Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol.original_ [149]
POLITICAL ART. In art of the ‘80s and ’90s, words are often as important as images, and tirades of text confront gallery-goers. Much purely visual art has an overtly feminist slant, as in Mary Kelly’s work. Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party” (1979) installation includes a “table” and place settings representing great women of history. Performance artists like Laurie Anderson, Karen Finley, and Eric Bogosian also speak out against sexism, racism, and economic injustice in mixed-media, theatrical monologues. In her performance piece “The Black Sheep,” Finley shrieked her outrage against the white, male power structure. Stripped to her underpants and smeared with chocolate simulating excrement, Finley used her body as a symbol of women’s degradation.
POST-MODERN SCULPTURE. Oil on canvas may have made a comeback in painting, but the only thing certain about Contemporary sculpture is that the figure on a pedestal is long gone — probably for good. Several trends are evident, however, such as the use of a wide range of materials, from dolls to furniture to industrial products. Mario Merz, leader of Italy’s Arte Povera (pronounced AR tay po VAIR uh, which means “poor art”) movement, uses rubber, newspapers, bales of hay, and neon tubing in his igloo-shaped works.
GRAFFITI GRAPHICS. The first professionally-trained artist to use the graffiti style was New Yorker Keith Haring (1958-90). Although he was frequently arrested for defacing public property, commuters soon began to appreciate Haring’s trademark images scrawled in subways: the “radiant baby, ” barking dog, zapping spaceships, and winged television set. “Everything I ever dreamed I could accomplish in art was accomplished the first day I drew in the subways and the people accepted it,” he said. When Haring died of AIDS, graffiti art, which had rapidly become commericalized, was finished as a force in art.
Haring, “Untitled,” 1982, Courtesy of Keith Haring estate.
Reflecting the era’s infatuation with speed and technology, other sculptors use machine parts to incorporate movement into their work. Mark di Suvero, a former crane operator, welds steel girders into abstract kinetic forms that gyrate like lumbering mastodons.
Both the American John Chamberlain and French sculptor César found gold in auto junkyards. They twisted demolition derby debris like warped fenders and squashed cars into macabre metal forms, as arresting as a roadside pileup.
Installations are in vogue, ranging from Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar’s (b. 1956) pleas for justice in the Third World to American Judy Pfaff’s fantasy environments like colorful underwater gardens.
Semiabstract sculpture that refers to recognizable objects is alive in the hands of black American Martin Puryear (b. 1941) and American Nancy Graves (b. 1940). Graves’s painted, cast bronze pieces are playful explosions of oddly grafted forms like lavender and orange palmetto leaves pinwheeling into the air. Puryear is known for his virtuoso handling of wood.
Figurative art is eerily evocative in the work of American Kiki Smith (b. 1954), who bases her sculpture on the human body, “our primary vehicle,” she said, “for experiencing our lives.” Soon after the death of her father, Abstract Expressionist artist Tony Smith, Kiki produced a piece both disturbing and consoling: an algae-coated wax hand floating in a mason jar of dark green water. A certified Emergency Medical Technician, Smith presents the body as a frail clinical specimen and, at the same time, a resilient spiritual vessel.
WHAT’S HAPPENING NOW. Art in the ‘90s, like life in the ’90s, reflects the unsettled twilight of the twentieth-century. It offers questions more than answers, challenges more than certainty. As Contemporary painter Mark Tansey put it, “A painted picture is a vehicle. You can sit in your driveway and take it apart or you can get in it and go somewhere.” Art so far in the ’90s ranges from figurative to abstract, funky to “serious,” handmade to mechanically