America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

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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.

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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.

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America Is Hard to See

Course of Empire

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

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On the Hour

America Is Hard to See

Course of Empire

23

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

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection