FLORENCE, ITALY – American Art 1961–2001 (from May 28 to August 29, 2021 Palazzo Strozzi, Florence) traces a path through these formative decades by showcasing the works of more than 50 artists, including Andy Warhol, whose celebrated painting Sixteen Jackies (1964) depicts First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy in the wake of the assassination of JFK. Here is the walkthrough of the exhibition.
Intro
With an important selection of works from the collections of contemporary art’s cult museum, the walker art center in Minneapolis, the exhibition sets out to illustrate forty years of American history in a broad variety of artistic expressions – including painting, photography, video, sculpture, and installations – and to explore such crucial issues as the consumer society, feminism, the struggle for human rights and capital punishment. Adopting a chronological approach, the exhibition maps out the most intense moment in the history of us art while simultaneously reflecting on a crucial period in world affairs. In 1961 John F. Kennedy became president and the Vietnam war officially began on 11 December when the first us choppers landed in Saigon. On 11 September 2001, under the presidency of George W. Bush, almost 3,000 people lost their lives in the most lethal attack on American soil since pearl harbor. These two dates mark a watershed in the history of the United States as a political superpower while also encapsulating an age of unprecedented experimentation in art with America as its global focal point.
Section 1 – Room 1: changes
This room acts as a bridge between the past and the future, between the Old and New Worlds. Louise Nevelson and Mark Rothko, both born in Europe but who moved to the United States as children, share a visionary talent of Jewish origin that translates into a religious, almost mystical take on art. Both were members of Peggy Guggenheim’s New York circle in the 1940s as was Marcel Duchamp, a naturalized US citizen of French origin who symbolized the transfer between the two worlds. The revolutionary spirit of the father of Conceptualism hovers over the entire exhibition because he was a beacon for the new American generations. Another member of the circle was Joseph Cornell, an artist whose poetic gaze was trained on the Old World. Bruce Conner’s art, on the other hand, looked boldly into the future in both form and concept, heralding such themes as interdisciplinarity and a break with the modernist tradition which came to maturity in a later phase of American art, and pursuing emancipation from European culture in the search for an identity of his own.
Section 3 – Room 2: pops
American Pop Art marked an era, disseminating the legend of the American Dream, glamorizing society and daily life and thus transcending the individual emotions embodied in abstract Expressionism. The idea was to cause art to interact directly with reality once more, ridding it of personal mediation and imbuing it with
anonymity through reiteration and repetition.
The exhibits in this room are by some of the leading exponents of Pop Art, starting with Andy Warhol and his typical themes: celebrities, mass media and the dissemination of images, concern with death and serial production. “Isn’t life a series of images that change as they repeat themselves?”, Warhol famously mused. Another key figure is Roy Lichtenstein whose unmistakable style is based on the typographic screen using cartoon images and revisiting the art of the past. Unlike Warhol, who began by painting before moving on to silk-screen printing, Lichtenstein continued to work by hand and to show interest in painting’s manual aspect. At a time of economic growth like the ’60s, dominated by the consumer society, the very objects of that society, reproduced and distorted, become art in Oldenburg’s work, while Robert Indiana turned for his inspiration to the world of advertising and brands, but unlike the others he was openly critical of contemporary culture.
Section 2 – Room 3a-b: crossing boundaries
The second part of the room, devoted to four iconic figures in American art – Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns – conjures up some of these figures’ most important collaborations that revolutionised their respective fields of dance, music and visual art, spawning a new model of interaction among different disciplines. Cunningham transformed 20th century dance but above all he was one of the first interdisciplinary artists open to collaboration, one of the most successful models for truly intermedial art. Crucial examples of this are the stage props for Minutiae (1954–76) and Walkaround Time (1968), devised before the choreographies were complete, without giving Rauschenberg or Johns any instructions other than that they should create something around which the dancers could move. The process of conceiving the choreography independently of his collaborators’ designs became Cunningham’s favourite working method, allowing dance, music, and visual art each to maintain its own independence while succeeding in merging them on stage. The first part of the room hosts a focus on Ellsworth Kelly with some of her most significant works which, with their formal and stringently abstract elegance, mark a moment of transition towards the minimalist works in the next section.
Section 4 – Room 4: less is more
Minimal and Pop were the chief trends in the transformation of art in the ’60s, characterized in opposition to abstract Expressionism by a cooling down of both gesture and emotion and a move towards an impersonal
art that was also a response to the tragedy of the war in Vietnam.
Minimal is marked by such strong differences in artists’ approaches that an artist such as Frank Stella who refused to admit that he belonged to a trend played a crucial role in its development. Donald Judd drafted a kind of manifesto of the trend, describing new three-dimensional works known as “specific objects” which contain aspects of both painting and sculpture yet without being either one or the other. Dan Flavin who used neon tubes and Fred Sandback who used acrylic yarn both dispensed with material, directly carving space and yet still producing volumes. Sol LeWitt moved in the direction of conceptual art, showing a greater interest in ideas than in objects, turned their backs on the studio and outsourced the production of their work, a practice that was to become commonplace. Ann Truitt and Agnes Martin, Minimalism’s only female exponents in a male-dominated world, stuck with studio work and emphasized manual intervention. The room also hosts a work by Robert Morris in felt, a material over which the artist did not have full control and an iconic example of Process Art that transcended minimalist rigor, along with a work by Richard Serra, an artist who stressed the production process’s physical side.
Section 5 – Room 5: no more boring art, Bruce Nauman
Fresh out of college in 1966, Bruce Nauman said: “If I’m an artist and I’m in a studio, that means that whatever I do in this studio is art.” Nauman began to become known at the same time as Pop Art, Minimalism, Process Art and conceptual art began to spread. He interacted with all these movements yet without ever losing his own specific identity, living in a state of self-isolation while being at the heart of the debate, and he is still
acknowledged today as the most influential artist of the last fifty years.
His long career is encapsulated here in a work taking up the whole room, entitled Art Make-Up: No. 1 White, No. 2 Pink, No. 3 Green, No. 4 Black, a video-installation made up of four scenes. Nauman is seen shirtless against a white backdrop; dipping his fingers into a dish, he spreads paint over his face and body as though they were his canvas, until they are completely covered. He starts with white, then moves on to pink, then green and lastly black, overlaying each layer of color on the layer below in a fusion of painting, sculpture, installation, video, and performance art. He masks himself with make-up, but the title tells us that his gesture is also a way of making himself up.
Section 5 – Room 6: no more boring art, John Baldessari
Considered the United States’ most influential conceptual artist, John Baldessari uses very different techniques and formats such as books, paintings, installations, photographs, video, sculptures, posters, and
public works in an art marked by irony, irreverence, and constant experimentation.
In 1971 he was invited to show at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Canada but there were no funds to pay for his journey so he suggested the students intervene in his place, enjoining them to write “I will not make any more boring art” on the gallery walls. In using students to constantly reiterate that phrase, Baldessari was poking fun at art schools encouraging young people to imitate rather than experiment. He also sent a sheet of paper with the same phrase written by him (reproduced here as wallpaper) so that the students could make prints of it, thus mulling the issues of authorship, a work of art’s uniqueness and the artist’s role. The act of writing on the gallery walls also reflects his critique of traditional painting in the early ’70s and, with devices typical of conceptual art such as repetition, it also ironically reaffirms that boring art is precisely conceptual art. The Four Short Films point up Baldessari’s interest in everyday activities filmed as though they were instructions for chemical and physical experiments.
Section 8 – Room 7, biographies
The Republican Ronald Reagan became President of the United States in 1981 and that same year marked the discovery of a new disease called AIDS. Reagan’s conservative government was indifferent to the issue, he even refused to pronounce the word and his policy was broadly homophobic. Artistic communities devastated by the virus responded through activism. 1987 saw the founding in New York of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) promoting the struggle against the disease and campaigning for the adoption of policies favourable to AIDS patients. Two years later the Hoyt L. Sherman Gallery at Ohio State University hosted an exhibition entitled AIDS: The Artists’ Response whose catalogue opened with an exhortation “to engage in collective action to put an end to the AIDS crisis.” But it was primarily through their work that artists, each in their own style, expressed the horror, fear, anger and pain attached to being gay at that difficult moment in history. Robert Mapplethorpe died at the age of 42 in 1989 and Felix Gonzales-Torres aged 39 in 1996, to mention only the artists whose work is on display in this room, but many more succumbed to the disease in those years. Robert Gober survived and expressed his anguish and trauma in work that combines autobiography with social history, while Jenny Holzer revisits people’s personal experience through a woman’s eyes.
Section 7 – Room 8: from pictures to pictures
A generation grew up in the ’60s immersed in the media culture of the movies, television, magazines and pop culture, while images – of social unrest, civil rights struggles, and atrocities perpetrated in the war in Vietnam – increasingly dominated Americans’ lives. The exhibition Pictures, held in an alternative venue in New York called Artists Space in 1977, presented artists who had begun to explore the relationship between art, mass media and society in their work by appropriating images to re-create original works. Three years later the Metro Pictures Gallery in SoHo staged an exhibition entitled Pictures Generation. The movement, which spawned a new style, was the first in which women played a central role, thanks also to the feminist activism of the previous decades.
Cindy Sherman adopted the stereotyped female roles of movies from the ’50s and ’60s, Richard Prince isolated subjects from different contexts, giving them broader meaning, and Robert Longo marked his difference by not using mass-media images but photographs that he took expressly for the purpose. Sarah Charlesworth created new interpretations of historical documents through subtracted text, and a combination of words and images was also used by Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer. Sherrie Levine used the re-production of work by other artists, working with photographs but also with painting and sculpture as in Fountain (after Marcel Duchamp: A.P.) where she adopts and reworks Duchamp’s ready-made from 1917.
Section 9 – Room 9a: more voices
1993 saw the return of a Democrat, Bill Clinton, to the White House after three Republican mandates under Reagan and Bush Sr. That year’s Biennial at the Whitney Museum, focusing on multiculturalism, the politicization of African American artists and identity, was the first major contemporary art show at which white male artists were in a minority and it was decided to afford priority to artists then “outside the system.” The exhibits addressed several key issues for gender identity and US domestic policy at the time, including racism, AIDS, feminism and economic inequality. The exhibition paved the way for the generation of Glenn Ligon, Lorna Simpson, Kerry James Marshall and Jimmie Durham, all artists whose work is on display in this room along with work by Hock E Aye Vi / Edgar Heap of Birds. Durham, a long-time political activist with the American Indian Movement, assembled references to Native American art such as animal skulls, branches and shells in a totemic structure alluding to ancestral culture but which sits squarely in the present day thanks to its use of modern waste materials. Ligon used excerpts from African American literature for his works produced with a lettering guide template to cock a snook at racial and sexual prejudice, while Lorna Simpson and Kerry James Marshall also addressed issues associated with under-represented communities.
Section 9 – Room 9b: more voices, Matthew Barney
The ’90s saw the emergence of artist Matthew Barney who spent many years producing the Cremaster Cycle (1994–2002), an epic story told in five feature films making up a holistic artwork populated with hybrid, post- human beings with moldable bodies subject to biotechnological transformation. One of the cycle’s themes is the biological process involved in reaching sexual maturity, which becomes a metaphor for creation and artistic production. One of the sources for Cremaster 2, the second episode in the narrative but the fourth to be produced, is The Executioner’s Song that Norman Mailer devoted in 1979 to the case of Gary Gilmore, a dual murderer executed in the State of Utah in 1977. Gilmore himself opted for the firing squad, thus spilling his blood in expiation of his sins in accordance with his Mormon faith. Barney transformed the story, linking it to Gilmore’s alleged descent from the Great Houdini to build a surreal movie in which he uses his imaginative style to explore such foundational themes of American culture as myth, violence, religion, and nature. This area preceding the screening room – designed by Barney and presented for the first time at the Walker Art Center in 1999 – has been transformed into an immersive space displaying items from the film.
Section 10 – Room 10: going west
California is the goal of the journey West that underpins the American dream. For over a century it has lain at the heart of the movie industry and in the ’60s and ’70s it attracted the “flower power” generation of pacifists in search of free love, drugs and hippy counterculture, but it has also played a central role in art. John Baldessari with his long spell in teaching, first at the California Institute of Arts and then at UCLA trained generations of artists and played a fundamental role in the Californian scene, so different from the sophisticated world of New York.
After the rioting that wreaked havoc in Los Angeles in 1992 in response to police brutality and violence towards African Americans that had gone unpunished in the lawcourts, the art world began to focus on political and social issues such as minorities and LGBTQ communities. Mike Kelley and McCarthy, who rank among its most representative figures, denounced the ongoing existence of inequality; Simmons took on the stereotypes of American popular culture to explore differences of race, culture, politics, and memory; Catherine Opie addressed social and gender differences; and Mark Bradford, the rising star of American art, was chosen to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale of 2017.
Section 9 – Room 11: more voices, Kara Walker
Kara Walker’s art marked the end of the old millennium and the start of the new. For her revisitation of US history in connection with such issues as slavery, physical and sexual violence, and oppression she uses different media such as collage, installations, drawings and watercolors, video, stage sets and puppets. A constant feature of her art, and indeed her stylistic hallmark, is her use of paper silhouettes, black outlines first devised in Europe for creating profile portraits and subsequently used by white Southern belles to while away the hours, but which Walker imbues with new and deeper meaning. Harking back to historical novels and tales handed down by word of mouth, she uses these simplified figures to tell stories of rape, violence and harassment set in the cotton plantations before the Civil War: silhouettes at once delicate and yet extremely violent. Do You Like Creme in Your Coffee and Chocolate in Your Milk? consists of 66 pages of drawings, watercolors and texts providing detailed descriptions of the characters, their faces and their clothing which would be impossible to convey in silhouette form. Cut – the dramatic life-size image of a black woman cutting the veins in her wrists after being raped – addresses the role of black women in history and gender issues. In her first film, entitled Testimony: Narrative of a Negress Burdened by Good Intentions, the artist resorts to the silent movie style typical of the early days of the movies to tell a tale of masters and
slaves in the South, another story of violence, rape, and lynching.
