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Review: "Everything Is Political In America"

Terri C. Smith | October 21st, 2024

Review:

Arts & Culture  |  Yale University Art Gallery

IMAGE 1-FLAGS_COINS

Everything is Political in America runs at the Yale University Art Gallery through Nov. 17. Installation view courtesy of the Yale University Art Gallery. 

Walking through Everything is Political in America at the Yale University Art Gallery, a somewhat incongruous dialogue emerges between the art’s social critique and the exhibition’s adherence to modernist museum display. There's a disconnect between the orderly exhibition aesthetic championed by MoMA’s Alfred Barr (art hung on a centerline with equidistant space and even lighting) and the art’s irreverent subject matter.

In 1967, conceptual and earthwork artist Robert Smithson posited, “The museum tends to exclude any kind of Life-forcing position.” In Everything is Political in America, the neutralized museum ethos is disrupted—perhaps even argued with—by the urgency, compassion, and recalcitrance in many works on view. Thanks to smart choices by curators Freyda Spira, Elisabeth Hodermarsky, and Joseph Henry, the exhibition effectively and vigorously reveals the prescience, insistence, and commentary that artists often bring to sociopolitical discourse.

Everything is Political in America is a handsome exhibition hung on dark gray walls. It includes works on paper dating from 1889 to 2017 and, according to the introductory signage, explores the themes of “environment, gender, guns, monuments and symbols, sex, and even freedom itself.” (Any unattributed quotes in this review are from the exhibition’s wall labels.)

IMAGE 2 - Homer_Bluemner watercolor wall

Everything is Political in America runs at the Yale University Art Gallery through Nov. 17. Installation view courtesy of the Yale University Art Gallery. 

Chronologically, the artworks begin with Winslow Homer’s watercolor Adirondack Lake (1889) and Sunset on the River, a chalk and watercolor drawing by Oscar Bluemner (1908). They are placed in the “environment” section and are joined by two watercolors from different eras: Lyonel Feininger’s Ray of Light, Plymouth (1950) and Donald Holden’s Yellowstone Fire XII (1990).

Most of the exhibition’s individual labels include informative or interpretive text as with Holden’s label, which shares that Yellowstone Fire XII was part of an ongoing series catalyzed by the largest fire in Yellowstone Park’s history (1988), and that its “delicate handling of watercolor tempers the apocalyptic imagery with a poetic quality.”

This arrangement is one of many where the curators use medium and subject to tie together artworks that crisscross epochs. The environmental section also includes: Save Our Planet Save Our Air (1971) an offset lithograph made by Georgia O'Keeffe one year after the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency; Christo’s mixed media collage, a project study for Surrounded Island (1981); and the lithograph Katrina Footprint, a colorful and swirling abstract composition by Howardena Pindell made after Hurricane Katrina.

In 2005, that tragic natural disaster was exacerbated by a delayed response from President George W. Bush, arguably contributing to the deaths of 1,800 people. In a show about politics, the accompanying label—which shares the death toll but fails to mention the event’s intersections of race and class or the administration’s insufficient emergency management—seems incomplete.

IMAGE 3_ENVIRONMENT PINDELL_OKEEFFE _CRISTO

Everything is Political in America runs at the Yale University Art Gallery through Nov. 17. Installation view courtesy of the Yale University Art Gallery. 

Two works in the show deal directly with guns. One is Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s Sheet from Untitled (Death by Gun) (1990), which lists the names of 464 people killed by guns in one week, including a photo in most cases. Less indexical but also related, Richard Hamilton’s screenprint Kent State (1970) is one of the most powerful images on view. A response to four student protesters being shot by police, the screenprint features a blurry televised image (from BBC news) of a wounded Ohio student:

In his London flat, Richard Hamilton photographed this image from footage of the shooting airing on his television.…Hamilton was at first reluctant to use the image, yet he later changed his mind and decided to print and distribute it in mass numbers. He recalled, “It seemed right . . . that art could help to keep the shame in our minds; the wide distribution of a large-edition print might be the strongest indictment I could make.

If the theme of guns were expanded to violence more generally, Gonzalez-Torres’ and Hamilton’s work could have been put in conversation with a broader array works. For instance, Claes Oldenburg’s maquette and broadside for Monument for Yale University (1969) and Robert Morris’s Crater with Smoke (1970) are both a response to the violence of the Vietnam War and would have benefited by being more directly in conversation with Hamilton and Gonzalez-Torres.

Kara Walker’s offset lithograph and screenprint Exodus of Confederates from Atlanta, from the portfolio Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated) (2005), also addresses violence—that of slavery, war, and historical erasure. In it she uses a double silhouette layered on an enlarged version of the original Harper’s image, to “distort much of the romanticizing details of the 1864 engraving…isolating and drawing attention to the Black figures at far left and spotlighting the Black boy loading the wagon at center.”

Smartly exhibited near Gonzalez-Torres and Michael Mazur’s Closed Ward No. 2 (1962)—tying together institutional dehumanization as it intersects with mental health, race, and sexuality—Hunter Reynolds’ photo-based work Path Over Corpses (page 9) (2011) speaks to the violence that government neglect inflicted on individuals with AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s. Its effectiveness is buttressed by compelling source material, its large scale, and Reynolds’ embodied process:

Between 1989 and 1993, Hunter Reynolds clipped every HIV/AIDS- and LGBTQ-related article he found in the New York Times. In 2010 Reynolds took the articles (by then yellowed with age) and methodically selected and arranged them, spattered them with his own blood, and then scanned, printed, and sewed them together to create photo-weavings that resemble elaborate quilts or tapestries.

Nearby, is Ann Hamilton’s RIGHTS (2017), which arranges phrases from the United Nations’ 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights into the shape of a human figure using blind embossing and ink. By placing RIGHTS near Gonzalez-Torres, Mazur, and Reynolds, the curators guide viewers to shift between micro issues such as gun violence and disability justice and global ideals about human rights.

ENTRANCE

Everything is Political in America runs at the Yale University Art Gallery through Nov. 17. Installation view courtesy of the Yale University Art Gallery. 

Patriotic symbols appear throughout the exhibition. Flags are layered in with labor union imagery in Robert Rauschenberg’s AFL-CIO Centennial Commemorative Artwork (1981), and four other works center flags. Jasper Johns and Christopher Pullman use the flag as source material for stylistic explorations, while Indigenous artist Fritz Scholder and Black artist Emma Amos use it as a site for social critique.

Scholder’s Bicentennial Indian features a figure in tribal clothing with a flag on his lap; and Amos’s aquatint titled Sold (1994) addresses racial disparity by “disrupt[ing] the flag…[with] a large white check mark and a vintage photograph showing three racist, stereotypical Black figurines in a shop window with price tags around their necks.”

The American Eagle and U.S. coins pattern Mildred Murphy Dillon’s screenprint titled America (1973); and a photo offset of a quarter from 1980 appears in Laurie Anderson’s Private Property, from Artifacts at the End of a Decade (1980), which also includes a clear flexi-disc recording of her spoken word piece “Private Property.” This excerpt of the lyrics shows its mix of deadpan humor and social critique:

You know, when I got back from a trip this summer, I noticed that all of the old factories here on the outskirts of town had suddenly been transformed into luxurious condos and that thousands of people had moved into them almost overnight. Most of the new residents appeared to be professional barbecuers.

Also poetic, Zoe Leonard’s “I Want a President” (1992) parallels Anderson’s work in its mix of humor, frustration, and observation, ending:

I want to know why we started learning somewhere down the line that the president is always a clown: always a john and never a hooker. Always a boss and never a worker, always a liar, always a thief and never caught. 

These texts by Anderson and Leonard arguably are still relevant today, as are many of the works in this exhibition. This may be the most successful aspect of this thoughtful show. Sharing art that spans almost 130 years, it reminds viewers that while the specifics of striving for authentic democracy, sustainability, and individual freedoms may vary with each generation, the overarching concerns are perennial and have yet to be resolved.

Everything is Political in America runs at the Yale University Art Gallery, 1111 Chapel St. in downtown New Haven, through Nov. 17. Hours and more information are available here