Key decade: 1970s - 1990s

Terms: Identity politics

1. Radical politics: Black Panthers, Grey Panthers, "women's lib", "Weathermen", "Symbionese Liberation Army", Art Worker's Coalition, Indian Activism (1960s-70s), forecasting 1980s and '90s identity politics, institutional critique (Guerrilla Girls, Act Up, etc.)
2. Political Interventions in and out of the museum
   1. Museum as fortress or bunker; decorous performers
   2. Hans Haacke and "systems" art (out of process, earthworks)
3. African American identities: complicating modernism
   1. out of conceptualism: Adrian Piper (philosopher, performance artist, 1970s on)
   2. working with the legacy: painting / quilts / fetish shrines / documentary
      1. May Stevens (political pop)
      2. Faith Ringgold (subversive quilts)
      3. Bettye Saar (the power of the fetish)
      4. Carrie Mae Weems (a searing documentary gaze)
   3. resisting the Man: David Hammons (installations and performances, 1970s on)
   4. conceptualism redux: 1990s stars
      1. Fred Wilson (museum critique)
      2. Glenn Ligon (black as metaphor and lived reality)
      3. Lorna Simpson (the "Cindy Sherman" archivist of black female identity)
   5. a place for formalism? Martin Puryear
4. On Naming
   1. Chicano/Chicana, Latino, Hispanic activism
      1. Mural legacy: Judy Baca in Los Angeles, Daniel Galvez (Oakland)
      2. ASCO (nausea), founded 1971 in L.A. – existentialism and Daffy Duck
   2. First peoples/ Native Americans
      1. inhabiting the ethnographic present: early Durham, Jaune Quick-to-see Smith
      2. deconstructing the categories: Jimmie Durham
      3. James Luna (museum critique)
   3. how African American art complicates modernist teleology:
      Jacob Lawrence Harriet Tubman series 1939-40 versus Henri Matisse Jazz portfolio image, 1947
5. Political art and AIDS activism:
   1. Silence+Death Project poster, 1986
   2. "Gran Fury" collective, He Kills Me poster, 1987
6. politicized art (artists stigmatized and politicized after art made):
   1. Robert Mapplethorpe, Jesse McBride, 1976 (accused by Senator Helms of fomenting pederasty)
   2. Andres Serrano, Piss Christ, 1987 (well, okay, this was intentionally polemical and earned its censorship)
   3. David Wojnarowicz, Why the Church... 1990 (artist with AIDS censored by Helms, appropriated by American Family religious right group, won lawsuit and $1 which he incorporated in subsequent art)

Slide List

Hirschhorn Museum exterior 1974
Haacke Condensation Cube 1963
Haacke Live Random Airborn System 1965
Haacke Shapolsky et al.: Manhattan Real Estate Holdings 1971
Haacke Oil Painting / Oelgemalde..., 1982
Piper Catalysis (performance, NYC transit system) 1970
Piper Vanilla Nightmare 1986
Stevens Big Daddy Paper Doll 1970
Ringgold Flag for the Moon: Die Nigger 1969
Saar Liberation of Aunt Jemima 1972
Weems Blue Black Boy 1987 ("Colored People" series)
Weems Kitchen Table series 1990
Weems In These Islands (appropriated 19th c. photo) 1994-5
Hammons Injustice Case 1973 (body print)
Hammons Nap Tapestry 1978
Hammons Higher Goals 1986
Hammons Bliz-aard Ball Sale 1983
Wilson Guarded View 1991
Wilson Metalwork 1992 from "Mining the Museum"
Ligon Untitled 1990
Simpson Guarded Conditions 1989
Simpson She 1992
Puryear Self 1978
Baca (et al.) The Great Wall, Los Angeles 1974
Durham Bedia's Stirring Wheel 1984
Durham Self-Portrait 1986
Durham Catskill Giveaway 1990
Luna The Artifact Piece 1990

Hirshhorn Museum, exterior, 1974
Carrie Mae Weems, Mirror, Mirror, 1987

The incapacity of institutions to represent the political issues that were animating world culture in the late1960s was made manifest by the architecture of the Hirshhorn museum, a kind of fortress overlooking the populist mall in the heart of official Washington in the USA. African Americans took up the styles of Pop (in the case of Stevens) or the tools of modernist documentary photography (in the case of Weems) to pointedly address the politics of power and exclusion.

Jacob Lawrence, Harriet Tubman series "I am no friend of slavery..", 1939-40
Henri Matisse, "Icarus" from the "Jazz" portfolio, 1947

The work of sophisticated African American artists had always complicated a simplistic view of modernism, in which "white" artists such as Matisse and Picasso appropriated "anonymous," "primitive" art forms from Africa to craft a new modernist idiom. As this false comparison (neither artist was looking at the other) shows, African Americans were using modernist idioms as well, but tying their use to a driving imperative: to tell their own narratives of slavery and death as well as articulate a vibrant living culture.

Bettye Saar , Africa, 1968
Martin Puryear, Sanctum, 1985

Although many artists of African descent chose "in your face" politics (think of Saar's own assemblage, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima), as the 60s waned they increasingly turned toward more subtle invocations of a complex multi-cultural heritage. Puryear is particularly nuanced in his combination of Nordic modernism (think of the use of natural materials in 50's teak furniture, for example) with an almost subliminal reference to African architecture and sculptural form.

Glen Ligon, I Feel Most Colored When I am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background, 1990
Lorna Simpson, She, 1992

Younger African Americans used the developing tenets of postmodernism, in which the stability of any race- or gender-based identity is questioned, to make language-based works that presented race and sex as fluid social constructs, capable of shifting with a shift in context or viewpoint.

Food for thought: How might Puryear be considered a modernist, while Simpson and Ligon might be postmodern?

Political Interventions

Hans Haacke, Condensation Cube, 1963
Haacke, Oelgemalde (Oil Painting), 1982

The work of German-born Hans Haacke moved from a concern with systems (even his Minimalist cube has "weather") to an attempt to expose the social systems undergirding the Guggenheim Museum (he tried to publicize the real estate holdings of its board). Since this defining political experience, Haacke has made works that use the gallery or art museum to make polemical points about the real world outside.

Silence=Death Project, poster, 1986
"Gran Fury" group, He Kills Me poster, 1987

As the AIDS crisis worsened in the 1980s, groups of collaborative artists and designers began to make art for the streets -- sophisticated visual images that jostled for space with advertisements, artists' broadsides, and public notices on Manhattan streets. Art or politics? You decide. Either way, these works make sophisticated reference to everything from Nazi iconography (the pink triangle, now inverted) to the art of Jasper Johns.

These three artists represent the third type of political art, "politicized" -- that is, art that was not necessarily intended to be incendiary, but art that nonetheless became embroiled in real-world political struggles. Each artist happened to be included in an exhibition that happened to be funded by the National Endowment for the Arts -- serving as the entrance point for furious debate over a federal agency whose entire budget is smaller than that of the military band.

Robert Mapplethorpe, Jesse McBride, 1976
Andres Serrano, Piss Christ, 1987
David Wojnarowicz, Why the Church Can't Won't Be Separated from the State, 1990