current exhibition essays  |  reviews  |  view artists' work

America in the Mirror - Norman Rosenthal

USA TODAY

Made in America

Meghan Dailey

In assembling exhibitions of art from a single country, it is perhaps a curator's hope that the essence not just of the individual art works but of the particular society they come from will be elucidated. For all the talk that we and our artists are living in a global culture, in which borders are fluid and ideas move easily, there is still an urge to look for meaning in nationalised groupings of art, as if the idea of a nation implies stability and an unerring commitment to one location or particular set of concerns. At a moment when international opinion of the United States and its government is dismally low, it is notable that American art has been a subject of enthusiastic international interest. Perhaps one can find a fresher, more inclusive, palatable and energetic aspect of America by looking at its cultural products rather than, say, its foreign policy.

Whatever the art in USA Today may say about America, it does reveal much about the state of art-making in the United States. The works chosen demonstrate an eclecticism of styles and approaches. The artists use a range of materials and make paintings, drawings, photographs and installations. They work in different cities, and some have come to America from elsewhere; all are aware that they are working in a 'global' condition, and yet this larger context comprises communities that are also intensely local and self-contained. It is a selection that is particularly youthful in its focus. The works in USA Today range from the hand-made to the coolly precise, the sharply cynical to the unabashedly romantic.

Even within one medium - painting - there are numerous styles, from Daniel Hesidence's swirling forms and iridescent colours, to Inka Essenhigh's distorted figures set in futuristic worlds and Kristin Baker's vigorous depictions of Grand Prix racing that succeed in capturing the dynamism of both painting and mechanised speed. There are abstract approaches, ranging from the gestural (Brian Fahlstrom's expressive landscapes that allude to myriad art-historical sources) to the graphic (Dan Walsh's deceptively simple large-scale paintings of concentric squares that consider fundamental painterly questions of depth and colour).

These paintings are shown in context with some innovative sculptural work, much of which defies easy categorisation. Matthew Monahan’s idiosyncratic, handmade objects, which are displayed like museum pieces in vitrines or on pedestals, recycle his own output as well as ideas and forms from elsewhere. Huma Bhabha uses wood, chicken wire, clay, Styrofoam and plastic, among other materials, to fashion sculpture that suggests ancient relics or architectural fragments. Her Museum Without Walls (2005) is like a cross-section of an architectural model, but also resembles animal remains or a totemic form unearthed from an archaeological site. Terence Koh embraces a darkly romantic sensibility in his wilfully decadent installations. The list of materials for an elaborately adorned crystal chandelier reads like a line of poetry: ‘vegetable matter, human and horsehair, rope from a ship found after midnight, stones, and artist’s blood and shit.’ The strange allure of Koh’s work lies in its material and allusive richness.

Given this multiplicity of approaches and sensibilities of art-making in which no single movement or style dominates, contemporary art can be viewed as a series of distinct, autonomous practices that are linked by their contemporaneousness alone. Twenty years ago, the critic and philosopher Arthur Danto theorised that this pluralism was a condition of 'the end of art', by which he meant not the end of art, but the end of a linear, art-historical mode of thinking, in which one style proceeds to the next. Danto still - and because of the heterogeneity of contemporary art, often extremely convincingly - applies this philosophy to his art writing today. In his review of the 2006 Whitney Biennial, he wrote: 'What [these works] illustrate is the extreme pluralism of contemporary art... To the degree that artistic pluralism mirrors the contemporary world, ours is an open world full of aesthetic opportunities, a condition that only an aesthetic monist would deplore.'1 It might even be said that this pluralism is the new American vernacular.

In the context of USA Today, it's hard not to think of the Biennial, as well as the recent Uncertain States of America, a travelling survey of American art that opened last autumn at the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo. All of these shows, it's worth noting, were organised by Europeans. The thinking behind these exhibitions, particularly the Biennial, was that they would open a window not just onto art made in America, but onto the nation itself. The Whitney curators Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne believed their selection of artists reflected the 'artifice of American culture, in all its complexity' and felt that the works chosen conveyed 'obfuscation, darkness, secrecy and the irrational'.2 They argued that the prevailing mood in America is a dark one; after all, their show was called Day for Night. During their year of travels across the country, the curators of Uncertain States - Daniel Birnbaum, Gunnar Kvaran and Hans Ulrich-Obrist - encountered art with an 'entrepreneurial tendency', with a social rather than economic intention, and ' a strong will to produce politically relevant art across the nation' as well as a 'political rage' and 'a sense of rebellion'.3

Does the art of today indicate the extent of that 'political rage and rebellion'? As I write this, there is a profound sense of dread about the ongoing war in Iraq. Many Americans feel disappointment, disillusionment and embarrassment regarding the Bush administration. Using the language of Pop or Conceptual art, a number of artists engage directly with political subjects, commenting on everything from the failures of the current administration to racial politics and the protest movement, and historical as well as current events. The New Orleans-based artist Ryan Trecartin, one of hundreds of thousands of people displaced by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, made World Wall (2006), a sprawling sculptural bricolage of detritus, in response to the devastation and chaos in the wake of the storm.

Removing the self-consciously artful aspects of art-making allows works to function on another level of expression. Jules de Balincourt's paintings satirise the thorny territory of contemporary politics using simplified forms and bright colours that mimic the visual language of advertising, cartoons and folk art. His U.S. World Studies II (2005), a reinterpretation of the map of the US in which states are repositioned, is a metaphorical portrait of an uncertain nation that has literally been turned upside down. The map, a ubiquitous form that does not bear the burden of originality but is loaded with symbolism, is the perfect vehicle to explore such plays on meaning. As early as the 1950s Jasper Johns used the map (fig. 3) and the American flag (fig. 2) as both sign and image. Aleksandra Mir also uses the outline of the map of the United States for her series 'The Church of Sharpie' (2005). These drawings, on which Mir and a group of assistants worked steadily over the course of a month using Sharpie markers, utilise the familiar form of the map as a means to comment on history, facts and symbols, such as the flower adopted by each state. The collaborative aspect of the project underscores Mir's interest in social systems and unconventional means of production.

Politics and consumerism overlap in Josephine Meckseper's work. She uses commercial display tactics, such as mirrored glass cases and merchandise racks, to hold various products (clothing, perfume, household goods) alongside photographs of protest marches and references to revolutionary groups. These juxtapositions point not only to the ways in which ideas can be packaged like consumer goods, but also suggest the uneasy coexistence of upbeat consumer culture and social discontent that marks the mood of contemporary America. Likewise, Kelley Walker's ad-busting imagery destabilises the original purpose of existing photographs and advertisements through subversive re-appropriation. In Black Star Press (2006), Walker silkscreened real white, dark and milk chocolate onto a digitally printed newspaper photograph of a race riot in the south in the 1960s, one-upping Andy Warhol's appropriation of the subject.

Some works, such as Rodney McMillian's painting of the marble facade of the Supreme Court building on a piece of sagging, unmounted canvas, question the efficacy of our political institutions. Marc Handelman's Banner in the Sky (2005) is a caustic reinterpretation of a famous Civil War-era painting by the American landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church. Whereas Church's nineteenth-century version was meant to reinforce the idea of united states, Handelman's questions that very concept by turning the Stars and Stripes upside down. Matthew Day Jackson's work often looks to the past and to symbolic and historical moments, some with darker undercurrents that invoke the long history of racial tensions in America, as in the wooden figure strung up in Hung, Drawn and Quartered II (Treeson) (2005).

The use of such national symbols and historical references might identify some of these works as quintessentially 'American'. But beyond the possibility of viable forms of political art, one might ask whether there is even such a thing as a uniquely American form of contemporary art, political or otherwise. For example, Ellen Altfest's closely observed paintings of tumbleweeds and cacti might be read as metaphors for the toughness of the American West, but her works are not scenic views, nor do they bear any nostalgia for unspoiled nature; she has transported her subjects from their habitat to her own, the artist's studio, and her concerns are primarily painterly.

Indeed, although the establishment of an indigenous art form is not foremost in the minds of young artists today, the struggle to create an artistic identity separate from those of Europe that would simultaneously display an awareness of European styles has historically been a concern for American artists. Earlier in the twentieth century, this question became inextricably linked to the advent of modernism. In the 1920s, for some artists, catalysing an authentic American art meant utilising indigenous culture as an artistic source. Charles Demuth and other painters in the circle of Alfred Stieglitz found this culture in advertisements, billboards and other commercial sources that proliferated in New York City, and later in the new factories that sprang up in the rapidly industrialising country (fig. 4). He determined that 'commerce was America's native language'4 and wanted to 'aestheticise the street dross'5 and transform it into an American vernacular art form. Forty years later the Pop artists were to pick up where Demuth left off, using mass-cultural forms and commercial techniques in ways that would overturn notions of what constituted an art object.

That Pop is a primary antecedent of contemporary art, which makes vast and varied use of all forms of popular culture, is a given. References to film, music and consumer culture are so ubiquitous in the art made during the last thirty years that 'global pop' might be considered 'as close to a movement as one could find in art today'.6 This pop art departs 'from a critical attitude toward popular culture and the role it plays in forming individual subjects... this new art addresses received modes of seeing and tweaks them in the interest of a heightened viewer consciousness.'7 Within this, we might locate the work of Ryan McGinness, Douglas Kolk and Wangechi Mutu. Trained as a graphic designer, McGinness creates large-scale installations of repeating decorative patterns and logo-like motifs that rely on the viewer to unlock their 'personalised meaning', as the artist puts it. This impulse to personalise the general can be found in Kolk's collage drawings, which transform the visual language of comic books and advertising into densely layered, diaristic collage drawings. For her collages, Mutu combines ink, acrylic and other materials with pictures cut out of fashion magazines as well as ethnographic images from National Geographic to address her African heritage (she was born in Kenya) as well as the legacy of colonialism and the persistent myth of the exoticised other.

Artists are still uncovering the aesthetic potential in the 'dross' of modern life that Demuth seized upon. For Dan Colen, it's the residual stuff of life - a worn-out sofa, the contents of a friend's apartment, a wall spray-painted with graffiti. His paintings and three-dimensional tableaux may reflect a derelict aesthetics of youthful ennui, but they are rendered with meticulous attention to detail. Lara Schnitger and Jon Pylypchuk both transform cheap and accessible cast-off materials into surprisingly poetic forms. Schnitger uses pieces of wood and scraps of fabric to make uncanny sculptural forms that are part display, part figure. Pylypchuk uses similar materials to construct cartoonish sculptures of animals in tragic-comic situations. His junk-culture poetry conveys a poignant sense of despair undercut by a humour that is often as crude as his materials.

The urban landscape and its shifting layers of visual signs are a resource of visual information for some artists. Mark Bradford's collages are inspired by the spontaneous urban imagery that he sees on the streets of Los Angeles as well as the patchwork nature of the city itself, in which people from diverse ethnic backgrounds live and work side by side. His Kryptonite (2006) reads like a map of just such a hectic urban topography. City streets are thrown into chaos by supernatural forces in Adam Cvijanovic's Love Poem (Ten Minutes after the End of Gravity) (2005), a mural-sized depiction of cars, homes and retail stores uprooted from the earth in a suddenly gravity-free Los Angeles.

Cvijanovic's painting merges so seamlessly with its surroundings that it gives the illusion of having been painted on site.In fact, he uses Tyvek, a durable material used for Fed Ex packaging - a material conceived with travel and durability in mind. This allows the work to be made and installed anywhere (Cvijanovic calls it a 'portable fresco'). The portability of this work, its 'anywhereness', extends beyond just its means of production and may be seen as a kind of metaphor for art-making now.

The mobility of actual artworks extends, of course, to all kinds of imagery, from corporate logos to news photographs, to written political slogans or even the codes of art making, such as the vocabulary of conceptualism or the use of video as a medium in a digital age. As much as the work in USA Today may include references to the American cultural landscape, such references 'belong to global culture today', as Danto reminds us.8 But while these signs are more broadly understood in today's internationalised world, their increased legibility and the fact that an artist in America who uses conceptual strategies to make art would be able to understand that his or her counterpart in China or South Africa is using those same strategies, the end results are still different enough to undercut that still-prevalent myth of globalisation: that the world is homogenous. When even the material definition of what constitutes a work of art can be questioned - is it a painting, an installation, does it matter? - then surely we are not approaching a single kind or 'brand' of art. It is possible that we can situate art made in any given place at a point between the global and the local, art that is both multivalent and grounded in locational matters. Artists everywhere do not live in a national vacuum; they take influences from everywhere as a matter of exchange. We might say that rather than an iconic 'American' art, we have art that is made in America.

Notes
1 Arthur Danto, I ll Be Your Mirror , The Nation , 1 May 2006, p. 40.
2 Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne, Curators Preface , Whitney Biennial:
Day for Night , exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York,
2006, p. 19.
3 Daniel Birnbaum, Gunnar Kvaran and Hans Ulrich-Obrist (eds), Uncertain
States
of America: American Art in the Third Millennium , exh. cat., Astrup Fearnley
Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, p. 12.
4 Wanda M. Corn, In the American Grain: The Billboard Poetics of Charles
Demuth, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York, 1991, p. 21.
5 Ibid., pp. 45 6.
6 Jordan Kantor, Drawing from the Modern: After the Endgames , in Drawing
from the Modern, 1975 2005 , exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New
York,
2005, p. 49.
7 Ibid.
8 Danto 2006, p. 40.



Copyright © 2006 Royal Academy of Arts, London.

  back to top | submit an essay

Copyright 2003-2006 © The Saatchi Gallery : London Contemporary Art Gallery : Site map