America Is Hard to See | Art & Artists

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

Raw War

Raw War

Floor 6

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the United States underwent a dramatic social and cultural upheaval. The sunny veneer and conformism of the immediate postwar years gave way to skepticism and calls for social justice, particularly on behalf of women, racial minorities, and others left behind. As in previous decades, such as the 1930s, artists bravely addressed pressing issues in their work as a form of protest and call for change. This chapter shows them tackling topics including voting rights in Danny Lyon’s photographs of Selma, Alabama; the exploitation of California farmworkers in Milton Glaser’s Don’t Eat Grapes; and the relationship between American patriarchal impulses and military action in Vietnam in May Stevens’s Big Daddy Paper Doll. We find images of the slain Martin Luther King Jr., civil rights activist Angela Davis, a ghoulish President Richard Nixon as well as the smiling portraits gathered by Howard Lester of the 242 soldiers killed during a single week in 1970 in the Vietnam War. The United States, as Bruce Nauman’s blistering 1971 palindrome suggests, was literally raw with war—on many fronts.

Other works in this chapter offer a more oblique take on a troubled time. The surreal bodies presented by Chicago artists Jim Nutt, Christina Ramberg, and Karl Wirsum suggest distortion, violence, and bondage, while Nam June Paik and Earl Reilback’s television sets each transmit images that are more eerie than entertaining. And On Kawara’s somber painting July 4, 1967, mutely marks the date on which it was made—Independence Day of a year when the world felt on fire.

Below is a selection of works from this chapter.

Associated with the Chicago Imagists as well as the Hairy Who group of artists, Christina Ramberg is best known for her discomfiting paintings of female torsos completed in the 1970s. Rendered in profile and tightly cropped by the edges of the canvas to create a sense of voyeuristic intimacy, the disembodied figures are bound, corseted, and bandaged in outfits that variously recall 1950s lingerie, sadomasochistic bondage, or the bionic prosthetics of the future. Recounting the childhood experience of watching her mother dress for parties, Ramberg would wear a foundation garment referred to as a “merry widow,” and recalled that “the paintings have a lot to do with this, with watching and realizing that these undergarments totally transform a woman’s body. . . . I thought it was fascinating . . . in some ways, I thought it was awful.”

In Istrian River Lady, a figure wears a long-sleeved bustier covered in what appear to be scales and trimmed with hair. The bustier squeezes the chest to an unnatural point. Soft curves of flesh swell over the hard edges of the outfit, and three loose stitches are visible where a seam is bursting at the figure’s shoulder. Ramberg’s paintings betray her conflicted reaction to her mother’s undergarments: it is unclear whether the garments are sources of power or restraints that limit it. Rejecting readings of her work as either feminist or erotically fetishistic, Ramberg shifted her subject in the late 1970s from the recognizable female form to an ambiguous, androgynous cyborg.

Excerpted from Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection (2015), p. 320. Published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; distributed by Yale University Press.

At first glance, the Day-Glo palette, lively composition, and exaggerated figures of Peter Saul’s Saigon seem cartoon-like, even whimsical. But Saul employed this cartoonish approach in the service of a biting critique of American policy during the Vietnam War. He depicts the trussed figure of a voluptuous Vietnamese girl labeled “Innocent Virgin;” nearby, American GIs drink Coca-Cola as they rape and dismember her family. In the canvas’s lower corners, the words “White Boys Torturing and Raping the People of Saigon: High Class Version”—painted in stylized lettering—literally spell out Saul’s condemnation of the war’s hypocrisies.

Painter, poet, and political activist May Stevens imbues her work with a sociopolitical consciousness. In the wake of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, Stevens developed a symbolic figure that would feature prominently in much of her work of the late 1960s and early 1970s: Big Daddy. According to Stevens, Big Daddy is modeled after her father, “who represented to me an authoritarian and closed attitude . . . towards culture, towards politics, towards Black people and towards Jews. He was a person who had stopped thinking when he was twenty and hadn’t opened his mind to anything since.”

Big Daddy Paper Doll features the outline of a naked, bespectacled, and mustachioed man holding a bulldog in his lap. Exuding a sexual and militarized dominance, his head appears bullet-shaped and phallic. His wrinkly features echo those of his canine companion, a visual allusion implying bestial alpha-male instincts. Stevens presents him as a mere paper doll with four potential guises—a masked executioner, an army sergeant, a policeman, and a butcher with a bloodstained apron, each one a manifestation of violence and power. Presenting these roles as interchangeable costumes hints that the same white patriarchal spirit runs through a wide range of American institutions. The representation of Big Daddy as a paper doll, a widely available commercial product, also ties the painting’s style and content to Pop art, and asks the viewer to consider how authoritarian mindsets are being packaged and sold to the American public.

Excerpted from Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection (2015), p. 368. Published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; distributed by Yale University Press.

While Judith Bernstein was an art student at Yale University during the Vietnam War, she adopted the image of the phallus as a central motif in her work, based in part on graffiti she found in men’s bathrooms on campus. She was attracted to the bold defiance of graffiti and to the masculine pompousness of tagging property with images of genitalia. In her drawings she transformed penises into guns, caped superheroes, giant screws, and flagpoles. In an era when many feminist artists were looking at their own bodies for subject matter, Bernstein’s virile, in-your-face phallus drawings were shocking. By forcing the male administration to address and accredit these works, Bernstein challenged the masculine culture that dominated Yale.

Vietnam Garden is one of a series of antiwar drawings that attacked the macho militarism of US foreign policy during the war. A group of erect phalluses capped with American flags rises up from the crest of a hill; a cross on one and a Star of David on another suggest that they are stand-ins for tombstones, with the steel-wool pubic hair covering their bases recalling flowers or plants left by mourners. This oil-stick-and-charcoal drawing retains the informal style and belligerence of the bathroom graffiti. Describing the use of humor in her work to address political issues, Bernstein has said: “When something is funny, you laugh. . . . It’s almost like an ejaculation, so you get a release by laughing at it, by laughing with the viewer when you see it; but it’s dead serious.”

Excerpted from Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection (2015), p. 65. Published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; distributed by Yale University Press.

On Kawara worked on his Today series for almost fifty years, until late 2013. Each work consists of the date of the day he made the work, hand-painted in white lettering against a solid background. If he was traveling abroad, he wrote the date in the language and syntax of the country he was visiting. Kawara stored each finished work individually in a cardboard box that he almost always lined with selections from that day’s local newspaper. The box for this painting, for example, contains the front page of a newspaper with a headline about Jayne Mansfield’s funeral, and an image of President Lyndon B. Johnson meeting his newborn grandson.

On their own, each of Kawara’s date paintings stands as a testament to the present, to being in a particular place and time. In its totality—Kawara eventually completed roughly three thousand—the Today series can be viewed as a meditation on living and dying, and on the significance of even single days and fleeting events.

In Lee Lozano’s early 1960s graphite drawing, inanimate objects protrude from a rectangular, grinning face. Its crooked teeth grip a cigar or crayon, yet other accessories defy bodily logic: instead of a neck, a pipe and faucet extend from the disembodied head; instead of eyes, a triangular opening is pierced by the crank of a brace drill, positioned so that its handle serves as ear while its jaws become a phallic nose. The inconsistency of graphite marks, which range from subtle chiaroscuro to violent scribbles, enhances the strangeness of the scene. This grotesque, Surrealist collision of human and mechanical forms is one of many Lozano produced in the years immediately following her move to New York around 1960. Made in pencil, wax crayon, pastel, and paint, these drawings stage disturbing, humorous, and perverse encounters between body parts—especially breasts, phalluses, and orifices—and a variety of handheld tools and household objects.

Lozano’s artistic career was cut short by a self-imposed exile from the art world in 1972, but during the nearly dozen years she spent in New York she produced a complex and provocative body of work. Her charged, mechanomorphic drawings can be seen as a comment on a turn to industrial techniques of art making, while also anticipating the gender politics of the late 1960s. A subsequent series of large-scale paintings and drawings depicts tools in a more hard-edged style that nonetheless retains suggestive anthropomorphism, while her language-based works of the late 1960s place her at the vanguard of Conceptualism.

Excerpted from Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection (2015), p. 238. Published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; distributed by Yale University Press.

Two people holding signs that say "Register now for freedom now" and "Register to vote"

The son of European émigrés, self-taught photographer Danny Lyon traveled south to join the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Selma, Alabama, in 1962. Working with the civil rights organization for two years, he became its first staff photographer and documented its activities, including sit-ins and marches, as they campaigned across the South for racial equality. In images that combine the unflinching realism of street photographers such as Robert Frank with the intertwining of reporter and participant that marked New Journalism, Lyon helped publicize the group’s efforts and, in the process, produced a visual record of a crucial period in the history of the civil rights movement.

Two SNCC Workers, Selma (which was published in a 1964 documentary book about the movement) pictures a pair of SNCC workers encouraging voter registration, which had been made difficult for African Americans in the South by obstacles such as literacy tests and administrative delays. The imperatives of the men’s signs, the visual rhythm created by their matching stances, and the striking tonal contrasts in the image make for a dramatic composition. Indeed, the moment Lyon captured was a tense one: soon after this shot was taken, the workers were arrested—an incident that Lyon also caught on camera.

Adapted from Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection (2015), p. 241. Published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; distributed by Yale University Press.

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View 646 works

America Is Hard to See | Art & Artists

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

America Is Hard to See | Art & Artists

Exhibition works

Raw War

CHRISTINA RAMBERG (1946-1995), ISTRIAN RIVER LADY, 1974

PETER SAUL (B. 1934), SAIGON, 1967

MAY STEVENS (B. 1924), BIG DADDY PAPER DOLL, 1969

JUDITH BERNSTEIN (B. 1942), VIETNAM GARDEN, 1967

MILTON GLASER (B. 1929), DON’T EAT GRAPES, 1969

ON KAWARA (1933-2014), JULY 4, 1967, 1967

HOWARD LESTER (B. 1944), ONE WEEK IN VIETNAM, 1970

HOWARD LESTER (B. 1944), ONE WEEK IN VIETNAM, 1970

LEE LOZANO (1930-1999), UNTITLED (GRINNING FACE WITH EAR/CRANK), C. 1962

BRUCE NAUMAN (B. 1941), RAW WAR, 1971

CLAES OLDENBURG (B. 1929), SMOKE STUDIES DURING THE BURNING OF CHICAGO, 1968

DANNY LYON (B. 1942), TWO SNCC WORKERS, SELMA, 1963

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On the Hour

America Is Hard to See | Art & Artists

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

America Is Hard to See | Art & Artists

Exhibition works

Raw War

CHRISTINA RAMBERG (1946-1995), ISTRIAN RIVER LADY, 1974

PETER SAUL (B. 1934), SAIGON, 1967

MAY STEVENS (B. 1924), BIG DADDY PAPER DOLL, 1969

JUDITH BERNSTEIN (B. 1942), VIETNAM GARDEN, 1967

MILTON GLASER (B. 1929), DON’T EAT GRAPES, 1969

ON KAWARA (1933-2014), JULY 4, 1967, 1967

HOWARD LESTER (B. 1944), ONE WEEK IN VIETNAM, 1970

HOWARD LESTER (B. 1944), ONE WEEK IN VIETNAM, 1970

LEE LOZANO (1930-1999), UNTITLED (GRINNING FACE WITH EAR/CRANK), C. 1962

BRUCE NAUMAN (B. 1941), RAW WAR, 1971

CLAES OLDENBURG (B. 1929), SMOKE STUDIES DURING THE BURNING OF CHICAGO, 1968

DANNY LYON (B. 1942), TWO SNCC WORKERS, SELMA, 1963

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection