It’s convenient for the Whitney Museum that America’s past century hinges so neatly in the middle. The years prior to 1950 were marked by two world wars and the Great Depression and culminated with the country’s emergence as a superpower. In the five decades since, the country has coped with the consequences of that power, a period marked by tremendous economic expansion, the Cold War, social upheaval, moral ambiguities, and baby boomer demographics.
The second half of the century likewise signaled a shift in American art, with, for the first time, Americans leading the way for the rest of the world. Ironically, the shift was brought about by a core group of about a dozen New York painters – the abstract expressionists – whose bold, extreme style has never been understood or appreciated by 99.99 percent of the American people. It has never become to this country what impressionism became to the French, or expressionism to the Germans.
This then is the start of “The American Century: Art and Culture, 1950-2000,” a sprawling, buzzing, messy exhibit, which, like its predecessor, attempts to put American art in its social and cultural context. That it is less successful than Part One is not surprising, if for no other reason than the attempt to write art history for the immediate past is a much riskier enterprise.
Andy Warhol’s “Elvis I and II.”
At the same time, however, there is a troubling paradox at the heart of this show, as we pursue a thread that takes us from the swirls and drips of Jackson Pollock through the Elvis and Brillo icons of Andy Warhol, to the lead slabs of Richard Serra, the homoerotic photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe, the broken plates of Julian Schnabel, and the mock movie stills of Cindy Sherman. It is a sense of disconnectedness, a sense that American art, obsessed with avant-garde status pushed itself so far out of common understanding that it has practically no audience and no relevance to most people’s lives.
That in itself doesn’t make it bad. After all, particle physics and string theory are understood by few, and yet most of us trust that the scientists understand each other and are doing something valid and quite possibly momentous (the atom bomb proved that). But artists today lack the credibility of physicists, and most people (perhaps without admitting it) might share the sentiments of the mayor of New York when he says, “If I could do it, it’s not art.”
Certainly there are any number of things in this exhibit that the mayor of New York could do. He could certainly lay metal plates on the floor as well as Carl Andre, or, with the aid of his public works department construct a spiral jetty like Robert Smithson’s, and, were he so inclined, he could dress like a shaggy-legged satyr and cavort in front of a video camera as Matthew Barney does.
Certainly the claim of an “American Century” can’t rest on this art in this exhibit. Too much of it is too silly. What it seems to suggest instead is that the most powerful, economically prosperous country the world has ever seen can afford to indulge itself in this way, that our art is sort of like the long fingernails of the late billionaire Howard Hughes, a whim, an eccentricity that is tolerated because of who they belong to.
The exhibit can still be enjoyed in a sociological way, for the Whitney has endeavored to supply the images and the background music of the larger culture to go with the art. And who doesn’t enjoy a nostalgia trip? Unlike the first exhibit, where film clips, posters, and newsreels shared the same space with the art, here the Whitney has created “cultural sites” in small galleries to illuminate the then-current scene.
Supplementing the action paintings of the Fifties, for example, are two sites, one devoted to the “The Cold War,” where one can view clips of “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” with its thinly disguised anxiety about the bomb and the Russians, and another devoted to “The Cult of the Individual,” where the movies are “East of Eden” and “The Fountainhead,” the music is by Elvis and Miles Davis, and the books are “The Catcher in the Rye” and “On the Road.”
George Segal’s “Cinema.”
The site devoted to the Sixties is the most flamboyant. A room set up with beanbag chairs, lava lamps, and Jimi Hendrix on the stereo will remind many baby boomers of their first apartment or dorm room. Images from the civil rights movement evoke the serious social issues of the period. With Warhol’s silk-screens of Elvis and Claes Oldenberg’s floppy vinyl toilet, pop art and pop culture blend into a seamless whole.
With each artist represented, for the most part, by one work, it’s hard to see who the curators believe are the more important artists. In this sense, the show takes few chances. There are certain predictable icons on view: Jasper Johns’ “Three Flags,” Robert Indiana’s “Love” painting, Mapplethorpe’s feminized self-portrait, and that scourge of the culture wars, Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” (Sorry, Mayor).
But the show also makes accessible more ephemeral events with film clips of early “happenings,” with their nude writhings and nonsensical rituals, as well as related avant-garde dance and performance pieces by the likes of Trisha Brown and Carolee Schneeman and the experimental films by Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas in which shadows, hand-held cameras, and disorienting closeups often conspire to conceal the subject of the film.
The larger structure of the show adheres to a historical progression through a series of styles and isms that might seem unbelievably bizarre were it not so familiar. For the past four decades art styles have come and gone with about the same rapidity as the average Hollywood movie. By way of contrast, consider the other big fall exhibit, the Metropolitan Museum’s show of Old Kingdom Egyptian art, in which one can see the development of a style based on clarity, simplicity, and exquisite balance that lasted, with only minor innovations, for more than 3,000 years.
Here inlate 20th century America one no sooner masters the theory behind a new art style than it is gone, replaced by another which is often the opposite of the one that preceded it. Abstract expressionism was serious and improvisatory. Pop art, its successor, was frivolous and looked mass-produced. That was succeeded by minimalism which was serious again, and as drab and static as pop was garish and animated. Minimalism gave way to post-minimalism, which was often tongue-in-cheek and reacted to the hard geometric aesthetic of minimalism with soft, often droopy organic materials like yarn, or tree bark, or some unknown gunk that seemed to ooze or flow. The Whitney dutifully tracks all of these stylistic maneuvers through myriad developments such as photo-realism, conceptual art, process art, appropriation art, color field, neo-geo, and earthworks.
If a curator was bold enough to leave one out, would the whole structure come tumbling down? That’s the feeling one gets moving through the five floors of the Whitney – that art in late 20th century America is about one style trumping another. Early in the exhibit there is film of Marcel Duchamp playing chess by the sea. The French dadaist artist – the man who hung a urinal on a wall and called it art, the spiritual father of Andy Warhol and the conceptualists, the man who first conceived of art as a mind game – this seminal artist got tired of art in his later years and devoted himself to chess. Perhaps he was trying to tell us something.
