America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

All

23 / 23

Previous Next

Course of Empire

23

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.

Back

4 / 12

Previous Next

PAUL CHAN (B. 1973), 1ST LIGHT, 2005

Paul Chan, 1st Light, 2005

In America Is Hard to See

0:00

Paul Chan, 1st Light, 2005

0:00

Narrator: The artist Paul Chan.

Paul Chan: The whole piece functions with the idea that if you walk into the room, where this piece is, you’ll look on the floor to this, non-square of light, and think to yourself, at some point, where is the window? That there’s a window, somewhere in this room that’s casting light onto this floor.

Narrator: The work is on a fourteen-minute loop. For most of that time, you will see things floating upwards—a subway train, a bicycle, and an ipod, for example. But at some moments, there are human bodies falling down. For many, these figures recall the sight of tumbling victims from the World Trade Center attacks. They also perhaps suggest a tradition of apocalyptic images in western art. In Christian doctrine, the apocalypse is associated with the rapture, or the ascension of believers to heaven. Here we see humans fall to earth and it is our possessions—everyday objects—that rise upwards.

Paul Chan: You must be a fool to not see the era of the twenty-first century infused with a kind of religiosity, whether from Eastern or Western. This idea of a need for a kind of order that comes from high above us, right? So when people talk about it in terms of apocalypse, I think it’s not necessarily because of the piece, but because the air in which we live now. . .the language is there, and so we grab it. I’ve certainly been invested in looking into, or using, or even perhaps hallucinating, why it is that we’re reaching for this, higher order. 

Paul Chan’s 1st Light spills across the gallery floor like sunlight through an unseen window. As the color of the looped digital projection cycles from dawn to dusk, a silhouette of a utility pole tangled with wires emerges. Shadows of objects—a cell phone, moped, bicycle wheel, sunglasses—rise into the air as if drawn aloft by some mysterious force. Birds fly across the scene before bodies suddenly begin falling downward. These figures unmistakably evoke the memory of men and women jumping from the burning World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001.

This narrative also suggests the story of the Christian Rapture—when the faithful will be pulled heavenward and spared the wrath of God—but in reverse. Here our possessions ascend while their owners tumble toward an unknown fate. Chan’s melancholy video provides no definitive statement about religion in contemporary society but envelops us in a meditative environment of reverie shadowed by calamity.

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection

View 648 works

On the Hour

A 30-second online art project:
Maya Man, A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City

Learn more about this project

Learn more at whitney.org/artport

On the Hour projects can contain motion and sound. To respect your accessibility settings autoplay is disabled.