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America in the Mirror - Norman Rosenthal


Made in America - Meghan Dailey

USA TODAY

America in the Mirror

Norman Rosenthal

'Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?' These immortal questions, asked by Paul Gauguin in the title of his 1897-8 masterpiece now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, were never so pertinent as they are today, and most especially as far as that great nation, the United States of America, is concerned. Still the only true superpower, despite the rise of China and other nations, the USA seems very much to determine the political and economic agendas of the rest of the world, both for better and for worse. Its policies and judgements, not to mention its cultural influence, are still decisive.

What therefore of the visual arts, for that is what concerns us here? The remarkable collector Charles Saatchi has now decided to give his attention to young artists working in the USA in the post-9/11 world. Why is he doing this after a period during which he concentrated on art being produced in Britain - the world of the Young British Artists and of Sensation - and in Europe, most especially Germany? What has changed after a decade in which - with some notable exceptions, among them Matthew Barney - little that was new seemed to be emerging from the United States? Los Angeles, of course, has long been a hotbed of creativity, but its 'stars', that unholy trinity of Charles Ray, Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy, are figures of the 1980s who provoked debate in their own ways throughout the 1990s and continue to do so today. Older masters, such as Cy Twombly and Richard Serra, have carried on making outstanding work, taking the opportunity brought about by wild and arguably excessive market conditions to realise ambitions beyond the wildest dreams of their youth.

The current phenomenon of the international art industry, with its proliferation of art fairs, biennales, art magazines, private galleries and exhibition spaces in virtually every corner of the globe, means that it is impossible to keep up with everything. Just two decades ago the smaller world of art knew everything about itself, and it was possible to have an overview. After the demise of the school of Paris, the centre of the art world was the United States and especially New York, from the time of Jackson Pollock's drip paintings through the movements of both Pop art and Minimalism. Some even detected a CIA plot behind Abstract Expressionism. One movement followed another, as artists fought for their place in the limelight, even as the art world was often suffused with melancholy, particularly at the time of the Vietnam War, which so divided America, and after the onset of AIDS. Everybody concerned with the visual arts needed to find their way to New York, which as well as being the centre of creativity was also the centre of distribution. They came from London, Paris or Dusseldorf - to speak only of Western Europe - either to settle or at least to visit regularly and exhibit. As Joseph Beuys said of the USA, in another immortal title, 'I like America and America likes me', and in a memorable postcard image of 1974 (fig. 1) he prophetically described the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York as Cosmos and Damian. The Iron Curtain has disappeared but, as we now know, it has been replaced not by The End of History but by 9/11 and its horrendous and divisive consequences.

What has young America's reaction been to this moment? In art, as in all other human activity, the torch must be passed on or the flame will die. In this selection of the work of young artists, each confronts not only their own fundamental existential questions, but also global poverty and inequality and population migrations, not to mention the gigantic environmental problems that confront the USA and the world as a whole. An artist is of course only a singular being, who has to find in his own time - as Beuys did in an exemplary manner - personal myth and personal language, grounded perhaps in politics or in contemporary sexual mores. Each must have a sense of time and place rooted in recent art history as well as the ubiquitous ambience of contemporary popular music, film and the endlessly proliferating forms of new electronic media. Yet it is interesting to find that the old-fashioned worlds of painting and sculpture refuse to go away.

'Mapping America' might have been another title for this exhibition and book. Just as Jasper Johns transformed the American flag into an art icon of particular immediacy, we see Aleksandra Mir, Jules de Balincourt and Marc Handelman looking for ways of investing the Stars and Stripes with their own agendas, re-reading it and turning it upside down or evoking moments in their country's history, such as the draft, the baby boom, the space race, the bicentennial or the wonderful world of flower power. Mark Bradford explores in paint the density at the heart of the typical American city seen from the air by night, ever-expanding circles of suburbs at its periphery. Art becomes life and life becomes art. There are spectacular and significant moments of mapping here that introduce a sense of political edge and anger mixed with nostalgia. America is a divided country. Jules de Balincourt entitles another provocative and highly charged, angry painting People Who Play and the People Who Pay, depicting the archetypal Miami beach hotel scene, the white middle classes lounging by the pool, complete with palm trees, while in the bedrooms in the background black servants passively make up their beds. In the land of the free there is forever segregation. For Rodney McMillian the independence of the Supreme Court from the Administration is questionable, its collapsed columns and pediment resembling the Roman Empire in imperial decline, not to speak of decadence. Even the propaganda surrounding the Unionist position in the American Civil War of 1861, when the difference between right and wrong was for so long perfectly clear, is called into question by Marc Handelman, who reappraises national identity, ideology and morality in the contemporary political climate.

Can values in both art and society be regarded as relative? Certainly the younger artists in America today seem to be asking questions about society to which there are no straight answers. It may be, of course, that there were no straight answers to these questions in the past, but now the questions tend to be more directly put. Josephine Meckseper's brilliant image on the cover of this book on the one hand suggests the glamorous world of advertising and radical chic, and on the other an anarchic provocation. We live in a world in which, rightly or wrongly, cigarette smoking is regarded as more anti-social and dangerous than the many far greater evils that surround America and the rest of the world and about which nothing is done. The same artist sees the ubiquitous shop window as an arena in which aesthetics merge with ideologies, and empty politics and the absurd symbols of lifestyle to which all of us succumb, whether in our choice of designer underwear or whatever else assails us in Fifth Avenue or Regent Street, overwhelm us. The whole world has become a homogenised shopping experience, with the same brands in every high street. In contrast, say, to the 1970s and the demonstrations against the Vietnam War, even today's political protests seem both weak and, strangely, tarnished by commodification. Maybe the United States today are best represented by Adam Cvijanovic's gravity-defying representations of suburbia mingling with the science-fiction fantasy of such Hollywood movies as E.T., in which dreams send normality into orbit. In the cinema or on the TV screen, fantasy becomes reality. In Cvijanovic's painting, wrapped around a room - a device used back in the early 1970s by James Rosenquist - the result seems to be a contemporary surrealism that represents some kind of 'general' truth about American art at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

The absurdity and beauty to be found in the art of Magritte and Dalí take on many new forms. Surrealism can recall a lost world of psychedelia and a drugged incandescence of imagery and colour, in which, for example, Daniel Hesidence's wild fantasy horse with an over-extended member passes through a dream-infused landscape, or Inka Essenhigh's surreally extended passengers desperately attempt to escape from some subway horror, each figure, male or female, atomised, chaotically concentrating only on themselves, oblivious to others, each concerned only with self-preservation. But surrealism is not only to be found in the city. It exists in Erick Swenson's chilling landscape as a white deer freezes to death in the ice, or in Ellen Altfest's hyper-realist depiction of ivy on the studio floor, or of tumbleweed - itself perhaps a symbol of nature finding its own space within the city - with a female sexual connotation obviously and directly the opposite of a depiction by the same artist of male genitalia. Even abstraction is not without its surreal and hyper-real aspect, veering between Dan Walsh's image of a kitchen tile and Ryan McGinness's Baroque decor to the delicate, spatial, colouristic dynamics of Mark Grotjahn in which space and contrary vanishing points lend a moment almost of relaxation to this world of constantly shifting imagery. Kristin Baker's crystalline, almost futurist visions of Formula One racing evoke movement and a faith in technology and speed. Kelley Walker gives us collaged images that seem rather to constitute a world of neo-Pop art derived in part from Andy Warhol, whose images of disasters find an echo here in works that still depict a world of racial violence, as white policemen confront black youths in a triptych of black-and-white imagery splattered with dark and white chocolate. Pop art meets Abstract Expressionism with brutal intensity within the aesthetic context of the art gallery. Therein lies one level of paradox and ambiguity. Everything is confused, and anarchy appears to rule, in Barnaby Furnas's violent yet strangely beautiful paintings. In Duel (2004), a spectacular light show seems to present us with fireworks that can also be read as blood and guts to produce a complex, highly colourful design. Banks Violette casts the world of the hard rock band in icy salt as a spectacular souvenir of a performance that in fact took place recently in a London art gallery, but which one could hear but not witness - a kind of Black Sabbath souvenir that evokes the legendary but now little-known artist Cady Noland, daughter of the target painter Kenneth Noland. Cady Noland was an artist of the 1980s who ceased to make art but whose influence on its development in America was, and remains, of huge significance. Terence Koh's drum set and chandelier meticulously covered in plaster and black paint suggest quite literally the black arts. Black, white and gold are the most erotically charged colours for him, the white neon sign of 'Big White Cock' evoking the legendary, now defunct, gay club in New York's Lower West Side. Dan Colen shows us that a world of graffiti still exists, and explores another generation of youth culture that sprays rocks and walls with simple slogans like 'RAMA LAMA DING DONG', or questions in a fanzine the validity and meaning of the image itself. 'What makes us think we can capture the pain, the loss, the pride and the confusion - this complexity - into a 4 x 5 glossy!' The graffiti in Colen's work becomes the poignant cover of an artist's book that can be picked up in an art or fashion shop on the Lower East Side. Gay politics, women's politics, Islamic politics (as with Huma Bhabha) and black politics (referring in the case of Wangechi Mutu not just to black America but also to Africa), all have their echo here. There is also a strong strain of new figurative expressionism in the paintings of Dana Schutz - perhaps inspired by German painting of the 1960s and 1970s, but whose psychotic imagery is clearly American in its obsessions with Krazy Kat cartoon-like characters - and the sculpture of John Pylypchuk, finding its inspiration in the primitive American outback.

In this short introduction, an attempt has been made to evoke the work of some of the many artists included here, though by no means all. As in each generation, every artist of note remains in his or her work an individual. The best of them are highly innovative but also aware of the culture of the past and the culture all around them. If today's world occasionally has cause to despair of America, it still remains a great country in which the arts of all kinds are flourishing. It is to be hoped that the holdings of a passionate and remarkable collector who never takes his eye off the ball will make a significant contribution to the debate about all that is best and beautiful about the United States today. Hope for the future of any culture must lie in its young people's potential for creativity, as I believe is made manifest here.

Copyright © 2006 Royal Academy of Arts, London.

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