America Is Hard to See | Art & Artists

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

Racing Thoughts

A print of two children with the text "We don't need another hero" across them in a red bar.

Racing Thoughts

Floor 5

Glossy, stagy, and buzzing with the energy of the street and the media machine, a potent strain of art in the 1980s both reflected and challenged the ethos of the era under President Ronald Reagan. An economic upswing reversed the downturn of the 1970s, though its benefits were felt unequally during a period of political conservatism that valorized conspicuous consumption and Wall Street speculation. Children of the American baby boom, the artists who came of age at this time were the first generation reared on television and the impersonal affect of Pop art. Much of their work relied on their media savvy and new theories of representation that questioned originality and authenticity in a world awash with recycled images and styles.

The sculptures of Jeff Koons, Nam June Paik, and Charles Ray on view in this chapter all incorporate readymade products or the display devices that sell them, from mannequins to lighted cases. These artists conflated the allure of consumer products and art at a time when a booming market led paintings and sculptures to be increasingly seen as commodities, a point emphasized by Louise Lawler’s auction house photograph of Andy Warhol’s take on Marilyn Monroe. Other heroines star in Sarah Charlesworth’s and Dara Birnbaum’s appropriations from art history and television, respectively, while even Keith Haring’s and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s graffiti-tinged paintings play with branding and the zip and glow of the screen.

Below is a selection of works from this chapter.

Sarah Charlesworth’s Fear of Nothingpairs a solid black panel with a Roman mask hovering above three geometric forms on a blue ground. The two photographs stage a wry dialogue about the history of art. Here classical antiquity and basic architectural building blocks face off against total abstraction. The “fear” of the title may refer to the mask’s expression although, so exaggerated that it is hard to take entirely seriously, its emotional register remains ambiguous. The reference to “nothing” is no easier to resolve—does that black square stand in for an existential void? Formalist abstraction? Blankness, emotional or otherwise? Charlesworth gave us few clues to resolve these questions.

This work is one in a series, called Objects of Desire. To make the photographs in the series, Charlesworth cut images from fashion magazines, archaeological textbooks, and other publications, arranged them against colorful backgrounds, and rephotographed the resulting collages.

Blue Cell with Triple Conduit consists of a blue square, a red square, and three black lines—all basic elements that an artist might use to compose a hard-edge, geometric abstract painting. Yet, rather than turning to geometry as an abstract language of ideal forms, Peter Halley employed these forms as metaphors for contemporary urban social patterns. The blue square, or “cell,” recalls a prison or other confined space; the black lines, or “conduits,” supply resources, such as electricity or water, to the cells. When combined, the cells and conduits allude to the iconography of the information age—flowcharts, microchips, and electrical circuits. The overlaps and interruptions of his circuit grids suggest the ways that contemporary systems and infrastructures arrange and connect—but also isolate—people in modern society.

Abstract view of a colorful interior, with photographs artwork reproductions, and artworks on the walls; two vases; a faucet; and words embedded in the patterned background.

In the mid-1950s, Jasper Johns began making paintings of recognizable objects and images, including the American flag, targets, and numbers. As the artist explained, these subjects are “things the mind already knows,” things that are “seen but not looked at, not examined.” In the early 1980s Johns started to render perspectival space in his paintings. For Racing Thoughts, Johns used trompe l’oeil illusionism to “tack” and “tape” personal mementos, both depicted and actual, to the painting’s surface. The complex layering of imagery is set in the bathroom at his former home (note the faucet at bottom right and the khaki pants hanging at left). Like the flags and numbers, these new motifs—Johns calls them “fragments of thoughts”—such as a lithograph by Barnett Newman, a pot by the ceramicist George Ohr, and a jigsaw puzzle portrait of his dealer Leo Castelli, would recur in subsequent works.

Adapted from Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection (2015), p. 194-195. Published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; distributed by Yale University Press.

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Jeff Koons, New Hoover Convertibles Green, Blue, New Hoover Convertibles Green, Blue Doubledecker, 1981–87

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Narrator: Artist Jeff Koons.

Jeff Koons: My father was an interior decorator, so I grew up around objects being displayed. And I think that influenced me very much, and that's how I could envision and make a work like this.

I’ve always enjoyed display. And the New Hoover Convertibles, Doubledecker, it's just displaying itself. It’s like an individual displaying themselves. My work I believe is always directed toward what it means to be alive, what it means to be a human being in the world we live. And these are breathing machines. They are like individuals. And the first thing that we do when we come into this world to be alive is to breathe. I also enjoy the sexual quality of the work where some vacuum cleaners may read more feminine, others more masculine. I’ve created some double deckers, it's almost like a family unit, like a momma bear, a poppa bear and a baby bear.

I think the work has a form of visual beauty, but I think that the work’s really more about a philosophical and psychological ideal. These vacuums—these vacuum cleaners are like eternal virgins. They’re brand new. The object has its greatest amount of integrity before it ever participates in the world. Their cords are wrapped up just as they came out of the box. [T]hey've never been turned on. They’re never participated.

I’ve always kind of enjoyed the idea of showing Hoover vacuum cleaners. When

I grew up there were still people coming door to door selling vacuum cleaners.

And I felt that I was kind of doing that with my artwork. I was a young artist saying, look here, I have something, and I'd like to participate. I'd like to get my foot in the door.

Jeff Koons’s series The New, which he began in 1980, captures the era’s fascination with conspicuous consumption. For New Hoover Convertibles, the artist sealed four never-used vacuum cleaners inside a fluorescent-lit vitrine. By placing it in a gallery setting, Koons encouraged the viewer to look at—not through—the transparent plastic conflating systems of commercial display with those of sculptural installation.

The unused vacuums are presented as pristine objects of desire, a quality exaggerated by their otherworldly glow. Yet almost paradoxically, the specimens in these hermetic chambers have inevitably grown dated, suggesting that the relentless quest for the “new and improved” in both art and commerce is inherently overshadowed by the threat of obsolescence.

Barbara Kruger studied at Syracuse University and then Parsons School of Design, where her instructors included the photographer Diane Arbus and the graphic designer Marvin Israel, art director at the fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar at the time. She began her career in commercial art, designing book covers and working as an editorial designer at Condé Nast on publications such as Mademoiselle. After initiating her fine art practice with abstract paintings and woven wall hangings, Kruger arrived at her signature aesthetic by the early 1980s—the juxtaposition of provocative catchphrases (slogans she appropriates or formulates herself), printed in bold blocks of text, with found and often vintage photographic imagery. These graphic combinations of text and image, often bordered in red, dramatize—and call into question—the effect of the contemporary mass media in shaping identity, desire, and structures of power. Kruger implicates her audience through the use of neutral pronouns such as you and we, and viewers must work to untangle the often ambiguous relationship between her texts and images. Untitled (We Don’t Need Another Hero) pairs the lyric from a 1985 Tina Turner song with a photograph of children performing stereotypical adult gender roles: the boy flexes his bicep and makes a macho expression while the girl, in her dress and pigtails, is his eager admirer.

Adapted from Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection (2015), p. 212. Published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; distributed by Yale University Press.

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Sherrie Levine, Knot Paintings, 1987–2002

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Richard Flood: With the Knot Paintings, I always tend to think of them in a funny sort of way as the Levine lexicon, that they are such a perfect representation of something that is incredibly essential in the way that the artist makes her work. I think it's one of those things that is so easy for people to disregard. "Oh, it's a piece of plywood, and look, she's filling in the knots."

Narrator: We spoke to Richard Flood, then chief curator at the New Museum, in 2011.

Richard Flood: They're totally what they are. They're completely pragmatic, and at the same time the pragmatism is what contains the poetry.

Even when you start looking at the varieties of board that Sherrie's used over the years, they're all quite different, and every time she introduces another kind of ply, there's a different rhythm in the wood. There's a different way in terms of how she's picking out those knots to create the pattern, to create the bytes in the story. I mean so you could also think of these really almost as computer notations—it's up to you what they put together. Are they, you know, is it a kind of Morse code for, "Have a great day," or Morse code for, "It's always rougher than you think it's going to be." The possibilities for all of these interpretations are there, and yet they are simply a fact. You know, wood is a fact. A knothole in a piece of wood is a fact. And then Sherrie just does one tiny thing, and the fact becomes a poem.

A sculpture of televisions stacked up to the ceiling.

For his 1982 retrospective exhibition at the Whitney, Nam June Paik assembled this ziggurat-shaped, floor-to-ceiling video installation from forty televisions of decreasing size, stacked one on top of another. Each monitor plays a kaleidoscopic montage of video footage, including material recycled from his earlier single-channel works.

Running through V-yramid are tensions between contrasting poles—for instance, between contemporary rock music and traditional Korean music; the high culture of a religious monument and the low culture of television; and the ancient pyramid form and the cutting-edge technology of the 1980s. Yet Paik did not necessarily see these opposing elements as being in conflict with each other. Indeed, as he noted: “The Egyptian pyramids are the first example of a combination of high art and high tech, because they used many of the cutting-edge technologies of their time.”

A sculpture of a boy wearing a white shirt and overalls.

With his sculpture Boy, Charles Ray transforms a recognizable, familiar subject—a clothed department store mannequin—into an unsettling figure. As in several of his key works, Ray manipulates scale to uncanny ends and uses illusionistic, provocative means to disrupt our customary experiences with ordinary objects. His “boy” stands as tall as a full-grown man (he is in fact the artist’s height), and the figure’s pose is possessed of an adult quality that more readily suggests the stance of a Roman orator than the informal manner of a child. Ray conjures the innocence of youth in the boy’s knee socks, short pants, and porcelain features, yet his realignment of scale and gesture renders that innocence puzzling, even threatening. With his pointing finger, the boy appears confrontational and accusatory, while his fusion of prepubescent and adult features treads close to the taboo territory of childhood sexuality.

A painting with a yellow background, words written and crossed out, and three faces.

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Hollywood Africans is one of a series of paintings that feature images and texts addressing stereotypes of African Americans in the entertainment industry. Several of the work’s notations are autobiographical: he included the digits of his birthdate: 12, 22, and 60; and the trio of figures on the right depicts the artist (far right) with his friends the rap musician Rammellzee and the painter Toxic, with whom Basquiat was traveling to Los Angeles when he made this painting.

Other allusions are historical, referring to representations of African Americans in mass media; phrases such as “Sugar Cane,” “Tobacco,” “Gangsterism,” and “What is Bwana?” evoke the limited roles available to black actors in Hollywood. Basquiat reiterated the notion of exclusion by striking a line through words or phrases in his compositions. The technique, he explained, was actually meant to direct attention to the excised text: “I cross out words so you will see them more; the fact that they are obscured makes you want to read them.”

A still from a video featuring Linda Carter as Wonder Woman with her arm raised and sparks flying out of it

Dara Birnbaum’s video art consists of sophisticated deconstructions of American media, especially those of broadcast television. Utilizing appropriated imagery and sound, her works are both formal compositions as well as politicized commentaries on how gender, sexuality, and other social norms are perpetuated through the codes of mainstream media culture. Birnbaum’s understanding of the aesthetic underpinnings of social systems grew out of her studies in architecture and urban planning at Carnegie Mellon University and then in painting at the San Francisco Art Institute. She turned to video as a political and aesthetic tool in the mid-1970s.

One of the earliest video works to appropriate broadcast footage, Birnbaum’s Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman is a subversive analysis of the popular 1970s television program. By looping scenes of the title character transforming repeatedly from anonymous secretary into superheroine, the artist vividly exposes an instance of female objectification and gender hierarchies: “This is the image of a woman made by men. . . . I did not want to undo the pleasure [of the image], but it was brought to a very strong visceral level. My hope was that . . . it would empty the signification of it.” Further articulating the construction of this female archetype, Birnbaum concludes the video with the song “Wonder Woman in Discoland”—its suggestive lyrics scrolling on the screen. In addition to its presentation at the Kitchen and on a monitor in a hair salon window, the video aired in 1979 as a public-access cable program opposite a CBS broadcast of the real Wonder Woman show.

Excerpted from Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection (2015), p. 67. Published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; distributed by Yale University Press.

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America Is Hard to See | Art & Artists

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

America Is Hard to See | Art & Artists

Exhibition works

Racing Thoughts

INSTALLATION VIEW

SARAH CHARLESWORTH (1947-2013), FEAR OF NOTHING, 1987, PARTIALLY REFABRICATED 2012

PETER HALLEY (B. 1953), BLUE CELL WITH TRIPLE CONDUIT, 1986

JASPER JOHNS (B. 1930), RACING THOUGHTS, 1983

JEFF KOONS (B. 1955), NEW HOOVER CONVERTIBLES, GREEN, BLUE; NEW HOOVER CONVERTIBLES, GREEN, BLUE; DOUBLEDECKER, 1981-87

BARBARA KRUGER (B. 1945), UNTITLED (WE DON’T NEED ANOTHER HERO), 1987

WILLIAM LEAVITT (B. 1941), SPECTRAL ANALYSIS, 1977, PRINTED 2011

SHERRIE LEVINE (B. 1947), LARGE GOLD KNOT: 1, 1987

NAM JUNE PAIK (1932-2006), V-YRAMID, 1982

LARI PITTMAN (B. 1952), UNTITLED #16 (A DECORATED CHRONOLOGY OF INSISTENCE AND RESIGNATION), 1993

CHARLES RAY (B. 1953), BOY, 1992

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT (1960-1988), HOLLYWOOD AFRICANS, 1983

DARA BIRNBAUM (B. 1946), TECHNOLOGY/TRANSFORMATION: WONDER WOMAN, 1978-79

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection

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America Is Hard to See | Art & Artists

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

America Is Hard to See | Art & Artists

Exhibition works

Racing Thoughts

INSTALLATION VIEW

SARAH CHARLESWORTH (1947-2013), FEAR OF NOTHING, 1987, PARTIALLY REFABRICATED 2012

PETER HALLEY (B. 1953), BLUE CELL WITH TRIPLE CONDUIT, 1986

JASPER JOHNS (B. 1930), RACING THOUGHTS, 1983

JEFF KOONS (B. 1955), NEW HOOVER CONVERTIBLES, GREEN, BLUE; NEW HOOVER CONVERTIBLES, GREEN, BLUE; DOUBLEDECKER, 1981-87

BARBARA KRUGER (B. 1945), UNTITLED (WE DON’T NEED ANOTHER HERO), 1987

WILLIAM LEAVITT (B. 1941), SPECTRAL ANALYSIS, 1977, PRINTED 2011

SHERRIE LEVINE (B. 1947), LARGE GOLD KNOT: 1, 1987

NAM JUNE PAIK (1932-2006), V-YRAMID, 1982

LARI PITTMAN (B. 1952), UNTITLED #16 (A DECORATED CHRONOLOGY OF INSISTENCE AND RESIGNATION), 1993

CHARLES RAY (B. 1953), BOY, 1992

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT (1960-1988), HOLLYWOOD AFRICANS, 1983

DARA BIRNBAUM (B. 1946), TECHNOLOGY/TRANSFORMATION: WONDER WOMAN, 1978-79

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection