“Everything is Political in America” runs through Nov. 17 at the Yale University Art Gallery. Exhibition view provided by Yale University Art Gallery.
Walking through “Everything is Political in America” at the Yale University Art Museum, a somewhat contradictory dialogue emerges between the art’s social critique and the exhibition’s modernist insistence on museum display. Come. There is a disconnect between the ordered exhibition aesthetic championed by Alfred Barr at MoMA (art hung on a center line with equidistant spaces and uniform lighting) and the irreverent subject matter of art.
In 1967, conceptual and earthworks artist Robert Smithson argued that “museums tend to exclude any kind of life-enforcing position.” In Everything Is Political in America, the sense of urgency, compassion, and nonresistance of many of the works on display disrupts, and perhaps even debates, the neutralized spirit of the museum. Thanks to wise choices by curators Freyda Spira, Elisabeth Hodermarski, and Joseph Henry, this exhibition effectively and energetically demonstrates the foresight, advocacy, and commentary that artists often bring to sociopolitical debates. It’s clear.
“Everything is Political in America” is a lovely exhibition hung on a dark gray wall. It includes works on paper from 1889 to 2017, with themes of “the environment, gender, guns, monuments and symbols, sex, and even freedom itself,” according to the introductory sign. I’m exploring. (All unattributed quotes in this review are from the exhibit’s wall labels.)
“Everything is Political in America” runs through Nov. 17 at the Yale University Art Gallery. Exhibition view provided by Yale University Art Gallery.
Chronologically, the works begin with Winslow Homer’s watercolor Adirondack Lakes (1889) and Oscar Blumner’s chalk and watercolor Sunset on the River (1908). They are placed in the “Environment” section and are joined by two watercolors from different eras: Lionel Feininger’s “Ray of Light, Plymouth” (1950) and Donald Holden’s “Yellowstone Fire XII” (1990).
Most of the individual labels in the exhibition contain informative or interpretive text, similar to Holden’s labels, and include the progression of Yellowstone Fire XII, the largest fire in Yellowstone Park history (1988). It is part of the Medium series and shares its “delicate treatment of the temperament of watercolor.” An apocalyptic image with poetic qualities. ”
This arrangement is one of many in which curators use medium and subject matter to connect artworks that cross eras. The environment section also includes: Save Our Planet Save Our Air (1971) Offset lithograph created by Georgia O’Keeffe one year after the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency. Project research for Christo’s mixed media collage, Surrounded Island (1981). and the lithograph “Katrina Footprint,” a colorful, swirling abstract work created by Howardena Pindell after Hurricane Katrina.
In 2005, that tragic natural disaster, made worse by President George W. Bush’s delayed response, likely killed 1,800 people. For a show about politics, the accompanying label (the death toll is the same, but it doesn’t address the intersection of race and class in the incident or the administration’s poor crisis management) seems incomplete.
“Everything is Political in America” runs through Nov. 17 at the Yale University Art Gallery. Exhibition view provided by Yale University Art Gallery.
Two pieces in the show deal directly with guns. One is a sheet by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (Deaths by Guns) (1990), which lists the names of 464 people killed by guns in one week, most with photos included. Masu. Less indexical but still relevant, Richard Hamilton’s screenprint Kent State Park (1970) is one of the most powerful images on display today. In response to the shooting of four student protesters by police, a screenprint features a blurred television image (from BBC News) of an injured Ohio student.
Richard Hamilton took this image from his London apartment from footage of the shootout that was being shown on television. …Hamilton was initially reluctant to use the image, but later changed his mind and decided to print and distribute it in large quantities. He recalled: . . That art may help keep shame in our minds. Widespread distribution in large print may be the strongest accusation I can make.
If the theme of guns had been expanded to include more general violence, Gonzalez-Torres and Hamilton’s work could have been in dialogue with a wider range of works. For example, Claes Oldenburg’s Maquette and Broadside of the Yale University Monument (1969) and Robert Morris’ Smoky Crater (1970) were both responses to the violence of the Vietnam War, and were more directly related to Hamilton and Gonzalez. It would have been useful to have a conversation. -Torres.
Kara Walker’s offset lithograph and screenprint “Confederate Escape from Atlanta,” included in Harper’s portfolio “A Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated)” (2005), also explores slavery, war, and historical It deals with violence such as erasure. In it, she uses a double silhouette superimposed on an enlarged version of the original Harper image to “distort many of the romantic details of the 1864 engraving…isolating the black figure on the far left. “At the center of the scene is a young black boy loading a wagon.” ”
It is smartly displayed near Gonzalez-Torres and Michael Mazur’s Second Closed Ward (1962). It connects systemic dehumanization that intersects with mental health, race, and sexuality. Path Over Corpses (9 pages) (2011), based on Hunter Reynolds’ photographs, tells the story of the government’s disregard for the violence inflicted on AIDS patients in the 1980s and 1990s. Its effectiveness is enhanced by its compelling source material, its large scale, and Reynolds’ embodied process.
From 1989 to 1993, Hunter Reynolds clipped every HIV/AIDS and LGBTQ-related article he could find in the New York Times. In 2010, Reynolds took the articles (which had yellowed with age), methodically selected and arranged them, sprinkled them with his own blood, scanned them, printed them, and stitched them together to create a photographic weave resembling an elaborate quilt or tapestry. Created.
Nearby is Anne Hamilton’s RIGHTS (2017), which arranges phrases from the United Nations’ 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights into human figures using blind embossing and ink. By placing RIGHTS close to Gonzalez-Torres, Mazur, and Reynolds, the curators move viewers between micro-issues like gun violence and disability justice and global ideals about human rights. I am guiding you to switch.
“Everything is Political in America” runs through Nov. 17 at the Yale University Art Gallery. Exhibition view provided by Yale University Art Gallery.
Patriotic symbols appear throughout the exhibition. In Robert Rauschenberg’s AFL-CIO Centennial Work (1981) and four other work center flags, the flag is superimposed with images of the union. Jasper Johns and Christopher Pullman have used the flag as a source of stylistic exploration, and Indigenous artist Fritz Scholder and black artist Emma Amos have used it as a platform for social critique.
The Bicentennial Indian on the Shoulder depicts a person in tribal costume with a flag on his lap. Also, Amos’s aquatint “Sold” (1994) “destroys the flag…three racist stereotypical black figures in a store window with a large white check mark and a price tag around their necks. It uses vintage photographs to highlight racial disparities.”
The American Eagle and U.S. coins are patterned after Mildred Murphy Dillon’s screenprint titled America (1973). The 1980 quarter-offset photograph also appears in Laurie Anderson’s Private Property in Artifacts at the End of a Decade (1980), which includes her spoken word work ‘ A clear sonosheet recording of “Private Property” is also included. This lyric excerpt shows a combination of deadpan humor and social criticism.
When I returned from a trip this summer, I noticed that all the old factories here on the outskirts of town had suddenly been turned into luxury condominiums, and thousands of people had moved into them almost overnight. Most of the new residents seemed to be professional barbecue enthusiasts.
Zoe Leonard’s equally poetic “I Want a President” (1992) is similar to Anderson’s work, which weaves humor, frustration, and observation, and ends with:
What I want to know is why someday, somewhere, we started learning that the president is always a clown, always a john, never a prostitute. Always a boss but never a worker, always a liar, always a thief but never caught.
These texts by Anderson and Leonard, like many of the works in this exhibition, are probably still valuable today. This may be the most successful aspect of this thoughtful show. By sharing nearly 130 years of art, we demonstrate that while the details of the pursuit of true democracy, sustainability, and individual freedom differ from generation to generation, the most important concerns are eternal and remain unresolved. remind the viewer.
“Everything is Political in America” runs through Nov. 17 at the Yale University Art Gallery, 1111 Chapel Street in downtown New Haven. Times and detailed information can be found here.
