by Jon Lackman | 18 April 2011 | Americas, Books, Contemporary
In her new book “Since ’45: America and the Making of Contemporary Art,” Katy Siegel examines artists’ “preoccupations with issues of race, mass culture, the individual, suburbia, apocalypse, and nuclear destruction” — noting that “while a leading textbook like Art Since 1900, for instance, assumes that the most important art is American or European, those national identities are treated as relatively incidental to the import of the art.”
Siegel is particularly interested in American art’s peculiar obsession with endings:
Mark Bradford’s 2008 project for the Carnegie International spelled the words “HELP US” on the museum’s roof, recalling the citizens of New Orleans … “I have always liked potentiality better than actuality. We all wait for the storm.” The storm that Bradford seeks seems to be on its way. Not only, literally, in extreme climate change, but also, finally, maybe really, in the end of America that so many see prefigured in the current economic and political situation. The short American century, which began with the economic ascension of the country in the 1920s, reached its highpoint with the end of World War II; at the same time, many claimed that moment of domination was also the end of America as historically constituted, as it marked the full entanglement of the nation in global affairs. One end after another has followed: recessions, military defeats in Vietnam and the Middle East, the attack on American ground of September 11, 2001, the economic crash of 2008. From even the slight distance of a few years, they seem of a piece, part of the same end, as well as a ritualistic repetition of America’s historical pattern of crisis, always already a ruin. Is this latest crisis just a repetition, or part of a long good-bye?
Another recently published book, Robert Genter’s “Late Modernism: Art, Culture, and Politics in Cold War America,” which has a narrower time-frame (the 1950s, mostly) and a broader subject (writers and artists), is particularly interested in American society’s “fear over the threat of totalitarianism,” its attempts to resist that threat with a fierce brand of individualism, and American artists’ participation in — or resistance to — that project. In a long chapter on Jasper Johns, Genter writes:
Johns had little respect for the overtly masculine displays of his fellow artists who believed that the potency of their brushwork, either dripped, splashed or poured across the canvas, testified in some way to their heroic natures … Johns refused to believe in simplistic notions of autonomy … Johns offered an image of the human subject as inescapably embodied … [subject to] social and psychic pressures … Johns deflated the excesses of romantic modernism, not merely through ironic detachment as many have claimed, but through an intense reconsideration of the expressive act itself … Johns turned American modernism away from its metaphysical themes and back to the real cultural debris littering the American landscape … [Johns argued that the Abstract Expressionists] in their compulsive quest to reclaim their own masculinities, had forsaken any contact with their own culture, trying to remain aloof from a world on the brink of catastrophe.
