Exhibition Sections

• The End Is Near

  The idea of “the end” was pervasive in 1980s culture. Art magazines were filled with talk of the end of painting (what could this centuries-old medium tell us in our mass-media age?) and the end of the avant garde (the image of the artist as an “outsider” had begun to feel naive). The most hotly debated version of the end was the emergence of the term postmodernism. Postmodernism signaled the end of a belief in history as either monolithic or a set of objective facts and instead saw history as a narrative that always contains a distinct point of view. Meanwhile, the culture wars, which resulted from government attacks on art that explicitly addressed sexuality, were seen by many artists as an attempt to end the social and cultural advances of 1960s counterculture. In the early winter of 1989, the Berlin Wall was gleefully dismantled. With its collapse came the end of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union and a realignment of power, culture, and finance on a global scale. New York (although it did not know it yet) was in the midst of being displaced as the center of the art world, as growing awareness of German art and the rise of Los Angeles as a major art center underscored the increasingly global character of contemporary art. Yet despite the 1980s’ various harbingers of “the end,” by the close of the decade, activists wearing T-shirts and buttons with the slogan “Silence = Death” made it clear that for thousands of Americans with AIDS, the end had already come.

• Democracy

  The art of the 1980s was shaped profoundly by an exploration of democracy. Although it is an ideal held sacred by many, democracy is also challenging, for at its core it asks us to respect and protect the rights of those we disagree with. For many artists, public spaces such as the street became arenas in which to facilitate encounters with art outside of the rarified space of the museum, and in this section we see artworks that use posters, graffiti, and everyday language to broadcast a social message as widely as possible. This interest in the public sphere was complicated by many artists’ observation that, increasingly, television was replacing the street or the public square as a primary site of democratic debate. Some artists grappled with the new role of the mass media in both political and artistic arenas. The issue of belonging—of who has rights to what, where, and when—lies at the heart of the democratic enterprise. Such issues were to be sorely tested in the 1980s along numerous fronts. Several artists whose work appears in this section made explicit use of immanent critique, a strategy, exemplified by the civil rights movement, that attempts to hold government responsible for remaining true to its highest principles. What all of the artists represented here shared was the belief that art can and should serve as a catalyst for philosophical and political debate.

• Gender Trouble

  This section includes works that engage with the implications of the 1970s feminist movement, expanding our understanding of the social construction of gender roles. In the 1980s artists influenced by feminism began to challenge the category “woman,” arguing that it was too homogenous and instead positing that identity is equally inflected by race, sexuality, class, and other, more individual forms of difference. No longer satisfied with a biologically based explanation of the difference between the sexes, 1980s feminism asked: How do we come to find ourselves as gendered people in the world? What are the ramifications of that gendering for our ideas and desires? The idea of gender as a set of performances and poses developed in the 1980s, championed by Judith Butler (American, b. 1956) in her influential book Gender Trouble (1990). As artists explored this idea, they looked to the history of images, focusing specifically on photography, which is the basis of mass media, advertising, and pornography—all of which produce seemingly infinite images of women. Investigating the role such pictures played in the creation of gender, some artists sought to debunk images of masculinity as heroic and suffused with authority. Others explored the physicality of the body, its limits and frailty, side-stepping the problem of gender altogether and contemplating the increasing loss of life due to the AIDS crisis.

• Desire and Longing

  We live in a society saturated with mass-media images designed to fill us with desire. Artists during the 1980s were intrigued by the strength of such images. While some found them enthralling, others sought to dismantle them in order to critique the mass media’s relentless command to consume. Within this milieu, appropriation developed as a central artistic strategy of the 1980s, comprising various techniques such as re-photographing the work of others, using commodities or everyday objects in sculpture, and using photographs as the basis for paintings. By deploying the language of the mass media in a new context, artists hoped to both unmask and debunk the power of commodity objects and mass-media images. Ironically, in using such techniques, artists also exposed their own desires for uniqueness and individuality, Hollywood-style fame, artistic greatness, luxury goods, or sexual prowess, suggesting that such desires, however manufactured, are hard to resist.

  The early 1980s witnessed a rise in the rhetoric of gay liberation, and artists produced increasingly explicit pictures of gay and lesbian desire for a culture almost exclusively devoid of images depicting the reality of gay life. By the end of the decade, as tens of thousands died of complications from AIDS in the United States, desire gave way to the fear and rage that fueled the activist group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), and a deep sense of longing—for days past, for loved ones gone, for a more just social fabric, and for a time before the AIDS crisis began.