America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

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Course of Empire

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Indecipherable Asian lettering and graffiti has overtaken the industrial edifice crouched beneath an acrid sky in Ed Ruscha’s painting The Old Tool & Die Building from his series Course of Empire. This title owes to Thomas Cole’s mid-nineteenth century cycle of allegorical canvases chronicling the rise of a triumphant civilization and its decline into war and desolation. In Ruscha’s ominous 2004 retelling, an American factory has fallen into the hands of new owners and been defaced by vandals, serving as an emblem of a changed world order. 

The first decades of the twenty-first century have seen American society and politics increasingly fractured and the country’s once dominant stature challenged around the globe. Artists have registered these changes, whether responding to the tragedy of September 11, 2001; wars in the Middle East; the financial calamity of 2008; or the ravages of climate change as evidenced by Hurricane Katrina. Dystopian imagined landscapes abound in this chapter where Ruscha’s canvas joins Mark Bradford’s tempestuous panorama and Carroll Dunham’s post-apocalyptic wilderness, while other works contain more specific responses to real world events. 

Yet amid this anxiety and skepticism, hopeful glimmers emerge. The country’s first black president shares a tender moment with his wife in Elizabeth Peyton’s painting Barack and Michelle, and Glenn Ligon’s neon relief summons a country that is, in his words, at once a “shining beacon” and a “dark star.” Ligon rotated each of the black-painted letters in the word “AMERICA” to face the wall so that it simultaneously addresses us and turns away. His splintering icon poetically captures the ambivalent sense of identification and alienation that the country so often inspires. A sense of gleaming promise is shadowed by doubt.

Below is a selection of works from this chapter.

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ADAM MCEWEN (B. 1965), UNTITLED (JEFF), 2004

Adam McEwen, Untitled (Jeff), 2004

In America Is Hard to See

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Adam McEwen, Untitled (Jeff), 2004

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Narrator: Adam McEwen made a series of obituaries for people who were unmistakably alive—including Bill Clinton, Kate Moss, and Jeff Koons.

Adam McEwen: My name is Adam McEwen and I live in New York. I used to have a job, a part-time job in London, writing obituaries for a big British newspaper and these are written in a style of that paper. So the only lie is in the first line where it says so-and-so who has died, age 47 or whatever. Everything else in these pieces is written from press clippings, from books, from the internet, everything else has been published, so it’s up for grabs as fact, as history. 

Obviously I really don’t know anything about any of these people, the only thing I know about them for sure is that they’re going to die and I don’t mean that in a morbid sense. I just mean it’s the only reliable fact, its a parameter, so for me its useful, it’s like a tool…First of all it allows me to hook the viewer in with the fact that this person isn’t dead. Secondly it allows me to make this art piece, that when this person dies, this art piece is going to become redundant because an obituary very like this is going to be published. 

It’s very hard to find people who I find interesting and admire in a sort of strange way, and at the same time have their flaws visible. 

They are narratives of people making decisions throughout their lives. Generally you’re making decisions you are hoping to make the right decision, so for me these are about the idea that you can make a decision.

In this series of faux New York Times-style obituaries, Adam McEwen excavates America’s obsession with the lives—and deaths—of public figures and celebrities. McEwen wrote or commissioned these near-pitch-perfect newspaper obits, which he then formatted on a computer and photocopied, enlarged, scanned, and printed as large-scale black-and-white photographs. The one detail missing from them all, however, is the cause of death. McEwen chose to profile people who are immediately identifiable, so the viewer would know that they are, in fact, not yet dead. This gives the macabre works the uncanny quality of premonition. According to McEwen, his obituaries are “homages to their subjects, all of whom are unable to finally control their (real/fictional) personae as they spin out into the world.”

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