MOBILE TOUR SCRIPT Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection
Greeting Hello, this is Jack Becker, Executive Director and CEO of Joslyn Art Museum. It is my pleasure to welcome you to the exhibition: Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection. This exhibition features a selection of works from an historic gift pledged to the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2010 by Emily Fisher Landau, one of the preeminent collectors of postwar art in the United States. Emily started collecting in the late 1960s with the purchase of a painting by Josef Albers. Initially, she acquired the work of modern masters, such as Pablo Picasso, but in time, she turned her discerning eye toward younger, emerging talents, such as Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol. Driven by sophisticated aesthetic and resolute confidence, Emily built a broad and inclusive collection that traces many of the concepts that have been formative in American art making, particularly over the last five decades. When Mrs. Landau joined the Whitney’s board of trustees in 1987, she became an ardent supporter of the museum’s commitment to living artists – many of whom Emily visited in their studios. Also, she upheld their focus of showing work that is often challenging in both form and content. In 1991, Mrs. Landau opened the Fisher Landau Center for Art in Queens, New York, a space that has allowed her to share her love of contemporary art with the public. This tour highlights 15 artists in the exhibition and is narrated by Karin Campbell, Phil Willson Curator of Contemporary Art. It is our hope that these stops provide you a rich experience with these contemporary masters. Mrs. Landau once said “Never stop learning. Never stop looking. Art is the greatest teacher.”
We thank the Whitney Museum for its generosity in sharing this remarkable collection with us, and thank you for visiting. To show your support, please consider becoming a Joslyn member. I hope you enjoy your time with us, and I encourage you to tell your friends and family about the exhibition. I look forward to seeing you in the galleries.
MOBILE TOUR SCRIPT Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection
Stop #1 Andy Warhol once mused, “more than anything people just want stars.” Myths brings together an array of recognizable figures, including fictional television and film characters, such as Superman and the Wicked Witch of the West from the Wizard of Oz, and other American icons, such as Uncle Sam and Aunt Jemima, the controversial figure whose likeness has appeared on syrup bottles since the late 1800s. Warhol’s use of reflective silver paint for this screenprint makes direct reference to the Hollywood “silver screen,” while the vertical rows of mechanically-‐reproduced head shots create a composition suggestive of a filmstrip. While the repetition of imagery echoes the contemporary fixation on celebrity, the work’s title hints at the more complex nature of stardom. The term “myth” suggests an individual’s exalted status, as with ancient gods and goddesses, yet it also implies falseness – the distortion of truth and the fleeting nature of fame, both of which are recurring motifs in Warhol’s work. Significantly, Warhol inserts his own image into this print, a decision that undoubtedly reflects his own meteoric rise to fame over the two decades before he created this piece.
MOBILE TOUR SCRIPT Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection
Stop #2 Jasper Johns once famously said, “Take an object, do something to it, do something else to it.” Printmaking has been particularly important to Johns’ work as it has allowed him to create countless variations on a limited number of themes. The screenprint suite Painting with Two Balls re-‐examines a multimedia work Johns made in 1960, the meaning of which sparked great debate among art critics at the time. In that piece, metal strips attach three canvas panels to each other. Between the top and middle sections, Johns inserted two metal balls into a thin slit. While some interpreted this as a humorous reference to the male anatomy and the machismo that had dominated Abstract Expressionism, others argued it was Johns’ direct reaction to one critic’s claim that his work was gutless. Johns has always embraced such discussions surrounding his work; rather than encourage specific readings, he delights in the confusion that ambiguous imagery sparks.
MOBILE TOUR SCRIPT Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection
Stop #3 James Rosenquist’s work sheds a disquieting light on consumer culture and its obsession with technology. His oversized, brightly-‐colored canvases depict objects in larger-‐than-‐life scale, creating images that veer toward abstraction but remain firmly rooted in the American Pop Art tradition. House of Fire II features four elements that appear regularly in Rosenquist’s paintings: food, consumer products, mechanical devices, and the human figure, yet he presents these components in a new way in this painting. Distinct objects evoke uncanny similarities; for example, the protruding lipsticks in the center panel resemble the splayed fingers at left, which themselves echo the teeth of the gears on the right. House of Fire II articulates anxiety over consumerism that Rosenquist’s earlier paintings had only begun to express. The overflowing grocery bag in the left-‐hand canvas is tearing, sending its contents tumbling toward floor, while the gloved hand makes a futile attempt to hold things together. Even the lipsticks take on a darker meaning, their missile-‐like appearance related to Rosenquist’s ongoing protests against the military-‐industrial complex.
MOBILE TOUR SCRIPT Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection
Stop #4 Made in response to the brutal attack of a young woman in New York City’s Central Park in 1989, Glenn Ligon’s Profile Series represents an important departure for the artist, whose previous work had drawn inspiration primarily from historical literature. The paintings in this series feature excerpts from the New York Times’ coverage of the rape case, which focused on descriptions of the five black and Latino teenagers convicted of the crime. In 2002, more than a decade later, new evidence revealed that the young men had been wrongly imprisoned for the attack. Ligon created these paintings between 1990 and 1991, long before this dramatic turn of events. Here, nearly illegible text is stenciled in dense layers, echoing the confusion and controversy surrounding the crime and trial, which was widely criticized for being conducted unethically. Additionally, the title of the series and the faint human silhouettes discernible in several of the paintings hint at the racial profiling that clouded accounts of the attack and how it was portrayed by the media. Profile Series, however, does not take sides in the debate, but rather meditates on the instability of memory and the uncertain capacity of written language to define an increasingly complex world.
MOBILE TOUR SCRIPT Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection
Stop #5 Jenny Holzer is known for creating public installations that feature politically and emotionally-‐ charged texts written on paper posters or displayed using LED lights. She began incorporating metal plaques and stone benches into her work in the 1980s. According to Holzer, her use of stone was prompted by a realization: “if everyone dies,” she explained, “this writing will stay on the rock.” Under a Rock: You spit on them because… is from Holzer’s earliest series of benches, which were included in her first formal commercial gallery installation. The series title makes reference to the solemn tone of the text, which Holzer describes as exploring, quote, “unpleasant topics – things that crawl out from under a rock.” Engraved by a professional tombstone carver, these cold benches mimic graves, yet rather than offering positive reflection on a life lost, they memorialize the human capacity for evil. By using a material that will last for thousands of years, the artist suggests that this inclination toward brutality is inevitable and enduring.
MOBILE TOUR SCRIPT Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection
Stop #6 Mark Tansey developed a unique approach to making his trademark monochromatic images. First, he spreads oil paint on a canvas covered with gesso, a white paint-‐like substance that is typically used as a primer. Then, working on one section at a time, he uses a variety of implements to remove paint from the top layer until figures emerge. This subtractive process results in dramatic canvases characterized by stark contrasts between light and dark and images that almost appear sculpted. Valley of Doubt is an allegorical painting laden with art historical references. Looming in the background is Mont Sainte-‐Victoire, the mountain in Southeastern France that Paul Cézanne, a founder of modernism, repeatedly painted. In the foreground, three soldiers clamber up a wall to catch a glimpse of the far away mountain. Giant letters embedded into the rocks on which they stand are Tansey’s nod to the challenging critical debates that artists must grapple with in their effort to achieve greatness. Soldiers appear often in Tansey’s work, signifying the artistic avant-‐ garde, or individuals who lead the way for creative innovation. In order for the trailblazers in this painting to reach Cézanne’s modernist ideal, however, they must first traverse the vast, desolate valley that lies before the mountain.
MOBILE TOUR SCRIPT Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection
Stop #7 Ed Ruscha’s large-‐scale paintings evoke the look of billboards through their combination of bold lettering and slick, commercial imagery. Yet unlike advertisements, which are designed to present clear messages, Ruscha’s paintings thrive on ambiguity. The slogan-‐like title of this work, Lion in Oil, is a palindrome, or a phrase that reads the same forward and backward. Ruscha set these words over a seemingly unremarkable mountain scene, reminiscent of a postcard or travel brochure. Closer examination of the painting reveals, however, that the textual palindrome is echoed in the image: the left and right halves of the mountain mirror each other. Ruscha has merged images and text in compelling, and often cryptic, ways since the 1960s. While his artworks remain open to broad interpretation, his arrangement of words and his visual representation of language is highly intentional. By varying formats, typefaces, and carefully articulated backgrounds, Ruscha evokes a mood or sentiment without providing an explicit message. Unleashed from any specific context, Ruscha’s work allows viewers to consider the formal qualities of written language, the unique meaning of each word in a phrase, and the relationship between text and pictorial imagery.
MOBILE TOUR SCRIPT Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection
Stop #8 Although Annette Lemieux trained as a painter, her artworks often combine a variety of media, including sculpture, photography, painting, and found objects. Lemieux says this multifaceted approach stems from her desire to breathe new life into existing images and objects and to challenge preconceived notions of what forms art should take. As she has explained, “when I make work that looks like art and holds to certain established rules…I don’t feel like I’m doing anything.” Lemieux often incorporates military imagery into her work, less to make direct reference to historical events than to allude to the loss associated with wartime. Party Hats is one of several works the artist made using antique helmets purchased at an Army Navy store. Here, Lemieux uses a childlike decorative motif – pastel polka dots – to contradict the helmets’ battered exteriors. While her execution may be playful, Lemieux is not proposing that military conflicts are festive occasions. Rather, this work casts a critical light on the hubris that often accompanies a country’s declaration of war.
MOBILE TOUR SCRIPT Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection
Stop #9 In 1990, Rodney Graham traveled to the English countryside to photograph the iconic oak trees that populate that landscape. The pictures in the series Oxfordshire Oaks are simply composed: in each, an isolated tree occupies the center of the frame, standing against a low horizon line, however tradition ends there. Displaying the photographs upside down, the artist presents viewers with images that are at once familiar and confusing. The inverted trees become abstractions: gnarled branches transform into complex networks of lines as new, unexpected shapes emerge. Oxfordshire Oaks has a distinctly melancholy tone, as if the grand subjects Graham has chosen to capture have been transported to the present moment from another time, if not another world. With this series, Graham aims to dismantle the mechanics of sight to explain how we receive visual information. When images pass through our eyes, they are inverted and must be corrected by the brain. Likewise, Graham’s photographs mimic the upside-‐down and reversed images that artists view when using large-‐format cameras. By disrupting how we read and interpret visual art, Oxfordshire Oaks provides a subtle reminder that art always offers an artificially-‐constructed view of reality.
MOBILE TOUR SCRIPT Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection
Stop #10 After supporting himself as a furniture maker for nearly a decade, in the early 1960s Richard Artschwager began making paintings and sculptures from inexpensive builder’s materials usually reserved for producing interior décor. What appears to be wood flooring in the wall piece White Table, for example, is fashioned of Formica, and the figure seated at the table, seen from a bird’s-‐ eye view, is made of Celotex, a course fiberboard typically used in ceiling tiles. Artschwager’s use of nontraditional, man-‐made materials stems from his desire to test conventional notions regarding how art objects can or should be created. Such an approach to art-‐making reflects his interest in the consumer culture obsession with distinguishing between “real and fake” goods. By playing with the distinctions between illusion and reality, and image and object, Artschwager reminds us of the fundamental artifice of art.
MOBILE TOUR SCRIPT Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection
Stop #11 The Gift and the Inheritance is a series of precise graphite drawings depicting books in artist Allen Ruppersburg’s personal library. When these works were first shown in New York City in 1990, individuals who purchased drawings were told they would inherit the actual books pictured when the artist died. By stipulating the conditions of sale for these artworks, Ruppersberg shifted focus away from the material properties of the drawings and toward their status as commodities. Strive and Succeed features an image of Horatio Alger’s 1908 novel of the same name floating on an otherwise empty sheet of white paper. Ruppersberg’s decision to draw this book – a rags-‐to-‐riches novel about the capitalist ideal – further underlines his concern with the economic transaction between collector and artist. For Ruppersberg, who created this series on the heels of the incredible art market boom of the 1980s, the process of exchanging art for money is central to a work’s historical significance and cultural value.
MOBILE TOUR SCRIPT Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection
Stop #12 Gregory Crewdson credits a wide range of influences, from the painter Edward Hopper to film director David Lynch, for shaping the unsettling sense of discord that pervades his work. Untitled (beckoning bus driver) belongs to Crewdson’s Twilight series, a group of forty large-‐format photographs made between 1998 and 2002 in small towns in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts. Each image is the product of weeks of planning and collaboration with actors, art directors, costume designers, and prop managers. Rather than disguise the staged nature of his elaborate tableaux, however, Crewdson amplifies their theatricality using cinematic lighting and special effects. In this photograph, a man in a school bus calls to a young girl, who stands barefoot in her pajamas at the end of a driveway. The girl gazes in the direction of the bus, while her family sits in the living room, oblivious to what is transpiring outside. While the narrative unfolding in this work is not entirely clear, Crewdson’s dramatic style results in an image that reads as ominous, casting the girl as a potential victim in this disquieting scene.
MOBILE TOUR SCRIPT Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection
Stop #13 In the late 1960s, when abstraction, Pop Art, and Minimalism dominated the American art scene, Neil Jenney was charting his own path, painting large canvases he described as “allegorical truths.” These paintings combine people, animals, and everyday objects into scenes that are peculiar, and often unnerving. In Threat and Sanctuary, a man swims toward a yellow life raft that is floating in shark-‐infested waters. Viewers are given the impression that something is about to happen, although Jenney does not reveal the outcome of this alarming scenario. Painted in a deliberately simplified manner with rough, hurried brushstrokes, Threat and Sanctuary is typical of Jenney’s early canvases, which he has characterized as “realist,” a term that had become passé by the middle of the 20th century. As many of his peers rejected the use of pedestals and frames, which were thought to constrict artistic freedom and innovation, Jenney was placing his compositions in thick black frames stenciled with the works’ titles. In 1978, Jenney was featured in an exhibition titled Bad Painting at the New Museum in New York. Rather than take offense to the show’s implication, Jenney playfully embraced the label “bad painting” in acknowledgment of his rebellion against the dominant aesthetic trends of the time.
MOBILE TOUR SCRIPT Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection
Stop #14 Inspired by childhood visits to the Museum of Modern Art, Nayland Blake has been working in a wide variety of media and methods for nearly three decades. Drawing on personal life experiences relating to a range of topics, including sexual identity, gender norms, race, body image, and mortality, Blake has said, quote, “I’ve never been the sort of artist who finds one language that’s flexible enough to talk about the things I want to talk about.” Double Feature Standards belongs to a loose body of work the artist calls “props,” which group together everyday items into sculptural tableaus. In this piece, two thin metal poles are connected by a rubber tube suspending two video cassette cases; in one is the science fiction film Bladerunner, made in 1982, and in the other is the 1988 remake of the classic 1950 crime drama D.O.A. This sculpture was made at a time when many in the art world and beyond were experiencing the devastating effects of the AIDS epidemic, and Blake’s mourning for lost loved ones is apparent. The tubing falls in a graceful catenary curve that calls to mind an IV drip, while the white silk roses have a funerary quality.
MOBILE TOUR SCRIPT Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection
Stop #15 In the 1970s, Nan Goldin began taking photographs of herself and her friends as a way to generate lasting documents of her most intimate life experiences. By the early 1990s, she had created hundreds of images which she compiled into a slideshow set to music, titled The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Unlike traditional documentary photographers, Goldin is not an outsider looking in. Rather, she is deeply enmeshed with her subjects, allowing her to approach them with candor and empathy. In the self-portrait seen here, Goldin sits on a bed at a drug and alcohol rehabilitation clinic. Though her face is blurred, her body language is easy to read: pushing away from the bed and clutching the pillow behind her, the artist appears uncomfortable, perhaps even confrontational. Goldin’s face is turned upward to the camera, her washed out complexion offset by dark red lips. While this image may look like a simple snapshot, it was in fact carefully constructed to communicate the artist’s anxiety and melancholy during an especially challenging moment in her life.
