Come as You Are: Art of
the 1990s
February 8 - May 17, 2015
Extended object labels from the exhibition
-
- Labels Are in Chronological Order
-
-
- Andrea Fraser (born 1965, USA)
- Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk, 1989
- Video (color, sound), 29 min.
- Courtesy the artist
-
- Andrea Fraser is closely associated with "institutional critique,"
a genre of conceptual art that flourished during the 1990s, particularly
with the depreciation of the art market at the beginning of the decade.
This video is based on a series of performances in which she dressed as
a docent and gave ersatz museum tours. Humorous and at times outrageous,
her "tours" offered incisive commentary on the politics of the
cultural industry in general and the museum in particular, especially in
relation to gender and class. One of the most prominent artist-writers
of the 1990s, Fraser was associated with the journal October and
its theorization of postmodernism within the visual arts. Additionally,
she was one of the numerous artists of the era who, early in their careers,
were exhibited and supported by Colin de Land at his influential American
Fine Arts gallery in New York.
-
-
- Manuel Ocampo (born 1965, Philippines)
- La Liberté, 1990
- Oil on canvas
- The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
- Gift of Councilman Joel Wachs
-
- This work appeared in Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s,
the controversial 1992 exhibition held at the Museum of Contemporary Art,
Los Angeles, known for celebrating a provocative, "bad-boy" aesthetic
among its artists. Ocampo was one of the younger artists in that show,
representing a fresh take on contemporary painting. This work presents
an eclectic range of symbolism from the history of racial injustice and
violence, including a Ku Klux Klansman, a swastika, and the motto of the
French Republic, liberté, égalité, fraternité,
offering searing commentary on race relations in contemporary America,
as well as its historical precedents.
-
-
- Pepón Osorio (born 1955, Puerto Rico)
- A Mis Adorables Hijas, 1990
- Mixed media
- Courtesy of Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, NY
-
- Osorio created this work for Broken Hearts, a performance at
the Dance Theater Workshop, New York and the Colorado Dance Festival, Boulder.
A sofa embellished with found objects is embroidered with the text of a
letter from the suicidal mother of a friend of the artist:
-
- To my darling daughters: I have to confess I am not feeling as well
as before, life has hit me hard, and pain grows each passing day. I never
thought this moment would arrive, but now I find no other solution. Take
care, remember I always loved you and will watch over you from Heaven.
I hope with time, you will forgive me. Your dear Mother.
-
- Osorio conceived of this work as a tribute to single mothers who immigrate
to the United States in hopes of a better life for their families.
-
-
- Felix Gonzalez-Torres (born 1957, Cuba - died 1996, USA)
- "Untitled" (Portrait of Dad), 1991
- White candies individually wrapped in cellophane, endless supply
- Overall dimensions vary with installation
- Ideal weight: 175 lbs.
- Carlos and Rosa de la Cruz Collection
-
- Felix Gonzalez-Torres made works that deal with the paradoxical strength
and fragility of the human body, in both sickness and health. Starting
in 1990, he made a series of candy spill works, several of them considered
portraits. This work consists of white candies individually wrapped in
cellophane, which may be spread on the floor or piled in a corner, depending
upon how the owner or curator wishes to install it. Part of the intention
of the work -- which has an ideal weight of 175 pounds, the approximate
weight of an average man -- is that visitors are allowed to take a piece
of candy; as they do so, the sculpture gradually diminishes. However, the
work can be replenished and thus re-manifested again and again, referring
both to the corporeality of the human body, and to its possibility for
renewal.
-
-
- Rirkrit Tiravanija (born 1961, Argentina)
- untitled (Blind), 1991
- 20 glass bottles with wax seal in cardboard box
- Collection of Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg
-
- Beginning in the early nineties, Tiravanija undertook a series of performative
works in which visitors were served free food and drink; the act of sharing
a meal became the work of art, enacted and enjoyed by the viewers. This
work is one of a series of sculptures by this title; the first was made
from beer bottles collected at the opening of his first New York exhibition
untitled 1990 (Blind) at Randy Alexander Gallery. Here twenty Rolling
Rock beer bottles appear stacked neatly and encased in a Plexiglas box.
The French critic Nicolas Bourriaud, who was among the first to theorize
this new participatory art, considers such works' emphasis on "conviviality"
as an indication of artists' desire to move beyond the studio -- and market
-- and into the social sphere. Shown in exhibitions and biennials throughout
the world, participatory art was arguably the first truly global artistic
practice of this era.
-
-
- Byron Kim (born 1961, USA)
- Synecdoche, 1991/1998
- Oil and wax on twenty panels
- Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, Michener
Acquisitions Fund, 1998
-
- Each of the works in the Synecdoche series, begun in 1991 and
ongoing to the present day, consists of a grid of monochrome painted panels;
each panel captures the skin tone of an individual whom Kim invited to
"sit" for this variation on the group portrait. Synecdoche
belongs to the tradition of monochrome abstraction, pioneered by such
artists as Kazimir Malevich in the late 1910s and continuing through Ellsworth
Kelly in the 1950s, while also offering a subtle commentary on racial
and ethnic difference. The literary term "synecdoche" refers
to a part that stands metaphorically for a whole. Kim calls attention to
how, in a racially divisive society, skin tone comes, simplistically, to
stand for an individual.
-
-
- Glenn Ligon (born 1960, USA)
- Invisible Man (Two Views), 1991
- Oil stick and coal dust on canvas, diptych
- Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH; Museum Purchase: The Henry Melville
Fuller Acquisition Fund
-
- This work belongs to Ligon's series of text-based paintings
citing quotations from literary sources. This work refers to Ralph Ellison's
1952 novel Invisible Man, perhaps the most important meditation
on the African American experience of the twentieth century. Ligon used
stencils to render the words with various densities, and the fading in
and out of the text mirrors the invisibility that Ellison uses as a metaphor
for the precarious position of black men in American life.
-
-
- Gabriel Orozco (born 1962, Mexico)
- My Hands Are My Heart, 1991
- Two silver dye bleach prints
-
- Pinched Ball (Pelota ponchada), 1993
- Silver dye bleach print
- Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
-
- Mexican-born artist Gabriel Orozco came to international prominence
during the nineties, beginning with his staged, conceptually influenced
photographs, including these works. The photographs, shot in various
international cities, make references to cultural touchstones ranging from
soccer to Mexican indigenous art. That Orozco made these works in cities
around the world came to represent his developing status as the model of
the newly global, itinerant artist.
-
-
- Aziz + Cucher (Anthony Aziz, born 1961, USA and Sammy Cucher, born
1958, Peru)
- Man with a Computer, 1992
- From the series Faith, Honor and Beauty
- C-Print
- Indianapolis Museum of Art, Koch Contemporary Art Purchase Fund
-
- Based in San Francisco during the early part of the decade, the artist
collaborative Aziz + Cucher were at the forefront of artists experimenting
with the new digital technologies being pioneered in nearby Silicon Valley.
This work presents a statuesque, nude man holding an early Apple laptop.
The artists collaborated with a commercial firm to use an industrial precursor
to Photoshop to "erase" the central figure's masculine characteristics,
a discomfiting take on the recurring theme of gender and sexuality; this
early use of digital manipulation predicted the explosion of such practices
later in the decade. In an updated twist on classical statuary, the central
figure stands as a symbol of the technological revolution: while he grasps
his laptop, like a sacred text, in one arm, he gestures toward the future
with the other.
-
-
- Jennifer Pastor (born 1966, USA)
- Untitled, 1992
- Sandblasted steel and pigmented epoxy resin structure, holding sandblasted
steel and pigmented epoxy resin nest and a found nest
- Eileen and Michael Cohen
-
- Pastor made this work the year she received her MFA from UCLA; it consists
of a small table, on whose surface sits both a found bird's nest and an
epoxy bird's nest created by the artist. Playing with the tension between
art and nature, real and virtual, it refers to an episode in the artist's
life: living in New York before graduate school, she had a job creating
environments at the Bronx Zoo. Her last assignment was to make birds' nests,
one of which appears in the sculpture. According to the artist, the table
lamp (the parts of which constitute other found elements in the otherwise
fabricated sculpture; the rest were made) resembles "a scrawny, impotent
figure, looking down at the two nests."
-
-
- Janine Antoni (born 1964, Bahamas)
- Lick and Lather, 1993
- Two self-portrait busts: one chocolate and one soap
- Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York
-
- First exhibited in the cutting-edge Aperto section of the 1993
Venice Biennale and inspired by that city's classical statuary, this work
is from a series of self-portrait busts, half of which were rendered in
chocolate, and half in soap. Antoni cast each bust from her body, and then
eroded its surface: licking away the chocolate and lathering away the soap.
Bust portraits are an ancient form of sculpture, commemorating important
personages (generally men), forged by artists (usually male) from marble
or bronze (traditional artistic materials). Antoni upends these conventions:
a female artist, she captures the likeness of a woman (herself), in unorthodox
materials (food and soap) usually associated with the domestic (historically
female) realm. Whereas a traditional portrait bust grasps at immortality,
Antoni embraces the fleeting qualities of her materials, subverting the
traditions of classical sculpture by literally destroying the images she
creates.
-
-
- Daniel Joseph Martinez (born 1957, USA)
- From the series I couldn't remember if death or love was the solution
to defeating the empire; One thought he was invincible, the other thought
he could fly?superheroes, assassins and astrology, they all pray
to the wrong god), 1993
-
- Combined Action, 1993
- Acrylic on velvet
-
- Systematic Decomposition, 1993
- Acrylic on velvet
-
- Constructed Situation, 1993
- Acrylic on velvet
-
- Detournement, 1993
- Acrylic on velvet
- Courtesy of the artist and Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, California
-
- Martinez made this series of paintings, I couldn't remember if death
or love was the solution to defeating the empire; One thought he was invincible,
the other thought he could fly -- superheroes, assassins and astrology,
they all pray to the wrong god, for the experimental Aperto
section of the 1993 Venice Biennale. They have not been exhibited again
until now. These works chronicle the acts and subsequent arrest of the
Brigate Rosse Marxist-Leninist terrorist group, active in Italy
since 1970. Martinez's chronicling of the group within the context of the
state-sponsored Biennale might be interpreted as an act of protest.
-
-
- Catherine Opie (born 1961, USA)
- Jo, 1993
- Chromogenic print
- Montclair Art Museum, Gift of Patricia A. Bell, 2003.9.2
-
- Richard and Skeeter, 1994
- Chromogenic print
- Montclair Art Museum, Gift of Patricia A. Bell, 2004.2.1
-
- Photographer Catherine Opie's early work focused on portraits of friends
and acquaintances, often from the LGBTQ community. Shot in a straightforward
documentary style, yet with an emphasis on formal rigor and brilliant color,
these works depict their subjects with psychological acumen. Attention
to the details of the sitters' appearance, such as tattoos and piercings,
identified them at the time as part of the counterculture. Opie was part
of a group of prolific and influential artists who graduated from CalArts
in the late 1980s, and who became pillars of the nineties art scene in
L.A. and beyond.
-
-
- Jason Rhoades (1965-2006, USA)
- Red, 1993
- Various materials
- Ann and Mel Schaffer Family Collection
-
- Jason Rhoades was known for his "scatter art" installations
dealing with American mass culture and the everyday objects that one accumulates
yet overlooks. Recalling Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades, these works are
composed of consumer goods such as prepackaged food boxes, which Rhoades
arranged in decentralized compositions that sometimes appeared random,
or "scattered." The results are disorienting yet intimately familiar,
and speak to the nature of consumer culture and both the waste and the
unexpected meaning it produces. One of the most prominent artists to come
out of Los Angeles during the nineties, and whose aesthetic has been likened
to that decade's grunge music and fashion, Rhoades was an innovator of
the DIY (do it yourself) sculpture that dominated the early 2000s.
-
-
- Beverly Semmes (born 1958, USA)
- Famous Twins, 1993
- Crushed velvet and cotton
- The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College,
Saratoga Springs, New York; gift of Joel and Zoe Dictrow
-
- Appearing in the landmark 1994 exhibition Bad Girls West, which
examined art and feminism in the 1990s, this work consists of two enormously
oversized dresses, hanging from the wall as if from hangers, with exaggeratedly
long arms that puddle on the floor below it. Both referring to the body
and distorting it, it points to the ways in which feminine identity, particularly
concerning beauty and sexuality, often hinges on appearance. Removing the
physical body from the clothes, Semmes questions the power of costume in
creating both women's self-image and the image they present to the world.
-
-
- Gary Simmons (born 1964, USA)
- Black Chalkboards (Two Grinning Faces with Cookie Bag) from
the Erasure Series, 1993
- Chalk and slate paint on fiberboard with oak frame
- Hort Family Collection
-
- This work, from Simmons's Erasure Series, centers on the most
stereotypically racist iconography of African Americans: the cartoonish
"watermelon grin" once legion in American popular culture, sketched
in white on a black chalkboard. With scathing irony, Simmons depicts the
grins surreally disembodied, and lustfully directed toward a floating bag
of cookies. His unusual technique?in which he covered the blackboard with
a drawing, which he then selectively erased to highlight just a few key
images?refers to the violently reductive nature of his imagery. While symbolizing
how the African American experience, and indeed fundamental civil and human
rights, have historically been "erased" from United States culture,
the imagery of the schoolroom blackboard also speaks to how racism is often
instilled from the youngest age.
-
-
- Kara Walker (born 1969, USA)
- Untitled, 1993-4
- Paper on prepared canvas
- Stuart & Sherry Christhilf
-
- Kara Walker's work examines African American history, particularly
the violent legacy of slavery in the United States. She began making her
celebrated cut-paper works, fashioned from black paper and affixed either
to canvas or directly on a white wall, in the early nineties. Using the
vocabulary of eighteenth-century silhouette portraits, these mural-like
compositions at first glance appear nostalgic, but upon closer examination
depict rapes, beatings, lynchings, and other horrific acts of violence
to which enslaved African Americans were regularly subjected. This work
depicts a formally dressed man, whom one imagines to be a plantation owner,
with a small child, presumably a slave, tucked under his tailcoat and seemingly
about to perform a sexual act.
-
-
- Fred Wilson (born 1961, USA)
- Portrait of S.A.M. (Europeans), 1993
- Six color photographs
- Collection of Peter Norton
-
- Fred Wilson created this work as part of a site-specific project for
the Seattle Art Museum (SAM). Invited to make a work using the museum's
collections, Wilson discovered in its storage these stylized porcelain
figures, meant to depict people from around the world. The artist photographed
"portraits" of each figure, then grouped them geographically:
Native Americans, Africans, Asians, and here, Europeans. These tongue-in-cheek
portraits satirize the racial and ethnic stereotypes perpetuated by the
porcelain figures, while pointing to the problem of how racial and ethnic
difference is represented in visual culture. His project also raises questions
about the museum's collecting history, and how these problematic works
function within the institution. The project thus constitutes an important
example of the "institutional critique" of the era?in which artists
investigated the social, economic, and political functions of the art world?of
which Wilson is a leading practitioner.
-
-
- Jeanne Dunning (born 1960, USA)
- Leaking 3, 1994
- Laminated Cibachrome prints and frames
- Collection of Hannah Higgins and Joe Reinstein
-
- Dunning achieved early success with her highly finished, lush photographs,
among which this diptych was one of her most widely exhibited. Juxtaposing
a close-up of a skinned tomato with a portrait of a grinning young woman,
juice running out of her mouth, this work invites the viewer to ponder
how women are traditionally represented in art. While women have typically
been portrayed as voluptuous objects of (male) sexual desire?to be gazed
upon and coveted?this image shows a female artist experiencing a gleefully
sensual moment. In this way, it belongs within the strain of feminist art
that was particularly prominent in the 1990s, during feminism's "third
wave."
-
-
- Ellen Gallagher (born 1965, USA)
- Tally, 1994
- Oil, pencil, and paper on canvas
- Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Living New England Artist Purchase
Fund, created by the Stephen and Sybil Stone Foundation
-
- Gallagher's early painting often paired found imagery -- focusing on
stylized images of African Americans -- with the tradition of monochrome
abstraction. This work updates the vocabulary of minimalist painting with
a near-monochrome palette that, when examined more closely, incorporates
collaged, found elements. These include lined grade-school paper, which
the artist underlined with pencil and overlaid with thin oil paint, juxtaposed
with cut-outs of red lips and eyeballs. These fragments, still recognizable
as exaggerated facial features, refer to nineteenth-century minstrel shows,
in which white performers in blackface impersonated African American characters.
Blending an investigation of racial prejudices with one of the history
of painting, Gallagher creates works of exquisite formal rigor that also
engage incisively with the most complicated social and historical issues.
-
-
- Diana Thater (born 1962, USA)
- Ginger Kittens, 1994
- Two digital videos, two BrightSign players, two monitors
- Courtesy of 1301PE Gallery, Los Angeles
-
- The Los Angeles-based artist Diana Thater creates complex digital video
installations exploring the natural and animal worlds. One of an influential
group of artists to study at Art Center College of Design in the late 1980s,
she was an early innovator in the use of digital video projection, often
within unconventional spaces. She notes that this work, a synchronized
two-channel digital video, is a particularly versatile piece that she "keeps
in her pocket" to use in experimental ways. Installed differently
each time it is exhibited, it presents lushly saturated scenes of figures
moving in and out of a field of sunflowers: a celebration of the natural
landscape, refracted through the lens of digital technologies.
-
-
- Andrea Zittel (born 1965, USA)
- Personal Panel, 1994
- Rayon, satin and leather
-
- Personal Panel, 1994
- Synthetic suit fabric and suspenders
-
- Study for Personal Panels, 1994
- Gouache on paper
-
- Study for Personal Panels, 1994
- Gouache on paper
- Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York
-
- Zittel's body of work is devoted to the avant-garde ideal of "art
into life," or the possibility that art objects can help bring about
social reform. Her A-Z Administrative Services -- begun in New York in
the early 1990s and relocated to the California desert, as A-Z West, in
2000 -- encompasses everything from room-sized machines-for-living to clothing,
all created according to the principle of better life through better design.
Among these projects is a series of uniforms, which the artist regularly
wears herself. The Personal Panels (1994) are simple, geometric
cloth panels that, when draped together in pairs and fastened across the
body, become everyday clothing. Inspired by garments made by Russian constructivists
in the early twentieth century, they are part conceptual art, part utilitarian
object. Because of Zittel's interest in redefining how individuals live
within their communities, her work has at times been considered "participatory
art."
-
-
- Doug Aitken (born 1968, USA)
- Monsoon, 1995
- Color film, sound, transferred to digital video
- 6:43 min. loop
- Courtesy of 303 Gallery, New York; Victoria Miro Gallery, London; Galerie
Eva Presenhuber, Zurich; Regen Projects, Los Angeles
-
- One of the most internationally successful artists to emerge in Los
Angeles during the 1990s, Doug Aitken was instrumental in developing the
use of digital technologies to create complex film and video installations.
His work often addresses the alienating effects of the technological advancements
and increased mobility in the age of globalization. For this work, a film
transferred onto digital video, Aitken travelled to Jonestown, Guyana,
where twenty years earlier the cult leader Jim Jones led almost one thousand
followers in a mass suicide. A monsoon was predicted to hit Jonestown during
the time Aitken was filming. The video, silent except for a low drone and
the hum of birds and insects, captures the deserted landscape, alternating
between footage of the jungle and traces of human presence, including an
empty road and an abandoned truck. The rains, however, never arrive, leaving
the viewer with a sense of unresolved tension and loss.
-
-
- Alex Bag (born 1969, USA)
- Untitled Fall '95, 1995
- 57 min, color, sound
- Courtesy of Team Gallery and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York
-
- Alex Bag was not long out of art school at Cooper Union when she created
this video, in which she plays multiple roles, primarily a student attempting
to make sense of her experience at New York's School of Visual Arts, interspersed
with set pieces of a London shop girl-cum-punk musician, a Ronald McDonald
doll attempting to pick up a Hello Kitty doll, and the Icelandic singer-artist
Björk, explaining how television works. The artist notes that she
made this work at a moment when the tropes of reality television,
with its "head and shoulders, confessional shots," were just
becoming part of the pop culture lexicon, and when the twenty-four-hour
cable-news cycle had, with the O. J. Simpson murder case, just started
to take hold of the public imagination. This work's ironic commentary
on media culture uncannily presages the YouTube videos so ubiquitous today.
-
-
- Shirin Neshat (born 1957, Iran)
- Untitled, 1995
- Gelatin silver print and ink, edition 10 of 10
- The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum purchase funded by Mary Lawrence
Porter
-
- Born in Iran and living in the United States intermittently since 1974,
Neshat rose to international prominence with her Women of Allah
series of hand-altered photographs, created between 1993 and 1997.
In this and related works, she presents portraits of traditionally dressed
Muslim women, many of whom hold weapons; she overlays sections of these
images with passages of Arabic calligraphy quoting the Iranian woman poet
Tahereh Saffarzadeh. According to the artist, "Women of Allah
visualizes personal and public lives of women living under extreme religious
commitment. A majority of the photographs deal with the concept of shahadat
or martyrdom. One finds a strange juxtaposition between femininity
and violence. Ultimately, the shaheed or martyr stands at the intersection
of love, politics, and death."
-
-
- Laura Owens (born 1970, USA)
- Untitled, 1995
- Oil, acrylic, enamel, marker and ink on canvas
- Private Collection
-
- Owens played a key role in the resurgence of painting during the 1990s,
and was active in the Los Angeles art scene of that period. This rarely-seen
work exemplifies her explorations of established painting conventions,
combined in unexpected ways that offer fresh insights into their histories.
Its foreground initially appears abstract, a vast neutral field marked
with red lines, yet those lines also refer to the Renaissance technique
of single-point perspective, used to create the illusion of three-dimensional
space. Untitled's spatial perspective is dramatically skewed, making
it far from a traditional illusionary painting; moreover, its background
is representational, showing a wall full of pictures, each in a different
art historical style. With her striving for innovation and fascination
with tradition, idiosyncratic combinations of abstraction and representation,
and knowing nods to the art of the past, Owens is one of the most inventive
painters of this era.
-
-
- Elizabeth Peyton (born 1965, USA)
- Princess Kurt, 1995
- Oil on linen
- Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis