America Is Hard to See | Art & Artists

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

Course of Empire

Course of Empire

Floor 5

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.

Garnering critical attention from the outset of her career, Dana Schutz is known for cartoonish figures and narrative infused compositions that draw upon the history of painting. Often depicting dystopic scenarios, though with wit and humor, Schutz’s paintings have featured “self-eaters”—figures who devour their own hands, arms, chests, and even faces—as well as a character named Frank, whom the artist imagines in a scenario in which she is the last painter alive and he the last man on Earth. Alluding to the works of René Magritte, Pablo Picasso, and Philip Guston, many of Schutz’s compositions can be interpreted as investigations of what painting means today—bodies being broken apart, dissected, augmented, digested, and reassembled evoke the very process of constructing a painting. Likewise, her pointed references to celebrity, technology, history, and current events bring to light the varied topics painting can address in the twenty-first century.

Her 2012 drawing Building the Boat While Sailing shares its title with a large scale painting she made prior to the work on paper. The figures in both are busily engaged in various activities, from useful actions like sawing wood to less industrious ones like squirting water from one’s mouth. Schutz based the overall composition on Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, an iconic early nineteenth-century painting of a shipwreck featuring—not unlike her own work—living and dead bodies in various states of distress.

Excerpted from Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection (2015), p. 340. Published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; distributed by Yale University Press.

A lithograph of a hooded silhouette with the text "Abu Ghraib"

Mark Bradford often builds the surface of his collaged paintings, including Bread and Circuses, using materials salvaged from the street. A self-proclaimed “paper chaser,” the artist gathers printed matter from his South Central Los Angeles community—advertisements, posters, newsprint, and notices that implicitly reference the livelihood of the neighborhood—and recombines the fragments into multilayered abstractions.

The dense, gridded passages and more open areas—demarcated by silver paper—resemble an indecipherable map of a tangled, urban landscape. Noting that he was influenced by Leonardo da Vinci’s Deluge drawings of cataclysmic storms inundating a city, Bradford has linked the work to the contemporary devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina, which had devastated the Gulf Coast just two years before he made the painting.

The work’s title invites a political reading. Translated from a Latin idiom, it refers to the provision of food and entertainment intended to divert the common people’s attention from problems such as poverty, disenfranchisement, and lack of social mobility.

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Paul Chan, 1st Light, 2005

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Narrator: The artist Paul Chan.

Paul Chan: The whole piece functions with the idea that if you walk into the room, where this piece is, you’ll look on the floor to this, non-square of light, and think to yourself, at some point, where is the window? That there’s a window, somewhere in this room that’s casting light onto this floor.

Narrator: The work is on a fourteen-minute loop. For most of that time, you will see things floating upwards—a subway train, a bicycle, and an ipod, for example. But at some moments, there are human bodies falling down. For many, these figures recall the sight of tumbling victims from the World Trade Center attacks. They also perhaps suggest a tradition of apocalyptic images in western art. In Christian doctrine, the apocalypse is associated with the rapture, or the ascension of believers to heaven. Here we see humans fall to earth and it is our possessions—everyday objects—that rise upwards.

Paul Chan: You must be a fool to not see the era of the twenty-first century infused with a kind of religiosity, whether from Eastern or Western. This idea of a need for a kind of order that comes from high above us, right? So when people talk about it in terms of apocalypse, I think it’s not necessarily because of the piece, but because the air in which we live now. . .the language is there, and so we grab it. I’ve certainly been invested in looking into, or using, or even perhaps hallucinating, why it is that we’re reaching for this, higher order.

Paul Chan’s 1st Light spills across the gallery floor like sunlight through an unseen window. As the color of the looped digital projection cycles from dawn to dusk, a silhouette of a utility pole tangled with wires emerges. Shadows of objects—a cell phone, moped, bicycle wheel, sunglasses—rise into the air as if drawn aloft by some mysterious force. Birds fly across the scene before bodies suddenly begin falling downward. These figures unmistakably evoke the memory of men and women jumping from the burning World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001.

This narrative also suggests the story of the Christian Rapture—when the faithful will be pulled heavenward and spared the wrath of God—but in reverse. Here our possessions ascend while their owners tumble toward an unknown fate. Chan’s melancholy video provides no definitive statement about religion in contemporary society but envelops us in a meditative environment of reverie shadowed by calamity.

Carroll Dunham worked on and off for six years to complete Large Bather (quicksand), a painting that draws from a wide range of genres: classical landscape painting, the long art-historical tradition of nude bathers, and popular cartoons. Dunham began the painting at the very center of the canvas, with the bather’s genitalia (a possible allusion to Gustave Courbet’s scandalous nude painting from 1866, The Origin of the World); he filled out the rest of her body and the landscape from there. The painting’s focal point is also in part a reflection on our own origins as humans. As the artist explained, the painting has “nothing to do with pornography”; rather, it has “more to do with my mother and the kind of universality of that: we all have one.” Dunham has placed this figure in a setting that is both appealing and foreboding—a tropical paradise filled with felled trees, trampled flowers, and an ominous pool of quicksand.

Rooster and chicken statues on top of colorful tablets.

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.

This photograph comes from Zoe Leonard’s Analogue, a series of 412 photographs, taken over the course of a decade, that capture urban neighborhoods in a state of economic transition. The artist began the project by walking the streets of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a neighborhood that historically has been a home to working-class and immigrant communities, but is growing increasingly gentrified. There she documented numerous storefronts—like the clothing shop seen here—both open for business and shuttered behind metal grates.

Leonard took each image with a vintage 1940s Rolleiflex camera, underscoring the photographs’ elegiac tone. Like the disappearing family-run shops with hand-painted signs that recur in Analogue, this once-familiar camera has been supplanted by digital models. “New technology is usually pitched to us as an improvement,” she has explained. “But progress is always an exchange. We gain something, we give something else up.”

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Glenn Ligon, Rückenfigur, 2009

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Narrator: The painted neon sculptures depicting the word “America” in this gallery were inspired by the opening of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.” Glenn Ligon spoke to us about it on the occasion of his retrospective at the Whitney in 2011.

Glenn Ligon: The first neons that I did were at the moment when our economy was booming, but we were in a war in Afghanistan. Well, we're still in a war with Afghanistan, but since then Barack Obama, the first black President of the United States, was elected.

Narrator: Ligon began to think of America in terms of dichotomies, contrasts, and light and dark. Neon, sometimes painted black to seal in the light, became his new medium. In this work, Rückenfigur, it takes a moment to realize that Ligon hasn’t spelled AMERICA backward. Each individual letter is flipped to face the wall. But because the “A”, the “M,” and the “I” are symmetrical, they still seem to face out towards us.

Scott Rothkopf is the Nancy and Steve Crown Family Curator and Associate Director of Programs at the Whitney.

Scott Rothkpof: And that's one of the really interesting things about this piece, I think, this idea of America, this country, this word facing away from us but at the same time addressing us. There's a sense of vulnerability in this piece—you see the back of this sign in a way, these wires that dangle down. You see the fragile connections between these letters, which I think suggests the sense of America, this country, as a confederacy that's both united and sometimes divided. And I think that all of those things, in a way, function metaphorically for where this country is at this moment.

Adam Weinberg: This work’s title, Rückenfigur, is a German term that describes a figure in a painting who is seen from the back contemplating a grand landscape. In many ways, Glenn Ligon puts us in that position—through his work we are confronted with the vast and contradictory landscape that is America today.

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Adam McEwen, Untitled (Jeff), 2004

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Narrator: Adam McEwen made a series of obituaries for people who were unmistakably alive—including Bill Clinton, Kate Moss, and Jeff Koons.

Adam McEwen: My name is Adam McEwen and I live in New York. I used to have a job, a part-time job in London, writing obituaries for a big British newspaper and these are written in a style of that paper. So the only lie is in the first line where it says so-and-so who has died, age 47 or whatever. Everything else in these pieces is written from press clippings, from books, from the internet, everything else has been published, so it’s up for grabs as fact, as history.

Obviously I really don’t know anything about any of these people, the only thing I know about them for sure is that they’re going to die and I don’t mean that in a morbid sense. I just mean it’s the only reliable fact, its a parameter, so for me its useful, it’s like a tool…First of all it allows me to hook the viewer in with the fact that this person isn’t dead. Secondly it allows me to make this art piece, that when this person dies, this art piece is going to become redundant because an obituary very like this is going to be published.

It’s very hard to find people who I find interesting and admire in a sort of strange way, and at the same time have their flaws visible.

They are narratives of people making decisions throughout their lives. Generally you’re making decisions you are hoping to make the right decision, so for me these are about the idea that you can make a decision.

In this series of faux New York Times-style obituaries, Adam McEwen excavates America’s obsession with the lives—and deaths—of public figures and celebrities. McEwen wrote or commissioned these near-pitch-perfect newspaper obits, which he then formatted on a computer and photocopied, enlarged, scanned, and printed as large-scale black-and-white photographs. The one detail missing from them all, however, is the cause of death. McEwen chose to profile people who are immediately identifiable, so the viewer would know that they are, in fact, not yet dead. This gives the macabre works the uncanny quality of premonition. According to McEwen, his obituaries are “homages to their subjects, all of whom are unable to finally control their (real/fictional) personae as they spin out into the world.”

Aleksandra Mir’s Osama comprises two large-scale, cartoonlike versions of New York Post and Daily Newscovers. When Mir made these works in 2007, Osama bin Laden was infamous for his role as the mastermind behind the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Originally published in 1998, these two newspaper issues feature eerily prescient headlines, as the Al Qaeda leader warned in the wake of U.S. attacks in Afghanistan and Sudan the “worst is yet to come,” and “the war has just started.”

Mir’s drawings come from a project titled Newsroom 1986–2000. After scouring ten thousand New York Postand Daily News issues, the artist selected groupings based on recurring topics. Then, for a six-week period in 2007, Mir turned a Manhattan gallery into an imitation newsroom, studio, and performance space, where she worked publicly with a group of other artists to make drawings that undercut the fleeting nature of tabloid news.

The title of Ed Ruscha’s The Old Tool & Die Building suggests that the industrial space pictured here—decorated with signage in a mix of altered, nonsensical Korean and archaic Mandarin characters, an unidentifiable corporate symbol, and graffiti—was once a place where machinists manufactured parts.

The Old Tool & Die Building is part of Course of Empire—a group of five paintings that revisit the subjects of Ruscha’s 1992 series Blue Collar. In those black-and-white canvases, Ruscha had pictured the industrial buildings once common to the American urban landscape. The newer paintings, rendered in color, capture old sites repurposed, abandoned, enlarged, or made obsolete.

Ruscha named the series after a group of paintings by the Hudson River School artist Thomas Cole (1801–1848). Cole’s The Course of Empire(1833–36) traces the transformation of an imagined civilization from an Edenic state close to nature, through the rise of culture, to a dominating Empire, and then on to decline and ruin. Although Ruscha’s coolly removed depictions do not editorialize on their subjects, like Cole’s works they chronicle the unrelenting development and the inevitable cycles of human civilizations.

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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

Course of Empire

DANA SCHUTZ (B. 1976), BUILDING THE BOAT WHILE SAILING, 2012

RICHARD SERRA (B. 1939), ABU GHRAIB, 2004

MARK BRADFORD (B. 1961), BREAD AND CIRCUSES, 2007

PAUL CHAN (B. 1973), 1ST LIGHT, 2005

CARROLL DUNHAM (B. 1949), LARGE BATHER (QUICKSAND), 2006-12

NICOLE EISENMAN, ACHILLES HEEL, 2014

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

ZOE LEONARD (B. 1961), CLOTHING PALACE, 1999, PRINTED 2001

GLENN LIGON (B. 1960), RÜCKENFIGUR, 2009

ADAM MCEWEN (B. 1965), UNTITLED (JEFF), 2004

ALEKSANDRA MIR (B. 1967), OSAMA, 2007

EDWARD RUSCHA (B. 1937), THE OLD TOOL & DIE BUILDING, 2004

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

Course of Empire

DANA SCHUTZ (B. 1976), BUILDING THE BOAT WHILE SAILING, 2012

RICHARD SERRA (B. 1939), ABU GHRAIB, 2004

MARK BRADFORD (B. 1961), BREAD AND CIRCUSES, 2007

PAUL CHAN (B. 1973), 1ST LIGHT, 2005

CARROLL DUNHAM (B. 1949), LARGE BATHER (QUICKSAND), 2006-12

NICOLE EISENMAN, ACHILLES HEEL, 2014

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

ZOE LEONARD (B. 1961), CLOTHING PALACE, 1999, PRINTED 2001

GLENN LIGON (B. 1960), RÜCKENFIGUR, 2009

ADAM MCEWEN (B. 1965), UNTITLED (JEFF), 2004

ALEKSANDRA MIR (B. 1967), OSAMA, 2007

EDWARD RUSCHA (B. 1937), THE OLD TOOL & DIE BUILDING, 2004

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection