Complicit! Contemporary American Art and Mass Culture
University of Virginia Art Museum
September 1 – October 29, 2006
Curated by artist, art historian, and media studies professor Johanna Drucker, Complicit!
Contemporary American Art and Mass Culture takes its initial impetus from the
arguments put forth in Johanna Drucker's recently published, highly provocative book
Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity (University of Chicago Press, 2005), a
copy of which is enclosed. Complicit! makes the argument that artists are engaged in a
new studio-based but conceptually self-conscious, dialogue with mass culture. Daniel
Wiener's artfully created playfully biomorphic sculptures made of vividly colored,
plastic, cloth, and pipe-cleaners, Alexis Rockman's ultra-realist painting showing interspecies communications and biosphere-type environments, and Nancy Chunn's
reworked newspaper headlines all show that artists are using contemporary materials and
media as the "stuff" and substance of their work. Likewise, Gregory Crewdson's staged
photographs, Susan Bee's eclectic sticker-and-decal painted collages, and Bill
Davenport's quirky quasi-cartoon realist objects are each distinct but share a common
acknowledgment of the seductive power of popular imagery. At the same time, their
artworks are very much made objects. Studio-based work is back.
Many of these works are hard to categorize using older critical terms. Joel Dugan's
strange, haunting paintings of apes are almost human: their brooding faces give them an
uncanny cast. Their highly finished, almost illustrational but still-painterly surface makes
them hard to place within any existing tradition of fine, high art; but they aren't
commercial works either. Lisa Yuskavage's glowing paintings also blur familiar
boundaries. The artificial light that illuminates the exaggerated bodies of her nude figures
comes from nowhere on this earth and yet seems as familiar as the lamp-shade colors of a
girl's suburban bedroom. Tony Oursler's video-sculpture whines and whimpers, trapped
under a discarded mattress. The worrisome figure works on our nerves, closer to a David
Lynch character than to any figure out of fine art's past. Like Judy Fox's nearly classical
studies of young nudes, these are all compelling works, readily consumable.
What is going on here? Visually and viscerally engaging, all of this work is typical of a
hybrid eclecticism that surfaced in the 1990s and 00s. No longer can we read this work as
a radical critique of mainstream culture. Nor can it be taken as a negative, resistant
expression characterizing mass media and material life as anathema to the creative spirit.
Mass culture is no longer perceived as the enemy or other of high art. Instead, artists are
working in a curiously complicit relation to the production values and ideologies of mass
culture. And yet, fine art continues to create a space apart–a space in which the ability to
think differently about the very materials, objects and forms in which experience comes
into shape are reworked. The simple act of transformation by which Weiner recomposes
materials that seem to be the stuff of K-Mart, Wal-Mart and Home Depot into
sophisticated compositions is compelling. This is the stuff of art even though these
objects continue to flaunt their origins in a mass-produced world of plastics and vinyl,
cheap stuff and ephemeral objects meant for rapid consumption and disposal. Their work
makes a clear, unequivocal intervention: “Look at me,” these objects say, “I am art!” But
how are they art? What values and insights do they propose?
The answers are that artists in the 1990s and 00s seem to be eagerly opportunistic with
regard to matters of taste and materials. Nothing is taboo, no holds barred. Current work
builds on the outrageous legacy of Marcel Duchamp and his readymades and extends the
daring gestures of Piero Manzoni, Yves Klein, and a host of Fluxus and Happenings
artists. It also draws on the enthusiasms of Pop and the intellectual reflection of
Conceptualism. But a break with more recent, orthodox postmodernism of the 1980s is
marked. Bee, Duggan, Oursler, Rockman, Yuskavage, and others are not producing
didactic work in the vein of 1980s’ theoretically correct mode. Gone is the stance of
moral superiority and theory-dependent pieces that required volumes of critical support.
Current work calls forth a panoply of creative critical responses--cries and whispers,
giggles and dismay, shouts of pleasure and eye-rolling-you’ve-got-to-be-kidding
expressions. But it also has a tactile, physical richness that grabs the viewer with an
immediate effect. These works share a commodified flare and bravado, as if in
recognition of a need to compete in a high-gloss world overrun with "things" of all kinds.
The title of the exhibition is meant as a challenge to the received positions of an academic
establishment still attached to the notion of a negative aesthetics and radical critique of a
long defunct avant-garde. Warhol is everywhere in this work, as inspiration and model,
and as the enigmatic figure whose relation to mass culture was never a simple, reductive
opposition. Warhol's capacities to take media images as matter, to reformulate the
meaning of mass culture through the gestures of artistic transformation that were
grounded in making and processing, in studio practice and artful production, are the
essential foundation of current artists' work. Coming to terms with this approach now
means adopting a new critical voice to engage its enthusiasms and expressions–a voice
that is equally willing to admit its own complicity with the machinations of mainstream,
mass media, and the ideologies of art.
The exhibition consists of work by 46 well-known and emerging artists representative of
this broad-based phenomena in contemporary art (bios and images attached). They work
in any and every medium--paint, sculpture, photography, mixed- and multi-media, book
arts, printing and digital output. All are engaged in a clear dialogue with mass culture,
media industries, and the history of fine art's own vocabulary of methods and subjects of
expression, as evident in Terri Weifenbach and John Gossage's Snake Eyes, an offset
photographic artists' book that echoes with themes of paradise and innocence, knowledge,
Eros, and the Fall. Unapologetic use of commercial printing makes this work gorgeous
and seductive, immersive, engaging, compelling.
We are well positioned to organize this traveling exhibition. In an era in which large,
high-profile institutions are often burdened by complicated demands of their various
constituencies, university museums are able to function with an intellectual agility and
creativity to do idea-based, risky and adventurous exhibitions. Complicit! is certainly one
of these. The exhibition is meant to be provocative and challenging but also focused in its
argument. It furthers the Museum’s exploration of American and contemporary art and
the involvement of multiple audiences, as demonstrated in our landmark 2000 show
Hindsight/Fore-site: Art for the New Millennium.
Complicit! will be used extensively in educational programs planned for the University
as well as K-12 youth, at-risk students, and life-long learners. Visiting artists, working
with student apprentices, will create a print portfolio/book object at the Virginia Arts of
the Book Center at the Frank Ix Building in Charlottesville, supervised by Ms. Drucker.
The portfolio will take Walasse Ting's 1¢ Life as its inspiration. That amazing publication
was produced just as the wave of Pop art was gaining momentum and has become a
canonical artists' book. Because we consider this exhibition to be as important to the field
as the New Image exhibition of 1974 or the Freestyle exhibition of 2001, we intend to
take advantage of Charlottesville’s ever growing arts environment by partnering with
local galleries Second Street Gallery and Les Yeux du Monde to host a symposium and
series of panel discussions with artists and historians that will debate the theoretical
foundation of the exhibition. A virtual catalogue, available on CD, will accompany the
exhibition.
Our curatorial team consists of Johanna Drucker, Robertson Professor of Media Studies
at U.Va.; Andrea Douglas, curator of collections and exhibitions; and Jill Hartz, Museum
director, with a larger planning committee including faculty in the McIntire Department
of Art, the Museum’s education department, area teachers and artists. Drucker held
faculty positions at the University of Texas (1986-88), Columbia University (1989-94),
and Yale University (1994-99), and was a faculty fellow at Harvard. She has taught at
SUNY Purchase, San Francisco State, and U.C. Berkeley, and lectured on contemporary
art at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Pompidou Center, ICA in Boston, Detroit
Institute of Art, Chicago Art Institute, Cal Arts, and many other venues. She was brought
to U.Va. six years ago to establish a new media studies program, which she directed for
five years. Her artists' books are in museums and libraries throughout the United States
and Europe, including MoMA, the Getty, the Stedlijk, and many other public and private
collections.