Of the last 100 years of American art, this much can certainly be said: Neither John Singer Sargent nor Edward Hopper nor Georgia O’Keeffe ever worked in feces.
New York’s prestigious Whitney Museum of American Art, unable to cram a full century of American art into its five-story Upper East Side premises for a single exhibition marking the millennium, has done the next best thing, opting to display, explore and explain the past century of American art in just two exhibitions, covering 50 years each.
“The American Century: Art & Culture, 1900-1950” ran last spring and summer, and Part II, covering 1950 to 2000, has just opened and runs through Feb. 13.
These twin shows have been as successful as they were ambitious and made for thrilling good times. But they also left me with an appalling notion:
How much more culturally evolutionary the past century of American art might have been if, instead of the other way around, it had commenced with the scatological like of Kiki Smith’s 1992 “Tale,” and then crawled from that ooze up the ladder of refinement, enlightenment and attainment to the lofty level of Thomas Eakins’ “The Thinker: Portrait of Louis N. Kenton” (1900), Elie Nadelman’s “Tango” (1919) or Paul Manship’s “Diana” (1921), which are all in this two-part show.
The first segment of the Whitney extravaganza was more of a history exhibition than an art show, for which it was derided by a few churlish critics.
But as all art is of necessity a reflection of its time, why not history?
Arranged thematically and to a degree chronologically, Part I presented artistic reflections of “America in the Age of Confidence, 1900-1919” (including works by the more romantic Aesthetes as well as such beloved painters of the “Ash Can School” as John Sloan, George Luks and George Bellows), “Jazz Age America, 1920-1929” (O’Keeffe, Hopper, Gerald Murphy, Elsie Driggs, etc.), “America in Crisis, 1930-1939” (Depression-era artists such as Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange) and “America in the 1940s” (including more Benton and Wood and, yes, Norman Rockwell — but also the explosive new abstraction of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Lee Krasner as it began to splatter forth after World War II).
Part II begins with much the same stuff, but its progression (and art’s) is far less linear. An effort was made to create vaguely chronological sections — the American supremacy (in art and all things) of the 1950s, the cultural revolution of the 1960s, the ennui of the 1970s, the rank materialism of the 1980s and what curator Lisa Phillips sums up as “the focus on identity, ethnicity and gender, together with an intense exploration of new technologies, which have swept the ’90s.”
This show is much more an art exhibition than a historical one — art that rises from the nihilist cultural landscape of the postwar world and rushes off from that void in a seeming infinity of directions.
It is full of marvelous stuff, including the San Francisco Beat icon “The Rose” (1958), George Segal’s glowing sculpture “Cinema” (1963), Richard Diebenkorn’s “Ocean Park” series, Eric Fischl’s jaded “Birthday Boy” (1983) and Carrie Weems’ “Man Reading Newspaper” from her 1990 kitchen-table photo series.
But one encounters also Jo Baer’s “Untitled” (1962), a perfectly empty white square reminiscent of Ad Reinhardt’s perfectly empty black squares (and Ellsworth Kelly’s black squares and white squares).
There are Robert Rauschenberg junk sculptures, Andy Warhol multiple Elvises, Cindy Sherman grotesques, Claes Oldenburg’s “Soft Toilet,” Robert Mapplethorpe homosadomasochism, lesbian love symbols carved in blood on Catherine Opie’s bare back in her photograph titled “Self Portrait,” and throughout an amazing fixation on male genitalia.
And, not to be overlooked, there’s “Tale,” Smith’s wax sculpture of a naked, crawling woman trailing a 12-foot length of feces.
The uproar between New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and the Brooklyn Museum of Art over it’s exhibition of works by young British artists, which features an African Virgin Mary decorated with elephant dung, is not an artistic but a legal and church-and-state constitutional issue — having in part to do with the constitutionality of a government official censuring a public institution’s art because the art offends a specific religious denomination.
“Tale” and similar art in the Whitney show have occasioned no such controversy. And neither would the Brooklyn Museum’s if Giuliani had kept his yap closed.
The operative term here is not “outrage” but “exhaustion.”
It’s not merely that the American people are now unbearably weary of these things; it’s that, with even fecal matter prompting yawns, art seems now to have utterly exhausted all its possibilities.
