Portraits of America
The exhibition Portraits of America draws a relationship between two iconic artists of their time: Diane Arbus and Cady Noland.
The two artists have probed the power of the everyday to reveal the dark underpinnings of American culture and society. In her unflinching photographs of the 1960s and 1970s, Arbus documented a challenged and changing nation, while Noland’s disjunctive sculptures and installations of the 1980s and 1990s embody the emptying-out of values in contemporary American life.
Arbus once said, “I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them”. It could be said that her work tells a story that no other artist has. Her work, which is almost painfully shocking at times, displays a certain sensitivity to her subjects. Arbus’s powerful imagery executed on an intimate scale and through a rapport with her subjects, was really unique at the time.
Like Arbus, Noland’s unique view tends to have an ability to normalise aspects of culture otherwise viewed as marginalised and extreme. For Noland, her focus is on objects of urban culture, rather than human subjects. Looking at the concept of violence, Noland incorporates tools such as guns, bullets, handcuffs and images of the people who have enacted violent crimes, including Lee Harvey Oswald and Patricia Hearst. Used within her works these objects are a way of showing how commonplace violence has become in American society. The objects do not shock, but instead are seen as aesthetic elements with a formal beauty, and the people are regarded as pseudo-celebrities.
Despite the fact that the artists are separated by time, coming from different generations, they are tied by their ability to portray a version of America that is seldom seen. The concept of the tarnished “American dream” runs throughout both of their works as they highlight how this “dream” is really just fiction.
Portraits of America is on display at Gagosian Gallery, New York until Saturday 19 April 2014.
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