America Is Hard to See | Art & Artists

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

Guarded View

Guarded View

Floor 5

“Under the enthusiastic banner of opening up the institutional art world to expansive diversity, the Whitney has in fact perversely narrowed its scope to an almost excruciating degree. The result: Artistically, it’s awful.” Critic Christopher Knight’s review of the 1993 Whitney Biennial was one of many negative appraisals of the exhibition, applauding the unprecedented presence of art by women, ethnic minorities, and gays and lesbians, while decrying the show’s artistic quality and polemical tone. The following year, the Whitney’s Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art proved equally controversial. Now regarded as landmarks, these exhibitions featured many of the artists whose work is on view in this room and the adjoining one: Matthew Barney, Jimmie Durham, David Hammons, Mike Kelley, Karen Kilimnik, Lorna Simpson, Sue Williams, and Fred Wilson. Each of them explores how our identities are shaped by culture as much as by birth, and how categories like race and gender depend on the complicated interaction between how we see and present ourselves and how others see us.

Nearly all of the works here focus on the body as a site of contest, ideology, desire, or disgust. Lorna Simpson and Catherine Opie turn their backs to the camera, challenging our gaze and our ability to classify them as either individuals or types. David Hammons’s use of black hair is both literal and symbolic, while Fred Wilson’s Guarded View confronts us with black figures that serve institutional power but are usually meant to go unseen. Other works dissect how common objects and images inform our sense of self, whether Mike Kelley’s manic accumulation of dolls or Karen Kilimnik’s do-it-yourself take on teenage fandom and feminine power and allure. As critics of the 1993 Biennial lamented the loss of traditional aesthetics at the hands of “political correctness,” these artists forged new and lasting understandings of beauty in relation to both bodies and art.

Below is a selection of works from this chapter.

Playboys (Feminist Movement) is from a series of paintings and drawings that Lutz Bacher based on Playboy magazine illustrations by Alberto Vargas. Vargas painted from his imagination; his nudes are pure fantasy and projection—naughty, available, and almost impossibly voluptuous. They were often paired with gag captions: here Bacher has combined a 1967 image with a text drawn from a 1970 illustration, a statement of women’s empowerment flippantly transformed into a sexually suggestive one-liner.

To make this work, Bacher hired a male commercial painter to re-create the appropriated image on a much larger scale in acrylic paint—a medium that is literally plastic, and which lacks the sensuousness of Vargas’s original watercolors. The shift in scale and material emphasizes the fictional aspect of the figure and recasts the tagline in an ambiguous, ironic light.

Matthew Barney’s films, videos, and sculptural installations examine themes of transformation and the limitations of the human body through an idiosyncratic visual language. In the three-channel video installation DRAWING RESTRAINT 7, part of the DRAWING RESTRAINT series that Barney began in 1987, the artist experimented with forms of self-imposed physical restraint.Barney’s interest in ancient Greco-Roman mythology and the ancient sport of wrestling is apparent throughout—in one scene two mature satyrs fight to remove each other’s horns, while the young satyr, played by Barney, attempts in vain to catch his own tail. The work signals Barney’s abiding interest in physical metamorphosis and the performance of gender roles, and in the process offers a metaphor for the continual struggle to create art.

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David Hammons, Untitled, 1992

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Narrator: Art historian Kellie Jones.

Kellie Jones: Some people describe it as like a tarantula; some kind of animal; some kind of bug; but huge. But if you go close to it, of course, what the main thing about it is that it’s this huge construction that’s made with African American hair, I mean not solid tendrils of hair, but hair that’s been affixed to wires, that’s been strung on wires.

Of course probably the most direct comparison in that case, is dreadlocks.I think it’s just, like I said, a kind of monumental homage to the body. But again, as David usually does, at this point, after the ‘70s, the body is only made reference to, and it’s not a figurative work, necessarily.

David starts out in LA, in the mid sixties, working with a group of artists, African American artists who are kind of right in the middle of the kind of California interest in assemblage that came out of the Beat movement of the fifties and early sixties.

So there’s an African American movement at that time, in the sixties, which is using castoff materials in the same way, but actually with a different slant, in that they’re using materials that have a significance for African American life.

And you know as he always says, you know, these items are free. That’s why I use whatever there’s a lot of that’s free. So he’s used bottle caps. He used hair in the same way, because he goes to barbershops, and this is garbage. This is the refuse that’s thrown away. And he also talks about, particularly in the case of hair, you can think of all the magical properties that it also has as well in so many cultures.

On first glance, David Hammons’s Untitled resembles an overgrown plant or an enormous spider. Closer inspection reveals that the artist made this installation primarily from cut hair, which he collected from African American barbershop patrons and threaded onto bendable wires. He carefully anchored the wires into a collection of twenty smooth rocks and then nestled in other found objects, including beads, feathers, pantyhose, and a hammer.

Just as humans shed hairs, Untitled’s strands and tufts inevitably fall off the wires and scatter among and around the rocks. These remnants offer reminders of the anonymous individuals who contributed to the work, while also evoking natural processes of growth and decay.

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Mike Kelley, More Love Hours than Can Ever Be Repaid and Wages of Sin, 1987

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Narrator: Mike Kelley’s work More Love Hours than Can Ever Be Repaid is made out of stuffed animals, afghans, and other craft objects.

Mike Kelley: They were all used items that I bought at thrift stores and yard sales. And they're all handmade objects. So they're not the kind of objects that would generally be sold—they’re the kind of objects that would be given away.

Narrator: The work’s surface is tightly packed with objects, suggesting an almost compulsive desire to fill the picture plane. Kelley was interested in the huge amount of time it took people to make all of these craft objects.

Mike Kelley: It had an accumulative effect. If you saw these things as representing love, then it was a massive amount of love. If you saw the things as being inducers of guilt or repayment, then it was more than you could ever pay back. So depending on your point of view, you either see it as super-lovable or super-creepy. And you know, so people tend to see it either way. Like, some people are really repulsed by it, and some people love it to death.

Narrator: Kelley paired this work with the piece on the floor, called Wages of Sin. More Love Hours than Can Ever Be Repaid, Wages of Sin is a massive accumulation of a material we don’t usually associate with high art—candle wax.

Mike Kelley: [It’s] like the kind of sculpture that a teenager would make in their pot smoking room or something like that. And by titling it The Wages of Sin, it gives this kind of morbid overtone, you know, some pseudo-ritualistic kind of thing.

Narrator: In the 1960s, many artists became interested in repetition and accumulation as almost mechanical techniques that downplayed the role of individual expression. In More Love Hours than Can Ever Be Repaid and Wages of Sin, Kelley questions that impulse. With the materials he uses, accumulation doesn’t result in just more of the same. Instead, it creates layers of association, feeling, and meaning.

More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid is an assemblage of handmade dolls, stuffed animals, and blankets that Mike Kelley found in thrift stores, stitched together onto blankets, and then attached to canvas. The work addresses the transactional relationships between parent and child, and child and toy, and sets up a complex economy in which it is difficult to tell if the currency is love or guilt. Somewhere along the line, these objects have been abandoned, allowing Kelley to transform the orphaned handicrafts into a dense morass of unrequited affection.

The shrine-like collection of half-melted candles in the pendant work, The Wages of Sin, appears almost as an altar to teen angst and might imply a child’s rite of passage into the adult world, filled with labor, debt, remorse, and atonement.

An installation view of artworks in a gallery.

This installation by Karen Kilimnik references the popular 1960s British television show featuring characters John Steed and Emma Peel as crime-fighting spies. With its amateurish “props”—a tall boot, a faux pearl necklace, a chandelier, and toy swords—and grainy images of the actors, it suggests a haphazard memorabilia collection assembled by an obsessive fan.

In this episode of The Avengers, which was censored in the United States, the protagonists infiltrate a modern-day version of the Hellfire Club, an eighteenth-century secret society of aristocrats who engaged in sadomasochistic sex acts and paganism. These salacious themes, along with the erotic appeal of the fashionable protagonists, unite key points of interest for Kilimnik—glamour, danger, sexuality, and upper-class culture.

Self-Portrait/Cutting uses traditional motifs of portraiture to examine contemporary concerns of queer identity. Large scale and an ornate backdrop traditionally assert the prestige of the sitter, but Catherine Opie’s photograph communicates a more complex relationship to power. Reversing the traditional frontal pose, she instead presents her back to the viewer. Her bare skin functions as a makeshift canvas into which a scalpel-wielding friend has scratched a crude line drawing. The still-bleeding cut depicts two skirted stick figures standing hand in hand next to a small house beneath a puffy cloud—a tranquil scene in radical contrast to the painful means taken to create the image.

Opie has explained that this photograph depicts her “dream for a lesbian domestic relationship,” but her fresh wounds suggest, as she put it, “the contradictions within that wish.”

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Paul Pfeiffer, Fragment of a Crucifixion, 1999

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Adam Weinberg: Artist Paul Pfeiffer talks about this video work, entitled Fragment of a Crucifixion (After Francis Bacon).

Paul Pfeiffer: It's an image taken from a commercial video of a basketball game. And it's a moment right after a particular player slam dunks. So he looks into the camera and kind of screams. And that image is digitized and looped and then edited on the computer, so that all the other players on the basketball court are edited out. Actually, all the evidence of the basketball game, all the corporate logos and all of the team jersey numbers are all edited out. And its kind of, you know, indeterminate what he's screaming about, it kind of looks like, a little bit like rage, or it could be some kind of ecstasy or it could be some kind of humiliation.

I thought of it as being in a way somewhat like the treatment of the Pope in Francis Bacon's painting, where the guy's recognizable as the Pope, or as a Pope. But there's something about the gesture that makes it not just the Pope but kind of almost like an archetypal image of a kind of human condition.

It's an amazing spectacle to be in an arena with tens of thousands of people and to have everything focused on this one, what is it, 50 square meter piece of ground, where this drama is going on. Then it's even more intense to think about what that must be like from the court itself, and to be an athlete that's attempting to play a game, and kind of call all of their strength and precision and talent into play while being surrounded completely by cameras and lights and tens of thousands of people screaming. And in a way, there's something about that I think of as being almost an archetypal image of our time.

Paul Pfeiffer, who grew up in the Philippines, studied at the San Francisco Art Institute and at Hunter College in New York, and was a participant in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program (1997–98), is known for video installations that destabilize the viewing experience. Pfeiffer dissects filmed material into clips, modifies it—for example, by erasing figures or elements—and reconstructs it into brief loops that reframe the original scene’s meaning or highlight its iconic nature. Sports, religion, gender identity, and power structures are themes that frequently surface in the work. Pfeiffer’s thirty-second video loop Fragment of a Crucifixion (After Francis Bacon) features basketball player Larry Johnson, centrally framed in the small projected image and trapped in a silent, triumphant scream that accompanies a quick movement between three different positions. The ball, backboard, and other players have been erased from the image, which frames Johnson in an explosion of flashbulbs in front of an audience that seems distant. The athletic moment is removed from and transcends its original context, and Johnson’sroar thus becomes ambiguous, oscillating between triumph and torment. Pfeiffer’s project references the 1950 painting Fragment of a Crucifixion by Francis Bacon, in which the scream of a dying creature suspended from a cross becomes the centerpiece of the work. Pfeiffer’s Fragment of a Crucifixion also has a strong sculptural quality: mounted on a metal armature, the projector emitting the video image becomes a prominent material component, and time itself becomes sculptural in the way it is compressed and formed into a continuously repeating moment.

Excerpted from Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection (2015), p. 303. Published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; distributed by Yale University Press.

After receiving a BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and an MFAfrom the University of California, San Diego, Lorna Simpson began in the mid-1980s to produce works combining photographs and text that draw on aspects of Conceptual art to consider themes of race, gender, and identity. Although they engage broader contexts of historical memory and visual culture, Simpson’s photo-text tableaux resist easy explication, relying instead on viewers’ interpretations to untangle their enigmatic syntheses of image and language.

2 Tracks, for example, seems to set forth a narrative in its juxtaposition of a photograph of the shoulders and close-cropped head of an African American woman, seen from the back; a pair of flanking photographs of long braids of black hair; and the words back and track, on accompanying plaques. But the relationship between these components remains unclear. The words have literal correlates (the subject’s back and the tracklike braids), but the phrase backtrack, with its connotations of reversal and regression, provokes consideration of additional meanings as African American hair, a favored motif of the artist’s, takes on loaded significance. Simpson frequently pictures her subjects from behind or crops or fragments her images—challenging the presumed objectivity of the photographic medium—and she often invokes systems of counting, indexing, or classification only to violate the order of these typologies. Both formal strategies heighten the ambiguity of her combinations of photographs and text.

Adapted from Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection (2015), p. 353. Published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; distributed by Yale University Press.

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Fred Wilson, Guarded View, 1991

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Narrator: These mannequins are wearing actual uniforms that were worn in the early 1990s by real guards at four New York Museums: the Jewish Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney, and the Museum of Modern Art. (You’ll see that the guards here wear different clothes today.

The uniforms may be easily identifiable, but the faceless, headless figures of the security guards are totally anonymous. They only have one identifying feature, their brown skin.

The artist, Fred Wilson, also worked as a museum guard in college. He remembers how strange it was—people mostly ignored him. He once said, “You’re on display, just like everything else. But, unlike the artwork, you’re invisible.”

This installation reflects a belief that no person should be ignored or treated like they are invisible—not because of their job, and not because of their race.

Fred Wilson’s Guarded Viewaggressively confronts viewers with four black, headless mannequins dressed as museum guards. Each figure wears a uniform, dating to the early 1990s, from one of four New York cultural institutions: the Jewish Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Modern Art. Despite this specificity, the faceless mannequins underscore the anonymity expected of security personnel, who are tasked with protecting art and the public while remaining inconspicuous. It also addresses the racial dynamics of the museum space, in which the guards may be the only people of color present.

This work originally appeared in the Whitney’s then controversial 1994 exhibition Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, which would prove to be a defining moment for the burgeoning movement of identity politics.

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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

Guarded View

LUTZ BACHER (B. 1952), PLAYBOYS (FEMINIST MOVEMENT), 1993

MATTHEW BARNEY (B. 1967), DRAWING RESTRAINT 7, 1993

DAVID HAMMONS (B. 1943), UNTITLED, 1992

MIKE KELLEY (1954-2012), MORE LOVE HOURS THAN CAN EVER BE REPAID AND THE WAGES OF SIN, 1987

KAREN KILIMNIK (B. 1955), THE HELLFIRE CLUB EPISODE OF THE AVENGERS, 1989

CATHERINE OPIE (B. 1961), SELF-PORTRAIT/CUTTING, 1993

PAUL PFEIFFER (B. 1966), FRAGMENT OF A CRUCIFIXION (AFTER FRANCIS BACON), 1999

LORNA SIMPSON (B. 1960), 2 TRACKS, 1990

SUE WILLIAMS (B. 1954), THE HOSE, 1994

FRED WILSON (B. 1954), GUARDED VIEW, 1991

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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

Guarded View

LUTZ BACHER (B. 1952), PLAYBOYS (FEMINIST MOVEMENT), 1993

MATTHEW BARNEY (B. 1967), DRAWING RESTRAINT 7, 1993

DAVID HAMMONS (B. 1943), UNTITLED, 1992

MIKE KELLEY (1954-2012), MORE LOVE HOURS THAN CAN EVER BE REPAID AND THE WAGES OF SIN, 1987

KAREN KILIMNIK (B. 1955), THE HELLFIRE CLUB EPISODE OF THE AVENGERS, 1989

CATHERINE OPIE (B. 1961), SELF-PORTRAIT/CUTTING, 1993

PAUL PFEIFFER (B. 1966), FRAGMENT OF A CRUCIFIXION (AFTER FRANCIS BACON), 1999

LORNA SIMPSON (B. 1960), 2 TRACKS, 1990

SUE WILLIAMS (B. 1954), THE HOSE, 1994

FRED WILSON (B. 1954), GUARDED VIEW, 1991

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection