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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RACHEL HARRISON (B. 1966), CLAUDE LEVI-STRAUSS, 2007

Rooster and chicken statues on top of colorful tablets.
Rooster and chicken statues on top of colorful tablets.

Rachel Harrison, Claude Levi-Strauss, 2007. Wood, chicken wire, polystyrene, cement, acrylic, taxidermically preserved silver-laced Wyandotte hen and Black Minorca rooster with attached label and mount, USPS Priority Mail cardboard box, and Sharp UX-B20 Fax machine cardboard box; 67 × 82 × 25 in. (170.2 × 208.3 × 63.5 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from Warren and Allison Kanders 2008.15a-f

Claude Lévi-Strauss is one of nine sculptures that Rachel Harrison exhibited in 2007 alongside fifty-seven portraits dealing with the theme of representing the human subject. Harrison titled each sculpture after a famous man (ranging from historical figures such as John Locke and Amerigo Vespucci to contemporary celebrities like Johnny Depp and Tiger Woods). The exhibition was titled If I Did It after a book by O. J. Simpson, in which he offers a “hypothetical” description of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. In the two-part Claude Lévi-Strauss—named for the renowned French anthropologist and ethnologist—Harrison stacked a pair of rectangular orange-red and green bases on U.S. postal and fax machine boxes; on top of the bases, a stuffed hen and rooster face each other. Through this seemingly incongruous combination of formal and symbolic elements, Harrison both alludes to the Structuralist theories of her work’s namesake and composes anthropomorphic forms that suggest properties of the standing body, such as uprightness and balance.

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On the Hour

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Maya Man, A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City

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