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

5 / 12

Previous Next

CARROLL DUNHAM (B. 1949), LARGE BATHER (QUICKSAND), 2006-12

Carroll Dunham (b. 1949). Large Bather (quicksand), 2006–2012. Polyurethane and pigment and pencil on linen, 96 1/8 × 119 1/4in. (244.2 × 302.9 cm) Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Director’s Discretionary Fund, the Painting and Sculpture Committee, and an anonymous donor 2014.40. © Carroll Dunham; courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels

Carroll Dunham worked on and off for six years to complete Large Bather (quicksand), a painting that draws from a wide range of genres: classical landscape painting, the long art-historical tradition of nude bathers, and popular cartoons. Dunham began the painting at the very center of the canvas, with the bather’s genitalia (a possible allusion to Gustave Courbet’s scandalous nude painting from 1866, The Origin of the World); he filled out the rest of her body and the landscape from there. The painting’s focal point is also in part a reflection on our own origins as humans. As the artist explained, the painting has “nothing to do with pornography”; rather, it has “more to do with my mother and the kind of universality of that: we all have one.” Dunham has placed this figure in a setting that is both appealing and foreboding—a tropical paradise filled with felled trees, trampled flowers, and an ominous pool of quicksand.

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.