CINCINNATI, OHIO.- The Contemporary Arts Center presents today "Crimes and Misdemeanors: Politics in U.S. Art of the 1980s," on view through 21 November 2004 at the Harriet Rauh Family Gallery and Otto M. Budig Family Foundation Gallery. Recent historical and critical accounts of U.S. art of the 1980s have tended to focus on theoretical issues in representation, especially appropriation and simulation. But this approach encourages a nearly exclusive focus on the studio products of just a few key artists (Ashley Bickerton, Peter Halley, Jeff Koons, David Salle, Julian Schnabel and Haim Steinbach, to name the most prominent), whose accomplishments are best understood with reference to formalist modernism. These accounts tend to marginalize not only those individuals and collaboratives working outside of the museum-gallery-critic network, but particularly artists with more directly expressed, critical economic, social, and political commitments.
Given the fact that the 1980s in the U.S. saw a virtually unprecedented representation of political sentiment in the visual arts, it is worth revisiting the decade in order to offer a carefully constructed social-critical account of artistic production in the period and to explain the relationship of the key representational strategies listed above to the evolution of more politicized artistic practices. This exhibition is organized around the exploration of four sub-themes: Having/Not, Identity/Constructs, Institutional/Critiques, and Sex/Kills. Each will allow the juxtaposition of now iconic works of art with important but largely non-canonical works that critique or undermine the dominant ideological expressions they represent.
For example, in Having/Not Haim Steinbach’s celebration of commodity culture will be juxtaposed with the decidedly anti-capitalist projects of Group Material and the work on homelessness by the Artist and Homeless Collaborative/Hope Sandrow. In Sex/Kills, the graphic and readily available sexuality represented in works by Koons and Richard Prince will be juxtaposed with the AIDS activist agit-prop of Gran Fury and Barbara Kruger’s work on feminist theories of the male gaze. And in Identity/Constructs, Neo-Expressionist celebration of the authentic, heroic "self" as represented in the new gestural painting will be juxtaposed with deconstructions of the very notion of authentic selfhood by David Hammons, Cindy Sherman, Carrie Mae Weems and others - particularly the selfhood of non-male, non-white, non-straight, non-privileged people.
The following is a partial list of artists to be represented: Artist and Homeless Collaborative, Ross Bleckner, Karen Finley, Gran Fury, Group Material, Guerilla Girls, Hans Haacke, Keith Haring, Lynn Hershman, Deborah Kass, Mike Kelley, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, Robert Mapplethorpe, Allan McCollum, Richard Prince, Tim Rollins + KOS, Martha Rosler, David Salle, Julian Schnabel, Cindy Sherman, Haim Steinbach, David Wojnarowicz, and Krystof Wodiczko. This exhibition is organized by the CAC.
