Tyler Green Modern Art Notes

How did artists channel or consider Cold War-era fears of nuclear annihilation? In artworks such as Bruce Conner’s 1976 Crossroads, an artist’s fascination with the bomb is pretty hard to miss. But surely artists weren’t always so obvious, right? In my column for this month’s Modern Painters magazine (which is particularly strong this month, probably the best issue of my time as columnist), I look at some of the ways art historians are beginning to intensify their study of how the specter of Cold War-era destruction worked its way into art. From the column:

Mount St. Helens erupted in May, 1980, just as saber-rattling Ronald Reagan was locking up the Republican nomination. The media, looking for a way to contextualize St. Helens, almost immediately started using atomic explosions as a baseline. (The initial eruption was equal to the force of 1,600 Hiroshima-sized bombs.) By his own account, Gohlke was impressed by the eruption, its potential power as a metaphor, and the way it was described. Still, so far as I can tell, it wasn’t until the presentation of the Mount St. Helens photos in 2005 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that Gohlke admitted that the specter of nuclear war partially prompted his trips to the mountain. [Many of Gohlke's Mount St. Helens pictures are on view through June 2 in "American Vesuvius: The Aftermath of Mount St. Helens by Frank Gohlke and Emmet Gowin."]

“If you listened to some of these jokers talk, they would be talking very matter-of-factly about an exchange of hundreds or thousands of warheads,” Gohlke told me on The Modern Art Notes Podcast. “That scared the hell out of me and I don’t think I was the only person.”

I suspect that over the next few decades, we’ll learn that a lot more art than we may have expected was informed by the bomb and the psychological consequences of mutually assured destruction.

The column takes a look at Gohlke’s story, an fall Hirshhorn exhibition about Cold War-era art and destruction and Katy Siegel’s recent book “Since ‘45,” which examines many of these issues. Look for it at a newsstand near you, or subscribe for $20!

In the wake of the November elections, in which pro-marriage equality ballot initiatives passed in three states and in which a fourth state beat back an anti-marriage constitutional amendment, I  spent my February Modern Painters column wondering:

Artists have engaged just about every major social movement in their work; from responding to the war in Vietnam to opposing torture, raising the profile of AIDS, and the rise of feminism, they have consistently—even predictably—made work within the vanguard of progressive thought. In the wake of last year’s elections, when Washington, Maine, and Maryland passed different ballot measures that made marriage equality a reality in those states, I tried to think of artwork that address the subject. I didn’t get far. Have artists mostly sat out this one?

“I would be hard pressed to find them either,” said Jonathan D. Katz, the co-curator of the landmark 2010 National Portrait Gallery exhibition “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture” and the director of the doctoral program in visual studies at the University of Buffalo. “The reasons for their absence are quite significant and clear, which is to say that the very sort of counter-discourse that the art world tends to celebrate mitigates against a queer representation in a normative key. When I think about queer representation, I’m stuck again and again by the disproportionate representation of a kind of ‘pick-up scene’ over and against the reality of long-term couplehood.”

The rest of the pieces considers a number of the (few) artworks that explicitly address marriage equality and bounces around some other ideas on why artists have mostly not embraced the subject. Look for it at a newsstand near you, or subscribe for $20!

In this month’s Modern Painters magazine, I mused on the bizarreness of numerous early Carrie Mae Weemses coming to life as the racist-right lashed out at a black president during the 2012 campaign, and linked that confluence to the influence Weems has had on the succeeding generation of artists.

And at the end, I note that Weems’ matter-of-fact approach to portraying racism seems particularly fitting right now:

Weems’s deadpan 30-year-old approach seems incredibly au-courant. When it comes to race in America, this is the age of Obama: His administration has not done anything to significantly impact the worst racial imbalances in public policy, such as the massive over-representation of African-American men in the prison system. Instead, Barack Obama has combatted racism and stereotypes merely by being assertively present. That hasn’t addressed structural racism in America, but it has obviously driven conservatives batty.

Look for it at a newsstand near you, or subscribe for $20!

At a time when the art world seems increasingly self-reflexive, eagerly fascinated by its own -ennials, art fairs, parties, openings, VIP lists, auctions and an eagerness to cozy up to the NetJets-set,  a response to one-percent scenesterism is quietly emerging: Increasingly artists seem to be looking for — and finding — ways to inject their work into real world conversations, into the place in which a gavel dispenses something more than eight-figure paintings.

Over at Creative Time Reports, the new website launched by the eponymous New York-based non-profit, artists publish essays and reportage about what’s happening with elections or economies or whatever else in Kuwait, Georgia, Mexico or wherever else they are. (Sometimes they even show — publish? — their work about same.) On the Walker Art Center’s website, artists have been lining up to participate in Paul Schmelzer’s “Lowercase P: Artists & Politics,” a series of interviews about the intersection of artistic practice and (non-electoral) politics.

In the November Modern Painters, I look at another way in which artists are reaching beyond the bubble: Via major publications that don’t just show off their work, but that seek to put a spotlight on policy and human behavior too:

In two recent books artists reckon with the primacy of all things oil in our society via their work, pairing it with recent research into the impact of the oil industries on our lives, the effects of which we might not otherwise know. (Among the things I learned: Oil is used in making food-like products such as vanillin, a flavoring agent that’s probably in your favorite ice cream, and in artificial color additives such as FD&C Blue #1. You may not know FD&C Blue #1, but it’s in foods such as Easter candy and in cosmetics. Oh, one more thing: Vanillin is used in cosmetics too.)

The two artists/books I discuss (and I could have chosen more) are the Richard Misrach-Kate Orff joint production “Petrochemical America,” and Edward Burtynsky’s recent “Oil.” Neither is a traditional art book, and by that digression from the norm both are strikingly important, even imperative.

Of course, both are pricey, high-gloss books enabled by mid-career success: Amazon lists the Misrach-Orff book at $50 and the Burtynsky at $80. But next time I’m at Printed Matter or another artists’ books mecca, I’ll be looking to see how what Misrach and Burtynsky have made have impacted other artists.

The issue is on newsstands now. Pick it up — or score a digital subscription to the magazine for just $20.

For months now, much has been made of Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s pledge to eliminate the $146 million the United States spends on the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, appropriations that each make up one-twenty-five-thousandth (1/25,000th!) of the federal budget.

In my column for this month’s Modern Painters, I try to look not just at the extreme right-wing positions Mitt Romney 3.0 is taking in an an effort to win the votes of the Michele Bachmann set, but at his broader record.

As I wrote in the piece: Romney’s rhetoric is draconian, but what about his record? Given the opportunity to pursue that kind of slash-and-burn policy as governor, did Romney eliminate arts spending? What can voters learn about Romney’s position on arts funding from his tenure in Massachusetts and his comments since?

My analysis of Romney’s tenure as governor revealed a record more moderate than Romney’s campaign asserts. Just as in areas such as health care reform, Romney the candidate is running to the right of Governor Romney.

One other note: I contacted about a dozen arts leaders in Massachusetts searching for comment, context and details about the arts in the Romney years. Sure, Romney’s short tenure as Massachusetts governor ended almost six years ago and memories have worn thin. But still: Only Massachusetts one arts leader I contacted — MASS MoCA director Joe Thompson — was willing to talk with me about Romney. Kudos and thanks, Joe.

The issue is on newsstands now. Pick it up — or score a digital subscription to the magazine for just $20.

I do not think Andy Warhol was much of a baseball fan. Nor do I think Robert Rauschenberg was a runner. So then why did Warhol use a news image of New York Yankees slugger Roger Maris in Baseball, his first photo-silkscreened canvas? And why are athletes in each of Rauschenberg’s Rebus canvases?

There are a number of reasons to be thinking about the intersection of art and sport this month, including the commencement of the London Olympics. (And each year during Wimbledon I think of Wayne Thiebaud’s 1968 Wimby commission from Sports Illustrated.)

As a big sports fan — particularly of hockey and tennis — I’ve long been fascinated by the way sports works its way into art. Apparently I’m not the only one: Recent exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts and at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts have featured artists’ takes on sport.

In this month’s Modern Painters, I take a look at why artists make work about sports. One of the people with whom I spoke for the piece was artist Tim Davis, whose LOL-level The Upstate New York Olympics was included in the MIA’s “The Sports Show.” (You can see excerpts from the videos that make up the piece  here. ) Davis was fantastic to talk to, and offered this idea, which didn’t make the published piece:

“There are two things about being a photographer that relate to the Olympics. One is the sense of seriality: When you’re a photographer in a traditional sense of photography, you spend lots of time failing in order to produce a serial set of works, works that require other works in order to make sense. You can’t really look at one Walker Evans photo to know what Walker Evans was about.

There’s a sense of the Olympic of that: Any individual moment in the Olympics seems really arbitrary. These people devote their whole lives to this infinitessimal practice that really has no practical application, no sense of belonging to the wider world. There’s not even a social dimension. If you’re an East German woman lugeist and you’ve been bred your whole life to hurdle down a mountain without moving for 25 seconds or something, and then it’s all going to come down to a tiny little fraction of a second and that’s the difference between success and failure….

That’s very sad on some level, but there’s something in that which reminds me of photography. Going out in the world and constantly repeating this serial obsessive behavior of looking for meaning in the world when there might not be anything there.

Another thing about photography is that it’s a completely individual world in which you’re really there on your own, out there making work.”

Pick up a copy of Modern Painters on a newsstand near you, or subscribe to the digital edition for $20 here.

Last week former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney clinched  the Republican nomination for president by winning the Texas primary. The 2012 campaign is all but officially underway.

That prompts the question: What role will arts policy play in the 2012 campaign? So far the arts have taken a beating: In March, Romney said that as president he’d eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Romney’s 2012 slash-and-burn pledge is a long way from Barack Obama’s 2008 approach: Obama was the first presidential candidate to offer a series of arts-related policy proposals.

In my Modern Painters column this month, I put forth three arts-related policies that either Romney or Obama — or both — should support during this year’s campaign. Astute readers will notice that none of them includes funding increases for the NEA: I’d rather see progressives put energy into new initiatives in other places rather than re-fight the same battle over and over.

I’ve written about one of the three ideas I discussed in the column here on MAN: In favor of a White House arts adviser. For the other two, pick up a copy of this month’s Modern Painters!