel of which is on view here—for the 2010 Whitney Biennial. Her compositional starting point was the Museum’s permanent collection and its former location at 945 Madison Avenue.

The chapter’s central motif, the trapezoidal windows that are a central feature of the building designed by architect Marcel Breuer, recurs in several of the panels. In addition, Quaytman restaged the Whitney’s painting A Woman in the Sun (1961) by Edward Hopper, a canvas that features a nude female figure standing before a bedroom window. Quaytman photographed fellow artist K8 Hardy naked in front of Breuer’s angular window, posed in profile like the model in Hopper’s work. “My idea,” Quaytman has explained, “was to set up a series of reflections between the viewer, the space and history of the Whitney, and American painting.”

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