In 1976, Manhattan\u2019s great art museums went big for the Bicentennial: American masterpieces at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the nation\u2019s Romantics at the Modern; our sculptors, then and now, at the Whitney.<\/p>\n
Fifty years later, the semiquincentennial barely gets a nod. The Met has one little room of objects from the founders\u2019 era. The Museum of Modern Art has folk art displayed \u201con the occasion of the country\u2019s 250th anniversary,\u201d but with no obvious link to that birthday. At the Whitney Museum of American Art, the 250th doesn\u2019t rate a mention.<\/p>\n
But over at the New York Public Library, a truly ambitious mix of nationhood and art is on display.<\/p>\n
Spread across the top floor of the library\u2019s grand Fifth Avenue flagship is \u201cArt as Declaration,\u201d an exciting spread of photos, drawings, videos and objects that aims to consider how American artists of the past few decades \u201chave reframed and reimagined the promises of the country\u2019s founding documents.\u201d (Some of those documents, including one of Thomas Jefferson\u2019s handwritten copies of the Declaration of Independence, sit in a pair of historical displays on a floor below.)<\/p>\n
The walls in \u201cArt as Declaration,\u201d which runs through Jan. 10, come topped with texts from America\u2019s origins as a nation. One quotes our constitution\u2019s prohibition of laws promoting \u201can establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech.\u201d Another cites the same document on \u201cthe right of the people to be secure in their persons.\u201d A quote from the Declaration of Independence chides George III for having \u201cendeavoured to prevent the population of these States\u201d by throttling immigration.<\/p>\n
Below those ancient words comes the recent art. It spoke to me not so much for how it addresses the quotes, but for how well it captures their four-square, declarative spirit. That\u2019s the brilliance of the show: Although a lot of its artworks could easily be read as critique, they almost always come closer to demonstration than polemic, to showing than telling \u2014 the way the Declaration of Independence asserts that we are all \u201ccreated equal,\u201d instead of setting out to argue the point.<\/p>\n
The Museums Special Section<\/p>\n
The Declaration\u2019s quote on migration has a counterpoint in photographs, captured in 1995, from the \u201cMigrantes\u201d series by Joseph Rodriguez. They have a down-home directness worthy of Ben Franklin. They simply document Mexicans \u2014 soon, maybe, to be Mexican Americans \u2014 as they flow into and then across the United States, encountering such sites as Eero Saarinen\u2019s St. Louis arch, the so-called gateway to the West.<\/p>\n
The Constitution\u2019s effort to keep Americans \u201csecure in their persons\u201d comes paired with portraits of how that might not be so easy to guarantee in a world of digital intrusions.<\/p>\n
In \u201cA New American Picture,\u201d a 2007 project from the early days of Google\u2019s Street View, Doug Rickard captured frames from Google\u2019s record of America\u2019s less prosperous streets, and fed them back to us as an image of the fractured country we live in. Not all of our streets are so painful to see, but in our digital age almost all of them are now there for the seeing.<\/p>\n
In a similar vein, for a 2012 series called \u201cPhotographs in 3 Acts\u201d Ethan Levitas identified the surveillance cameras that now intrude on our \u201cpersons\u201d almost anywhere we go. He then used his cumbersome sheet-film camera to record the same image the CCTV might have captured, but in glorious color, at the highest analog resolution. His glowing photos put our world\u2019s lurking surveillance on view.<\/p>\n
The N.Y.P.L. has not included a quote about the Constitution\u2019s \u201cright to bear arms\u201d; its meaning might be too contested, these days, to bear such brief examination. But a photograph that speaks to the free exercise of our worship also talks about how we arm ourselves. From a series that documents Americans \u201cwho have made the decision to live well outside of normative lifestyles,\u201d says a wall text, Lucas Foglia presents an image of a modestly dressed Christian girl whose community believes in a return to holier, unmodern ways \u2014 except maybe for the looming shotgun she\u2019s pointing straight at Foglia\u2019s lens. W.W.J.D., I wonder, if offered such a weapon?<\/p>\n
Not all 39 works in the show are as strictly documentary as the photos I\u2019ve cited. The art stars Kara Walker and Glenn Ligon give us handcrafted pictures that riff on American history and its imagery; the show\u2019s four videos are all of dance. But a sense of documentation, of a national accounting, lurks throughout. Even Robert Longo\u2019s silkscreen of the American flag doesn\u2019t seem to take a position on that symbol: Although it\u2019s subtitled \u201cFalling Flag,\u201d the Stars and Stripes might just as well be rising.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll close this review on an artwork that\u2019s an actual document \u2014 just a single typewritten sheet \u2014 whose aspirational flavor echoes documents from the nation\u2019s founding. Zoe Leonard\u2019s \u201cI Want a President\u201d presents a list of the kinds of Americans she\u2019d like to see have a chance at the White House: poor people, sick people, gay people. \u201cI want a Black woman for president,\u201d she writes. \u201cI want someone with bad teeth, someone who has eaten hospital food, someone who cross dresses and has done drugs and been in therapy. I want someone who has committed civil disobedience. And I want to know why this isn\u2019t possible.\u201d<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t most Americans have a list of their own, and don\u2019t they ask a similar question \u2014 even on the Fourth of July?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In 1976, Manhattan\u2019s great art museums went big for the Bicentennial: American masterpieces at the Metropolitan Museum of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":506047,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[1228,252397,442,498,499,500,252395,501,156,252402,21934,252398,252401,233938,20587,252394,252399,51211,8793,252396,111,139,69,5296,252400,113,57698,20734],"class_list":["post-506046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-art","tag-art-as-declaration-exhibit","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-declaration-of-independence-us","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-foglia","tag-glenn","tag-jefferson","tag-joseph-photographer","tag-kara","tag-leonard","tag-libraries-and-librarians","tag-ligon","tag-lucas","tag-museums","tag-new-york-public-library","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-photography","tag-rodriguez","tag-thomas","tag-walker","tag-zoe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=506046"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506046\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/506047"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=506046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=506046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=506046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}