America Is Hard to See | Art & Artists

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

Love Letter From The War Front

Six color images of people in various scenes.

Love Letter From The War Front

Floor 5

During the 1980s and 1990s, the AIDS epidemic caused nearly half a million deaths in the United States, becoming one of the most searing issues in American life and politics. The artistic community lost thousands, while even more friends, lovers, survivors, and family members faced lives transformed by grief, fear, indignation, and struggle with illness. Many artists made activist work bravely aimed at AIDS awareness and support for people fighting the disease. Donald Moffett’s He Kills Me, for example, lambasted President Ronald Reagan’s failure to recognize the epidemic. Other artists, such as Robert Mapplethorpe, Andreas Serrano, and David Wojnarowicz, became embroiled in the culture wars of the late eighties and early nineties, as religious and political conservatives objected to their work, with its frank and sometimes challenging subject matter.

Taken together, the works in this chapter, however, offer a more intimate and poetic meditation on the AIDS crisis and the creative community it devastated. Some, made before the discovery of the HIV virus in 1984, were created by artists picturing other artists who were also their lovers, rivals, and friends. Mark Morrisroe’s sexually assertive self-portrait appears with his classmate David Armstrong’s tender rendition of his boyfriend, while Armstrong himself figures in their friend Nan Goldin’s stirring diaristic slideshow. The human body appears fragile, mysterious, and unknowable in Robert Gober’s disembodied wax leg and in Kiki Smith’s chilling print of an ovum surrounded by protective cells. The era’s overwhelming sense of loss is poignantly encapsulated in Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s photographic puzzles, which cling together while threatening to fall apart. One pictures a fragment of a haunting love letter from Gonzalez-Torres to his companion Ross Laycock. By the end of the 1990s, both men had died, along with most of the artists featured here, but through their art their memory remains.

Below is a selection of works from this chapter.

An orange and white target on the left and a picture of Reagan on the right with the text "He Kills Me."

In 1987, Donald Moffett created this poster and pasted it up on walls throughout New York City. It was also used in demonstrations staged by the activist organization ACT UP (AIDSCoalition to Unleash Power). The poster aggressively took issue with then-President Ronald Reagan’s failure to respond to the rapidly escalating AIDS crisis. It was only in 1987, after years of silence on the topic, that Reagan uttered the word “AIDS,” by which point the disease had taken more than forty thousand lives in the United States. Moffett’s graphic combination of a bull’s-eye target, photographic image, and the words “He Kills Me” succinctly convey the sentiments of many at the time: that the government’s inaction and indifference had directly resulted in unnecessary deaths.

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Martin Wong, Big Heat, 1988

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Narrator: This 1988 painting by artist Martin Wong is called Big Heat. Andrew Castrucci was a friend of the artist. During the 1980s, he and Wong were both residents of the Lower East Side.

Andrew Castrucci: I knew him as a character of the neighborhood. He used to walk around with this, the firemen's uniform, actually. So he was kind of very theatrical. Martin lived, I believe on Attorney Street in a tenement there and he did have an obsession and love for, for bricks.

The tenements were beautiful to Martin, no matter how empty it was or, or so forth. It was like a Roman ruin or a Greek ruin or an Egyptian ruin, the pyramids. What Martin was part of, what I was part of, we were trying to hold on to. . .the whole tradition of what the Lower East Side was about. The diversity of it. . .It's very gentrified now and so forth.

Artists are constantly redefining what beauty is. So I think this is just another perspective of redefining beauty—the kissing firemen. It certainly celebrates gay life, but it's also, I think, more abstract than that. It's just about human contacts, somehow. I mean it's part of the nature of the city is this beautiful chaos, somehow. And I really see this in this painting even though it's very calm and still.

Sue Coe’s message in Aids and the Federal Government is grim and unambiguous: the AIDS epidemic—personified in dozens of lifeless bodies sprawled on the ground—was neglected by the country’s leaders, symbolized by the US Capitol Building looming at the top of the image, and the cropped, smirking face of an apparent politician or anchorman on a television screen in the foreground. Coe suggests that American military involvement in the Persian Gulf following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 came at the expense of addressing the domestic health crisis, which the etching’s caption identifies as the true enemy. The image’s threatening sky, austere palette, and severe figural renderings reinforce its ominous sentiment, and evoke the charged agendas and stark representational modes of art historical antecedents such as social realism and German Expressionism.

British-born, Coe moved to the United States in 1973 and worked as a freelance newspaper and magazine illustrator at periodicals including the New York Times and Time, and her art evinces a journalistic concern with truth telling and straightforward communication. Motivated by what she has described as “the idea that art can be used to speak for those that cannot,” her paintings, drawings, prints, and mixed-media works involve extensive research and have investigated social and political injustices, such as apartheid, wartime torture, sweatshop labor, and cruelty to animals. Coe’s art embodies activism; she hopes that her moving images—often disseminated through publications—will not only provoke emotional responses but also galvanize protest and positive change.

Excerpted from Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection (2015), p. 98. Published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; distributed by Yale University Press.

An installation of a leg sticking out of a wall with a wax candle sticking out of the knee.

In the late 1970s photographer Nan Goldin began to document her life, recording friends, lovers, relatives, and herself. The resulting color snapshots capture moments of tenderness, pleasure, and intimacy, but these works also chronicle the harsh effects of drug use, squalid living conditions, and the physical traces of abuse. Unlike documentary photographers, who observe communities from an outsider’s position, Goldin is deeply entwined with her subjects: “This is my party,” she has explained. “This is my family, my history.”

Goldin first presented the accumulating photographs as live slideshow performances in downtown New York bars, clubs, and alternative art spaces. Loading her slides into the projector carousel, she conflated public with private by displaying what she called “the diary I let people read.” In 1981 she named the still-evolving project The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (after the song from Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera) and arranged the slides into loose categorical groupings—women looking into mirrors, people at clubs, empty interiors. She timed the progression to a soundtrack of pop songs, reggae music, blues, and operatic arias, each underscoring various emotional states that emerge as the narrative opens up to issues of gender, sexuality, and love. Goldin completed the Ballad in the mid-1990s, explaining that “stories can be rewritten, memory can’t. If each picture is a story, then the accumulation of these pictures comes closer to the experience of memory, a story without end.” A deeply personal work, Goldin’s Ballad nonetheless strikes a universal chord as it demonstrates the human need for connection.

Excerpted from Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection (2015), p. 147. 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

Love Letter From The War Front

ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE (1946-1989), AMERICAN FLAG, 1977

DONALD MOFFETT (B. 1955), HE KILLS ME, 1987

MARK MORRISROE (1959-1989), UNTITLED, 1981, PRINTED 1984

KIKI SMITH (B. 1954), BLACK FLAG, 1989

MARTIN WONG (1946-1999), BIG HEAT, 1988

DAVID ARMSTRONG (1954-2014), FRENCH CHRIS, RUE ANDRÉ ANTOINE, 1980

SUE COE (B. 1951), AIDS AND THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT, 1990

ROBERT GOBER (B. 1954), UNTITLED, 1991

NAN GOLDIN (B. 1953, THE BALLAD OF SEXUAL DEPENDENCY, 1979-96

FELIX GONZALEZ-TORRES (1957–1996), “UNTITLED” (LOVE LETTER FROM THE WAR FRONT), 1988

PETER HUJAR (1934-1987), DAVID LIGHTING UP, 1985

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection

On the Hour

America Is Hard to See | Art & Artists

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

America Is Hard to See | Art & Artists

Exhibition works

Love Letter From The War Front

ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE (1946-1989), AMERICAN FLAG, 1977

DONALD MOFFETT (B. 1955), HE KILLS ME, 1987

MARK MORRISROE (1959-1989), UNTITLED, 1981, PRINTED 1984

KIKI SMITH (B. 1954), BLACK FLAG, 1989

MARTIN WONG (1946-1999), BIG HEAT, 1988

DAVID ARMSTRONG (1954-2014), FRENCH CHRIS, RUE ANDRÉ ANTOINE, 1980

SUE COE (B. 1951), AIDS AND THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT, 1990

ROBERT GOBER (B. 1954), UNTITLED, 1991

NAN GOLDIN (B. 1953, THE BALLAD OF SEXUAL DEPENDENCY, 1979-96

FELIX GONZALEZ-TORRES (1957–1996), “UNTITLED” (LOVE LETTER FROM THE WAR FRONT), 1988

PETER HUJAR (1934-1987), DAVID LIGHTING UP, 1985

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection